Bootstrapping to $10 Million: Coalition Technologies Co-Founder Jordan Brannon (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Was there dominance in the platform? 

Jordan Brannon: Magento was the dominant platform at that time simply because of market demand. Shopify and BigCommerce were small players in e-commerce in the small to mid-sized space. They weren’t as well-developed.

Bootstrapping to $10 Million: Coalition Technologies Co-Founder Jordan Brannon (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What kind of customers were you able to attract, and how did you attract those customers?

Jordan Brannon: We primarily attracted businesses that were manufacturing products and selling through traditional retail channels. A company making garments and selling through a larger retail chain like Nordstrom was our early-stage target customer.

Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later, Build an EdTech Unicorn from Canada: John Baker, CEO of D2L (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Strategy-wise, it’s still large accounts selling and just bigger deals? No major change on that front?

John Baker: Not at that stage. We’re just accelerating that work and putting in place the infrastructure to grow faster. We did another round a couple of years later for another $80 million.

Bootstrapping to $10 Million: Coalition Technologies Co-Founder Jordan Brannon (Part 1)

Coalition is still largely a services company but also has a few products. It’s a well-managed journey.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later, Build an EdTech Unicorn from Canada: John Baker, CEO of D2L (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk about a bit of metrics so we can pin the journey all the way to bootstrapping before you got a funded company model. How far did you get from a revenue point of view, customer metrics, employee metrics? What were the vital statistics?

John Baker: We’re somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 to 500 people when we raised the largest Series A at that time in Canadian history. It was for $85 million. That was back in 2012.

Capital Efficient Startup, Venture-Scale Growth: ShipMonk CEO Jan Bednar (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: You think the unemployment pay from the government is preventing people from looking for jobs?

Jan Bednar: 100%. People told us that on the phone. We called people from our database. Their mentality is, “Why would I work if I can make more money not working and I’m safe?” It’s a tough argument. You can’t blame them for not wanting to work.

Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later, Build an EdTech Unicorn from Canada: John Baker, CEO of D2L (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Is there anything else that we should discuss about that bootstrapping period before we switch into the next inflection point?

John Baker: One thing I would like to discuss is how we differentiated from the competition. In my case, I spent a lot of time on the engineering and design side.

Capital Efficient Startup, Venture-Scale Growth: ShipMonk CEO Jan Bednar (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Where in California did you open?

Jan Bednar: In Redlands. It’s a DisneyLand warehouse. We were hiring new people and trying to keep the culture. It was a lot of fun. The first couple of years was really tough.

Then in 2018, we went from $11 million to $28 million. We moved to an even bigger warehouse. Last year in 2019, we went from $28 million to $67 million. This year, we’re going to do north of $140 million.