Bootstrapping with a Paycheck from New Jersey: Suuchi Ramesh, CEO of Suuchi (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How much did you do in 2018 in product revenue?

Suuchi Ramesh: It was about 10% to 15% of our revenue at that point. We only started commercializing towards the end of the year.

Sramana Mitra: How did that split change in 2019?

Bootstrapping with a Paycheck from New Jersey: Suuchi Ramesh, CEO of Suuchi (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go to the period where you’re still bootstrapping with a paycheck with this network of factories. What prompted you to quit your job and feel comfortable enough to go full-time on this?

Suuchi Ramesh: Within six months, we had half a million in bookings. That was validation. It wasn’t profitable, but the net burn wasn’t crazy. It was driving itself forward. I saw the opportunity. We just didn’t commercialize the digital solution early on because we had to build the features. That had to be informed by what we understood. We had to do that first.

Bootstrapping with a Paycheck from New Jersey: Suuchi Ramesh, CEO of Suuchi (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Where is the domain knowledge for supply chain coming from in your team?

Suuchi Ramesh: My domain knowledge with supply chain is with respect to the data piece of it. Then of course I had the opportunity to study supply chain from a data standpoint with the companies that we had sold predictive data solutions to.

Bootstrapping with a Paycheck from New Jersey: Suuchi Ramesh, CEO of Suuchi (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Before you quit your day job, what was the timeframe between your coming up with this idea, deciding to start this company, and quitting your job?

Suuchi Ramesh: The idea took shape about 18 months before I quit my day job. By that time, Suuchi Inc became really tangible. It was in the second quarter of 2016 when we signed on our first few customers. I quit my day job at the end of 2016.

Bootstrapping with a Paycheck from New Jersey: Suuchi Ramesh, CEO of Suuchi (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. 

This is a wonderful bootstrapping with a paycheck story of a really smart, scrappy entrepreneur.

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 with Services from London, Raise Money Later: Rich Waldron, CEO of Tray.io (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: What is your funding strategy? We talked about the $2.2 million round. What else have you done since then?

Rich Waldron: We’ve raised a total of $109 million now. We raised a $5 million bridge to a Series A. In 2016, we raised our Series A which was $14 million in March of 2018. Then last year, we did our Series B and Series C just under four months of each other.

Bootstrap First with Services from London, Raise Money Later: Rich Waldron, CEO of Tray.io (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Talk to me about your go-to market strategy. What has worked? What turned out to be the repeatable customer acquisition strategy?

Rich Waldron: For a long time, we were relying on partner referrals. To this day, they still make up a healthy portion of our go-to market. To really stand on your own feet, you need to control your own destiny in terms of customer acquisition.

Bootstrap First with Services from London, Raise Money Later: Rich Waldron, CEO of Tray.io (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: By the time you raised money, what did you have?

Rich Waldron: We raised a $2.2 million round in December of 2014. That was the first institutional check. Prior to that, we had some capital from the accelerators and we raised a small angel round off the back of that.

Sramana Mitra: How many customers did you have at this point when you were raising this $2.2 million?