Bootstrapping a Virtual Company to Scale: Lily Stoyanov, CEO of Transformify (Part 1)

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

Lily has built a virtual company with zero employees, all freelancers and scaled it without outside financing.

Read on for more.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to you. Where are you from? Where did you grow up? Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey.

Bootstrapping to Exit: Imagine Easy Solutions CEO Neal Taparia (Part 6)

Neal Taparia: Then we acquired the next biggest site in the space which was called CitationMachine. Later on, we acquired the biggest international site in UK and Australia following that same playbook of building relationships to eventually lead to an acquisition.

By 2016, we were reaching 30 million students across the globe, primarily in Western-educated countries. We had a very strong high-margin business that was driven by ad revenue and subscription revenue. We also had this side business where we were selling to institutions.

Bootstrapping to Exit: Imagine Easy Solutions CEO Neal Taparia (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: In terms of the monetization strategy, it sounds like you needed advertisers through the ad networks who were going after the student demographics.

Neal Taparia: That’s correct.

Sramana Mitra: Were there ad networks specifically focused on that demographic or were you just working with various ad networks and finding the segment match with each of them?

Bootstrapping to Exit: Imagine Easy Solutions CEO Neal Taparia (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Why don’t we step through the journey. 

Neal Taparia: When we started working on it full-time, I had mentioned that we benefited from a lot of organic growth. What was really interesting is as we focused on it full-time, we were able to understand all these ways to increase ad revenue.

Bootstrapping to Exit: Imagine Easy Solutions CEO Neal Taparia (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: A couple of metrics before we go on to the post-Lehman story. What kind of revenues were you making in college? What kind of revenues were you making from the company while you were working at Lehman?

Neal Taparia: In college, we were probably making around $30,000 a year. It was nothing crazy. By the time we were at Lehman, the growth continued. We were lucky to see strong organic growth with the site even though we weren’t focused on it full-time at that point.

Bootstrapping to $35 Million: BannerBuzz CEO Nishant Shah (Part 3)

Nishant Shah: In 2017, we were very aggressive in acquiring new customers. That’s when our marketing strategy changed a lot. From just one channel, now we have multiple channels. We came in with affiliates, email marketing, and display marketing. We had a much larger budget allocated to marketing versus almost nothing. That helped a lot.

Sramana Mitra: In terms of team, how do you run this company now?

Bootstrapping to Exit: Imagine Easy Solutions CEO Neal Taparia (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: If they came to your site, what would they do?

Neal Taparia: They would go there when they’re writing papers to start documenting their information. We had launched this site after putting it together over two months. Students would go there.

Say they were using Catcher in the Rye, all they would have to do is put in the title of the book or other bibliographic information. We would structure and cite it for them.

Bootstrapping to $35 Million: BannerBuzz CEO Nishant Shah (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What was the insight in terms of customer acquisition for instance? What clicked?

Nishant Shah: When you’re growing the business and you’re bootstrapping it, it always depends on how much money you have. You want to spend more on marketing because you want to grow that way, but you have to have your infrastructure in place.