Bootstrapping to Exit: Imagine Easy Solutions CEO Neal Taparia (Part 1)

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

We’re big fans of bootstrapping to exit case studies. This is a wonderful one.

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?

Bootstrapping to $35 Million: BannerBuzz CEO Nishant Shah (Part 1)

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

In these unusual times, many who once dreamed of funding are forced to bootstrap. Well, bootstrapping is good during good times, and necessary during bad times.

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?

Bootstrapping to $8 Million: Sina Khanifar, CEO of Waveform (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk a little bit about how you built the pieces of the business. Let’s talk about the retail e-commerce piece. It sounds like there is inventory involved. Did you finance the inventory through some bank, or did you just do it organically?

Sina Khanifar: That’s where seed capital came in. We didn’t need any financing.

Bootstrapping to $8 Million: Sina Khanifar, CEO of Waveform (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What was Waveform going to do in 2006?

Sina Khanifar: We graduated college and were trying to figure out which up and coming industry we could get started in.

My dad had just come back from South Korea. He mentioned that in South Korea, all the buildings had device repeaters that would help bring the signal from outdoors into the building. We had a bad signal at my parent’s house. It was a solution to a problem that we had.

Bootstrapping to $8 Million: Sina Khanifar, CEO of Waveform (Part 1)

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

Sina started tinkering with bootstrapped entrepreneurship way back in college. It has paid off.

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?

Bootstrapping a Perishable Meat Business To Significant Scale: ButcherBox CEO Mike Salguero (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What is the logistics backend at this point? 

Mike Salguero: Multiple warehouses. We have four, soon-to-be six, warehouses. We had multiple cutters and farms. 

Sramana Mitra: Is this national?

Bootstrapping a Perishable Meat Business To Significant Scale: ButcherBox CEO Mike Salguero (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What is the logistics of packaging this? What format are you shipping this in?

Mike Salguero: It’s basically pre-portioned. If you get a 10-ounce Ribeye, you’re going to get it in a frozen package. Right before Kickstarter, we realized that people didn’t just want beef. They wanted chicken and pork as well. We started offering all three.

Serial Entrepreneurship in Ad and Content Networks: inPowered CEO Peyman Nilforoush (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What channels are most of your content distributed on? Is it social media? Is it Facebook?

Peyman Nilforoush: We assumed the same thing, that most of it will be on Facebook. However, it’s very specific to the kind of content. For example, we have a lot of B2B clients. A lot of times when you upload the content and you want to get engagement, you start by understanding from prediction.