Bootstrapping a Virtual Company to Scale: Lily Stoyanov, CEO of Transformify (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What is the PR angle to this?

Lily Stoyanov: We have an HR suite. The freelance marketplace is just one of the modules. We have freelancer/contingent workforce management software, which is something that comes after you hire freelancers from the freelance marketplace to manage the relationship with them over time and to use the same people.

Bootstrapping a Virtual Company to Scale: Lily Stoyanov, CEO of Transformify (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: We are a completely remote company and we’ve been completely remote since 2010. When you started in 2016 as part of Virgin’s startup program, what were you going to do?

Lily Stoyanov: In 2016, we already had a product. We already had customers. 

Bootstrapping a Virtual Company to Scale: Lily Stoyanov, CEO of Transformify (Part 2)

Lily Stoyanov: At that time, I already had an idea about Transformify. It started when I was still at Coca-Cola. When you lead a business transformation project, you know that processes need to be optimized and costs need to be cut. Inevitably, people lose their jobs.

Many companies were going through business transformation. The moment I saw this, I had an idea to combine my experience with a financial services company with the experience of a manager who has been hiring people for a very long period of time.

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.