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.

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?