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.

Bootstrapping a Perishable Meat Business To Significant Scale: ButcherBox CEO Mike Salguero (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: It’s so disheartening to see all these great businesses go through a Death by Overfunding. I’ve written extensively about this. 

Mike Salguero: What’s funny is with this business, we haven’t raised any money. We are way bigger and way more successful. So much of the success and where we are right now is because we didn’t raise money.

Serial Entrepreneurship in Ad and Content Networks: inPowered CEO Peyman Nilforoush (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Are you talking about the category that Outbrain and Taboola have been in?

Peyman Nilforoush: They are the ad networks. 

Sramana Mitra: They were in the business of propagating and pushing content.

Bootstrapping with Services from Poland to a US SaaS Company: Stefan Batory, CEO of Booksy (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: You are in Chicago and Warsaw?

Stefan Batory: Today we have offices in San Francisco, Chicago, Orlando, Tampa, and San Antonio in the US. We have offices in Warsaw and a few other cities across the country. We are also in Sao Paulo, Johannesburg, and in Madrid. These are the markets that we actively go after and operate in.

Sramana Mitra: How many people?

Bootstrapping a Perishable Meat Business To Significant Scale: ButcherBox CEO Mike Salguero (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What were the business metrics with that $500,000 and with that $1.2 million? How was the business moving?

Mike Salguero: When we first bought the website, it was a subscription business where the maker would pay an annual fee to be on the website. We scaled it pretty well. We had a whole team of salespeople and had all these leads.

Serial Entrepreneurship in Ad and Content Networks: inPowered CEO Peyman Nilforoush (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What was the name of your ad network?

Peyman Nilforoush: NetShelter. 

Sramana Mitra: What years were these?

Peyman Nilforoush: From late 1999 to 2008. In 2008, we raised $26 million in venture capital. We moved to San Francisco in 2009 and started building out the company and scaling it out. We ended up selling the company in 2013.