Bootstrapping a Marketplace: Sardor Umrdinov, CEO of Home Alliance (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What is the revenue level in 2016 at the point at which you introduced this homegrown CRM system?

Sardor Umrdinov: $10 million.

Bootstrapping a Marketplace: Sardor Umrdinov, CEO of Home Alliance (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You were providing technicians for various appliances. Why do you need all these software developers?

Sardor Umrdinov: Our lead generation is through website and SEO. We do SEO locally. We pipeline those leads to our CRM. You couldn’t do it with other CRMs, so we had to build our own. It was expensive to do it here.

Bootstrapping a Marketplace: Sardor Umrdinov, CEO of Home Alliance (Part 1)

Sardor has bootstrapped a marketplace of home appliance technicians to over $10 million in revenue. Great story.

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 $33 Million: Freightwise CIO Richard Hoehn (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: I know you are above $5 million in revenue. Do you want to provide any metric beyond that? Any more granularity?

Richard Hoehn: We’re quite a bit more than $5 million. We did $33.6 million last year. We’re number two, fastest growing company in the United States on Inc 5000.

Sramana Mitra: Fantastic. Did you reach this level of revenue purely on the strength of heavy manufacturing? How did the vertical and geographical strategy change?

Bootstrapping to $33 Million: Freightwise CIO Richard Hoehn (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What happens next?

Richard Hoehn: Now we got some money and start ramping into sales. You also got the whole complexity of managing this money. What we do is, we aggregate and pay the carriers. If we have a client and we save them money on a specific carrier like FedEx, FedEx sends us a bill.

Bootstrapping to $33 Million: Freightwise CIO Richard Hoehn (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: How much were you burning during this period?

Richard Hoehn: We were running $45,000 a month for a while. You definitely need some runway. 

Sramana Mitra: Where does this money come from?

Bootstrapping to $33 Million: Freightwise CIO Richard Hoehn (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What did you have to plug into to make this happen? Based on what you’re describing, integration was involved. Can you talk a bit about what it entailed to get this client to a point where you could start charging them on a gain-share basis?

Richard Hoehn: A good amount of client integration was involved in terms of how they needed to bring the data back in for their ERP systems. We often try to provide value on multiple levels.

Bootstrapping to $33 Million: Freightwise CIO Richard Hoehn (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s get into the details. How did you launch the company?

Richard Hoehn: We bootstrapped the company. Freightwise has almost no debt. The way we did it is, we loaded cash in and bootstrapped it. We made one key decision early on that we would build our platform rather than buy it.