Featured Videos

Bootstrapping to $20 Million: Jagan Reddy, CEO of Leeyo Software (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How did you negotiate the deal with Brocade? How much were they willing to pay you for doing what you were going to do for them?

Jagan Reddy: Today for a $2 billion company, our price point would be anywhere between $300,000 to half a million dollar annual subscription fee. At that point, I gave it to them for just under $20,000.

Sramana Mitra: Oh, wow!

Jagan Reddy: That’s just for the software. They paid for the services.

Sramana Mitra: How much did they pay for the services? >>>

Bootstrapping to $20 Million: Jagan Reddy, CEO of Leeyo Software (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What was the conclusion? What was the insight that you drew from this process?

Jagan Reddy: One of the fundamental things that I understood from the requirements perspective is, if you look at the FASB, which is the standard for accounting, it is very direct and clear about how you need to do the accounting. The biggest challenge is that the same type of two different companies may be adopting different accounting methods. When I looked into it, I found that the most challenging thing for any ERP vendor would be to come out with a product that can solve all those different ways of accounting. I started working on a software which would be heavily configurable to meet different requirements. That’s where the idea came from and I decided to build a software. >>>

Bootstrapping to $20 Million: Jagan Reddy, CEO of Leeyo Software (Part 1)

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

Jagan built a niche software that solved a very specific problem and started selling it to enterprises for a lot of money. This story is a textbook case study of how well you can scale with no outside financing if you can identify a burning pain point in customers who are willing to pay a LOT to solve that pain.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Jagan Reddy: I was born in India. All my schooling was done in India.

Sramana Mitra: Where in India?

Jagan Reddy: In Chennai. My schooling was all done in Chennai. >>>

Morphing a B-to-C Idea to a B-to-B Business: Andrew Witkin, CEO of StickerYou (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Customer acquisition strategy-wise, what works for you the best?

Andrew Witkin: I’m in a few tech groups that are very strong SaaS businesses. For them, it’s very much that whole customer on ramping process. Of course, the sales team is very much responsible for that. They need to acquire customers when you’re a SaaS model because the value of each customer is so high. We’re more marketing-driven to send traffic to inspire people to come to the website and realize the solutions they can now afford using our platform.

Marketing is really there to drive a lot of that awareness and mid-funnel conversion whether it be through search. Our sales team is not built to go out and cold call. Once people come to the website and they want help, we built up a team to be able to, one-on-one, accommodate a customer’s unique needs. >>>

Morphing a B-to-C Idea to a B-to-B Business: Andrew Witkin, CEO of StickerYou (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: We haven’t really talked about the ramp curve. You launched the business in 2010?

Andrew Witkin: Yes, in February 2010. By the fall of 2010, we made it a little more accessible for do-it-yourselfers. We allowed people to do templates so they can make a page of circle stickers only and not have to have die cut shapes. After we did that, about a year and three months later, we released the business version in 2012.

That’s when we started to see not only some incremental growth, but also some more substantial growth in terms of average order value and customer retention. All of a sudden, we had to revise our business plan. At the end of 2012, we were starting to hit very different types of forecasts which we hadn’t been able to do up until that point. >>>

Morphing a B-to-C Idea to a B-to-B Business: Andrew Witkin, CEO of StickerYou (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What happened when you went live? What was the market telling you?

Andrew Witkin: This is always the fun part, right? You get so excited thinking that you know what the market is. I think the irony or the quick learning for us was that skateboarders don’t have a ton of money. When you charge even $10 for a custom die cut sticker, it wasn’t in the kind of volume that we had in our business plans. We realized that this was going to be a bit of a problem.

Luckily, seeing other types of customers like small businesses and brides, they also started ordering from us in fairly good quantities. We realized that we needed to pivot the website in terms of user interface and some of the branding to make it a little bit more inclusive to many different types of segments, and >>>

Morphing a B-to-C Idea to a B-to-B Business: Andrew Witkin, CEO of StickerYou (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Before you raised the next million dollars, what milestones did you achieve in terms of validation?

Andrew Witkin: We showed that from a technical perspective, you could go on to a website, upload an image, type text, and work with various images, and both the image and an automated die-cut could be created. You can then checkout with that image. It was actually a page of stickers. You would have multiple stickers on a page. They were all uniquely die-cut. That would get saved to a server and could eventually get downloaded to a digital printer that would print and then cut that page. We proved that it could be done automatically.

Sramana Mitra: Did you have any customers using this yet? >>>

Bootstrapping to $23 Million: Michael Nemeroff, CEO of RushOrderTees (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: In terms of strategic moves, what were some of your moves that were driving this growth?

Michael Nemeroff: We invested in people, getting the right people in place, and learning about management, which wasn’t easy for us. We don’t have any formal education on management. We don’t have any background on that. I don’t know if I told you. Customers just keep coming back, which was a big thing. We realized that customer experience is huge.

Technology came in around 2007 to 2008 where we invested in technology where customers can self-service. You can go online, design online, and checkout online. We invested on that but it didn’t really take off until we started putting marketing dollars behind it. We hired someone to handle the marketing and focus on e- >>>