Solo Entrepreneur Bootstrapping to over $5M: Vladimir Gendelman, CEO of Company Folders (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How did you recover from that situation where you lost traffic? How did you come back from that?

Vladimir Gendelman: We also got hit at the beginning of all those penalties. There wasn’t much information out there. We hired a company. It was a digital marketing company that had some knowledge of this. They gave us ideas on what to do.

Solo Entrepreneur Bootstrapping to over $5M: Vladimir Gendelman, CEO of Company Folders (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What were you offering people to buy?

Vladimir Gendelman: I started selling online right away. The very first version of the website was very basic. I just came up with a whole bunch of folders styles. I put them on a website. There weren’t that many. I started promoting.

Sramana Mitra: How did you promote it?

Solo Entrepreneur Bootstrapping to over $5M: Vladimir Gendelman, CEO of Company Folders (Part 1)

Ukrainian entrepreneur Vladimir Gendelman started as a solo entrepreneur in Detroit and has bootstrapped a $5M+ niche e-commerce company.

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

Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship from the Czech Republic: Runecast CEO Stan Markov (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What about events? Is that something that you’ve done in those marketplaces?

Stan Markov: Yes, we haven’t been to a Microsoft of Google event. We’ve been to the AWS ReInvent and exhibited there. We’ve also been to the KubeCon event. It’s a great audience and a great source of leads.

Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship from the Czech Republic: Runecast CEO Stan Markov (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Tell me more about how things evolved now that you have some money and have a team together. How are things going in 2018 and 2019?

Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship from the Czech Republic: Runecast CEO Stan Markov (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Talk to me about the VMWare Marketplace. How many VMWare admins are on the marketplace?

Stan Markov: It’s not the biggest source of leads. If I compare it to the AWS Marketplace or the Azure marketplace, VMWare Marketplace is not as popular. It’s one of the ways to get to either VMWare or third-party products.

Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship from the Czech Republic: Runecast CEO Stan Markov (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: They invested because the five of you had deep domain knowledge. This is a very desirable team.

Stan Markov: In addition to that, we had all the certificates. I was the first one in the entire IBM to get the highest VMWare certificate – VMWare Certified Design Expert. Only around 300 in the world have it.

Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship from the Czech Republic: Runecast CEO Stan Markov (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: How is Runecast positioned? What is the go-to-market?

Stan Markov: We started developing the MVP in 2014. We launched at VMWorld in San Francisco in 2015. At that time, our product was oriented towards VMWare vSpheres. It was proactive troubleshooting but also security hardening. It was a lot on the IT operations and configuration management side.