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Bootstrapping with a Paycheck from Indiana: One Click Ventures Co-Founder Angie Stocklin (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Sunglasses is a fairly big category on the Internet. How did you compete with the existing larger players?

Angie Stocklin: We were a discount brand. There were several brands that were similar to ours at that time. We were targeting customers who wanted something that was not branded and between $15 and $20. That shrunk our customer base just a little bit. We paid a lot of attention to what other people are doing in terms of user experience, price points, and shipping prices to make sure that we were competitive. Understanding paid search and getting better SEO were some of the ways that we were able to win.

Sramana Mitra: How did the business ramp? We are talking 2005?

Angie Stocklin: We purchased the site in early 2006. >>>

Bootstrapping with a Paycheck from Indiana: One Click Ventures Co-Founder Angie Stocklin (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Somebody else is sending these letters from Indiana and you were an affiliate partner of that particular business.

Angie Stocklin: Correct.

Sramana Mitra: You were generating traffic in your website and monetizing those letters in that affiliate model from that original business?

Angie Stocklin: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: How much did he charge for these letters and how much commission were you getting?

Angie Stocklin: I remember that we got $5 per letter. I don’t remember how much the customer was being charged. I want to say somewhere between $10 and $15. >>>

Bootstrapping with a Paycheck from Indiana: One Click Ventures Co-Founder Angie Stocklin (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: This is actually an interesting point because we often see entrepreneurs trying to start affiliate marketing as a side business. Did you both quit your jobs and start it full-time or did you still hold on to your prior jobs?

Angie Stocklin: We kept our jobs for several years. We were toying around with the idea of running an affiliate business in 2004. We officially launched in 2005. I didn’t leave my job until the middle of 2007. We put our friends, families, and hobbies on the side for several years while we built our business up. We made sure that we were cash flow positive and our business was growing. It was really important for us to be self-funded and to make sure that we can support ourselves as we grow.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s take it one step at a time. You basically had pay checks coming in. By the way, we have a name for this methodology called Bootstrapping With A Paycheck. If you look in the Entrepreneur Journeys Series, there’s actually a book called Bootstrapping With A Paycheck, which is actually your methodology of starting something and developing it on the side. Let’s double-click into the first few things that you did as you got this started. >>>

Bootstrapping with a Paycheck from Indiana: One Click Ventures Co-Founder Angie Stocklin (Part 1)

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

Angie and her husband have built a portfolio of e-commerce businesses using a very unusual strategy. I had a lot of fun learning about their journey, and hope you would as well.

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

Angie Stocklin: I was born in a small town called Paisley in Indiana. It’s a town of about 2,500. My mom was a teacher and my dad is a farmer and somewhat of an entrepreneur in the fact that farming is a self-employed type of business. My dad and his brothers owned an implement dealership. They sold tractors. I grew up with a little bit of an entrepreneurial spirit. I went to college at the University of Evansville and started studying Psychology. I went on to get my Masters and my educational specialist degree in School Psychology. I worked as a school psychologist for three years before starting One Click. >>>

Leveraging Amazon To Build a Cloud Storage Business: Nelson Nahum, CEO of Zadara Storage (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Was there any segmentation of what kinds of customers were finding your product attractive?

Nelson Nahum: First of all, before the customer, I would like to tackle the question of the business model. We created a great technology. We found out that Amazon really liked what we do because it’s enterprise storage and it brings additional functionality to the Amazon cloud. Amazon doesn’t really OEM, but they offered us a cloud that is connected to them. Any customer of Amazon can be a customer of ours.

We said, “This could be very good. We can put in a small cloud and get the first customer.” This is how we got the first customer. We promoted the storage inside Amazon. There weren’t really a lot of options to use storage there as opposed to storage on-premise where anybody can buy from any storage company. The market is much more crowded today and it’s much harder to differentiate. Back then, the only options were either Amazon storage or us. Then people started finding us.

Sramana Mitra: It sounds like your business model was a regular subscription SaaS business model. >>>

Leveraging Amazon To Build a Cloud Storage Business: Nelson Nahum, CEO of Zadara Storage (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You still had $3 million which you hadn’t really started building a product on. You were basically experimenting with the cloud and learning about the cloud.

Nelson Nahum: Yes. I didn’t have the $3 million then. My experiments started the day after I was laid off. It took a few weeks until the bill from Amazon came. The money came later. The idea was we should cover enterprise storage that has flexibility.

Sramana Mitra: What happens next? How does the story progress?

Nelson Nahum: One thing that I want to mention is that the two startups came after bad news. The first one was because the company was closing. The second was because I was laid off. It’s easy to get comfortable to be in a VP position in a big corporation. Only when things happen that you do things that are much riskier and much less comfortable. We then had the money. We hired the best engineers. I had 250 people that I could choose from. We got a really good team of engineers. >>>

Leveraging Amazon To Build a Cloud Storage Business: Nelson Nahum, CEO of Zadara Storage (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What level of revenue did you get to before the LSI acquisition?

Nelson Nahum: I think we were in the $10 million range.

Sramana Mitra: How much did you sell for?

Nelson Nahum: It’s confidential. It was good for most of the people.

Sramana Mitra: So the bottomline is that you made some money off that transaction?

Nelson Nahum: Yes, definitely. >>>

Building an IPO-Ready Identity Software Company from Colorado: Andre Durand, CEO of Ping Identity (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: What is the financing history beyond that $2 million Fidelity and General Catalyst round?

Andre Durand: I would say after about two years roughly, in very traditional fashion, we started raising money to fuel our growth. I think we raised about $30 million in total between 2003 and 2012. In 2013, we made a decision to switch our business model from a perpetual software license to a subscription business model.

Sramana Mitra: You waited till 2013 to make that shift?

Andre Durand: We did for a couple of reasons. Number one is we were selling infrastructure to big enterprises. While they are open to buying applications on a subscription model, their infrastructure decisions are measured in 3 to 10 year increments. They didn’t really want to be buying infrastructure and visiting a subscription decision every year. Almost all of their infrastructure was purchased on a very traditional basis. That was number one.

Number two was that it wasn’t until we began offering our own cloud service that our own business model was bifurcated. We knew that was not optimal. We >>>