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Building a Global Software Company From Australia: Bigcommerce Co-Founder Mitch Harper (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Was there any geographical bias in the 2,000-customer base?

Mitch Harper: They were mainly from North America and Australia.

Sramana Mitra: Why were they pre-ordering? Why were they interested in your product? This is a segue into the discussion about your competitive landscape. There are a few players in that space. There is Volution, Magento, and Shopify. When you were starting out in 2008, what exactly was the competitive landscape? How were you positioning, and what is it that these 2,000 customers, who pre-ordered, found attractive? >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services: InRule COO Rik Chomko (Part 2)

Rik Chomko: Once we shut down the services company, my business partner and I wanted to start a product company. Our idea was to provide software to corporations which would allow them to modify logic without any coding effort.

Sramana: What year are we talking here?

Rik Chomko: This is in 2002.

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Student Entrepreneurs Bootstrapping a Zero-Logistics E-Commerce Company to $19 Million: Wrist-Band.com CEO Azim Makanojiya (Part 6)

Azim Makanojiya: The other company then told them that they can still service us. They got their orders for three weeks but didn’t pay the factory. In the meantime, they built their own factory in China and started doing orders. They left the factory with unpaid bill of about $175,000.

We’re now basically the sole company that sources from them. We started with one factory over there and he [Chandler] has built up to 20 factories that he sources our orders from. He personally owns about five factories and he sources the surplus orders from about 15 other factories.

Sramana Mitra: So you have a good supply chain established at China at this point.

Azim Makanojiya: Sourcing was probably one of the biggest hurdles that we came across. Then, there was shipping. >>>

Building a Global Software Company From Australia: Bigcommerce Co-Founder Mitch Harper (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Is it the same team that you had in Sydney that got Bigcommerce off the ground?

Mitch Harper: Not really. As I had mentioned, I used to be an engineer and built the first version along with Chris who was one of our early employees from that initial team. He’s still with us today leading a team here in Sydney.

Sramana Mitra: Was Eddie also involved in Bigcommerce? What was his progression in this story?

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Bootstrapping Using Services: InRule COO Rik Chomko (Part 1)

Rik and his team had to navigate a long journey, including a recession that disrupted one of their key customer segments dramatically. Read how they survived.

Sramana: Rik, let’s start with the beginning of your story. Where are you from? Where were you raised? What kind of circumstances? Give us some of the back story.

Rik Chomko: I was born in the Chicago land suburbs and grew up there. My dad introduced me to computers at a very early age, which was way back in the 70’s, mostly because that’s what he did for a living. He’s one of the first people, I think, that jumped on to the information technology bandwagon. >>>

Student Entrepreneurs Bootstrapping a Zero-Logistics E-Commerce Company to $19 Million: Wrist-Band.com CEO Azim Makanojiya (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: $110,000 to $6.9 million! Explain to me how that happened? What were the strategic levers?

Azim Makanojiya: We were all new to this industry. We didn’t know what was going on. The only reason that this could happen at a very fast pace, from my point of view, was because we had the drive. We were working full-time at this business. The second and probably the most important thing is, if you really understand the AdWords engine, it translates into instant traffic. We were going really aggressive at this and probably marketing at the first to second spot constantly in a majority of the keywords.

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Building a Global Software Company From Australia: Bigcommerce Co-Founder Mitch Harper (Part 1)

We seldom see global software companies emerge out of Australia. Bigcommerce is a rare exception.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with the beginning of your personal story. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised? What’s the back story of BigCommerce?

Mitch Harper: I was born and raised in Sydney in Australia. Bigcommerce was also born in Sydney five years back in 2009 when I was about 27 years old.

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Building a Successful Social Media Business from Germany: Moviepilot CEO Tobias Bauckhage (Part 7)

Sramana: What was the next milestone?

Tobias Bauckhage: The next milestone was in 2010 when Facebook became a very important tool to reach people. You could target people based on their page and do advertising to drive them somewhere. We used targeting to experiment with Facebook and our Facebook page. We had editorial teams writing stories and we would experiment with how to write those stories to increase engagement. Every time we had a mainstream story, we would spend money to promote that content. We would target people who would want to see that page on our platform who we knew would engaged with our content on our platform. That was very successful. >>>