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Ultra-Light Startup to $20 Million in Revenue: WatchUWant CEO OJ Whatley (Part 1)

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

OJ Whatley did $6 million in revenue in 2006 from his home, with ‘me, myself, and I.’ Further elaborating on the ultra-light startup trend, we bring you his story of approaching $20 million with 20 employees.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the beginning of your story. Where are you from? Where did you grow up and in what kind of background?

OJ Whatley: I was raised in Chicago. My father was a commodities trader. That’s where I got in my blood the idea of buying low and selling high – the idea of speculation and entrepreneurship.

Sramana Mitra: Entrepreneurship and speculation are not the same things.

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Building a Fat SaaS Venture: Rob Hull, Founder and President of Adaptive Insights (Part 1)

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

We continue our coverage of fat startups, how they get funded, built, and scaled in this series with Adaptive Insights. Lean startups get a lot of attention now, but I have been covering fat startups as well with stories like Adaptive Insights.

Sramana: Rob, let’s start by reviewing your background. Where do you come from? What are the roots to your entrepreneurial journey?

Rob Hull: I was born in Austin, Texas. I spent most of my early years in southern California before heading north to attend Stanford. I was an economics major but did some dabbling in computer science classes. I graduated form Stanford in 1988. I decided that since I had spent most of my life in California, it was time to live somewhere different. So, I moved to the east coast. >>>

Bootstrapping a Big Data Company Using Services: DataSong CEO John Wallace (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Can you talk about that?

John Wallace: The problem now has a name. It’s not an ideal name but it has a name. It’s called marketing attribution. It’s looking at the effectiveness of marketing spend. The field closest to that would be approaches of this in Statistics in the past 20 years – by week, how much we’ve spent and see if we can sort out changes in our revenue based on changes in spend. We chartered a model like that. They just couldn’t fall in love with it. We asked them why. They said, “It doesn’t take into account which consumers have been exposed.” They had this catalog modeling background where they’re used to looking at households and whether or not to spend money or not. That was a problem we decided to address.

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Student Entrepreneur to $10M+ in Revenue Without Dropping Out: Course Hero CEO Andrew Grauer (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: You focused on getting to a business model. Part of the problem at the Valley right now is that people just go and build things without figuring out a business model. As a result, they have huge burn rates and no monetization model. That doesn’t create a sustainable company. That whole model is predicated upon some fluke acquisition. Otherwise, you cannot sustain that model. Your model is much more sustainable.

You said you were very conscious about the burn rate. Can you talk a little bit about how you built your team? What areas did you put in people?

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Ultra-light Startup with $6 Million Revenue: Car Part Kings CEO Michael Dash (Part 7)

Sramana: What kind of expertise do you have on your team and how is that split out?

Michael Dash: I have two full time people working in customer service. I have a database engineer and a full time catalogue person. I have a marketing analyst. Myself and my partner are the President and CTO. I have a full time designer and the rest of my team consists of developers. We primarily have Magento developers. They help our own site, our distribution outlets, and the tie-ins there.

Sramana: How much of your business is generated from your own site as opposed to the marketplaces like eBay?

Michael Dash: Our breakout is about 50/50 right now. >>>

Bootstrapping a Big Data Company Using Services: DataSong CEO John Wallace (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How much did you do in terms of revenues in the first couple of years?

John Wallace: It probably took us four years to get to a million dollars.

Sramana Mitra: How many people were involved?

John Wallace: There were about four people. My original hypothesis was that there would be a lot of short-term contracts and that people need specialty skills. Once they’ve seen it in action, they would try to copy it and do it themselves. That’s not at all what happened. >>>

Student Entrepreneur to $10M+ in Revenue Without Dropping Out: Course Hero CEO Andrew Grauer (Part 6)

Andrew Grauer: Then, moving on to the other question on the engagement level, engagement is quite high. I think the difference between other online education sites like Coursera and edX is that their users are looking just to learn for learning sake. Our supplemental resources are really focused on helping students who are already enrolled in the course and there is a requirement where there’s a large incentive for them to complete and do well in the course. If they can really get an edge and make sure that they master the course, this will be a major motivation to use Course Hero.

Sramana Mitra: Are you saying that your 150,000 subscribers are all active users?

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Ultra-light Startup with $6 Million Revenue: Car Part Kings CEO Michael Dash (Part 6)

Sramana: Your policy of being selective with distributors makes perfect sense. How many relationships do you have with distributors in order to allow you to serve the entire car parts market?

Michael Dash: I have one distributor who covers 99% of my aftermarket parts requests. For my body parts, I have one distributor that I use for 99% of my fulfillment requirements. For performance parts also, I have one distributor that I use who satisfies 99% of those requirements. We tried to deal with multiple distributors and we found out that it was not worth it and it did not pay off for us. >>>