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How An Entrepreneur Couple Bootstrapped to $5M: RuffleButts CEO Amber Schaub and COO Mark Schaub (Part 3)

Sramana: You said you designed the clothing yourself even though you did not have a background in design. Can you explain that process to us?

Amber Schaub: I would draw things up and take my designs to a pattern maker. She would take my designs and convert them into a paper pattern. I sent those paper patterns to the factory, and they cut the fabric based on that pattern.

Sramana: How many different design variations did you have in your first line?

Amber Schaub: The first line had a RuffleButt Bloomer, a RuffleButt Crawler which is a pants version of our Bloomer, T-shirts to coordinate with the RuffleButt Crawler and tops to match the RuffleButt Bloomers. >>>

How An Entrepreneur Couple Bootstrapped to $5M: RuffleButts CEO Amber Schaub and COO Mark Schaub (Part 2)

Sramana: You had the intuition to react to something that a retail salesperson was giving you. What did you do next? How did you go about setting up your business?

Amber Schaub: My first step was to go back to Mark and share my idea. I also had to get the trademark, which cost $400. I remember telling Mark that $400 was a lot of money to spend. Mark told me that I either had to go for it or do nothing, so I just went for it.

After that, I went full steam ahead. I started doing research and read anything I could get my hands on about how to design, how to get samples, and everything else you need to do in the retail space. I called everyone I knew who had knowledge on sample-making and I took a sewing class. I had to be able to talk to the person who would make the product to describe the fabric and seams that I wanted to use. >>>

How An Entrepreneur Couple Bootstrapped to $5M: RuffleButts CEO Amber Schaub and COO Mark Schaub (Part 1)

RuffleButts is a perfect story on how to bootstrap with a paycheck. Amber Schaub started RuffleButts, a children’s apparel company, in March of 2007, backed by her husband’s full-time job. He later joined in 2010 as the COO after the company had gained traction.

Sramana: Let’s start at the very beginning of each of your stories. I imagine you co-founded the company?

Amber Schaub: I grew up in Louisville, Kentucky. I had the entrepreneurial spirit from a very young age. I used to convince my cousins to help me start lemonade stands, baby sitting clubs, and we even tried to start a grocery delivery business in middle school. My dad is an entrepreneur. My parents were divorced so I watched what my mother had to do as a single mother. She worked a 9 to 5 job for a utility company and had to raise a child on that income. We did not live a lavish lifestyle, but I always had what I needed. >>>

Bootstrapping with Services in India: Srishtisoft CEO Ajay Sharma (Part 5)

Sramana: What was the size of the healthcare team when the companies split?

Ajay Sharma: The healthcare side had grown to 50 personnel. Today, we have around 145 people on the team. We were generating around $500,000 in revenue during our beta phase.

Sramana: Was that revenue earned from Indian customers or global customers?

Ajay Sharma: That revenue was primarily from Indian customers. We went to very good hospitals in Delhi and Bangalore. We offered them very good pricing plans to entice them to use us during our beta phase. International customers had no interest in trying it out. We ended up with 8 large Indian hospitals using our product in the beta phase. >>>

Bootstrapping with Services in India: Srishtisoft CEO Ajay Sharma (Part 4)

Sramana: I don’t see what risk they were afraid of. You were financing the company with your own cash. The engineers were not taking any risks. They were just there earning their salary.

Ajay Sharma: Some of them thought that we were not going to be able to pay their salary. At that time, the media in India published a lot of material stating that India was only a software services economy. They would publish articles detailing why it was impossible to build product companies from India. That really spooked our engineers and most of them left us. We were only able to convince a few of them to stay.
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Bootstrapping with Services in India: Srishtisoft CEO Ajay Sharma (Part 3)

Sramana: You had three verticals; media companies, healthcare companies, and finance companies. Which vertical did you decide to focus on when it was time to build a product, and why?

Ajay Sharma: When we looked at the financial companies, we realized that it was a market area that we understood well, but we also recognized that there was a buyers’ club dilemma. We did not have the contacts and relationships necessary to sell the product into that demographic.
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Building an Open Source Software Company Around Cassandra, Seed-Funded by RackSpace: Jonathan Ellis and Matt Pfeil, Founders of DataStax (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: What would you say are the key milestones that you have accomplished, based on almost four years of being in business?

Matt Pfeil: From my perspective, I think that open source as a business is really hard because you create something as an open source project that you don’t own. You throw up things that you could sell. So we have a clear-cut strategy on what our products will look like. I think we figured out how to sell it and we now have 20 of the Fortune 100 as customers. So the customer list backs that up.
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Bootstrapping with Services in India: Srishtisoft CEO Ajay Sharma (Part 2)

Sramana: What were the primary sectors that you supported?

Ajay Sharma: We did a lot of application integration work for healthcare companies, media companies, and financial companies. Those were our three primary verticals. In 2004, we ran into some challenges. In fact, the period between 2004 and 2005 was challenging for most Indian services companies. At the beginning of 2004, the company had four partners. All of us got married during that period and two of the partners felt our market had too much risk to proceed with the company. They elected to leave and get a more secure job.

Sramana: How large was the company? Was it just the four of you?

Ajay Sharma: No, we had 200 employees at that point. We had differences among the partners, so we had to liquidate that company.

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