Building a Cutting Edge Drone Technology Company: Tom Walker, CEO of DroneUp (Part 1)

The drone industry is a massive beneficiary of the Corvid pandemic. Read how Tom has shepherded DroneUp to hyper-growth from its bootstrapped beginnings and a slow start.

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

Building a Capital-Efficient, Highly Scalable Smart City IoT Venture: LYT CEO Timothy Menard (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: It sounds to me like you have very large deals in your pipeline. At some level, $5 million may be the only money you need to build this business.

Timothy Menard: Absolutely. The mindset was to build a company and be revenue-generating. Having these large contracts that pay 90% of the contract value in the first year is significant.

Sramana Mitra: Oh my goodness. That is fantastic! You won’t be able to recognize the revenue, though but cash-wise, it’s incredible for business-building.

Building a Capital-Efficient, Highly Scalable Smart City IoT Venture: LYT CEO Timothy Menard (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Santa Clara was the first that adopted your technology?

Timothy Menard: San Jose was first.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go into the mechanics of how you built the company from a financial engineering point of view. The first grant was $250,000. You got a second grant because of the discussions with Santa Clara and San Jose.

Building a Capital-Efficient, Highly Scalable Smart City IoT Venture: LYT CEO Timothy Menard (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Was there a customer that you had in mind?

Timothy Menard: All sides – automotive and the communities they drove in.

Sramana Mitra: How did you get the company off the ground?

Timothy Menard: I applied for a Federal Small Business Research and Innovation grant. The company started on a quarter-million grant. I was able to use a portion of that and partner with the University of California – Irvine to have a road system and students of all classifications work on this digitalization concept.

Building a Capital-Efficient, Highly Scalable Smart City IoT Venture: LYT CEO Timothy Menard (Part 1)

You would think deep tech AI / IoT startups take gobs of venture capital to build. Read on to see how Tim has built an incredibly capital-efficient business with massive growth potential using grant money and revenues. Superb company!

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

Bootstrapping Using Facebook Ads to $5M: Dow Janes Co-founders Laurie-Anne King and Britt Baker (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Did you follow the same strategy in the second year?

Britt Baker: Exactly.

Sramana Mitra: Very interesting. It doesn’t sound like you need to make any change. You just keep executing and put more money into Facebook. Is that correct?

Britt Baker: That works well until your Facebook ad account gets shut down. Sometimes they’ll just do this to businesses. They did this in January of 2021.

Bootstrapping Using Facebook Ads to $5M: Dow Janes Co-founders Laurie-Anne King and Britt Baker (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Is this a rolling program?

Britt Baker: People can join anytime. We took on a handful of people in March from another Facebook post. Then we really decided to take more people in April which is when we started advertising.

Sramana Mitra: What kind of advertising did you do?

Britt Baker: We advertised on Facebook and Instagram.

Bootstrapping Using Facebook Ads to $5M: Dow Janes Co-founders Laurie-Anne King and Britt Baker (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Britt, get us to the point where you launched Dow Janes. How did you get yourselves off the ground?

Britt Baker: It’s the fall of 2019. I have another job at that time that I decided was not my passion. I’d be going to dinner parties and cocktail parties and everyone would ask when’s the next Dow Janes meeting. I knew that Laurie-Anne had started an online business before. I called Laurie-Anne. She was about eight months pregnant.