From Hardcore Techie to Successful Entrepreneur: Cybellum CEO Slava Bronfman (Part 5)

Slava Bronfman: It was a better year in terms of sales. Earlier, a lot of our sales were based on physical conferences. It’s hard to compete as a small startup. If you go to a conference and you have a small booth, it’s hard to compete. Now remote working levels the playing field. We felt that it was easier for us to approach customers remotely. We have customers around the globe. We have customers in the United States, Europe, China, and Japan. It was relatively easier than before.

Sramana Mitra: I’ve heard this from a lot of startups. The pandemic has been a boon for them for exactly the same reasons.

Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Art.com CEO Josh Chodniewicz (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: We are now in 2004?

Josh Chodniewicz: 2001 was when we acquired Art.com. Then 2004 was when we raised $30 million and combined it with our leading competitor at that time called AllPosters. I called up the other CEO and said, “We can shoot bullets at each other or we can join and shoot them at the rest of the world.” We put the businesses together in 2005.

Sramana Mitra: You ran the company?

From Hardcore Techie to Successful Entrepreneur: Cybellum CEO Slava Bronfman (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: You’re giving a lot of automotive examples. Is that one of the areas where you entered the market?

Slava Bronfman: Yes, we wanted to start with one segment that we can really understand well. We started with automotive. Today, we are in other segments like medical devices and industrial IoT. When we started, we were laser-focused on the automotive segment.

Sramana Mitra: When you were designing the product, did you have a design partner?

Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Art.com CEO Josh Chodniewicz (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What was the revenue trajectory with search engine and affiliate marketing as the drivers?

Josh Chodniewicz: The other consumer driver for us was our partnership with eBay in 1998 to list our products. We were talking to eBay about why their marketplace didn’t have the traction. The problem was their listing fee. They were charging a 10-cent listing fee.

From Hardcore Techie to Successful Entrepreneur: Cybellum CEO Slava Bronfman (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: By December, you had the MVP. How many of the other customers came on board?

Slava Bronfman: Just a handful in the first quarter of 2017.

Sramana Mitra: What was the incident to make you realize that you had to pivot?

Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Art.com CEO Josh Chodniewicz (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Why Art.com?

Josh Chodniewicz: This was in 1994. It was a while ago. A buddy of mine called me up. He was at Virginia Tech. He was getting his Computer Science degree there. He said, “Josh, I know something that’s going to be huge one day – the internet.” We started talking about it.

I bought myself a modem and started playing around with it. We brainstormed in a diner in New Jersey. Nobody was using it. To give context, one out of 800 Americans had an email address in 1994.

From Hardcore Techie to Successful Entrepreneur: Cybellum CEO Slava Bronfman (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You’ve finished this accelerator program and you’ve got some mentors. What was your trajectory? Were you building a product first? Were you talking to customers? Where did the validation of your idea come from?

Slava Bronfman: We were a bit naive. We just started building the product. Our product is very tech-heavy. We were thinking that two guys can just build the product. We understood that it’s not the case. The right thing to do is to build a nice presentation and approach investors. We had a big mission here and we needed a lot of people to build the product.

Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Art.com CEO Josh Chodniewicz (Part 1)

Josh bootstrapped for 10 years before raising a $30M first round of funding.

Read on to learn more about his journey.

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