Dealing with Major Market Shifts: Aphrodite’s CEO Jonathan Foltz (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What product were you selling?

Jonathan Foltz: We were selling LED shoes. We could have kept on going. Then we had a problem in China. They didn’t do the proper paper work and they had batteries. They had to recall them and send them back. It was a huge problem. We could have probably made a million to $1.5 million if we didn’t have any of those problems.

Sramana Mitra: How were you getting the customers?

4X Serial Entrepreneur from India: Kashyap Deorah, CEO of HyperTrack (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How long into your independent journey did the acquisition happen?

Kashyap Deorah: Three years.

Sramana Mitra: Then you stayed at Future group for two more years?

Kashyap Deorah: Correct.

Sramana Mitra: In those later two years, did the business change? India was coming online at a very fast pace.

Dealing with Major Market Shifts: Aphrodite’s CEO Jonathan Foltz (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: For the digital agency, how were you acquiring your clients?

Jonathan Foltz: No one believes me when I say this. It started off with friends and people I knew. I never marketed, ever.

Sramana Mitra: What year was this?

Jonathan Foltz: We started in 2009. 2010 and further was when things started to accelerate.

4X Serial Entrepreneur from India: Kashyap Deorah, CEO of HyperTrack (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Talk a little bit about that project – the one where we met.

Kashyap Deorah: I was always inspired by the power of the internet to democratize disaggregated markets. One of the problems I saw was that not all the market participants get the same opportunity. Internet was not mainstream at that time. The idea was to create an eBay over the phone where buyers and sellers could call a number and talk to a person who would have an assisted commerce layer.

Dealing with Major Market Shifts: Aphrodite’s CEO Jonathan Foltz (Part 1)

Jonathan has had to shepherd his jewelry e-commerce venture through the pandemic first. Then came the Apple iOS battle with Facebook which has rendered small merchants ineffective on the Facebook platforms.

Read how a scrappy, creative entrepreneur is managing all the curveballs thrown at him.

4X Serial Entrepreneur from India: Kashyap Deorah, CEO of HyperTrack (Part 1)

Kashyap had early success with three of his companies, each of which had very small amounts of friends and family financing. He pretty much bootstrapped these three startups to rapid exits.

His fourth startup, HyperTrack, has been a challenging journey, but he has navigated it well, and turned around the earlier setbacks over the last five years.

Wonderful story.

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?

14 Courses on How To Build a Startup in the Midwest

This bundle of courses is for IT entrepreneurs who wish to start and grow a startup in the Midwest of the United States. If you are in that region, start by reviewing this course:

1. How Investors Think About Startups in the Midwest with Sramana Mitra

It will give you an inside look at the Mid-Western startup ecosystem and how you may fit into it. 

Bootstrapping a Vertical CRM Product using Services: Cleverping CEO Haysam Ali (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Do you charge the brands?

Haysam Ali: No, they charge me. They invest resources and we invest resources on our side to make sure that we can accomplish the integration. At the end of the day, both sides generate revenue by using the CRM.

Sramana Mitra: How many of these mom-and-pops are out there that you are selling this to?

Haysam Ali: There are more than 30,000.