Bootstrapping to Exit, Then do a VC-Funded Venture: Cordial CEO Jeremy Swift (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: I was recently talking to the founder of HubSpot. His observation when they started was that people were trying to do inbound marketing by starting blogs and then tying together some level of CRM. He said that nobody had an integrated solution, so he chose to build one.

None of the categories that constituted this integrated system were number one. They were number four or five, but they were the only ones that had an integrated system. What approach did you take in designing and determining what product to go to market with?

6 Udemy Courses on How To Build a Startup for an Early Exit

I’m a big advocate for building small, capital-efficient startups. Not all entrepreneurs need to chase Unicorns. Not all investors need to chase Unicorns. There are many more viable ideas for those smaller ventures and there are considerably more opportunities for their exits, which means cashing in earlier on your hard work.

Bootstrapping to Exit, Then do a VC-Funded Venture: Cordial CEO Jeremy Swift (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You were getting ready to start something else, but you wanted to develop some sales chops. Where did you do that?

Jeremy Swift: I actually told this mentor that he’s crazy. I spent the next year or two warring against that. I finally came back around and this mentor said, “You got to do it.” I jumped in. I ended up leading the worldwide enterprise sales organization for a number of years specifically on our unit around email marketing and digital marketing platforms there.

Bootstrapping to Exit, Then do a VC-Funded Venture: Cordial CEO Jeremy Swift (Part 2)

Jeremy Swift: I worked full-time during the day. I started waning on college. I was talking to advisors and told them about it. An advisor in the Comm department and another from the business department both sat down with me and said, “We understand your personality and what you’re interested in pursuing. We’re going to work with you if you’ll work with us to help you finish school.”

It took me a bit longer. It took me three more years to be able to finish my degree. I was on the six-year college program. I ended up taking night classes. I put my out-of-office reply in the middle of the day and I’d drive back to campus to a class and then race back to the office.

Bootstrapping to Exit, Then do a VC-Funded Venture: Cordial CEO Jeremy Swift (Part 1)

A very effective way to dance the entrepreneurial Waltz is to do a bootstrapped company first, sell it, and then do another with a more ambitious agenda. Jeremy’s journey is a great case study in this method.

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

From Teen Student Entrepreneur in Australia to a Mature Global E-commerce Entrepreneur: Mike Rosenbaum, CEO of Spacer (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What are the metrics? How many buy side and how many sell side do you have?

Mike Rosenbaum: We have over 50,000 locations across Australia and over 200,000 members on our platform. In the US, we have over 10,000 locations now. It’s growing rapidly. The key thing for us is to keep balancing supply and demand at that hyperlocal level. That’s something we’re optimizing. 

From Teen Student Entrepreneur in Australia to a Mature Global E-commerce Entrepreneur: Mike Rosenbaum, CEO of Spacer (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What worked?

Mike Rosenbaum: It’s hard to say when we started getting product-market fit. Over time, we just got better and better at targeting the right customers whether that was through Google or Facebook or offline channels. Eventually, it was word of mouth. Now, most of our new supply is people telling other people about the positive experience that they’ve had.

From Teen Student Entrepreneur in Australia to a Mature Global E-commerce Entrepreneur: Mike Rosenbaum, CEO of Spacer (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Did you launch with your own money?

Mike Rosenbaum: We made a lot of mistakes as well. We did okay. I put in some of my money. I had a new co-founder, Roland. He came from private equity background and had a very complementary skillset. He was more of a finance and strategy guy. We had met over the previous 12 months or so. We kept in touch. We put in some money. We raised some money from our network. 

Sramana Mitra: Give me more specifics. What did you raise money with? Did you do an MVP?