From Solo Entrepreneur to Serial Exits: Shane Neman, CEO of EZ Texting (Part 4)

Shane Neman: Back then, Shortcodes had just come out. Are you familiar with what Shortcode is?

Sramana Mitra: No. 

Shane Neman: It’s like those five or six-digit phone numbers that you text into to get a coupon. It’s a special five or six-digit phone number, and at that time they had just come out in the United States.

From Solo Entrepreneur to Serial Exits: Shane Neman, CEO of EZ Texting (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You started as a solo entrepreneur, and it scaled. How long did you do it as a solo entrepreneur?

Shane Neman: The first year was solo, but then my girlfriend became my partner in it. She had a lot of experience in events in particular and that is how we came to doing our own events. She would do the events portion and I would do the digital online portion. I started it and once it started building, she came in a little bit later.

From Solo Entrepreneur to Serial Exits: Shane Neman, CEO of EZ Texting (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What did you do after that?

Shane Neman: I have to remember because it was a long time ago. 

Sramana Mitra: I remember it very well. I don’t know if you know my background. I am a computer scientist from MIT. The period that you are describing – the 1994 to 2000 period – I founded and ran three startups as a founder and CEO. I remember in absolute gory detail exactly what happened on a daily basis at that time.

From Solo Entrepreneur to Serial Exits: Shane Neman, CEO of EZ Texting (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our free Bootstrapping course and the Investor Introductions page.

Shane started as a solo entrepreneur and built two companies, bootstrapped both, and found successful exits for each.

Read on for more on his journey.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised? What kind of background did you have?

Bootstrapping Using Services from Atlanta: Avelead CEO Jawad Shaikh (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: How long did it take you to hit $1 million ARR with this product?

Jawad Shaikh: At the end of 2019, we were roughly at $500,000 ARR. Twelve months later, we were at $4.9 million ARR. We spent a lot and invested a lot in a period of three years to perfect this. We also changed our pricing model at the end of 2019. 2020 has been a blow-up year as you can see. There was a 900% growth from an ARR perspective. 

Bootstrapping Using Services from Atlanta: Avelead CEO Jawad Shaikh (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: By the time you started to identify the opportunity for productization, it was still just the two of you? Were there other people involved?

Jawad Shaikh: No, we started hiring people much early on. I used to say that in my first business, it took us ten years to get to 30 employees. In Avelead, we reached 20 employees in less than three years. 

Bootstrapping Using Services from Atlanta: Avelead CEO Jawad Shaikh (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Tell me a little bit more about what the product is? What was the process of identifying this product that you wanted to build?

Jawad Shaikh: This was during the Obama years and the stimulus package of helping healthcare systems move to electronic medical records. Our job was always to help hospitals implement those systems. We migrate data and get electronic as much as possible. There were a lot of challenges with that.

Bootstrapping Using Services from Atlanta: Avelead CEO Jawad Shaikh (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our free Bootstrapping course and the Investor Introductions page.

As usual, we love Bootstrapping Using Services case studies.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised? What kind of background did you have?