Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Glamping Hub CEO Ruben Martinez (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What about financing? Did you bootstrap it? How did you get it off the ground?

Ruben Martinez: At the very beginning, it was bootstrapped. It took about two years, more or less, before we got our first angel round. We had a small round that allowed us to invest in a little bit of technology and hire a few people.

Bootstrapping First from Colorado, Then Scaling with VC Funds: Faction CEO Luke Norris (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What does this do to your revenue? You’re approaching $20 million in revenue and you’re facing competition. What happens? How does the revenue change?

Luke Norris: At this point, the revenue started to flatten a little. We’re growing but we’re not growing anywhere near what we used to. We’re still finding our way on how to position this complex product.

Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Glamping Hub CEO Ruben Martinez (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What was the spark for the business?

Ruben Martinez: The idea of Glamping Hub came from the simple fact that nobody was representing unique outdoor accommodation online. Everybody has gotten into hotels, apartment rentals, and condo rentals.

Bootstrapping First from Colorado, Then Scaling with VC Funds: Faction CEO Luke Norris (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Talk to me a little bit about the co-labelled and white-labelled channel partnerships that kicked in gear. How did they come about?

Luke Norris: We had established an early go-to market motion. The key to this next level of success was NetApp. We were able to co-label with them where they were signing up service providers to resell and help us sell our service and solutions. That virtuous circle is what helped expand us on the map rapidly.

Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Glamping Hub CEO Ruben Martinez (Part 1)

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

Travel has been a popular category for entrepreneurs to build capital-efficient businesses in. Read the story of Glamping Hub.

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?

Ruben Martinez: I was born and raised in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I went out to University of New Mexico for a year before I transferred to a university here in Denver, Colorado.

Bootstrapping First from Colorado, Then Scaling with VC Funds: Faction CEO Luke Norris (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Do you have a sense of where your pricing model is settling into based on these early interactions? When you were starting to get bombarded by VCs, did you know where your price point was settling into?

Luke Norris: I had an idea where my price point is settling into. Still to this day, we don’t have a lot of comparables. A lot of it involves having a high MSRP and then working back the partner discounts and further discounts to close the customer.

Bootstrapping First from Colorado, Then Scaling with VC Funds: Faction CEO Luke Norris (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: At this point, the revenue that you’re making is from this product that you just demonstrated at VMWare?

Luke Norris: A third of our revenue is from that. The other third is through the sharing of networking and sharing of compute resources.

Sramana Mitra: The revenue that is coming from this product, who are the early customers?

Bootstrapping First from Colorado, Then Scaling with VC Funds: Faction CEO Luke Norris (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Where were you based while you were doing all this?

Luke Norris: I was still in Denver. At that time, I was working a lot in New York. I didn’t have a permanent place out there, but I was there several weeks a month.

Sramana Mitra: What happens next and what year are we going to go to next?