Bootstrapping a Niche E-Commerce Company: Modded Euros CEO Sean Dawes (Part 1)

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

This conversation is a comprehensive discussion on how to bootstrap a niche e-commerce venture with a lean team and effective use of inventory financing.

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?

Sean Dawes: I was born and raised in Philadelphia. I haven’t gone too far away from my hometown as my company is based out of West Chester, Pennsylvania, which is 20 or 30 minutes outside of Philadelphia.

Building an Online Travel Company From Barcelona: Guillermo Gaspart, CEO of ByHours (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: To open America, you don’t want US investors?

Guiller Gaspart: The main problem that I found last month when we were talking with some investors from the States is that they want to invest in the companies that they already are working in the States.

Once we open the States, we’ll talk again with this venture capital firm. But right now, they realize that they would prefer to invest once we are up and working in the US.

Building an Online Travel Company From Barcelona: Guillermo Gaspart, CEO of ByHours (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk about what happens after you’ve covered all of Spain. Is there any other strategic move that you made that is worth discussing?

Guillermo Gaspart: Yes. At the beginning, we were really focused on the product and on the technology. We were investing a lot of money just to improve this technology both from the user side and from the hotel side.

But after that, in 2015, we did another fund raising process with international investors. The challenge at that time was to go out outside of Spain. The first country that we moved outside of Spain was Germany.

Building an Online Travel Company From Barcelona: Guillermo Gaspart, CEO of ByHours (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How long did it take you to reach $1 million in revenue?

Guillermo Gaspart: It was the second year or third year that allowed us to reach this amount.

Sramana Mitra: Clearly, your first point of call is Barcelona. You had contact and friends there. So that was an easy start. How many hotels were you able to get from Barcelona before you moved out to other places?

Building an Online Travel Company From Barcelona: Guillermo Gaspart, CEO of ByHours (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Talk a little bit about what you needed to build. You needed to build some software that would allow hotels to manage this process as well as users to make bookings in this mode because none of the OTAs would allow users to even do this at the moment.

Guillermo Gaspart: Exactly. We needed to build the software just to put it in the hotels and at the same time, build the website just to offer and sell to the users.

Building an Online Travel Company From Barcelona: Guillermo Gaspart, CEO of ByHours (Part 1)

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

European startups are fast gaining maturity. ByHours is a venture-funded company growing steadily and expanding globally. Read on for a wonderful story.

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

Guillermo Gaspart: I was born here in Barcelona, Spain 40 years ago and am married with three kids. I’m the fourth generation of a hotel family business from Spain. My great grandfather was one of the founders of the first hotel groups here in Spain.

Building a New Insurance Company From Scratch: Clearcover CEO Kyle Nakatsuji (Part 7)

Kyle Nakatsuji: The fortunate thing for us is that car insurance is a $230 billion per year market. The fact that one person who didn’t know us wanted to buy was an indication that lots of people we didn’t know would do the same. So we ended up immediately growing pretty quickly, faster than we would have liked in fact.

We ended up moderating our growth early on, but it was really staying laser-focused as a company on getting that first person to buy the product. Because of the size of the market and the way that we built our distribution, it just started to grow pretty quickly.

Building a New Insurance Company From Scratch: Clearcover CEO Kyle Nakatsuji (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What did you do by way of financing? This doesn’t sound like something that was self-financed. You probably started with financing.

Kyle Nakatsuji: We did. Right when we were getting started, we raised a seed round of about $2 million. About six months later, we raised another $9.5 million.

Sramana Mitra: Is this part from your previous insurance company funds?