Bootstrapping a Virtual Company to 5 Million Plus: Nick Shaw, CEO of Renaissance Periodization (Part 1)

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

Nick has built a very interesting e-learning company and addressed scalability with nifty strategic choices. Read on. You’ll learn a lot.

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?

Nick Shaw: I was born and raised in the state of Michigan. I grew up with the goal of wanting to go to the University of Michigan. It’s a top-level school. I was lucky enough to get accepted there. I started in the Sports Management program. I originally wanted to be an athletic director. >>>

Bootstrapping with Paycheck to $15 Million from Tennessee: Gene Caballero, CEO of GreenPal (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: How big a company do you think you can build? Obviously, you probably have a sense of the total market that you can access. What is the size of that market?

Gene Caballero: The landscaping industry is about a $9 billion a year industry. Our TAM is almost limitless. In 2019, we want to be in all the major top 100 markets. Then in 2020, we’re going to double back and hit some of those sub-markets in those areas. By then, our revenues should be in the neighborhood of $80 million a year.

Sramana Mitra: Right now, you’re doing it with just the two of you. Do you use a lot of outsourced resources? >>>

Bootstrapping with Paycheck to $15 Million from Tennessee: Gene Caballero, CEO of GreenPal (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Can you talk a little bit more about the Facebook outreach? What did you learn? What have you learned about doing the Facebook outreach? Whom do you target?

Gene Caballero: We target landscaping professionals on a geocoding basis. We are able to get those down to about $3 or $4 a click. That has been our goal. Now we’re getting about 10 vendors a day as opposed to 10 vendors a week, and we’re able to hyper-target specific areas. Facebook outreach has been a gamechanger for us.

Sramana Mitra: It sounds like landscape professionals are identifying themselves on Facebook for you to be able to target 

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Bootstrapping with Paycheck to $15 Million from Tennessee: Gene Caballero, CEO of GreenPal (Part 4)

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

Gene Caballero: We did that in 2015.

Sramana Mitra: This is revenue – not gross merchandise value, right?

Gene Caballero: Yes. >>>

Bootstrapping with Paycheck to $15 Million from Tennessee: Gene Caballero, CEO of GreenPal (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How long did it take you to scrape and convince enough Craigslist lawn mowing people so that you could launch the service?

Gene Caballero: It took about three weeks to a month of calling. For vendors, it’s free. There’s not any cost associated. We knew that if we were calling these professionals and charging them, we wouldn’t be in business.

Sramana Mitra: That’s right. In the beginning, that doesn’t work at all.

Gene Caballero: Probably to this day, it still doesn’t work because you hadn’t really given them any value. You can promise them the world, but if >>>

Bootstrapping with Paycheck to $15 Million from Tennessee: Gene Caballero, CEO of GreenPal (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Did you start this as a bootstrapped company?

Gene Caballero: Yes. We aggregated about $100,000 between the co-founders. We blew that by paying a custom shop to build us a website and a couple of apps. After about a year and a half of not getting what we want, they turned over a semi-usable product to us. They actually went out of business right after that. We knew that there was no way that we can move forward or get serious about starting a business without redoing the site.

We brought on one of our friends who was the engineering type. He went to software school to learn how to build websites. After about six months >>>

Bootstrapping with Paycheck to $15 Million from Tennessee: Gene Caballero, CEO of GreenPal (Part 1)

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

This is a fantastic story of a founder duo bootstrapping with a paycheck, now growing from $5M to $15M in one year, with a virtual team of freelancers. Your classic 21^st century internet business. No outside financing whatsoever!

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?

Gene Caballero: I was born in Lima, Peru. My dad’s side of the family are all entrepreneurs. My grandfather had his own propeller business. We >>>

Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Neil Vaswani, CEO of Corestream (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Besides the roughly $2 million you raised, did you raise any other funding?

Neil Vaswani: We had some angel funding throughout the way at different points.

Sramana Mitra: What is the total amount of money that you’ve raised?

Neil Vaswani: Probably around $3 million or so.

Sramana Mitra: What kind of revenue run rate are you at? What would you finish 2018 at? >>>