Building a New Niche Brand from New Hampshire: Yogibo CEO Eyal Levy (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Why Japan?

Eyal Levy: Through the years and since 2012, people would see our brand if they came to the US and tried it or they’d just read articles online. Some approached us to see if they can start the brand in their own country. With most of them, it just wasn’t the right fit because we really believe in the model that we created, which is the synergy with the brick-and-mortar and online. Some of those leads wanted just online or just stores and didn’t want to have the entire model.

The first person who we really believed could do it was a person from Japan. He read about Yogibo and approached me. He ordered and paid $800 to ship one and wrote me an email that it’s the best purchase he’s ever made. We met a few weeks later in Asia. There was great chemistry. Three months after, we signed the >>>

Competing with Giants: Colin Earl, CEO of Agiloft (Part 3)

Colin Earl: The next thing that happened was somewhat of a surprise. It was being picked up by very large businesses. I won’t mention by name but it’d suffice to say that one client was one of the world’s largest defense contractors. When a guy representing them called, I asked him what they will be using it for.

Then he replied, “We’re going to be using it for satellite communication errors.” Then I wondered, “Why? You’re a Fortune 50 company. You must have something for tracking satellite communication errors. Satellite is one of your primary areas of business.” The voice got really cold at the end of the line. He said, “Yes. If I want to add one field, it takes two months for IT to do it. I have to call in political favors to get it done at that time. Now, I downloaded your product this >>>

Building a New Niche Brand from New Hampshire: Yogibo CEO Eyal Levy (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Now we’re talking 2010. What is the split in the business? How much are you selling through retail? How much are you selling online?

Eyal Levy: Back then, the online business was about 20%.

Sramana Mitra: What happens in 2011?

Eyal Levy: We saw that the model of the store worked. In October of 2010, we opened the second store.

Sramana Mitra: Where was that? >>>

Competing with Giants: Colin Earl, CEO of Agiloft (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You had IBM paying the bills and you were basically hatching a company on the side. You had the time and runway to do that.

Colin Earl: As anyone working 40 hours a week.

Sramana Mitra: Tell me about what you were doing on the side.

Colin Earl: I was working on an optimization technology – a blackbox optimizer. It would plug in to existing systems and allow the optimization of solid models to minimize stress while maximizing strength, minimize weight while also minimizing the maximum stress of the object. The reason >>>

Building a New Niche Brand from New Hampshire: Yogibo CEO Eyal Levy (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Is this a product that you are doing under your own brand?

Eyal Levy: For the first line, we had to develop the product ourselves. We had to develop a different inner fabric to make it more durable and to comply with the regulations here. It’s our own brand. I started the brand. We started eight years ago with a core line of bean bags, but we have now expanded it to a whole lifestyle line, which includes a lot of comfort accessories and home décor products. Now we’re expanding into fashion accessories.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the beginning. In 2009, what did you launch the company with? I’m assuming you bootstrapped the company since you had just gone through the exit of your family business. >>>

Competing with Giants: Colin Earl, CEO of Agiloft (Part 1)

Colin’s company has to compete with Salesforce.com, ServiceNow, and Apttus with a bootstrapped business. Read on to learn how he does so.

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?

Colin Earl: I was born in London and raised to be an engineer. I graduated from Imperial College. I came to Silicon Valley three years later. >>>

Building a New Niche Brand from New Hampshire: Yogibo CEO Eyal Levy (Part 1)

We’ve been covering new niche brands that have successfully been built either purely with e-commerce or with an online-offline combination. Yogibo is a bean bags company that has scaled nicely in its niche.

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?

Eyal Levy: I was born and raised in one of the suburbs of Tel Aviv. I was raised in a family of entrepreneurs. My father was an entrepreneur. He founded a plastic company. My maternal grandfather was also an entrepreneur. He had a toy factory. Since I was ten years old, I was helping out. I would spend half of the summer vacation >>>

Bootstrapping an Online Mattress Brand to $168 Million: Ricky Joshi and Ron Rudzin, Co-Founders of Saatva Mattress (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: One of the results of this increased competition is that Google keyword pricing goes up significantly.

Ricky Joshi: Absolutely.

Sramana Mitra: You’re a high-ticket item, so I suppose you have lots of headroom to spend on customer acquisition. Still, everybody in that space does have that kind of headroom, so the bidding war must be tremendous.

Ricky Joshi: It comes back to building the business and being an early mover. Because we were early, we were able to test and learn what worked. We were >>>