Bootstrapping With a Paycheck to Techstars: Nevin Shetty, CEO of Blueprint Registry (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Facebook is unique in its targeting capabilities. Talk about how you took advantage of that. What was the segment you were going after? What segment was converting for you? What did you learn about these nuances of positioning?

Nevin Shetty: As a wedding registry, we targeted people who were engaged.

Sramana Mitra: The status says they’re engaged, and you were marketing to that status.

Nevin Shetty: Correct. Lizzie and I would go to General Assembly classes and other online classes for marketing. Even though they’re engaged, people who live in New York are different from people in Texas. People who like Vogue are different from people who like InStyle magazine. We would then break out >>>

Successful Pivot from B-to-C to B-to-B: Inkling CEO Matt MacInnis (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What about the business model? Your hypothesis at that point was that you were going to digitize these textbooks, you were going to do the customer acquisition on the B2C side, and you were going to take a commission off that sale. What was the business model assumption with the publishers?

Matt MacInnis: They were taking all the rest of the money. It was a royalty-based model where Inkling was keeping a percentage of the sale of these titles. The publishers had all the leverage. The publishers got to set the price. They unilaterally controlled the transaction value and we just got a percentage of that. In hindsight, they were totally off. >>>

Bootstrapping With a Paycheck to Techstars: Nevin Shetty, CEO of Blueprint Registry (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: One clarification, both you and Liz kept your jobs while you were raising this convertible note round. For the whole time?

Nevin Shetty: Yes. That’s the amazing part. It was just the two of us working part-time. From across the nation, Lizzie had moved at this point.

Sramana Mitra: Where is she?

Nevin Shetty: She moved back to Seattle.

Sramana Mitra: During this period, you had a working product. The MVP was in business. You were able to experiment with customer acquisition strategy. >>>

Successful Pivot from B-to-C to B-to-B: Inkling CEO Matt MacInnis (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How did they know about your software?

Matt MacInnis: We found out later that they had discovered Inkling through a publisher who had gotten a job at Starbucks and looked at what Starbucks was doing every quarter by shipping binders out to their district managers. We were a software platform that lets you build interactive content for iPad. There was a match. They opened our eyes to this opportunity, that we could license the technology for businesses to communicate with their employees, and that we could probably get more money as a SaaS business than we could in a consumer business.

Sramana Mitra: You started in 2009. At that point, was this a bootstrapped business or did you already raise money in 2009? >>>

Bootstrapping With a Paycheck to Techstars: Nevin Shetty, CEO of Blueprint Registry (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Did you go with offshore or onshore?

Nevin Shetty: Since it’s very high-touch front-end stuff, we wanted someone we could meet with. We chose a dev shop in New York. They had done e-commerce before. Frankly, they just had very good project management. We were able to talk with them and think through things strategically. It was very helpful because we didn’t know how to architect the website. They were seemingly helpful with that.

Sramana Mitra: How long did it take you to get a minimum viable product out?

Nevin Shetty: I would say it took seven months. >>>

Successful Pivot from B-to-C to B-to-B: Inkling CEO Matt MacInnis (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: This thinking behind your startup is happening while you were still at Apple?

Matt MacInnis: For probably six or nine months, we explored and brainstormed whether there was a viable business here.

Sramana Mitra: Your observation that the future of textbooks was not just digitization of what already existed was the impetus to think about Inkling and what you wanted to do differently at Inkling.

Matt MacInnis: Yes, I was walking into classrooms as part of my work. I saw students with laptops but not using them because the textbook was taking their >>>

Bootstrapping With a Paycheck to Techstars: Nevin Shetty, CEO of Blueprint Registry (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: This is a big challenge. We do have entrepreneurs who are non-technical. Let me ask you one question before you go to the development portion. Before launching into this direction with your startup, you must have done some level of comparative analysis. Talk to me a little bit about what you unearthed in that process of looking around. What else is there? What other options are there along these lines?

Nevin Shetty: In 2013, I had the conception of building an e-commerce experience based on the blueprint of a home. We were like, “Let’s apply this to one particular market. Instead of going to general e-commerce, let’s focus on one particular niche.” We decided to focus on weddings. Wedding is a one-time life event related to the home. >>>

Successful Pivot from B-to-C to B-to-B: Inkling CEO Matt MacInnis (Part 1)

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

Here’s another pivot story. Note: pivots are very expensive to do in VC timeline and cap tables. Matt discusses how damaging the ownership structure has been. Worth understanding the ramifications.

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?

Matt MacInnis: I’m from Nova Scotia, Canada. I’m from a small island in the northeast, 300 miles to the nearest airport. My mom was a school teacher and my dad was a factory worker. We had a pretty good upbringing up there. It was a little bit cold in the winter. I ended up getting into Harvard somehow from that little town. We had to find a way to make that work. My parents, very graciously, gave their retirement savings to make that work. >>>