Building a Robust Business in Australia: Investorist CEO Jon Ellis (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What market were you going after? Was Investorist focused on the Australian market to start with?

Jon Ellis: To start with, it was. Initially, Investorist launched as an idea of working just in the Australian market. As soon as I launched, I’ve probably been active for six months and then I realized that to make it successful, it had to go global and it had to go global almost straight away.

Sramana Mitra: What did you accomplish in the first six months? Were there enough transactions happening in your marketplace within Australia? >>>

Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Janet Kosloff, CEO of InCrowd (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What year are we talking?

Janet Kosloff: This was 2010. I wrote the business plan in 2010 and I started to think about it. Once I was ready to take the leap, I left my job because I am very commerically-oriented, and I wanted to  find a co-founder that had more of the research and operations side. It was very important to me that I find someone to go on this journey with me because I’m a people person and felt that I wanted to be in this with somebody.

Diane Hayes, who has a background as an epidemiologist, was that partner. There’s a long story that includes a psychic, which I won’t get into. I told her about this idea and, literally, the next day after she slept on it, she said, “I’m in.” She and I decided to bootstrap the company out of the gate. We, each, wrote fairly large checks, put it in a bank account and set out to build the MVP with some software engineers that we hired. We’re not technical founders but we had very strong vision for the product. >>>

Building a Robust Business in Australia: Investorist CEO Jon Ellis (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: After you quit Mirvac, you started an ad agency?

Jon Ellis: I didn’t intend to start an ad agency. I just intended to work as a marketing manager for other property developers. Very quickly, I realized that there weren’t a lot of experienced marketers. There was an opportunity to work for a number of different companies. I, very quickly, brought on more and more stuff until I was spending a lot of money with ad agencies every year. I started an ad agency called Extension, which is still running today.

Sramana Mitra: You said you ran it for four years. How big did the agency become? What kind of revenues were you doing?

Jon Ellis: It was $3 million a year.

Sramana Mitra: That’s awesome. When you decided to move on from that, what drove that decision? >>>

Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Janet Kosloff, CEO of InCrowd (Part 1)

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

You know I don’t buy into the men saying that there’s a bias against women entrepreneurs in the industry. Janet doesn’t either. Here’s an opportunity to learn from her success in building solid revenues, and a profitable business.

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

Janet Kosloff: I was born and raised on Long Island in New York. My father owned a diner in Queens. He was from Brooklyn. My mother was from a small town in Central Pennsylvania. I had a fairly typical upbringing. I went to college at the State University of New York and I studied Nursing. I started my career as a nurse not necessarily because I had a passion for nursing. It was more so because I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to do with my life. My family guided me into that career for the reason that I had an affinity for science. >>>

Building a Robust Business in Australia: Investorist CEO Jon Ellis (Part 1)

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

Jon has side-stepped venture capital, and raised a significant funding from his customers. He hopes to take the company public in Australia once the company gets to about $50 million in revenue.

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

Jon Ellis: I grew up in a small town in Australia on the border of New South Wales and Victoria. It’s got a population of about 40,000 people. My father is a mechanic and has owned his own business for many years. My mother is a teacher.

Sramana Mitra: What did you do for education? >>>

Bootstrapping to $18 Million: Vlad Friedman, CEO of Edge Hosting (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: If you can attract bank financing and can do things with bank financing, it’s hugely advantageous from an ownership point of view.

Vlad Friedman: Exactly. Today, we’re at about $18 million run rate and on our way to hit $20 million this year. We’re still in the same position. We still have a strong balance sheet. We still have a fantastic relationship with our banks. I’m completely non-diluted because everything is just simple debt financing.

Sramana Mitra: What do you want to do with the company? You’ve been running it since the mid 90s and now we’re in the mid 2010s. It’s been 20 years since you’ve been doing this. What do you want to do? Where do you want to go from here? >>>

Bootstrapping to $18 Million: Vlad Friedman, CEO of Edge Hosting (Part 4)

Vlad Friedman: Over the course of time, it was almost like there was an impasse where by the time the recession hit in early 2000, we had just reached our stride. We were sitting in a good place. We were starting to build these relationships with more and more customers. As the market bottomed out, our business just exploded. While all of our competition wasn’t focused on services before, as soon as they lost their funding and valuations, they drastically slashed staffing and quality of support.

My organization was already positioned for high-quality support and high-quality service, and we had this huge rush of customers into our business, which really helped the foundation of Edge. We flourished in the recession because all of our competition fell off the map because they weren’t focused on value and service. As companies cut people out of their organizations, their IT still needed to be managed and needed to be serviced. I think these are pretty basic business principles. You focus on quality and delivering great outcomes. >>>

Bootstrapping to $18 Million: Vlad Friedman, CEO of Edge Hosting (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What year did you come up with the insight?

Vlad Friedman: It was in the mid-90s. I don’t remember the exact year.

Sramana Mitra: You started to provide a hosting solution in the 1995 to 1996 time frame. What was the customer base that you went after with that?

Vlad Friedman: Interestingly, the hosting solution came in 1998. That’s when I went into the automotive space and started to understand the recurring business model. I built that up to a couple of million dollars a year company at that point. In 1998, I said, “This Internet thing is cool. Let’s put up our first website.”

I fired seven vendors in a row because nobody was really outcome-focused or service-focused back then. >>>