From Australia to Silicon Valley: Anthony Smith’s Journey with Insightly (Part 1)

Anthony started a CRM app in Australia that became the No. 1 on the Google App Store. VCs started calling. Anthony moved to San Francisco and has built a robust company with funding from Emergence Capital. Very cool story!

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

Anthony Smith: I was born in a very small town of Hamilton in the northern part of New Zealand. It’s famous for its cows and

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Bootstrapping to $100M+ from Arizona: JT Marino, CEO of Tuft & Needle (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: How do you compete with these hundred different competitors?

JT Marino: We built the company our way. We cannot compete the same way they do. If we want to compete like a Casper, we cannot beat them dollar per dollar in ad spend. We have to be very careful how we purchase our marketing. We have to be very ruthless with measuring our return on ad spend.

If it’s not profitable, it just doesn’t work. We have to constantly move and reevaluate where we’re spending our money. We started opening stores and we have to be more scrappy where we measure all these things carefully. Our goal is to make sure >>>

Bootstrapping to $100M+ from Arizona: JT Marino, CEO of Tuft & Needle (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Where was that factory?

JT Marino: That was in Southern California. They were willing to take a chance. Their primary business wasn’t even mattresses. We had to go to a factory that didn’t produce mattresses and convince them to produce them. As far as the marketing side goes, we were using family, friends, social media, and doing some Google AdWords.

Customer service was critical to the whole experience. We did very well on that. We would follow up with every single customer and get feedback as to what they didn’t like. We used that to iterate on the product. That drove down our return rate and drove up >>>

Bootstrapping to $100M+ from Arizona: JT Marino, CEO of Tuft & Needle (Part 2)

JT Marino: We shut the site down and quit our jobs. We officially launched Tuft & Needle in October of 2012. The primary differentiation for us was that we were direct to consumer. We had just one model. This was very contrarian to the entire industry. There’s no company that makes one model. There’s firm, medium firm, medium soft. We wanted to just make one. Is it possible that most people actually need the same stuff?

We take that formula and offer that at a fair price, which was easy to do by going direct. We don’t have to have as big a margin because we’re not selling it to a store that marks it up again. We can operate at a much better price. We’re simplifying the process. >>>

Bootstrapping to $100M+ from Arizona: JT Marino, CEO of Tuft & Needle (Part 1)

Online mattress is the hottest e-commerce category these days, and here is yet another one delivering venture scale growth without venture capital.

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?

JT Marino: I was born in Phoenix, but I grew up in Pennsylvania. I went to Penn State. That’s where I met my co-founder, Daehee Park. From there, my career took me to Silicon Valley working for several startups. That’s where my co-founder and I stuck together. We were >>>

10 Podcasts Sharing Successful Startup Stories

Rather than reinventing the wheel as you build your startup, you should be trying to learn the lessons of those who have successfully walked the path you are on before you. Here are the startup stories of a diverse group of entrepreneurs who have all built profitable businesses. Have a listen to these approximately 30-minute podcast interviews:

Alexander Zacke, Founder and CEO of Auctionata – Discusses his online auction house business and how he has built a quintessential Web 3.0 business taking advantage of the web’s building blocks: commerce, community and content in the context of online auctions.

Allan Wille, President and CEO at Klipfolio – Talks about his long journey from a bootstrapped business to a venture funded, higher growth company with 8,000+ customers.

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Bootstrapping with Services: 2600Hz CEO Patrick Sullivan (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: How much of your leads come from open source customers who have bought your core platform and then you get in and sell them applications?

Patrick Sullivan: A lot of our leads come from word of mouth. It woulld usually be an engineer who works at one company and then transfers to another company. Early on, we had a hard time because when customers heard open source, they’d assume it’s inferior. It’s interesting how over the last couple of years, that mindset has drastically changed. Open source means they can build anything they want on top of it. >>>

Bootstrapping with Services: 2600Hz CEO Patrick Sullivan (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: They take over the product roadmap and they don’t pay enough. You lose control of the process and become their outsourced development shop.

Patrick Sullivan: That’s exactly what happens. When you’re stuck in the middle of it, you still get swayed by the brand recognition. That was the hard part. I remember five stories of these big companies trying to push our roadmap in a different direction. We finally had to pull back. That is between 2012 to about 2015.

Around 2016 is when we finally got the platform to a place where it can scale worldwide and it can be distributed in multiple data >>>