1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Shane Neman, Principal at Neman Ventures (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: You were running a bootstrapped business; you had to make it profitable, otherwise you would go out of business.

Shane Neman: Right. It is interesting because there were certain things that I could have done to accelerate a lot. However, I chose not to do it because it would be highly unprofitable to do. I think that venture-backed companies have the luxury of doing that because they have runway and burn and all this money behind them. I didn’t have that. I don’t think that is normal in the SaaS world. I was in it in the early stages.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Shane Neman, Principal at Neman Ventures (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Did they come to you or did you approach them? How did you find that exit?

Shane Neman: We were friendly, but we were fierce competitors. I approached him and said, “Listen, something’s got to give, I would be willing to discuss selling the company if that was something that you were interested in. That way, we can get rid of this competition where we are driving prices up.” We came to terms that made sense for both of us.

Sramana Mitra: What level of an exit was it?

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Shane Neman, Principal at Neman Ventures (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: You also did ad sales on your own?

Shane Neman: Initially, I did. The first advertiser I got was a boutique that was doing a sample sale. They asked me how much I wanted to send out an email blast. I said $5,000. I just made up a number. It was whatever I thought was really expensive at that time. They just said, “Okay, come pick up the check, and we will give it to you. We will send it next week.”

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Shane Neman, Principal at Neman Ventures (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra:  What was the business model?

Shane Neman: It was the traditional media model where we sold ads on our website. We also sold the photos and the print copies. It doesn’t seem like it, but we found a way to find a third-party printer and batch take them and then you sell them for a pretty expensive price. We started to do our own events because we had our own database.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Shane Neman, Principal at Neman Ventures (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: There was little due diligence before people were willing to write checks at that time.

Shane Neman: In retrospect, I wouldn’t have given myself a check. We got almost $2 million. I wasn’t part of the finance portion of things. I was the CTO. We built this company and hired people. We built a platform that was essentially Microsoft 365.

We called it utilizing computing because we didn’t have the word for SaaS. You had to pay a monthly fee just like you would pay a monthly fee for your utility bill. We would get your apps delivered to you through a web portal. We built essentially an AppStore because you could pick which apps you wanted for how many users and pay for them on a monthly basis.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Shane Neman, Principal at Neman Ventures (Part 1)

Shane Neman is the Founder of EZ Texting, JoonBug.com, and Principal at Neman Ventures. Shane has bootstrapped two companies as a solo entrepreneur, found successful exits for both, and is now an investor. Needless to say, he has no bias against solopreneurs. 

Sramana Mitra: We are going to spend quite a bit of time today with Shane Neman. I met Shane a while ago in his Entrepreneur Journey story. I found a lot of interesting insights and lessons from his journey that I wanted to highlight and showcase for you. That is what we are going to do for a while today then we will see what else we have time for. Welcome to the show, Shane.

536th Roundtable Recording on June 24, 2021: With Rajeev Singh-Molares, Alma Mundi Ventures

In case you missed it, you can listen to the recording here:

Roundtable Recap: June 24 – Discussion on the Europe-US Bridge for Tech Startups

During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Rajeev Singh-Morales at Alma Mundi Ventures. We discussed the Europe – US bridge for tech startups.

Adios

As for our entrepreneur pitch, we had Tarun Gulati from Pune, India, pitching Adios, an app for achieving mental clarity. It aligns with the mental health tech startup trend that Rajeev discussed earlier.

FaveKitchens

Next, we had Praveen Akula from Seattle, Washington, pitching FaveKitchens, a restaurant tech startup that is already doing significant revenue and wants to raise a round.

You can listen to the recording here:

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

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