Bootstrapping to $10 Million: Gesture CEO Jim Alvarez (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You basically built this on your father’s farm?

Jim Alvarez: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: You turned it into a theme park kind of thing?

Jim Alvarez: Yes. This is our 8th year and we are still growing strong. It’s a really big operation. I’ve got eight people in the parking lot, three police officers, and two paramedics every night. We have upwards of a hundred kids who come and act and scare people. We have professional makeup artists. I’ve been doing that every year since 2010.

In the beginning of 2011, right after we successfully ran our first year, I always knew there had to be a way to run a fundraising event. I had gone to many of these fundraising events. You go to these events. You wait in line for registration and you make a donation. I don’t really like to wait in line; let alone give somebody money at the end of the night. I kept thinking that there has to be a better way.

It was the early part of 2011 when I started Gesture. We have a bidding platform that allows people to go to a charity event to instead of bidding on paper and pen during an auction, you can bid right from your mobile phone. The cool part is this allows people to be notified when they’ve been outbid. We text them the second they’ve been outbid. It allows the charity to open the event early.

In the old days, you had to be present to bid. Now we can open it up weeks ahead of time and give people more than enough time to be engaged. Probably the single most important thing that we do is we handle all the payments for charity partners. It makes the donor’s life much better because they’re not waiting in line to figure out how to pay. They can simply pay right from their phone.

For charities, it’s much easier. Before Gesture, people would win. Right now, they can collect the majority of the money on the night of the event. I started in my basement just by myself. As I realized this was going to work, I hired a couple of people. Now I think we have 70 or so employees.

Sramana Mitra: I imagine that this is the company that we want to focus the story on. Let’s go back to the beginning of Gesture. Who built the product?

Jim Alvarez: A guy by the name of Rich Aquino. He’s the only developer that I knew. I’m a sales guy at heart. The circle I run around are sales people. I just happened to play in a poker game with Richie. I called him up one day and said, “What do you think about quitting your job and building this platform?” Once he realized I was serious, he said, “I think I could do it.” He built our first version of Gesture himself with his bare hands.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Bootstrapping to $10 Million: Gesture CEO Jim Alvarez
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