Bootstrapping to $10 Million: Gesture CEO Jim Alvarez (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: As you have built this business, are you selling through the charities directly or are there channel partners? You brought up Ritz-Carlton. Ritz-Carlton holds a lot of charity events in its ballroom and so do many other luxury hotels on behalf of major charities.

Jim Alvarez: Most of our business is gained directly through the charity. We do have some channel partners and some live auctioneers throughout the nation. We talk about it internally all the time. The Hyatt Regency in Chicago does 200 auctions a year. We handle about 20 of them. We have not figured out a way to break into the venues to become a preferred vendor. It’s something on our list of things to do in 2018. We mainly have feet-on-the-street salespeople.

Sramana Mitra: What year did you actually make your first sale?

Jim Alvarez: May of 2011.

Sramana Mitra: How long did it take you to reach the million dollar revenue mark?

Jim Alvarez: In our third year – 2013.

Sramana Mitra: Then what was the growth trajectory after 2013.

Jim Alvarez: Then we did $2.2 million. Then $4.5 million. Last year, we did $7.8 million.

Sramana Mitra: Great. Any financing?

Jim Alvarez: It’s been bootstrapped. I did raise some money from some of my buddies in 2013. Other than that, it’s been bootstrapped.

Sramana Mitra: You said you have about 70 people?

Jim Alvarez: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: Where are the bulk of these people?

Jim Alvarez: Our headquarters is about 12 miles west of Chicago.

Sramana Mitra: In the headquarters, what are the functions? I’m assuming 20 out of the 70 are sales people.

Jim Alvarez: We have a marketing department and a finance department. We have a whole team of account managers. When our sales people sell an event, we onboard the customer. That is thrown over the wall to an account manager. They own that customer for the rest of their life. They will take that customer from a contract to two weeks after event night. That’s a pretty intense process.

Like I mentioned before, 80% of the revenue is made in a three-hour window. We make sure it goes right. Our account managers spend a lot of time with our customers making sure everything is set up properly. Then we have a pretty big development group. We have a whole team that’s dedicated to support. We have a team of developers. We release code every two weeks.

Sramana Mitra: Where do you go from here? What is your ambition?

Jim Alvarez: The goal has never changed – to build a mobile fundraising platform that encompasses everything that occurs in a charity world. We started with a cornerstone product, which is mobile bidding. Then we’ve added a robust ticketing platform. Before the event occurs, you need to buy tickets to the event. We have a really cool seating management module. We handle all of that. We’re looking to continue to build out additional products. The end game is to build a donor database that will help store all this information. That’s been my goal since I started and that hasn’t changed.

Sramana Mitra: Awesome. Great story.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Bootstrapping to $10 Million: Gesture CEO Jim Alvarez
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