Bootstrapping an E-Commerce Startup from Utah: KURU CEO Bret Rasmussen (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What did you learn by way of customer acquisition channels? Which ones were producing against this strategy?

Bret Rasmussen: Search engine was very effective. We could solve a real problem that customers have, so the search engine is a great place when you know what you want. For example, you want shoes for heel pain. That’s become easier to get in front of a customer compared to searching for a lifestyle shoe.

People don’t search for that, but if they know they have a specific problem that they want to solve with footwear, then that search becomes effective. 

Sramana Mitra: Did you have a blog that talked about these special-purpose shoes? 

Bret Rasmussen: We did not. We did launch a blog in 2011 or 2012. From 2009 until then, we didn’t have one. We did have content on our landing page. We created a lot of pages of content on these different conditions to build awareness of us as a possible solution.

We then used the search engine to drive traffic to those pages to get visibility. We also did SEO to drive traffic to those pages. There was a lot of word of mouth that happened back then too. Once customers discover us and have success with us, they would tell their friends about it.

They were active on message boards and forums where they would say, “Hey, you should try KURU. I tried them and they have been amazing for me.” We were doing that part of the marketing. It was our customers doing it for us. It was effective. 

Sramana Mitra: What was the price point at which you were selling the shoe?

Bret Rasmussen: We were in the $100 to $120 range depending on the style. We had a couple in the $90 price range. 

Sramana Mitra: You said you raised seed funding. What was the source of the seed financing?

Bret Rasmussen: Primarily individuals, angels, friends, and family.

Sramana Mitra: Was it a professional angel or friends and family? Those are two different categories.

Bret Rasmussen: Both. Professional angels led the round then friends and family came in. 

Sramana Mitra: Can you talk about how you got to the professional angel who invested in your company. 

Bret Rasmussen: I found the angel through a lot of networking. It was through the business plan competition that I mentioned earlier. We entered a couple of university business plan competitions. In one of those competitions, we met this individual who said, “Hey if you guys want to raise money, let’s talk.” A couple of years later when we were going out to raise money, that’s when we reconnected. 

Sramana Mitra: We understand what is happening, what the business is. How long did it take you to get to a million dollars in annual revenue? 

Bret Rasmussen: It took us four years. 

Sramana Mitra: So it was from 2008 to 2012? What is the next major inflection point after you crossed that million-dollar revenue milestone? What was the strategy driving it?

Bret Rasmussen: What I found was that I’m never happy with stagnating. If I could get this much in revenue, then it’s going to be amazing. But what I find is that when I reach those levels, I’m just hungry for more. We discovered our customer, and we have a product-market fit.

The brand pivoted from a brand that was focused on a lifestyle urban outdoor action sports to a brand that could help with foot pain. One of our inflection points is focusing more on problems that we could solve for our customers. If the customer has foot pain, we want to get in front of them and find ways to solve them. That is one pivot that we did, and it continues to accelerate.

Another thing is to get more efficient and holistic in our marketing strategy. What got us to that $1 million was a lot of search engine marketing. By then, we launched a new website. It was a much more robust e-commerce platform that would allow us to scale. It’s a more scalable platform than the first one.

The brand pivoted and the focus is on our customers now that we know who they are. Our customers are more than just our customers. We want to treat them like they love us and we love them.

If you think about it that way, who is your life partner? They are someone you love. You would treat them differently than you would if they are just your customer. We started focusing on creating that level of connection with our customers. We got a lot more effective in our email marketing and our story telling.

Now that we know who our customers are, and we have product-market fit, we started delivering a better experience to them and a better product. That was on the technology and marketing side. On the product side, it was understanding what the product needs our customers had and asking ourselves if we are meeting them.

The original brand was more of an outdoor inspired brand; our original product was outdoor looking. We learned with our customers that they were wearing a lot of footwear intended for the outdoors for work and for applications that the product wasn’t intended for.

We realized that we needed to start investing in new platforms – taking our technology, and applying it to sandals for example. That became another focus – how to offer a broader product mix that meets the needs of the customer.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Bootstrapping an E-Commerce Startup from Utah: KURU CEO Bret Rasmussen
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