Entrepreneur Couple Bootstrapping an E-Commerce Business Using a Paycheck and Crowdfunding: Nomad Lane Co-Founders Kish Vasnani and Vanessa Jeswani (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What kind of jobs were you doing?

Vanessa Jeswani: I was doing marketing consulting, primarily for a PR firm.

Kish Vasnani: I was doing a lot of sales and business development work for a marketing agency. They had a lot of inbound interest but never had anyone take those leads and develop them further. It was about 10 to 20 hours of work. I didn’t even get paid for that. I made a deal with the owner. I said, “I’ll dedicate this much time. Can you please pay for my and Vanessa’s insurance?”

Sramana Mitra: Why wouldn’t you charge them?

Kish Vasnani: It was important for us to have our health insurance needs covered. If and when I close a deal, I would make a commission from the deal. 

Sramana Mitra: So you were not working for free. There was a commission plan in place.

Kish Vasnani: Yes. If there wasn’t much to do, I could focus on Nomad Lane. Other weeks, I could close deals and receive some commission. 

Sramana Mitra: Between the two of you, what level of cash were you bringing in that allowed you to bootstrap Nomad Lane?

Kish Vasnani: We were bringing in enough to not even break even. From my years at Thomson Reuters, I had a 401-K that I cashed out.

Sramana Mitra: So you dipped into your savings?

Kish Vasnani: Yes. We just committed to giving ourselves enough time to figure things out. For that, I had just over $100,000 sitting in my 401-K. I took a tax penalty on it. We were extremely frugal. It’s not that we live a lavish lifestyle now, but we were very frugal where we could be. 

Sramana Mitra: Until when did you have these part-time jobs?

Kish Vasnani: Vanessa started her part-time consulting in September 2016. We both kept our part-time jobs up until March of 2019.

Sramana Mitra: Almost two years. What was your calculation? This is a question we get all the time when people are bootstrapping with a paycheck. When is the right time to quit? My answer to that is it’s subjective. One of my thumb rules is to get the business validated before you quit. It sounds like you already got the feedback from the market that people were looking for something else. You were already into bags when you quit?

Kish Vasnani: I just want to backtrack. We both quit our jobs in March of 2019 and not 2018. We spent the first six months of 2017 finding a supplier. We launched our website in September. Going to the end of 2017 and into the first half of 2018, we learned as much as possible. The next super pivotal moment came around June 2018. By that time, we had our first couple of prototypes of the travel bag. We immediately fell in love with it.

Sramana Mitra: What’s special about this bag?

Kish Vasnani: It’s really niche. It’s a really well-designed personal items bag. It’s lightweight. It counts as a personal item when you fly. Since it has many different compartments, you’re able to maximize your space and avoid check-in baggage fees. It can hold all of your valuable items like a laptop, jewelry, snacks.

Vanessa Jeswani: It’s also a very organized bag. It opens down the middle. You can pack things efficiently. We also include optimally designed pockets. 

Sramana Mitra: This is a really specialized product that became the core of your business.

Kish Vasnani: A one-sentence way to describe it is it’s a duffel bag that packs like a suitcase. Through our previous relationships from tradeshows, we also met a couple of bag manufacturers. By the third round of sampling, we were in love with it. 

Vanessa Jeswani: In April of 2018, we had the final prototype. We had a photoshoot for the bag as well as a video that we can use for a crowdfunding project. 

Kish Vasnani: We had to put it out there. Bag production cost a lot more. We were thinking to ourselves that we didn’t want to raise money. We had the idea of going down the crowdfunding route, which is when we did Indiegogo. It was another tool that we had. 

This segment is part 3 in the series : Entrepreneur Couple Bootstrapping an E-Commerce Business Using a Paycheck and Crowdfunding: Nomad Lane Co-Founders Kish Vasnani and Vanessa Jeswani
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