Entrepreneur Couple Bootstrapping an EdTech Company to $10M: Boom Cards CEO Mary Oemig (Part 2)

Mary Oemig: We did what I would recommend to every single entrepreneur – a lot of listening tours. We talked to our future customers. We talked to teachers. We learned that teachers were trying to hire developers around the world to turn what they knew into games. They were losing a lot of money doing it, because they didn’t know how to manage developers.

We realized in the end that what we should develop is a creation platform with a student play platform based on best-in-breed knowledge about what you need to know about student performance in order to inform good next decisions about what to teach next. We trust that teachers know what content needs to be taught.

What we bring to the table is knowledge about what data matters and what strategies work to keep users engaged. Then we have some elements in there that are specifically about a critical skill – executive function. We feed the data not just to the teacher, but to the students as well. They are empowered to own their own learning and are accountable for seeking help when they don’t know something.

They can see that they got it wrong. They get instant feedback. This gives them the tools they need to say, “I need help now.” In a traditional education environment, you get that feedback two weeks after you’ve done the homework. You don’t even remember what you were doing anymore. Now you get it right away.

Sramana Mitra: What year did you start this company?

Mary Oemig: I ran the co-op between 2010 and 2012. Then we started this company in the fall of 2012. We did the first big road mapping work in 2012. We built a beautiful version in 2013. What we learned from the MVP was that teachers wanted what we had and they didn’t want it as an iPad app. We went back to the drawing board and we threw out our first version. We recoded it as one Meteor so it would meet what superintendents were communicating to us. It had to work on every platform.

Sramana Mitra: How were you financing all this work?

Mary Oemig: We are bootstrapped.

Sramana Mitra: Fantastic.

Mary Oemig: I had a great VC friend and she said, “Bootstrap as long as you can.” Eric and I both did a combination of simplifying our expenses. We did have money from which we could live on. We would periodically do contract work to augment our finances. I would work from time to time as a contract attorney. Eric did a stint as a CEO for nine months for a local company.

There was great benefit from those gigs. Eric was exposed to new technology that became the foundation of our current platform in his gig. So a combination of rethink how you spend. You do need to understand how long you can bootstrap.

I do have to say there were times when we started looking for financing. How much runway do we have before one of us has to go get a full-time job? After talking to several people, we realized that we just needed to get to a million ARR, and then we’ll get venture. We hit that in 2020 because of the pandemic and then went all the way to the next milestone of $10 million ARR.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Entrepreneur Couple Bootstrapping an EdTech Company to $10M: Boom Cards CEO Mary Oemig
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