Solo Entrepreneur Bootstrapping to over $5M: Vladimir Gendelman, CEO of Company Folders (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What were you offering people to buy?

Vladimir Gendelman: I started selling online right away. The very first version of the website was very basic. I just came up with a whole bunch of folders styles. I put them on a website. There weren’t that many. I started promoting.

Sramana Mitra: How did you promote it?

Vladimir Gendelman: There were discussion boards. That’s where I started posting. I didn’t know any better, so I called the company Company Folders. I probably had absolutely nothing going on for about three months. Then, all of a sudden, somebody called me. Then somebody else called. Then a couple of people called on the same day.

Sramana Mitra: Were they all looking for folder customization?

Vladimir Gendelman: Yes, absolutely.

Sramana Mitra: How did you deliver that?

Vladimir Gendelman: I had to partner with somebody who can do that at the moment and start from there. I found somebody who could do that.

Sramana Mitra: A printer.

Vladimir Gendelman: Right.

Sramana Mitra: You found a printer from Detroit and shipped it out.

Vladimir Gendelman: Right.

Sramana Mitra: Did the unit economics work?

Vladimir Gendelman: I didn’t care about any kind of economics as long as I didn’t lose money. I didn’t lose money. I didn’t care how much I was going to make. All of that can be fine-tuned later. With that, I made some kind of money. Then it started improving.

Sramana Mitra: How long did it take you to get to a million dollars in revenue?

Vladimir Gendelman: In 2007, we did $175,000 in revenue. In 2008, we did $525,000. 2010 was $930,000, and 2011 was over a million.

Sramana Mitra: You were still doing this alone?

Vladimir Gendelman: 2008 was when I hired people.

Sramana Mitra: What positions did you hire for?

Vladimir Gendelman: Mostly sales and marketing. All the sales were coming from the website as they still do. Prior to that, I did hire developers and a designer but on a contract. In 2008, I started hiring everybody full-time.

Sramana Mitra: What did you do by way of marketing? Was it still discussion boards?

Vladimir Gendelman: By 2008, I don’t remember discussion boards as a thing anymore.

Sramana Mitra: Not anymore. It became Facebook groups and LinkedIn groups.

Vladimir Gendelman: We started doing SEO. I connected with an SEO company from Europe. They started doing our SEO in 2006.

Sramana Mitra: SEO was producing?

Vladimir Gendelman: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: The URL is SEO-optimized. Is that what people were looking for?

Vladimir Gendelman: People were looking for presentation folders and packet folders. Having folders in the name was good. We ran with that. In 2008, we tripled the revenue. It turned out that they were doing link building in a way that Google didn’t like. I didn’t even know that. In March 2012, we got an unnatural links warning. We lost 76% of our traffic. By then, we were over a million dollars.

Sramana Mitra: How many employees did you have?

Vladimir Gendelman: We had about seven or eight.

Sramana Mitra: You had a payroll to make.

Vladimir Gendelman: Correct. It turned out that they had an amazing team. Everybody rallied behind it and we worked through it. We changed our marketing strategy. We got more into social media. We got more into producing phenomenal content. Our blogs are high-quality blogs to the point where some of my friends would send me screenshot of their kids taking a graphic design class in school and the teacher showing them our website.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Solo Entrepreneur Bootstrapping to over $5M: Vladimir Gendelman, CEO of Company Folders
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