Solo Entrepreneur Bootstrapping to over $5M: Vladimir Gendelman, CEO of Company Folders (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How did you recover from that situation where you lost traffic? How did you come back from that?

Vladimir Gendelman: We also got hit at the beginning of all those penalties. There wasn’t much information out there. We hired a company. It was a digital marketing company that had some knowledge of this. They gave us ideas on what to do.

The biggest thing was to contact all the websites that were linking to us and ask them to remove the links. People who run those websites don’t really care to spend their time or even read your email. We had to create a system to track everybody who we emailed. We had to find their contact information first. We had to contact them every week or however often. A good amount actually removed the links.

Sramana Mitra: While this is happening, how did the business recover?

Vladimir Gendelman: The good thing is, we were in business for almost 10 years by then.

Sramana Mitra: You had repeat customers.

Vladimir Gendelman: Yes. We started calling people. We would call our customers and say, “Thank you for ordering from us before. We just wanted to see if you’re ready to reorder.” Believe it or not, we didn’t skip a beat. We grew in 2012. We might have done some paid advertising as well.

We had to ask those websites to remove the links. For the rest, Google had a disavow tool where you create an Excel file and list all the websites whose links you want to disavow. It took us about a year to clean up. When we cleaned up, we were basically starting from scratch.

Sramana Mitra: You developed a methodology for doing upsell and cross-sell.

Vladimir Gendelman: Which we still use.

Sramana Mitra: Sometimes you learn things in a crisis that becomes very valuable.

Vladimir Gendelman: There is a reason why they say success is a poor teacher.

Sramana Mitra: That is very true. We’ve covered the zero to one million stage. Let’s go to the one million to five million phase. What were the strategic moves that you did or was it more of the same?

Vladimir Gendelman: It’s a combination of things. Definitely more of the same.

Sramana Mitra: That’s a good thing by the way. Often you take zero to one million to figure out what works. Then one million to five million is just pure execution.

Vladimir Gendelman: A lot of it was more of the same but constantly improving. We put more processes in place. It’s gotten to the point where I cannot be everywhere at once. We had to empower people to make decisions.

Sramana Mitra: How long did it take you to go from one million to five million?

Vladimir Gendelman: Probably about 10 years.

Sramana Mitra: Around 2021.

Vladimir Gendelman: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: How about people? How many did you have to add to get to $5 million?

Vladimir Gendelman: Not that many because I put a lot of technology in place as well to help scale. We probably added another seven or eight.

Sramana Mitra: So it’s a 16-people team delivering $5 million.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Solo Entrepreneur Bootstrapping to over $5M: Vladimir Gendelman, CEO of Company Folders
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