Building a Portfolio of Bootstrapped Businesses: Ryan Millman, CEO of Undigital (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: I’m trying to help my audience learn from what you’ve done. What is the rationale for having separate companies?

Ryan Millman: Well, there’re a few things. We have consolidated books for each and every company. So we treat each company individually. If we were to look at opportunities to sell a company, keeping it separate would obviously be a great benefit to have an opportunity and go in with clean books and have a clean sale. We haven’t sold any of our businesses. From a liability perspective as well, it is another great reason to have separate entities.

Sramana Mitra: All right. Tell me a bit more about the trajectory of the second company, which is the manufacturing company. At what point did that come in and how did that scale? Clearly you had a captive customer base that were coming from your original company. What else is interesting in that company?

Ryan Millman: We didn’t have too much. We had some fulfillment work that was coming out of our original company, but this company needed to get a marketing engine. We were one of the early manufacturers of photo products. We didn’t take any film products. A lot of cameras were using film at that time. We were at the early days when digital cameras were coming to market and photographers using digital cameras could then go and upload their files to us.

The beauty of digital production is that the transfer was immediate and we could produce and ship out orders very quickly. So, there were a lot of great benefits, but the market was just evolving. So it was all about finding those early adapters, the people that were shooting pictures digitally, and to also then distinguish ourselves in a field of other competitors that were starting to come to market. We really focused on finding customers that were looking for a high level of quality. We were at the premium side of the market, making sure that every product was at a high quality. So we wanted to bring the wedding photograph quality to the masses. That’s what we brought into all of our different product lines.

The early days were really about getting the word out, finding the pockets of where those customers lived, what they read, ensuring that we could set up all of our advertising funnels. We’re building our marketing endeavors to make sure that those customers were finding us and we could profitably bring in those customers throughout the various channels that we were advertising.

Sramana Mitra: So double click down for me on your positioning. Where were high quality digital images being produced, by who? What market did you go after? As digital cameras hit the market, especially alongside social media, there was an explosion in low quality photography, right? Digital photography created an explosion in crap photography. So how did you distinguish yourselves? How do you differentiate and how did you maintain that quality audience?

Ryan Millman: To be honest, we were new to that market and even new to manufacturing, so we had a lot of learnings to even understand how we could create great products. We tried to find the best roadmap for excellence.

We first did a lot of opposition research to figure out who else was out there that was doing this and who was doing it the best. We were very resourceful. We would go on resume sites to find employees at companies that were competitors that were doing a great job. They’d list lots of key information like what machines they were using. So we’d get these machines.

We just learned a lot because frankly, we didn’t have the background or expertise. We didn’t know a lot about the manufacturing or photographic space. So, we did a lot of consulting. We met with a lot of people and learned a lot. We started to bring in the right things to set up this business effectively.

As far as the quality goes, you’re right. You’re only as good as the quality of the photographs that were taken. So in the early days, the camera started out at just three and four megapixels. Quality wasn’t as good as film, but you had these early adopter people that were just pushing in that direction and you could see the growth in it every year.

With time, quality was moving up but it was more of a niche in the early days for people to get the high quality that they were looking for. But we were still able to grow very fast because we were growing from zero. So people were coming in. There was a small number of competitors. We were one of the few in the space. People were finding our offering compelling, and we were able to continue to grow our base from there.

Sramana Mitra: What year are we talking?

Ryan Millman: 2004.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Building a Portfolio of Bootstrapped Businesses: Ryan Millman, CEO of Undigital
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