Bootstrapping a $25 Million E-Commerce Company: Saatva Co-Founder Ricky Joshi (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Absolutely. Tell me more about the business itself. First and foremost, who were the people involved when you got this off the ground? You mentioned your co-founder. Where did he come from? How did you meet him? Where do you know him from?

Ricky Joshi: There are basically three co-founders of the company—myself, Kris, and Ron. I actually hired Kris at Craigslist. We also had a startup that we were incubating. I just knew that Kris and I would be working together. Kris is one of the smartest and most disciplined persons I’ve ever been around. It’s interesting because oftentimes, you have these people who are famous and have these brand names. Kris definitely has that spark.

Sramana Mitra: What is his background?

Ricky Joshi: Kris is one of those guys who’s been creating websites since he was 11 years old. He actually paid for college by creating websites. There was a loophole in Amazon delivery. He created a website where you’d be able to ship multiple products in one interface. He was making like $60,000 to $70,000 in college. He’s a developer. Ron’s background is in the furniture industry. He invested in a number of retail furniture properties. He has brick-and-mortar experience. He created a logistics company and has that retail backbone. Ron is older; Kris and I are younger.

One thing different in our space versus our competitors is our competitors ship mattresses via UPS, which creates a lot of product limitations. There’s a lot of negatives of creating a scalable national mattress business by shipping something in a box. We’ve actually created a huge national infrastructure around local delivery. Our bed can’t be stuffed in a box. Ron understands all those logistics.

Sramana Mitra: What does that mean that you’ve created a local delivery infrastructure? Do you have warehouses locally everywhere? What does that mean?

Ricky Joshi: We have 11 factories that produce our mattress nationally and 34 distribution centers. At the end of the year, it will be up to 90. This means that we service every top 50 city. We have a distribution within 50 miles. It also means that on the backside, you have a lot of operational technology to make sure that every delivery occurs on time. Basically, it’s a national infrastructure which really services heavy items. We actually have in-home installation. We analyze every driver. The minute someone buys our bed, we ask them how the experience was. We have data on every single driver and every single mattress type around the country.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Bootstrapping a $25 Million E-Commerce Company: Saatva Co-Founder Ricky Joshi
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