Bootstrapping a $25 Million E-Commerce Company: Saatva Co-Founder Ricky Joshi (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Tell me a bit about what else is strategic in your story of building this company. What other strategic moves have you made that are worth discussing in an interview like this?

Ricky Joshi: One thing I would say is we do nothing normal. Every single thing that we’ve done has been different. Our marketing has been more creative. I don’t mean branding. We’re just smarter about stuff. For example, if you type mattress, you’ll see a bunch of white beds. We put in branded shops with backgrounds that stand out. I’ll give you another example. This is pretty nuanced. The way AdWords works is you set a radius around an area. A lot of times you’re setting LA or New York. But our customer doesn’t necessarily live at the same zip codes. We actually went and took the average home value of a radius around every city and put a modifier on average home value to target zips as opposed to targeting city areas. We do stuff like that all the time.

Sramana Mitra: You have the flexibility to do that in Google to be able to be that precise?

Ricky Joshi: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: That’s one of the big secret sauces in your customer acquisition strategy, which helps you grow that fast.

Ricky Joshi: I think the really creative marketing has helped us.

Sramana Mitra: What does the competition look like? Whom are you up against?

Ricky Joshi: We’re really against entrenched competitors who have been in the industry for a long time. Obviously, they’re manufacturing brands that go retail. Also, big retailers like Macy’s and Bloomingdales. We’re also competing with online-only retailers like 1-800-Mattress. Then, we’re also dealing with new generation startups like Casper for example is online only.

Sramana Mitra: Cool. I take it that your game plan at this point is to just grow organically and not worry about trying to scale faster than you’re already scaling? Financing is not a lever that will add anything to your story?

Ricky Joshi: At this point, the founders have taken sacrifices. We’re just really growth-oriented. We feel that we are in control of our growth.

Sramana Mitra: It’s fabulous.

Ricky Joshi: One thing I always say is, “There’s so many things I’m doing wrong, which I love because there’s so many things I get to fix.”

Sramana Mitra: Absolutely, but the good news is there are a lot of things you are doing right so that gives you the margin to fix all the other things.

Ricky Joshi: Exactly.

Sramana Mitra: Great! Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Bootstrapping a $25 Million E-Commerce Company: Saatva Co-Founder Ricky Joshi
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