How a Hillbilly in Nevada Bootstrapped a $140M ARR Manufacturing Company | Jim Belosic, SendCutSend
Show notes
Jim Belosic is the Co-founder and CEO of SendCutSend, a sheet metal manufacturing business he bootstrapped to a $140 million revenue run rate in eight years. We talk building a manufacturing business in the US, creative ways he financed the company early on, using speed and trust to compete with overseas competitors, lessons from restaurants, and why you can’t run a factory from a spreadsheet. Thank you to Numeral, Flex, and Amplitude for supporting this episode Numeral: The end-to-end platform for sales tax and compliance https://www.numeral.com Flex: Sign-up for Flex Elite with code TURNER, get $1,000 https://form.typeform.com/to/Rx9rTjFz Amplitude: AI analytics, all you have to do is ask https://www.amplitude.com Timestamps: (0:16) Automating sheet metal manufacturing (5:59) Zero to $140 million ARR in 8 years (7:58) Acquiring a $750k laser with $0 (13:38) Automating factories is like baking cookies (15:17) Being legible to capital (17:31) Unlocking custom, low order manufacturing with software (20:00) Building more factories instead of selling the software (24:50) Run your company like a lemonade stand (28:30) Raising an angel round in 2021 as a safety net (33:21) SendCutSend’s unique bottoms-up GTM (38:24) Fun coupons (40:12) Building a moat with speed and trust 45:55) How US factories can beat China (47:40) Gaslight product launches (52:05) Lessons from non-manufacturing businesses (55:19) You can’t run a factory from a spreadsheet (58:10) Using data in manufacturing (59:50) Lessons from Factorio (1:03:17) Unlocking a negative cash conversion cycle (1:06:14) You need to resist automating everything (1:13:51) Surviving COVID with six weeks of cash (1:15:47) Solving the US skilled labor shortage (1:26:17) Teaching kids about manufacturing Referenced SendCutSend: https://sendcutsend.com/ Careers at SendCutSend: https://sendcutsend.com/careers Sandy Kory: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sandykory Horizon VC: https://www.horizon.vc/ Concrete Canoe Competitions: https://www.asce.org/communities/student-members/conferences/asce-concrete-canoe-competition Follow Jim Twitter: https://x.com/jimbelosic LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/belosic Follow Turner Twitter: https://twitter.com/TurnerNovak LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/turnernovak Subscribe to my newsletter to get every episode + the transcript in your inbox every week: https://www.thespl.it/
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