recruiting a programmer and a Web designer

recruiting a programmer and a Web designer“We’ve focused on being very bootstrap, very lean,”Edge cardsays Mr. Bi, who says theDVD Ripperbusiness has sold about 450 shirts. Recently, it has seen a big bump in traffic, with orders of about 10 shirts a day. He says the company makes money on every shirt.

Once, Mr. Bi wanted to be an investment banker. In the summer of 2008, while pursuing his finance degree, he worked as a junior analyst at a Sydney bank. But the experience left him disenchanted. “Probably a product of my generation — I was too entitled,” he acknowledges. “I felt I’m just one very, very small ant in this massive firm. I’m not feeling very engaged. And entrepreneurships and start-ups became interesting.”

On a trip to Shanghai, where his parents grew up, he got an idea: a service offering custom-tailored suits to college students at a bargain price. He wasn’t thinking about an online business. He thought he’d hire a rep at every college in the Boston area and sell suits one at a time.

Then he met Danny Wong, now a 19-year-old communications major at Bentley University. Mr. Wong had applied to be a rep. Excited about “bridging the gap between consumer and manufacturer,” Mr. Wong remembers quizzing Mr. Bi about his marketing strategies, particularly on the Web. They teamed up and, several monthsDVD Ripperlater, Blank Label was born.

At first, Mr. Bi and Mr. Wong tried to raise venture capital.

“To be honest, we couldn’t,” Mr. Bi says. “We were two very young guys who had no track record.” So Mr. Bi financed the site with about $10,000 in savings, he says, recruiting a programmer and a Web designer and vowing to make leanness a strength, not a weakness.

One goal was to communicate directly with customers. The Web site commands: “Call us. We like to talk.” Depending on the time of day, Mr. Bi answers the calls himself. When he is awake, he also activates a feature that sends instant messages to customers who have been on the site for more than 90 seconds.

Need help? he asks. For several hours a day, he andEdge cardhis partners chat withDVD Rippercustomers about what they like and don’t like on the site.