Steals.com

Jaina Francis's youngest daughter was the inspiration behind Steals.com. In April 2008, frustrated by the lack of quality daily deal options for families, Jaina launched the business from her basement with a simple but novel concept: feature one brand per day at the best price online for exactly 24 hours. This focused approach—one product, one day—would become her competitive advantage in a crowded e-commerce space.

Jaina and her 50/50 business partner (CEO) took a completely custom approach to technology. "At the time when I launched in 2008, there was no Shopify or Magento or all these cool e-commerce platforms," she explained. They built their entire system from scratch, with her CEO architecting the platform and engineers in Costa Rica coding it. The custom build proved crucial: eight years later, the platform was still performing beautifully and enabled the business to scale without external capital.

The inventory model was equally deliberate. Rather than drop-shipping, Steals.com buys inventory directly from brands at deep discounts, warehouses it in a 35,000 square-foot fulfillment center in Salt Lake City, and ships to customers. This approach gives them control over quality, photography, and the customer experience—but it also ties up working capital. By 2016, Jaina was testing a hybrid model: holding samples for quality verification, then placing purchase orders after validating demand.

In her first year, Jaina hit $680,000 in transaction volume—an impressive feat from a basement operation. The early growth came from building a loyal customer base and establishing direct relationships. By 2016, cumulative transaction volume had reached nearly $76 million. The business expanded to four niche sites targeting different demographics (moms, kids, scrapbooking enthusiasts, women), each launching multiple deals daily across the Steals.com family.

Email marketing became the engine of growth. By 2016, Jaina had built an email list of 375,000 subscribers across all four sites, and email drove 55% of revenue—an exceptional concentration for a single channel. She was sending 13 million emails monthly, yet spending less than 4% of top-line revenue on marketing overall. Direct traffic accounted for 25% of visits, and affiliate and social channels made up the remainder.

The unit economics were carefully optimized. On a $12 shoe sale (cost to customer), Steals.com paid the brand $6.25, incurred roughly $4 in packaging and shipping costs, and netted $2—a 17% margin. This varied by site: ScrapbookSteals, selling lower-cost paper products from local Utah brands, enjoyed better margins; KidSteals and BabySteals ran thinner. "It's like Tetris every day," she described the daily calculus of inventory, shipping costs, and margins across product sizes and geographies.

Despite $8 million in 2015 revenue, Jaina barely took a salary. Employee costs and other operational expenses consumed the bottom line, leaving her with roughly break-even cash flow. She was willing to personally absorb all pay cuts to fund operations.

By 2016, with 22 full-time employees in Utah and two engineers in Costa Rica, Jaina had proven the concept was defensible and scalable. She valued the company at 1x revenue ($8 million pre-money) and was seeking $2 million in equity to accelerate marketing spend. Her pitch was compelling: the existing 35,000 square-foot facility could support $24 million in annual revenue without additional infrastructure investment. With 1,700 brand relationships, an impeccable reputation, and a clean cap table (founder and CEO only), Steals.com represented a rare bootstrapped success story in e-commerce. Jaina's message to her younger self captured her journey: "Stop stressing about being so poor because one day you won't be."