We recently connected with Jake Budler and have shared our conversation below.

Jake, appreciate you joining us today. One thing we always find fascinating is how differently entrepreneurs think about revenue growth and cost reductions – both can be powerful ways to improve profitability. What do you spend more of your time and energy on?

As a small business owner in the book industry, this is a really interesting one – we also can’t control pricing (books’ MSRP is set by publishers). For any small business looking to do “better” financially, the gut check is always grow revenue. However, I’m a huge proponent for sustainably and smartly improving margin. That’s not the same as reducing costs – it’s improving how much you can make out of any sale. Small business owners really do have to “wear all the hats” and often miss small but meaningful ways to increase margin by even 1 or 2%. Revenue can stay flat, costs can stay flat, but if a business can creatively find ways to improve margins but a handful of percentage points, that can be a huge financial shift for a small business.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I am the co-owner to Tomorrow Bookstore, a general interest independent bookstore in downtown Indianapolis. I own the business with my wife, Julia – she handles the books and I handle the business. For both of us, this provides an amazing creative outlet that aligns with our interests and skills.

We launched the business in early 2023, after just six months of business planning. While we moved fast, we were intentional – Julia’s background in storytelling and writing and mine in startups and business advising gave us a great platform to build our own brand and business.

As a store in the business of stories, our global selection explores the full kaleidoscope of human experiences and says: here you are, here is why, and here’s what’s next.

In addition to running our shop, I created and run the Indy Indie Book Crawl, an annual city-wide book crawl that supports nearly 30 bookstores and has over 2,000 participants annually. I believe that community building is key for our city and literary industry – and for our business itself.

Can you talk to us about how you funded your business?

Funding any small business is tough – especially as a first-time business owner. We decided to use a creative funding source: revenue-based crowdfunding. This is a niche, but incredibly useful way to raise money from your friends, family, community, and network. Revenue-based financing is really aligned with small businesses – you pay investors back (their initial investment and a return) with a set percentage of your revenue. So, the better the business does, the faster your investors are paid back (and the higher their return is). We raised $36,000 from 64 investors through an online crowdfunding platform and used this money to finance most of our initial inventory. It was a win-win: we raised money to start the business, our investors became strong community members, and our bookstore did well enough to pay off all the investors within two years.

How did you build your audience on social media?

When we were just starting out, we wanted to thoughtfully try to tap into various different communities to try get the broadest possible reach. Our strategy was to create posts about our favorite books (we were starting a bookstore after all!) and creatively link them to our favorite local businesses and landmarks. For example, we did a post about a cyclist biography (“The Fastest Man in The World”) and tagged and talked about the Indianapolis Cultural Trail. These creative links led to many other businesses and organizations re-sharing and engaging with our content, allowing us to reach their followers and community too. It really turbocharged our initial growth on social media and helped us build a community quickly.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://tomorrowbookstore.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tomorrowbookstore/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jakebudler/

Image Credits

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