Bootstrapping E-Commerce to 16 Million: Valerie Holstein, CEO of Cableorganizer.com (Part 4)

Sramana: How much revenue did you generate from CableOrganizer.com during your first year? Valerie Holstein: I did a little bit under $200,000. Sramana: Wow! That is not bad for a garage, grass roots operation. Valerie Holstein: Every penny that we made was reinvested in purchasing more product for inventory. Whatever was not reinvested in additional

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Pradeep Rathinam, CEO of Aditi Technologies (Part 4)

SM: From what I’m seeing, the CRM and related systems, for instance, is one of the areas where an enterprise buys largely public cloud solutions. Of course, there are other big silos which people are procuring largely from public cloud solutions, talent management and various other management areas, and then there’s a long-tail application development

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Bootstrapping E-Commerce to 16 Million: Valerie Holstein, CEO of Cableorganizer.com (Part 3)

Sramana: In 2002 when you started selling things to hide computer cables, how did people find your website? Was it primarily via your blog? Valerie Holstein: Yes, it was from the blog. I had a couple of pages that explained the issues we had and what products were helpful in hiding the cables. People started

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May 10: Opportunity For Entrepreneurs to Pitch at 126th FREE Online 1M/1M Roundtable

Entrepreneurs are invited to the 126th FREE online 1M/1M roundtable on Thursday, May 10, 2012, at 8:00 a.m. PDT/11:00 a.m. EDT/8:30 p.m. India. If you are a serious entrepreneur, register to “pitch” and sell your business idea to Sramana Mitra. You’ll gain constructive feedback and she’ll answer any of your questions. Others can “attend” to

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Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Will Overstreet, CEO of Voices Heard Media (Part 5)

SM: You realize that this is tying, to some extent, into a world that came well before you guys and well before social media as the world where automated customer service based on natural language processing and automated email response systems? WO: Yes. It wasn’t a bad idea. It’s how do you provide a high

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Pradeep Rathinam, CEO of Aditi Technologies (Part 3)

SM: Yes and no. How much of this what we call bootstrapping, using platform-as-a-service, a SaaS platform, I guess, do you see happening in small startups? PR: We’re seeing a lot of them. What’s happening is the new companies that are coming right now, the companies that are starting up are starting with such low

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Bootstrapping E-Commerce to 16 Million: Valerie Holstein, CEO of Cableorganizer.com (Part 2)

Sramana: When did you start CableOrganizer.com? Valerie Holstein: We actually started the company 10 years ago when I was nin3 months pregnant with my child. I was still working full-time as a drafting engineer for a screen enclosure company. My husband was working more than full time at Computer Science Corporation. He was a trainer

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Roundtable Recap: May 3 – Some Wonderful Opportunities With Corporate Partners

Today’s roundtable marked our 125th Free session. We’ve come a long, long way, offering these free consulting sessions consistently for some years now. Through the last couple of weeks, you have learned about some wonderful opportunities that our corporate partners, A&N Media, Elance, and BlueSnap have been creating for entrepreneurship development. A&N Media is offering

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