Bootstrapping a Bulk Book E-Commerce Business: BookPal CEO Tony DiCostanzo (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: There are major trends in the space right now. For example, Amazon has made it very easy for independent or self-publishers to maintain a whole portfolio of books. A lot of major writers are moving to that mode of publishing. Especially in the business books genre, there’s a major shift. These are in your

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Disrupting the Floral E-Commerce Industry: Farbod Shoraka, CEO of BloomNation (Part 4)

Sramana: Does this mean that you are hosting their websites and helping them move their presence to your hosted sites? Farbod Shoraka: We want to partner with florists. We don’t just want to hand them a technology or a tool. We want to partner with them and help them grow their business. We give them

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Bootstrapping a Bulk Book E-Commerce Business: BookPal CEO Tony DiCostanzo (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How did you build the corporate business? What was the go-to market strategy and customer acquisition strategy on the corporate business? Tony DiCostanzo: Going back to the epiphany moment, the other entrenched players in the book space weren’t adequately servicing the corporate buyers. At that point, I realized that the biggest opportunity is

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Thought Leaders in Big Data: Charlie Lougheed, Co-Founder and President of Explorys (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How do you see that playing out? Are you saying that physicians around the world start sharing case studies on how they have treated certain cases and what results they have gotten in some sort of a central exchange? Then the system does analysis and recommends specific instances. Is that what you’re saying?

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August 14 – 226th 1M/1M Mentoring Roundtable For Entrepreneurs

Entrepreneurs are invited to the 226th FREE online 1M/1M roundtable mentoring session on Thursday, August 14, 2014, at 8 a.m. PDT/11 a.m. EDT/8:30 p.m. India IST. If you are a serious entrepreneur, register to “pitch” and sell your business idea to Sramana Mitra. You’ll gain straightforward feedback, advice on next steps, and she’ll answer any

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Disrupting the Floral E-Commerce Industry: Farbod Shoraka, CEO of BloomNation (Part 3)

Sramana: What solution did you have in mind to address these issues? Farbod Shoraka: Our first beta version of BloomNation was a place where florists could create profiles, almost like FaceBook. This was a place where they could put up info about their store to include location and delivery zones. They could also list their

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Roundtable Recap: August 7 – You Can’t Have The Cake And Eat It Too

Today’s roundtable had two discussions, one about an online real estate venture, and the second about branded retail. Find My Flat First up, Robert Diefendorf from Hong Kong pitched Find My Flat, an online real estate marketplace for the Hong Kong market. Robert is struggling with the age-old issue of how to get his venture

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Bootstrapping a Bulk Book E-Commerce Business: BookPal CEO Tony DiCostanzo (Part 4)

Tony DiCostanzo: When I started engaging customers on the website in the broader segment of enterprise sales rather than just healthcare, I initially put up the books and made single copies available. It was difficult to say, “We’re great at these bulk sales but we also can do one copy.” That’s what everybody else was doing. Within two months, I realized that

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