Aiming to Disrupt Consumer Credit: Al Goldstein, CEO of AvantCredit (Part 5)

Al Goldstein: We just focused on the things that are most critical to the business. In our case, it was building out the regulatory infrastructure from day one, and building data reporting and analytics infrastructure. There was demand because there are a lot of customers looking for lending products. As we’ve grown our business, we

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Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Rick Wilson, President of Miva Merchant (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: E-commerce has been a category where a lot of people have bootstrapped businesses to some scale. You talked about your sweet spot being this half a million to million range. A large portion of that is probably bootstrapped businesses right? Rick Wilson: Absolutely, I would say the vast majority. Sramana Mitra: What are

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236th Roundtable Recording On October 30, 2014

In case you missed it, you can listen to the recording here:

Thursday, Nov. 6 – 237th 1M/1M Mentoring Roundtable For Entrepreneurs

Entrepreneurs are invited to the 237th FREE online 1M/1M roundtable mentoring session on Thursday, November 6, 2014, at 8 a.m. PST/11 a.m. EST/9:30 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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Building a Subscription E-Commerce Business from Switzerland: Samy Liechti, CEO of Blacksocks (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Interesting. In 2005, you said you had the biggest growth year. What kind of numbers did you do? Samy Liechti: We had 75% growth. The reason was very simple. We had won an award for customer experience in the US. I remember we had a whole bunch of PR coverage all over the

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Aiming to Disrupt Consumer Credit: Al Goldstein, CEO of AvantCredit (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: When you went to market, what about the institutional partner side? Did you go to market with a set of institutional partners pre-negotiated? Al Goldstein: No, we didn’t. In these marketplaces, you have to match both sides. To get started, we lent only our own capital. We raised equity capital. We have raised

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Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Rick Wilson, President of Miva Merchant (Part 6)

Rick Wilson: The trend we see there is that they want to go direct. They want to build a community around their product. I think Kickstarter has really brought that down even from the million dollar plus range to the zero dollar plus range where you can do a product video, get a personality out

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Building a Subscription E-Commerce Business from Switzerland: Samy Liechti, CEO of Blacksocks (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Were all these customers in Switzerland? Samy Liechti: We have different currencies and languages here. We were not prepared for payments outside Switzerland. We only had Swiss Francs. All of a sudden, we had our first German customers. Then we started the same for Germany. Little by little, we introduced other currencies and

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