Bootstrapping to $20 Million with Intelligent Financial Engineering: Tim Hentschel, CEO of Hotelplanner.com (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: All the business model is entirely predicated upon the hotels paying your fees and not the consumers. What are the key segments where you do business? Are we talking weddings? What are the top segments in which your business flows? Tim Hentschel: Sports teams is big for us. It’s great to have a

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Building a Founding Team Financed Business from Omaha, Nebraska: InfoFree CEO Rakesh Gupta (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Internet marketing is your primary channel? Rakesh Gupta: Yes. Sramana Mitra: In terms of segments and where you found the most adoption, what segments are you seeing the maximum revenue from? Rakesh Gupta: After that initial journey into financial services and insurance, what we are finding is that we have a very broad

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Catching Up On Readings: Teenage Entrepreneurs

The California Sunday Magazine features a bunch of startups started by teenagers. Hackathons are more like technological Woodtock and teenagers are flocking to the Silicon Valley to work on startups. For this week’s posts, click on the paragraph links.

Bootstrapping to $20 Million with Intelligent Financial Engineering: Tim Hentschel, CEO of Hotelplanner.com (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Between 2005 and 2015, there’s a ten-year journey. Can you highlight for us some of the major strategic moves that really helped your business propel forward? Tim Hentschel: The years between 2005 and 2008 were very interesting because we had two competitors. One was Group Travel Planet and the other was Groupe. Groupe had the Travelocity

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Building a Founding Team Financed Business from Omaha, Nebraska: InfoFree CEO Rakesh Gupta (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: In terms of customer acquisition, what customer base did you go after? There’s a bit of a subtlety in that question. Typically, in data services like yours, you tend to have richer data in one particular area or a few particular areas. What was that segmentation that you went with at the beginning?

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Bootstrapping Using Services: eMazzanti CEO Carl Mazzanti (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What scale are you at now? Carl Mazzanti: We’ve been in the middle of the pack of the Inc. 5000 fastest growing companies for the last five years. We hit $7 million in 2014 and we’re on track for revenue between $9 and $10 million this year. If we continue this for the next 15 years

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Bootstrapping to $20 Million with Intelligent Financial Engineering: Tim Hentschel, CEO of Hotelplanner.com (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What did you do with that? What was the next milestone after you got that money? Tim Hentschel: We just used it for growth. We eventually bought our own office space in San Diego and started hiring some people. Sramana Mitra: Why would you buy office space? Tim Hentschel: There was a real estate

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May 21 – 260th 1M/1M Mentoring Roundtable For Entrepreneurs

Entrepreneurs are invited to the 260th FREE online 1M/1M roundtable mentoring session on Thursday, May 21, 2015, at 8 a.m. PST/11 a.m. EST/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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