Thursday, September 8 – 320th 1M/1M Mentoring Roundtable For Entrepreneurs

Entrepreneurs are invited to the 320th FREE online 1M/1M roundtable mentoring session on Thursday, September 8, 2016, 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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Featured Videos

Bootstrapping to $13 Million with Freemium and Free Trials: SurveyGizmo CEO Christian Vanek (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. Christian has bootstrapped SurveyGizmo to $13 million from Boulder, Colorado. He has experimented with both freemium and free trial, and has managed to monetize nicely. Read more about the strategies that have worked for him. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey.

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Catching Up On Readings: VMWorld 2016

VMWorld 2016 was held in Las Vegas last week and covered the latest in latest in virtualization, SDN, containers, hyperconverged infrastructure and mobile management. This feature from Network World covers the hottest products from the event. For this week’s posts, click on the paragraph links.

Bootstrapping, Pivoting, Gaining Liquidity, Scaling to Over $100 Million: MediaAlpha CEO Steve Yi (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: People do comparison shopping all the time. Steve Yi: Exactly. Amazon does the same thing. When you look for a product on Amazon, they will actually have listings for competitive retailers. It’s a combination of insurance revenue and understanding that there is media revenue from your property that you can extract. In turn,

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Building a Global Enterprise Software Company from Belgium: Felix Van de Maele, CEO of Collibra (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Where are you now revenue-wise? Felix Van de Maele: We’re getting close to $20 million. Sramana Mitra: You said you’re already profitable? Felix Van de Maele: We were profitable over the last two years but then made the decision to grow the company.

Bootstrapping, Pivoting, Gaining Liquidity, Scaling to Over $100 Million: MediaAlpha CEO Steve Yi (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: In terms of your operating expenses, how many people were involved and what kind of a P&L did you have to support within that operating margin? Steve Yi: There was three of us. One person was working with us as a contractor who eventually became our VP of Sales. Sramana Mitra: How many customers were

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Building a Global Enterprise Software Company from Belgium: Felix Van de Maele, CEO of Collibra (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: When you raised the seed round, you already had some revenues and customers? Felix Van de Maele: No. We raised the round in August 2008. We just incorporated the company. We had no customers and just had a letter of intent. Sramana Mitra: Who were the people who funded you in this round?

Bootstrapping, Pivoting, Gaining Liquidity, Scaling to Over $100 Million: MediaAlpha CEO Steve Yi (Part 5)

Steve Yi: We were fortunate to become profitable within the second month. For that first month, we thought we could never make that math work. We were losing a lot of money in that first month. It’s specific to this business. You just have to go through that period where you’re willing to lose money. Sramana Mitra: You

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