Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped a Book E-commerce Business

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.  When we spoke in 2014, BookPal Founder CEO Tony DiCostanzo had identified a gap in the book business and had built a thriving company. Let’s learn the how, what, and why of it. Sramana Mitra: Tell us a bit about yourself. Where are you from? Where

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Use Bootstrapping with Services to Increase Your Probability of Fund Raising

Raising funding for startups in Silicon Valley is a low probability game. Fewer than 1% who try actually succeed. Outside the Valley, the startup ecosystems are mostly immature, and the probability gets even lower. The bar to raise seed funding is getting higher and higher. Seed investors are mostly operating as growth investors, expecting that

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Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Iterate CTO Brian Sathianathan (Part 1)

In this interview, we explore the priorities of enterprise decision makers through the lens of an AI platform vendor. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing the audience to yourself as well as to Iterate.

Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped CloudSense with Services on Force.com

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.  When had this conversation in 2014, the Force.com platform – now Salesforce Platform – was a great bootstrapping device for entrepreneurs. Read how Co-founder CTO Alex Fuller and Co-founder CEO Richard Britton bootstrapped CloudSense to a sizable product company on the platform. Sramana: Alex, let’s start

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Bootstrapping to $3M a month: Prequel CEO Timur Khabirov (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What are some examples of non-paid customer acquisition? Timur Khabirov: Some celebrity who makes their own content. Let’s talk about viral effect. The first one was BTS. I didn’t know about this band before, but they started using Prequel. When I woke up, we were on the top. The BTS group used Prequel

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Catching Up On Readings: OpenAI’s GPT-4 Rollout

This interview by ABC News’ Rebecca Jarvis with Open AI CEO Sam Altman explores the risks and opportunities of GPT-4, the latest iteration of the AI language model. For this week’s posts, click on the paragraph links.

Bootstrapping to $3M a month: Prequel CEO Timur Khabirov (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Talk to me about influencer marketing. What did you do? Timur Khabirov: Influencer marketing is a bit complicated. If you’re doing user acquisition, it’s a clear traffic. You understand your consumers. You understand the conversion rate. With influencer marketing, it’s not that easy to manage this. Sramana Mitra: But it’s worthwhile in your

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Bootstrapping to $3M a month: Prequel CEO Timur Khabirov (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Explain, step by step, how you brought this product to market? Timur Khabirov: You need to understand what the market needs. We have social media platforms. What do they need? First and foremost, it has to be a time saver. Then, it has to be easy. Sramana Mitra: Are we talking about a

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