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book business
Bootstrapping a Bulk Book E-Commerce Business: BookPal CEO, Tony DiCostanzo (Part 7)
Sramana Mitra: What are some of the major trends that you are tracking and building your strategy around as you’re watching the book business? Tony DiCostanzo: I think the one that’s most prevalent is the momentum that e-books are building in the market. That’s one of the reasons that we pursued and made the investment
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
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
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
Bootstrapping a Bulk Book E-Commerce Business: BookPal CEO Tony DiCostanzo (Part 2)
Tony DiCostanzo: We engaged a professor out of Stanford who had developed some studies documenting a return on investment for companies that implemented this wellness program. We were able to take that and develop a new company without all of the baggage that the other firm had. That was the first personal foray into entrepreneurship
Bootstrapping a Bulk Book E-Commerce Business: BookPal CEO Tony DiCostanzo (Part 1)
Tony has identified a gap in the book business and 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 were you born and raised? Tony DiCostanzo: I was born in Anchorage, Alaska. Shortly after turning two, I moved
Will Amazon Kindle Vertical Integration?
I wrote a controversial Forbes column, How Amazon Could Change Publishing, in the spring. In this column, I submitted that Amazon could disintermediate traditional publishers and agents, and free up money that they could share with authors. My hypothesis was based on the fact that since Amazon has a technology-based merchandising system capable of figuring
Deal Radar 2008: Entrepreneur Journeys
There was a time when technology venture capitalists would not touch a “content” deal. They only funded pure play technology companies. Gradually, as the Internet industry evolved, the notion of “paid content” brought about a fundamental change, leading to many content deals getting funded. Back in the summer of 2005, as I wrote about the
