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- The Accelerator Conundrum
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Book Pal
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 3)
Sramana Mitra: After you sold the healthcare business? Tony DiCostanzo: Yes. I didn’t think of the book company as having a big potential because at that time, it was limited to probably about 20 different books that we sold consistently. Some of those books were from different publishers, but I didn’t really represent all the other books
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
