An SEO-Driven Bootstrapping Success: Benchmark Email CEO Curt Keller (Part 6)

Sramana: There are going to be a lot of entrepreneurs who are trying to reach a million dollars of revenue. What are the key lessons learned that you would like to pass on to them? Curt Keller: When I look at all the ups and downs, I realize that I have actually dealt with a

Read Full Article »

An SEO-Driven Bootstrapping Success: Benchmark Email CEO Curt Keller (Part 4)

Sramana: All together, how many people did you have working on the project? You had an outsource engineering and support team, an SEO expert, you, and your wife. What was the headcount? Curt Keller: When we first started it was just me, a support guy in India and three programmers. A few years later we

Read Full Article »

An SEO-Driven Bootstrapping Success: Benchmark Email CEO Curt Keller (Part 3)

Sramana: When you got your first product done, how did you get it out to market? Curt Keller: We started with Google PPC. That is where we focused all of our energy. It started to get some traction. We got a lot of traction that first year. Sramana: How much funding did you put into

Read Full Article »

An SEO-Driven Bootstrapping Success: Benchmark Email CEO Curt Keller (Part 2)

Sramana: Essentially you wanted to execute on a business strategy that was already proven as a way of reducing risk. How did you get yourself off the ground? Curt Keller: It would have taken a lot of money to do all the programming in the U.S. I made a conscious decision to find good resources

Read Full Article »

An SEO-Driven Bootstrapping Success: Benchmark Email CEO Curt Keller (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.  Curt Keller is the founder and CEO of Benchmark Email, a global email marketing services company. After buying his first business in 2000, Keller grew Benchmark Email from a small operation with a handful of employees to a multinational company offering email marketing services for English,

Read Full Article »

How To Achieve Great Media Coverage For Your Incubator

By guest author Irina Patterson Who doesn’t appreciate great PR? It leads to brand recognition and more business. Let me use a case study to explain how simple it is with 1M/1M. One of our partners, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur (IIT, KGP), held a custom roundtable with us in January 2012.

Strong Entrepreneurs vs. Weak Entrepreneurs

By guest author Irina Patterson Which kind of entrepreneur do you want to be? Great entrepreneurs always find the time to study even when they are very busy. They find the time to fill the gaps in their knowledge of how to build a business. Weak entrepreneurs keep doing the same thing over and over

Read Full Article »

How to Explain One Million by One Million (1M/1M)

By guest author Irina Patterson One of our partners asked me for an overview of 1M/1M in a letter form. He wanted an easy way to explain 1M/1M to a government agency that he is part of.