How Rafat Ali Found a Job (Part 8)

SM: Who are your primary advertisers? What is the source of revenue? RA: Over the years it has broadened quite a bit. The focus quickly expanded to cover all digital media.

How Rafat Ali Found a Job (Part 7)

SM: When did you finally close the investment deal with Alan Patricof? RA: It was in the middle of 2006. I believe it closed in June.

How Rafat Ali Found a Job (Part 6)

SM: You turned down some private investors, what about institutional investors? RA: We started to get interest from companies who wanted to buy us in late 2005. I had a friend who had a friend who helped me sort through it, and we went through the normal gyrations.

How Rafat Ali Found a Job (Part 5)

SM: How did getting married affect the business? RA: I had to go away for about 40 days because my wife, who is of Indian origin, was from South Africa. The marriage was in South Africa and the reception was going to be in India. The entire ordeal was going to take 40 days. There

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How Rafat Ali Found a Job (Part 4)

SM: How many email newsletter subscribers and website visitors did you have at that point? RA: This was in 2003 and it was probably a couple of hundred. At that point I was still hoping to find a job in London as a journalist, but some offers to advertise on my site made me think

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How Rafat Ali Found a Job (Part 2)

SM: The fellowship you received enabled you to attend Indiana University. Were there any requirements tied to that fellowship? RA: Two of us were given a fellowship, and our mandate was to create an intranet for the university’s professors to use. It sounded grand, but we could not achieve it over the year and a

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More Bootstrapping: VirtualTourist.com Co-Founder J.R. Johnson (Part 6)

SM: When you hired people, did they have equity in the company? JJ: Yes, that was one way to entice people to join us.

More Bootstrapping: VirtualTourist.com Co-Founder J.R. Johnson (Part 5)

SM: You had to be cash flow positive for the majority of your business, correct? When did you start breaking even? JJ: It is easy to break even when you are not paying yourself anything. It was not a typical scenario where we had a million dollars, ran with negative cash flow for a while,

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