Journey of a Child Entrepreneur: Scott Wainner (Part 4)

SM: How old are you now? SW: Twenty-nine. SM: What happened between 20 and 29? SW: The high point was the sale to EarthWeb, and it went downhill from there.

Journey of a Child Entrepreneur: Scott Wainner (Part 3)

SM: How did the sellout craze affect you? Were people coming to you trying to buy your site? SW: I had been in Portland for a couple of months when out of the blue I got an email from Andover, which is the company that bought SlashDot and was later acquired by VA Linux. They

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Journey of a Child Entrepreneur: Scott Wainner (Part 2)

SM: Did you do SysOpt.com full time or was it just on the side? SW: I was doing it on the side. When I was in high school I worked on it after school as a hobby. When it started to pass the $30K, $40K, and $60K a year mark, I started to think there

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Journey of a Child Entrepreneur: Scott Wainner (Part 1)

I have interviewed many entrepreneurs, yet few interviews have been as interesting (or entertaining) as Scott Wainner’s. His first company, SysOpt.com, emerged from his childhood hobby of PC performance optimization (founded when Scott was 15). By the time he started college he had a thriving business and a six-figure income.

Urging Authors to be Entrepreneurs: iUniverse CEO Kevin Weiss (Part 7)

SM: What should I have asked you that I didn’t? KW: We have not talked about our overseas facility yet. I recently did a press conference with the governor of Indiana where I announced the closure of our Shanghai facility.

Urging Authors to be Entrepreneurs: iUniverse CEO Kevin Weiss (Part 6)

SM: Will your publishers be paying a fee to gain access to the service? KW: Yes, they will pay a fee to use the service. In this business, if you do not have critical mass it is really hard to drive customer satisfaction and to get costs in line.

Urging Authors to be Entrepreneurs: iUniverse CEO Kevin Weiss (Part 5)

SM: From a writer’s perspective, one of the biggest issues is marketing. If you are an author without an existing platform, how do you market your book, aside from to your friends and family? KW: That is the biggest complaint that writers have. We will launch something focused on author marketing by the end of

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Urging Authors to be Entrepreneurs: iUniverse CEO Kevin Weiss (Part 4)

SM: How big do you think the self-publishing, or publish on demand (POD), market is? KW: McMillen, Random House, and HarperCollins have all asked that question. My answer is that it is as big as anything else out there. There could be as many as a million manuscripts sitting around waiting to be published; people

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