Bootstrapping a $10 Million E-Commerce Business: Seismic Audio CEO Steve Acree (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: How much was your total revenue line in 2009 when you had six employees? Steve Acree: In the neighborhood of $2.5 million to $3 million. Sramana Mitra: What’s the next major inflection point in the business after 2009? Steve Acree: It started to get cumbersome. It was three dashboards. You had to plug

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Bootstrapping a $10 Million E-Commerce Business: Seismic Audio CEO Steve Acree (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: In 2007 when you introduced this new channel, how much did Amazon do? Steve Acree: Amazon, at the get-go, didn’t do a whole lot. In the first month, it sold about 10 items. By the six-month mark, it was doing about $10,000 a month in sales. After about 12 months, it was doing about

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Bootstrapping a $10 Million E-Commerce Business: Seismic Audio CEO Steve Acree (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What really clicked in gear in 2003? If you look 12 years back when you decided that this was where you’re going to spend your time, what clicked in gear? Steve Acree: Just the idea that everybody is moving to the Internet. They’re interested in eBay and Amazon. I had really good success

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Thought Leaders in Sales 2.0: Carol O’Kelley, CEO of Salesfusion (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Have you been tracking this area of influencer marketing that is getting a bit of attention these days? Carol O’Kelley: I’m not sure what you mean. I’m certainly interested in the idea of Masons and that there are gurus in particular areas that can have enormous influence, but I’m not sure if that’s

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Thought Leaders in Sales 2.0: Carol O’Kelley, CEO of Salesfusion (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What are other core areas where you think marketing automation and Sales 2.0 is making a real difference? Carol O’Kelley: To where you can make systems work for the marketers or for the sales people, instead of the other way around. You can even look at an auto dialer that’s improving the efficiency

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Thought Leaders in Sales 2.0: Carol O’Kelley, CEO of Salesfusion (Part 1)

A short discussion on how marketing and sales technologies are evolving. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with introducing our audience to yourself as well as to your company. Carol O’Kelley: Thanks for having me. I’m the CEO of Salesfusion. I joined the company earlier this year after having spent most of my career in technology, marketing,

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Bootstrapping a Billion Dollar Unicorn in Online Real Estate: Auction.com CEO Jeff Frieden (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: The entity that you sold to private equity was still REDC? Jeff Frieden: That’s right. Sramana Mitra: You bought the Auction.com domain name and rebranded your original entity as Auction.com? Jeff Frieden: Correct. Sramana Mitra: It seems you’re doing hybrid auctions but you’ve expanded from residential distressed properties to commercial distressed properties.

Bootstrapping a Billion Dollar Unicorn in Online Real Estate: Auction.com CEO Jeff Frieden (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: You were still focusing only on real estate? Jeff Frieden: Only on real estate. Then the market crashed in 2007. We were able to pivot very quickly to help out institutions like large banks that had a tsunami of foreclosures coming in when the market blew up. In 2007, we held our first

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