Student Entrepreneur to $10M+ Business: Blaine Vess, CEO of StudyMode (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: In 2008, you have got one acquisition under your belt. What happens next? Blaine Vess: We ended up buying another site, which was called All Free Essays. It was another site that has been around since about 2000. It was not monetized at all. I had been reaching out to the owner for

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Student Entrepreneur to $10M+ Business: Blaine Vess, CEO of StudyMode (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: I want to know precisely what happened in 2008. What are the significant things that you did in 2008 and how did those play out? This $1.1 million, was there a concentration of colleges you were getting this from? Blaine Vess: In 2008, we launched in international markets and started the acquisition of

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Student Entrepreneur to $10M+ Business: Blaine Vess, CEO of StudyMode (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Was Chris working full time or did he take up another job? Blaine Vess: Chris was working full time on this business. He was also doing the contract programming with me. Sramana Mitra: You guys were doing contract programming. You had a job and Chris was doing the business?

Student Entrepreneur to $10M+ Business: Blaine Vess, CEO of StudyMode (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What was the motivation? If I am a student, why would I want to load up my course notes? Blaine Vess: The main motivation is to get access to other people’s course notes or research. Say you’re writing a research paper on global warming and you have a writer’s block or you’re three

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Student Entrepreneur to $10M+ Business: Blaine Vess, CEO of StudyMode (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.  We’re seeing a wonderful trend of student entrepreneurs building substantial businesses without dropping out. Blaine Vess is yet another great role model. This story outlines Blaine’s entrepreneurial journey. Sramana Mitra: Blaine, let’s start with introducing our audience to you. Where did you grow up? Where were

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Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Interview with Bobby Yazdani, Founder and CEO of SABA (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: These changes will have to be integrated. Let me tell you how we have designed a product or an environment in which we run our virtual incubator. It is not a simple design. We have video lectures and case studies. The video lectures are recorded videos. Then we have case studies that go

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Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Interview with Bobby Yazdani, Founder and CEO of SABA (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: That is where the question I am asking stems from. There are a lot of these massive open online courses available from various brand-name universities, or online programs that are now becoming available. From an enterprise learning point of view, the strategy so far has been just to learn content or send employees

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Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Interview with Bobby Yazdani, Founder and CEO of SABA (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: If you are trying to get a European sales team to bond around a sales training module and enhance that module with their own live learning and web conferences, that requires a level of moderation. Somebody needs to orchestrate that behavior. It is not clear to me from an organizational adoption point of

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