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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Celebrating MIT’s 150th Anniversary: Alumni Ian Clemens, Founder Of IDV Solutions (Part 7)

Sramana: Are there no other companies out there that take your same philosophical approach to visualization? Ian Clemens: Contextualized visualization for companies like Tableau is an afterthought. What they are doing is rapid visualization, which remains technical and is very much a power user function. It is not very contextual. Mapping is often a product

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Building The Largest Online Bus Ticketing Company in India: redBus.in Co-founder and CEO Phanindra Sama (Part 12)

Sramana: What you describe about the call center and the home delivery service is OK for India. In countries that have low-cost labor, there are more opportunities for mixing high tech efficiencies with high-touch customer service. That becomes harder in countries where labor is more expensive. It is an interesting model. Phanindra Sama: It can

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Building The Largest Online Bus Ticketing Company in India: redBus.in Co-founder and CEO Phanindra Sama (Part 11)

Sramana: What percentage of the bus operators ticket business do you have now? Phanindra Sama: We are at 1% of total business. We have 70% of the automated bus ticket business.

Building The Largest Online Bus Ticketing Company in India: redBus.in Co-founder and CEO Phanindra Sama (Part 10)

Sramana: How did you achieve an industry-leading conversion rate? Phanindra Sama: We have taken our analysis down to fine details. We have a specific orientation for the bus on the entry page.

Building The Largest Online Bus Ticketing Company in India: redBus.in Co-founder and CEO Phanindra Sama (Part 9)

Sramana: How many customers does redBus have today? Phanindra Sama: We sell about 200,000 seats per month at this point. Sramana: How many seats were you selling when you met the journalist? Phanindra Sama: At that time we were selling 10 to 15 seats per month. It was enough to keep our allocations from the

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Building The Largest Online Bus Ticketing Company in India: redBus.in Co-founder and CEO Phanindra Sama (Part 8)

Sramana: How did you gain access to a payment gateway as a new Internet company? Phanindra Sama: I took a banker’s recommendation and accepted personal liability for charge backs. I had to keep a certain amount of money in my account as well. Once we took the site live, we then had to focus on

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Building The Largest Online Bus Ticketing Company in India: redBus.in Co-founder and CEO Phanindra Sama (Part 7)

Sramana: How far were you able to bootstrap your company while maintaining your job? Phanindra Sama: The product was completed and ready. To solve this problem, the logical process was to give the software to bus operators.