Bootstrapping to $100 Million Plus: Ultra Mobile Chief Strategy Officer Rizwan Kassim (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Pinpoint for me the strategy for growth. Rizwan Kassim: First was having the right distribution. This is a business that was about distribution. Sramana Mitra: What was the distribution strategy? Rizwan Kassim: These cellphone shops are used to getting screwed by the carriers. Sometimes they don’t get paid commissions. Sometimes they don’t get

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Bootstrapping to $100 Million Plus: Ultra Mobile Chief Strategy Officer Rizwan Kassim (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Let me try to understand this. At the end of the day, the value proposition that you were offering was international calling at affordable rates from anywhere in the world to anywhere in the world. Rizwan Kassim: No, it would be their US cellphone service. Instead of using Verizon or AT&T, they would

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Bootstrapping to $100 Million Plus: Ultra Mobile Chief Strategy Officer Rizwan Kassim (Part 4)

Rizwan Kassim: There’s also a term in telco called breakage. If you sell 500 minutes to someone at two cents a minute, they don’t necessarily use all 500 minutes. That helps with forward pricing. We spent a lot of time on what sort of message communicated best with first-generation Indians. We used people we knew.

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Bootstrapping to $100 Million Plus: Ultra Mobile Chief Strategy Officer Rizwan Kassim (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: We should probably step through that. That’s your first technology entrepreneurship, right? Rizwan Kassim: That’s the first one that hit any sort of scale. Sramana Mitra: You started that in the 2006 to 2007 period? Rizwan Kassim: The company was founded in 2006.

Bootstrapping to $100 Million Plus: Ultra Mobile Chief Strategy Officer Rizwan Kassim (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: In 2006 you finally graduated. What happened after that? Rizwan Kassim: I worked at a couple of companies. I did some technology consulting. I worked at a restaurant startup that was started by Nolan Bushnell, the founder of Atari. I was the Director of Engineering there. I was there for a few years.

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Bootstrapping to $100 Million Plus: Ultra Mobile Chief Strategy Officer Rizwan Kassim (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.  I have long believed that Go BIG or Go HOME is complete bullshit. I have seen entrepreneur after entrepreneur build a small but profitable, slower growth business as a first outing, followed by a much larger, higher growth business as a follow-on venture. Rizwan has done

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Bootstrapping a Two-Sided Marketplace to $10M: Sal Akbani, CEO of Gateway Classic Cars (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Where to from here? More of the same? Sal Akbani: More of the same. We’re also incorporating a few other items out there into the product mix. As part of one of our themes, we have partnered with a very famous NASCAR personality Kenny Wallace. We are producing a mini-series on TV and

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Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Bonanza Co-Founder Mark Dorsey (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Now we’re still in 2010. In the last six years, what has happened to the business? Where has the growth come from? Mark Dorsey: In the past six years, we’ve attempted to rebrand ourselves into a fashion site. We kept Bonanza but we also created a second site for handbags exclusively. What we

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