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- The Accelerator Conundrum
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- The Future: End of Capitalism
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Bootstrapping a Bulk Book E-Commerce Business: BookPal CEO Tony DiCostanzo (Part 6)
Sramana Mitra: There are major trends in the space right now. For example, Amazon has made it very easy for independent or self-publishers to maintain a whole portfolio of books. A lot of major writers are moving to that mode of publishing. Especially in the business books genre, there’s a major shift. These are in your
Disrupting the Floral E-Commerce Industry: Farbod Shoraka, CEO of BloomNation (Part 4)
Sramana: Does this mean that you are hosting their websites and helping them move their presence to your hosted sites? Farbod Shoraka: We want to partner with florists. We don’t just want to hand them a technology or a tool. We want to partner with them and help them grow their business. We give them
Bootstrapping a Bulk Book E-Commerce Business: BookPal CEO Tony DiCostanzo (Part 5)
Sramana Mitra: How did you build the corporate business? What was the go-to market strategy and customer acquisition strategy on the corporate business? Tony DiCostanzo: Going back to the epiphany moment, the other entrenched players in the book space weren’t adequately servicing the corporate buyers. At that point, I realized that the biggest opportunity is
Disrupting the Floral E-Commerce Industry: Farbod Shoraka, CEO of BloomNation (Part 3)
Sramana: What solution did you have in mind to address these issues? Farbod Shoraka: Our first beta version of BloomNation was a place where florists could create profiles, almost like FaceBook. This was a place where they could put up info about their store to include location and delivery zones. They could also list their
Bootstrapping a Bulk Book E-Commerce Business: BookPal CEO Tony DiCostanzo (Part 4)
Tony DiCostanzo: When I started engaging customers on the website in the broader segment of enterprise sales rather than just healthcare, I initially put up the books and made single copies available. It was difficult to say, “We’re great at these bulk sales but we also can do one copy.” That’s what everybody else was doing. Within two months, I realized that
Disrupting the Floral E-Commerce Industry: Farbod Shoraka, CEO of BloomNation (Part 2)
Sramana: Where were you when you made the decision to strike out on your own and start a company? Farbod Shoraka: I started out in Los Angeles. Once I realized there was a problem, I wanted to validate it, so I started walking around and talking to various florists. I just started talking to them
Bootstrapping a Bulk Book E-Commerce Business: BookPal CEO Tony DiCostanzo (Part 3)
Sramana Mitra: After you sold the healthcare business? Tony DiCostanzo: Yes. I didn’t think of the book company as having a big potential because at that time, it was limited to probably about 20 different books that we sold consistently. Some of those books were from different publishers, but I didn’t really represent all the other books
Disrupting the Floral E-Commerce Industry: Farbod Shoraka, CEO of BloomNation (Part 1)
You must have heard of 1-800-Flowers. Did you know that the company takes 50% of the order value, while the local florists fulfill the orders? That’s a hefty customer acquisition cost. Read how Farbod Shoraka and his co-founders are disrupting the industry. Sramana: Farbod, let’s start by learning a bit about you. Where are you