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- The Accelerator Conundrum
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- Platform as a Service
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- Web 3.0 = (4C + P + VS)
- The Future: End of Capitalism
- Capitalism 2.0
Disrupting the Floral E-Commerce Industry: Farbod Shoraka, CEO of BloomNation (Part 7)
Sramana: How do you validate and curate florists in a scalable manner? Farbod Shoraka: We started to use some of our funds to hire a sales team that will help us decide on who to partner with. It is not an automated process. In the end, it creates a lot of value. For BloomNation’s marketplace,
Disrupting the Floral E-Commerce Industry: Farbod Shoraka, CEO of BloomNation (Part 6)
Sramana: What metrics did you use to solicit funding? Where were you in terms of revenue? Farbod Shoraka: We used two key metrics. This was very early stage investment, so it was really about the idea and vision. We needed to demonstrate that there was a product market fit. We were able to show that
Bootstrapping a Bulk Book E-Commerce Business: BookPal CEO, Tony DiCostanzo (Part 7)
Sramana Mitra: What are some of the major trends that you are tracking and building your strategy around as you’re watching the book business? Tony DiCostanzo: I think the one that’s most prevalent is the momentum that e-books are building in the market. That’s one of the reasons that we pursued and made the investment
Disrupting the Floral E-Commerce Industry: Farbod Shoraka, CEO of BloomNation (Part 5)
Sramana: How long did it take you to launch the first version of the site? Farbod Shoraka: Once we won the money, we hired a developer and spent a few months building the first version of BloomNation.com. It was an alpha platform to give florists an idea of where we were headed. It was enough
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