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Bootstrapping to $13 Million in 4 Years in Niche E-commerce: Pavel Sokolovsky, CEO of eComfort.com (Part 6)

Posted on Saturday, Mar 1st

Sramana: How do you handle merchandising? Merchandising involves building relationships with suppliers, determining what products to bring on, what products to create deals around, and how to position them with consumers. Pavel Sokolovsky: Merchandising is an interesting term. In a traditional sense we did not do much of it. It just happened as a by-product

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Building an American E-commerce Company that Now Sells into China: Peter Mann, CEO of Oransi (Part 1)

Posted on Friday, Feb 28th

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.  Peter Mann started Oransi as a B-to-C e-commerce company. Today, 40% of his $10M revenue comes from China. This is the kind of company America hopes to see more of – selling American products to international consumers. Sramana Mitra: Peter, let’s start with your background. Where

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Bootstrapping to $13 Million in 4 Years in Niche E-commerce: Pavel Sokolovsky, CEO of eComfort.com (Part 5)

Posted on Friday, Feb 28th

Sramana: How do you do in terms of sell-through? How much of the inventory that you invest in is able to be liquidated? Pavel Sokolovsky: I would love to say all of it but there have been some decisions that turned out to be less than ideal. Eventually we have been able to sell all

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Bootstrapping to $13 Million in 4 Years in Niche E-commerce: Pavel Sokolovsky, CEO of eComfort.com (Part 4)

Posted on Thursday, Feb 27th

Sramana: This is very similar to how you probably manage CPC [cost-per-click] campaigns with Google AdWords. Pavel Sokolovsky: The high level logic is the same. You have to know how much a data object is worth and when to stop spending.

Bootstrapping to $13 Million in 4 Years in Niche E-commerce: Pavel Sokolovsky, CEO of eComfort.com (Part 3)

Posted on Wednesday, Feb 26th

Sramana: Our audience is very familiar with price comparison engines as consumers and as businesses. The new perspective you are bringing is the experience of working with price comparison engines as an e-commerce site. You said that you submit your site and a structured data set to the price comparison engine. I thought that price

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Bootstrapping to $13 Million in 4 Years in Niche E-commerce: Pavel Sokolovsky, CEO of eComfort.com (Part 2)

Posted on Tuesday, Feb 25th

Sramana: What specific steps did you take to get the business launched? How did you acquire your customer base? Pavel Sokolovsky: We put up a website using open source software. I had a bit of a technical and development background. Victor took on the challenge of accurately describing the products on our site. He did

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Building a $10M Company Proctoring Exams Online: Don Kassner, CEO of ProctorU (Part 7)

Posted on Monday, Feb 24th

Don Kassner: It remains to be seen if it’s going to break out the way that it used to break out. For us, we’ve been very happy with the success that we’ve had in growing this from nothing to a $10 million a year company. You were talking about getting entrepreneurs to that first million

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Bootstrapping to $13 Million in 4 Years in Niche E-commerce: Pavel Sokolovsky, CEO of eComfort.com (Part 1)

Posted on Monday, Feb 24th

We continue to be bullish about niche e-commerce as a category to build sustainable businesses in. This story is a further illustration of the trend. Sramana: Pavel, let’s start at the beginning of your story. Where are you from? What is the genesis of your entrepreneurial aspirations? Pavel Sokolovsky: I was born in Minsk, Belarus.

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