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

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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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Building a $10M Company Proctoring Exams Online: Don Kassner, CEO of ProctorU (Part 6)

Don Kassner: If you think about proctoring itself, integrity is critical. It’s a service. We’re providing service to both the student and to the institution. It’s important that it’s simple because they’re remote. They’re on their own device. People need to be able to understand the process. There’s the people side of it and that’s

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Bootstrapping a Category Leading E-commerce Company: Tony Ellison, CEO of Shoplet (Part 7)

Sramana: I would imagine you are using the private label strategy to drive margins up, correct? That is one of the levers that you can push. Tony Ellison: Yes, that is correct. Sramana: What categories offer you the best levers for your private label strategy?