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- The Accelerator Conundrum
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- The Future: End of Capitalism
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Cool and Creative Serial Entrepreneurship: 99Designs and DeveloperAuction Co-Founder Matt Mickiewicz (Part 5)
Sramana: In three years you gained huge traction. How dramatically has your adoption curve changed? Matt Mickiewicz: We have been pushing international expansion heavily. We are seeing which markets work for us. The growth curve has continued very strongly. Our CEO has done a very good job. Sramana: Have you changed CEOs or have you
Cool and Creative Serial Entrepreneurship: 99Designs and DeveloperAuction Co-Founder Matt Mickiewicz (Part 4)
Sramana: Why did you decide to raise money? Matt Mickiewicz: To expand our marketing and increase customer acquisition. We also wanted to pursue international expansion. We used the money to hire a chief marketing officer, a chief financial officer and expand internationally, which included language expansion. Recruiting in San Francisco is much easier when you
Cool and Creative Serial Entrepreneurship: 99Designs and DeveloperAuction Co-Founder Matt Mickiewicz (Part 3)
Sramana: Who were the early adopters of 99Designs? Matt Mickiewicz: The earliest adopters were Silicon Valley and New York startups. In the first couple of years in the business we did not do any marketing. We relied on press, media attention and word of mouth. Sramana: How did you get press? That can be very
Cool and Creative Serial Entrepreneurship: 99Designs and DeveloperAuction Co-Founder Matt Mickiewicz (Part 2)
Sramana: You started that website while you were in high school. What happened after you graduated? Matt Mickiewicz: The business went really well up until the dot-com crash. All of our advertisers went bankrupt, which make me scramble to find an alternative business model. I turned to book publishing. I published over 70 books in
Cool and Creative Serial Entrepreneurship: 99Designs and DeveloperAuction Co-Founder Matt Mickiewicz (Part 1)
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. Matt Mickiewicz, who was named to the Forbes Magazine “30 under 30” list in 2012, co-founded 99designs. The company has hosted more than 200,000 design contests and paid out more than $50 million to designers, while winning a 2010 Webby Award for “Best Web Service” and
Startup, Survival, Scaling: Kareo CEO Dan Rodrigues (Part 7)
Sramana: What did you do, strategically, after you achieved profitability? Dan Rodrigues: Once we turned the corner and made positive cash flow we re-invested it in our business by purchasing more advertising, buying another server or hiring another customer support representative. We started to grow the business slowly but surely. That kicked off act three
Startup, Survival, Scaling: Kareo CEO Dan Rodrigues (Part 6)
Sramana: So the medical billing companies were not the ones paying you? Dan Rodrigues: We sold our software as a monthly fee to the doctors. For us. the revenue was about activating licenses with the doctors via the medical billing offices. We were building out forecasts around a quicker adoption cycle. Doctors were not adopting
Startup, Survival, Scaling: Kareo CEO Dan Rodrigues (Part 5)
Sramana: How much did you raise in your first round? Dan Rodrigues: We raised $2 million. That was in 2005. Sramana: What is interesting in healthcare IT startups in that time is that the rest of the market had not figured out that it was a hot space. VCs realize that something is hot at