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- The Startup Velocity Question
- Platform as a Service
- Man and Superman
- Web 3.0 = (4C + P + VS)
- The Future: End of Capitalism
- Capitalism 2.0
Building a Fast-Growth Local Advertising Business: Yodle Co-founders Ben Rubenstein and John Berkowitz (Part 1)
Ben Rubenstein is a co-founder of Yodle and the company’s regional vice president of sales. He has been with Yodle for the last seven years. Prior to Yodle, Ben graduated magna cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied history and Latin American Studies. John Berkowitz is a co-founder of Yodle and the
Bootstrapping a $40M Niche E-Commerce Business: Stroll CEO Dan Roitman (Part 7)
Sramana: Is an M&A your primary strategy for growth? Dan Roitman: We are going to buy, build, or license products to plug into our platform to allow us to scale. We are focused on consumer education businesses. Sramana: So, you are looking for other personal development educational products that are in the B2C model, right?
Bootstrapping a $40M Niche E-Commerce Business: Stroll CEO Dan Roitman (Part 6)
Sramana: Tell me about hiring your early key players. What roles did they play, and how did you find them? Dan Roitman: My best friend served as the VP of marketing for about two and a half years. Ultimately, I realized that it was not going to work out. I had to let him go
Bootstrapping a $40M Niche E-Commerce Business: Stroll CEO Dan Roitman (Part 5)
Sramana: What platforms did you use to advertise? Dan Roitman: In our initial phase we used acquisition email. We did that for the first eight months. We then built the business one or two channels at a time. We focused on building out one to two channels per year. I think people fail because they
Bootstrapping a $40M Niche E-Commerce Business: Stroll CEO Dan Roitman (Part 4)
Sramana: What were some of the early keys to success? What did you do right very early on that led you to have a successful business? Dan Roitman: I was fortunate in one key aspect. Very early on I aligned myself with thought leaders. In 2001, after I found out that we would have to
Bootstrapping a $40M Niche E-Commerce Business: Stroll CEO Dan Roitman (Part 3)
Sramana: You started selling language learning products online in 2001. How did the business build from there? Dan Roitman: We had been selling the product as early as 2001, but we really started focusing on it in the middle of 2002. We became one of the largest resellers in the audio books division. Based on
Bootstrapping a $40M Niche E-Commerce Business: Stroll CEO Dan Roitman (Part 2)
Sramana: You said that you had to pivot the business into a different area. How did you go about doing that? Dan Roitman: It took me about two years to focus on the language learning aspect of the business. I did a lot of research doing the two years I was trying to replace the
Bootstrapping a $40M Niche E-Commerce Business: Stroll CEO Dan Roitman (Part 1)
Dan Roitman is the founder and chief executive officer of Stroll, an Internet retailer of lifestyle information products. He founded Stroll in 2000 while a senior in college and has led the firm from startup to present. He is an active member of the Smart100, a local network of chief executive officers. Roitman holds a