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HOT TOPICS
- The Accelerator Conundrum
- 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 4)
Sramana: The company had hit $3.5 million in revenue, you brought in venture capital and a new CEO. What strategic decisions were made to put the company on a faster growth curve? Ben Rubenstein: This was the time when we were starting to scale. There were a lot of things we were doing in the
Building a Fast-Growth Local Advertising Business: Yodle Co-founders Ben Rubenstein and John Berkowitz (Part 3)
Sramana: There are a lot of angel investors who are also great business mentors. I think turning to VCs was the right move because typically angel investors do not invest in companies that already have over a million dollars in revenue. John Berkowitz: That is true. We did not have to raise a large amount
Building a Fast-Growth Local Advertising Business: Yodle Co-founders Ben Rubenstein and John Berkowitz (Part 2)
Sramana: When you were selling local advertising, where was it placed online? Ben Rubenstein: The first thing we did was create a website for our clients because most of them did not have one. We then took that website and distributed it to the major search engines as well as 75 other online search directories.
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
