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- The Startup Velocity Question
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An SEO-Driven Bootstrapping Success: Benchmark Email CEO Curt Keller (Part 4)
Sramana: All together, how many people did you have working on the project? You had an outsource engineering and support team, an SEO expert, you, and your wife. What was the headcount? Curt Keller: When we first started it was just me, a support guy in India and three programmers. A few years later we
An SEO-Driven Bootstrapping Success: Benchmark Email CEO Curt Keller (Part 3)
Sramana: When you got your first product done, how did you get it out to market? Curt Keller: We started with Google PPC. That is where we focused all of our energy. It started to get some traction. We got a lot of traction that first year. Sramana: How much funding did you put into
An SEO-Driven Bootstrapping Success: Benchmark Email CEO Curt Keller (Part 2)
Sramana: Essentially you wanted to execute on a business strategy that was already proven as a way of reducing risk. How did you get yourself off the ground? Curt Keller: It would have taken a lot of money to do all the programming in the U.S. I made a conscious decision to find good resources
An SEO-Driven Bootstrapping Success: Benchmark Email CEO Curt Keller (Part 1)
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. Curt Keller is the founder and CEO of Benchmark Email, a global email marketing services company. After buying his first business in 2000, Keller grew Benchmark Email from a small operation with a handful of employees to a multinational company offering email marketing services for English,
Replacing Founders with CEOs: A Discussion with Paul Doscher, CEO, Lucid Imagination (Part 7)
Sramana Mitra: Google made a tricky situation work. Paul Doscher: They also held to a hiring standard that was not heard of before then. SM: The real issue is that power struggle. They had a mature understanding between Eric, Larry, and Sergey about how the power was going to be shared. Mark Zuckerberg had a
Replacing Founders with CEOs: A Discussion with Paul Doscher, CEO, Lucid Imagination (Part 6)
Sramana: The problem with young founders is that they do not know what they don’t know. Paul Doscher: That is exactly right! Sramana: I was in that category. When I was going through that process, there was a big limit to how much I knew. Paul Doscher: When you face that situation, you can deal
Replacing Founders with CEOs: A Discussion with Paul Doscher, CEO, Lucid Imagination (Part 5)
Sramana: It sounds like the first two scenarios were pretty much exact opposites of each other. What was the third experience of replacing the founder as CEO like? Paul Doscher: The third scenario was, unfortunately, a bit of a train wreck. A new CEO role was mandated by the board. There was no passive-aggressive behavior
Replacing Founders with CEOs: A Discussion with Paul Doscher, CEO, Lucid Imagination (Part 4)
Sramana: How many times have you replaced founders as the CEO? Paul Doscher: Three times. Each time I have been a CEO, I have replaced a founder. Sramana: In each of those three scenarios, what was the situation you came into, and how did you both navigate the scenarios? Paul Doscher: The first situation was