Building a Cross-Border e-Commerce Success Selling to Russia: Bay.Ru CEO Aaron Block (Part 3)

Sramana: It sounds like one of the innovations you have accomplished was creating a wide range of payment options for Russian consumers. Is that a fair statement? Aaron Block: Yes, definitely. It took a significant amount of work to create all of the payment touch points in a way that resounded with the Russian consumer.

Building a Cross-Border e-Commerce Success Selling to Russia: Bay.Ru CEO Aaron Block (Part 2)

Sramana: How does the sales cycle work? Is delivery fulfillment happening in Russia with merchandise stored in Russian warehouses? Aaron Block: We are a middleman in Russia, but in the U.S. we are known as a cross-border e-commerce company. There are a number of players in the cross-border space. The cross-border space means that you

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Building a Cross-Border e-Commerce Success Selling to Russia: Bay.Ru CEO Aaron Block (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.  Aaron Block is the CEO of Bay.ru, the first cross-border e-commerce business in Russia and the fastest growing shopping site in Russia. Bay.ru’s growth has been powered by affiliate partnerships with eBay and Amazon which provides Bay.ru an integrated product catalog in a wide range of

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Gaps in Analytics: Jon Kondo, CEO of Host Analytics (Part 7)

Sramana: In the pre-SaaS era, a lot of software got bought and sold that just stayed on the shelf. Siebel was notorious for being shelfware. As a category, is SaaS significantly better in terms of utilization rates? Jon Kondo: The beauty of SaaS is that if a company is not using the software, then they

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Gaps in Analytics: Jon Kondo, CEO of Host Analytics (Part 6)

Sramana: What is the current financing market like for enterprise software? Silicon Valley has tipped heavily in favor of B2C. Having said that, a lot of cloud computing companies are doing well and raising financing. Can you comment about the lay of the land in general? Jon Kondo: It is a very good time for

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Gaps in Analytics: Jon Kondo, CEO of Host Analytics (Part 5)

Sramana: Have you now made the conscious choice to cater to two different market segments? Jon Kondo: What we are realizing is that we are catering to separate segments, but we are able to do so with the same philosophical approach. It only requires some tweaks in our delivery mechanism. If large customers are willing

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Gaps in Analytics: Jon Kondo, CEO of Host Analytics (Part 4)

Sramana: You talked about sticking with your core market segment of companies with revenues between $75 million and $1 billion. How do you feel when large enterprises call you? How do you deal with those queries? Jon Kondo: We like those queries because they tend to be big opportunities. Large enterprises tend to spend a

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Gaps in Analytics: Jon Kondo, CEO of Host Analytics (Part 3)

Sramana: When you came into the market in 2008, what did you notice in the competitive landscape? Who were you seeing in deals? Jon Kondo: We saw the big guys in the space, although they did not take us seriously at first. We saw Oracle, SAP and IBM. Now, they take us a lot more

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