Bootstrapping To $1 Million, Then Growing to $40 Million: iContact CEO Ryan Allis: Chapel Hill, North Carolina (Part 3)

Sramana: Where did the money come from to get iContact off the ground? Ryan Allis: We bootstrapped for three years. Initially it was just the two of us, and we did not draw a salary. We were in downtown Chapel Hill. I lived in the office, so I did not have any rent personally. Aaron

Read Full Article »

Bootstrapping To $1 Million, Then Growing to $40 Million: iContact CEO Ryan Allis: Chapel Hill, North Carolina (Part 2)

Sramana: What was going on in your life parallel to your young entrepreneur activities? Ryan Allis: I was a normal school kid living in Florida. I went to middle school and high school, and I worked when I could on the side. Throughout high school I did 40 or 50 websites and I started a

Read Full Article »

Bootstrapping To $1 Million, Then Growing to $40 Million: iContact CEO Ryan Allis: Chapel Hill, North Carolina (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.  Ryan is the co-founder and CEO of iContact, a provider of e-mail marketing software.. iContact currently has 300 employees, 700,000 users, and $50 million in annual revenues. Ryan has been an entrepreneur since he started Allis Computing at age 11 in 1995. He is an active

Read Full Article »

Monetizing Free Traffic That Refuses To Convert To Premium: SocialVibe CEO Jay Samit, Los Angeles (Part 7)

Sramana: What have been some of the significant milestones in terms of building the company? Jay Samit: The key was getting advertisers to get understand that the key things to measure in a post-impressions world are the attention, engagement, and the rally. We have had campaigns like Toy Story where half of the people who

Read Full Article »

Monetizing Free Traffic That Refuses To Convert To Premium: SocialVibe CEO Jay Samit, Los Angeles (Part 6)

Sramana: You said news sites is one of your strong areas. What does a before and after picture look like in that segment? Jay Samit: We can talk about news sites in general. One of the most traffic areas is news. That sounds silly, but it’s not. If there is a flood or hurricane that

Read Full Article »

Monetizing Free Traffic That Refuses To Convert To Premium: SocialVibe CEO Jay Samit, Los Angeles (Part 4)

Sramana: How much business does Zynga do with you? Jay Samit: I can’t discuss financial numbers since they have filed to go public. I think we are a key revenue stream. We started with PetVille, and because it was so successful they expanded us into CityVille, FarmVille, and FrontierVille. They have expanded anywhere and everywhere

Read Full Article »

Monetizing Free Traffic That Refuses To Convert To Premium: SocialVibe CEO Jay Samit, Los Angeles (Part 3)

Sramana: What is the use case for the donation-driven advertising? Jay Samit: If you are on Causes or SociaVibe.com and you want to make clean drinking water to people then the value proposition is that if you watch an advertisement, a company like Nestlé will give a donation to charity: water.

Monetizing Free Traffic That Refuses To Convert To Premium: SocialVibe CEO Jay Samit, Los Angeles (Part 2)

Sramana: If the model only appealed to 60 million Americans then it would be a niche product. Is that the case? Jay Samit: It was a niche, however brands got tremendous attention from people but it did not scale to the size that it should have because it was focused from the value exchange of

Read Full Article »