Building A Niche E-Commerce Powerhouse: Coastal Contacts CEO Roger Hardy (Part 4)

Sramana: Let’s talk some about your supplier terms. As a fresh company just getting started in 1999, were suppliers willing to give you inventory on credit? Roger Hardy: Initially we were pretty constrained. Often we would get half-way through the month, and we would have to take the revenue from the previous couple of days

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Building A Niche E-Commerce Powerhouse: Coastal Contacts CEO Roger Hardy (Part 2)

Sramana: How big did your t-shirt venture become? Roger Hardy: The biggest weekend I had was about $30,000. I had secured the rights to a music festival, and we did well there. I actually took on some shareholders and paid them a return on their money for funding that business.

Building A Niche E-Commerce Powerhouse: Coastal Contacts CEO Roger Hardy (Part 1)

Roger Hardy is the founder and CEO of Coastal Contacts Inc, the world’s largest online retailer of contact lenses and eyeglasses. While working for a contact lens manufacturer, he became aware of the optical store mark-ups on contact lenses and eyeglasses and recognized an opportunity to serve customers better. As a result he founded Coastal

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Morphing a Consulting Business to a Cloud Computing Product Company: Bill Loumpouridis, CEO of EDL (Part 7)

Sramana: Are the increased e-commerce metrics experienced by LI-COR a direct result of their use of CloudCraze? Bill Loumpouridis: Yes. They have used CloudCraze in a manner that has allowed them to focus on their business, not on running an e-commerce architecture and the associated challenges.

Morphing a Consulting Business to a Cloud Computing Product Company: Bill Loumpouridis, CEO of EDL (Part 6)

Sramana: You must have dedicated a substantial amount of resources into developing CloudCraze on the Force.com platform. Bill Loumpouridis: Yes, we have, and it remains ongoing today. We have dedicated developers and support staff. It is a significant ongoing investment.

Morphing a Consulting Business to a Cloud Computing Product Company: Bill Loumpouridis, CEO of EDL (Part 5)

Sramana: Clearly you have enormous domain knowledge in the e-commerce space collected over a decade. Now you are bringing that knowledge to a new cloud delivery model. Bill Loumpouridis: Salesforce’s objective is to be an enterprise platform. We fulfill a big part of that requirement. By demonstrating our capability, we become the poster child for

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Morphing a Consulting Business to a Cloud Computing Product Company: Bill Loumpouridis, CEO of EDL (Part 4)

Sramana: Does that mean that your Comergent business went away? Bill Loumpouridis: It did not go away. In 2007, I saw the trend that would take us away from traditional premise-based application development and move us toward cloud development.

Morphing a Consulting Business to a Cloud Computing Product Company: Bill Loumpouridis, CEO of EDL (Part 3)

Sramana: How did you establish your relationship with Comergent? Bill Loumpouridis: Entering business partnerships like the one we did with Comergent is crucial and difficult. Establishing that relationship came through my personal business network. When the dot-com crash happened I reached out across my network and had a lot of conversations with people across the

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