How Rafat Ali Found a Job (Part 5)

SM: How did getting married affect the business? RA: I had to go away for about 40 days because my wife, who is of Indian origin, was from South Africa. The marriage was in South Africa and the reception was going to be in India. The entire ordeal was going to take 40 days. There

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How Rafat Ali Found a Job (Part 4)

SM: How many email newsletter subscribers and website visitors did you have at that point? RA: This was in 2003 and it was probably a couple of hundred. At that point I was still hoping to find a job in London as a journalist, but some offers to advertise on my site made me think

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How Rafat Ali Found a Job (Part 3)

SM: Did you go to Silicon Alley Reporter for the magazine or the website? RA: When I joined the magazine was shut down, so I wrote for the website. I did daily stories. This was in 2002, which is also when I started paidContent.org.

How Rafat Ali Found a Job (Part 1)

Rafat Ali is a journalist, pioneering blogger, and entrepreneur. Editor & Publisher has called Rafat “journalism’s poster boy for career independence from news companies”. I am very pleased to share his story of persistence and success. SM: Where are you from? Where did you grow up? RA: I was born in the UK, but my

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More Bootstrapping: VirtualTourist.com Co-Founder J.R. Johnson (Part 6)

SM: When you hired people, did they have equity in the company? JJ: Yes, that was one way to entice people to join us.

More Bootstrapping: VirtualTourist.com Co-Founder J.R. Johnson (Part 5)

SM: You had to be cash flow positive for the majority of your business, correct? When did you start breaking even? JJ: It is easy to break even when you are not paying yourself anything. It was not a typical scenario where we had a million dollars, ran with negative cash flow for a while,

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More Bootstrapping: VirtualTourist.com Co-Founder J.R. Johnson (Part 4)

SM: What type of traffic levels are you currently seeing? JJ: We are seeing 5-6 million unique visitors a month.

More Bootstrapping: VirtualTourist.com Co-Founder J.R. Johnson (Part 3)

SM: What was your plan for monetizing the site? How did you do it? JJ: During that time I convinced GoTo.com, which later became Overture.com, to allow us to take their paid links and put them into our content. I made the argument that a user who had to click six times to get down

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