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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More Bootstrapping: VirtualTourist.com Co-Founder J.R. Johnson (Part 2)

SM: When did you launch VirtualTourist.com? JJ: In 1999 I started talking to Tilman [Reissfelder], who is now my partner. He had the website, which at the time had a clickable map, some open source content, and some paid links. Reflecting back on my travel experiences, I suggested we build something that gave people a

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More Bootstrapping: VirtualTourist.com Co-Founder J.R. Johnson (Part 1)

VirtualTourist.com is a Web 3.0 travel community where users and locals share real travel advice and experiences. It is a source of unbiased, user-generated travel content and a premier resource for travelers seeking an insider’s perspective on their upcoming travels. Real travel tips, reviews, and photos are provided by a community of over 1 million

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