Pioneering Data On-Demand: Salary.com CEO and Serial Entrepreneur Kent Plunkett (Part 5)

SM: Aside from your on-demand aspect, how else do you differentiate from the consulting firms? KP: We do not charge on an hourly basis for customer service and the help desk. Our customers call us all the time and ask for help pricing a job – we try to help our customers with those problems.

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Pioneering Data On-Demand: Salary.com CEO and Serial Entrepreneur Kent Plunkett (Part 4)

SM: What was the competitive landscape like when you started? Besides consultants, was there anyone else in that space at the time? KP: Even today the competition is fairly scant. Back then there was no one doing it. We were alone in the consumer and enterprise business for a solid three or four years.

Pioneering Data On-Demand: Salary.com CEO and Serial Entrepreneur Kent Plunkett (Part 3)

SM: It was easy to raise money in 1999. It was not easy to raise money in 2001. What was your experience raising angel money during that time window? KP: I have never had a problem raising angel money. It was extremely easy in 1999. We did talk to some venture capitalists, but they did

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Pioneering Data On-Demand: Salary.com CEO and Serial Entrepreneur Kent Plunkett (Part 2)

SM: What was the genesis of Salary.com? KP: Right before I started Salary.com I was building software for What Color Is Your Parachute?, which is also in the career management space. There we ended our process with a recommendation as to what would be a good career fit for an individual. The goal was to

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Pioneering Data On-Demand: Salary.com CEO and Serial Entrepreneur Kent Plunkett (Part 1)

Kent Plunkett is the CEO of Salary.com. His efforts there earned him the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year award for 2007. He has domain expertise in data on-demand and data syndication, with expertise leveraging this at all levels from the enterprise to the consumer. SM: Where do you come from? Give us some

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Urging Authors to be Entrepreneurs: iUniverse CEO Kevin Weiss (Part 7)

SM: What should I have asked you that I didn’t? KW: We have not talked about our overseas facility yet. I recently did a press conference with the governor of Indiana where I announced the closure of our Shanghai facility.

Urging Authors to be Entrepreneurs: iUniverse CEO Kevin Weiss (Part 6)

SM: Will your publishers be paying a fee to gain access to the service? KW: Yes, they will pay a fee to use the service. In this business, if you do not have critical mass it is really hard to drive customer satisfaction and to get costs in line.

Urging Authors to be Entrepreneurs: iUniverse CEO Kevin Weiss (Part 5)

SM: From a writer’s perspective, one of the biggest issues is marketing. If you are an author without an existing platform, how do you market your book, aside from to your friends and family? KW: That is the biggest complaint that writers have. We will launch something focused on author marketing by the end of

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