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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Building Indian Mobile Banking: mChek CEO Sanjay Swamy (Part 7)

SM: How do you view the competitive landscape both internationally and in India? SS: Quite honestly, I have not worried about the competitive landscape. Our opportunity is so large that I have to focus on the massive growth we have. The Indian market is so big that we have not looked at expanding beyond India.

Building Indian Mobile Banking: mChek CEO Sanjay Swamy (Part 6)

SM: Where are you seeing traction in terms of income level? SS: It is unbelievable how wide our customer base is. We were sitting in a meeting with one customer who said it was a high-end niche product, and that they would be happy to roll it out but expected it would remain a niche

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Building Indian Mobile Banking: mChek CEO Sanjay Swamy (Part 5)

SM: Are other telecom operators adopting this model? What is the business model of your relationship with the telecoms? SS: mChek’s vision is to be a global consumer payments brand. The business model is inherently transaction-based, where we receive a percentage of the transaction. Over a period of time other telecom operators will be launching the product,

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