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HOT TOPICS
- The Accelerator Conundrum
- The Startup Velocity Question
- Platform as a Service
- Man and Superman
- Web 3.0 = (4C + P + VS)
- The Future: End of Capitalism
- Capitalism 2.0
Building a Two-Sided Marketplace: LawnStarter CRO Ryan Farley (Part 1)
As you know from our prior coverage, we like niche two-sided marketplaces a lot. Here’s another one to study. Please note, this company went through TechStars, and had a validated business before getting into TechStars, as we have seen in several other case studies. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your personal
From Australia to Silicon Valley: Anthony Smith’s Journey with Insightly (Part 6)
Sramana Mitra: What about financing? Did you raise more money? Anthony Smith: CRM, as you well know, is a very popular field with a lot of competition. Insightly was just one of many CRMs that had popped up over the four years prior to my starting the business. We had a lot of traction with
From Australia to Silicon Valley: Anthony Smith’s Journey with Insightly (Part 5)
Sramana Mitra: What did you tell Emergence Capital about what is going to be your monetization strategy? What were you going to charge and how were you going to go move your free users to paying users? Anthony Smith: We talked through it and looked at what would be some good options there. Google had
From Australia to Silicon Valley: Anthony Smith’s Journey with Insightly (Part 4)
Sramana Mitra: At this point, were you charging for the product? Anthony Smith: We were not. Anybody could install Insightly and start using it. I was still at Perth in Western Australia. A lot of Google’s customers were based in the US which is a 12-hour time difference. A lot of stuff was happening in
From Australia to Silicon Valley: Anthony Smith’s Journey with Insightly (Part 3)
Sramana Mitra: You really wanted to go very cheap and with no administration kind of model. Anthony Smith: Right. These small businesses don’t have a lot of resources. More to the point is that employees within those companies don’t sit in front of the computer all day. They go off and do their own thing
From Australia to Silicon Valley: Anthony Smith’s Journey with Insightly (Part 2)
Sramana Mitra: You said you did your own company, but you built software for a particular large mining company. You were doing contract software services at a contracting company? Anthony Smith: I did professional consulting for a couple of years and then teamed up with another consultant. We built some software for a large mining
From Australia to Silicon Valley: Anthony Smith’s Journey with Insightly (Part 1)
Anthony started a CRM app in Australia that became the No. 1 on the Google App Store. VCs started calling. Anthony moved to San Francisco and has built a robust company with funding from Emergence Capital. Very cool story! Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your personal journey. Where are you from?
Bootstrapping to $100M+ from Arizona: JT Marino, CEO of Tuft & Needle (Part 4)
Sramana Mitra: How do you compete with these hundred different competitors? JT Marino: We built the company our way. We cannot compete the same way they do. If we want to compete like a Casper, we cannot beat them dollar per dollar in ad spend. We have to be very careful how we purchase our