Books By Sramana Mitra

If you haven’t already, please study our free Bootstrapping course. Entrepreneur Journeys Billion Dollar Unicorns (Available for order from Amazon Kindle) The vast majority of entrepreneurs today are trying to figure out how to build billion dollar Unicorn companies. Venture Capitalists have always been looking for Unicorns to fund. And yet, the probability of founding

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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 2)

SM: The fellowship you received enabled you to attend Indiana University. Were there any requirements tied to that fellowship? RA: Two of us were given a fellowship, and our mandate was to create an intranet for the university’s professors to use. It sounded grand, but we could not achieve it over the year and a

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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 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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