Bootstrapping a Robust SaaS company from India: Rategain CEO Bhanu Chopra (Part 3)

Sramana: Who did the development on the technology while you started the business? Bhanu Chopra: Initially, I did everything. I was the project manager, the coder, and tHE visionary. While I was building the technology, I was also focused on selling it. I made several trips to the US and Europe to do road shows.

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Bootstrapping a Robust SaaS company from India: Rategain CEO Bhanu Chopra (Part 2)

Sramana: What was the premise of the company you founded in Chicago? Bhanu Chopra: It was essentially the same thing I was doing before. We were working with some very large firms in the Chicago area. We had four Fortune 500 clients and we helped them implement large CRM systems. We built a very good

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Bootstrapping a Robust SaaS company from India: Rategain CEO Bhanu Chopra (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.  Rategain is one of the top global SaaS companies built out of India. This interview captures CEO Bhanu Chopra’s entrepreneurial journey. Sramana: Bhanu, let’s start with the beginning of your story. What kind of circumstances where you raised in? What is the genesis of your entrepreneurial

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Bootstrapping to $13 Million in 4 Years in Niche E-commerce: Pavel Sokolovsky, CEO of eComfort.com (Part 7)

Sramana: How does the supply chain work in your industry? Where is the margin getting eroded? Pavel Sokolovsky: Here is my version of how the industry came to be. In the 1950s and 1960s, the manufacturers wanted to have national exposure for their products. This required boots on the ground to install and service the

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Bootstrapping to $13 Million in 4 Years in Niche E-commerce: Pavel Sokolovsky, CEO of eComfort.com (Part 6)

Sramana: How do you handle merchandising? Merchandising involves building relationships with suppliers, determining what products to bring on, what products to create deals around, and how to position them with consumers. Pavel Sokolovsky: Merchandising is an interesting term. In a traditional sense we did not do much of it. It just happened as a by-product

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Bootstrapping to $13 Million in 4 Years in Niche E-commerce: Pavel Sokolovsky, CEO of eComfort.com (Part 5)

Sramana: How do you do in terms of sell-through? How much of the inventory that you invest in is able to be liquidated? Pavel Sokolovsky: I would love to say all of it but there have been some decisions that turned out to be less than ideal. Eventually we have been able to sell all

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Bootstrapping to $13 Million in 4 Years in Niche E-commerce: Pavel Sokolovsky, CEO of eComfort.com (Part 4)

Sramana: This is very similar to how you probably manage CPC [cost-per-click] campaigns with Google AdWords. Pavel Sokolovsky: The high level logic is the same. You have to know how much a data object is worth and when to stop spending.

Bootstrapping to $13 Million in 4 Years in Niche E-commerce: Pavel Sokolovsky, CEO of eComfort.com (Part 3)

Sramana: Our audience is very familiar with price comparison engines as consumers and as businesses. The new perspective you are bringing is the experience of working with price comparison engines as an e-commerce site. You said that you submit your site and a structured data set to the price comparison engine. I thought that price

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