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- The Startup Velocity Question
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- Man and Superman
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- The Future: End of Capitalism
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Building a Fast-Growth Local Advertising Business: Yodle Co-founders Ben Rubenstein and John Berkowitz (Part 6)
Sramana: Do you have any other serious competitors who target small, locally owned businesses? Ben Rubenstein: The former Yellow Pages would be. In terms of PPC and bid optimization on the local market, the only company that could compete with us is ReachLocal. They are at a higher price point than us and they are
Building a Fast-Growth Local Advertising Business: Yodle Co-founders Ben Rubenstein and John Berkowitz (Part 5)
Sramana: Let’s talk some about the technology at Yodle. What are the key technology components behind your offering? John Berkowitz: We realized that it was not intuitive for small businesses to go online and set up a paid search campaign. Most of them do not have the time or expertise to manage the nuances of
Building a Fast-Growth Local Advertising Business: Yodle Co-founders Ben Rubenstein and John Berkowitz (Part 4)
Sramana: The company had hit $3.5 million in revenue, you brought in venture capital and a new CEO. What strategic decisions were made to put the company on a faster growth curve? Ben Rubenstein: This was the time when we were starting to scale. There were a lot of things we were doing in the
Building a Fast-Growth Local Advertising Business: Yodle Co-founders Ben Rubenstein and John Berkowitz (Part 3)
Sramana: There are a lot of angel investors who are also great business mentors. I think turning to VCs was the right move because typically angel investors do not invest in companies that already have over a million dollars in revenue. John Berkowitz: That is true. We did not have to raise a large amount
Building a Fast-Growth Local Advertising Business: Yodle Co-founders Ben Rubenstein and John Berkowitz (Part 2)
Sramana: When you were selling local advertising, where was it placed online? Ben Rubenstein: The first thing we did was create a website for our clients because most of them did not have one. We then took that website and distributed it to the major search engines as well as 75 other online search directories.
Building a Fast-Growth Local Advertising Business: Yodle Co-founders Ben Rubenstein and John Berkowitz (Part 1)
Ben Rubenstein is a co-founder of Yodle and the company’s regional vice president of sales. He has been with Yodle for the last seven years. Prior to Yodle, Ben graduated magna cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied history and Latin American Studies. John Berkowitz is a co-founder of Yodle and the
Bootstrapping a $40M Niche E-Commerce Business: Stroll CEO Dan Roitman (Part 7)
Sramana: Is an M&A your primary strategy for growth? Dan Roitman: We are going to buy, build, or license products to plug into our platform to allow us to scale. We are focused on consumer education businesses. Sramana: So, you are looking for other personal development educational products that are in the B2C model, right?
Bootstrapping a $40M Niche E-Commerce Business: Stroll CEO Dan Roitman (Part 6)
Sramana: Tell me about hiring your early key players. What roles did they play, and how did you find them? Dan Roitman: My best friend served as the VP of marketing for about two and a half years. Ultimately, I realized that it was not going to work out. I had to let him go