categories
HOT TOPICS
- 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
Bootstrapping a $40M Niche E-Commerce Business: Stroll CEO Dan Roitman (Part 5)
Sramana: What platforms did you use to advertise? Dan Roitman: In our initial phase we used acquisition email. We did that for the first eight months. We then built the business one or two channels at a time. We focused on building out one to two channels per year. I think people fail because they
Bootstrapping a $40M Niche E-Commerce Business: Stroll CEO Dan Roitman (Part 3)
Sramana: You started selling language learning products online in 2001. How did the business build from there? Dan Roitman: We had been selling the product as early as 2001, but we really started focusing on it in the middle of 2002. We became one of the largest resellers in the audio books division. Based on
Bootstrapping a $40M Niche E-Commerce Business: Stroll CEO Dan Roitman (Part 2)
Sramana: You said that you had to pivot the business into a different area. How did you go about doing that? Dan Roitman: It took me about two years to focus on the language learning aspect of the business. I did a lot of research doing the two years I was trying to replace the
Bootstrapping a $40M Niche E-Commerce Business: Stroll CEO Dan Roitman (Part 1)
Dan Roitman is the founder and chief executive officer of Stroll, an Internet retailer of lifestyle information products. He founded Stroll in 2000 while a senior in college and has led the firm from startup to present. He is an active member of the Smart100, a local network of chief executive officers. Roitman holds a
Parallel Entrepreneurship: Serguei Beloussov, Founder of Parallels (Part 7)
Sramana: How did you grow? I am assuming that you were selling multitenant infrastructure to these hosting companies? Serguei Beloussov: What we initially started building was very ambitious. We wanted to build the storage, operating system, system management, automation, and services. This would enable us to build applications in the ASP mode. That is a
Parallel Entrepreneurship: Serguei Beloussov, Founder of Parallels (Part 6)
Sramana: What did you do once you realized that your product design and re-licensing business would not scale? Serguei Beloussov: We then looking at venture engineering. We would evaluate ideas and supply the engineering talent to develop the software. We got involved with the e-economy, and [the venture] was built by 10 guys from Austin,
Parallel Entrepreneurship: Serguei Beloussov, Founder of Parallels (Part 5)
Sramana: When you established an ERP software company [for] Asia, what size of clients did you target? Serguei Beloussov: We sold to companies of all sizes. We also established a partner network. We got involved into customization for localized requirements. At the same time I established a side project where we developed, from scratch, a
Parallel Entrepreneurship: Serguei Beloussov, Founder of Parallels (Part 4)
Sramana: It sounds like you started a series of smaller companies across the IT space, a lot of them at the same time or very close to each other. It also sounds like a lot of these companies were established as a matter of circumstance rather than detailed planning. Is that a fair assessment? Serguei