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Farbod Shoraka
Disrupting the Floral E-Commerce Industry: Farbod Shoraka, CEO of BloomNation (Part 7)
Sramana: How do you validate and curate florists in a scalable manner? Farbod Shoraka: We started to use some of our funds to hire a sales team that will help us decide on who to partner with. It is not an automated process. In the end, it creates a lot of value. For BloomNation’s marketplace,
Disrupting the Floral E-Commerce Industry: Farbod Shoraka, CEO of BloomNation (Part 6)
Sramana: What metrics did you use to solicit funding? Where were you in terms of revenue? Farbod Shoraka: We used two key metrics. This was very early stage investment, so it was really about the idea and vision. We needed to demonstrate that there was a product market fit. We were able to show that
Disrupting the Floral E-Commerce Industry: Farbod Shoraka, CEO of BloomNation (Part 5)
Sramana: How long did it take you to launch the first version of the site? Farbod Shoraka: Once we won the money, we hired a developer and spent a few months building the first version of BloomNation.com. It was an alpha platform to give florists an idea of where we were headed. It was enough
Disrupting the Floral E-Commerce Industry: Farbod Shoraka, CEO of BloomNation (Part 4)
Sramana: Does this mean that you are hosting their websites and helping them move their presence to your hosted sites? Farbod Shoraka: We want to partner with florists. We don’t just want to hand them a technology or a tool. We want to partner with them and help them grow their business. We give them
Disrupting the Floral E-Commerce Industry: Farbod Shoraka, CEO of BloomNation (Part 3)
Sramana: What solution did you have in mind to address these issues? Farbod Shoraka: Our first beta version of BloomNation was a place where florists could create profiles, almost like FaceBook. This was a place where they could put up info about their store to include location and delivery zones. They could also list their
Disrupting the Floral E-Commerce Industry: Farbod Shoraka, CEO of BloomNation (Part 2)
Sramana: Where were you when you made the decision to strike out on your own and start a company? Farbod Shoraka: I started out in Los Angeles. Once I realized there was a problem, I wanted to validate it, so I started walking around and talking to various florists. I just started talking to them
Disrupting the Floral E-Commerce Industry: Farbod Shoraka, CEO of BloomNation (Part 1)
You must have heard of 1-800-Flowers. Did you know that the company takes 50% of the order value, while the local florists fulfill the orders? That’s a hefty customer acquisition cost. Read how Farbod Shoraka and his co-founders are disrupting the industry. Sramana: Farbod, let’s start by learning a bit about you. Where are you
