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HOT TOPICS
- The Accelerator Conundrum
- 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
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Successful Pivot from B-to-C to B-to-B: Inkling CEO Matt MacInnis (Part 7)
Sramana Mitra: You said you’ve raised about $90 million. With all these changes and pivots, how has revenue in the new model tracked? Are you able to justify that kind of financing from a market cap point of view? I’m not talking about foo-foo market cap. I’m talking about market cap that is derived out
Successful Pivot from B-to-C to B-to-B: Inkling CEO Matt MacInnis (Part 6)
Sramana Mitra: When you were starting to see this traction from Starbucks, KMPG, and other corporates, what kind of a business model did you follow in these deals? Matt MacInnis: We knew it was going to be SaaS. We gave Starbucks a very sweet deal. They got extra for the platform for all their district
Successful Pivot from B-to-C to B-to-B: Inkling CEO Matt MacInnis (Part 5)
Sramana Mitra: What kind of B2C traction were you experiencing at this point? Matt MacInnis: Some titles performed very well. I should say that at some point in 2012, we also started doing non-academic content. Inkling is not an easy story to tell because we’ve adapted a lot. Sramana Mitra: That’s okay. That is exactly
Successful Pivot from B-to-C to B-to-B: Inkling CEO Matt MacInnis (Part 4)
Sramana Mitra: What about the business model? Your hypothesis at that point was that you were going to digitize these textbooks, you were going to do the customer acquisition on the B2C side, and you were going to take a commission off that sale. What was the business model assumption with the publishers? Matt MacInnis:
Successful Pivot from B-to-C to B-to-B: Inkling CEO Matt MacInnis (Part 3)
Sramana Mitra: How did they know about your software? Matt MacInnis: We found out later that they had discovered Inkling through a publisher who had gotten a job at Starbucks and looked at what Starbucks was doing every quarter by shipping binders out to their district managers. We were a software platform that lets you
Successful Pivot from B-to-C to B-to-B: Inkling CEO Matt MacInnis (Part 2)
Sramana Mitra: This thinking behind your startup is happening while you were still at Apple? Matt MacInnis: For probably six or nine months, we explored and brainstormed whether there was a viable business here. Sramana Mitra: Your observation that the future of textbooks was not just digitization of what already existed was the impetus to think
Successful Pivot from B-to-C to B-to-B: Inkling CEO Matt MacInnis (Part 1)
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. Here’s another pivot story. Note: pivots are very expensive to do in VC timeline and cap tables. Matt discusses how damaging the ownership structure has been. Worth understanding the ramifications. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where
