Helping Publishers Monetize Premium Ad Inventory: isocket CEO John Ramey (Part 2)

Sramana: You started developing software for real estate during the real estate boom. How did you handle the crash that came shortly afterward? John Ramey: We knew that the real estate market was going to tank coming into 2008 and had decided to start developing software to address the problem of finding and buying premium

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Helping Publishers Monetize Premium Ad Inventory: isocket CEO John Ramey (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.  John Ramey is the founder and CEO of isocket, a company that offers premium ad inventory solutions. Prior to founding isocket, he was one of the founders of Maven Ventures, which offered direct marketing software for real estate investment. He founded his first company, Lythargic Media,

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Testing the Cloud: SOASTA CEO Tom Lounibos (Part 7)

Sramana: Your pricing model is good because it is adaptable to companies of all sizes. Is it safe to assume that a company starting up with the expectation of ramping to 2 million users in a short time will be able to afford to access your service? Tom Lounibos: Absolutely. I think Amazon’s number one

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Testing the Cloud: SOASTA CEO Tom Lounibos (Part 6)

Sramana: How have revenues ramped at SOASTA? Tom Lounibos: We are still under $20 million  in revenue but have ramped up substantially over the past three years.

Testing the Cloud: SOASTA CEO Tom Lounibos (Part 5)

Sramana: How do you compare to Mercury and Silk from a cost competitive standpoint? Tom Lounibos: We charge $1,500 an hour. They charge $60,000 an hour. There is a lot more to it, but that is the simple way to look at it.

Testing the Cloud: SOASTA CEO Tom Lounibos (Part 4)

Sramana: What is your business model? Tom Lounibos: We sell our testing by the hour. If a company needs only a couple of hundred users, the cost might be $300 or $400 an hour. If they need thousands of users, then the cost might be around $7,500 an hour.

Testing the Cloud: SOASTA CEO Tom Lounibos (Part 3)

Sramana: Who were your first customers at SOASTA? Tom Lounibos: It took us some time to build our technology. They were small companies and large companies. The larger ones were Hallmark and TurboTax. In 2007, TurboTax had an amazing [crash]. They filed 25 million tax returns, and their site went down in 2007 when a

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Testing the Cloud: SOASTA CEO Tom Lounibos (Part 2)

Sramana: What did you do after Knowledgeware? Tom Lounibos: I went into small startup in the object oriented programming space called Digitalk. Our product was Smalltalk. When Steve Jobs went to Xerox park to find the mouse he found three things that day. One was the UI, one was the mouse and one was Smalltalk.

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