Acquiring Deadpool Technology to Leapfrog a Services Company into Products: Canara CEO Steve Cotton (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.  Steve Cotton is the founder and executive chairman of Canara, a company that provides turnkey backup power solutions and predictive monitoring solutions for mission critical operations focusing on data centers, telecommunications sites, wind/solar farms, smart grid and electric vehicles. Prior to Canara he was the director

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Building a Conversion Optimization Company from London: Graham Cooke, CEO of Qubit (Part 7)

Sramana: You have identified a sweet spot of $10 million-plus e-commerce companies. How many of those are there in London? Graham Cooke: In the UK, we think there are a couple of thousand of these businesses. The UK Internet market is around $80 billion.

Building a Conversion Optimization Company from London: Graham Cooke, CEO of Qubit (Part 6)

Sramana: Adobe definately did not have this path in their original plans. They are a bunch of technologies bolted together. Graham Cooke: Omniture bought a lot of companies before Adobe bought them. Then Adobe added all of the other things. Their vision is definitely correct but the execution is difficult to do. Sramana: When you

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Building a Conversion Optimization Company from London: Graham Cooke, CEO of Qubit (Part 5)

Sramana: What were you doing with your technology? I understand that you collected and categorized customer feedback. Where you then making recommendations when they cam eback to the site? Graham Cooke: It’s more than that. We wanted to learn, from the 4% of users who gave feedback, how to solve issues for all users on

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Building a Conversion Optimization Company from London: Graham Cooke, CEO of Qubit (Part 4)

Sramana: In the first few quarters of 2010, you released a minimum viable product by outsourcing to India and hiring some freelancers. Can you tell us a bit more about that process? Graham Cooke: It is not easy to go that route. Luckily, Emre is a great coder, and he could build the architecture and

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Building a Conversion Optimization Company from London: Graham Cooke, CEO of Qubit (Part 3)

Sramana: What was your first minimally viable product? Graham Cooke: There were two things that we wanted to do. In 2010, web analytics was not getting feedback. When you are on a website, why do people do things? We wanted to understand why people did stuff. We wrote a very simple survey system to ask

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Building a Conversion Optimization Company from London: Graham Cooke, CEO of Qubit (Part 2)

Sramana: Did your work at Google lead you into starting Qubit? Graham Cooke: My last three years at Google were spent working on a product designed to measure how advertisers on Google’s platform were investing their media budgets on different campaigns. If you were a company like Amazon and you spend hundreds of thousands of

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Building a Conversion Optimization Company from London: Graham Cooke, CEO of Qubit (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.  Graham Cooke is the CEO and co-founder of Qubit, a conversion optimization company. Prior to founding Qubit, Graham worked for Google, where he ended up as the global leader in charge of conversion rate optimization. Today he is focused on Qubit’s mission of helping businesses get

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