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- The Accelerator Conundrum
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social annex
Winning Against Heavily-Funded Competitors: Al Lalani, CEO of Social Annex (Part 5)
Sramana Mitra: You managed to get to $5 million in what time frame? Al Lalani: We’re past that stage now, but it took us about two to three years. Sramana Mitra: Who else in the competitive landscape was really giving you a hard time in deals in particular? Al Lalani: We were getting hit by the
Winning Against Heavily-Funded Competitors: Al Lalani, CEO of Social Annex (Part 4)
Al Lalani: The next phase of growth was primarily to scale some of the traditional SaaS channels. We hired an outbound marketing team to scale the people I hired from college and Craigslist. We created an inbound marketing team to do a lot of content marketing. If you look at our site, we’ve got really
Winning Against Heavily-Funded Competitors: Al Lalani, CEO of Social Annex (Part 3)
Sramana Mitra: How did you acquire customers? What was the pricing model that you were using? Al Lalani: It was, plain and simple, cold-calling for the most part. It was really focusing on the niche of e-commerce. Within that niche, we focused on the mid-market. These are customers between $2 million to $50 million in online
Winning Against Heavily-Funded Competitors: Al Lalani, CEO of Social Annex (Part 2)
Al Lalani: I had hired a few developers in my first startup. I didn’t know what to do when I was losing money every month. I wasn’t making much on the e-commerce side. A friend of mine said, “I’m in a little bit of a fix. We need to build this site. I have a budget
Winning Against Heavily-Funded Competitors: Al Lalani, CEO of Social Annex (Part 1)
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. We often get this question: how do you compete with a bootstrapped startup against heavily venture-funded competitors. We’ve done other stories on this topic. Here’s one that will give you additional perspective. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you
