Bootstrapping with Affiliate Marketing: Zeeto CEO Stephan Goss (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: How did you utilize this data? What did you do with the data that you were accumulating?

Stephan Goss: We never did any bulk data sales. We would use the data to then start showing ads against that data. For example, if somebody told us he’s a diabetic, then we would show an advertisement about diabetes. We had a lot of inexpensive traffic that we were able to up value into high quality traffic.

Sramana Mitra: How do you show them ads based on email addresses? Do you do retargeting?

Stephan Goss: We would buy traffic. People would come to our website. They would answer questions and then right in line we show the advertisement.

Sramana Mitra: How did that ramp in 2011? >>>

Bootstrapping from Ukraine: BPMOnline CEO Katherine Kostereva (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: We need to go from 2004 to 2015. In the context of what happened as you were growing within Europe, were you following the customer acquisition strategy using cold calling?

Katherine Kostereva: Yes, for outbound marketing and inbound marketing as well.

Sramana Mitra: Specifically, what marketing strategies worked for you that helped you generate the right leads? Is Russian language software a big deal for your customer base?

Katherine Kostereva: Our primary marketing channel was outbound campaigns. >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services From Sweden: Dapresy Founder Tobi Andersson and CEO Rudy Nadilo (Part 7)

Rudy Nadilo: I have a thought that is separate from what Tobi just said. A lot of people told me I was crazy to go work for the Swedes. When I joined, it was probably $2 million. There were more than 30 clients. I looked at this, not as a risk, but as a gift. I built companies from scratch and knew what it took. When you think about Tobi’s journey, he was all in. He put the horse, the farm, the pig, and the cow on the line.

I’m now launching into North America and I’ve got a list of clients that I can go to and say, “Hey, Audi, Mercedes-Benz, Hilti, and KLM are using this software.” I’m actually able to show them examples of that. To those people, I was never that guy who could invent the thing. Tobi is the inventor. I have always prided myself in being able to take a product and figure out a way to package it, sell it, and grow it. For those people who are more on the marketing >>>

Bootstrapping from Ukraine: BPMOnline CEO Katherine Kostereva (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What did you need to do in terms of sales and marketing? Precisely, what were the hires assigned to do?

Katherine Kostereva: Since the beginning of the company, we invested heavily into both inbound and outbound marketing. We always had sales development. In 2003, we managed to do it just through cold calls. It doesn’t work nowadays. We use completely different tools for the outbound campaigns. When we started, I was making cold calls as well.

Sramana Mitra: You were actually calling people to sell $10 a month solution.

Katherine Kostereva: I was calling people to find the opportunity, then I’d visiting people to sell them the product for as many users as they have. One of >>>

Bootstrapping with Affiliate Marketing: Zeeto CEO Stephan Goss (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go back to the very beginning. I’m going to step you through the process of how you put one foot before the other. How did you get the business off the ground? Who was the first client? How did you win this client? How did the business start to unfold?

Stephan Goss: I had gotten decently good at buying ads. I started buying ads for a company. Basically, it was just affiliate marketing. I was getting the deals through a network. I wasn’t doing any of the sales directly myself. I was just finding the people who had the offers that I could piggyback on top of. I would buy ads. I would spend $1000 and hopefully make $1,200 back. It was an arbitrage play. The nice thing is if you’re good at doing that, you can be profitable. We had the opportunity to be profitable from day one.

Sramana Mitra: What kind of a client did you have? What kind of affiliate segment was this company trying to reach?

>>>

Bootstrapping Using Services From Sweden: Dapresy Founder Tobi Andersson and CEO Rudy Nadilo (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What is it about this company that appealed to you and what is your background?

Rudy Nadilo: My background is in technology. To keep it simple, I graduated from Northwestern and got my MBA. I ended up being in the advertising industry for the first 10 years. Then I went to the research field because there was a firm called Information Resources, which had this amazing technology called Behaviour Scan. I just thought about this.

I remember sitting with a client and looking at these people come in presenting these electronic test markets and quantifying. You’d write an opinion paper and everybody was talking about it. Here was people coming in with facts. We were able to, electronically, send and read what people are buying in the supermarket based upon their scanner purchases and beam a television ad to one house versus another house. Being a geek, I love that. I worked for IRI for 10 years running their consumer panel and ended up being their Chief Marketing Officer. There was a lot of manual things being done. >>>

Bootstrapping from Ukraine: BPMOnline CEO Katherine Kostereva (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Tell me a little bit about you and how this came about. You’re saying that you experienced demand from different countries for CRM. This was 2003?

Katherine Kostereva: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: How did you get this off the ground?

Katherine Kostereva: It was just the two of us – myself and my partner. We bootstrapped the company. Especially in Ukraine, there were no venture capitalists. This industry just didn’t exist in Eastern Europe. Almost everyone was bootstrapping. Today, the company has 700 people on board. The question is how we grew from two founders to 700 people on board today. My friend was a developer. I left my job. He started to develop the product. I did the rest. >>>

Bootstrapping with Affiliate Marketing: Zeeto CEO Stephan Goss (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. 

Affiliate Marketing is at the heart of many wonderful bootstrapping stories. It’s inexpensive to get going and profitable quickly, and managed well, can scale substantially.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Stephan Goss: I was born in Switzerland pretty close to Zurich. I came to the US in 2007.

Sramana Mitra: Did you do your education in Switzerland? >>>