Bootstrapping with a Paycheck: DefinitiveDeals Founder Mattias Larson (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You used the Internet to find you and then draw traffic in and then act as an affiliate partner to these deals?

Mattias Larson: Exactly. I found all these good deals and different coupons. “Here’s the best price that you can get on this Dell computer, but hurry up it’s only good for three days.” Those are the type of things that I posted there. But again, you can have the greatest idea but if don’t have traffic on your site, nobody knows that it’s there. That’s when the advertising came in. I started bidding on specific keywords that I thought would convert well. I really mastered Google AdWords in the early days. In 2008, I decided to quit my day job and turn this into a full-time business.

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Bootstrapping with a Paycheck: DefinitiveDeals Founder Mattias Larson (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What happens after that?

Mattias Larson: Then I landed in Stanford, Connecticut. That’s where my US journey started. I still worked for that same Swedish software company. They are yet to open an office in the US. They needed someone with technical expertise in this particular product. I came in over to train. It was a very technical solution.

Sramana Mitra: How does the story arrive at the DefinitiveDeals story?

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Building a New Online Fashion Brand: Combatant Gentlemen CEO Vishaal Melwani (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: What about team? What size is your team?

Vishaal Melwani: We’ve grown from a humble three to 22 now. The team is focused on three prongs: development and engineering, creative, and production. On the development side, we really focus on leading the cutting-edge on user interface. On our site, we focus on Fit Tech. A lot of guys don’t know their suit size so we’ve done stuff where we matched BMI to suit size. >>>

Building a New Online Fashion Brand: Combatant Gentlemen CEO Vishaal Melwani (Part 2)

Vishal Melwani: Within a year, we garnered around 180 clients that were some of the world’s top urban wear brands. We ended up selling to a large trading firm within the first year. We sold to a trading firm based in Hong Kong. I was 25 and I had an exit under my belt. I was this guy who was a highly-driven, third-generation tailor who wanted to focus on the product. I took a couple of months off and went to visit my friends who I’d graduated with. They were typical guys who graduated from business school and law school and they moved out to the east coast to get jobs at Goldman Sachs or JP Morgan. This was the height of the recession. This is around 2008 when jobs were literally just decimated. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Codero CEO, Emil Sayegh (Part 1)

Cloud hosting, as companies scale, is moving from public cloud to hybrid cloud. More in this discussion.

Sramana Mitra: Emil, tell us about Codero and yourself so that our audience can get to know you a bit.

Emil Sayegh: I’m Emil Sayegh. I’m the CEO and President of Codero. By way of a quick introduction, Codero has been around, as a company, since 1992 in various names. It started as a small corner computer reselling shop in San Diego. Quickly, the Internet came about. They got into shared hosting, domain name registration, and web design. The company grew and evolved into dedicated hosting and managed hosting, and later cloud. In 2006, Catalyst Investors out of New York came and purchased them. >>>

Building an American E-commerce Company that Now Sells into China: Peter Mann, CEO of Oransi (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: How much business are you doing in China? What percentage of your revenue comes from China right now?

Peter Mann: This year, we’re planning to do $10 million. I would say 40% would be in China this year. >>>

Building an American E-commerce Company that Now Sells into China: Peter Mann, CEO of Oransi (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Where is your contract manufacturer in the US?

Peter Mann: They’re in Connecticut.

Sramana Mitra: Are you selling the new product in the US only?

Peter Mann: We sell in the US, Canada, and China.

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Building an American E-commerce Company that Now Sells into China: Peter Mann, CEO of Oransi (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: It’s mostly paid search-based customer acquisition – PPC?

Peter Mann: That’s how we started. We have a brand that no one has ever heard before. It’s hard to get started and so PPC is the quick way to get up and going. It’s expensive, though. We’re trying to have PR and some other marketing in place as well. Google PPC is still probably two-thirds of our advertisement spend though. It’s down from close to 100%.

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