Featured Videos

Resilient Entrepreneurship: Inspire CEO Brian Loew (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What kind of revenue level did you get to with that company?

Brian Loew: Somewhere between $15 million to $20 million. We sold that in 2000. One of my Board members was the former President of the Washington Post. I was exhausted after that. He said, “Why don’t you go to the Washington Post for a while?” I did. I had this technology strategy role that was an interface between washingtonpost.com and the newspaper. That was a really interesting three years of my life and I made a lot of good friends there. Then I had the idea for Inspire. It was the marriage of two ideas. When I was up at Washington Post, I sometimes helped the internal venture capital group on due diligence. One of the things they were looking at was social networks – Myspace and a lot of the others. >>>

Managing Multiple Pivots While Scaling to $50 Million: MotionPoint CEO Will Fleming (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: When you were describing this localisation thing, I was thinking, “Okay, it’s not just doing a site in another language. Selling in another geography is a whole different ball game.”

Will Fleming: Exactly. Our customers were telling us this and we were thinking, “That’s not our business. We don’t have this capability and for that capability, and you have all of these talented employees. You have all of these agencies, experts, and consultants. Why is it that you are talking to us?” They said, “Unlike us, each of us generally operate one website in one industry in one market. The reality is you operate more multi-lingual websites than anybody else in the world. You operate these websites across different geographies and markets. You’re deep into most industries. You’re the ones who are naturally positioned to solve this riddle.” >>>

Resilient Entrepreneurship: Inspire CEO Brian Loew (Part 1)

Brian and his team went five years with little or no revenue. Revenues started flowing in year six, and now, in the 10th year, the company is doing over $5 million in revenue, growing 80% y-o-y.

Read Inspire’s journey of resilience and persistence.

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?

Brian Loew: I grew up in Northern Virginia in the suburbs of Washington DC. Both my parents are teachers. My father is a university professor. My mother was an elementary school teacher and, later, a computer programmer. I grew up as a sort of normal suburban kid. I went to the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, which was a big influence. Then I went on to George Washington University and double majored in Physics and Economics. I was always the entrepreneurial kid. >>>

Managing Multiple Pivots While Scaling to $50 Million: MotionPoint CEO Will Fleming (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: I’m going to ask a couple of details about the structure of the business. What is the average deal size of one of these clients? Are we talking in the hundreds of thousands or millions? What average size contracts are these?

Will Fleming: We do deals as small as tens of thousands and certainly do deals that are in the single digit millions. It runs the gamut in between, depending on the size and complexity of the project.

Sramana Mitra: I guess what I’m trying to asses is, is this an enterprise solutions company or is this an SME solution company?

Will Fleming: Enterprise businesses are our target market. We serve over a thousand multi-lingual websites and we have over 300 customers. Nearly all of them are companies you’re familiar with. >>>

Managing Multiple Pivots While Scaling to $50 Million: MotionPoint CEO Will Fleming (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Website translation. Wow! That’s completely different.

Will Fleming: It sounds completely different. Our target market for the brochures were the largest retailers in North America. We met with nearly every one of the top 20 or 25 retailers. We had great visibility into this common problem. It was interesting to us that all of those retailers wanted to meet with us but none wanted to buy. As we tried to figure out what was so interesting about us that they wanted to meet with us and also what was so unattractive that they never wanted to buy, they revealed a lot about their own businesses.

They told us, “These brochures are nice-to-have but not a need-to-have. The reason we have you here is because you combine website technology and language in ways that nobody else has ever thought of, and might be very valuable to us down the road.” >>>

Bootstrapping a Niche E-Commerce Venture: Elite Fixtures CEO Steven Annese (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: When you say B2B, what kind of B2B? Did you go after commercial? Did you go after restaurants?

Steven Annese: We did a lot of things. We instituted a pro-trade account. If you were a contractor or designer, you could basically sign up for our account. Once we scan the application and verify that you are a legitimate business, we would approve you. You would automatically be qualified for contractor pricing, which is a lot less than when you go to these big electrical supply houses. In fact, we have supplied to some of the big electrical supply houses. We still do today because they don’t have certain lines that we do. We facilitate that for them.

Sramana Mitra: How did the revenue split as you went into 2010 or 2011? How did the revenue emerge between B2B and B2C? >>>

Managing Multiple Pivots While Scaling to $50 Million: MotionPoint CEO Will Fleming (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What happens after that?

Will Fleming: In 1999, we hung up a shingle to be consultants. That was our way to be exposed to people and projects while we were trying to sort through what we were going to do next. We wanted to start another business. We didn’t have that business in mind yet. The Internet had sprung up. We knew that we knew a whole lot about retail operations working with large retailers from our experience in prepaid. We had also been exposed to changing demographics in the United States and also the impact of data and the ability to use data to drive really good decision-making.

Back in 2000, when we looked at the Internet through the lens of a retail operator, we thought, >>>

Bootstrapping a Niche E-Commerce Venture: Elite Fixtures CEO Steven Annese (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: It looks like that at the end of 2006, you were back to being able to have multiple distributors for your business and were able to get back to your top ranking in Google bids. Is that correct?

Steven Annese: Correct, in Google and Yahoo!. That was probably about 2007.

Sramana Mitra: What else happened in 2007?

Steven Annese: Between 2007 and 2009, we started building volume and focusing on key brands. At that point, I was probably open direct with about 70% of the manufacturers that we sold.

Sramana Mitra: Where was the revenue at this point?

Steven Annese: Revenue in 2009 was probably about a million.

Sramana Mitra: What are the next major inflection points between 2009 and 2015? >>>