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Bootstrapping a Credit Card Processing Business: Payscape CEO Adam Bloomston (Part 1)

Adam has scaled a very simple business diligently, systematically. Have a look at how.

Sramana Mitra: I want to go to the very beginning of your personal story, where are you from, where were you born, raised, and what kind of background?

Adam Bloomston: I grew up in Birmingham, Alabama and studied at the University of Alabama. I moved to Atlanta, Georgia in 2000. >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Jacob Cooke, CEO of Web Presence in China (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: So, Baidu controls all the search traffic in China and this traffic gets routed largely to servers hosted in China. So websites have to be hosted in China to be ranked for the Chinese consumers. That’s the reason why you have to have a strategy for China to do e-commerce. Is that the point?

Jacob Cooke: That’s correct. There are two main concerns. One is, we need to be inside the country to get a proper listing at Baidu. Number two, is your site may not be open-able and is not enough to go through the firewall, the user experience can be sub-par and not optimal in terms of converting the user.

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Mass Customization in Online Fashion E-Commerce: Indochino CEO Kyle Vucko (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Does that mean that San Francisco and New York are your two major customer bases?

Kyle Vucko: Not exactly. They’re part of our top 10. Because we are still looking for shorter term real estate, we’re looking simultaneously at 10 cities. Once we find the location that’s the right price, we’ll move in. We’re taking any place that comes up first. New York, San Francisco, and Toronto are very much bigger markets for us. San Francisco is very much as well.

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Mass Customization in Online Fashion E-Commerce: Indochino CEO Kyle Vucko (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: In 2010, you have $4 million more capital. What does the competitive landscape look like at this point? Are you starting to see competitors?

Kyle Vucko: Not really. We did see some smaller competitors who came and went. The competition landscape was pretty bare.

Sramana Mitra: As a result, does that mean that your PPC keywords were still pretty cheap?

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How To Monetize a Q&A Site: Answers.com CEO David Karandish (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: In this strategy of being the a customer service portal for brands, the business model around that is not exactly an advertising business model; it’s more a SaaS business model, isn’t it?

David Karandish: That’s where half of the revenue comes from, but we leveraged the Advertising.com business model to build out the subscription piece. Three years ago, we had no subscription revenue. Today, it’s approximately half of our overall revenue. We were believers in both. We’re not against the dot-com side. We’re really excited about what we can do on the advertising there, but we’re looking at it saying that if we restrict ourselves to just Answers.com, we’re missing a big market where some of the most commercial questions and answers are available—or should be available—on some of the top websites of the world.

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Mass Customization in Online Fashion E-Commerce: Indochino CEO Kyle Vucko (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How did you go about doing that? Is this your own factory or a third-party that you built a relationship with? That is the cornerstone piece of the delivery part of this business, right?

Kyle Vucko: There’re so many other pieces that go into delivering.

Sramana Mitra: Acquisition and all that is regular e-commerce. It’s the manufacturing fulfillment part that is the nightmare.

Kyle Vucko: We always had a very clear and strong vision >>>

Bootstrapping a $175 Million Business with Services: TEOCO CEO Atul Jain (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: What percentage of the revenue would you say is BPO services?

Atul Jain: We are mostly a software company. When you say professional services, do you mean to say installation and implementation kind of stuff?

Sramana Mitra: No, anything that is custom where you’re not selling software.

Atul Jain: We don’t do any real contract-based software development. Sometimes, we do services that are not selling software. For example, we do have a portion of our business, which is not very large, where somebody will hire us to do optimization of their network. They’re not buying our optimization software. They want us to come in and optimize their network. Sometimes they will hire us to do managed services on an ongoing basis. There are services like that, but there are no services where we are building custom modules of our software. >>>

How To Monetize a Q&A Site: Answers.com CEO David Karandish (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: You’re offering a content management platform that you offer as a SaaS product to these retailers?

David Karandish: Exactly. And in that content management platform, we have a couple of different options. We can provide the content from the Answers.com community. Or we can help partner for the content with top brands. So if you’re a retailer, we can work with a brand who sells products within your retail space. We can also get content from the users of your website, whether it’s feedback on your site itself, or whether it’s somebody filling out a survey and providing information on their customer experience. >>>