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Disrupting the Floral E-Commerce Industry: Farbod Shoraka, CEO of BloomNation (Part 3)

Sramana: What solution did you have in mind to address these issues?

Farbod Shoraka: Our first beta version of BloomNation was a place where florists could create profiles, almost like FaceBook. This was a place where they could put up info about their store to include location and delivery zones. They could also list their designs for sale.

We told florists to think of us as their stores’ FaceBook page. Florists across the country wanted to show off their creativity. They took photos of their work and put them for sale on the site. We originally thought that we would start in Los Angeles but florists started talking about it and sharing the site with others. The next thing we knew, we had almost 1,000 florists listing their products on the site all across the country. >>>

Bootstrapping a Bulk Book E-Commerce Business: BookPal CEO Tony DiCostanzo (Part 4)

Tony DiCostanzo: When I started engaging customers on the website in the broader segment of enterprise sales rather than just healthcare, I initially put up the books and made single copies available. It was difficult to say, “We’re great at these bulk sales but we also can do one copy.” That’s what everybody else was doing. Within two months, I realized that we needed to get rid of all the small sales to position us as experts. That was an important distinction for us because it enabled us to convince publishers that don’t normally ship on behalf of book distributors to become drop-shippers for us. We have some unique leverage in the market that we’re really the only company that some of these major publishing houses will drop-ship for.

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Disrupting the Floral E-Commerce Industry: Farbod Shoraka, CEO of BloomNation (Part 2)

Sramana: Where were you when you made the decision to strike out on your own and start a company?

Farbod Shoraka: I started out in Los Angeles. Once I realized there was a problem, I wanted to validate it, so I started walking around and talking to various florists. I just started talking to them and learning about the industry. I knew the industry from an analyst’s perspective, which means I understood the bigger market players. I felt that it was important to gain the same understanding at the local level.

I had an aunt who was a local florist and I used her as a resource. After that, I went around to various florists in Los Angeles to gain a better understanding of the resounding issues. Why were they closing their doors? I wanted to understand why the trend of retail flower shops was declining. To me it was an exciting problem to solve. >>>

Bootstrapping a Bulk Book E-Commerce Business: BookPal CEO Tony DiCostanzo (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: After you sold the healthcare business?

Tony DiCostanzo: Yes. I didn’t think of the book company as having a big potential because at that time, it was limited to probably about 20 different books that we sold consistently. Some of those books were from different publishers, but I didn’t really represent all the other books that those publishers carry. We didn’t develop our own content.

Sramana Mitra: Were you focusing the business on business books and those kinds of books? >>>

Disrupting the Floral E-Commerce Industry: Farbod Shoraka, CEO of BloomNation (Part 1)

You must have heard of 1-800-Flowers. Did you know that the company takes 50% of the order value, while the local florists fulfill the orders? That’s a hefty customer acquisition cost. Read how Farbod Shoraka and his co-founders are disrupting the industry.

Sramana: Farbod, let’s start by learning a bit about you. Where are you from? What is the backstory to the BloomNation story?

Farbod Shoraka: I am from Los Angeles. I was born in Iran, but I grew up in LA. I was only two years old when we came over to California. I went to school at Berkeley. I studied economics and graduated in 2004. >>>

Bootstrapping a Bulk Book E-Commerce Business: BookPal CEO Tony DiCostanzo (Part 2)

Tony DiCostanzo: We engaged a professor out of Stanford who had developed some studies documenting a return on investment for companies that implemented this wellness program. We were able to take that and develop a new company without all of the baggage that the other firm had. That was the first personal foray into entrepreneurship using the company experience and applying it into a new company. It felt more comfortable, if you will, to get my feet wet in something that I knew.

About eight months later, I pulled in a business partner who was involved with the previous firm. Together, we grew the company over a two and a half year period. We had the good fortune of a private equity >>>

Disrupting Cloud-Based Recruiting: SmartRecruiters CEO Jerome Ternynck (Part 7)

Sramana: It sounds like your recruiting marketplace is a key differentiator for you.

Jerome Ternynck: The store is becoming a very interesting community. We have reviews, sharing of reviews, and cross-customer analytics. For example, if you want to find a designer in San Francisco, we can easily tell you where the best places to advertise for designers are based on other customer experiences. We can tell them what impact they can expect from a projected spend.

Sramana: You said you raised a $5.5 million Series A. Have you raised additional funds?

Jerome Ternynck: Yes. In the summer of 2013, we raised a $10 million Series B round led by Rembrandt Venture Partners. This was a preemptive round. I really wanted to get significant traction for the store and our first professional customers before I hit a Series B, but Rembrandt was very convincing so we accepted their term sheet. We are now starting to spend our B round funding on a sales and marketing team. >>>

Bootstrapping a Bulk Book E-Commerce Business: BookPal CEO Tony DiCostanzo (Part 1)

Tony has identified a gap in the book business and built a thriving company. Let’s learn the how, what, and why of it.

Sramana Mitra: Tell us a bit about yourself. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised?

Tony DiCostanzo: I was born in Anchorage, Alaska. Shortly after turning two, I moved up to Nome, Alaska – from a small city to an even smaller village of 3,000 people. We lived there through the sixth grade and then moved back to Anchorage through most of high school. I ended up spending a couple of years in Washington State but found that California was more of my natural habitat. I came down to go to school at Pepperdine University and met my wife who was from southern California. It was a natural >>>