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Student Entrepreneur to $10M+ in Revenue Without Dropping Out: Course Hero CEO Andrew Grauer (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Explain to me the value proposition of your concept.

Andrew Grauer: The best way to understand it is to think about tutoring. The first version of this was a content version of tutoring – getting supplemental help for people to learn and succeed effectively in their specific course at their school. We really started out at Cornell and then extended to a number of other schools. We thought about it a lot like Airbnb – letting people rent space anywhere in the world that has an address and is recognizable by the Google Maps API. We wanted some thing where you can upload your educational resources and tag it to any course at any school in the world.

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Ultra-light Startup with $6 Million Revenue: Car Part Kings CEO Michael Dash (Part 2)

Sramana: When did you start Car Part Kings?

Michael Dash: We started it in late 2011. We incorporated and had the idea. We approached some different people about products that we were interested in. We launched in September of 2011.

Sramana: What were you going to sell?

Michael Dash: We talked to a number of different people and concluded that we wanted to get into a space that was not as easy as fashion or electronics so we chose auto parts. That is one of the most difficult items to sell online and has a huge barrier to entry for a number of different reasons. >>>

Student Entrepreneur to $10M+ in Revenue Without Dropping Out: Course Hero CEO Andrew Grauer (Part 1)

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

We love student entrepreneurs who have managed to not only build successful businesses but have done so without dropping out of school. We also love entrepreneurs who have the discipline to get to a strong and sustainable monetization model early on in their evolution. Andrew Grauer scores on all fronts, and there is much to learn from this entrepreneur’s journey.

Sramana Mitra: Andrew, let’s start with your personal beginning. Tell us where you were born, raised, and in what circumstances. What’s the back story of Course Hero?

Andrew Grauer: I’m from the Bay Area of California. I grew up there my whole life. I went to college in Ithaca, New York at Cornell University. After graduating at Cornell, I came back to the Bay Area and continued working on Course Hero here.

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Ultra-light Startup with $6 Million Revenue: Car Part Kings CEO Michael Dash (Part 1)

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

We’re seeing the trend everywhere – companies building significant revenue and market reach with very few employees. Car Part Kings is approaching $10 million in revenue with 14 employees. Of course, WhatsApp’s $19 billion valuation with 32 employees is an extreme example of this trend.

Sramana: Michael, let’s start at the beginning of your story. Where are you from? What kind of circumstances were you raised in?

Michael Dash: I was born in New York. I was raised in New York for half of my life before moving to the suburbs in Long Island. I went to high school in Long Island and then went to College at Tulane in New Orleans. I finished college in 2004 and then I got into real estate. I did real estate for 5 years and worked in financing, construction, project management, and all the phases of real estate you can imagine. >>>

Identifying Customer Pain Through Consulting Services: Tealium Co-Founder & President, Ali Behnam (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: What is your pricing model? Is there enough deal size to do field sales?

Ali Behnam: We have deals ranging anywhere from $15,000 all the way up. Average deal size is five figures.

Sramana Mitra: So talk to me about your business model and pricing model a bit.

Ali Behnam: Right now, we’re still selling to a lot of Fortune 2000 companies. These are companies that do a decent amount of business online. Our pricing is based on site traffic. The more traffic the website has, the more they’re paying for a service like this. With us going after the top echelon of customers, you can imagine the deal sizes are typically five digits. >>>

Identifying Customer Pain Through Consulting Services: Tealium Co-Founder & President, Ali Behnam (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What was the sweet spot that emerged out of all these? Where were you finding traction?

Ali Behnam: This is where I’m starting to see the web analytics space all over again. I was in WebSideStory in 2000. That was the early days of web analytics space. The early adopters of web analytics were typically e-commerce sites. They were followed by a lot of media or publisher sites and then some B2B or Fortune 500 websites. We see that same exact pattern with the tag management space. The early adopters were, for the most part, e-commerce sites because they have the most to gain or lose from this technology. They were followed by publishers and media sites and some of the other demand generation websites.

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Identifying Customer Pain Through Consulting Services: Tealium Co-Founder & President, Ali Behnam (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: If this is not too much proprietary information, what were the keywords that you were able to get a lead on? You said that buyers were the same with the web analytics buyers. Were you then advertising on the web analytics keywords?

Ali Behnam: No, we weren’t. By 2012, which is when we started doing marketing, people were starting to look for tag management solutions.

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Thought Leaders in Online Education: Todd Hitchcock, COO of Pearson Embanet (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: I’m going to switch gears a little bit. If you were to advise entrepreneurs who are interested in working in the domain of online education, where would you point them? Where do you see open opportunities to build businesses in?

Todd Hitchcock: There are a lot of inflection points. We know that there are a lot of pieces of the partnership that we have competency in, but there are certain pieces that we may never build a competency in if we don’t acquire a company. Therefore, we like to partner with that provider to bring them into the ecosystem. We’re very strong in our belief that we need to provide solutions but that doesn’t mean that we need to provide every single component. >>>