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Crossing the Desert, Hitting the Jackpot: Taboola CEO Adam Singolda (Part 2)

Sramana: There are a lot of entrepreneurs who have a military background. I think there are some unique skill sets or opportunities that you can gain from military service.

Adam Singolda: I also had a unique opportunity to work with large data sets and applied mathematics. I joined as an engineer and I was an officer at the end, so I was leading the teams. The projects that we worked on required those skill sets. I can’t talk about most of my projects, but one public project that we worked on was to encrypt the General’s mobile phone to ensure it was encrypted.
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Student Entrepreneur to $10M+ Business: Blaine Vess, CEO of StudyMode (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: I want to know precisely what happened in 2008. What are the significant things that you did in 2008 and how did those play out? This $1.1 million, was there a concentration of colleges you were getting this from?

Blaine Vess: In 2008, we launched in international markets and started the acquisition of our competitors. That year, we ended up doing about $2.8 million in revenue. We get visitors from all over the world so it wasn’t coming from a specific college.

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Crossing the Desert, Hitting the Jackpot: Taboola CEO Adam Singolda (Part 1)

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

Taboola had to sustain four years of zero-revenue, until it hit a million dollar revenue year in 2012. In 2013, their revenue run-rate is $100 million.

It’s an amazing story! Read on…

Sramana: Adam, let’s start with a bit of your personal background. What kind of family did you grow up in?

Adam Singolda: I was born in Israel, just south of Tel Aviv. I am 32 now. My family is still in Israel and they have split origins between Morocco and Europe. I joined the Israeli Army but I did it a bit different than most. In Israel, everyone has to go through the Army for 2 or 3 years. I was there for close to 7 years and I worked for a unit that was in charge of protecting Israel’s information using encryption. It was a great opportunity for me because I learned the importance of people as opposed to the problem you are trying to solve. >>>

Student Entrepreneur to $10M+ Business: Blaine Vess, CEO of StudyMode (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Was Chris working full time or did he take up another job?

Blaine Vess: Chris was working full time on this business. He was also doing the contract programming with me.

Sramana Mitra: You guys were doing contract programming. You had a job and Chris was doing the business?

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Bootstrapping a Robust SaaS company from India: Rategain CEO Bhanu Chopra (Part 7)

Sramana: How do you calculate TAM and how much of the TAM is still available in the market? The OTA segment is relatively small and it sounds like you have saturated that segment quite well.

Bhanu Chopra: There is not any publicly available data regarding the OTA segment. If you look at the top OTAs, you will see that we have all of them as clients. If they are not a client, then we are in talks to replace our competitors.

In terms of the hotel and car rental space, I think there is still a lot of market opportunity. There are around 500,000 hotels out there. We have several solutions in that space and each product has a different penetration rate. We may have 75,000 hotels using one solution and only 50,000 hotels using the other solution. There is not much market left to penetrate on the car rental side. However, we do still have opportunities with the franchisees. I think there are 10,000 franchises that could use our revenue management solution. >>>

Student Entrepreneur to $10M+ Business: Blaine Vess, CEO of StudyMode (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What was the motivation? If I am a student, why would I want to load up my course notes?

Blaine Vess: The main motivation is to get access to other people’s course notes or research. Say you’re writing a research paper on global warming and you have a writer’s block or you’re three pages in to a five-page research paper, you could get ideas from other people and see how they approach the topic.

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Bootstrapping a Robust SaaS company from India: Rategain CEO Bhanu Chopra (Part 6)

Sramana: What are the techniques that worked really well for you?

Bhanu Chopra: The fact that we focused on expanding in an area that we did well in was very important. We expanded our online travel agent business and got a lot of new customers. The other major key was moving into strategic new areas such as the car rental market.

On the hotel side, we have now realized that it depends on who you sell to. You must have a customized approach to each segment. If the hotels are tech savvy, then you can make deals with them over the phone. Many hotel chains require relationship building. You have to meet them, face-to-face. We need feet on the ground or have reseller and partner relationships in the geographies that we work in. We have decided that we do not want to do OEM deals anymore. >>>

Student Entrepreneur to $10M+ Business: Blaine Vess, CEO of StudyMode (Part 1)

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

We’re seeing a wonderful trend of student entrepreneurs building substantial businesses without dropping out. Blaine Vess is yet another great role model. This story outlines Blaine’s entrepreneurial journey.

Sramana Mitra: Blaine, let’s start with introducing our audience to you. Where did you grow up? Where were you born? What kind of back story leads up to StudyMode?

Blaine Vess: I’m Blaine Vess, the CEO of StudyMode. I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, which is where I co-founded StudyMode with my friend Chris Nelson. At that time, we were going to North Central College. From there, I ended up moving to Northern California and graduating from San Jose State University with a degree in Marketing. I originally focused on Computer Science and learned that I could program, but it wasn’t my specialty. So I switched over to Marketing and ended up moving to Los Angeles.

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