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Bootstrapping to $13 Million in 4 Years in Niche E-commerce: Pavel Sokolovsky, CEO of eComfort.com (Part 3)

Sramana: Our audience is very familiar with price comparison engines as consumers and as businesses. The new perspective you are bringing is the experience of working with price comparison engines as an e-commerce site. You said that you submit your site and a structured data set to the price comparison engine. I thought that price comparison engines crawled websites to create those datasets.

Pavel Sokolovsky: I am not familiar with price comparison engines that crawl sites, but I would assume they also use a lead generation model. The sites we use require us to feed them from our product database. We upload a list of products and their properties to them via FTP.
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Bootstrapping to $13 Million in 4 Years in Niche E-commerce: Pavel Sokolovsky, CEO of eComfort.com (Part 2)

Sramana: What specific steps did you take to get the business launched? How did you acquire your customer base?

Pavel Sokolovsky: We put up a website using open source software. I had a bit of a technical and development background. Victor took on the challenge of accurately describing the products on our site. He did the groundwork to make sure the information that our future customers were going to need was available on the site.

Sramana: Were you carrying inventory?
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Building a $10M Company Proctoring Exams Online: Don Kassner, CEO of ProctorU (Part 7)

Don Kassner: It remains to be seen if it’s going to break out the way that it used to break out. For us, we’ve been very happy with the success that we’ve had in growing this from nothing to a $10 million a year company. You were talking about getting entrepreneurs to that first million which is a real demarcation for success. We’ve passed that. Now, where do we go from here? Are we going to be a $100 million company or a $1 billion company? I have no way of knowing yet, but right now, the company’s growing. The market seems to be growing.

Sramana Mitra: You’re growing at a decent pace. It’s not like you’re growing anemically.

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Bootstrapping to $13 Million in 4 Years in Niche E-commerce: Pavel Sokolovsky, CEO of eComfort.com (Part 1)

We continue to be bullish about niche e-commerce as a category to build sustainable businesses in. This story is a further illustration of the trend.

Sramana: Pavel, let’s start at the beginning of your story. Where are you from? What is the genesis of your entrepreneurial aspirations?

Pavel Sokolovsky: I was born in Minsk, Belarus. I moved here with my family at a very young age in 1989. I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago. My father had an entrepreneurial background. In the mid-1990s, he started his own contracting business doing heating and cooling work. That was his second or third business by that time. I grew up watching him go through the trials and tribulations of entrepreneurship. I was inspired by it and when the time came, I wanted to have a shot at it. >>>

Building a $10M Company Proctoring Exams Online: Don Kassner, CEO of ProctorU (Part 6)

Don Kassner: If you think about proctoring itself, integrity is critical. It’s a service. We’re providing service to both the student and to the institution. It’s important that it’s simple because they’re remote. They’re on their own device. People need to be able to understand the process. There’s the people side of it and that’s why fun is so critical. We’ve that face-to-face connection with the student in a situation where they’re in high stress. We want to make sure that we bring in an element of relaxation to it. Those four pillars were critical for our business. We have, since day one, made sure that we follow those. The key element in executing is your ability to really find that base of what your company is going to be and be very consistent in building off that base.

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Bootstrapping a Category Leading E-commerce Company: Tony Ellison, CEO of Shoplet (Part 7)

Sramana: I would imagine you are using the private label strategy to drive margins up, correct? That is one of the levers that you can push.

Tony Ellison: Yes, that is correct.

Sramana: What categories offer you the best levers for your private label strategy?
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Building a $10M Company Proctoring Exams Online: Don Kassner, CEO of ProctorU (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: The large state universities are adopting this?

Don Kassner: Yes, it’s typically large state universities. There’re some private universities in there as well. Generally speaking, you’re going to see most of it in the lower level, general administration courses where examinations and assessments are more critical. As you get in deep to any program, the project starts to change. Generally speaking, the focus is going to be on courses that rely heavily on assessments. That’s all over the board. We have Liberal Arts, Math, Science, Healthcare, and many different disciplines.

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Bootstrapping a Category Leading E-commerce Company: Tony Ellison, CEO of Shoplet (Part 6)

Sramana: You have crossed a lot of categories that are not traditional for your market area. What was the strategy behind that decision?

Tony Ellison: We are the first in our industry to cross the traditional lines of office supplies and offer many unconventional products that businesses need. This is important because we cater to small and medium sized businesses. Most of the time there is one buyer who is responsible for not only business supplies but pretty much all purchase. Shoplet is the trailblazer in our industry. We have defined the borders. We have defined the responsibility our industry has to take. We have defined the rules of engagement that companies like ours must have with customers and what the expectation should be from the SMB perspective.

Sramana: Are you still doing all outsourced distribution?

Tony Ellison: By and large we still follow the outsourced model. We have engaged with 3PL companies and we have a number of items we can ship that way. We also have a select amount of products that are now our own brand. >>>