Dealing with Major Market Shifts: Aphrodite’s CEO Jonathan Foltz (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: For the digital agency, how were you acquiring your clients?

Jonathan Foltz: No one believes me when I say this. It started off with friends and people I knew. I never marketed, ever.

Sramana Mitra: What year was this?

Jonathan Foltz: We started in 2009. 2010 and further was when things started to accelerate.

4X Serial Entrepreneur from India: Kashyap Deorah, CEO of HyperTrack (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Talk a little bit about that project – the one where we met.

Kashyap Deorah: I was always inspired by the power of the internet to democratize disaggregated markets. One of the problems I saw was that not all the market participants get the same opportunity. Internet was not mainstream at that time. The idea was to create an eBay over the phone where buyers and sellers could call a number and talk to a person who would have an assisted commerce layer.

Dealing with Major Market Shifts: Aphrodite’s CEO Jonathan Foltz (Part 1)

Jonathan has had to shepherd his jewelry e-commerce venture through the pandemic first. Then came the Apple iOS battle with Facebook which has rendered small merchants ineffective on the Facebook platforms.

Read how a scrappy, creative entrepreneur is managing all the curveballs thrown at him.

4X Serial Entrepreneur from India: Kashyap Deorah, CEO of HyperTrack (Part 1)

Kashyap had early success with three of his companies, each of which had very small amounts of friends and family financing. He pretty much bootstrapped these three startups to rapid exits.

His fourth startup, HyperTrack, has been a challenging journey, but he has navigated it well, and turned around the earlier setbacks over the last five years.

Wonderful story.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

14 Courses on How To Build a Startup in the Midwest

This bundle of courses is for IT entrepreneurs who wish to start and grow a startup in the Midwest of the United States. If you are in that region, start by reviewing this course:

1. How Investors Think About Startups in the Midwest with Sramana Mitra

It will give you an inside look at the Mid-Western startup ecosystem and how you may fit into it. 

Bootstrapping a Vertical CRM Product using Services: Cleverping CEO Haysam Ali (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Do you charge the brands?

Haysam Ali: No, they charge me. They invest resources and we invest resources on our side to make sure that we can accomplish the integration. At the end of the day, both sides generate revenue by using the CRM.

Sramana Mitra: How many of these mom-and-pops are out there that you are selling this to?

Haysam Ali: There are more than 30,000.

Bootstrapping Using Services from Helsinki: Juha Lehtonen, CEO of FA Solutions (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Where did the inbound interest come from? What countries?

Juha Lehtonen: We currently have clients in 17 countries. We get contacts from the Baltics, UK, Switzerland, and the Middle East.

Sramana Mitra: They come to you and you sell through online touchpoints. You don’t have to go visit people.

Juha Lehtonen: Yes.

Bootstrapping a Vertical CRM Product using Services: Cleverping CEO Haysam Ali (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Was there any technology element to what you were providing?

Haysam Ali: Not at first. While providing consulting services, we were able to build a CRM that provides intelligence into the data that we collect for them. That was then used to get other clients. Telefonica was the main case that opened the door to Frontier. We became one of the biggest players of Frontier in the US. We won a prize on the number of quality customers. That prize led us to other customers.