Entrepreneur Couple Bootstrapping to $10M from Colorado: AdCellerant Co-Founders Brock Berry and Shelby Carlson (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: I can totally see that. The follow-on question from there though is that the wounds of the media industry are very deep. Their monetization problems are very deep. Their existential crisis is very deep. To what extent do you view that issue as a threat to your long-term sustenance?

Brock Berry: It’s an interesting question. We are continually diversifying our business. Today, we work with radio stations, TV stations, newspapers, and some small agencies. Beyond that, we work with companies that can be labeled as non-traditional. These are media channels that are not easy to define but they work with local business owners. We have, at least, the group of five. >>>

Entrepreneur Couple Bootstrapping to $10M from Colorado: AdCellerant Co-Founders Brock Berry and Shelby Carlson (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: This relationship came along early in your evolution and that basically financed your bootstrapping.

Brock Berry: It did. That and a few other similarly large relationships. Because we had some wind underneath our wings, we didn’t have another sweat equity deal with anyone, but we did have very good partners that helped us with our business.

Sramana Mitra: With the same model?

Brock Berry: That’s correct. Our distribution model is kind of like a channel sales strategy >>>

Entrepreneur Couple Bootstrapping to $10M from Colorado: AdCellerant Co-Founders Brock Berry and Shelby Carlson (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Could you throw some light on what kind of revenue sharing you were doing? It sounds like that is the core of your business model.

Brock Berry: For the services part of what we do, the media company takes 70 cents out of every dollar they sell. That’s the revenue share so to speak. If you think about our business model from a manufacturing perspective, we’re more of a distributor in that relationship. These folks that we work with are more like retail locations. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Blake Garrett, CEO of Aceable (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: I think I understand what your perspective is on online education. What kind of a company are you? Are you bootstrapped?

Blake Garrett: We are funded but we use cash much more effectively than some of our competitors. I founded the company in late 2012 and I frankly didn’t have the development skills to create a product. I needed cash early on. I raised money from angel investors.

Being based in Austin, Texas, there’s a good amount of angel investors but the dollar value per angel investor is not >>>

Entrepreneur Couple Bootstrapping to $10M from Colorado: AdCellerant Co-Founders Brock Berry and Shelby Carlson (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How much of what you are saying you do is done manually versus in software?

Brock Berry: The recommendation part of the software is completely automated via the technology software platform. The trafficking of all the campaigns that are sold is also automated right from the proposal to the ad-serving tools including the input into an order management system to keep track of the history and background changes to the campaign.

>>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Blake Garrett, CEO of Aceable (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What are the trends in your space as it pertains to online education?

Blake Garrett: We are seeing this macro-trend from people moving from the classroom to online education. When we started three years ago, about 150,000 people took online driver’s education in Texas. Those numbers would be closer to 200,000 if normalized for differences in population per age. We are definitely seeing a trend where as they become more familiar with online learning and mobile-based learning, we’re seeing that market move that way.

Sramana Mitra: What is the size of the market for license training? What percentage of that market do >>>

Entrepreneur Couple Bootstrapping to $10M from Colorado: AdCellerant Co-Founders Brock Berry and Shelby Carlson (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What was that business doing that allowed it to grow that fast?

Brock Berry: That’s exactly why we started AdCellerant. The market was really ready for that type of traction and we were bringing these highly-sophisticated marketing strategies to local business owners. We were doing that through the media companies that we worked with, which had thousands of sales people.

Because of the massive sales force and the fact that we are able to leverage that sales force for free, we >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Blake Garrett, CEO of Aceable (Part 1)

Blake discusses a unique area of online education: training for licenses of various kinds of vehicles, etc. using mobile apps.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself and Aceable.

Blake Garrett: I’m the Founder of Aceable. Aceable is focused on licensure and certification training. We created a mobile-first platform that allows people to take licensure and certification training every year. We want to be the platform that they go through for that training to help advance their careers. We started with a very niche area of >>>