Child Entrepreneur Kevin Sproles: CEO Of Volusion (Part 5)

SM: How is your pricing model set up?

KS: It has changed over the years. My most inexpensive option was $100 a month and up. We had plans at $200 and $300 a month. I also sold the source code for a couple thousand dollars. Today, we have a plan at $25 a month. >>>

Child Entrepreneur Kevin Sproles: CEO Of Volusion (Part 4)

SM: How has your relationship with your business partner evolved over the past five years?

KS: It has been great. It is one of those things we have always heard you have to be cautious about. I hear that when there are two partners, statistics show that the business will have conflict. We have been really lucky to have an excellent partnership. We have never clashed. >>>

Child Entrepreneur Kevin Sproles: CEO Of Volusion (Part 3)

SM: In 2003 you did $130,000. What was your next phase of business evolution? How did you grow?

KS: From 2003 to 2004 I really learned how to build on the concepts of product and repeatable processes. I made a significant effort to leave custom work behind. That is what we are still doing today. It increases our profit margin and our ability to offer lower prices. On every call where the customer requests a feature or asks how to implement a capability, we annotate exactly that that request or concern was. >>>

Child Entrepreneur Kevin Sproles: CEO Of Volusion (Part 2)

SM: What year did you turn your Web design services company into an e-commerce engine?

KS: The first version of Volusion came around 2001. I released a lot of the marketing around it in 2002. It was branded as Store 2002. >>>

Child Entrepreneur Kevin Sproles: CEO Of Volusion (Part 1)

Kevin Sproles is the founder and CEO of Volusion, an online e-commerce solution for the SMB market. He began his career by coding and designing in high school. Most of his clients had a common need, a shopping cart system, so he developed the first version of Volusion before graduating. Today Volusion has over 150 employees, and Kevin has won several business awards for his success with Volusion, including Businessweek’s “Best 25 Entrepreneurs Under 25” and the San Fernando Valley Business Journal’s “40 Under 40 Leadership Award.”

SM: Kevin, take us back to where you story begins. What is the background information we should know that leads to the Volusion story?

KS: I started Volusion when I was sixteen, when I was still in high school. I started the company as a custom Web development company, and I created various websites for clients. >>>

Catching Up On Readings: E-Reader Price Wars

The latest news is that Barnes  & Noble is up for sale. Read more about the rise of e-readers in e-Commerce Booms Amid Slow Retail Sales. Click on the full article to read the rest of this week’s posts. >>>

Learning From Failures: IMVU Founder Will Harvey (Part 7)

SM: Who was your intended customer base for the 3-D characters when you set the $300 sales goal?

WH: It was our parents. We figured they could not turn us down. It was not a great form of validation, but it was a good form of invalidation. We found out just how hard it was at that time to build a full product and customer experience from beginning to end. >>>

Learning From Failures: IMVU Founder Will Harvey (Part 6)

SM: What did you do after There.com?

WH: After I left There.com I started IMVU. I was determined to not make the same mistakes again. >>>