Ultra-Light Startup to $20 Million in Revenue: WatchUWant CEO OJ Whatley (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Why watches?

OJ Whatley: I’ve always loved watches. Even going back to my days as a 10-year-old, I was always enamored of watches.

Sramana Mitra: It’s a passion.

OJ Whatley: Yes. The price points were $10 to $300. I was always obsessed with watches and I’ve been wearing a watch since I was about 12 years old. It evolved. It started with Star Wars R2-D2 and Darth Vader watches. I wear some of them on a chain around my neck. It progressed to Casio calculator-type of watches and watches that would play music. Then it progressed to the freestyle sports watches and Casio G-Shocks.

>>>

Ultra-Light Startup to $20 Million in Revenue: WatchUWant CEO OJ Whatley (Part 1)

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

OJ Whatley did $6 million in revenue in 2006 from his home, with ‘me, myself, and I.’ Further elaborating on the ultra-light startup trend, we bring you his story of approaching $20 million with 20 employees.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the beginning of your story. Where are you from? Where did you grow up and in what kind of background?

OJ Whatley: I was raised in Chicago. My father was a commodities trader. That’s where I got in my blood the idea of buying low and selling high – the idea of speculation and entrepreneurship.

Sramana Mitra: Entrepreneurship and speculation are not the same things.

>>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Codero CEO, Emil Sayegh (Part 2)

Emil Sayegh: Fast forward to 2014, what we are seeing right now in the market is both of these models hitting a point where frankly they’re becoming less useful as a monolithic type of offering. Companies out there want to be able to benefit from the ability to grow very quickly with the cloud offering for the right applications but also need a solid performance of what used to come with dedicated servers for certain applications like databases and Big Data applications. All those applications need very high I/O still need traditional infrastructures.

Now, you’re in a dilemma. I put my front-end web infrastructure on something like Amazon cloud or Rackspace cloud, but then where do I put my high performance computing needs? Very few companies have been able to bridge those two elements. What we’re seeing is the emergence of hybrid cloud, which allows customers to essentially spin up front-end web resources in a cloud environment in a utility-based model and then have their back-end on robust dedicated gears. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Codero CEO, Emil Sayegh (Part 1)

Cloud hosting, as companies scale, is moving from public cloud to hybrid cloud. More in this discussion.

Sramana Mitra: Emil, tell us about Codero and yourself so that our audience can get to know you a bit.

Emil Sayegh: I’m Emil Sayegh. I’m the CEO and President of Codero. By way of a quick introduction, Codero has been around, as a company, since 1992 in various names. It started as a small corner computer reselling shop in San Diego. Quickly, the Internet came about. They got into shared hosting, domain name registration, and web design. The company grew and evolved into dedicated hosting and managed hosting, and later cloud. In 2006, Catalyst Investors out of New York came and purchased them. >>>

Trying to Turn Carriers and Retailers Into Google: Azzimov CEO Benoît l’Archevêque (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: What you have today is a product and a business model that is just starting to come into the market? This business model is not generating $5 million in revenue?

Benoît l’Archevêque: If you only consider Azzimov, no. But if you consider the whole entity, yes.

Sramana Mitra: You’re basically trying to turn people with major traffic to a Google-kind of business model. It would be interesting to see if they can execute on their side on these ad sales and generating affiliate networks. You’re leaving the execution in their hands. They’re not set up to execute on these kinds of principles. >>>

Trying to Turn Carriers and Retailers Into Google: Azzimov CEO Benoît l’Archevêque (Part 6)

Benoît l’Archevêque: It’s like the 411 service in North America where people call to get services. In China, they have salesmen receiving the call. People call and say, “I’m looking for this.” The person receiving the call will not only give the information but also go and complete the sale. Azzimov is included in that. They have the affiliate program already in place.

Sramana Mitra: I understand the advertising and lead generation, but how does the affiliate program work?

>>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Lou Guercia, CEO of Scribe Software (Part 5)

But I would think that there’s tremendous opportunity for entrepreneurs to kickoff very specific use cases within an industry or between a couple of technologies and build complete solutions. For example, something around the idea of connecting SMS types of technologies to other forms of broad-based marketing such as email, analytics between SMS campaigns, and web analytics. >>>

Trying to Turn Carriers and Retailers Into Google: Azzimov CEO Benoît l’Archevêque (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: In the case of Google, they have web self-service advertisement capabilities like Google CPC. If I, as a small business, want to advertise on Google, I can go to Google’s website and set it up to do that advertising. Do you have that in place as well?

Benoît l’Archevêque: Yes. We call that ad boosting. We can do product placement in site. We can actually increase or not, depending on the context of the search. Also, we do product re-targeting. For example, you have a blog. You would like to have contextual products offered in the article you were doing. We can actually place products beside the articles. We call that product re-targeting. >>>