Student Entrepreneur to $10M+ Business: Blaine Vess, CEO of StudyMode (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What was the motivation? If I am a student, why would I want to load up my course notes?

Blaine Vess: The main motivation is to get access to other people’s course notes or research. Say you’re writing a research paper on global warming and you have a writer’s block or you’re three pages in to a five-page research paper, you could get ideas from other people and see how they approach the topic.

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Student Entrepreneur to $10M+ Business: Blaine Vess, CEO of StudyMode (Part 1)

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

We’re seeing a wonderful trend of student entrepreneurs building substantial businesses without dropping out. Blaine Vess is yet another great role model. This story outlines Blaine’s entrepreneurial journey.

Sramana Mitra: Blaine, let’s start with introducing our audience to you. Where did you grow up? Where were you born? What kind of back story leads up to StudyMode?

Blaine Vess: I’m Blaine Vess, the CEO of StudyMode. I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, which is where I co-founded StudyMode with my friend Chris Nelson. At that time, we were going to North Central College. From there, I ended up moving to Northern California and graduating from San Jose State University with a degree in Marketing. I originally focused on Computer Science and learned that I could program, but it wasn’t my specialty. So I switched over to Marketing and ended up moving to Los Angeles.

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2012: Top Trends and Opportunities

New year. Fresh energy. Time to take stock of trends and open problems for 2012. The most notable change this coming year is that Steve Jobs is dead. In death, however, he has become even larger than life, and his legacy will drive this decade’s technology movement for a while at least. One of his key legacies is the marriage of technology and humanities, which I believe will shape the next phase of evolution in the IT industry. I elaborated my vision in Silicon Valley: The Next Decade.

In Top 10 Tech Trends For The Decade, I outlined a set of key movements which are pretty much the driving factors for the time being:

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Too Much Unmonetized Ad Inventory

If you are a content producer or a freemium app or game developer, you would know, instantly, what I am talking about: there is WAY too much ad inventory out there. Too many eyeballs that are not getting adequately monetized. Major publishers sitting on top of huge masses of unmonetized impressions. Game developers monetizing, barely, 1-2% of their traffic. App developers, similarly, struggling to convert free users to premium.

If you are an entrepreneur, looking for an open problem to solve, look no further. This is your opportunity. In 2012, one of the greatest unaddressed pain points for the Mobile and Online industries is this over abundance of eyeballs that publishers, software, app and game developers are struggling to find monetization models for.

There are many Ad Networks that offer very low monetization rates and take a large sales commission. If you decide that the way you want to address all this is by becoming, yourself, an ad network, that is certainly one way of addressing the pain-point. However, you would need to know how to sell $25-50 CPMs, because at $4-5 CPMs, there is no money for anybody. Not for the network, and not for the publisher. It’s just not worth it. Some vertical ad networks have gone after this opportunity, Glam Media being one of the most successful of the lot.

But, by and large, the problem remains unsolved from the publishers perspective.

Now, if you are an entrepreneur looking for cheap advertising, this actually plays in your favor. However, most ad networks don’t have the kind of self-service mechanisms of buying ad impressions that Google AdSense has, for example. This is a limitation on the side of Ad Networks, who would actually monetize a lot better if they were to open their inventory up to the small-medium businesses.

Now, if you are an Ad Network with the ability to service a large pool of SME advertisers, I would like to hear from you.

1Mby1M Incubation Radar 2011: ifood.tv, Menlo Park, California

For some, like Tyler Florence and Rachael Ray, cooking is their livelihood. For others, it’s a hobby. But for most, cooking is a necessity, a means to an end. Still, they want to cook food that looks and tastes good.

Based in Menlo Park, California, with offshore offices in India, ifood.tv was launched in 2007. This 1M/1M premium company is a popular destination for food- and recipe-related video content. On ifood.tv, foodies are coming together to discover new and interesting content, while professional chefs are using the platform to gain exposure and build their brand. Over the past few years, the company has aggregated a large library of cooking videos (more than 40,000) and text recipes (about 200,000) online; all the videos are hosted, managed, and streamed through the content management platform. Content is created by an in-house team of editors and sourced from professional chefs, video producers, authors, and media companies. The technology platform can deliver a blend of multimedia, interactive, and social features, and it can be reused to launch new Web 3.0 sites in other verticals. >>>

1Mby1M Deal Radar 2011: Uloop, Chicago, Illinois

Anyone who’s ever gone to college knows that college students have a lot of needs. They need internships for real-world work experience in their chosen fields. They need scholarships to help pay for their education. If they want to live off campus, they need to find apartments in safe, nearby neighborhoods; and then they’ll need to find roommates. Uloop, Inc. was founded in 2007 to meet those needs and others through localized college classifieds. It does this with its two primary business units: Uloop.com and CampusAve.com.

Uloop.com is online college classifieds with student users at more than 1,500 colleges and universities throughout the United States. Through the Uloop.com classifieds platform, students can connect to buy and sell textbooks, find jobs and internships, search for housing, look for roommates, and so on.

CampusAve.com is Uloop’s white-label classifieds platform for college newspapers. It powers online and print classifieds for more than 175 college newspapers, including Arizona State University, the University of Minnesota, the University of Oregon and Rutgers University. >>>

1M/1M: Mobile and Social Apps Module Of The Curriculum Is Ready

Readers, we have just released the Mobile and Social Apps module of the 1M/1M premium curriculum. In it, you will find a synthesis of the various trends and opportunities that I see at this point, along with case studies and video lectures. I will do an additional module specifically focused on Gaming, coming soon.

1Mby1M Deal Radar: WebiMax, Mt. Laurel, New Jersey

Following up on my Top 10 Online Advertising Trends of the Decade, Deal Radar will increase its coverage of online marketing and advertising and search engine optimization (SEO) in 2011, beginning with WebiMax. Recently recognized by TopSEOs.com, WebiMax focuses on online marketing specific to SEO, pay-per-click management, social media, reputation management, Web design, and e-commerce functions. >>>