Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Daniel Gulati, Comcast Ventures (Part 1)

Excellent discussion on the e-commerce startup trends and what can and cannot be venture financed at this stage, and why.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as Comcast Ventures.

Daniel Gulati: I’m currently a Principal of Comcast Ventures based here in San Francisco. I focus 100% of my time on seed and early stage investments in consumer internet companies. About half of my work is in e-commerce and marketplaces. The other half is everything else within consumer Internet – digital media, social media, mobile. Prior to joining Comcast Ventures, I was actually on the operating side. >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Brenda Boehler, CEO of Bellacor (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What you’re talking about is often technically not so easy to do. There are lots of opportunities to push the envelope on really good visualization. Where do you see opportunities for new entrepreneurs to do interesting work bringing together new technologies in the space?

Brenda Boehler: I do believe that it comes down to balancing new technology with a genuine uniqueness and a genuine uniqueness around the product. I’d say this to my team. To compete on price isn’t really a great model, because there will always be someone that can beat you on price.

Where you should really compete is in unique products and the experience that you have with that customer. Look at everything that is >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Brenda Boehler, CEO of Bellacor (Part 3)

Brenda Boehler: When I look to where we want to take our business next, there are a number of new technologies that will greatly help people as they decorate their homes. There’re a number of concepts in other verticals that have not been implemented in our vertical yet. We have a website that has over 500,000 lighting and home furnishing products from 500 different manufacturers. We have a wide assortment.

There is one type of customer that just wants to come to that site to replace a broken light fixture. That involves an easy navigation, a solution, and a wide assortment. Another type of customer has a passion for decorating. The third type of customer is the one we are >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Brenda Boehler, CEO of Bellacor (Part 2)

Brenda Boehler: The opportunity exists in creating an experience for consumers to solve a problem online. We do that in many ways. Some online and some offline. I’ll speak about lighting specifically. If you’re a lighting retailer, it’s really important that you create really good content that makes it easy for consumers to understand scale and to understand lighting. We do that in a number of ways.

We do that through not only robust content on our product detail pages but also through buying guides within our blog so that people have the resources. We just help them become a problem solver for their home. The other thing that we invest in is training for our team members. There is an >>>

Bootstrapping a Niche E-Commerce Brand: Big Barker CEO Eric Shannon (Part 1)

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

We’ve talked about niche, proprietary e-commerce brands and how entrepreneurs are building businesses around different concepts. Eric shares the story of Big Barker, a dog bed for large dogs.

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?

Eric Shannon: I was born in Pennsylvania in a suburb about 45 minutes outside of Philadelphia. I went to Temple University. I was a Finance major. After school, I moved to California and took a job in banking. I hated it and was terrible at it. I had a >>>

Can You Scale an SME Facing B-to-B Business in India?

Can you scale an SME facing B-to-B business in India? Not easy, but …

Watch this inspiring 1 minute 36 seconds video and learn more:

>>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Mark Lavelle, CEO of Magento Commerce (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: What about the mid-market? Unless you’re an enterprise-scale company where you can afford very expensive software, can you afford to do complex personalization in the mid-market through platforms like Magento?

Mark Lavelle: Not today. I think it’s the hardest thing out there. It’s still early for true personalization. We need to get modest personalization right first. We also need to Segment customers by the life cycle. There are a lot of signals that we get that we don’t have to turn to personalization. Just because I bought a brown sweater doesn’t mean that you have to keep showing me brown sweaters. Now it’s re-targeting that same damn brown sweater. >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Mark Lavelle, CEO of Magento Commerce (Part 6)

Mark Lavelle: The ability to launch and scale applications today is like electricity in your home. It’s getting cheaper and cheaper everyday. We’re entering an era where developers step back in and run these applications and create great experiences. This is a great era of software coming back. We have SaaS applications on the back end to do common things where we’re not differentiating.

An entrepreneur is going to win when they develop the next great digital experience that delivers their product in a great way in, say, Instagram. We have this company called Card that has done a great job with Magento integrating into Instagram. They sell hand-carved wooden iPad covers. They’re beautiful works of art. Their main channel had been Instagram. That’s an example of a great product expertly curated in a great channel where their customer was spending time. That’s exciting. I don’t understand Snapchat at all. What implications does that have for reaching the next customer.

Sramana Mitra: Where would you ask new entrepreneurs to look for opportunities? >>>