A Bootstrapping Recipe to $3 Million

A Bootstrapping Recipe to $3 Million
Clate Mask of Infusionsoft: $54M Ways Your Small Business Can Benefit
Hazard Consulting Services Needed
WordPress Company Automattic Buys Popular Synced Note-Taking App

Posted: 25 Jan 2013 11:00 AM PST

bootstrapping What constitutes a successful startup? If you ask the global entrepreneurship media, they will tell you financing. Ask naïve entrepreneurs, they will tell you the same.

But I have always believed that a successful startup is a function of customers, revenues and profits. Financing is optional. You identify a market gap, build a product to address the gap, develop a business model, and generate revenues and profits.

ifood.tv has done just that.

In 2006, co-founders Vikrant Mathur and Alok Ranjan were interested in honing their culinary skills. However, they found that text-based instructional sites were sorely lacking in their instructional capabilities and incorporated no means of reaching out to recipe authors with questions – not to mention there were no visual elements to speak of.

So they took the resources they did find helpful, such as the Food Network, and set about developing a means of adapting it to an on-demand platform.

The result is 2007's ifood.tv, a multi-platform video channel that focuses on the visual aspect of learning how to cook. The site features an ever-expanding library of videos that are hosted, managed and streamed through their content management platform, as well as text-based recipes. Content is created by an in-house editorial team and crowdsourced from professional chefs, video producers, authors and media companies.

Fully bootstrapped by its founders, Vikrant and Alok have invested $100,000 of their own funds to date, and are currently searching out strategic partnerships.

The company, profitable for 3 years, generates revenue primarily through advertisements: display ads, video ad networks, and in-text source campaigns, as well as custom, brand-specific campaigns involving social media and video.

At the start, ifood.tv competed directly with established, brand name media in online form, such as the Epicurious and Food Network sites. But as Vikrant points out, these sites fail to engage their own community of users – the very problem ifood.tv sets out to solve with its online community of recipe exchange and resource sharing. Up to 4 million monthly unique visitors rate and review existing content as well as providing new material of their own.

ifood.tv's closest competition now comes from YouTube as the de facto platform for video content online. Vikrant and Alok's project remains unique, however, by providing users increased facility in searching and organizing information, as opposed to pulling lists of aggregated videos.

While ifood.tv operates on its own steam, through its development the company itself has produced a Web 3.0 platform that can now be used to configure, manage and distribute videos and multimedia content of all kinds. Vikrant and Alok have already leveraged their work to launch a new nutrition site, NutritionRank, in June 2012.

At this point ifood.tv is approaching three million dollars in revenue, and will be exploring additional revenue models including e-commerce in 2013.

One of the most important lessons from the iFood.tv story is that bootstrapping works. Vikrant and Alok did not wait around for venture capital to get their business off the ground. They focused on customers, revenues, and profits.

Today, with $3 million in profitable revenue under their belt, Vikrant and Alok have many options open in front of them, including adding business lines with different business models, and, of course – financing.

Food Photo via Shutterstock

The post A Bootstrapping Recipe to $3 Million appeared first on Small Business Trends.

Clate Mask of Infusionsoft: $54M Ways Your Small Business Can Benefit

Posted: 25 Jan 2013 08:00 AM PST

Clate Mask, CEO of Infusionsoft, a company that specializes in sales and marketing automation, joins Brent Leary to discuss the recent investment of $54 million dollars the company received from Goldman Sachs and also their acquisition of GroSocial, a suite of web-based tools that allow you to build and track social media campaigns – and the benefits these recent events will bring to you and your small business.

* * * * *

sales marketing automation Brent Leary: Having recently raised $54 Million from Goldman Sachs, why do you feel they were they a good investment partner?

Clate Mask: I did have other choices. We had some other great people. But I think if I had to summarize why Goldman Sachs, I would put it this way; number one they had a real desire and an appetite to invest in small business and that was a surprise to me. But it was also extremely refreshing and exciting.

Goldman Sachs really is interested in us over a long stretch. That was super important to us. So I would best summarize it as small business passion, long term focus, and then good validation.

Brent Leary: Is this deal a sign that marketing automation is going mainstream at the small business level now?

Clate Mask: I think you are right, Brent. For us and Infusionsoft, it is marketing automation, it is CRM, it is eCommerce, it is sales and marketing automation. There is no doubt about the fact that a big part of what we do is marketing automation. A big part of what Goldman Sachs sees is marketing automation. The combination of CRM and marketing automation is a special thing for smaller businesses.

I agree that the very low end of the market with true small businesses that we serve; we just see more and more of the appetite to have sales and marketing go together. I feel that at the enterprise level it makes more sense, or it's more feasible, for a standalone marketing automation solution that plugs into, or is integrated with, other CRM and other systems.

We see in these companies that are less sophisticated, that integration is just one more challenging thing that they have to try to figure out. We feel like the momentum we continued to build last year is just more and more validation of small businesses saying:

“You know what? You got that one thing, let’s do that, we like that idea.”

Brent Leary: What will your recent acquisition of GroSocial bring to Infusionsoft customers? Why did you purchase them?

Clate Mask: First, we recognize that to do all-in-one sales in marketing, software for small business lead generation needs to be a more prominent part of the solution. Early on, we were much more a lead conversion company. But over the last couple of years, we have really embraced the idea that it is not just about conversion. It's also about lead generation.

Second, it’s clear that social media is an absolutely necessary part of the sales in marketing suite for small businesses. What we have seen over the last 18 months or so is an evolution from social media being an interesting part of small business lead generation and customer relations activities – to becoming a necessary part of it.

To be totally honest, our take on it two years ago was that social media was useful for companies in monitoring brand. It was interesting for big businesses, and it was promising in a lot of ways. But we did not see a lot of hardcore practical value for small businesses, and how they were extracting value.

A year ago that began to change quite a bit and we started to see some pretty strong data that showed small businesses were able to generate interest, and generate leads using social media platforms – in particular Facebook.

Twitter was also starting to show some real interesting stuff. Then as the year progressed, we just saw more and more that when small businesses are out there trying to get the word out – they were beginning to do it very effectively through social platforms.

For us, about the middle of last year, our thesis was pretty clear that we could not afford to just go and develop it on our own. We needed to go and get the expertise and then the innovation and the thinking that others had spent a few years putting into it. And the best way for us to do that was to acquire a company.

Brent Leary: Why specifically GroSocial?

Clate Mask: Frankly, we were a little bit smitten by their understanding, their expertise and their true understanding that it is not just about capturing a lead. It's about nurturing that lead. Developing relationship with that lead.

The combination of social lead generation and CRM, in their mind, was so powerful. As they began talking about what their future plans were, it was so similar to what the way we thought about nurturing leads and customers through CRM, and sales and marketing automation. We were just impressed with their deep understanding of social media for small businesses.

The most important thing was the culture of the company. It really felt like it would be a successful integration and acquisitions usually succeed or fail based on the culture of the integration. It was very clear to me that this could be a good win in terms of our cultures.

Brent Leary: Does this change the target audience for Infusionsoft? Are you still serving the 25 employees and under space?

Clate Mask: That’s as true as can be, my friend.

Brent Leary: I have seen things change with companies as they get more involved with more aspects of lead generation and qualification.

Clate Mask: Sure, I totally understand it. It's the norm and it's definitely not what we are doing. We are totally focused, more than ever, on serving true small business.

Brent Leary: Do you see this expanding the types of small businesses that Infusionsoft will attract?

Clate Mask: That is a really great question. We don't right now.

But we do think there is a chance that could evolve and help us to get more into retail. Where traditionally, we are much more focused on service businesses. Our initial push with GroSocial and the integration of what we are doing will be about serving the same kind of customers we are serving today.

Yet we have a sneaking suspicion that down the road, it could help us get into the businesses where the average ticket size is smaller, that is typically in the retail space.

This interview is part of our One on One series of conversations with some of the most thought-provoking entrepreneurs, authors and experts in business today. This interview has been edited for publication. To hear audio of the full interview, click the right arrow on the gray player below. You can also see more interviews in our interview series.

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Hazard Consulting Services Needed

Posted: 25 Jan 2013 05:00 AM PST

business meeting cartoon

What does a daredevil look like? Well, there’s the sparkly outfit, probably a wide collar, big belt buckle, some big hair… but is it enough?

Originally, I’d also had the caption reinforcing it with something like:

“…so I’ve asked this daredevil in.”

But I thought maybe that was too much. So I gave him a dangerous name instead.

I was feeling pretty proud of myself when my wife walked in and said:

“So is he from the Dukes of Hazzard?”

Ugh, she was totally right. The name was confusing.

But by that point the cartoon was done. Even though it would be a quick fix in Photoshop, once I’m done with a cartoon, I like to be done with it. So I’m left with this imperfect cartoon.

But his hair looks awesome!

The post Hazard Consulting Services Needed appeared first on Small Business Trends.

WordPress Company Automattic Buys Popular Synced Note-Taking App

Posted: 25 Jan 2013 02:30 AM PST

Online business includes blogging. In fact, what is arguably the most popular form of digital publishing is so inextricably linked to entrepreneurship, its importance is rarely questioned. In this post, we’ll look at developments at one of the most popular blog platforms around and talk about blog techniques and other tools likely to help your business efforts online.

Blogs for Business

Digital business is ‘automattic’. The company behind the popular blogging platform WordPress has purchased Simperium, creator of Simplenote, a popular note-taking app for iOS. Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg says the company will use the new Simplenote’s utility to improve WordPress’s mobile performance and continue to offer it as a service for others. All Things D

Take the a-list. Blogging is about establishing a presence and a voice for yourself and your business, but of course, there’s plenty of competition out there. So the key is to distinguish your blog’s voice and your personal brand from all the rest. Guest blogger Justin Young suggests taking tips from superstars like Michael Jordan when elevating your performance as a blogger. Basic Blog Tips

Tips for Topics

The biggest fail. The other extreme is the blog that never makes the splash intended and fails to create a presence or an impact for your business or brand. Though the conventional wisdom may be that simply starting a blog and updating it regularly guarantees an audience, in the end this is not necessarily true. Here are some common things that cause blogs to fail…and some solutions to help you succeed. SteamFeed

The road already traveled. Original content is critical to a successful blog, but there may be reasons you want to cover the same topics as other bloggers too. For example, you may want to make sure you are the main resource for information in your niche, and this means not sending your audience to another site for information you could easily provide. Here blogger Kristi Hines shares a number of reasons you should consider writing about topics also covered elsewhere. Famous Bloggers

Starting over. Successful blogging is also about stick-to-itiveness. Don’t give up and eventually your audience will grow, even if it takes a while. But there is a time to go back to the drawing board. No, this doesn’t necessarily mean scrapping your original blog completely, but it may be time for a reboot. In this post and podcast, online entrepreneur Tristan Higbee explains how and why he started over again with his blog and a bit about the art of niche selection. The Backlight

Digital Business Basics

Too many gurus. One of the most important steps toward blogging success, as in all business, is to find your own path and follow it; but if you’ve listened to a lot of advice along the way, you may find yourself paralyzed when looking for the right path forward. Blogger Timo Kiander has some suggestions to avoid this plight. Just pick the right teacher and don’t look back. Weblogbetter

Other cool tools. In a way, blogging could be thought of as the ultimate micro-business. Public relations and small business coordinator Arthur Piccio describes at least some of these micro-businesses as people attempting to monetize their hobbies connected by networks like Facebook, Twitter, Etsy, and Pinterest. In addition to WordPress, there are many other tools that can help this group. These technologies can transform any business, including yours. UPrinting

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