Matt Hill from Shopit.com
buying businesses, long tail, selling businesses, venture capital, viral marketing
Matt Hill is the CEO of Shopit.com. Shopit is like eBay for social networking sites. According to Matt, Shopit is now the fastest growing e-commerce application on Facebook. EBay has had a lot of fraud problems, and a lot of people don't like using it anymore. After interviewing Matt, I wrote about eBay's problems and how Shopit could take over this space here. I think the model will take some work to implement properly, but they have a good team and a space with massive potential, so keep an eye on Matt and his team. Matt also talks about his involvement investing in a couple of successful companies including reunion.com.Full Interview »
Meet Brad Fallon from Free IQ. Brad is well known in the info-marketing community for his StomperNet launches. He sold around $12M of his continuity program in a day, so he knows a few tricks. FreeIQ is Brad's latest venture; a YouTube-type online video site that hosts different types of digital media products focusing on business expertise on a variety of topics. One of the interesting aspects of this interview is Brad's insight into the process of importing products from China to use for wholesale and retail sales. While the import process may appear complicated at first, Brad's explanation makes it “not as hard as you might think.”
This week’s interview is with Mike Filsaime. He’s another one of these viral guys. Except he’s different. Most viral business models don’t generate much revenue. And while Mike’s company is relatively small ($5M), he has very low acquisition costs due to the (mostly free) viral customer acquisition, so it’s very profitable. For anyone interested in viral marketing being used with lead generation or information product marketing, you should check out this interview.
I have tracked Ian Clarke for several years now and was very excited to have the opportunity to interview him. He founded FreeNet, a p2p network that enables people living in non-free countries (like China, Cuba, etc) to get secure access to the Internet. He has helped the Skype guys with their latest project Joost, co-founded Revver and is now running his own startup called Thoof. Thoof is a generic targeting engine designed to accurately provide predictions about users like Amazon's "customers also bought" page. That in itself is nothing new, but Thoof is designed around providing accurate targeting for very small datasets. Ian's technology can be applied in a many areas online including behavioural targeting and personalization.
John Linden, the CTO of Think Partnership, is introducing us to some of their new products. For anyone spending time in the pay per click market, you’ll find what they’re doing to be pretty interesting, there are some new methods coming where you can get additional PPC traffic.
This week’s interview is with Yanik Silver, who runs Surefire Marketing. His business model is very different to most of you – he runs a $3M business out of his house, with very high profit margins, no employees, and only works 5 hours/day. If any of you are feeling burned out, you may want to consider his model.
This interview is with Brian Littleton from ShareaSale. Some key points of the interview: Learn how a company is using affiliate marketing to monetize the “long tail” of traffic. Find out how offers can be made to last for years without modification. Discover how ShareaSale is monetizing Facebook viral traffic.
