Interview by Mike Sullivan of Sully’s Blog

Eric Borgos is well known for the sale of Bored.com for over $4 million. Born an entrepreneur, he spent his childhood days turning hobbies into profits by collecting and selling coins and baseball cards. As a teenager, he had an interest in trading stocks and it was not unusual to find him reading the Wall Street Journal. In college, Eric ran a “976″ phone line teaching people how to make money. After college, Eric stared a computer consulting business and soon moved into designing websites for others and then for himself.

Impulse Communications, Inc. was founded in 1990 by Eric Borgos and was incorporated in 2000. The company runs over 300 developed websites and owns over 9,000 domains. The company’s revenue comes from ecommerce sales, domain sales, advertising, and parking undeveloped names. Impulse Communication has been featured in several blogs and in the traditional news media as well.

MO:

Eric, the evolution of Impulse Communications, Inc. is impressive, growing from your post college computer consulting operation to the domain and website force we see now. Tell me about Impulse Communications today. Is it a one man operation, or do you have a staff? How are you able to manage 300 active sites and a portfolio of over 9,000 domain names?

Eric:

My company is somewhat unique, in that I plan never to work from an office no matter how big my business gets. I have everything setup to be as virtual as possible so I can work from home. At one point I had 15 people working for me from their homes in many different countries, yet I had never met any of them or spoken to them by phone, we just communicated by email.

My mailing address is a virtual PO Box where a service scans all my mail online so I can read it, and I have a phone number where all my voicemails are translated to mp3 files (and also translated to text) and emailed to me. All of my company’s bills are setup to be autopayed from my checking account/credit card and all my income is deposited automatically into my bank account. For the few companies that still pay me by check, my mail box service scans the checks and deposits them into my bank account for me. I even signed up for a new e-signature service today that allows me to sign documents (like domain name sales contracts) online so I don’t need to manually fax or mail them back to people.

All that being said, my business still requires a lot of work. Although I use several programmers, I handle everything else myself. I spend my first few hours each day just dealing with emails. There is always something that needs my attention, like a server that is down, domain name offers that need a response, paying money to workers, questions from programmers, changes that need to be made to a site, billing issues, etc. I also need to deal with all the general hassles of running a business, such as accounting, taxes, computer software and upgrades, calls from sales people, contracts and paperwork, legal issues, and more.

Aside from when problems arise, most of my sites/domains run themselves. Much of my time is spent on new projects, like creating new websites or adding to my existing ones. In the past few years I have done a lot of work adding content to my sites Dumb.com and Adoptme.com, since I think those have a lot of potential.

MO:

You have had success with developing sites as well as selling domains. Which criteria do you use when deciding which domains to develop and which to sell?

Interview by Mike Sullivan of Sully’s Blog

Ed Robinson specializes in designing and bringing to market software that builds business value for developers and IT professionals. He has developed specific expertise in making big sales to Fortune 500 companies. He has worked for major technology companies including Microsoft where he designed and helped market Microsoft Visual Studio, Microsoft Content Management Server and Microsoft SharePoint; and also for smaller companies through the start up phase.

Ed is the CEO of Aptimize, a New Zealand-based company that develops and sells the Aptimize Website Accelerator (WAX). WAX is a software product that helps companies dramatically increase the performance of their websites and intranets.

MO.com:

Aptimize is a young company. Out of the box, you have a laundry list of huge and well-respected clients such as Google, Microsoft, Northrop Grumman, Fidelity, and on and on. How did you manage to land these giants? What is the secret of your sales technique?

Ed Robinson:

From the beginning we didn’t worry too much about building up automatic systems and things like that. We just connected with people. We e-mailed everyone we knew utilizing our networks. Anyone approaching our website, we offered to just talk to them to help them with any web performance questions that they had. People buy from people and from the beginning we’ve tried to build relationships rather than just sell and I think people sensed that we genuinely wanted to help them do better business online.

Also, we developed a product that people needed, one that quickly developed a reputation for being the best at what it does – speeding up websites. The internet giants and Fortune 500’s tend to be well informed about the benefits of fast page load, for example when Shopzilla increased the speed of their website by 5 seconds it resulted in a 25% increase in page views, a 10% increase in revenue, a 50% reduction in hardware, and a 120% increase traffic from Google. The ‘big’ companies are constantly looking for ways to improve visitor experience, be more competitive, and increase their bottom-line – as we can see with the Shopzilla example, increasing the page load speed of a website is an effective way to do this

So here’s how I pitch our product: We’re a software product. You download it, put it on your web server. It will immediately double the speed of your website with no code changes and no extra hardware, and that’s all it does. And so that’s very simple for people to understand, and some people will say, “I’m in the Marketing department for a company,” or the IT Engineer, and can instantly see how this can help their business – so you can see how simple it is.

Here are three important rules – especially for a start-up company:

1. Have a very focused value proposition: Aptimize’s products instantly accelerate websites and intranets.

2. Be good at it: Our software works really well – a lot of our customers instantly see a reduction in load times of 50%. This is powerful

3. Love your customers. We work across the internet, but pride ourselves on providing better support than most companies you’d deal with locally.

With these three rules you’re equipped to sell to small and big companies.

MO.com:

You were a program manager at Microsoft and then Intergen before being involved in Action This, a catalyst to Aptimize. How would you describe the difference in working for a large corporation to leading your own company?

Interview by Mike Sullivan of Sully’s Blog


Peter Frank is a college student at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. He founded Sumdae, LLC, while still in high school. The business started on the premise of buying Internet domain names and reselling to end users at a profit. Peter now owns and operates CollegeACB.com.

CollegeACB.com or “Anonymous Confession Board” is a controversial hot spot for college students, boasting upwards of a half million pageviews per day. Although originally created by two other students, Peter is behind the enormous growth of the site. CollegeACB.com is described as a web-based community for college students to voice their opinions on college life while remaining anonymous.

MO.com:
You obviously have a strong entrepreneurial spirit, forming a business while still in high school. What drivers, experiences or influences did you have at such an early age that positioned you where you are today? Did you come from an entrepreneurial family?

Peter Frank:
No one else in my immediate family line has been particularly entrepreneurial, but my parents have always supported me in every way they could. They had trust and allowed me to sign up for a Paypal account at thirteen. That freedom allowed me to start my first business with a friend (we sold Counter Strike admin privileges). From that point forward, I was always trying something new to make money. Eventually (around fifteen), I stumbled into domain names and websites and now here I am.

I have a drive from within to be successful, and generating profits allows me to see my success concretely. Equally important to making money is the sense of satisfaction from beating competitors and/or the market.

MO.com:
You have been featured in countless blogs, newspapers and most impressively, TIME. Have you had any difficulty handling this rush of attention? What impact has it had on your day-to-day life?

Peter Frank:
I had my fifteen minutes years ago, so I know how ridiculous the media can be. It hasn’t really impacted me too much in my daily life, though the attention at times can be both exciting and aggravating. It is also quite frustrating when my quotes are taken out of context to make me look bad, but I guess that comes with the territory. I’ve certainly learned to become much more careful when talking with the media over the last year.

MO.com:
CollegeACB.com is clearly controversial. While some describe it as “practical and helpful”, others describe it as “hateful and hurtful.” How do you react to those that claim to be victims of online bullying or others who claim their reputation has been destroyed?