
How HOTorNot Bootstrapped To Over $5 Million In Annual Profits - corlapa
http://mixergy.com/hotornot-bootstrapped5-million-profits-james-hong/
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sounddust
To anyone who has watched the whole thing, could you please very briefly
summarize the responses to the following question that the author is
intentionally withholding?

* How HOTorNOT negotiated away some of their biggest expenses using techniques you could (and should) use right now.

* How a bad economy could help your company grow. (It helped HOTorNOT.)

* The most effective way to increase conversions and get more users to pay. (It’s not what you’d expect.)

* The step James ADDED to his order process that increased sales. (It’s still an under-utilized technique)

(I'm not going to watch a 74 minute interview, but I would have gladly have
read the 20 page transcript if it had been posted. )

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Flankk
* Negotiated with their hosting company to get free hosting for a year in return for endorsement of their scaling capabilities.

* Many large companies fail in a bad economy while lean, agile businesses have opportunity to thrive and gain market share.

* Make the site fast and leverage the press thereby using the funnel model; more users at the top of the funnel means more customers at the bottom.

* They added a phrasal template to allow unpaid users to send "canned messages" to each other. Only paying members can send custom messages.

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AndrewWarner
Holy crap you sum things up better than I do!

Maybe I should sum up my interviews in this bullet form and just forget about
the headaches of transcripts.

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knightinblue
Andrew, you have a great idea for a site. The only thing missing is
transcripts. Asking viewers to watch an hour long interview is way too much (I
didn't watch it). Transcripts will go a long way towards making your visitors
happy and keeping them coming back more often (I know I'd come back if you
added transcripts).

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jwt
Seconded! Andrew- I'd love to see transcripts of the Mixergy interviews as
well, as I'm sure many others are too.

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vaksel
I think part of it, is that they had a fun product, when there was no real
competition from things like youtube(+5 years), flash games(+7 years), hulu(+9
years), decent social networks(+3 years myspace, +4 years facebook)

And the product itself, led them to pretty much be able to signup anyone who
stumbled on their website.

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imp
A more in-depth description can be found in Founders at Work.

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AndrewWarner
I asked him about how his chapter in Founders at Work was written because I'm
a big fan of the book. (I actually hold it up a lot in the interview.)

Because many of us read the book, I asked James questions that weren't covered
in it. I think you'll learn some new ideas in my interview. Let me know if you
don't.

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imp
Thanks for the follow-up. I only read the text excerpt because I didn't have
time for the video. I'll see if I have time later to watch the whole thing.

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qeorge
Enjoyed the interview a great deal, thanks Andrew. His strategy for locking
out the press was brilliant.

One thing - I'm unable to skip forward in the video. The Firefox beta crashed
on me midway through watching, and being unable to restart the video halfway
was maddening. Is this intentionally disabled?

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AndrewWarner
That's a strange issue with blip.tv's player. I think it just needs some time
to fully buffer before it'll let you skip forward or backward. Sorry about
that.

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dthakur
[Removed]

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teej
Offtopic comment and NSFW link. Please don't do either of those things.

