2X eCommerce Podcast

My guest on today's show is Igor Shoifot. Igor is here to talk about his experience as a VC investor and to offer insights about how to entice VC investors like himself to 'fall in love' with your ecommerce startup.

Igor Shoifot is based in Silicon Valley and is an investment partner at TMT Investments who have about 40 companies currently in their portfolio. Independently, Igor is an investor, board member, shareholder in over 50 startups with combined valuation of $1 Billion including 3 ecommerce start ups: LeTote, ScentBird and Wanelo. 

Igor is also the chairman of the largest internet incubator in Ukraine, Happy Farm (40+ startups) and of Tnation.com incubator in Kazakhstan, and writes for San Francisco Examiner. He taught at New York University, UC Berkeley, UCSF, and lectured at Stanford and other schools in several countries. Igor has an MBA from Boston University and a PhD from The Russian Academy of Sciences. 

I'm super excited to welcome today’s guest - Julie Fredrickson.She is the CEO & co-founder of Stowaway Cosmetics (https://www.stowawaycosmetics.com/) - a venture backed direct to consumer and potentially disruptive cosmetics company that retail their own-brand 'right-sized makeup' that are half the size and half the price of conventional cosmetics.

I brought Julie on to discuss how she went about raising capital for a product based business. Before I introduce her; here is a list of some heavy weight investors Julie and Chelsa (her partner) have managed to convince to invest in their idea: Gary Vaynerchuk, Jason Calacanis, Dave Morin (of Path), Paul Sethi, Brian Sugar, Don Hutchison and more...

Download this episode's show notes on http://2xecommerce.com/podcast/ep59/

I super excited to introduce today’s guest: Dimitri Semenikhin.He is my first non-ecommerce guest in the traditional sense of ecommercebut has a LOT to share today with us about influencer marketing on InstagramThat is because his Yacht portal - called Yacht Harbour has garnered 42,100 followers and counting on Instagram since 2014.He is a 20 year entrepreneur born in Moscow, raised in Monaco currently running a business in London as well as a student at Kings College London.Their social media monthly reach at the moment is to well over half a million users monthly. The company currently has offices in Monaco and Moscow, employing five people full time.

Show notes can be downloaded from http://2xecommerce.com/podcast/

Happy New Year's Eve - this is 2015's last episode! At the start of the year I made some bold predictions about the outlook of ecommerce in 2015. To be more precise, I made 11 predictions.Whilst a few of my predictions missed the mark, I was quite surprised to hit the mark on most predictions. Here is how I fared... 8 of my 11 predictions saw the light in 2015. Not too shabby...

Vitaly Gonkov is the Chief Marketing Officer at MageWorx,a fast-growing Magento extensions and solutions company that develops a full range of Magento extensions used on 30,000+ Magento stores worldwide. I personally recommend one of their technical SEO extensions called, SEO Suite Ultimate to clients because of its exhaustive feature-set for technical SEO deployment.

I invited Vitaly to today's show to talk about Magento 2.0 and it's new SEO features. This interview is based on an article published by MageWorx shortly after the release of Magento 2.0. Here's the article: http://blog.mageworx.com/2015/08/magento-2-seo-features/

My guests on today’s show are: Jennifer Chong and Roman Khan, the co-founders of a Luxury Direct to Consumer (D2C) consumer fashion brand that launched their business and raised capital through crowdfunding...They managed to raise over $180,000 on INDIEGOGOand then went unto KICKSTARTER to raise more capital and doubled(YES DOUBLED) what they raised on INDIEGOGO by raising $360,000 just over a year ago.

The are the founders of LINJER - D2C makers of Minimalist leather bags without the luxury markup.They sell their bags for 1/4 the price that luxury brands would sell them for.And are able to do this by selling directly to clients,allowing them to cut out middlemen, storefront costs, and excessive marketing spend.

If you are trying to figure out how to effectively use crowdfunding platforms such asIndiegogo and Kickstarter to launch a direct to consumer business that is set out to change an industry or the world - then listen into this one!

They take us through the exact steps they used to raise capital on indiegogo as well as on kickstarter...And talk through promotion tactics such as blogger/press outreach and scaling awareness through paid media... This episode is not to be missed!