DoctorPreneur: Introduction to DoctorPreneur

John James, MD, SIE

DoctorPreneur, with John James, M.D.

(John James, M.D., is a physician turned serial Internet entrepreneur. His latest venture is Acumen Holdings, a rapidly growing ecommerce company based in Fayetteville. Each Tuesday, his Doctorpreneur blog will appear in INOV8. Drop him a line in comments.)

When the Innovate Arkansas crew asked me to write a weekly column about Internet business topics, I’m pretty sure they didn’t realize the can of worms they were opening.

You see, I’ve been an outspoken critic of the pathetic (but improving) startup infrastructure in our fine state for many years.

But Innovate Arkansas is a bright spot in a formerly dark void.  They, along with the Arkansas Economic Development Commission, have provided substantial help to my budding technology-based enterprise at a crucial stage.  When they asked me to write a weekly column about Internet business, I jumped at the chance to give back a little.

This column will cover trends and topics related to doing business online.  In addition, I’ll give a behind the scenes look into my latest venture, a rapidly growing ecommerce company located in Fayetteville.

To introduce the series, I’ll provide some background on my (weak) credentials.  Here’s the short version:  I’m 35 years old and have no formal business training.  I’ve started six businesses.  Four of them were pretty good, but two of the six were complete flops.

If you’re interested, here’s the longer version:

In 1981 at the age of 7, I wrote my first computer program.  In 1989, I started a nationally-known Bulletin Board System out of my parent’s bedroom.  I’ve been a computer geek my whole life.

In 1995, while a sophomore at the University of Arkansas, I started my first business.  I sold quiz bowl questions through direct mail.  To support this business, I built my first ecommerce website… it was terrible, but hey, it was 1995, I got lucky and it worked!

Quiz bowl nerd and computer geek… clearly, I’m a babe magnet.  (I got overly lucky in that department too…)

Anyway, this little business supported my young family as I went through medical school.  Despite being bitten by the entrepreneurship bug, I finished medical school in Little Rock and completed a three-year family practice residency in Fayetteville.

In 2001, during the first year of my residency, my brother and I started selling BBQ grills online. With only a $49 investment, we built a multi-million dollar ecommerce business by harnessing the immense power of search engine keyword marketing.  I sold my stake in that business in 2008, after a great six-year run.

On June 18, 2003, Google launched its Adsense contextual advertising program.  This program changed my life forever:  it allowed me to give up medicine, and pursue my love for entrepreneurship.

Within days of the Adsense launch, I built a keyword arbitrage system that exploited price gaps in the emerging keyword market.  At the time of Google’s IPO in 2004, my little business accounted for 1.6 percent of Google’s partner revenue… not bad for a couple guys in a basement.

As the keyword market matured, the opportunity for arbitrage diminished slowly… fortunately, we made hay (lots and lots of hay) while the sun was shining.

After a brief run at my most colossal business flop, a large-scale local Internet marketing venture that was ahead of its time, I returned to my roots last year to make another run at building an ecommerce behemoth.  (As a brief aside:  I don’t talk about the flops… as Mark Cuban says, to be a huge success in business, you only have to be right once.)

To start my latest venture, Acumen Holdings, I acquired the smallest website from my previous business, and used this nursing scrubs store as a base to build a scalable ecommerce platform.

We built a robust ecommerce shopping cart from scratch and integrated it with an enterprise level, cloud-based, business management application. After 18 months of work to build the back-end technology to support a rapid scaling exercise, we began implementing our (reckless, overly aggressive?) growth plan two months ago.

In 60 days, we’ve hired 20 people (yikes), expanded our online workwear and baby stores by adding 30 new manufacturers, and more than doubled our little $3 million dollar business to a $6 million-plus dollar run-rate.

Over the next 24 months, we will open 20 new online stores, add products from 1,000 additional manufacturers, and attempt to build a $100 million company in less than three years.

In this column each week, I’ll reflect on the process of (hopefully) building a hyper-growth technology company IN ARKANSAS.  I’ll attempt to share the little nuggets of wisdom we stumble into along the way, and try to help local business owners leverage the Internet to help expand their business.

Thanks for letting me share…

Leave a Reply

Name (required)

Mail (will not be published) (required)

Website

CAPTCHA Code