Archives For Randolf Jorberg

3Gstore.de sold for 135 000 Euro

October 5, 2011

German blog: 3Gstore.de nach Bieterkampf für €135.000 verkauft

This news was supposed to break with a (german languaged) press release by Sedo, but as a domainer blog broke the news I don't want to be quiet: The iPhone store 3Gstore.de that I started in 2008 was sold to Teebik Inc for 135.000 € (ca. 180.000 US$) through the broker house Sedo.

The blog was saying we sold only a domain name, but it was all the existing assets of the former 3Gstore.de GmbH. We even opened the worlds first iphone only brick and mortar store here in Germany and generated a turnover of more than 15 million Euro in total. 3Gstore.de still has more than 2000 unique daily visitors and transaction, even though we announced the sale and shut down two months ago. In short: we didn't sell a domain name, but a whole online shop / brand / business with a complete domain-portfolio (3G.de, generic and typo-domains) organic search traffic and lots of customers that are eager to return and order again...

There are lots of stories about all the successes and failures I experienced in the last three years, but I can honestly say: it was an awesome experiencing to start an e-commerce business from scratch, learn ALL aspects of starting and growing  an online business from zero to 1 million € monthly turnover and I'll be glad if the next three years have a bit less excitement for me...

In Domains, how to NOT, Online Marketing , , ,
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Angel Investments in South Africa…

February 28, 2008

The future looks bright for tech-startups in South Africa. My friend Thomas Promny sent me the news via email before I saw it on Jens Kunaths Blog (who also lives in Cape Town half the year) today: Hasso Plattner Ventures did just setup an 30 million Euros Venture Capital fund "aimed at early stage companies, not those within the seed stage". This fits very well into my plans. I intend to invest some of the funds I got from selling gulli.com not only into my own south african projects (weather.co.za being only one of them) but also to help young entrepreneurs to startup their own online-based businesses. But being a seed capital / angel investor alone will not work if there is no infrastructure to support ventures that grow beyond that size and this could be where Hasso Plattner Ventures steps in.

sunsetMy company in Germany has a proven track record for building high-traffic customer-oriented Portals in various niches and we'll start using this experience help others to grow on the South African market as well... In March I'll be back in Cape Town and I hope to meet the first potential partners, though I'll mainly be there for some well-deserved vacation... :-)

In South Africa , , ,
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Good Bye gulli.com – I sold my baby

February 26, 2008

I did just announce publicly that gulli.com - the website I started in 1998 - was sold for an undisclosed amount. I expect the new owner to keep the main features and start developing new exciting extensions for it's more than 600k registered members. Alexa says that gulli is one of the Top50 visited sites in Germany and Google Analytics counted more than 55.5 million pageviews from 9.8 million visits in January.

While I have to thank gulli for the existence of my company and an uncountable amount of experience and learnings I felt it's a good time to say good bye after ten years of hard work on a single internet project. I will keep all my employees, hire new staff, move into bigger offices and use our experience in the internet-technology, community-management and online-marketing markets to build new exciting projects primarily targeted to the german and south african markets.

I hope to give you more updates here on my blog that was just recently moved from the old bi-lingual gul.li domain name to the english-only randolf.jorberg.com Domain.

In gulli , ,
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Randolf in Cape Town

November 20, 2007

It's now more than a month that I arrived back in Cape Town and lots of things happened but I never got a blogpost ready to talk about these events.

Sunset view from my home officeLife here is as different (compared to Germany) as it is beautiful. While productivity is seriously decreased by the lack of instantly available internet-connectivity (Vodacom's HSDPA is the best compromise I was able to find but it lacks speed and reliability to be used for VoIP and permanent connectivity), this wonderful people and scenery of Cape Town more than compensate for the problems I might be running in. Cape Town really is THE city in Africa to be, when it comes to Online Marketing. I was meeting old and new friends in Cape town, specifically at these events:

Podcamp Cape Town on the October 20th was great for me as a first-timer. I met Dave Duarte for the first time and had a great chat with Chris du Toit, Rafiq (of webaddiCTs) and many others. It's good to see that there's a vibrant internet scene here in South Africa. It was here that I first announced the aquisition of the domain name weather.co.za (still without real content) and that I do plan to develop it into a proper weather portal as soon as possible.

The 27dinner in Cape Town just a few days later really showed the size of the online marketing industry in SA. Around 100 people came together to have dinner, talk and listen to the well prepared presentation on user experience by Phil Barret and having to go through that talking thing myself by giving a short speech on my last 9 years in the online marketing world. I was happy to sponsor the corkage at this event so we could enjoy the wonderful Stormhoek Wine. This was a good opportunity to meet new people and I really look forward meeting and doing business with you again. After meeting oh-so-many people there (if I'd start linking and mentioning you, I'd miss out the other half of you) Marcus (of Capetownmagazine.com), Jayx and me decided to end that night at the fabulous Rafiki's.

After some busy working days there are some upcoming events I'll attend. First there is mobile and broadband conference AfricaCom starting tomorrow that I was lucky to get a press pass for and there's the Geekdinner coming up on November 28th where I'll be present as well. Too bad I'll be travelling Namibia, when *Camp (aka Starcamp) hits the town December 8th and 9th. Before I go to Namibia, I'll visit Johannesburg for a few days, and I'm happy to meet new people from the industry over there...

In Online Marketing, South Africa , , , ,
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This blog…

December 14, 2006

… is brand new - so please handle with care.There were some earlier approaches to blogging for me, but they never worked as I wished they would. I may feel like pasting some old posts from old forgotten blogs into this wordpress at a later time, so don’t be surprised if this isn’t going to be the first entry forever.
This is gonna be me, Randolf Jorberg, aka. ‘gulli‘ and a few other temporary nicknames, blogging about stuff that matters - for me ;)I’ll try to keep this blog english languaged but with a heavy emphasis on german topics. I’m into all aspects of online marketing (specially affiliate marketing and search engine optimization) and the internet business to interesting discoveries on the net and maybe even some viral stuff floating around. There may be a german-only post every here and then, but I guess you’ll figure that out yourself ;-)You can expect me to write about stuff I care about whenever I feel that I’ve got something to commit to a discussion. This will never be a blog where I tell you about all the News that you can read about at so many different places. If you’re interested, subscribe to the feed, as there may be month-long breaks where I don’t post at all.Oh - and I nearly forgot: http://gul.li used to be the index-site of the gulli blog-hosting service - this info-site moved into our tools-section where you find info how to get your own blog at yourname.gul.li. Edit: this is outdated as since selling gulli.com I moved all content from gul.li to http://randolf.jorberg.com in early 2008.

In public ,
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