Houman Akhavan
Founder
Houman Akhavan
Founder
Hey, I’m Houman! I’ve been an ecommerce executive for over a decade now. I have extensive experience in growing revenue and market share of startups and public companies. Throughout my career, I’ve built and ran high-performance offshore operations and transformed offline distributors into ecommerce powerhouses. I specialize in post-acquisition marketing integration and traffic growth. I determine go-to-market strategies for clients and oversee integrations of current their web properties with other channels with the goal of driving significant traffic increases.
I’m responsible for the largest traffic footprint in the auto parts vertical with industry-low customer acquisition costs. I’ve also managed search engine optimization (SEO), search engine marketing (SEM), product listing advertising (PLA), affiliate, email, comparison shopping engine (CSE), display, loyalty, mobile, and retention programs, with annual advertising budgets of over $20 million. This includes optimizing large e-commerce catalogs of over 2 million SKUs to maximize online presences.
Currently, my focus is on competitive intelligence, pricing, and growing private label auto parts through strategic marketing.
Articles About Houman Akhavan
Mike Villar wants to put romance back into advertising
Read ArticleA battle-hardened marketing veteran, Villar wants you to practice constraint.
“Relationships escalate one step at a time. Selling without a story is like asking someone to marry you on a first date,” he told the dozen startup employees at Saola, an accelerator program run by 500 Startups.
The entrepreneurs come from a handful of early-stage companies; their biographies are combinations of data scientist, Silicon Valley veteran, Ivy League graduate, programmer, competitive gamer, mathematical physicist, computational biologist, 3x founder, and defecting corporate lifer. To some of them, ‘sales’ is a dirty word, an oil slick contaminating the purity of science.
That’s why 500 summoned Villar: a storyteller who’s obsessed with “putting narrative to data.” Villar said f– you to sales (as we know it) a long time ago. He levitates above the content scrap yard. He’s seen the matrix of advertising and he doesn’t want you to flush that precious venture capital down the toilet by buying tone-deaf Facebook ads.
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