Back in the late 1990s, Sascha Deri, an engineer working at a high-paying day job, decided he wanted to act on his childhood dream of doing something for the greater good.
“Ever since I was young I wanted to do something idealistic,” says Deri, CEO of Alternative Energy, LLC, a $7.7 million Hudson, MA online firm that sells things like solar energy panels through its Web site, www.altenergystore.com.
So in 1999, Deri, who then worked at NEC Electronics, decided to start up the company in his spare time. This was his second entrepreneurial venture. The first, with partners Jason Federspiel and Nick Albright, was a failed attempt to market VOIP telephones.
“I would work from 8 p.m. to 1 or 2 in the morning,” he says of the start-up days. After a couple of years, he went to work at his business full time. Federspiel and Albright joined him soon after. The firm has been steadily growing at the rate of about 25% per year and shows no signs of stopping, he says.
The company sells and installs a whole variety of solar energy products, batteries, special meters, wind systems, water pumps and related products, as well as how-to books and videos. The target market is homeowners and small businesses all around the country.
The firm relies on a mix of search engine marketing and direct response space advertising.
The company buys general keywords such as “solar panels” along with some brand-specific product names. Some perform very badly but others quite well, Deri says. He also optimizes the company’s altenergy.com Web site successfully so that, for example, it ranks tenth among the organic listings for a Google search on “solar panels”. For more technical product names, the site ranks higher in the listings. Overall, the site gets 10,000 clickthroughs per week.
The other mainstay of the company’s advertising is a full-page ad in Home Power magazine, a bi-monthly dedicated to homemade electricity and renewable energy.
Deri says the ad, which costs $1,000 per issue, brings in “two or three times that in profit.”Deri credits his company’s survival of the dot-com bust to his personal fiscal conservatism, keeping his day job for the first couple of years and not running to venture capitalists as so many others did.
“The industry was on the steroids of venture capital [back then] and there were a lot of companies that did not have sound business plans,” he says.
Looking to the future, Deri sees interest in alternative energy systems continuing to rise, because of the current rising prices for gasoline and other fossil fuels.
For this reason, he says he’s going to expand the firm’s educational offerings, which now include technical articles on installing different types of systems.