Posts tagged Entrepreneurs
Strategy Roundtable For Entrepreneurs: Are You Fundable?
Feb 9th
Today’s roundtable had a couple of interesting businesses, but before I get to them, I want to underscore that entrepreneurs MUST gauge fundability before assuming that they can build their businesses by raising money.
TravelTriangle.com
First, Sanchit Gurg from Noida, India, pitched TravelTriangle.com, a marketplace for travel agencies offering personalized tour packages for travelers seeking such help. The company already has engaged about 75 travel agencies and some 900 customers. They have started transacting, generating multiple bids for each RFP and taking a 5% commission off closed deals. Reviews, ratings and other core marketplace functions are part of the offering. Sanchit and his team of six have validated the concept already.
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I like the idea a lot, especially because traveling in India and South Asia and South East Asia is still quite complicated. Local knowledge and contacts are key, and the logistics of travel can be very complex. Having personalized, reliable service from a travel agent, along with local guides, etc., are attractive value propositions.
The market size, however, is relatively small: 5% of $500M or $25M is the estimated Total Available Market for the foreseeable future. Frankly, that doesn’t bother me, since I tend to like small, niche businesses with good, solid execution, which Sanchit’s company is demonstrating. Clearly, a multi-million dollar, profitable business can be built here, and I plan to be a user of the service. In fact, I’d like to design a trip to visit Bandhavgarh National Forest in Madhya Pradesh to see tigers, as well as visit the Khajuraho Temple, ideally during the famous dance festival that is held there. Maybe one of the travel agents on TravelTriangle can help put this together for me.
For the time being, the company is seeing maximum interest from travelers who want to visit Rajasthan, Kerala and Sri Lanka.
BabbleTAB
Next, Andrew Jaffa from Jacksonville, Florida, pitched BabbleTAB, a social media marketing service that generates relevant content for the Facebook pages of small businesses like car dealerships, restaurants, retail, etc.
Andrew wants to offer a tablet-based console on location that would capture video and images of customers and post them to the businesses’ Facebook pages. The business model is a subscription service with a small fee per loaded image.
We brainstormed today about the adoption barriers and whether consumers would take the trouble to be photographed or recorded. Andrew’s preliminary research says that they would if offered the right incentive. In a car dealership, for example, he thinks a $250 discount would be a substantial enough incentive. I am listening to the use cases but would like to see a statistically significant validation exercise done on the idea.
We also discussed Andrew’s proposed tiered pricing model, which I felt was too complicated. A simple flat pricing would be more appropriate. Andrew agreed and is planning to change the model.
You can listen to the recording of today’s roundtable here. As always, I would very much like to hear about your business, so let me invite you to come and pitch at one of our free 1M/1M public roundtables. We will be holding future roundtables on the following dates starting at 8:00 a.m. PST:
Thursday, February 16, Register Here.
Thursday, February 23, Register Here.
Thursday, March 1, Register Here.
Thursday, March 8, Register Here.
Thursday, March 15, Register Here.
If you want a deeper relationship with me, you are very welcome to join the 1M/1M premium program. If you have any questions about the program, please, first study the website, especially What to expect from the 1M/1M premium program and the FAQs. If you have additional questions, please email me, and I would be very happy to respond. Please note that I work exclusively with 1M/1M entrepreneurs.
I also invite you to join the 1M/1M mailing list for the ease and convenience of getting updates. This way we can stay in touch, and it will help you to decide if 1M/1M is a program for you.
Image courtesy of Shutterstock
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Strategy Roundtable For Entrepreneurs: YCombinator vs. 1M/1M
Feb 2nd
Today’s roundtable, as usual, was an international affair, with entrepreneurs presenting from different parts of the US, India, Israel, and many other geographies. Before I share what we heard from them today, I want to highlight an important aspect of 1M/1M that is repeatedly underscored in these roundtables: the international, inclusive, democratic nature of the initiative.
In fact, one of the best ways we can delineate this phenomenon is by contrasting 1M/1M with YCombinator. (Video after the jump.)
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This short video explains how the two programs differ:
Bottomline: YC, superb incubator, is a program that applies to less than .01% of entrepreneurs, whereas 1M/1M is an inclusive, global program. The businesses we will discuss today will put this distinction in perspective.
Hooduku
First, Sudhendra Seshachala from Houston, Texas pitched Hooduku, a professional services business that already has significant revenue from cloud integration work. Hooduku is a 1M/1M premium member and is interested in moving away from pure services toward a product+services model.
Sudhi presented the idea of a platform that bridges between Microsoft Azure customers who are also using RackSpace and other Infrastructure-as-a-Service providers for their content management and delivery. He uses a classic and highly successful mode of building products, that of being deeply immersed in customer situations through services projects and using that domain knowledge and relationship to identify opportunities for building products. A major example of such a company is Appirio, which went on to get funded by Sequoia Capital and has since built a strong product-services company in the cloud integration domain.
My advice to Sudhi is to not position his company as a ‘platform’ but rather pitch the value proposition as an ‘integration framework’. These subtle wordings make a huge difference in how a company is viewed.
Buy Or Boycott
Next Doug Lowenthal from Jacksonville, Florida presented Buy Or Boycott, which he came up with at the recent Startup Weekend program. Buy Or Boycott wants to offer consumers an easy way to avoid buying products that have major issues, be it political or environmental. However, the user experience that Doug described to deliver this was not convincing. He proposes to offer a mobile app with which to scan every product in your grocery store shopping cart. I don’t believe consumers would do this. When we stand on grocery store lines after a long day or week, the last thing we want to do is scan a bunch of products with our mobile phones.
NXI Group
Then Kaushik Mitra from New Delhi, India, pitched the NXI Group of Companies, a custom hardware vendor that presented itself as a laptop and tablet company. It took me a bit of time to parse through the details and figure out that NXI is NOT a laptop or tablet vendor competing with HP, Dell and Acer. Rather, it is developing custom hardware for consumers with specific needs. For example, they are in the midst of developing RFID-enabled tablets for the universal ID effort by the Indian government.
Kaushik’s company already has $400,000 in revenue, and while the business is not a typical venture-fundable one, I see no reason why the company cannot continue to grow in its niche.
Koolaring
Last, Edoe Cohen from Tel Aviv, Israel pitched Koolaring, a SaaS solution for building private alumni networks a la LinkedIn. I have seen numerous startups with this general idea. It makes perfect sense for universities to have their own private alumni networks, and it is only a matter of time before they do. Whether Koolaring will be the winner in that space or not will depend on execution.
So you see, I just shared with you four businesses, none of which would suit YCombinator for a variety of reasons outlined in the video. However, 1M/1M is delighted to help any and all of them.
You can listen to the recording of today’s roundtable here. As always, I would very much like to hear about your business, so let me invite you to come and pitch at one of our free 1M/1M public roundtables. We will be holding future roundtables on the following dates starting at 8:00 a.m. PST:
Thursday, February 9, Register Here.
Thursday, February 16, Register Here.
Thursday, February 23, Register Here.
If you want a deeper relationship with me, you are very welcome to join the 1M/1M premium program. If you have any questions about the program, please, first study the website, especially What to expect from the 1M/1M premium program and the FAQs. If you have additional questions, please email me, and I would be very happy to respond. Please note that I work exclusively with 1M/1M entrepreneurs.
I also invite you to join the 1M/1M mailing list for the ease and convenience of getting updates. This way we can stay in touch, and it will help you to decide if 1M/1M is a program for you.
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Capital Innovators Graduates First Class of Entrepreneurs
Feb 1st
Tonight in downtown St. Louis the second group of companies to be funded by Capital Innovators will be announced. These will receive $50k in seed funding, free office space and credits toward other useful services as part of their acceleration program. We wrote about their innovative program last fall.
Some of the first companies have launched products or services or are in the process of getting there, according to their entrepreneurs. Most have felt the program worthwhile and given them a jumpstart on their operations.
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For example, Sam Glines says, “Effectively, NorseCorp, while led by me, born and raised in St Louis, was a stranger in its own town. I spent very little time here in my professional life, so my local business connections were limited. Capital Innovators accelerated access to and recommendations for vetted service providers, two of which we have brought on. One of them is serving a critical role in a new Norse service offering in Web security.” The company has some innovative security offerings for payment card processors that we will cover in the near future. They also signed Global eTelecom as a customer, one of U.S.’ largest check processors at the end of December. “Our plan is to have seven figure revenues and be profitable by Q3, in addition to to seven new hires by end of the year,” he says.
Jim Dolan, the CEO of Action Online, is looking to launch in May and redo their YoJo.com site. Since joining the program, he has seen an increase in ad sales and also received new investment capital.
Anthony Favazza, CEO of DiningCircle has hired a CTO that will be overseeing a rebuild of our product in early 2012. “We also have an intern from Washington University helping with customer satisfaction and retention, and one of the marketing partners from the program was able to deliver a comprehensive marketing plan for us that included a new logo, website, print marketing, mailers, and a clear message.”
Ryan Bell, the CEO of Gremln.com says, “We continue to have advisory meetings to discuss how we will convert free users into paying customers. We have begun the sales cycle with a number of potential clients and are nurturing these relationships during private beta stage and are looking to white label our product.”
Jim Eberlin, the CEO of Jbara says, “We are continuing to make enhancements to our current product as sales are increasing. Current customers have helped to improve our analytics. Our customer base pipeline is growing as we’re in the process of closing several contracts. We are currently the sole sponsor of a meetup and users group for customer success executives. The group is led by Marqueto, and Exactly, one of our current customers. We have two strategic partnerships in the works that could lead to potential exits. These are in addition to our currently existing partnership with SalesForce.”
The new ventures include:
- Bonfyre is a location-based mobile application exclusively for college students that helps them find what’s hot around campus, keep up with friends and save money. Bonfyre was created by Off Campus Media, a company focused on creating value for college students and highly relevant advertising opportunities for local merchants and national brands.
- BusyEvent is a profitable live event CRM company monetizing some of the 10 million annual face-to-face transactions at conferences, trade shows and business to business events. They track buyer behavior and present that data as actionable information that multiple stakeholders pay for.
- Click With Me Now makes 1-click Web-sharing for consumers possible; with no cost, no downloads and no frustrations. Supporting businesses that connect with consumers online, they provide tools that let their customers instantly invite friends to co-browse with them. Their SaaS-based, platform-independent solution results in richer experiences, greater conversion and increased sales.
- Material Mix owns and operates an exchange for reusable industrial byproducts. Each year, U.S. manufacturers pay to dispose of 176 million tons of waste, 34% of which is reusable. The online trade of these recoverable materials represents an unrealized $13.2 billion market opportunity.
- RollSale is reducing the need for expensive middlemen in the used car supply chain by providing dealers with a simple, inexpensive, mobile-centric social network for buying and selling inventory.
- Systematic Revenue provides growing businesses with an easy to use and affordable marketing automation software application to consistently follow up with all prospects and customers in a meaningful and relevant way.
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The Other 99% of Entrepreneurs
Jan 31st
In my recent piece Reengineering Capitalism I highlighted a phenomenon that the global entrepreneurship ecosystem is paying very little attention to: Over 99% of entrepreneurs who seek funding get rejected. Yet, the entire world is focused on the 1% that is “fundable.”
The media, when pitched a startup story, is interested in who funded the venture. They seldom ask how much revenue the company has or if it is profitable.
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“I don’t foresee leaving the company for at least 10 years. I would like to leave it a private company with no external investors and absolutely no thoughts whatsoever about Wall Street. I am having fun and take great pride in my freedom. There is no reason I would give that up. We are a cash flow positive company. We have recurring revenues and no debt. We have a large customer base that is growing exponentially.”
Incubators take pride in how exclusive they are and how many “deals” they “reject.”
Angels and VCs, of course, discard most of their “deal flow.”
And entrepreneurs? They seem to have confused the definition of entrepreneurship altogether. Entrepreneurship, they mistakenly believe, equals financing!
This is wrong.
There are numerous stories of successful businesses that have been built without a penny of outside financing. I want to share with you some wisdom from the heroes of the other 99%. They live in a world of entrepreneurs who enjoy their freedom and are not looking to sell their businesses or take them public. You could say these businesses are built-to-enjoy, as opposed to built-to-flip. Needless to say, outside financing, by definition, requires an “exit,” and for most businesses, that means a sale to a larger company.
But the entrepreneurs I will introduce you to today are not interested in selling their companies. They just want to continue doing what they are doing: building value.
Meet Girish Navani, CEO of eClinicalWorks, a super-successful healthcare IT company based in Boston. He has never taken any funding but has built a $100 million-plus business by delivering value to customers.
Girish says, “I don’t foresee leaving the company for at least 10 years. I would like to leave it a private company with no external investors and absolutely no thoughts whatsoever about Wall Street. I am having fun and take great pride in my freedom. There is no reason I would give that up. We are a cash flow positive company. We have recurring revenues and no debt. We have a large customer base that is growing exponentially.” [You can read Girish's full story here.]
Meet Andrew Fox, CEO of ClubPlanet, a $30 million-plus nightclub ticketing services company that is also 100% founder-owned. Andrew loves nightlife and says, “The business is very successful and has a lot of room for growth. I think that we have a lot of suitors out there who mention really ridiculous numbers at times. This is such a great lifestyle business that I don’t know if I could ever sell it. All of my previous businesses I built to sell, but this time around you might find me right here in thirty years. I hope by then it is $300 million a year.
Based on our growth trajectory, we are seeing really good signs of improvement. [You can read more of Andrew's story here.]
Imagine if the American economy had many more such steady private companies that are far removed from the movements of the speculative markets, how much more robust things would be? It really is time that the media starts celebrating more of these kinds of heroes: the other 99%.
Then there is the oft-cited Sridhar Vembu, who has turned all tables with Zoho, a $100 million-plus SaaS company that competes with Google, Microsoft, and Salesforce.com without a penny in outside capital.
I have had numerous conversations with Sridhar over the years, and each time he reinforces the same basic philosophy: “I want to build this without outside capital. I don’t want to sell the company.” [You can learn more about Sridhar's methods here.]
Each of these entrepreneurs could raise money in a nanosecond given how much success they’ve had. The fact that they don’t gives you an idea about the advantages of the self-financed, organic growth model. No matter how much Wall Street gyrates, these entrepreneurs experience and demonstrate a level of stability and steadiness that is exemplary.
Imagine if the American economy had many more such steady private companies that are far removed from the movements of the speculative markets, how much more robust things would be? It really is time that the media starts celebrating more of these kinds of heroes: the other 99%.
And for young entrepreneurs, as you evaluate role models to emulate, perhaps it is not a bad idea to also consider some of these lesser-known heroes. They can give you a picture of the realities of an alternate, deeply satisfying universe.
In conclusion, I want to leave you with a 1:49 minute video message. Please listen to it, and stop for a moment to think about your path forward. Is a single-minded focus on fund-raising your only option?
Conference photo by Dell
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Top Tech Video of the Day: [Stuff] Entrepreneurs Say
Jan 27th
“Connect it to Facebook, viral spread, boom, boom.” I have no idea what that means but I do know that for some reason, I’m still not tired of the Sh*t [fill in the blank] Says meme. This video is for anyone who’s spent more than five minutes reading Techcrunch, knows what Y Combinator is and has faced the (sometimes) irrational exuberance of a tech entrepreneur. “Overheard: Time to pivot.”
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Strategy Roundtable For Entrepreneurs: Are Media Sites Fundable?
Jan 19th
Today’s roundtable brought some core issues up for debate regarding media startups that are focusing largely on Content and Community features and expecting to get funded. So, I would like to take some time to offer a broad overview on the topic and some pointers to entrepreneurs who are making the assumption that you can raise $500,000 for such a venture. Be careful!
Empower Lounge
Misty Gibbs from Austin, Texas, presented Empower Lounge, a concept for a website that focuses on offering inspirational content along four major vectors: work, health, play and giving. In addition, the site will offer some level of professional networking. Misty is folding in a national site, Inspiration Lounge, and a local site, AustinWomen, to bring together her current 10,000-strong subscriber base under the Empower Lounge umbrella.
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I probed quite hard about the specific positioning for the site and brainstormed with her on examples of other sites/organizations with related agendas: Women 2.0, ASTIA, Ladies Who Launch, etc. The first two are non-profits, and Ladies Who Launch is still a fairly small-traffic destination, far from a venture-style, high-growth business. The company that has successfully monetized in the women vertical is Glam Media, but their model is of a Vertical Ad Network.
I also pointed out that there is way too much unmonetized ad inventory online, a challenge that is putting digital publishers through serious heartburns. I have shared my thoughts on this topic over and again on my blog, as well as elsewhere on the Web. We’ve had substantive discussions on the topic with entrepreneurs such as John Ramey, CEO of iSocket, Kenny Rosenblatt, CEO of Arkadium, and Jay Samit, CEO of SocialVibe, who all attest to the downward pressure on CPM rates and the challenges of low fill-through.
In addition, ad networks taking large cuts of ad revenues put further pressure on the publishers. Vikrant Mathur, CEO of iFood.tv discusses that at length in the blog post here. Vikrant is running a bootstrapped publishing company, and is a 1M/1M premium member. In 1M/1M, we happen to have a great deal of experience dealing with such companies and their challenges.
I don’t think I got through to Misty, though. She is ‘confident’ that she can raise $500,000 for this website right away. Well, good luck, Misty! I hope you are right.
However, for other entrepreneurs who may be listening a bit more seriously to the challenges facing the industry, I would also like you to invest some time and energy in assessing the ‘fundability’ of your project before making assumptions like this. You can use the 1M/1M Self-Assessment for that purpose. Also, here is a short video on the issue of fundability, addressing some questions that we hear often from entrepreneurs.
In conclusion, I would like to highlight the fact that entrepreneurs really should STOP focusing so much on funding and start worrying more about how to build a sustainable business. Less than 1% of entrepreneurs actually ever get funded. The other 99% who go out to look for financing get rejected. But there is no reason to believe that you cannot succeed even without funding. So, my advice to Misty is to focus on the business fundamentals of how to get to revenues and profits within a realistic time frame. Here is my video message to all entrepreneurs who are focused on raising money and are facing difficulty: The Other 99% (Entrepreneurs).
Themeefy
Also, Titash Neogi from Pune, India, pitched Themeefy, a publishing platform for self-publishers that helps users create, curate and publish books, magazines, etc. I happen to know a great deal about this business because of my own long involvement in publishing. So, we dialoged about the product marketing issues of what constitutes a complete product in this space. For instance, HTML books are simply not enough and all the traditional formats of e-books need to be supported. Similarly, self-publishing platforms like Amazon’s CreateSpace need to be supported; iPad apps need to be supported.
In general, when you come to the market with a solution, it needs to meet the needs of the contemporary customers. The proposed solution is an inadequate one for serious book authors to want to use. It is, however, being used for free by about 5,000 educators, travel book authors, etc., which is a good start. But people using your product for free is one thing, getting them to actually pay is quite another. And that’s where Themeefy will need to develop a product roadmap and business strategy that takes this minimum viable product and builds a sustainable business out of it. I will be happy to help him accomplish that.
You can listen to the recording of today’s roundtable here. As always, I would very much like to hear about your business, so let me invite you to come and pitch at one of our free 1M/1M public roundtables. We will be holding future roundtables on the following dates starting at 8:00 a.m. PST:
Thursday, January 26, Register Here.
Thursday, February 2, Register Here.
Thursday, February 9, Register Here.
Thursday, February 16, Register Here.
Thursday, February 23, Register Here.
Please note, next week’s roundtable will be co-hosted with Jacksonville Startup Weekend and a couple of hundred entrepreneurs are participating in this weekend’s event in Florida. On January 26, the top five will be presenting at the 1M/1M roundtable.
If you want a deeper relationship with me, you are very welcome to join the 1M/1M premium program. If you have any questions about the program, please, first study the website, especially What to expect from the 1M/1M premium program and the FAQs. If you have additional questions, please email me, and I would be very happy to respond. Please note that I work exclusively with 1M/1M entrepreneurs.
I also invite you to join the 1M/1M mailing list for the ease and convenience of getting updates. This way we can stay in touch, and it will help you to decide if 1M/1M is a program for you.
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Strategy Roundtable For Entrepreneurs: Spotlight On IIT Kharagpur, India
Jan 13th
Today’s roundtable was jointly organized by the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur (IIT KGP) and the 1M/1M program as part of the former’s Global Entrepreneurship Summit organized by the student-run e-cell. For the uninitiated, IIT KGP is considered one of the top technology schools in India, and it is located in the Eastern part of the country, not far from the city of Kolkata.
I have visited IIT KGP many times over the years, and each time I see a marked improvement in the energy and momentum at the campus on entrepreneurship. My 1997 recruitment visit met with tepid response, with the student body largely interested in multinational placements at the time. But a subsequent visit in January 2009 saw a massive change: the students were excited about entrepreneurship.
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Today’s roundtable was yet another step forward: the students have started producing interesting, viable business ideas, and some are even validating them successfully. It gives me great satisfaction to observe this evolution, and play a small role in shepherding these young entrepreneurs along.
Before I start discussing the businesses, I’d like to highlight the role the National Entrepreneurship Network (NEN) has played in developing the e-cells at 470 different schools and colleges in India. NEN is part of the Wadhwani Foundation’s efforts at entrepreneurship development, and it is great to see how pervasive their success has been. I spoke to Ajay Kela, the CEO of Wadhwani Foundation recently, and got a feel for the breadth of their investment.
The challenge ahead for NEN and the academic institutions in India is to now take the massive interest and enthusiasm that has been generated, and harness it to produce a large number of successful companies.
Today, at IIT KGP, we caught a glimpse of some of the budding heroes of 21st century India.
mobHUB
First, Piyush Bagaria from IIT KGP pitched mobHUB, a learning management solution with extensive simulation and visualization capability that he proposes to sell to science and technology educational institutions to empower faculty to produce rich media content. Piyush has got some early encouragement from a couple of schools in Calcutta, and while he needs to expand the scope of his validation process, there are some interesting nuggets in his core idea.
Optimum Mobility Services
Next Lakshman Pasala from IIT KGP presented Optimum Mobility Services, a fleet routing and optimization solution for cab companies, their current validation segment, followed by logistics companies operating trucks, etc. Two cab companies have already validated the idea, and OMS is on their way to signing up more cab companies in India as beta customers. Clearly, the solution offers some concrete value, and conceivably, OMS can look at the global market later on in their evolution. The notion of Indian companies bringing software technology to the Western market at dramatically lower price-points is one that I have highlighted on many prior occasions.
BUYHatke
Then Gaurav Dahake from IIT KGP pitched BUYHatke, a penny auction site that is considering three primary segments with a consumer-to-consumer e-commerce business model: net-savvy housewives, IT and BPO professionals, and college students with Internet access. My feedback was that the company needs to enter the market in a business-to-consumer mode because the logistics infrastructure in India is not at a point where a c-to-c business can thrive. A B-to-C business, on the other hand, can use Flipkart’s logistics infrastructure, and have a better shot at success. My other feedback was to focus on one of the three segments, because everything else – from customer acquisition, to merchandising, to PR, to SEO would work better if the segmentation is tighter.
Univect Education Solutions
Next Parth Pachoir and Udayan Pandey from IIT KGP presented Univect Education Solutions, a social network for parents, teachers, and students in second and third tier Indian cities, to support online expert networks, mentoring programs, knowledge sharing, etc. The team is short of Computer Science expertise, and is looking for a co-founder to add to their pack. I like their focus on second and third tier Indian cities, and they have already started pilots in Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh.
TransTag
Then Nishant Koul from IIT KGP pitched TransTag, a RFID solution to help check car-theft in India. Well, Nishant’s idea, to achieve success, would need the cities to install RFID readers at every street-corner. This is impossible to consider as realistic in the near term. Nishant would turn grey by his mid twenties if he hangs his hat on this idea, so I discouraged him to pursue it. Instead, he should turn his talents elsewhere.
I very much enjoyed getting a peek into IIT KGP’s entrepreneurship action tonight, and look forward to working with other campuses – both in India, as well as in the US, Europe, Asia, and Latin America – on similar programs.
You can listen to the recording of today’s roundtable here. As always, I would very much like to hear about your business, so let me invite you to come and pitch at one of our free 1M/1M public roundtables.
We will be holding future roundtables on the following dates:
Thursday, January 19, 8:00 a.m. PST, Register Here.
Thursday, January 26, 8:00 a.m. PST, Register Here.
If you want a deeper relationship with me, you are very welcome to join the 1M/1M premium program. If you have any questions about the program, please, first study the website, especially What to expect from the 1M/1M premium program and the FAQs. If you have additional questions, please email me, and I would be very happy to respond. Please note that I work exclusively with 1M/1M entrepreneurs.
I also invite you to join the 1M/1M mailing list for the ease and convenience of getting updates. This way we can stay in touch, and it will help you to decide if 1M/1M is a program for you.
IIT photo by zimble thimble
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Strategy Roundtable For Entrepreneurs: ERP Galore
Jan 5th
At today’s roundtable, we had an unusual amount of discussion on ERP startups. Given that ERP is such a mature market, the fact that all this startup activity is going on in ERP is a bit puzzling to me.
Rural ERP
Surjith Singh from Chennai, India, pitched Rural ERP, a business that intends to focus on supplying rural Indian small and micro businesses with local language ERP systems. While there are 30 million small and micro businesses in rural India, according to Surjith, and only 5% of those know English, there are substantial barriers to selling technology to these companies, including the fact that computer knowledge and Internet connections are both quite low in this segment. Hence, building a local language (Tamil, Hindi, Bengali, Punjabi, Marathi, Gujrati) ERP SaaS business will be an uphill task.
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The company, however, has a small ERP product plus customization services business which currently generates $36k a year, on track to do $50k this year. The 20 customers for this business are urban businesses in Tamil Nadu, and one of them had some local language needs coupled with the regular English ERP functions.
The strategy for scaling this business needs to be completely rethought. Building a rural ERP company is going to be an uphill task, and I am not convinced that Surjith should follow that route.
SmartERP
Next Sudhendra Seshachala from Houston, Texas and Bangalore, India, presented SmartERP, catering to the domain-specific needs of textile companies in India. Sudhi also has a professional services business that generates $200-250k a year, and is currently financing his forays into ERP. The textile ERP business is in validation stage with a couple of paying beta customers, and Sudhi needs a strategy to scale both.
My assessment is that the textile industry in India is also extremely backward, so the business model that would work for that sector is more a managed services kind of solution as opposed to a regular software or SaaS model.
Patient-Help
Then Adarsh Patil, also from Bangalore, India, pitched Patient-Help which is toying with two different, albeit related ideas: (a) a doctor-patient marketplace for India (and potentially other markets where the insurance industry is less mature than the U.S. or Europe), and (b) a marketplace for medical tourism. The latter is what he has started implementing, and it has a business model of generating leads via PPC advertising, followed by selling those leads to hospitals and medical service providers.
Adarsh has a crucial decision ahead of him: which of the two businesses is he going to pursue?
You can listen to the recording of today’s roundtable here. As always, I would very much like to hear about your business, so let me invite you to come and pitch at one of our free 1M/1M public roundtables. We will be holding future roundtables on the following dates:
Thursday, January 12, 7:30 p.m. PST, Register Here.
Thursday, January 19, 8:00 a.m. PST, Register Here.
Thursday, January 26, 8:00 a.m. PST, Register Here.
If you want a deeper relationship with me, you are very welcome to join the 1M/1M premium program. If you have any questions about the program, please, first study the website, especially What to expect from the 1M/1M premium program and the FAQs. If you have additional questions, please email me, and I would be very happy to respond. Please note that I work exclusively with 1M/1M entrepreneurs.
I also invite you to join the 1M/1M mailing list for the ease and convenience of getting updates. This way we can stay in touch, and it will help you to decide if 1M/1M is a program for you.
Cane field photo from RDPixelShop
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Strategy Roundtable For Entrepreneurs: Free Apps, Ad-Supported Business Models => Dangerous!
Dec 22nd
At today’s roundtable, the last for 2011, we had four different countries represented and an intense set of discussions on five very interesting businesses – a fabulous event to end the year with.
BootstrapToday
Anand Agarwal from Pune, India, pitched BootStrapToday, an Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) SaaS solution from his company Sensible Softwares. Anand already has 100 beta customers and fifteen of them are paying Rs. 1000-2000 (~$20-$40) per month to access advanced workflow logistics and intelligence in the area of software testing and productivity improvement.
Sponsor
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Strategy Roundtable for Entrepreneurs: Web 3.0 & Social Dancing, Romania Emerging
Dec 15th
At today’s roundtable, we had a 30-minute segment on Web 3.0 and Social Dancing. We basically took the Web 3.0 framework – Web 3.0 = (4C + P + VS) – and did a blue sky exercise on how to create a comprehensive user experience for social dancers. We also explored business models that not only can span advertising, subscription, and e-commerce, but also hybrid virtual-physical concepts that could even draw upon a Starbucks of Salsa, Tango or Swing!
It’s a fun segment, so please take a look at the recording here. I hope some of you reading this post ARE social dancers. I am. I would love to see a much better leverage of web technologies to facilitate the formulation of dance related experiences. For more, you can also follow the discussion on my blog titled: Web 3.0 and the Argentine Tango. Complete with videos and definitive use cases, it would give an interested reader some great ideas on how to design such a Web 3.0 system.
Sponsor
Then we moved to another exciting segment for which I need to give you some context. As you may recall from previous roundtable posts, that 1M/1M works closely with many incubators around the world. We simply offer our services as an extension of the incubators’ existing programming. Today, Timisoara Software Business Incubator, led by Executive Director Radu Ticiu, brought on an entrepreneur to pitch, giving us a window into the Romanian startup scene.
123ContactForm
Florin Cornianu from Timisoara, Romania, pitched 123ContactForm, a company that competes in the same space as YCombinator’s WuFoo that exited earlier this year for a $35M price, and was acquired by SurveyMonkey. In other words, 123ContactForm offers web forms of all kinds that are used by web developers, small businesses, etc., for various purposes, from surveys to lead collection.
Florin has already built a nice, profitable business with $100,000 a year in revenue. Of course, the significantly lower cost-structure in Romania helps a lot. He is looking at additional expansion opportunities, especially in Europe (through the introduction of multi-language forms) and Asia (through channel partners).
The space is crowded, and requires steady navigation. However, it is wonderful to see steadfast execution from a software startup, and the evolution of a sustainable business in Romania. We hope to see many more in 2012.
You can listen to the recording of today’s roundtable here. As always, I would very much like to hear about your business, so let me invite you to come and pitch at one of our free 1M/1M public roundtables. We will be holding future roundtables at 8:00 a.m. PST on the following dates:
Thursday, December 22, Register Here.
Thursday, January 5, Register Here.
Thursday, January 19, Register Here.
Thursday, January 26, Register Here.
If you want a deeper relationship with me, you are very welcome to join the 1M/1M premium program. If you have any questions about the program, please, first study the website, especially What to expect from the 1M/1M premium program and the FAQs. If you have additional questions, please email me, and I would be very happy to respond. Please note that I work exclusively with 1M/1M entrepreneurs.
I also invite you to join the 1M/1M mailing list for the ease and convenience of getting updates. This way we can stay in touch and it will help you to decide if 1M/1M is a program for you.
Dance photo by Gabriel
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