Posts tagged Strategy
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
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Online Newsrooms: A Necessity for Search and Social Content Strategy
Feb 9th
Think content. Think fresh content. Think Google loves content. Think social shares of content. Now when news breaks in a tweet and via mobile device, the online newsroom can hold the keys to dominating online visibility in a three-screen world.
View full post on Search Engine Watch – Latest
Google Plus SEO could equal profit for companies with smart social media strategy – Toronto Star
Feb 9th
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Google Plus SEO could equal profit for companies with smart social media strategy
Toronto Star … including key link to al Qaeda Air Canada loses $60M in fourth quarter Tooba Yahya to appeal murder convictions Google Plus SEO could equal profit for companies with smart social media strategy Google Plus, Facebook, Twitter, social media and. |
View full post on SEO – Google News
[Poll] What Is Facebook’s Best Mobile Monetization Strategy?
Feb 3rd
You would think that a company with 423 million monthly active mobile users would find a way to squeeze some revenue out of them. Easier said than done. The biggest question to come out of Facebook’s S-1 filing for its IPO was how the company could monetize its robust mobile app ecosystem. How will Facebook do it? Stitching in mobile banner ads is not likely a solution for Facebook. We explore Facebook’s opportunities and ask for your opinion in this week’s ReadWriteMobile poll.
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From Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s letter to shareholders:
By helping people form these connections, we hope to rewire the way people spread and consume information. We think the world’s information infrastructure should resemble the social graph – a network built from the bottom up or peer-to-peer, rather than the monolithic, top-down structure that has existed to date. We also believe that giving people control over what they share is a fundamental principle of this rewiring.
One of the beautiful (or creepy) things about Facebook ads on a desktop browser is that they are targeted straight to the user. Facebook knows where you are, what you are sharing, who your friends are and what they are doing. If you “Like” pages, it knows what brands you like, what books you read, what TV and movies you watch. With the Open Graph and Timeline, it also knows other verbs associated with your lifestyle, such as when and how far you run when exercising, what you eat and what music you listen to. All of this, of course, if you choose to share it.
It has been pointed out several times after Facebook filed its S-1 that the key to the company’s billions has been the “Like” button. The Like button turned a mammoth but disorganized social graph into a skeletal body that permeates both the front and back end of the Internet. Facebook was then able to correlate users’ interest graph and advertising against that. If you think about it, the Like button isthe most brilliant inventions of the Web 2.0 era. The Like button organized the social Web, gave it backbone, structure… and money.
One of Facebook’s challenges will be to take the data it already has through the Like button and burgeoning Open Graph ecosystem and apply it to mobile. What will this look like? Will we see the same banner and targeted ads that we see on our desktop? How does Facebook do this without ruining the mobile user experience and angering its most dedicated users?
On the other hand, targeted advertising actually has larger potential when it is taken off the desktop and put into the pockets of users. Smartphones are sophisticated sensors that recognize the world around them. The capability of knowing where a person is, what they are doing and who they are with will only grow as devices evolve over the next several years. The social Web in the physical world. This is where Facebook’s biggest opportunity is. Geo-fenced push notifications, proximity alerts when near something or someone on your interest graph, location-based deals. To a certain extent, you have heard it all before. Startups have been working on how to bring push advertising and messaging to mobile since smartphones became location aware. Yet, none of those startups have the user base that Facebook has.
Google will also likely turn to more of a messaging-based mobile advertising strategy in the future. With an Android in 50% of smartphone users pockets, Google has the potential to know more about you than any other company on Earth. It probably already does.
Facebook could also set up a platform, much like AdMob for Facebook, which serves as a real-time bidding (RTB) exchange for keywords based on the social and Open Graph. By making it an ad platform, Facebook takes a lot of the work out of building its own internal ad infrastructure. Google has employed the RTB method to great success.
Or, it could be a mixture of all of these avenues.
There is also the idea of payments through the app ecosystem. Mobile Web-based games built on top of the social graph with in-app payments. This harkens to the so-called “Project Spartan” that Facebok was rumored to be working on last year. It does not have to be only games either. Brands could create Facebook Page mobile Web apps and tie incentives and payments through Facebook Credits. The ability to turn Pages into mobile advertising or payment revenue could be a huge vertical for Facebook.
As you can see, there are a lot of opportunities and avenues for Facebook to take when monetizing its mobile user base. What is the likeliest choice? What will be the best money maker for Facebook in the mobile realm? Take the poll below and let us know your thoughts in the comments.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
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.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
6 Reasons Why Adding Google+ to Your Web Presence & SEO Strategy is a Good Idea – iMedia Connection (blog)
Jan 30th
 Promotion World (press release) |
6 Reasons Why Adding Google+ to Your Web Presence & SEO Strategy is a Good Idea
iMedia Connection (blog) This is proof that the lines between social networking, social media and SEO are indeed thinning and that social networking and social signals are becoming more important to the practice of SEO. Google+ is a social networking force to be reckoned with … The (Quickly) Changing Role of Twitter in SEO |
View full post on SEO – Google News
Strategy Roundtable: Spotlight On Jacksonville, Florida
Jan 26th
Today’s roundtable was co-hosted with the Jacksonville Startup Weekend. For the uninitiated, Startup Weekends are 54-hour events where entrepreneurs come together to pitch ideas, form teams, and learn best practices.
This past weekend, the Jacksonville entrepreneurship community hosted their own version of this exciting program. 150 people came together, and 17 businesses were formed. An additional 50 were on the wait-list, an evidence of the energy and enthusiasm that is bubbling in Florida right now. MJ Charmani, founder of iStart Jax, a business accelerator, and one of the key organizers of the event, introduced today’s session with additional reports on last weekend’s event.
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Armex Zero Suit
First, Eric Keeler with Armex Industries, Inc. pitched the Armex Zero Suit, a new kind of durable, special-purpose suit with significantly higher heat and cold resistance targeted towards racecar drivers, firefighters, and military personnel. Eric has done some technology scouting, and believes he can deliver on the specs of the product.
The problem, however, is that he is assuming that an investor would fund the product development. Investors rarely fund concepts. Even seed investors generally fund businesses that are already rolling. So, Eric will need to create a method with which to get to paying customers before any investor would invest. In addition, there is significant work to do on market sizing and go-to-market strategy. Direct selling simply is not the right solution for bringing this product to market. The price-point is too low for that to be sustainable.
pay2pitch.com
Next Perry Kaye presented pay2pitch.com, a network where entrepreneurs will come and pitch investors and mentors and pay, say, $1,000 for a twenty-minute interaction. The money, however, will be donated to the investor or mentor’s favorite charity.
Perry rightly points out that a miniscule percentage of entrepreneurs get funded. We agree on the observation, and many of you have already seen our The Other 99% video. However, Perry’s observation that entrepreneurs don’t get funded because they can’t get meetings is not entirely accurate. Most entrepreneurs don’t get funded because they are simply not fundable. For a variety of different reasons that have to do with the fundamentals of their businesses, entrepreneurs, even if they CAN get meetings, don’t get funded. So paying $1,000 to get a 20-minute meeting, in my opinion, is a total wastage of money. Of course, if the assumption is that this is for charity, that is different.
The second problem with the assumption here is that mentoring networks typically do not scale. You can see my video on the subject to get more color on why.
Bottomline, we get this question very often: Can 1M/1M help me get funded? So yes, tons of entrepreneurs are looking for funding, whether or not they should. Most of them are not fundable. So getting them to pay $1,000 for a 20-minute meeting that will most likely result in a rejection seems deceptive to me.
Ziffor
Then Tim LeMaster pitched Ziffor, a service for table restaurants that would like to offer promotions for non-peak times. This is a compelling idea, because many restaurants that have experimented with Groupon-like services have often been overwhelmed with unprofitable customers showing up during peak hours. Tim’s idea offers a good solution to this problem.
However, there are some serious operational complexities involved to make a solution like this work at scale. Getting access to restaurant booking data won’t be easy. Also, selling to restaurants is expensive, as we have seen in the massive operational expenditure and lack of profitability in the Groupon model.
I reviewed Tim’s financial assumptions, and advised him to redo them with the assumption that the team would have to bootstrap the business locally, get enough validation, etc., before any investor would even consider investing.
SustanAbin
Next Rushabh Shah pitched SustainAbin, a concept that anchors on the assumption that 83 million people are searching for how to practice a green lifestyle. Rushabh wants to create a portal that harnesses this traffic, and give them meaningful content, based on which he would be able to generate high value leads for local businesses in the sustainability area such as solar, organic farming, etc.
Rushabh needs to do a lot of studying of how lead-arbitrage businesses work. To make a case of the business he proposes, he would have to, somehow, channel the search traffic from Google to his site. This is the domain of PPC and SEO, and the market is very competitive, buying extremely expensive.
On the business model side, also, some of the assumptions of monetizing with advertising are misplaced. I keep repeating this: there is way too much unmonetized ad inventory out there, driving CPMs down. Dramatically. Rushabh’s analysis of the business needs to be significantly more thorough and comprehensive to even assess viability.
Bthere
Vincent Laganella then pitched Bthere, an excellent concept of analyzing 911 data feeds to extract leads for glass repair, door and window repair, and other crime-related contexts that immediately trigger needs in consumers. For example, a consumer has just had a burglar break in to the house through a glass window. The 911 call would generate a lead for a local glass repair shop instantly. And small businesses would be more than happy to pay good money for such immediately actionable leads. Very strong idea, and excellent analysis of the business fundamentals.
Overall, today’s roundtable was a window into Jacksonville’s efforts at drumming up additional entrepreneurship for regional economic development. The Startup Weekend programs around the world are doing this in different cities, and the organization is supported by the Kauffman Foundation. We look forward to supporting more such efforts through the 1M/1M initiative.
The Roundtable
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 2, Register Here.
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.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
There Is Opportunity In Diversifying Your Android Publishing Strategy
Jan 25th
Mobile marketing company Tapjoy has had a tumultuous ride in the last year. It has been bounced around by Apple and its App Store terms of service, has gone to the Web to skirt Apple’s policies, integrated mobile video ads and set up a fund for iOS developers to port their games to Android. It has been scattershot and frenetic but it appears that, finally, the company is starting to see some success.
Tapjoy launched a mobile Web-based application store late in 2011 with the intention of skirting Apple and bringing iOS, Android and HTML5-based Facebook games to one central location. Through its Android Fund, Tapjoy now has 130 applications that includes several million user editions. So much for the notion that 2012 would be the death of the third-party app store.
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For the record, I still believe that many third-party app stores will eventually get pushed out the ecosystem. It seems now that the market is still in its boom phase where many parties believe there is money to be made by living off the scraps from the Android Market and Apple App Store. And hey, why not? If Apple proved anything with its $700 million paid to iOS developers last quarter, it is that there is a healthy and vibrant demand for mobile applications and that there is money to be made by all.
Despite its bumpy ride, Tapjoy has been growing quickly. Its Android network reached 25 million monthly active users in December 2011. That is, of course, thanks to its focus on Android after iOS kicked the company and its virtual currency out of the App Store. Tapjoy then partnered with PapayaMobile to bring social discovery to mobile apps through its Web-based store.
“Our goal for the Tapjoy Android Fund was to help enhance the Android ecosystem by bringing great games from Facebook, iOS and other platforms to the Android Market,” said Rob Carroll, Tapjoy’s director of publishing, in a press release.
So, Tapjoy has been growing. So, it has had some success with Android apps. So what? Tapjoy in and of itself is only one player, and a smaller one, in the larger sea that is the Empire Of Android. Tapjoy’s recent success actually has a lot less to do with the company than the trend it represents.
What is the biggest problem facing Android developers? Making money. The Android Market has not been conducive helping publishers to that end. We expect Google to help change that in 2012 but right now there is an ecosystem building around Android that can help developers get their apps discovered and get paid. While there is basically zero grey market for iOS apps, the grey market for Android is a viable place for publishers to turn to. Whether it is the Tapjoy Android Fund and its repository of apps or the Amazon Android Appstore or GetJar (which just signed a deal with GameLoft) there are alternatives.
Android publishers have opportunities to make money. It is not as streamlined as iOS and some creativity will be needed. Diversifying your Android strategy can help you put apps on users’ smartphones and dollars in your pocket.
Developers: What is your Android strategy? Do you rely on the Android Market or ar you actively pursuing outside opportunities in third party application stores? Let us know in the comments.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Is Your Link Strategy Selfish?
Jan 22nd
The pursuit of links is far too often a highly selfish process. It’s all about your target keywords, your business model, and your rankings. Getting over your selfish goals and thinking about what others want is where actual innovation comes from.
View full post on Search Engine Watch – Latest
Facebook Marketing: a Powerful SEO-building Strategy – Set Piece Analysts
Jan 22nd
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Facebook Marketing: a Powerful SEO-building Strategy
Set Piece Analysts Facebook marketing has emerged as one of the most powerful SEO-building strategies in today's web business world. If you own a business site or blog and are looking for a platform to promote it to a wide community of audience, then you can try out … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
