Roundtable Recap: September 23 – Do Not Spray And Pray

At today’s roundtable, we had three niche e-commerce entrepreneurs and two e-commerce infrastructure entrepreneurs. I will describe their businesses briefly, below. You can vote on which one you like most by clicking on our Facebook page. If you missed the session, please listen to the recording before voting.

First up was Brad Barrett presenting GrillGrate, a grill accessory with which Brad has built a year-to-date revenue of $400,000. We discussed how Brad might be able to do his first $1 million year by leveraging the upcoming holiday season. What is working well for Brad is a combination of television infomercials and e-commerce. Brad has had some success in working with retailers as well, but I advised him to be careful about the cash flow management. To do a solid holiday season, he will need to balance the inventory and marketing budgets, and getting stuck in a complex situation with inventory being stuff in the retail channels with bad terms will be the kiss of death. I will work with him on his inventory financing strategy.

Then Jeanne Chinn with JCLABoutique.com presented an upcoming e-commerce company that is planning to sell $210 tote bags for carrying pets. Jeanne’s positioning needs a lot of work. While she articulates a good value proposition of being able to easily detach the inside layer of the bag for cleaning purposes, her go-to-market strategy needs better segmentation, and much more accuracy. Otherwise, customer acquisition will be a huge problem.

In general, for entrepreneurs operating at a 30,000 feet level, I am concerned that unless you get down to earth and develop more granular and specific strategies, you will not get traction in the market. I ask all entrepreneurs to work with the Clarify Your Story framework in preparing for the roundtable, but very often I see entrepreneurs who don’t quite get the level of precision they need to. As a result, the pitches sound like spray and pray to me. I am happy to help you tighten your strategies, but I cannot over-emphasize the need for homework. We’re giving you material to do your homework with. Listen to multiple sessions, see how I help various entrepreneurs tighten their strategies, and then go back and implement similar strategies in your own business. This is why we follow this case study based teaching method – so you can learn from the situations of others.

Next, Umakant Soni discussed Vimagino.com, a software for Web-based Q&A support to engage customers better on sites that are trying to draw people in and convert them into customers. Now, the Web self-service software market is very crowded with major players like RightNow already deeply entrenched. With enterprise customers, this would result in tremendous exit barriers, making sales cycles long and involved, which a small startup will find hard to withstand. For Vimagino, therefore, an OEM strategy is a far better starting point. I will connect the company to a few larger companies that may be good OEM channels for them.

Then Dhana Cohen pitched TheNextBigZing.com, where she has collected various merchants with video reviews of products. She wants to sell these products on her site. Her upcoming campaign of reaching out to 100,000 moms will be one of the first concerted efforts to actually test her business model. I would be curious to see what results this experiment produces.

Last up was Indrajit Chowdhury discussing PowerStores.in, an e-commerce storefront building software for the Indian market. E-commerce has had extremely slow penetration in India, one of the key reasons being the lack of reliability of the delivery and logistics chain. Products get lost in the mail, and that, if you are selling expensive products, is a nightmare for merchants. Another issue is that India has had no catalog shopping industry, so the consumer psyche is not used to buying products that would be delivered later. Add to this the Not-Invented-Here (NIH) syndrome that most e-commerce companies in India have . . .  will they buy Indrajit’s product? I advised Indrajit to find a small group of brick-and-mortar retailers in the Bombay–Pune region (because he is based on Goa, also on the west coast of India) selling not-too-expensive products, and see if they want to go online. This may be the best place where Indrajit can start selling his product. Good news: Indrajit is a solo entrepreneur, so he doesn’t have a large overhead to support.

I started doing my free Online Strategy Roundtables for entrepreneurs in the fall of 2008. These roundtables are the cornerstone programming of a global initiative that I have started called One Million by One Million (1M/1M). Its mission is to help a million entrepreneurs globally to reach $1 million in revenue and beyond, build $1 trillion in sustainable global GDP, and create 10 million jobs. In 1M/1M, I teach the EJ methodology, which is based on my Entrepreneur Journeys research, and emphasize bootstrapping, idea validation, and crisp positioning as some of the core principles of building strong fundamentals in early stage ventures. In addition, we are offering entrepreneurs access to investors and customers through our 1M/1M Incubation Radar series. You can pitch to be featured on my blog following these instructions. All three of today’s roundtable companies will soon be featured on Incubation Radar.

The recording of this roundtable can be found here. Recordings of previous roundtables are all available here. You can register for the next roundtable here.

This segment is a part in the series : Roundtable Recap
. March 25 – A Mixed Bag Of Advice . April 1 – Bootstrapping Tips . April 8 – A Focus On E-Commerce . April 15 – Small Is OK; The Goal Is Profitability . April 22 – The Original Runners . April 29 – Finding The Right Direction . May 6 – Defining Value Proposition . May 20 – Validation, Validation, Validation . May 27 – Is The Venture Worth Your Time? . June 3 – Defining Market Segments . June 10 – Efficient Targeting . June 17 – Online Education Startups . June 24 – Three Startups That Can Hit One Million Dollars . July 1 - Get Your Pricing Model Validated . July 8 - The EJ Methodology . July 15 - A Market Of Late Adopters . July 22 - Bootstrap Using Services . July 29 - Startups In Malaysia . August 5 - Paying Customers =>Validation =>Valuation . August 19 - Niche E-Commerce Is Great For Bootstrapping . August 26 - 85%-90% Of Search Traffic Comes From Organic Search . September 2 - Find High Velocity Channels . September 9 - Open Opportunities In Cloud Computing And Rural BPO . September 16 – 5 Cloud Computing Opportunities for Entrepreneurs . September 23 - Do Not Spray And Pray . September 30 - Investors Don't Fund Broad Ideas . October 7 - Try To Get At Least $2M Pre-Money In Seed Round Valuation . October 14 - Professional Investors Do Not Invest In $20 Million Markets . October 21 - Bootstrapping Comes In Many Flavors . October 28 – Convert Potential Competitors To Partners . November 4 - Premium Lounge Sneak Preview . November 11 - African Tech Entrepreneurs Emerging . November 18 - Not Coming To The Rescue Of Victory . December 2 - Niche Marketplace Businesses Can Be Interesting . December 9 - Where Should You Raise Money? . December 16 - Top 10 Tech Trends To Watch . January 6 - Top 10 Vertical and Social Web Trends For The Decade . January 13 - Top 10 Online Advertising Trends For The Decade . January 20 - Personalization Remains An Open Problem . January 27 - Non-Dilutive Financing Through Revenue Sharing . February 3 - Indian Entrepreneurs Are Maturing . February 10 - When Keywords Are Competitive . February 17 - Indian Company Plugs Gap In Google’s Enterprise Solution . February 24 - VCs, Angels, Incubators, Accelerators – What Are You Doing With Your Rejects? . March 3 - Spotlight On The Northwest . March 10 - Spotlight On India . March 17 - Spotlight On Latin And Central America . March 24 - 75th Session Spotlights The Midwest . March 31 - Microsoft’s $100,000 India Startup Challenge Grant . April 6 - 1M/1M Announces Important Partnership With MAD Incubator, Malaysia . April 9 - 1M/1M Announces Partnership With TiE Chennai . April 16 - 1M/1M Partners With Indian Angel Network Incubator . April 17 - High-Octane Energy In Pune . April 21- Incubators Are Reaching Out To 1M/1M . April 28 - Guerrilla P.R. & SEO Most Profitable Customer Acquisition Strategies . May 5 - Ownership Matters . May 12 - Two Really Cool Companies . May 19, Making Money From Blogs . May 26 - Twitter, LinkedIn - Why Not Affiliates? . June 2 - 1M/1M And Incubators - What We Have Learned . June 9 - Silicon Valley . June 16 - Exciting Companies Lined Up For Microsoft Startup Grant Finals . June 23 - New Assessment Tool For Entrepreneurs . June 30 - Continued International Participation . July 21 - Crowd Sourced Funding Exchanges - An Emerging Trend . July 28 - Investors And Incubators Need To Look At Pre-Incubation . August 4 - How Do You Bootstrap Freemium Ventures? . August 11 - Menlo Park And The Silicon Valley Renaissance . August 25 - How To Use Twitter For Lead Generation . September 1 - Fall Call To Action . September 8 - A View Into Israeli Start-ups . September 15 - Do Your Homework First . September 22 - How Do You Catalyze A Region’s Entrepreneurship? . September 29 - From Poland To Argentina . October 6 - Dedicated To Steve Jobs, Reinforcing Mission To Restructure Capitalism . October 13 - FREE Is Not A Business Model . October 20 - Non-profits And For-profits . October 27 - Check Out Stanzr . November 3 - VCs Are Not Always Right . November 17 - Business Schools And Early Stage Entrepreneurship . December 1 - 1M/1M Premium Company Freshdesk Wins Funding From Accel Partners . December 8 - Three Open Opportunities For 2012 . December 15 - Web 3.0 And Social Dancing; Romania Emerging . December 22 - Free Apps, Ad-Supported Business Models => Dangerous! . January 5 - ERP Galore . January 12-13 - Spotlight On IIT Kharagpur, India . January 19 - Are Media Sites Fundable? . January 26th - Spotlight On Jacksonville, Florida . February 2 - YCombinator vs. 1M/1M . February 9 - Are You Fundable? . February 16 - What’s Happening In Turkey? . February 23 - Microsoft Israel To Offer 1M/1M Scholarships . March 1 - Strategy Gaps Need To Be Plugged . March 12 - Winners Of Microsoft Israel Scholarships . March 15 - Spotlight On 3 Day Startup Tel-Aviv . April 3 - Rendezvous In Bangalore . April 12 - More From Indian Entrepreneurs . April 19 - Tyranny Of The TAM . April 26 - A Rare Women-Only Session . May 3 - Some Wonderful Opportunities With Corporate Partners . May 10 - BlueSnap-Elance Contest Applications Deadline This Weekend . May 22 - Winners Of TechHub-A&N Media Battle Of The Startups Contest In London Win 1M/1M Scholarships