Roundtable Recap: January 6 – Top 10 Vertical and Social Web Trends For The Decade

On January 6, 2011, we hosted our 64th FREE One Million by One Million (1M/1M) strategy roundtable for entrepreneurs, and the first for this year.

We started this week’s roundtable with a discussion of all the resources we have brought together over the last three years to help entrepreneurs, including a comprehensive curriculum for entrepreneurship development on a large scale. This curriculum is based on the various questions entrepreneurs have asked me over these 64 sessions, spanning financing, positioning, customer acquisition, marketing, sales, channel, and other early stage startup related issues.

As usual, I then talked with three entrepreneurs working on specific businesses.

First up was John Bertoni with Mava Consulting, who is setting up a part-time sales force for companies to use without having to invest the fully loaded cost of a direct sales rep in each region. John has rightly observed that many small companies, as well as foreign companies trying to get into the United States, have limited budget, and could use 25% of the time of a sales rep in each region or city, say, New York, San Francisco, Chicago, and Seattle. So, effectively, at the cost of one full-time sales rep, they can access coverage in four different regions.

I like the idea and recognize the problem. John already has a couple of customers, and he needs about 50 customers to get to $1 million in annual revenue. I offered to help him market his services through 1M/1M, since his target customer base overlaps rather nicely with the 1M/1M community.

Next Julie Acevedo presented Juju Band, a newborn navel protection band to cover the umbilical cord for about eight weeks from birth. Drawing on traditions in the Latin American community, Julie and her partner are bringing to market a very specific product to address a very specific pain, and I believe she can build a very successful e-commerce business based on this idea. In 1M/1M, we have extensive expertise on bootstrapping e-commerce businesses, and will be happy to help her navigate the paths of customer acquisition, inventory, merchandising, and financing. To begin with, today I gave her a set of immediate action items, including starting a blog, a PPC campaign with ideas on how to position her keywords, and guidance on merchandising.

Then J.J. Yosh presented Ancient Tomorrow, a concept for a TV show drawing upon ancient wisdom to unearth alternative energy innovations used by ancient cultures. Very cool concept designed by an energy scientist, upon which J.J. wants to develop a mystery show. He has written a first season with nine episodes, and has built some relationships on the production side. He is looking for financing for the show.

My knowledge of television show financing is limited, although a friend of mine was the COO of Magical Elves, a Hollywood production company that has produced Top Chef and Project Runway. I’ve had several conversations over the years on TV show financing, and the basic formula is that you have to get a network to finance your show. This means you have to convince a network that focuses on your topic – in this case, A&E, National Geographic, Discovery Channel, or perhaps The History Channel – to buy into your concept and agree to fund the production. That is what I advised J.J. to pursue.

In the Entrepreneur Journeys methodology, we focus on customer validation as early as possible. In the case of J.J’s business, the customer is the network. Unless he can get a network to buy in, there will be no point in producing the show.

Finally, I spent the last part of the session on the methodology that we teach in 1M/1M, as well as few minutes on trends.

In fact, in the discussion on JuJu brands is yet another validation of the verticalization and niche-ization of the Internet. This week, I published an article called The Top 10 Vertical and Social Web Trends where I have discussed this at length. I am pretty convinced that the web will get increasingly more verticalized, where appropriate, localized, and niche businesses will do very, very well. This is my core assumption on Web 3.0. In 1M/1M, we have a huge emphasis on helping today’s Web entrepreneurs navigate their ways into a Web 3.0 tomorrow.

It is clear to me, after doing these strategy sessions for over two years, that entrepreneurs need a lot more training on positioning and go-to-market, financing strategies, including alternative financing besides venture capital. As such, I have created video lecture modules with case studies in the 1M/1M premium lounge on these topics with very specific guidance on what analysis to perform and how. The easiest way for me to teach a large number of entrepreneurs some of these basics is to have you spend 30–40 hours on the curriculum I have created, and then have you come work with me on refining your strategies and positioning at the private roundtables.

I have thought a lot about how to make an entrepreneurship education and eco-system scalable and accessible to a vastly larger number of people. The answer to that question, I believe, is the 1M/1M Premium Lounge.

You can listen to the recording of today’s roundtable 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