Roundtable Recap: January 20 – Personalization Remains An Open Problem

I want to start today’s recap with a prayer for Steve Jobs. I just wrote a post on my blog saying, Apple Doesn’t Need Steve Jobs; Tech Industry Does. It sums up my sadness at the thought of our industry not having the privilege of Steve’s thought process. I have, most certainly, drawn tremendous inspiration from him as a thinker and a visionary. I am sure most entrepreneurs have.

With this week’s One Million by One Million roundtable, we have moved from the DimDim web conferencing platform to the ViVu video conferencing platform. DimDim, as you know, was recently acquired by Salesforce.com.

First up today was Michael Greenberg presenting Better Personal Advertising. Mike wants to manage online identity on behalf of consumers, so that they can maintain multiple identities for different types of sites, say photo, career, etc. and present themselves better in those different contexts.

Mike’s customer acquisition strategy is weak at this point, and he also has a rather broad strategy in approaching this market. While I do believe there is an interesting opportunity in identity management, I am going to need to work much more closely with Mike to extract the nuggets out of his idea, and give shape to a viable go to market strategy.

Then Kelly Fallis pitched Remote Stylist, a personalized interior decoration advice service coupled with e-commerce in the domain of furniture and furnishings. Kelly’s business has already done about $150k in 2010 revenue, which tells me that she has successfully validated at least some of her assumptions. Kelly has a lot of gaps in her customer acquisition strategy, as well as positioning, and she is seeing customers from commercial and residential clients. All this is too broad, and needs tightening up on multiple dimensions.

I like the business idea a lot, and in 1M/1M, we know a lot about building Web 3.0 and e-Commerce businesses, so I would love to work with Kelly to help her figure out the various nuances of building a successful e-commerce business, especially one that differentiates on personalization. I have repeatedly said that personalization is an open opportunity in web businesses, and needs to be tapped this decade. For Kelly, a good starting point would be the 1M/1M Curriculum, where we can offer her a lot more on the subject.

Next Sajeeva Bora with tekMunk Software Solutions discussed BizzGenie, a business software concept to help retailers manage the decision-making between “shop floors and top floors”. Sajeeva and his cofounders have good domain knowledge of the retail business, but have not yet done sufficient validation of the idea. He is looking for money and naturally, getting rejected by investors for lack of validation. As I have said before, this is not the right stage to look for money. There’s more work to be done to prepare for a funding round.

Nwenna Kai then presented Food Is Our Medicine Vision, an online training concept through which she wants to teach community leaders how to create healthier living concepts like organic gardens, etc. in urban areas. Nwenna has surveyed about 200 readers of her blog, and they have told her that they would be willing to pay $400-$800 for such courses.

Nwenna came to the roundtable with the question: what now? Where do I begin? Well, that’s a rather large question to answer in 5 minutes, but she obviously needs to start validating her business within that group of 200 users who have said they’re willing to pay for her offering.

Up last was Gagan Biyani pitching Udemy, an online marketplace for educators and experts to teach various topics. Gagan has about 150 completed courses on the site so far, and about 10 of those are monetizing. He has run some experiments within the entrepreneurship training vertical, and has seen success when he has brought on known thought leaders. However, he faces the problem that the top tier thought leaders are unwilling to set up shop on his site. They have their own programs under their own brands.

Interestingly, Nwenna, who pitched right before Gagan, would be very interested in setting up shop on Udemy, and teaching her concepts and bringing her audience onto Udemy. We did this spot validation at the roundtable, and I believe, Gagan got a customer. However, I’d like to see a more focused, vertical specific go-to-market strategy in Udemy. At some level, Gagan’s focus on entrepreneurship courses doesn’t really align with Nwenna’s target audience.

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. In fact, at a time when we’re facing severe youth unemployment in America and Europe, and the emerging markets are just starting to build their entrepreneurship eco-systems, we really need to think deeply on how more and more young people can be efficiently, rapidly and cost-effectively be trained in entrepreneurship.

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