Roundtable Recap: March 3 – Spotlight On The Northwest

At this week’s One Million by One Million roundtable, we put a special focus on entrepreneurs in the northwestern part of the United States, and we had three presenters, all from Washington.

The first, Nitie Mehta from Redmond, Washington, presented Dental Office Services, a business process outsourcing (BPO) concept targeted to help small dental offices handle their office management, financial processing, claims collections, and patient communication functions.

Nitie is working with dentists to validate her assumptions about the service, and she is a member of the 1M/1M premium program. In the spirit of 1M/1M, I invited the audience to connect her with dentists in the United States who may be willing to speak with her and help her understand the specifics of what she needs to put together in her offering. And readers, I request you to do the same. Please feel free to e-mail Nitie with your suggestions through 1M/1M.

Meanwhile, I also asked Nitie to look into what athenahealth offers in terms of dental practices since they are one of the most successful SaaS-enabled BPO companies in existence right now in the field of healthcare IT. It would be a good idea to explore what part of their technology could be used to deliver what Nitie wants to offer. You can read more about athenahealth here.

We also had two other entrepreneurs who are working with the William Factory Incubator in Tacoma, Washington.

Scott Deutsch and Robin Deutsch with Wise Mind Studios LLC in Tacoma presented Life Skills Winner, a learning app to help autistic and developmentally challenged children learn certain skills. The app has just been released and has been downloaded about 250 times in a week, which is a good start.

While I like the basic concept, the company needs to do a lot of positioning work. It’s a bit all over the place, trying to cater to everybody and their mother (literally), including refugees from developing countries. I advised them to focus on parents of autistic children of a certain age band, say 5 to 7 years. It is that kind of precision that will drive a focused go-to-market strategy.

Then Greg Snead, also from Tacoma, discussed Orbiter, an RFID venture that is moving along quite nicely, having clocked more than $700,000 in revenue last year. The company has bootstrapped using services, a philosophy we espouse heavily in 1M/1M, and has simultaneously gathered a group of angel investors who are supporting it through the next phase. At this point, Greg is in the process of bringing in two additional investors, and  the primary topics of our discussion were valuation and ROI issues around the new investors. Orbiter expects to give its investors a 15 times return on investment based on their current pipeline and revenue forecast. If that does happen, I would say the investors will have done extremely well.

In addition to the Northwest contingent, we had Dan Stewart from Safety Harbor, Florida, pitching Happy Grasshopper. Dan is also a premium member of the 1M/1M program and a serial entrepreneur, having done about seven companies so far. Happy Grasshopper is an e-mail marketing service that assists real estate agents in reaching out to their networks and generating referrals. Dan is already seeing strong conversion from site visitors to free registrations (over 17%, which is excellent), and reasonable conversion from free to paid subscribers for the service. Dan wanted to know how to increase the conversion.

My sense is that because Dan has such good ROI case studies, it would simply be a matter of showcasing these case studies prominently on the landing page and then focusing on increasing traffic flow into the site. We discussed a numbers of customer acquisition methods to do so. We also discussed Dan’s options vis-à-vis channel partners.

Up last, Thomas Vellaringattu from San Jose, California, pitched Social Pulse, a service through which he is helping small businesses that are not terribly net savvy set up profiles and use social media to market and curate relevant information to help them market.

Tom wants to use college students and unemployed people and arm them with the Social Pulse platform, such that they can market the service in their local region, as well as make money by building and managing Social Pulse profiles on behalf of local small businesses.

Tom has positioning issues and has presented Social Pulse as a much broader service than what it needs to be. We discussed ways to acquire small business customers and how to recruit college students through internships.

Next week, we are going to partner with the Indian Angel Network for the strategy roundtable. You can register for the next roundtable here.

You can also listen to the recording of today’s roundtable here and select the business you like best through a poll on the 1M/1M Facebook page. Recordings of previous roundtables are all available 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