Roundtable Recap: March 24 – 75th Session Spotlights The Midwest
This week’s One Million by One Million roundtable was our 75th session, and we worked today with three entrepreneurs from the Midwest region of the United States. Our co-host for the program was TiE Midwest based in Chicago.
First up, Priyanshu Harshavat from Evanston, Illinois, presented Socioclean, a service for cleaning up your reputation on social networks. The company addresses a widely-experienced pain: employers are now using social networks for background check on issues such as comments about prior employers, substance-usage, and general image issues that may come across as red-flags to a prospective employer. Jobseekers, therefore, need help cleaning up their social media profiles so that objectionable material does not find its way to these background check scenarios, disrupting their chances of getting hired.
Socioclean already has about 25,000 users, and has good interest from a dozen colleges and universities who want to offer white label solutions through their career development offices. Monetization models, while not yet validated, can come from charging the customer base that is already acquainted with the service, as well as selling the white label solutions to colleges. In addition, Priyanshu is also considering an enterprise solution with the notion of cleaning up the profiles of employees (based on social media policies) of objectionable material.
The discussion today was around Socialmedia financing and go-to-market strategy. My assessment is that this is a good company that should be able to raise money at this point. Additional work in figuring out the precise go-to-market (consumer, academic institution, or enterprise – each is a different business), and consequent business model and pricing model will help enhance the company’s valuation.
Next Chris Ruder from Chicago, Illinois, pitched Spikeball, a new volleyball-esque game that is being played at camps and college campuses. The game set retails online at $49.95, and about 2,000 unites have already been sold. Chris is primarily trying to assess his customer acquisition strategy, which requires that people see the game being played. This pretty much rules out SEO, PPC, Affiliate Marketing, etc. at this point, because no one is really looking for Spikeball online unless they have seen the game being played. Campus sales reps is a good strategy that Chris is experimenting with, as well as marketing to camp directors. I like these two strategies. The missing piece is getting reviewed by campus blogs and newspapers, which I advised Chris to look into.
Then Satish Tripathi from Skokie, Illinois, discussed Biomedical Consulting International Inc., a consulting company that provides consulting services in writing and reviewing regulatory filings and other kinds of highly specialized applications in the biomedical field. Satish has about 20 customers, and 60 consultants around the world. His customer acquisition strategy, however, needs a lot of work. Being a domain expert in the biomedical field, and not having much experience in marketing and sales, Satish is hitting the wall on business development.
I advised Satish to study his current customers, what problems his firm has solved for each, and create a target list of other potential customers with similar issues. Then, we need to define a precise process of how to approach them, and how to make them aware of the firm’s expertise.
Next week, the 1M/1M roundtable will be co-hosted with TiE Chennai and TiE Mumbai. 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