Roundtable Recap: April 6 – 1M/1M Announces Important Partnership With MAD Incubator, Malaysia

At this week’s One Million by One Million roundtable, we announced a very important  partnership with MAD Incubator, Malaysia for entrepreneurship development in the region. This is our first major partnership with an incubator whereby MAD will adopt the 1M/1M methodology to foster Silicon Valley–style technopreneurship in Malaysia. Andrew Wong, CEO of MAD, has been working with us for almost a year, and we have made a mutual choice to deepen the partnership by making MAD a premiere value-added reseller partner of the 1M/1M program.

At today’s session, therefore, all our entrepreneurs were pitching from Malaysia. First up, Alvin Yuen from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, presented ISA Innovation, a company providing a hosted IT asset and inventory management solution.  At present, ISA has a set of pilot clients and is toying with the idea of going global. Well, you can’t really go ‘global’ without a go-to-market strategy that evaluates different markets, and assesses the competitive positioning in each of them. This strategy needs to be developed for ISA, and they have to pick a specific market to go after, rather than going global.

Next, also from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Mohd Hezri Amir Abdul Latiff with HezMedia Interactive pitched Math-Quest, an edutainment company focusing on math learning games for kids aged nine to 12. One of the primary pieces missing from this presentation is a thorough competitive analysis of what other math games are in this market, and that will drive Math-Quest’s go-to-market strategy. Also, the business is primarily on CD-ROMs right now, but the good news is that the CD-ROM product is selling and generating revenue. It could be a good business to bootstrap the social/mobile edutainment business with.

Then, Yong Wai Ming, from Bukit Jalil, Selangor, Malaysia, discussed I-Gamer, a gaming platform that connects gamers in cybercafés. I-Gamer wants third-party game developers to develop games on its platform. Today, the company has about 15,000 cybercafés paying subscription fees to be connected through their platform to play certain traditional games. The good news, again, is that this business is generating revenues. The company has ambitions of working with more cutting-edge gaming companies, but I don’t know enough about their platform to see why developers would choose to work with their platform as opposed to others like Facebook.

Another entrepreneur from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Darren Panag with Convep Mobilogy, pitched AppsAsia, a mobile platform for business apps on various mobile devices such as iOS, Android, BlackBerry, and so on. The company sells to the marketing departments of corporations, has 50 customers, and is already profitable. Fantastic! We discussed their growth strategy, and my advice is to build the ad agency and interactive marketing channels as the primary growth driver. The entrepreneur seems obsessed with building his own brand and selling directly to end customers. A mistake, in my opinion.

Last up, Alvin Yuen from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, pitched Techsailor, a services company that provides online community engagement to major brands. Alvin seems perturbed by the fact that his business is largely services and not as much products. I don’t see a problem with this, especially since the services model generates cash early on, and he can practice our tried-and-true model of bootstrapping using services! This is also a business that has substantial revenue, which is wonderful. The entrepreneur is exploring ways to turn it into more of a product company as opposed to a pure services company. This is something we can certainly help him with, using our methodology.

Based on my assessment of the Malaysian entrepreneurs – we have seen a good sample of them over the past year – I think this is a group that would do well to go through the 1M/1M premium program as soon as possible, and internalize the curriculum. There are numerous basics that are missing from their business strategies right now, which are gaps that can be easily and efficiently plugged by adopting the 1M/1M methodology.

In addition, for several of the companies above, we have channel relationships that we can bring them into as soon as they are ready. As you know, we strongly believe in trying to get to customers and channel partners as early as possible and even using that as alternative financing, rather than beating the pavement looking for equity capital without adequate validation – a path that yields a 99% rejection rate.

Over time, if the Malaysian entrepreneurship ecosystem can groom several thousand technology entrepreneurs using the 1M/1M program, we envision an immense economic impact on the regional economy. We can also provide a subset of these entrepreneurs who are looking to penetrate the U.S./global market a strong channel through Silicon Valley.

This is an extremely important experiment that we are running in Malaysia. If successful, it can be replicated all over the world – throughout cities and towns in the United States, throughout the emerging markets, throughout every region that wants to efficiently groom a large number of technology entrepreneurs and unleash their power on the global economy. I am truly excited to welcome the Malaysian entrepreneurs and the  visionaries in their ecosystem who are leading this movement, and every member of the 1M/1M team greets our friends in Malaysia with enormous enthusiasm. We fully grasp the potential of what you are embarking upon, and we look forward to our journey together.

I also have a message for all the various ecosystem players in Malaysia (and elsewhere): 1M/1M is not here to compete with any of you. We’re here to supplement your efforts and provide a base level of entrepreneurship education to a large number of entrepreneurs in your communities in a scalable manner through a virtual program. This, we believe, will create a strong downstream deal flow for all of you – incubators, angel investors, and VCs.

I will be traveling in India over the next several days and doing live roundtables in three cities: Chennai (April 9), Mumbai (April 16), and Pune (April 17). There will be no online roundtable next Thursday, but our usual schedule will resume on April 21 and focus on the northeastern part of the United States. You can register for the upcoming roundtables 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