Roundtable Recap: April 28 – Guerrilla P.R. & SEO Most Profitable Customer Acquisition Strategies

At this week’s roundtable, we had five entrepreneurs pitching. One recurring theme that kept coming up is that entrepreneurs are finding guerrilla p.r. and SEO as two of the most effective and affordable customer acquisition strategies. At yesterday’s private roundtable we also had this discussion, so I thought I would mention it in today’s recap.

Recruiterbox
First up, Raj Sheth from Bangalore, India, presented Recruiterbox, a SaaS recruitment management tool for small businesses, with co-founders Raghu Kancherla and Girish Redekar. Raj presented a 3 million total available market of Google App users as his target audience. My sense is the market is not as broad, and most small businesses do not hire very actively. The fast growth ones do, and one possible filter on this segmentation would be venture funded businesses. Groupon China happens to be a customer of Recruiterbox, and found them through organic search. Guerrilla p.r. and an affiliate program would also help with customer acquisition.

AskHerFriends.com
Next, Ben Blomerley from Fountainebleu, France, pitched AskHerFriends.com, an online gift ideas service where a guy looking for a gift for his girlfriend could ask her friends for ideas. Nifty idea, but the business model is predicated upon selling merchandise that is curated from affiliate networks like Commission Junction. My question was around the size of the catalog that can be pulled together that will render affiliate commissions and will meet quality standards of this business. So, while I find the concept intriguing, I’d still like to get a feel for the market sizing to gauge how big a company this would become.

GemKitty
Then Danny Wong from Shanghai, China, presented GemKitty, a custom jewelry design site that is having difficulty finding its core customer base. As we peeled the onion, I felt the merchandising strategy is really weak, and the products are relatively undifferentiated. Undifferentiated products are hard to generate excitement and traction around in the highly crowded web, and I suggested they look at DeNovo which sells highly differentiated, limited edition jewelry as a good example of what good merchandising looks like. I believe, they need to do a DeNovo like concept, although, possibly at a lower price-point.

inCircled
Arun Ravi from San Francisco, California, discussed inCircled, a proposed new social network that would be significantly more selective about only involving ‘inner circle’ friends. The concept is way too broad, and what I would like to see is a massive refining of the product strategy to a more focused, segmented application on top of Facebook or LinkedIn or some other established network, rather than an entirely new network.

Magne Consulting
Last up was Ayesha Hazra from Kolkata, India, discussing Magne Consulting, a retail strategy consulting firm. Ayesha had questions about her scaling challenges, so I asked her what her capacity was in terms of servicing clients. Well, today, she has only booked about 5% of her total capacity in terms of business development, so scaling is a moot question. She needs to worry about business generation, not scaling.

You can select the business you like best of those discussed through a poll on the 1M/1M Facebook page.

The recording of this roundtable can be found here. Recordings of previous online roundtables are all available here. You can register for upcoming roundtables 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