Roundtable Recap: May 5 – Ownership Matters

Before I write the recap of today’s roundtable, I want to share with you a couple of thoughts that have been playing in my head, and I have given at least four talks on this topic over the past 30 days. One of them is: Ownership matters. A second is: You will get rejected by VCs. That’s okay. I have, in fact, recorded a video to address both issues with relevant case studies, and I would appreciate it if you would take 30 minutes to listen to it. It’s important.

On to today’s roundtable, we had five businesses, all of which, I believe, can be built to become sustainable companies.

EduMark
First up, Sumit Jha from New Delhi, India, presented EduMark, a real estate education program for the nascent Indian market that Sumit is already selling successfully, and wondering how to take to the next level of scale. We discussed the possibility of recruiting a couple of cofounders who can help him build out the core skill-set needed on his team right now. As for investment, one of the key elements missing for me is a concrete market sizing. Without that, I cannot gauge whether this business is fundable.

Business Intelligenze
Next, Rahul Sethi, also from New Delhi, India, pitched Business Intelligenze, a SaaS BI solution catering to the call center industry in India. Rahul pitched his value proposition as social CRM analytics, but through some brisk dialog, I was able to figure out that social CRM is less than 20% of his core value proposition. The positioning of the company needs work, although I do believe Rahul has half a dozen beta customers whose feedback and engagement would give him the ammunition with which to find and validate the real pain point around in-house legacy systems at call center companies.

10screens
Then Abinasha Karana from Bangalore, India, presented 10screens, a product for translating software use cases into robust specs. The pitch was very difficult to understand and needs a tremendous amount of work still, but, conceivably, the product could be a useful one for business analysts to define software specifications.

IndiaCollegeSearch
An incubatee with Indian Angel Network, Anirudh Motwani from New Delhi, India, discussed IndiaCollegeSearch, a vertical search engine to address the problem of finding detailed information about various colleges and institutions in India. Many of these are currently not able to sell all their seats, while many students are not able to find a college program to get into. Anirudh wants to bridge this gap. There are multiple other options within this basic space, including improving the quality of students for certain colleges. However, my advice to Anirudh was to focus on the first problem as a market penetration strategy. The pricing model and related market sizing exercise need a lot of work still.

Tabillo
Last up was Sanjeev Arora from Oakville, Ontario, Canada, discussing Tabillo, a collaboration and content management solution for SME customers across verticals like legal, engineering, and so on. We discussed Sanjeev’s go-to-market strategy, and based on the fact that there is a fair bit of metadata management that is specific to each vertical, I felt that a vertical by vertical market penetration strategy would be the best way to go. The product is horizontal below the metadata layer and has, conceivably, a larger opportunity. We also discussed pricing and delivery models and priorities around on-premise and dedicated installations versus SaaS.

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

Just before this week’s roundtable, Dan Stewart, CEO of HappyGrasshopper, made my day by calling me to say how much he has been learning from the 1M/1M Premium program. “I was looking for what you teach back in January of 2007 and couldn’t find it anywhere. We had just launched our first tech venture and would have saved countless thousands in trial and error education if 1M/1M was available,” he said. Dan spent $12,000 a year on a subscription to Vistage, a CEO mentoring program, and says, “The value of your program is amazing. For perspective, I also joined a $1,000 a month CEO roundtable group, with professional speakers and full day, once-per-month meetings.  At 1/12th the cost, 1M/1M provides far more value.”

And Bill Gordon, who is working on pulling together the Stamford Innovation Center in Connecticut with Patty Meagher and Ed Petner, e-mailed me, saying: “We have spent a week going through your curriculum.  What a great product – truly an excellent value for entrepreneurs.  In fact, I think it is a great curriculum for certain angel investors too, especially those who are starting out, including angel groups that are just formed. We are eager to start a collaboration with you that will allow us to have your curriculum as part of our menu of items we can offer to entrepreneurs here in the region.” Needless to say, we’re working on a deal as we speak.

Both Bill and Dan were present at the roundtable today, and I was delighted to see them explaining the value of 1M/1M to the audience in the public chat. Made my job infinitely easier, I must say. And audience members were suggesting local incubators that they want to bring in to the 1M/1M program, which was also great!

The recording of today’s roundtable can be found here. Recordings of previous roundtables are all available here. You can register for upcoming roundtables here. And you can sign up for the 1M/1M premium program 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