Roundtable Recap: May 12 – Two Really Cool Companies

During today’s roundtable, we had two 1M/1M premium members discussing their businesses alongside Penworks, a new company we looked at for the first time. The premium members have been working with us for a bit and have made progress, so this was an interesting roundtable where we were able to discuss some more advanced issues.

Penworks
First up, Vrushali Humnabadkar from Pune, India, presented Penworks, a technical documentation outsourcing service. Vrushali is moderator of a forum for technical documentation professionals and gets a lot of her clients through that channel. She has, thus far, not done any other formal customer acquisition initiative. I suggested LinkedIn, oDesk, and eLance with the caveat that the field is extremely competitive and crowded and differentiation would be tough to achieve.

 

Happy Grasshopper
Next, Dan Stewart from Safety Harbor, Florida, pitched Happy Grasshopper, an email-based referral marketing service. Dan is a 1M/1M premium member and has, over the last few weeks, worked systematically, following our methodology. He is seeing excellent results. In February, he had about 200 customers. Today, he has over a thousand, and he has chosen to focus on the realtor vertical. Following a guerrilla p.r. strategy, he has succeeded in getting his company featured in Realtor Magazine’s ‘Cool Tools’ section. Happy Grasshopper has incredible testimonials and a host of satisfied customers who are now helping build word of mouth buzz. Large real estate companies are coming to Dan, and all in all, the business is looking very interesting. The next two customer acquisition strategies we will be expanding on are more aggressive guerrilla p.r. and a systematic affiliate marketing program.

Stanzr
Then Taariq Lewis from San Francisco, California, presented Stanzr, a lightweight online events platform specifically focused on moving qualified leads generated through webinars towards a close. Taariq is also a 1M/1M premium member. Over the last few weeks, we have been tightening his positioning. What I love about the Stanzr value proposition is that it can host very quick, online chat based events for large numbers of prospects, help answer questions that can handle objections, and further qualify leads to generate definitive opportunities. For example, let’s say an enterprise marketing organization hosts a large webinar using ON24 and generates 2,500 attendees. As a next step, they could hold a few Stanzr events – quick and easy – to answer questions for these 2,500 prospects and figure out from there who are the real leads and what could be the real opportunities. For enterprises and small businesses, managing a systematic sales cycle is crucial, and before having telemarketing reps call prospects, a few rounds of Stanzr events may be an efficient way to move them down the sales funnel.

Now, the other wonderful feature in Stanzr is that all these conversations are shared across social media platforms – Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook. Creating that kind of systematic buzz is an excellent social media marketing strategy as well.

In summary, Stanzr scores on two fronts: (1) a systematic lead qualification platform and methodology and (2) a systematic social media marketing platform and methodology.

Very cool, indeed!

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

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