Roundtable Recap: June 16 – Exciting Companies Lined Up For Microsoft Startup Grant Finals

During today’s roundtable, we had four Microsoft BizSpark Startup India Challenge grant finalists present. Two of them, Freshdesk and Bizosys (10Screens), are 1M/1M premium members, and we have already been working on their strategies for a few weeks.

Freshdesk
First, Girish Mathrubootham from Chennai, India, pitched Freshdesk, a SaaS company that provides small and medium businesses with on-demand customer support software that offers multi-channel social support. Freshdesk introduces itself as a kind of Salesforce.com for customer support so to speak. Small and medium size business owners can set up online customer support platforms that combine the backend help desk system used by agents (ticketing, knowledge management) with an online customer portal (self service, forums, idea management, voting, etc) on the front end.

What I find exciting about Freshdesk is that they may be able to do the same thing in customer support that Zoho did in CRM: a drastic downshifting of the price-point of a full-functionality, differentiated, cutting edge customer support solution. For the uninitiated, Zoho introduced a CRM system that was one-tenth the price of Salesforce.com, and penetrated the lower end of the market using an Indian cost structure.

In the case of Freshdesk, their main competitor, Zendesk, is operating with a San Francisco – Copenhagen cost-structure, and will find it harder to compete with this strategy. Zendesk is heavily financed by Benchmark and Charles River and has 10,000 customers. They charge $9, $29 and $59 per agent per month, and I am eager to see bootstrapped, scrappy Freshdesk morph their pricing structure to aggressively compete with them. Higher end players like ServiceCloud charges $65, $135 & $260 per agent per month. RightNow’s per agent price starts at $110 per agent per month.

The space is validated. The game, now, is to push the envelope on price, performance and functionality – a game that 1M/1M looks forward to helping Freshdesk play!

You can read more about Freshdesk on the 1M/1M Incubation Radar today. The company already has paying customers, and a validated business model. They have an opportunity ahead to build a billion dollar company.

Bizosys (10Screens)
Then Abinasha Karana from Bangalore, India, presented 10Screens from Bizosys. Bizosys Technologies, a Bangalore, India based software engineering company was founded in 2009. The founders, Sunil Guttula and Abinasha Karana are experienced IT professional with 15 years of experience between them solving various enterprise IT problems. Guttula, Bizosys’ CEO, and Karana founded the company with the goal to “simplify software development.”

Toward that end, they have created two products. The first is HSearch, a NoSQL technology based search engine for big data that aims to break the barrier of scale of growing information and accessing it across information silos. The second product is 10Screens, a tool to visualize business requirements critical to software development, which tend to be hampered by poor communication among various stakeholders. 10Screens is currently also a finalist in the Microsoft BizSpark India Startup Challenge.

This company is 100% bootstrapped, and like Freshdesk, they are also offering a value proposition at a substantially lower price-point than competitors, making it affordable for small companies. Outsourcing is spreading at a frantic pace today with a global footprint, and players like oDesk and eLance have made it very easy for companies to connect with outsourcing vendors. Now, if the communication can be smoothened, the entire process will become a great deal more productive.

In 1M/1M, we are committed to supporting businesses that are not only focusing on billion dollar market opportunities, but also those that focus on $5M, $10M, $20M niches. We see Bizosys as a promising niche vendor with demonstrated capabilities in creative bootstrapping. We look forward to helping them move through the milestones of various levels of validation and market penetration, on the way to becoming a sustainable, profitable company delivering real value to customers.

You can also read more about Bizosys on the 1M/1M Incubation Radar today. The company already has paying customers and a validated product.

Techcello
Next, Ram Kumar, also from Chennai, India, discussed Techcello, a multi-tenant SaaS framework for moving applications from .NET to a cloud architecture. The value proposition is definitely interesting, and the company has already validated with customers. In fact, they generated $100k in revenues over the last year, since they first pitched at one of our roundtables. Techcello presented a TAM of about $25M-$50M a year, which I haven’t had a chance to study. They need to get a handle on the customer acquisition strategy, and I advised Ram Kumar to utilize the Positioning and Customer Acquisition modules of the 1M/1M premium curriculum to work on it further.

Luna Ergonomics
Next, Abhijit Bhattacharjee from Noida, India, pitched Luna Ergonomics’ CleverTexting and the Panini Keypad. The technology has been highly acclaimed in the mobile device community as a way to let users type in multiple, especially non-Latin, languages. LG is licensing the technology, and many other device vendors are in the queue. Abhijit foresees primarily a technology licensing business model whereby device vendors would be paying royalty per handset or tablet. This, needless to say, projects a very large TAM.

Having worked on technology licensing businesses, I have a good idea on how challenging those are from a sales cycle and cash flow perspective, and since Abhijit is still running a bootstrapped operation, I asked him about his strategy to manage the long sales cycle, and the associated cash flow challenge. Well, Abhijit believes that he can sell enough apps on iTunes and other app stores to mitigate the cash flow challenge, and assured me that he runs a very tight shop.

Very cool technology, and I think this company has a fair shot at winning the mobile category in the Microsoft challenge. To learn more, you can check out some of the videos here.

Blue Coin
Last up, Sunil Sharma from Walnut Creek, California, presented Blue Coin, a loyalty program management platform and service catering to small to medium size businesses. Effectively, Sunil is speaking to a trend that I have been discussing recently on my blog that companies like Groupon are pointing at: revenue sharing with merchants for providing marketing services. In my recent piece, There’s a Trend To Spot In Groupon’s Growth Rate, I noted that, ‘Simply put, they are offering a massive channel and effective customer acquisition strategy for merchants, small and large, and for that, they charge a hefty channel fee.’

In the future, the channel fee will, perhaps, go down. But Sunil is saying that he can provide yet another kind of marketing service to local merchants where he will also be charging a channel fee.

I like this genre of thinking and willlook forward to watching Blue Coin evolve. The company is still very early and has just completed an alpha prototype. But this is not that difficult a business to validate, and Sunil intends to bootstrap for another 6-8 months, during which time, I am sure, the business can be sufficiently validated.

You can select the business you like best of those discussed today 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. We will be holding future roundtables at 8 a.m. PDT on the following dates:

Thursday, June 23, 2011: Register Here.

Thursday, June 30, 2011: Register Here.

Thursday, July 21, 2011: Register Here.

Thursday, July 28, 2011: Register 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