Roundtable Recap: July 21 – Crowd Sourced Funding Exchanges – An Emerging Trend
Those of you who are familiar with my work know that I do a lot of trend spotting.
Some recent trend posts on my blog include There’s a Trend To Spot In Groupon’s Growth Rate, Customer Service and the Social Web, SaaS Enabled BPO, Near-shoring and U.S. Policy.
During this week’s roundtable, I spotted yet another trend. We had two crowd sourced funding ventures, peerbackers and Ekjaa. When two out of four pitches in a session are from the same category, it most certainly makes me take notice.
Earlier, of course, we covered AngelList at length, also a crowd sourcing venture in the angel financing space, and this week, we have covered SecondMarket, which is powering Facebook’s private market capital raising.
peerbackers
Today, Andrew Rachmell from Boca Raton, Florida, discussed peerbackers, a crowdsourced fund raising platform to help very early stage entrepreneurs raise small denomination funding ($50, $100) from friends, family, and peers to help finance the prototype development phase with about $25,000 in seed financing.
My first reaction is that raising $25,000 in $50 to $100 chunks will be very, very difficult. I suggested that Andrew tap into some family offices and corporate CSR programs to inject some liquidity to the exchange, otherwise entrepreneurs would not engage.
Andrew also asked how he could partner with the 1M/1M program. Well, we have a well-developed Affiliate program, and I encouraged him to join.
The 1M/1M philosophy is to strengthen the entire entrepreneurial eco-system. Today, many quality advocates and providers to the ecosystem are either underpaid or not paid at all. The 1M/1M affiliate program will create additional revenues for some, and for some, this could be their first decent revenue option.
At 1M/1M, we value quality partnerships, so we offer generous affiliate commission structures (10% of a $1,000 annual 1M/1M Premium Membership fee) with an extended cookie duration (12 months). That means, for every new entrepreneur you refer to the 1M/1M program, we’ll share with you $100, if the sale occurs at any time within 12 months.
Quipu Applications
Next, Michael Issa, from San Francisco, CA, pitched Quipu Applications, which is a cloud based business plan financial modeling application. Michael has almost 90,000 free users and is looking for a way to be in the deal flow of people looking for business plan software. That customer is typically searching on Google, and Michael needs to orchestrate his SEO, blogging, and guerrilla pr efforts to get them. Meanwhile, he can start monetizing his 90,000 user base also with the 1M/1M affiliate program discussed above.
Endeavour Press
Then Nadia Ahmad from Centennial, Colorado, presented Endeavour Press, a concept-stage e-publishing venture for the legal industry. Nadia’s idea is rather nebulous yet, and I advised her to go through the 1M/1M curriculum to get it into a more concrete framework.
Nadia’s situation is one that we’re starting to see often these days. She doesn’t have any background in business, and has a concept that she has started developing. This is a perfect stage to join 1M/1M and follow the methodology. By doing so, she can prevent herself from making a lot of avoidable mistakes and would have a direct path to validation or invalidation of her idea without wasting valuable months and years of her life on unworthy projects.
Ekjaa Foundation
Finally, Harsha Mukherjee from Hyderabad, India, pitched Ekjaa Foundation, yet another crowd sourced funding exchange for NGO and social entrepreneurship. Harsha is facing a question whether or not to cast her venture as a non-profit. My advice is to use the for-profit model.
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.
I would very much like to hear about your business, so let me invite you to come and pitch at one of our free 1M/1M public roundtables. We will be holding future roundtables at 8:00 a.m. PDT on the following dates:
Thursday, July 28, 2011, Register Here.
Thursday, August 4, 2011, Register Here.
Thursday, August 11, Register Here.
Thursday, August 25, Register Here.
And if you want a deeper relationship with me, you are very welcome to join the 1M/1M premium program. If you have any questions about the program, please, first study the website, especially What to expect from the 1M/1M premium program and the FAQs. You can also take the 1M/1M self assessment test here. If you have additional questions, please email me, and I would be very happy to respond. Please note, that I work exclusively with 1M/1M entrepreneurs.
I also invite you to join the 1M/1M mailing list for ease and convenience of getting updates. This way we can stay in touch and it will help you to decide if 1M/1M is a program for you.
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