Bootstrapping With a Paycheck to Techstars: Nevin Shetty, CEO of Blueprint Registry (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: One clarification, both you and Liz kept your jobs while you were raising this convertible note round. For the whole time? Nevin Shetty: Yes. That’s the amazing part. It was just the two of us working part-time. From across the nation, Lizzie had moved at this point. Sramana Mitra: Where is she? Nevin

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Successful Pivot from B-to-C to B-to-B: Inkling CEO Matt MacInnis (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How did they know about your software? Matt MacInnis: We found out later that they had discovered Inkling through a publisher who had gotten a job at Starbucks and looked at what Starbucks was doing every quarter by shipping binders out to their district managers. We were a software platform that lets you

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Bootstrapping With a Paycheck to Techstars: Nevin Shetty, CEO of Blueprint Registry (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Did you go with offshore or onshore? Nevin Shetty: Since it’s very high-touch front-end stuff, we wanted someone we could meet with. We chose a dev shop in New York. They had done e-commerce before. Frankly, they just had very good project management. We were able to talk with them and think through

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Successful Pivot from B-to-C to B-to-B: Inkling CEO Matt MacInnis (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: This thinking behind your startup is happening while you were still at Apple? Matt MacInnis: For probably six or nine months, we explored and brainstormed whether there was a viable business here. Sramana Mitra: Your observation that the future of textbooks was not just digitization of what already existed was the impetus to think

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Thursday, January 19 – 336th 1M/1M Mentoring Roundtable For Entrepreneurs

Entrepreneurs are invited to the 336th FREE online 1M/1M roundtable mentoring session on Thursday, January 19, 2017, at 8 a.m. PST/11 a.m. EST/9:30 p.m. India IST. If you are a serious entrepreneur, register to “pitch” and sell your business idea to Sramana Mitra. You’ll gain straightforward feedback, advice on next steps, and she’ll answer any

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Bootstrapping With a Paycheck to Techstars: Nevin Shetty, CEO of Blueprint Registry (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: This is a big challenge. We do have entrepreneurs who are non-technical. Let me ask you one question before you go to the development portion. Before launching into this direction with your startup, you must have done some level of comparative analysis. Talk to me a little bit about what you unearthed in

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Successful Pivot from B-to-C to B-to-B: Inkling CEO Matt MacInnis (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.  Here’s another pivot story. Note: pivots are very expensive to do in VC timeline and cap tables. Matt discusses how damaging the ownership structure has been. Worth understanding the ramifications. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where

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Death by Overfunding

Funding = Success, right? I wish it did. But entrepreneurial tracks are littered with carcasses of dead startups that were very well funded, some to the tune of hundreds of millions. As a case in point, watch this 2 minutes 31 second video: Death By Overfunding. If you prefer to read instead of watching, read

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