633rd Roundtable for Entrepreneurs Starting in 30 Minutes: Live Tweeting by @1Mby1M

Today’s 633rd FREE online 1Mby1M Roundtable for Entrepreneurs is starting in 30 minutes, on Thursday, February 15, at 8 a.m. PST/11 a.m. EST/5 p.m. CET/9:30 p.m. India IST. CLICK HERE to join. PASSWORD: startup  All are welcome!

Featured Videos

Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped a Virtual Business to Scale

If you haven’t already, please study our free Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. 

When we spoke in 2020, Lilia Stoyanov, CEO of Transformify, had built a virtual company with zero employees, all freelancers and scaled it without outside financing. Read on for more.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to you. Where are you from? Where did you grow up? Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey.

Lilia Stoyanov: I was born in Bulgaria. It was part of the communist block before 1989. After that, I moved to the UK and I traveled a lot.

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Best of Bootstrapping: What is the Best Bootstrapping Tactic for B2B Startups?

If you haven’t already, please study our free Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. 

What is the best bootstrapping tactic for B2B startups? Solve an acute customer pain. Get paid an advance to do so. Leeyo Software Founder Jagan Reddy followed this strategy to bootstrap to $20 million. He built a niche software that solved a very specific problem and started selling it to enterprises for a lot of money. This story from 2016 is a textbook case study of how well you can scale with no outside financing if you can identify a burning pain point and customers who are willing to pay a LOT to solve that pain. Leeyo Software was acquired by Zuora in 2017.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Jagan Reddy: I was born in India. All my schooling was done in India.

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Video FAQs

Meta’s AI Strategy Delivers Strong Ad Revenue Growth While Google Languishes on Ad Front

Meta (Nasdaq: META), formerly Facebook, recently announced its fourth quarter results that blew past market expectations. The company’s restructuring efforts continue to bear fruit as it surged past both revenue and profit expectations and announced its first ever dividend payout.

Best of Bootstrapping: Founder CEO Bootstrapped to $35+ Million

If you haven’t already, please study our free Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. 

During these unusual times, many who once dreamed of funding are forced to bootstrap. Well, bootstrapping is good during good times, and necessary during bad times. Here, BannerBuzz Founder and CEO Nishant Shah shares how he bootstrapped to over $35 million in 2019 revenue.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Nishant Shah: I was born and raised in Ahmedabad, India. I studied civil engineering at the university, and then went on to do my masters in construction management from Georgia Tech in Atlanta.

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Catching Up On Readings: AI PC and Smartphone Market

This report from Gartner forecasts that worldwide shipments of AI PCs and GenAI smartphones will grow 11% to 295 million units by the end of 2024. For this week’s posts, click on the paragraph links.

Colors: La Nuit III

I’m publishing this series on LinkedIn called Colors to explore a topic that I care deeply about: the Renaissance Mind. I am just as passionate about entrepreneurship, technology, and business, as I am about art and culture. In this series, I will typically publish a piece of art – one of my paintings – and I request you to spend a minute or two deeply meditating on it. I urge you to watch your feelings, thoughts, reactions to the piece, and write what comes to you, what thoughts it triggers, in the dialog area. Let us see what stimulation this interaction yields. For today – La Nuit III

La Nuit III | Sramana Mitra, 2021 | Watercolor, Pastel, Ink | 8  x 8, On Paper

Colors: La Nuit II

I’m publishing this series on LinkedIn called Colors to explore a topic that I care deeply about: the Renaissance Mind. I am just as passionate about entrepreneurship, technology, and business, as I am about art and culture. In this series, I will typically publish a piece of art – one of my paintings – and I request you to spend a minute or two deeply meditating on it. I urge you to watch your feelings, thoughts, reactions to the piece, and write what comes to you, what thoughts it triggers, in the dialog area. Let us see what stimulation this interaction yields. For today – La Nuit II

La Nuit II | Sramana Mitra, 2021 | Watercolor, Pastel, Ink | 9  x 12, On Paper