Roundtable Recap: March 16 – Two Startups Already in Revenue

During this week’s roundtable, we worked with two entrepreneurs.

Albiva

First up, we had Ivana Iesini from London, UK, pitch Albiva – a natural skin care line that is already in revenue.

ChargebackZero

Next, we had Vasanth Matamudra from San Ramon, California, with Sudhir and Raja in India, pitching ChargebackZero, a FinTech venture that is also already in revenue.

You can listen to the recording of this roundtable here:

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Cloud Stocks: Analysis of Veeva CRM’s Split from Salesforce

Veeva (NYSE: VEEV) recently reported its fourth quarter results that continued to surpass all market expectations. Last December, Veeva had announced plans to shift its CRM platform from Salesforce to Veeva Vault. Analysts are treating the migration as an opportunity for Veeva as it barrels towards its next milestone year.

Bootstrapping to $3M a month: Prequel CEO Timur Khabirov (Part 1)

Timur has bootstrapped a digital app to $3M a month. Read on to learn how.

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

Video FAQs

Best of Bootstrapping: Serial Entrepreneur Bootstrapped Using Services Repeatedly

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

See how a serial entrepreneur used the ‘Bootstrapping Using Services’ methodology repeatedly to get companies off the ground. Krishna Kumar, Founder of App Orchid, I’ve learned, is sadly now deceased. From this conversation from 2014, you can imagine that he has left behind quite a legacy.

Sramana: Krishna, let’s start with the beginning of your personal story. Where are you from, what is your background? What leads up to your entrepreneurial story?

Krishna Kumar: I was born in India. I came to the US in 1996. I worked my way up the consulting chain from an SAP consultant to the Vice President of Ness, a consulting firm based in New Jersey. Ness was also primarily an SAP shop. It was a NASDAQ-listed company and I had exposure to both the strategy and product sides of the house.

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Mastering Bootstrapping: 6 Essential Courses for Launching a Capital-Efficient Startup

Most businesses can be launched in a capital efficient manner. Most businesses can go a long way in a bootstrapped mode. As long as you’re not taking on capital guzzlers like drug discovery or semiconductor chips, you have many options to explore.

At 1Mby1M, we don’t insist on fund raising. A bootstrapped, capital-efficient, million-dollar business is considered a success in our worldview, as long as you are profitable and sustainable.

What is bootstrapping? It’s what happens when you use your own resources, which you control, to build a business. 

The first six courses below focus on different bootstrapping methods, so if you study all of them ahead of time, you’ll be able to cross the first barrier of getting your venture off the ground.

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Building a Robotics Company from India: Ritukar Vijay CEO of Ottonomy (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Who’s paying?

Ritukar Vijay: The concessionaire, airport, and end customer. End customers are paying for convenience. They don’t have to pay any tips.

Sramana Mitra: Are you making your revenue from the airport payments or concessionaires?

Ritukar Vijay: All three of them. We are the single point of contact with the consumer where we are getting the order value.

How to Use Your AI, ML and Big Data Knowledge to Bootstrap a Startup

Let’s talk about the field of medicine. If you think about what a doctor needs to do to diagnose an illness, she needs to consider all the symptoms, take into account all the test results, consider all the treatment options, factor in all the side-effects of various medications and their interplay with other medications the patient is already taking. 

This is, effectively, a multivariate optimization problem that a doctor has to do in her head. And, she needs to keep up with all the new research and advances in medical science, and factor those in as well. The field of medicine is full of incorrect diagnosis and mistreatment of illnesses. Now, if you replace this whole process with software, which IBM is trying to do with their Watson supercomputer, medical diagnosis becomes a truly scientific, deterministic process. 

I can tell you, if I have the option of being diagnosed by software versus a human doctor, I would always prefer software. It would be far more accurate.

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Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapping Paint Nite

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

Paint Nite has thrived by tapping into the desire human beings have to ‘hang out’ and do creative things. Here is my conversation with Co-founder CEO Dan Hermann from 2014.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with telling our audience a little bit about your personal background. Where were you born and raised? What kind of background?

Dan Hermann: I am now 43 years old. I was born in Boston and grew up in Newton, Massachusetts. I attended the University of Wisconsin. I started my first business at the age of 21. That business is a pick-up and delivery laundry service, which I still own today. We’re in six different states. I learned a great deal about operational businesses in that business.

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