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Building a Robotics Company from India: Ritukar Vijay CEO of Ottonomy (Part 5)

Posted on Tuesday, Mar 14th 2023

Sramana Mitra: Six months later after you got all the feedback and incorporated all the feedback, was there a big check?

Ritukar Vijay: It was a monthly subscription. We did a contract of a rolling window of six months.

Sramana Mitra: What kind of pricing structure did you set up?

Ritukar Vijay: It was around $3,000 a month per robot.

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Building a Bootstrapped Million-Dollar Online Fashion Business

Posted on Tuesday, Mar 14th 2023

I started one of the Internet’s first fashion e-commerce companies in 1999. It was very expensive to do so at the time.

Today, an online fashion business can be launched in an extraordinarily capital-efficient manner. 

There are so many effective e-commerce platforms from Amazon, eBay and Etsy to Shopify and BigCommerce that will allow you to either start selling through their marketplaces or create your storefront for just a few dollars. 

There are skilled freelancers on sites like Fiverr and Upwork to whom you can outsource some of your business building tasks at a very reasonable price.

A bootstrapped, capital-efficient, million-dollar online fashion business is a great asset to build and own, and after that, you can decide to grow it further or not. It is a great place to be and you do not have to be an IT genius to get to that place.

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Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped Sitecore Using Services to $1B Exit from Denmark

Posted on Monday, Mar 13th 2023

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

Sitecore not only reached global scale, but was competing with Oracle, Adobe, IBM, and Salesforce.com when I spoke with then CEO Michael Seifert in 2014. European software companies were seldom reaching global scale at that time. Sitecore was acquired by EQT AB for $1.1B in 2016. Read on to learn how he navigated the market.

Sramana: Michael, where are you from? What is the background to your story?

Michael Seifert: I was born in the Copenhagen area where I lived until first grade. I then moved to a little island in Denmark with a population of about fifty thousand people. I lived there with my mother and her brothers through high school. My father moved to the US when I was 8 or 9. I spent my summer vacations in the Bay area with my father. My first flight to the US was at age 11.

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Video FAQs

Building a Robotics Company from India: Ritukar Vijay CEO of Ottonomy (Part 4)

Posted on Monday, Mar 13th 2023

Sramana Mitra: What happened with Cincinnati airport after the one-month pilot? You now have some money to fix the usability issues. What were the commercials on that?

Ritukar Vijay: We were focusing on Robotics-as-a-Service model. There’s a fixed subscription for each month. These robots will perform deliveries. There’s potential revenue share. There was a lot of thought process going on during that time.

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Real-World Examples for Building a Successful Two-Sided E-commerce Marketplace

Posted on Monday, Mar 13th 2023

Two-sided marketplaces are becoming increasingly popular in the e-commerce startup world. eBay and Etsy are some of the most obvious examples of two-sided marketplaces, but now we are seeing a lot of niche and esoteric marketplaces as well all over the world. 

So what does it take to be successful in this kind of business? 

This Udemy course provides real-world examples of successful two-sided marketplaces, as well as a step-by-step breakdown on how they were built.

  1. Building a Two-Sided E-commerce Marketplace w/ Sramana Mitra

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Catching Up On Readings: Oscars 2023

Posted on Sunday, Mar 12th 2023

This feature from The Wall Street Journal covers the highlights of the 95th edition of the Academy Awards held in Los Angeles on Sunday this week. Everything Everywhere All at Once was the big winner with seven Oscars. Its protagonist Michelle Yeoh became the first Asian woman to win the Academy Award for best actress. For this week’s posts, click on the paragraph links.

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Building a Robotics Company from India: Ritukar Vijay CEO of Ottonomy (Part 3)

Posted on Sunday, Mar 12th 2023

Sramana Mitra: What was the use case for Cincinnati Airport?

Ritukar Vijay: To deliver goods. After the security check-in, there are gate-hugger personas. There are people who just fly off after the departure gate. We are not participating in any of the retail activities at the airport. 2020 was a time when the aviation industry was having a bad time. It was a nightmare.

They started looking at ways to engage people in more economic activities focusing on the non-aeronautical revenue. The airport came together to solve that problem. We did the first pilot in December 2020.

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Colors: Vastness, Miniature IV

Posted on Sunday, Mar 12th 2023

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 – Vastness, Miniature IV

Vastness, Miniature IV | Sramana Mitra, 2021 | Watercolor, Pastel, Brush Pen | 8  x 8, On Paper