October 27 – 594th 1Mby1M Mentoring Roundtable for Entrepreneurs

Entrepreneurs are invited to the 594th FREE online 1Mby1M Mentoring Roundtable on Thursday, October 27, 2022, at 8 a.m. PDT/11 a.m. EDT/5 p.m. CEST/8:30 p.m. India IST.

If you are a serious entrepreneur, register to “pitch” and sell your business idea. You’ll receive straightforward feedback, advice on next steps, and answers to any of your questions. Others can register to “attend” to watch, learn, and interact through the online chat.

You can learn more here and REGISTER TO PITCH OR ATTEND HERE. Register and you will receive the recording by email, even if you are unable to attend. Please share with any entrepreneurs in your circle who may be interested. All are welcome!

Featured Videos

Bootstrapping a RegTech Venture to $20M: PerformLine CEO Alex Baydin (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Expand on that limited exclusivity. When you do deals like this, you’re almost developing the software for their use. How do you get out of the limited exclusivity and go from a services business to a product business where you can sell that to other people?

Alex Baydin: I got lucky. This customer was rooting as much for me as he was for having a viable solution for his business. It might have only been 9 or 12 months of exclusivity but we were soon free to bring other customers onto the platform.

Sramana Mitra: It took you that long to build the software anyway.

Catching Up On Readings: Startup Battlefield at Disrupt 2022

This feature from TechCrunch covers the highlights of the Startup Battlefield at Disrupt 2022 where among the 20 finalists that pitched on stage, five finalists were selected, and one winner was announced for the $100,000 prize and the Startup Battlefield cup. For this week’s posts, click on the paragraph links.

Video FAQs

Bootstrapping a RegTech Venture to $20M: PerformLine CEO Alex Baydin (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: During the period that you’re describing, vertical ad networks were starting to be fairly big. I remember we were covering companies like Adify and vertical search engines like Kayak. In this period that you were describing, a vertical ad network was starting to develop.

Alex Baydin: A couple of signals started happening. Because we were delivering this report which entailed screenshots of all the user experience that generated the lead, we started hearing from our customers that the quality of what we were selling was good and the volume is low. They said, “But that report is super interesting. How do I get that report when I buy from the vertical ad network or I buy from the large ad networks?” They were very interested in that.

Bootstrapping a RegTech Venture to $20M: PerformLine CEO Alex Baydin (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Once you decided that you wanted to own your own business, what were you going to do?

Alex Baydin: I was working at one of the internet companies that I mentioned. I actually got fired for the first time in my life. I’ve been working since I was 15. I took it really hard.

Sramana Mitra: Why were you fired?

Alex Baydin: The company was trying to get better performance out of a certain group. I was running the lead gen division there. I may have had a different communication style that my boss wasn’t a huge fan of. I just took it really hard. I ended up in the hospital that night. I felt literally sick to my stomach.

Female Entrepreneur Scaling a PropTech Venture with Over $40M in Funding: PunchListUSA CEO Min Alexander (Part 6)

Min Alexander: This business builds one by one. That’s a competitive moat for us. Folks that think they’re going to blast and market, that doesn’t necessarily happen in an industry like ours. It’s taken so long to disrupt it at scale. You need all the components. You need the technology and infrastructure to keep it simple and very accessible. You also need relationship builders who are holding these clients accountable in the markets that we’re in.

We build the brokers. We’ll have transactions that are also consistent. As long as we’re serving the brokers and delighting them with our quality, they’ll keep coming back. Every sales transaction brings two homeowners that we can serve throughout their entire homeownership journey. We have a seller who sold their home and a buyer who bought the home.

Bootstrapping a RegTech Venture to $20M: PerformLine CEO Alex Baydin (Part 1)

RegTech is emerging to become a category of its own with numerous risk and compliance issues getting addressed by technology solutions. Alex has bootstrapped a wonderful business and is now doing a private equity-driven roll-up within the space.

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?

Female Entrepreneur Scaling a PropTech Venture with Over $40M in Funding: PunchListUSA CEO Min Alexander (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How much have you raised in total so far?

Min Alexander: Our Series A round was $39 million. We had targeted $35 million. It got others really excited. We ended up declining other funding. We could have been well over $45 million.

Sramana Mitra: The story was pitched to me as a $5 million-plus company. Do you want to add some color to that?