1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Dr. Aniruddha Malpani, Founder of Malpani Ventures (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: One of the observations I have about the global startup ecosystem is this position of looking for paying customers is not at all unusual. I would say the vast majority of investors are looking for paying customers at this point. It has become so much easier to bootstrap companies. There’s a lot of methodology and knowledge about how to bootstrap a company.

The point that you’re making of wanting to see validated companies that already have product-market fit and customers does not come to anybody as a surprise at this stage of the game.

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557th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast with Eva Yazhari, Beyond Capital Ventures

Eva Yazhari, General Partner at Beyond Capital Ventures, discusses Impact Investing in Africa and India.

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Solo Entrepreneur Bootstrapping with a Paycheck to over $15M Revenue: SoPost CEO Jonny Grubin (Part 2)

Jonny Grubin: Aside from that, there were a couple of things that led to its failure. The way we executed was not great. The whole idea behind what we were trying to do was about making the process of shipping a physical item easier. When we went back and looked back, it was a 26-step process to send an item to another person. We were making it much harder. It just really affected the adoption rate. It wasn’t because nobody was interested in the concept; it was because it was a long-winded experience to use our product.

The third is that the timing was wrong. We could have launched exactly the same thing years later and would have had better success. The reality is the way we structured the team, the way we executed things wasn’t helpful.

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10 More Indian Unicorns

We previously analyzed 10 Indian Unicorns. Many are unjustifiably overvalued, some are not. However, if the founders can keep their heads straight and execute, thereby back-filling the valuations, invaluable infrastructure could get built in sector after sector.

Here are 10 more:

• Chargebee Helps Businesses Manage their Subscription Billing
• BrowserStack Addresses a $45B Market Opportunity
• Mindtickle Leverages AI for Sales Enablement
• upGrad Consolidating within the EdTech Sector
• Eruditus Targets the K-12 Market
• Zetwerk Brings eCommerce to Manufacturers
• >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Dr. Aniruddha Malpani, Founder of Malpani Ventures (Part 1)

Dr. Aniruddha Malpani, Founder of Malpani Ventures, is an active angel investor in Indian startups for the past decade. Wonderful conversation.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s catch up a bit on what has been going on in our collective universe and how you see the world based on all these years of observing the ecosystem. How do you see the Indian startup ecosystem evolving?

Solo Entrepreneur Bootstrapping with a Paycheck to over $15M Revenue: SoPost CEO Jonny Grubin (Part 1)

Jonny started as a solo entrepreneur, bootstrapped with a paycheck, and has built a $15M+ revenue global business with a small amount of funding. Excellent story!

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

Solo Entrepreneur Building a Venture Scale EdTech Company from India: Cuemath Founder Manan Khurma (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: How does the teacher handle so many grades?

Manan Khurma: The teacher handles the students either in a one-to-one class or she does a small group of students. Typically, our teachers will opt for a certain grade segment. Even in a group class, the teacher is essentially teaching one-on-one. Let’s say a teacher has four students in a group at that same hour. Each student would work on their own material. The teacher would hop on from student to student.

Solo Entrepreneur Building a Venture Scale EdTech Company from India: Cuemath Founder Manan Khurma (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: You had to develop a new methodology of online learning that would capture some of the nuances of your physical learning and translate that into a methodology that would work online.

Manan Khurma: Not some nuances, but all nuances. Lots of custom development work had to be done. It took us two years to get that right. By the end of 2019, we were in a situation where the online platform was working pretty well. We hired a few hundred students to learn online with us. Our offline student back then was really large – about 40,000 students. Our online was still nascent.