Catching Up On Readings: CES 2022

This feature from Time magazine reviews the ten best gadgets at CES 2022 held virtually this year including innovations ranging from BMW’s color-changing SUV to Razer’s cutting-edge modular PC concept. For this week’s posts, click on the paragraph links.

Featured Videos

Bootstrapping by Piggybacking: Evenica CEO Sadek Ali (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: If you tried to go into the Shopify marketplace with another e-commerce platform, that wouldn’t work. That was not an option. You were trying to build your own e-commerce platform.

Sadek Ali: Shopify is a long-tail play.

Sramana Mitra: Shopify, on many levels, is not the right marketplace for you.

Sadek Ali: Shopify and Shopify Plus are great products, but they’re not the best products for the mid-market.

January 13 – 559th 1Mby1M Mentoring Roundtable for Entrepreneurs

Entrepreneurs are invited to the 559th FREE online 1Mby1M Mentoring Roundtable on Thursday, January 13, 2022, at 8 a.m. PST/11 a.m. EST/5 p.m. CET/9:30 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!

Video FAQs

Bootstrapping by Piggybacking: Evenica CEO Sadek Ali (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: You had a diverse set of e-commerce platforms that were in that portfolio.

Sadek Ali: That’s correct. We didn’t really know what the platform was. I picked up technologies my entire life. If you understand how e-commerce works, then you know the operational side of it that they’re looking for. We did that and we said, “Let’s make sure our contracts are easy. Let’s make sure we have happy customers and let’s make sure we have a happy culture in this little group of three.”

They liked our hands-on approach and they liked being able to have an open and honest conversation about e-commerce. We got our three customers monetized right away. For two customers, it took us two years. We still had the contract for them, but they wouldn’t pay us a penny. We had to be persistent because we wanted that conversation with them.

Building a 2-sided Farm to Table Marketplace from Indiana: Nick Carter, CEO of Market Wagon (Part 5)

Nick Carter: We can prove a few things though. We had gross margin profitability. We’re not losing money on operations. We have been building a playbook for scale. We had practice with opening – what the regulatory problems are, how you find a space, who you need to recruit. They backed us with $5 million in the fall of 2020.

We raised even more in the summer of 2021 because the model that we had put together was based on variables that we really had no way of knowing how accurate they were. We finetuned it over the following six months. The money primarily went into customer acquisition. That and new geographies. Opening up a new geography doesn’t take a lot of capex. As I mentioned, we’re doing things very inexpensively without a warehouse. We do have to commit to about $100,000 in operating expenses and customer acquisition in order to get each hub up to a viability point.

Roundtable Recap: January 6 – Bootstrapping to Exit and Bootstrapping Products Using Services

During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Deepak Balakrishna, Co-founder CEO of Adya, which was acquired by Qualys. Deepak was in the 1Mby1M program, and I had introduced him to Qualys. We reviewed his lessons from the trenches, steering a Bootstrapping to Exit transaction.

CMD

As for entrepreneur pitch, we had Bijay Mitra and his team from Bhubaneswar, India, pitch CMD, a services company that aims to transform into a product business.

You can listen to the recording of this roundtable here:

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558th Roundtable For Entrepreneurs Starting NOW: Live Tweeting By @1Mby1M

Today’s 558th FREE online 1Mby1M Roundtable For Entrepreneurs is starting NOW, on Thursday, January 6, 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!

558th Roundtable For Entrepreneurs Starting In 30 Minutes: Live Tweeting By @1Mby1M

Today’s 558th FREE online 1Mby1M Roundtable For Entrepreneurs is starting in 30 minutes, on Thursday, January 6, 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!