Bootstrapping to Exit, Then do a VC-Funded Venture: Cordial CEO Jeremy Swift (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: I was recently talking to the founder of HubSpot. His observation when they started was that people were trying to do inbound marketing by starting blogs and then tying together some level of CRM. He said that nobody had an integrated solution, so he chose to build one.

None of the categories that constituted this integrated system were number one. They were number four or five, but they were the only ones that had an integrated system. What approach did you take in designing and determining what product to go to market with?

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554th Roundtable Recording with Deepak Gupta, WEH Ventures

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Roundtable Recap: November 18 – Workshop on How to Teach Entrepreneurship

During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Deepak Gupta, Founding Partner at WEH Ventures, discussing his fund’s pre-seed and seed funding strategy for Indian startups.

After that, we spent an hour on a workshop on how to teach entrepreneurship using the 1Mby1M methodology and case studies.

You can listen to the recording of this roundtable here:

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Hamiz Awan, Founder and Partner at Plutus21 Capital (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: I have another example. It’s the example of Damien Hirst. He’s a very famous British artist. He jumped on the NFT bandwagon. He said he’s going to create a large number of artworks that are connected to NFTs. These are not digital artworks to begin with. These are physical artworks that have an NFT tie-in. That requires a different infrastructure. Have you seen this developing?

Hamiz Awan: NFTs are just a concept or a platform for people to innovate. Some people are going to say, “We’re going to have a physical item represented by an NFT.” Some are seeing them as experiences. Mike Tyson sold a weekend with him for $300,000. He would train you. That’s what he sold.

6 Udemy Courses on How To Build a Startup for an Early Exit

I’m a big advocate for building small, capital-efficient startups. Not all entrepreneurs need to chase Unicorns. Not all investors need to chase Unicorns. There are many more viable ideas for those smaller ventures and there are considerably more opportunities for their exits, which means cashing in earlier on your hard work.

Bootstrapping to Exit, Then do a VC-Funded Venture: Cordial CEO Jeremy Swift (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You were getting ready to start something else, but you wanted to develop some sales chops. Where did you do that?

Jeremy Swift: I actually told this mentor that he’s crazy. I spent the next year or two warring against that. I finally came back around and this mentor said, “You got to do it.” I jumped in. I ended up leading the worldwide enterprise sales organization for a number of years specifically on our unit around email marketing and digital marketing platforms there.

554th Roundtable For Entrepreneurs Starting NOW: Live Tweeting By @1Mby1M

Today’s 554th FREE online 1Mby1M Roundtable For Entrepreneurs is starting NOW, on Thursday, November 18, 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!

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Hamiz Awan, Founder and Partner at Plutus21 Capital (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: I want to probe that point a little bit. We have done a lot of two-sided marketplaces. We see two-sided marketplaces all the time. We have lots of case studies. We have curriculum material on it.

As you rightly said, it’s much more difficult to go from zero to 10,000 than to go from 10,000 to a million when the network effect starts to kick in gear. That’s not just true in Blockchain; it’s true in two-sided marketplaces in general. To go from zero to 10,000, what are people doing that you have seen is working?