Entrepreneur Couple Bootstrapping an E-Commerce Business Using a Paycheck and Crowdfunding: Nomad Lane Co-Founders Kish Vasnani and Vanessa Jeswani (Part 1)

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

Kish and Vanessa bootstrapped to multi-million dollars in revenue selling a private label product before quitting their job. In this story, you also get to see the nuances of running successful (and not so successful) crowdfunding campaigns. Very interesting journey and insights.

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Putting the Freshworks IPO in Context (Part 1)

On Nov 13, 2009, I wrote an article in my Forbes column titled India’s Next Celebrities. It was a year after the financial crisis.

Never mind the recession. In India, entrepreneurial energy has continued to grow. It still exists only in small pockets. And the sophistication of the entrepreneurial ecosystem has a long way to go before it can resemble anything like Silicon Valley–or even Israel. In this evolution, the Indian media has an important role to play.

At the time, I was busy trying to turn Sridhar Vembu, CEO of Zoho, into a celebrity. Hardly anyone had heard of HIM until my 2007 profile.

I had not yet launched 1Mby1M.

Girish Mathrubootham, avid fan of celebrity Tamil film star Rajnikant, had not yet launched Freshdesk (now Freshworks). He was still working at Zoho, under Sridhar’s tutelage.

Both of those events happened in 2010.

Roundtable Recap: September 23 – Spotlight on Exit Strategy

During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Steven Mitzenmacher, SVP of Corporate Development at Rackspace Technology, to discuss the Buy-side thought process on Exit Strategy.

i3systems

For the entrepreneur pitch, we had Piyusa Ranjan Prusti from Mumbai, India, pitch i3systems. The company has 15 paying customers, but needs a strategy to increase velocity.

You can listen to the recording of this roundtable here:

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5 Udemy Courses on How to do a Startup as a Non-technical Founder

Ever since the 2008 financial crisis, intellectuals have had to ask themselves, ‘Does Capitalism Still Work?’ I have explored this question for several years now, beginning with a seminal column I wrote for Forbes: Capitalism’s Fundamental Flaw. Two particular problems stand out.

8 Validated Enterprise Software Startup Ideas for the DataStax-1Mby1M Challenge

The DataStax-1Mby1M Fall 2021 Startup Challenge launched on September 9th. Here is the kick-off video with Chet Kapoor, CEO of DataStax, Ed Anuff, Chief Product Officer of DataStax discussing the program with me.

DataStax has significant enterprise customers that are using their Apache Cassandra-based database products to solve real world problems. They are putting these use cases out in the public domain for startups to build companies around. DataStax would be helping the startups on the technical and customer acquisition side, and 1Mby1M would be helping the startups on the positioning, mentoring, and financing side. $10,000 of grant money is also included in this challenge.

Let’s look at some of the use cases. They’re all related to the increasingly digital nature of most businesses. The ever-growing use of IoT is a good example. Verticals that manage many assets need real-time access to data for visibility and decision purposes. Organizations interacting directly with customers need to ensure they are engaged with the right customer, and they have a digital twin of the customer to drive services and experiences. These experiences and services are entirely digital and depend on real-time data access. Finally, organizations drive their intelligence and decisions by understanding and leveraging the increasingly vast amount of data they manage. Here are more details.

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12 Udemy Courses on How to Come Up With New Tech Startup Business Ideas

You want to do a startup. So, you need an idea to build around. The Covid-19 pandemic has changed consumer behavior in a major way. As we move through the virus-era, much more will likely change. With this realization, we ran a poll asking which topics readers would like me to cover and discuss. The overwhelming winner was startup ideas. So, after much thought, here are eight of my most recent startup ideas. My hope is to stimulate and help my fellow entrepreneurs catalyze these ideas into profitable businesses.

546th Roundtable Recording on September 16, 2021

In case you missed it, you can listen to the recording of this roundtable here:

Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapping LittleThings First, Raising Money Later

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

Joe Speiser, Founder & CEO of LittleThings bootstrapped his first digital media/ad network business to $50 million in revenue and then sold it to private equity. Later he started a second business, an e-commerce company, that he bootstrapped for a year and then raised venture capital. His third business, LittleThings, is a spin-off within the second business that took him back to his digital media roots. Since our conversation in 2015, LittleThings was acquired by RockYou Media, an entertainment and media company aimed at millennials, in 2018.

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?

Joe Speiser: I’m from New York and I went to school in the city. I studied at the Columbia University. I’ve been doing all sorts of businesses from a very young age. I always had a passion for trying to start something from scratch and make a living. My dad is an entrepreneur. I used to work in his warehouse for most of my summers. It definitely taught me a lot watching my dad run a business. I don’t know if it’s something that’s taught or something that you’re just genetically predisposed to. I enjoy it so much.

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