1Mby1M Udemy Courses with Sramana Mitra: Financing

Raising money to build a startup is a huge challenge. To be able to raise any money at all, you must first understand how investors think. We have developed the following courses catering to entrepreneurs in different stages of their entrepreneurial journey.

The Indian Startup Eco-System Wants Acqui-hiring!

I spent large chunks of time in the last two days with my friend Sharad Sharma, one of the true deep thinkers of the Indian startup eco-system. I first met Sharad when he invited me to co-chair the Nasscom Product Conclave in Bangalore with him in 2010. I really enjoyed working with him, and over the years, have come to appreciate what he is trying to do for the Indian eco-system.

Sharad, by the way, is one of the 20 odd effective angel investors who invest in the technology sector in India. While the total number of angel investors is much larger, many of them come from outside the sector, and hence are not capable of leading deals. If you look at Indian Angel Network or Mumbai Angels, for instance, a vast majority of the angels made their money elsewhere (like real estate), and often find it difficult to fully grasp what’s happening in the software, mobile or Internet businesses, let alone networking or semiconductor. Thus, these lead angels are critical for the eco-system to mature.

>>>

Featured Videos

How To Start An Incubator

This is REALLY exciting!

As you know, we’ve been working with many partners around the world over the last year.

This has helped us develop an informed perspective on the need for a scalable incubation system that our partners can use easily, affordably, seamlessly to launch their own incubators, with our help, anywhere in the world, but with deep ties into Silicon Valley.

And now, we present the 1M/1M Incubator-in-a-Box, a new program to support partners in how to start a business incubator.

>>>

The Million Dollar Club: Quantifying The 1Mby1M Value Equation

At 1Mby1M, our agenda is to help you figure out how to put one foot before the other and build a sustainable business, irrespective of financing. If you use the program the way it is designed to be used, you would be able to derive value from it on multiple vectors. Let me quantify that equation for you. >>>

The Million Dollar Club: Conclusion

I know many of you are struggling to figure out how to put one foot before the other in your quest for a successful entrepreneurial journey. I also know that many of you are continuously chasing investors over customers.

>>>

The Million Dollar Club: Freshdesk

Completing our list is Billion Dollar Unicorn club contender Freshdesk. The company was founded in 2010 by CEO Girish Mathrubootham and CTO Shan Krishnasamy. After a series of successful products in his work as a technical architect, Girish was inspired to start Freshdesk by a posting in Y Combinator’s Hacker News. Learning that a major company in the customer support software industry, Zendesk, had raised its prices, Girish and Shan set out to create an affordable alternative. [Note: Zendesk has since had a successful IPO and is valued at ~$2 Billion (May 2015).]

>>>

The Million Dollar Club: InSync

Atul Gupta first began his entrepreneurial ventures in 2003 with an IT provider based in Bhutan, India. His drive to provide software solutions to local small businesses resulted in a move to Kolkata in 2006, where he founded InSync. Over the next three years the company conducted extensive research through their more than 500 domestic customers. Atul noted that once a business reached a certain volume, customers could no longer manage an e-commerce business without an integrated ERP system.

>>>

The Million Dollar Club: Happy Grasshopper

In October 2010, multiple-time Inc. 500|5000 honoree Dan Stewart began a side venture based on a clear need for effective e-mail marketing campaigns. The project was originally inspired by an earlier venture, a customer relationship management (CRM) company Dan founded in 2007. One of his customers, a marketing-focused teacher to real estate agents and brokers, advised his students to stop sending e-mails that were “boring” in nature. He instead recommended that e-mail messages be “fun, relationship-building, [and] conversation starting,” giving Dan his evidence that creative message content was a challenge facing the market at large.

>>>

The Million Dollar Club: Indus Net

Abhishek Rungta has bootstrapped Indus Net Technologies to a $5 million, 500-person Web design and digital marketing services company from Kolkata, India. Indus Net focuses specifically on application development for Web and mobile, integrated digital marketing, and Web design, with specific work in SEO and SEM.

>>>

The Million Dollar Club: Mansa Systems

San Francisco-based Mansa Systems, led by founder Siva Devaki, is one of them. Mansa provides cloud, mobile, and social enterprise solutions, including cloud storage, secure document sharing, cloud telephony and more. In order to differentiate the firm from its competitors, Siva initially focused on Salesforce CRM, partnering with the company to build apps for Salesforce customers and publish them via AppExchange. Today, the company provides both products and services that extend the Salesforce CRM capabilities.

>>>

The Million Dollar Club: Sapience Analytics

Another Pune, India company, Sapience Analytics, is the creator of an enterprise class solution designed to increase productivity and create ‘automated work visibility’ across the enterprise hierarchy – with no added managerial responsibility.

>>>

The Million Dollar Club: IndiaCakes

Also in the Million Dollar Club is IndiaCakes, an online cake delivery shop based in Pune. Founder Manit Nagrani started off by observing that Indians around the world would like to celebrate their loved ones at home on special occasions by sending them cakes.

>>>

The Million Dollar Club: MMIS

Portsmouth, New Hampshire-based MMIS develops and markets software products for secure collaboration and compliance for healthcare and pharmaceutical businesses. Founder Michaeline Daboul has shepherded the company through significant pivots to arrive at a value proposition that customers are resonating with.

>>>

The Million Dollar Club: Orangescape

Chennai, India-based Orangescape, a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) company, has reached its million-dollar mark by catering primarily to large enterprises trying to move out of Lotus Notes to Google. Co-founders Suresh Sambandam and Mani Doraisamy spotted a gap in Google’s App Engine and over the last couple of years, successfully plugged it for many large customers.

>>>

The Million Dollar Club: iFood.tv

It was 2006, and Vikrant Mathur and Alok Ranjan were learning how to cook. After seeking out advice from every cooking website they knew, they found that text-based sites were lacking in their instructional capabilities. No resources existed that incorporated visual elements or a means to reach out to recipe authors with any questions. The two decided to take matters into their own hands.

>>>

The Million Dollar Club: Introduction

If you haven’t already, please study our free Bootstrapping course.

I had two conversations last week, each of which reinforces a simple phenomenon that I have constantly emphasized over the last five years in my writings.

On Wednesday, I had lunch with Brian Jacobs, General Partner at Emergence Capital. We were discussing our respective startup portfolios, and Brian mentioned that his firm’s preferred stage for investment is when a company has about a million dollars in revenues. Presumably, at that point, the experimentation with product, business model, pricing model, customer acquisition strategy, cost of conversion, and other key issues have settled down. That means, a cash infusion of, say, $7 million will result in a somewhat predictable set of outcomes. Most importantly, the fresh cash would accelerate customer acquisition, and hence revenues.

>>>