If you haven’t already, please study our free Bootstrapping course. Entrepreneur Journeys Billion Dollar Unicorns (Available for order from Amazon Kindle) The vast majority of entrepreneurs today are trying to figure out how to build billion dollar Unicorn companies. Venture Capitalists have always been looking for Unicorns to fund. And yet, the probability of founding
Here are some comments from Forbes readers on my last column. My response is below. Please feel free to chime in.
By Greg Gianforte, Guest Author [SM: On the heels of my Weapon Of Mass Reconstruction column, I’d like to welcome Greg Gianforte, CEO of RightNow, whose interview you have read recently, to share his perspective on bootstrapping.]
SM: How do you view the competitive landscape both internationally and in India? SS: Quite honestly, I have not worried about the competitive landscape. Our opportunity is so large that I have to focus on the massive growth we have. The Indian market is so big that we have not looked at expanding beyond India.
SM: Where are you seeing traction in terms of income level? SS: It is unbelievable how wide our customer base is. We were sitting in a meeting with one customer who said it was a high-end niche product, and that they would be happy to roll it out but expected it would remain a niche
SM: Are other telecom operators adopting this model? What is the business model of your relationship with the telecoms? SS: mChek’s vision is to be a global consumer payments brand. The business model is inherently transaction-based, where we receive a percentage of the transaction. Over a period of time other telecom operators will be launching the product,
SM: When you joined, was it a commercially viable solution? SS: There was a big gap between the concept and a commercially ready solution. We had investments and a team and had to take the idea and build it into a large-scale enterprise system. That took 18 months.
SM: When did you finally move back to India, and when did you decide to do mChek full time? SS: We moved back in 2003. Initially, I came to the conclusion that the business was not viable at that point, largely due to Indian regulatory issues. I ended up starting up the Indian operations for Ketera