1Mby1M Success Stories

3. What kinds of founders have seen success in the program—are there examples beyond SaaS or tech?

Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped with a Paycheck to $7M

This conversation from 2023 with AIScreen CEO and Co-founder Nikita Sherbina is a classic bootstrapping story with a very small team to serious revenue. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised? What kind of background? Nikita Sherbina: I was born and

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Do Not Chase Investors Before Chasing Customers

Sridhar Vembu built Zoho with zero outside funding to a billion-dollar ARR SaaS company. I wrote the first piece ever written on him in 2007 in my Forbes column. No one had yet heard of Zoho. But VCs were already salivating. Sridhar validated my philosophy of how I advise startups when he came to see

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The Accelerator Conundrum: 1Mby1M vs Y Combinator

The Accelerator Conundrum is a multipart series that challenges the prevailing wisdom of the tech startup ecosystem that entrepreneurs should Blitzscale out of the gate. Written by Sramana Mitra, the Founder and CEO of One Million by One Million (1Mby1M), the world’s first global virtual accelerator, it emphatically argues that a better strategy is to Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later, focus

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Best of Bootstrapping: Entrepreneurial Couple Bootstrapped with a Paycheck to Millions

Nomad Lane Co-Founders Kish Vasnani and Vanessa Jeswani bootstrapped to multi-million dollars in revenue selling a private label product before quitting their jobs. In this story, you also get to see the nuances of running successful (and not so successful) crowdfunding campaigns. Their very interesting journey and insights were shared with me in 2021. Sramana

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Best of Bootstrapping: Pre-Seed Fundraising is a Low Probability Game

For our Seed Capital series of podcasts, I’ve interviewed hundreds of investors, especially micro-VCs and angels who play an important role in the early-stage game. The toughest round of funding an entrepreneur will seek to raise is Pre-seed. How do you increase your odds? Pre-seed has the lowest probability of success. Over 99% of the

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Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped a New Age AI Services Venture

CEO Anji Maram has bootstrapped CriticalRiver to $50M in revenue and is introducing AI into his services business model. We expect to see a lot of this happening all over the tech services ecosystem. AI Services is going to become a massively valuable category. Sramana Mitra: All right, Anji, let’s start at the very beginning

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