September 15 – Deadline To Apply For BootUpINDIA Awards

Bootstrapped Indian entrepreneurs should consider nominating yourselves for BootUpINDIA, an iSPIRT initiative. Through a self-nomination/application process, a select group of winners will be chosen by a jury of successful product champions, including Sramana Mitra. Winners will be awarded participation in BootUpINDIA’s year long mentorship program. You can find more details here. The BootUpINDIA program launch will take place on October 2, 2014, in Bangalore, India.

The deadline to apply is September 15, 2014: CLICK HERE TO APPLY.

Ten Lessons I Learned From a ‘Failed’ B2B Software Startup

By guest author and 1M/1M member Luis Montes

Below are ten key lessons our team learned following an unsuccessful two-year launch of PatientDox – a cloud-based startup Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution for healthcare providers. It is our intention to not only learn from our mistakes but also help other tech entrepreneurs and colleagues avoid them.

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Bootstrapping a Fun Social Business: Paint Nite CEO Dan Hermann (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: All the online ticket processing happens through your central website?

Dan Hermann: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: Is this self-financed?

Dan Hermann: That’s one of the really great things about this business. We’re completely self-financed. Our financing engine is based on the fact that people purchase a ticket for a future event, but they don’t attend the event for quite some time – typically anywhere between 28 days to 2 months. That gives us a certain amount of cash that we leverage to grow the business. >>>

Bootstrapping a Fun Social Business: Paint Nite CEO Dan Hermann (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: How many people showed up?

Dan Hermann: We essentially got our friends and family to attend. We were gauging their reactions. Both of us wanted to dip our toes into the business. We had intentionally chosen a business that we thought we could try without having to spend a ton of money. The other thing that we did was we remained relatively hands-off in terms of running the events so we could gauge whether or not it could scale. Rather than teaching the events ourselves and overseeing every detail, we were actively trying to find local artists to run the events without a whole lot of training.

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Bootstrapping a Fun Social Business: Paint Nite CEO Dan Hermann (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: When people show up for the class, what are they buying? When they’re buying tickets to attend these events, are they buying for just the class or the drinks as well?

Dan Hermann: They’re buying a ticket to attend a class. We like to call it an event rather than a class. We have a local artist that leads the event and walks everybody through a painting. When people buy a ticket, they can choose the event from which venue it’s at, what the date is, and what the painting is. You can see all the different paintings that there are to choose from on our website, which is PaintNite.com.

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Bootstrapping a Fun Social Business: Paint Nite CEO Dan Hermann (Part 2)

Dan Hermann: We attended a friend’s birthday party, which was at this painting studio where they were serving beer and wine. Both he and I recognized very quickly that there was a lot of power to the concept, which had a lot of visual implications. We could tell that it was just very social media friendly. It made for a natural camera phone picture and people were posting on their Facebook pages. It just carried very well across social media. We could also tell that it was a lot of fun. Both of us thought that it would just be a fun thing to start.

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Bootstrapping a Fun Social Business: Paint Nite CEO Dan Hermann (Part 1)

Social media is great, but human beings also love to socialize in person. Paint Nite is thriving by tapping into the desire human beings have to ‘hang out’ and do creative things.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with telling our audience a little bit about your personal background. Where were you born and raised? What kind of background?

Dan Hermann: I am now 43 years old. I was born in Boston and grew up in Newton, Massachusetts. I attended the University of Wisconsin. I started my first business at the age of 21. That business is a pick-up and delivery laundry service, which I still own today. We’re in six different states. I learned a great deal about operational businesses in that business.

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Entrepreneur Dysfunctions in Cartoons: Pipe Dreams

Honestly, this comic strip is based verbatim on my personal experience!

As you know, I anchor the 1M/1M Free Mentoring Roundtables weekly. After close to 225 sessions, I am astounded at the level of unrealistic expectations and pipe dreams that entrepreneurs come to us with. Still.

Just last week, at our 223rd roundtable, we had an entrepreneur called Madhu Kodali from Hyderabad, India pitch Project Recuerdos, a concept for preserving memories gathered from all kinds of digital sources. Madhu expects seed money to get his project started. Unfortunately, investors don’t fund concepts. You can listen to Madhu’s pitch and the ensuing mentoring discussion in this video [25:35-35:30].

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