1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: Felix Hartmann, Hartmann Capital (Part 1)

Felix Hartmann, Managing Partner at Hartmann Capital, discusses his firm’s investment thesis. This segment triggered an excellent discussion on Human Augmentation.

1Mby1M Udemy Courses with Sramana Mitra: Domain Knowledge

At 1Mby1M, we believe in learning from case studies of successful entrepreneurs. These case studies involve discussions on opportunities and challenges specific to the domain such as Generative AI, E-Commerce, Digital Health, Cyber Security, and FinTech. 

Building a Bootstrapped Million-Dollar Online Fashion Business

I started one of the Internet’s first fashion e-commerce companies in 1999. It was very expensive to do so at the time.

Today, an online fashion business can be launched in an extraordinarily capital-efficient manner. 

There are so many effective e-commerce platforms from Amazon, eBay and Etsy to Shopify and BigCommerce that will allow you to either start selling through their marketplaces or create your storefront for just a few dollars. 

There are skilled freelancers on sites like Fiverr and Upwork to whom you can outsource some of your business building tasks at a very reasonable price.

A bootstrapped, capital-efficient, million-dollar online fashion business is a great asset to build and own, and after that, you can decide to grow it further or not. It is a great place to be and you do not have to be an IT genius to get to that place.

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Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: James Green, CEO of Magnetic (Part 1)

James points out that in e-commerce and digital marketing, point solutions have become more effective than the broad suites from players like Adobe and Marketo. Read on and see if you agree!

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to Magnetic.

James Green: I’m the CEO of Magnetic. Magnetic is a marketing and advertising technology company. The simplest way to think about us is we learn about what you’re looking for when you’re looking to buy something on the Internet through very large and distributed data networks. We help our customers communicate with you either by showing you advertisements or by customizing their web pages or by sending you emails. That’s what we do. >>>

Billion Dollar Unicorns: Web 3.0 and E-Commerce Investment Thesis of 3 VCs

Last fall, we had three VCs participate in our 1M/1M roundtables to discuss their Web 3.0 and e-Commerce investment thesis. These interviews cover as well as build upon the themes discussed in my two recent books, Billion Dollar Unicorns and From E-Commerce to Web 3.0. If you are looking to build a Unicorn company in the Web 3.0 / e-Commerce domains, I strongly recommend you listen to these three interviews. In each case, listening to just the first 30 minutes would be adequate.

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Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Darren Hill, CEO of WebLinc (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: What are you able to do? What strategies do you follow to make that an instant fit in some sense on the mobile phone?

Darren Hill: If you think about products, products have attributes and tags. The consumer uses those tags to find products on the website. The biggest thing we’re doing is tagging the customer. We look at searches that the customer makes based on past purchases, the last place the customer has been, or even the way they shop. Some shoppers are shopping for something very specific. Some shoppers are shopping to fill their closets. Some shoppers are buying gifts. We’re doing a lot of work to identify what type of shoppers are here. Those shoppers actually respond differently to different page layouts. Someone who’s buying just a pair of jeans is much interested in seeing those jeans >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Darren Hill, CEO of WebLinc (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: One question on Nasty Gal and the scalability point, what are the issues? What are we trying to solve?

Darren Hill: The issue is making sure the site is up. It works for all of your customers and they’re getting the environment that they’re expecting. For us, it’s really a technology play. Our systems are built on Ruby on Rails with a MongoDB database on the back-end. That technology allows us to rapidly scale in a virtual environment so that we can add new servers very easily. We can handle insane amounts of traffic almost seamlessly.

Sramana Mitra: Talk to me about pricing. I know the pricing of some of these other players that are serving much larger number of customers. You seem to be serving 100 customers that are much larger. I imagine your pricing is very different from theirs. Talk to me a bit about how you charge.
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Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Darren Hill, CEO of WebLinc (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How do you do the recommendation on what goes with what? Is that a manual recommendation system or is there technology that enables scaling of something like that?

Darren Hill: It’s a mix. There are several data points that go into it such as what people have bought and what they have looked at. That’s the easy one and something that everybody’s been doing for years. The shoppers can put products together in their own category. They’re being a stylist, if you will, on the site. We use that data as well. We are able to see which customer is the best stylist based on how much sales is generated through what they’re suggesting. Then we have professional stylists who work there. They’re also putting this information in. We essentially take those data points and make the suggestion based on all of that. >>>