Sramana Mitra - ReadWriteWeb

Strategy Roundtable: Startups In Malaysia

Sramana Mitra — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 10:00:00 -0800

This week's roundtable was organized in collaboration with my partner MAD Incubator, a technology incubator in Malaysia that is dedicated to giving technopreneurs a chance to succeed and make a difference.

First up was Max Teoh presenting GetToDo, a real-time, vicinity-based sales and promotions solution for the Malaysian lifestyle market. It enables retailers and brands to promote their products to consumers interested in lifestyle products through Internet and mobile channels. In terms of target audience, the company targets trend-conscious Internet savvy consumers in the teenagers to working adult segments.

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]]> Max came with a few specific questions around pricing and content strategy. On pricing, his assumption is that retailers and brands will be paying for promotions, and he has checked with about 100 retailers and brands to validate this assumption. However, the pricing model he suggested - $.01 per minute of promotion highlight - doesn't sit well with me. Elsewhere in the world, promotions pricing models generally revolve around CPM, CPC, CPA, and similar metrics. I have not seen a time-based promotion metric ever.

Even though Max wants to undercut the price-points of Google and Facebook, which may be a fine strategy, I just don't feel comfortable about this cost-per-minute metric that I have not seen before. Readers, if any of you have seen it, please let me know. If not, then I would advise Max to stay within industry-standard pricing models like CPM, CPC, and CPA. Max also had questions about his user-generated content strategy, and how to ensure that UGC quality is maintained at a high level. Well, to that my advice is to introduce a layer of human moderation.

Social Walk

Next Tham Keng Yew discussed SocialWalk, a Web-based solution for managing conference and meeting registrations. Keng Yew has introduced a level of differentiation in this solution by helping the registrants connect with people with related interests from a business networking point of view, which I thought was quite clever. The company already has a number of good customers, and is a validated business.

His questions for me were around how to increase his sales momentum. Currently, most of their leads are coming in from referrals from event organizers. My response is to do a focused direct mail and email campaign, or even telemarketing campaign, targeting the conference and event organizers. We also discussed how to engage the attendee community further, and to that, my response was to build an event recommendation engine that promotes related events to their community.

Xilnex

Ooi Boon Sheng then presented Xilnex, a retail business software catering to the Malaysian SMB space. The company already has 200-plus customers, and a validated subscription-based business model. The product, however, needs some high-touch, hands-on support to drive adoption, which is why Ooi is selling the product through a couple of national distributors.

His problem is that distributors are lukewarm because of the low initial payment due to the subscription business model. Ooi needs to, therefore, make it as attractive as possible for distributors to sell the product, and the way to do so is to invest in some marketing and lead generation himself. And as the leads come in, pass them onto the distributors, so that they can service and convert those leads efficiently.

For a new product, the ISV needs to do some demand generation on behalf of the distributors, and thus make it worthwhile for the distributors to engage with them. And once again, direct marketing against very tightly segmented lists is one of the cheaper ways of demand creation.

Parking Management

Up last was Roslee Ali for Abbassy Sdn Bhd who has a comprehensive parking management solution. Roslee's customers are municipal parking owners and also building owners with parking lots. There are about three existing competitors in the market who have deep relationships with the target customer base, even though their products are relatively simple, non-comprehensive, and commodity-based. Nonetheless, it is proving hard for Roslee to penetrate the market because the buyers tend to rely on these older vendors, and are reluctant to change into a new vendor or a new system.

My assessment on this scenario is that Roslee needs to partner with the existing vendors and extend their solutions, and sell to the customers with these vendors. Competing with them and trying to replace their solutions won't work. We discussed a variety of issues about this business including financing and cash-flow challenges.

I started doing my free Online Strategy Roundtables for entrepreneurs in the fall of 2008. These roundtables are the cornerstone programming of a global initiative that I have started called One Million by One Million (1M/1M). Its mission is to help a million entrepreneurs globally to reach $1 million in revenue and beyond, build $1 trillion in sustainable global GDP, and create 10 million jobs. In 1M/1M, I teach the EJ Methodology which is based on my Entrepreneur Journeys research, and emphasize bootstrapping, idea validation, and crisp positioning as some of the core principles of building strong fundamentals in early stage ventures. In addition, we are offering entrepreneurs access to investors and customers through our recently launched our 1M/1M Incubation Radar series. You can pitch to be featured on my blog following these instructions.

The recording of this roundtable can be found here. Recordings of previous roundtables are all available here. You can register for the next roundtable here.

Sramana Mitra is a technology entrepreneur and strategy consultant in Silicon Valley. She has founded three companies, writes a business blog, Sramana Mitra on Strategy, and runs the 1M/1M initiative. She has a master's degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her Entrepreneur Journeys book series, Entrepreneur Journeys, Bootstrapping: Weapon Of Mass Reconstruction, Positioning: How To Test, Validate, and Bring Your Idea To Market and her latest volume Innovation: Need Of The Hour, as well as Vision India 2020, are all available from Amazon.

Photo by Ramasamy Chidambaram

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Strategy Roundtable: Bootstrap Using Services

Sramana Mitra — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 17:00:00 -0800

This week's roundtable had several interesting discussions around techniques for bootstrapping, both during the entrepreneur pitches, as well as during the Q&A. One of the most effective mechanics that I know for bootstrapping the early phases of a startup venture is by using services – consulting services, contact development work – such that you can achieve customer intimacy and also bring in revenue that can help fund your business.

Even if you do product or IP development in parallel, that revenue stream is very valuable, as is the direct access to customer feedback. Some of my favorite entrepreneurs who have bootstrapped using services are Paul Kocher (Cryptography Research) and Jerry Rawls and Frank Levinson (Finisar).

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]]> Lopworks Ltd.

I gave this advice to one of today's presenters: Ademola Osindero of Lopworks Ltd. from Nigeria. Ademola has a network integration services company for the last three to four years that generates revenues. But now he wants to build SaaS business apps for healthcare, for instance, and would like to raise $1M to do so. Well, the problem is that he doesn't have any validation for the software business, and the chances of his raising money against an idea are slim.

It is slim in a mature market like Silicon Valley, so I cannot believe that it has a prayer in a backward market like Africa. I advised Ademola to use his network integration services business to validate the healthcare IT product idea that he has, work with customers, build a product, and generate some revenue momentum by using the bootstrap using services principle.

Q&A

In the Q&A someone asked how to bootstrap a B to C user-generated content site. Good question. This one is harder. One of the ways to do that is by offering market research data and analysis to the customers. It's still a service, and it can turn into revenues quickly while giving you the runway to build your B to C business.

Renewable Energy Now

We had Faith Kinslow start off by presenting her idea for Renewable Energy Now, which sounded like a content site through which she wants to raise funding for scientific research in alternative energy in universities. Well, I don't see a business here, and advised her to use Facebook Causes for her fundraising interest. No need to waste precious time and energy in trying to build a business that has no chance.

Magnetic Pursenality

And then Karen Averill presented Magnetic Pursenality, a magnetic purse company that sources artisan products from wholesalers around the world, puts magnets on them, and sell through their website and other distribution channels. One of Karen's goals is to help reduce global poverty by bringing the work of poor artisans into focus. Now it turns out that this is an area that I have done a lot of research on, and in my Vision India 2020 book, I have presented several projects around rural and slum development using similar ideas. However, there is one fundamental missing piece in Karen's idea: design. Artisans in remote villages around the world have no clue about good design that sophisticated customers in the West are willing to spend money on. As a result, the products that Karen is selling on her website at this point are, pardon my bluntness, pretty ugly.

Well, for a good cause or not, people simply don't buy ugly products. So Karen either needs to work with a great designer who can provide designs to some artisans who execute against those designs. Or, she needs a great merchandiser who can pick a set of products that reflect taste. You cannot be in the fashion business without taste. This is a cardinal rule that cannot and should not be violated.

We also had a discussion about channels. For Karen's business, once the design problem is fixed, she has the option of selling in the B to C mode on her website, or in the B to B mode through catalogues. It turns out that she has done some great research to identify a set of catalogues that may be interested in buying her products wholesale. Her next step, therefore, is to validate that channel, and see how much appetite these companies have for her magnetic purses.

ShabdMitra

At the end of the show, Ruchir Tewari introduced ShabdMitra, a mobile value-added service that takes English SMSs and converts them to one of the major Indian languages: Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Telegu, Marathi, Gujarati, Kannada, etc. Assuming that his technology works, an extremely hard problem in itself, Ruchir's questions were around his go-to-market strategy. He has designed some use cases, including one that I liked: Advertisers trying to reach rural consumers can send an SMS in English, which can then be translated and broadcast to various geographies of rural consumers in their respective languages. There are issues around the need for the ad copy to be cool, and such.

But it is an idea worth validating with some advertising agencies and marketers of consumer goods who need to market to these vast masses of rural Indian consumers? If the value proposition resonates, then Ruchir can take it to a carrier along with a group of advertisers and start a pilot. The regular mobile VAS business model applies: If an advertiser sends 100,000 messages, paying Rs. 2 per message, the carrier will split the revenue with the VAS provider. But the first order of business is to check whether the advertisers want such a service!

The recording of this roundtable can be found here. Recordings of previous roundtables are all available here. You can register for the next roundtable here.

Sramana Mitra is a technology entrepreneur and strategy consultant in Silicon Valley. She has founded three companies, writes a business blog, Sramana Mitra on Strategy, and runs the 1M/1M initiative. She has a master's degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her Entrepreneur Journeys book series, Entrepreneur Journeys, Bootstrapping: Weapon Of Mass Reconstruction, Positioning: How To Test, Validate, and Bring Your Idea To Market and her latest volume Innovation: Need Of The Hour, as well as Vision India 2020, are all available from Amazon.

Photo by Grzegorz Rejniak
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Strategy Roundtable: A Market of Late Adopters

Sramana Mitra — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 17:00:00 -0800

This week's roundtable had two entrepreneurs from India. Now for those of you who are unfamiliar with the Indian market, it is a market that has not seen as much Internet adoption as elsewhere. Whereas China's Internet penetration will reach 518 million this year, India's is only about 80 million, and access is still largely from companies and cyber cafes. Establishing home-based broadband Internet access is an elusive goal. Even at small and medium companies in non-IT or ITES sectors, Internet usage and in fact computer usage, is relatively low.

Against that backdrop, Tarak Nagraj started off by presenting Abhaya, his SME ERP solution targeting the Indian ERP market, focusing on manufacturing companies with $2 million to $15 million in revenue.
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]]> Tarak's product is built on top of Tally, India's de-facto accounting software standard, and supplies additional modules such as manufacturing resource planning, customer relationship management and other functions. Tarak's analysis is that manufacturing companies in India are operating at 28-30% efficiency levels, and introducing MRP into their midst dramatically enhances their performance. Abhaya has been in business since 2007 and would like to be a pure play SaaS company.

The market realities, however, are quite different in India in general, and in the SME manufacturing sector in particular. In addition, the segments of manufacturing that Abhaya is working with - textiles, dyes, garments, leather goods - tend to be very backward from a technological standpoint. Thus, for every customer, Abhaya has to conduct extensive training to plant the seeds of adoption, and this training cannot be conducted online over Web conferencing software like DimDim, which is what we use for our roundtables. No, the training has to be in person, making the adoption cycle longer and more expensive.

My advice to Tarak is that he needs to meet the market where it is, and not try to force a configuration that doesn't work for the customers. Self-service SaaS won't work for the Indian manufacturing segment at this point. Tarak will have to assume that 10-20% of his business will be training, and budget and plan accordingly. The critical thing is that the training is paid for. In fact, the training business could become a serious revenue generator, and help him bootstrap the business further.

Pure-play SaaS is a long way away for Abhaya. To some degree, it is a long way away for India.

AfterCollege.in

Next Kamal Dunani and Mukul Samtani presented AfterCollege.in, an online career-counseling portal for students. Their current business is a local brick-and-mortar training business for students in the central Indian town of Bhopal. Fifty percent of the current revenue comes from soft-skill training and 50% from MBA entrance exam coaching. Kamal and Mukul, however, want to do a national portal for online career counseling.

This business idea is not flushed out sufficiently yet. They need to map the idea to my Web 3.0 framework and define a content strategy with a freemium game plan, taking advantage of both advertising and subscription business models. In addition, they need a community strategy including some user generated content game plan. They also need to figure out what they can sell online, to execute on a commerce strategy. Also, detailed competitive analysis is missing. Who are the top competitors, what are their traffic and advertising metrics? All this will lead to a possible business strategy that may or may not make sense, but without following the necessary steps of analysis, this business idea is at a 30,000-foot level. It needs to hit the ground and put the tires on the road.

I started doing my free Online Strategy Roundtables for entrepreneurs in the fall of 2008. These roundtables are the cornerstone programming of a global initiative that I have started called One Million by One Million (1M/1M). Its mission is to help a million entrepreneurs globally to reach $1 million in revenue and beyond, build $1 trillion in sustainable global GDP, and create 10 million jobs. In 1M/1M, I teach the EJ Methodology which is based on my Entrepreneur Journeys research, and emphasize bootstrapping, idea validation, and crisp positioning as some of the core principles of building strong fundamentals in early stage ventures. In addition, we are offering entrepreneurs access to investors and customers through our recently launched our 1M/1M Incubation Radar series. You can pitch to be featured on my blog following these instructions.The recording of this roundtable can be found here. Recordings of previous roundtables are all available here. You can register for the next roundtable here.

Sramana Mitra is a technology entrepreneur and strategy consultant in Silicon Valley. She has founded three companies, writes a business blog, Sramana Mitra on Strategy, and runs the 1M/1M initiative. She has a master's degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her Entrepreneur Journeys book series, Entrepreneur Journeys, Bootstrapping: Weapon Of Mass Reconstruction, Positioning: How To Test, Validate, and Bring Your Idea To Market and her latest volume Innovation: Need Of The Hour, as well as Vision India 2020, are all available from Amazon.
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Strategy Roundtable: The EJ Methodology

Sramana Mitra — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 16:30:00 -0800

This week's roundtable was an interesting mix of entrepreneurs ranging from an IP licensing company to a snow removal system.

Dr. Marilyn Bruno started off by presenting Aequor, Inc., an early stage biotech company that removes biofilms by using proprietary chemical compounds extracted from marine microbes. Biofilms support the proliferation of bacteria. Marilyn wants to license her technology to various market segments that have applications in bacteria removal, and has identified markets from ships' hulls to agriculture to contact lenses to teeth cleaning as possible application areas.
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]]> She expects that it would take the company about five years to really kick into royalty revenue gear, and meanwhile, is investigating funding options.

My take of IP Licensing businesses is that it takes a very long time for patents to be issued, and royalties to start kicking in. There are a number of IP licensing companies that I cover regularly on my blog: Tessera, Dolby, InterDigital, ARM, and to an extent Qualcomm, which also has a very large IP licensing business. Tessera, in fact, was a client of mine.

If you study the industry and the business model, you will see that it is rather difficult to finance the early stages of an IP licensing business, since traditional venture investors tend not to like the model. Thus, my advice to Marilyn, based on some of the conversations she has had with various industry players, is to try to convert at least a few of these customers into flat licensing fee customers as soon as possible, and not worry too much about trying to get royalties from them.

Based on Marilyn's analysis, there is a diverse and large set of potential licensees for her technology. So, in the long run, she may be able to create lucrative royalty deals with some of them. But meanwhile, she needs to survive the short and medium term, and for that, my suggestion is to try to get customer funding via modest amounts of flat licensing fees that can keep things going.

My worry is that businesses that have long gestation periods tend to run out of cash. There are 600,000 companies that go out of business each year. I don't want Marilyn to be one of those entrepreneurs who faces that predicament.

Innovation: Need Of The Hour

And while on this topic, I also want to talk about my new book, Innovation: Need Of The Hour, where I have addressed the issue of innovators having the tendency to come up with solutions and then look for problems, instead of the other way round. In general, my belief is that if you are planning to spend an extensive amount of your time, energy and resources developing an innovation, it is better that you do a serious due diligence on what the commercial path of that innovation is likely to take. My take: Efficient innovators solve problems, not come up with solutions looking for problems.

Snow Removal

After Marilyn Bruno, Hari Prasad presented an automatic snow removal system that he has designed, but has not yet brought to market. In fact, he is still missing the control system of the invention, for which he said that he was looking for an engineer. I asked him if he knows how to design the control system, since it sounded relatively simple based on the schematic he presented. Well, great news - Hari does know how to design it. This eliminates the barrier to finishing this product.

Hari should just go ahead and design it, and finish the product. Then comes the question of manufacturing and go-to-market. I advised Hari to experiment with a service called Quirky. It is a crowdsourced product innovation platform that has caught my attention, and it would be interesting to see if Hari can use them to bring his snow removal system to market.

Mill Creek Systems

Up last was Warren Newhauser, founder of Mill Creek Systems, Inc., who is looking to productize an estimating solution for structural steel fabricators. Warren has been listening to my roundtables since the beginning of the year, and has thus developed a sound understanding of the EJ Methodology that we teach in the 1M/1M program. He has implemented the methodology and came to this session with a very good set of market research data. He has made 41 customer calls and shared with me his findings about the customer feedback.

We had a very good dialog about the Total Available Market (TAM) analysis, and also the possible ways of finding customers who are ready to buy. In the end, Warren went away with two action items. 1: Talk to some of the distributors of CAD software products like Autodesk and Solidworks and get their input on whether they would be able to sell his product. 2: Search engine optimize his website such that people looking for this sort of product would be able to find him. The search volume is low, true, with only about 66 queries in his domain. However, those 66 are highly qualified prospects, and could represent several tens of thousands of dollars in business.

I started doing my free Online Strategy Roundtables for entrepreneurs in the fall of 2008. These roundtables are the cornerstone programming of a global initiative that I have started called One Million by One Million (1M/1M). Its mission is to help a million entrepreneurs globally to reach $1 million in revenue and beyond, build $1 trillion in sustainable global GDP, and create 10 million jobs. In 1M/1M, I teach the EJ Methodology which is based on my Entrepreneur Journeys research, and emphasize bootstrapping, idea validation, and crisp positioning as some of the core principles of building strong fundamentals in early stage ventures. In addition, we are offering entrepreneurs access to investors and customers through our recently launched our 1M/1M Incubation Radar series. You can pitch to be featured on my blog following these instructions.

The recording of this roundtable can be found here. Recordings of previous roundtables are all available here. You can register for the next roundtablehere.

Sramana Mitra is a technology entrepreneur and strategy consultant in Silicon Valley. She has founded three companies, writes a business blog, Sramana Mitra on Strategy, and runs the 1M/1M initiative. She has a master's degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her Entrepreneur Journeys book series, Entrepreneur Journeys, Bootstrapping: Weapon Of Mass Reconstruction, Positioning: How To Test, Validate, and Bring Your Idea To Market and her latest volume Innovation: Need Of The Hour, as well as Vision India 2020, are all available from Amazon.

Photo by Stefan Klabunde.
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Strategy Roundtable: Get Your Pricing Model Validated

Sramana Mitra — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 16:00:00 -0800

Today's roundtable had a couple of mobile and social media app companies that I thought were quite promising. At least at the concept and market analysis level I could resonate with them - although the devil is always in the details.

Sean Malatesta started off by presenting Marengo Movies, a film distribution and marketing venture built on top of the Apple platform, spanning iTunes, iPad, iPhone, and iTouch. Marengo is building a mobile app for all three platforms that will utilize viral consumer behavior to market movies and episodic video content by independent producers who are struggling with distribution and marketing challenges.
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]]> The films would be sold on iTunes, and Marengo wants to take a percentage of the retail price as its primary monetization model, aside from a set-up fee of about $500 per film. Apple charges 30% to sell digital content on iTunes. That leaves another 70% to share between the producer and Marengo. Marengo is pointing to Apple's $1.1 billion app sales on its mobile platforms, and estimating that the 80-85 million units of Apple devices (iPod, iPad, iTouch, iPhone) constitute almost 69% of the U.S. television audience of 115 million households - an audience that may be ripe for buying independent films that do not have access to any other distribution channel.

While I like the value proposition very much, I am also of the opinion that distribution will become commoditized over time, and Marengo's real value proposition would be its marketing capabilities. Nonetheless, this is a company worth building, and Sean needs to validate his business model and pricing model with customers. His app is just two weeks from launching, and I am looking forward to it!

MyStudiyo

Then Gili Torovezky pitched MyStudiyo, an online app for increasing customer engagement through interactive quizzes. More than 20 million quizzes have been taken on this platform, and conversion rates of MyStuiyo's clients have increased 3 fold in some cases. However, the monetization model of the business has not quite been worked out yet, and that is what we focused on at the roundtable.

My advise to Gili is to focus on ad agencies and talk to about 25 of them to see how they would be interested in working with MyStudiyo. The value proposition is quite powerful in my opinion, and eminently quantifiable, with a direct impact on revenues. The question is how do they charge? Does the agency pay or the client? Pay for performance vs. flat fee? There are multiple options, and a comprehensive set of discussions with the agencies will help validate the pricing model. Gili will collect some of this feedback, and then we will talk again to sift through it and iron out the precise pricing model.

G Creative World

Next, Govind Ramaiah introduced G Creative World, his dream of building an ad agency. Govind got a slight chiding from me for coming to the roundtable without doing any homework. I pointed him to my Clarify Your Story questions to help him through the process of testing and validating his business idea, and I hope he follows through.

RentToday.us

Up last was Mia Melle with RentToday.us. It helps residential property owners rent out and manage their properties, including repairs, evictions, collection, etc. This company did $1.1 million in 2009, projects $1.3 million in 2010 and operates in four counties in Southern California. The problem is, they have been around since 2001, and growth has been quite slow. They seem confused about how to grow the business and somewhat stuck on the low-differentiation services like repairs.

They asked if they should franchise the business, to which I asked how much of their business happens through in-person contact versus virtual. Well, it turns out that 99% of the business is virtual, although they do need physical resources to do inventory and photography of properties, as well as repairs and maintenance. Those are, however, backend services that can easily be done by creating partnerships with contractors in various geographies, while their core business remains virtual, technology-leveraged, and highly scalable.

I advised them against franchising. I also advised them against building in-house resources for repair- and maintenance-type functions. I believe this business, freed from the shackles of the physical services, can grow much faster as a virtual business while leveraging a fluid pool of distributed physical resources.

I started doing my free Online Strategy Roundtables for entrepreneurs in the fall of 2008. These roundtables are the cornerstone programming of a global initiative that I have started called One Million by One Million (1M/1M). Its mission is to help a million entrepreneurs globally to reach $1 million in revenue and beyond, build $1 trillion in sustainable global GDP, and create 10 million jobs. In 1M/1M, I teach the EJ Methodology which is based on my Entrepreneur Journeys research, and emphasize bootstrapping, idea validation, and crisp positioning as some of the core principles of building strong fundamentals in early stage ventures. In addition, we are offering entrepreneurs access to investors and customers through our recently launched our 1M/1M Incubation Radar series. You can pitch to be featured on my blog following these instructions.

The recording of this roundtable can be found here. Recordings of previous roundtables are all available here. You can register for the next roundtablehere.

Sramana Mitra is a technology entrepreneur and strategy consultant in Silicon Valley. She has founded three companies, writes a business blog, Sramana Mitra on Strategy, and runs the 1M/1M initiative. She has a master's degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her Entrepreneur Journeys book series, Entrepreneur Journeys, Bootstrapping: Weapon Of Mass Reconstruction, Positioning: How To Test, Validate, and Bring Your Idea To Market and her latest volume Innovation: Need Of The Hour, as well as Vision India 2020, are all available from Amazon.

Photo by Yello-Dog.
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Strategy Roundtable: Three Startups That Can Hit $1 Million

Sramana Mitra — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 11:00:00 -0800

Today's roundtable overlapped with the Italy - Slovakia World Cup soccer game, which from what I can tell was quite exciting, albeit very disappointing for the reigning champions!

Michael Jastram started off by presenting ProR, an open-source platform to manage the RFQ process for automotive parts manufacturers and suppliers. Michael has an European Union grant for the next 18 months to build this platform, and intends to offer integration services and premium functionality on top of it to monetize it. His presentation was clear and concise, and he has good connections into the automotive industry, through which he expects to be able to scope out the functionality of the system relatively easily.
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]]> There are about 6 major manufacturers and 600 smaller parts manufacturers who feed into these companies. We discussed average deal sizes for the integration projects, which Michael estimates between €10,000-50,000. This would be a very reasonable way to monetize the platform and build a several million dollars a year business over the next three years. I found Michael's strategy robust and well thought through.

He used me as a sounding board to verify his assumptions. Michael came to the session with a good deal of homework done, which made it a smooth discussion with a very clear execution roadmap. I gave him several pointers to open source case studies, including SugarCRM, CollabNet, SpringSource, and DimDim, which, of course, is our host for the 1M/1M roundtables.

Norton Scientific

Then Bryan Webb pitched Norton Scientific, which is a protein aggregation monitoring system that helps with drug discovery. Bryan's target market is the 3,500 chemistry labs worldwide, adding up to a TAM of about $250 million. The product is 12 weeks from being ready, and will be sold through distributors at $8,000 per unit. Bryan seems to have identified a well-defined niche, and has designed a product that costs $1,000 to build. Distributors will be paying $6,000 per unit, making $5,000 profit per unit. There are some short-term cash flow issues with this business, but clearly, there is a business here that can get to break-even relatively quickly. With some seed capital, the business will scale just fine. I plan to invite Bryan to be featured on my Incubation Radar series, and introduce him to some angel investors.

Relationships Matter Now

Next, Denise Barreto started off by introducing Relationships Matter Now, a Web portal for wellness programs that want to offer relationship advice to employees of corporations. I'm afraid I did not find the value proposition convincing, and advised her to go talk to at least 50 corporate HR managers in charge of wellness programs to validate her idea before she quits her day job.

Giant Media

Up last was David Segura with Giant Media, discussing his viral video marketing company which did $90,000 last month in services revenue. David is exploring ways to manage his cash-flow challenges so that he can invest some money in building a widget or two that transforms Giant Media to more of a technology company, as opposed to a pure services company.

I tend to really like services businesses that achieve deep customer intimacy and build products based on that knowledge and experience. I am curious to see what kind of widgets David comes up with over the next few months, and again, as this business develops, we will feature the company in my Incubation Radar and expose it to seed investors.

While I am not sure about Denise's venture, the others three businesses - ProR, Norton Scientific, and Giant Media - I am reasonably sure have the potential to reach the $1 million mark with good execution and intelligent maneuvering.

I started doing my free Online Strategy Roundtables for entrepreneurs in the fall of 2008. These roundtables are the cornerstone programming of a global initiative that I have started called One Million by One Million (1M/1M). Its mission is to help a million entrepreneurs globally to reach $1 million in revenue and beyond, build $1 trillion in sustainable global GDP, and create 10 million jobs. In 1M/1M, I teach the EJ Methodology which is based on my Entrepreneur Journeys research, and emphasize bootstrapping, idea validation, and crisp positioning as some of the core principles of building strong fundamentals in early stage ventures. In addition, we are offering entrepreneurs access to investors and customers through our recently launched our 1M/1M Incubation Radar series. You can pitch to be featured on my blog following these instructions.

The recording of this roundtable can be found here. Recordings of previous roundtables are all available here. You can register for the next roundtable here.

Sramana Mitra is a technology entrepreneur and strategy consultant in Silicon Valley. She has founded three companies, writes a business blog, Sramana Mitra on Strategy, and runs the 1M/1M initiative. She has a master's degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her Entrepreneur Journeys book series, Entrepreneur Journeys, Bootstrapping: Weapon Of Mass Reconstruction, Positioning: How To Test, Validate, and Bring Your Idea To Market and her latest volume Innovation: Need Of The Hour, as well as Vision India 2020, are all available from Amazon.

Photo by Svilen Milev
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Strategy Roundtable: Online Education Startups

Sramana Mitra — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 17:00:00 -0800

Today's roundtable was organized in collaboration with TiE Delhi, and had a special emphasis on the online education sector with three out of the five entrepreneurs presenting education businesses.

Ankur Mehra and his associate Aditya started off by introducing GuruVantage. Ankur and Aditya have determined that training managers at various Indian companies need help with vetting the quality, methodology and infrastructures of various training institutes, training vendors and such.
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]]> Sramana Mitra is a technology entrepreneur and strategy consultant in Silicon Valley. She has founded three companies, writes a business blog, Sramana Mitra on Strategy, and runs the 1M/1M initiative. She has a master's degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her Entrepreneur Journeys book series, Entrepreneur Journeys, Bootstrapping: Weapon Of Mass Reconstruction, Positioning: How To Test, Validate, and Bring Your Idea To Market and her latest volume Innovation: Need Of The Hour, as well as Vision India 2020, are all available from Amazon.

In response to that, they are proposing a solution to do both pre-hiring and post-hiring. Prior to hiring, for example, training managers need to assess where candidates have been trained, and what is the quality of training that they provide. In addition, there are additional training needs post-hiring, which training managers address often by hiring training vendors.

The key question that Guruvantage needs to answer is whether training managers are willing to pay for the solution or not. If the answer is yes, then the next question is how much are they willing to pay? What this leads us to is first, value proposition validation, then business model validation, followed by pricing model validation. Each stage of validation helps enhance the valuation of a company. And in 1M/1M, we always emphasize the best practice of building as much value, validation and valuation upfront.

In addition, we had a specific discussion about segmentation alternatives - based on size of company, vertical, and geographical. Guruvantage has a large vision of doing this kind of training assessment for a wide variety of sectors ranging from engineering to business to the arts. All very well, but they have to pick a segment to enter through. As I told them, by trying to cater to everybody, you end up catering to nobody. You HAVE to go segment by segment.

ARROW

Devesh Verma was up next to present ARROW, a finishing school solution that helps college graduates become employable. Devesh addresses the issue that a large portion of Indian college grads are not employable because of a lack of essential skills, especially communication. Devesh has three colleges that have told him that they are willing to pay Rs. 150,000 for training 30 students on ARROW. He expects to be able to deliver a 30-student session within Rs. 130,000. Not bad.

Now I want to know whether Devesh can find 100 colleges - tier B and tier C colleges since the tier A colleges tend to have their own offerings - who are willing to pay Rs. 150,000 for ARROW. If he can, then there is a business worth building here. And pay attention to the segmentation of who is adopting vs. who isn't; it will provide great cues to where the highest velocity entry points to the market are.

Devesh asked me, "Is the Indian education sector ready for something like ARROW?" My answer is: "A sector's readiness is a function of the customers' readiness. So by answering the question - Will more colleges buy? - you will also be able to answer the broad question."

Global Experts

Then Rahul Jain presented Global Experts, a community of business experts who will be tutoring, coaching and mentoring business students. Rahul has assembled a lot of content on business and management curriculums, and wants to use that to attract potential customers who will then pay to access more personal engagements with experts. In essence, he is proposing a freemium model whereby he uses content to draw in users, and then try to convert a percentage of them to paying customers in the U.S.

Well, the paid content model in the U.S. has really imploded, so I have some skepticism about the viability. There are some competitors who seem to have validated the business model to a degree, like http://www.studentoffortune.com. So Rahul's next step is to SEO-optimize the content he has put together and harness a group of users ti see if he can convert a percentage of them (average freemium conversion rate is usually 2%) to paying customers.

If Rahul can get to about 5,000 paying customers, paying $250 a year, then he can get to the $1M mark. The question is, can he attract 250,000 students with his free content and then convert 2% of those to paying customers?

For these three and other online education entrepreneurs, I would like to take a moment and point you to some online education case studies on my blog. Take a look at Apex Learning, Archipelago Learning, KC Distance Learning, Revolution Prep, and Global English.

Intelligent Monitoring

Next Vikas Hazrati and Narinder Kumar discussed Intelligent Monitoring. Vikas and Narinder have identified an interesting pain point that IT managers seem to have: a large volume of alerts from various IT monitoring systems without the ability to actionable correlation analysis. They have feedback from three to five IT managers, including one that is willing to pay them to build a solution.

To them, my advice is to leverage as much of the "consulting" money that clients are willing to pay to solve the problem, and use that cash to bootstrap the business. I love this kind of customer intimacy through working closely with customers, and getting paid for it. If they can talk to 100 IT managers in the SME segment and get 10 to 15 to pay up, the entire product design and development process can be financed by customers! I referred them to the Bootstrapping To Billions case study in Entrepreneur Journeys, Volume One.

Simplogy

Up last was Hasnain Zaheer for Simplogy, who wants to offer marketing strategy and execution services from Australia. My advice to him is to zero in on specific marketing processes that can be offered in a remote mode, which could be email marketing, or SEO, SEM, Web design - all those being highly competitive areas - but strategy consulting cannot really be sold online.

I started doing my free Online Strategy Roundtables for entrepreneurs in the fall of 2008. These roundtables are the cornerstone programming of a global initiative that I have started called One Million by One Million (1M/1M). Its mission is to help a million entrepreneurs globally to reach $1 million in revenue and beyond, build $1 trillion in sustainable global GDP, and create 10 million jobs. In 1M/1M, I teach the EJ Methodology which is based on my Entrepreneur Journeys research, and emphasize bootstrapping, idea validation, and crisp positioning as some of the core principles of building strong fundamentals in early stage ventures. In addition, we are offering entrepreneurs access to investors and customers through our recently launched our 1M/1M Incubation Radar series. You can pitch to be featured on my blog following these instructions.

The recording of this roundtable can be found here. Recordings of previous roundtables are all available here. You can register for the next roundtable here.
Photo by Mary Gober.
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Startup Strategy Roundtable: Don't Get Blindsided By a Large Competitor

Sramana Mitra — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 16:34:00 -0800

Today's roundtable was a difficult one, as I had to tell an entrepreneur not to proceed with his business that is ready to launch. Shamoon Siddiqui presented MetroFlats.com, a vacation rental marketplace he plans to launch next month. He says that all the vacation rental sites out there, including Vacationrentals.com and FlipKey, are directory services, and you cannot actually book the rental through them. I immediately asked, What would keep the big vacation-listing players from quickly expanding their services to include this functionality? Nothing. I hate to discourage any entrepreneur ever, but this is a very precarious position from where to start a business.
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]]> I recommend that Shamoon take a look at the FlipKey case study on my blog to understand what FlipKey does, and how and why. And how easy it would be for big players to just insert the booking function if they had any indication from their customer base that the functionality is desired. I hope Shamoon will continue to look for another opportunity to put his time, money and talent into.

Sramana Mitra is a technology entrepreneur and strategy consultant in Silicon Valley. She has founded three companies and writes a business blog, Sramana Mitra on Strategy. She has a master's degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her Entrepreneur Journeys book series, Entrepreneur Journeys, Bootstrapping: Weapon Of Mass Reconstruction, Positioning: How To Test, Validate, and Bring Your Idea To Market and her latest volume Innovation: Need Of The Hour, as well as Vision India 2020, are all available from Amazon. Mitra is also a columnist for Forbes and runs the 1M/1M initiative.

Jonathan Weinberg started off by introducing AutoSlash.com, a site that helps consumers save money on car rentals. His system finds and systematically crunches all the various discounts and coupon codes out there to give the consumer the best rate. He is not searching the rack rates like others in this space. AutoSlash also tracks fluctuations in price and continues to offer the customer the lowest rate up until they pick up the car. Since launching 30 days ago, their traffic has risen from 50-100 visitors per day to 1,000 per day following a story about them in Budget Travel.

His target audience of consumers and small business travelers as well as business travelers at mid-sized companies is way too broad at this stage. Focusing sharply on the budget traveler is really the way to go since that is where there is a lot of traction. He'll have the bad economy on his side! Armed with the Budget Travel coverage, I suggest he does systematic outreach to all the budget travel blogs to help keep the buzz going from week to week. He can also look at SEO and developing a blog with keyword-rich content to bring in the natural search traffic. Then he can look at PPC, but that is somewhat more expensive. He should leave the small business traveler for later and stay focused on the budget traveler for now as he continues to build up momentum. And oh, by the way, financing is not an option at this stage.

eNrate

Indrajit was up next to present eNrate, an algorithm to find the most credible news sources, taking criticism of sources into account. He aims to catalog and rate all the journalists worldwide, based on this algorithm, and create a destination site where consumers would come for high quality news. He is presenting a reasonable and valuable service, but the problem is monetization. Especially when it comes to local news and international news, news agencies and newspaper companies have slashed so much of their staff that their coverage has become weak. As a destination site, however, it will be very expensive for Indrajit to acquire customers or monetize the service.

More importantly, news is simply not commerce-related, so his idea of doing keyword-based advertising simply doesn't work here. Someone looking to find out about a terrorist attack in Malaysia is not looking to shop simultaneously. The PPC value of what he is proposing is very low. The model for such a consumer site is a freemium one - which is also very difficult to bootstrap. My suggestion is for Indrajit to explore brokering relationships with news services and media companies. Find out how his service can serve as a solution to some of their problems in the domain of local and international news, and then follow the B-to-B model to monetization. I hope he will read the Finisar case study, a great example of a bootstrapped company using services around their core competency to finance their business for the long term.

Diginamic

Then Lionel Binnie presented Diginamic. He is looking to sell, install and service a touch-screen hardware and software solution at point-of-sale. Lionel has been exploring several different verticals looking for customers, ranging from retail to hotels to airports. He wants to charge a portion of the co-op dollars that large brands give retailers for local and in-store marketing. The kind of content he offers will need to be rich and comprehensive and the goal should be to replicate the personal shopper experience in the software. And this would really only work for complex products where the need for information is high. Lionel knows a software vendor who has already created the content for wine.

He is wondering if wine stores may be an interesting segment. Well, if placed in a wine store, you don't want a customer to type in a wine and only get back a bunch of ads from a set of vendors. That won't work. He needs to provide a full solution for this segment - comprehensive database of thousands of wines. With that caveat in mind, if he can work with the vendor to build a comprehensive software for wine and combine it with his point-of-sale product, then I suggest he targets wine stores, specialty food stores and large stores with wine departments. After that rolls out, then he can look for a software provider who has the content for cheese perhaps, and then sell to cheese retailers. Go segment by segment, but be sure you are providing a full solution for each segment before you approach them. Otherwise, none will convert into business.

PandaForm

Up last was Ben Cheng discussing PandaForm, a just-launched form builder application to help customers create and process forms, especially those that require a lot of processing and human attention. He is targeting small businesses; they can sign up and use this system right away. As he was speaking I was searching online, confirming that the Web based form/form builder space is indeed very crowded. And since this business does not show up in my search means they are not SEO optimized for the U.S. If he wants customers in the U.S., that needs to be done. But since the horizontal form market is so crowded, I suggest he focuses on selling solutions to a specific class of customers -- educational institutions, for example, which have significant application form building and processing needs, rather than selling just a horizontal form builder.

If he has a specific application for a specific vertical, he can create a solution. Then all of the SEO, PPC, email marketing, etc., needs to be laser-focused on acquiring educational institutions as customers. Ben is concerned about operating out of Hong Kong and selling to the U.S., but many people do that successfully. The concern should be building up those early customers who will provide references and testimonials. That is the best way to build credibility. Find three customers to work with and really solve their problem.

As you as an entrepreneur reach out to your potential customers, also do a thorough competitive analysis to see who is already providing similar solutions. Avoid going back into another overly crowded space. Whether it is in Hong Kong or Timbuktu, you have to do this thorough homework before you launch yourself into a space. You need to understand the competition. Don't get blindsided.

Early stage entrepreneurs usually have very few resources, so they need to be very targeted in the most efficient way possible. For those just starting out, before writing a line of code or investing any money of your own (or investors), please validate your value proposition. Speak to many potential customers and confirm that you have something they are willing to pay for. Ask the right questions and you will be steered to the right answers. I have compiled a list of such questions for entrepreneurs here. I ask that you please use this to get to a more thorough analysis of your business, and not end up in places with too much competition where you have to differentiate and have no defensibility.

Trust me, it is a very bad place to be.

I started doing my free Online Strategy Roundtables for entrepreneurs in the fall of 2008. These roundtables are the cornerstone programming of a global initiative that I have started called One Million by One Million (1M/1M). Its mission is to help a million entrepreneurs globally to reach $1 million in revenue and beyond, build $1 trillion in sustainable global GDP, and create 10 million jobs. In 1M/1M, I teach the EJ Methodology which is based on my Entrepreneur Journeys research, and emphasize bootstrapping, idea validation, and crisp positioning as some of the core principles of building strong fundamentals in early stage ventures. In addition, we are offering entrepreneurs access to, investors and customers through our substantial channels. We recently launched our 1M/1M Incubation Radar series, and you can also read about several other 1M/1M entrepreneurs in my recent Forbes columns, These Companies Are Built To Enjoy and Calling All Angel Investors.

Recordings of previous roundtables are all available here. You can register for the next roundtable here.

Photo by homero chapa.
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Startup Strategy Roundtable: Do One Thing Really Well

Sramana Mitra — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 15:30:00 -0800

I am very pleased with the conversations I had with the four entrepreneurs who presented at today's Online Strategy Roundtable. All are going after problems and then looking for solutions, as opposed to presenting solutions that are looking for problems. While not every business solves a problem per se, all do cater to a need of some sort. Once you identify the potential customer who truly needs your product or service in the narrowest of terms, then you can zero in on the best way to reach them. Only after you sharply define your market segment can you develop a successful go to market strategy.
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Sramana Mitra is a technology entrepreneur and strategy consultant in Silicon Valley. She has founded three companies and writes a business blog, Sramana Mitra on Strategy. She has a master's degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her Entrepreneur Journeys book series, Entrepreneur Journeys, Bootstrapping: Weapon Of Mass Reconstruction, Positioning: How To Test, Validate, and Bring Your Idea To Market and her latest volume Innovation: Need Of The Hour, as well as Vision India 2020, are all available from Amazon. Mitra is also a columnist for Forbes and runs the 1M/1M initiative.

Matt Sidhom started off by introducing MyTestAnswers.com, which offers video solutions to questions on standardized tests. While coaching in Maine, he realized the students didn't have easy access to test prep services beyond buying a book. His aim is to give everyone, including those living outside of metropolitan areas, access to affordable standardized test prep. Each video can be viewed on an iPod, iPhone or browser, and is self-contained. Through combining audio and graphics, his videos explain which answer is correct and why, rather than just providing an answer key like the prep books.

Launched in 2009, he currently offers 1,700-plus SAT prep videos and 800-plus LSAT prep videos. Which leads to the first problem: The market segment preparing for the SATs is completely different from the segment preparing for the LSATs and I'm afraid too much time has been wasted trying to reach both. Matt says he has more free customers for the SAT prep, so I recommend he builds that up as his primary business and puts the LSAT business on hold for now.

I also don't think his pricing model that offers each video for $0.99 is right. His 8% conversion rate from freemium to paying customer is not bad at all (the average is 2-4%). I suggest he does some sort of focus group with existing free and paying customers to find the most appealing pricing model. I also recommend Matt reads up on Archipelago Learning and understand their strategy. Archipelago could also be a possible channel for him to go to market through.

Next, Juan Perez presented Nature's Beauty, a line of creams, shampoos and soaps made with natural extracts (such as cream of avocado oil and garlic shampoo) that he would like to introduce to the U.S. market starting in San Diego. These products are produced in Mexico and he claims the benefits are well known to women in Mexico. Juan says his target segment is Hispanic women, ages 20-60, in middle- to upper-income levels, which definitely needs to be narrowed down. This is much too broad.

He planned to introduce the product as giveaways at local swap meets, until we came to realize that those attending such events are by and large not middle and upper income level women. You cannot test your product with the wrong market segment. Your experiment will come back with tons of false negatives or false positives. Juan needs to validate who his target market segment is, and then go where they can be found to test the products. I recommend he read the story of TheFind, an excellent example of a business zeroing in on its customers precisely.

Aaron Moskowitz was up next to present Capchure, a startup that wants to bring the lead generation model and all its monetization potential to the blogosphere. Capchure adds a hover-over form that readers can opt into as they touch highlighted keywords on a blog page. Through his research, he has learned that bloggers are open to this depending on the price, and advertisers are willing to experiment with it. It certainly sounds like a better alternative to CPM, which doesn't monetize well at all, and is something that the big ad networks should be interested in.

He has identified the video game segment as the one with the most potential for his service, and also bloggers in the technology space. My suggestion is for Aaron to consider working with the big advertising networks already in those verticals (Federated, Adify, IDG in Tech), and get them to buy into his service while he remains the tech provider who runs the service. The alternative is for him to become an ad network himself, but that requires core competency in reaching advertisers which I did not get the sense that he has. Aaron asked me if I would use his service for my blog. The answer: It depends on which advertisers you bring to the table. I suspect Richard, Om and Arrington would all say the same thing.

Up last was Ram Kumar, who discussed techcello's cellosaas, a shrink-wrapped SaaS framework on which you can develop, host and maintain your cloud-ready application from anywhere. Built on standard technologies, developers can start coding the first day with this system, saving on custom development time and maintenance. He went into too much detail explaining the licensing and pricing strategy and had to be reeled in, but overall I like his ideas.

He was concerned about going against the verticalization trend, but I'm completely comfortable with his strategy of focusing on the horizontal layer. Since he plans to do online promotions rather than employ a direct sales team, I pointed out that they have a great opportunity to use an open-source framework as a means to acquire customers. He should offer a free version along with the paid version as outlined in this story about Dimdim. I also suggest he explores partnering with outsourced product development companies like Persistent Systems. I think he'll find the enterprise IT companies harder to reach without systems integrator intermediaries.

I started doing my free Online Strategy Roundtables for entrepreneurs in the fall of 2008. These roundtables are the cornerstone programming of a global initiative that I have started called One Million by One Million (1M/1M). Its mission is to help a million entrepreneurs globally to reach $1 million in revenue and beyond, build $1 trillion in sustainable global GDP, and create 10 million jobs. In 1M/1M, I teach the EJ Methodology which is based on my Entrepreneur Journeys research, and emphasize bootstrapping, idea validation, and crisp positioning as some of the core principles of building strong fundamentals in early stage ventures. In addition, we are offering entrepreneurs access to investors and customers through our substantial channels. Last week we launched our 1M/1M Incubation Radar series, and you can also read about several other 1M/1M entrepreneurs on my recent Forbes column, These Companies Are Built To Enjoy.

Recordings of previous roundtables are all available here. You can register for the next roundtable here. You can find the recording of this roundtable session here.

Photo by ilco.

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Startup Strategy Roundtable: Don't Waste Precious Years Of Your Life

Sramana Mitra — Thu, 27 May 2010 17:30:00 -0800

Today quite a variety of entrepreneurs presented their business ideas at my Online Strategy Roundtables. Several times I brought up how precious our time is and we need to treat it as such. So many people become enamored with technology and the building of the product before they ever think to validate that this is a business service or product that a customer wants to pay for.

I've seen too many entrepreneurs wasting precious years of their lives, and I sincerely try to discourage anyone from wasting his or her time on an idea that does not have legs based on concrete customer feedback. One of the entrepreneurs said he thinks of me as the Simon Cowell for entrepreneurs after listening to some recordings of previous roundtables. I think my advice is only valuable if I'm being honest and direct. Plus, I don't want to waste my precious time either!

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]]> Sramana Mitra is a technology entrepreneur and strategy consultant in Silicon Valley. She has founded three companies and writes a business blog, Sramana Mitra on Strategy. She has a master's degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her Entrepreneur Journeys book series, Entrepreneur Journeys, Bootstrapping: Weapon Of Mass Reconstruction, Positioning: How To Test, Validate, and Bring Your Idea To Market and her latest volume Innovation: Need Of The Hour, as well as Vision India 2020, are all available from Amazon. Mitra is also a columnist for Forbes and runs the 1M/1M initiative.

Dawson Fercho started off by introducing Temetic Research, an software services company that offers advanced tools based on digital sociology that can offer a deeper understanding of social media buzz (beyond just words) than social listening and monitoring products currently do. Launched in January, they already have half a dozen communications firms who deal in brand awareness and management on board as clients. They offer a base analysis report as a service, and they hope those who like the report will become clients of either the software products or of their ongoing service.

Dawson asked if he should position his business as being similar to social monitoring to help potential clients fit them into a category. He tells me there are several metrics that his technology is able to track because of the algorithmic sophistication that others cannot, so my advice is to lead with those metrics to differentiate. He needs to ask customers if they are interested in measuring X, Y, and Z to validate that these metrics are indeed of interest to them.

Dawson said all of their money is going into development, and my advice is to ramp up the base analysis service to help fund their development and continue to bootstrap. I also suggested he explore partnering with SaaS PR businesses like Vocus PR who I think will find this technology intriguing. I asked him to check out my case study on Vocus PR.

Next, Griffin Boyce presented PsycView, a software to help eliminate the distance between doctors and patients. Griffin discussed how this software can help doctors manage patients over great distances, and also how patients can use it to get treatment from rural and frontier areas. Griffin is trying to do too many things at once with his business and is going in too many directions. He spoke about having an iPhone application to serve people living in frontier areas, but the iPhone is not widely used in such places. He said he thinks addicts are a strong segment to target, but I don't think people in the depths of addiction will be checking their phones for solutions.

I think there could be something interesting in Griffin's pool of ideas, but he needs to do a lot more focused work to figure out what it is. I told him it's like an uncut diamond that still needs to be shaped and pared down to get to the gem. He needs to focus his software on doing one thing really well - zero in on one idea, a specific disease or whatever. Spraying and praying does not work. I suggest using the Clarify Your Story framework to focus.

Gustavo Hernando was up next to present daFoodie, a website that allows diners in Orlando to share photos of their plate of food at a restaurant to help others decide where to eat. He sees the sharing of such photos as a growing trend and does not plan to include ratings or reviews.

I'm very concerned that there is no reasonable way to make money doing this. I question how many people base their dining decision on photos alone rather than reviews. Perhaps he could partner with some other review sites, but what will keep them from doing this themselves? I hate to discourage any entrepreneur, but Gustavo may be better off using his considerable skills elsewhere. It is very expensive to go to market in this area; OpenTable has spent a ton of money. I hope Gustavo will find an opportunity that will monetize better for him.

Then we had Rudy Santamaria who has designed a line of kids clothing called Look Mommy! Clothing. These clothes convey positive images depicting what a child would like to be when he or she grows up. He has sold 750 of these shirts by hand in the past six months, validating that this is something parents are interested in buying for their child. If he would like this business to scale, the next step is to figure out how to sell these shirts without Rudy being physically involved in the process. Since baseball player and rock star shirts are his best selling, I suggest he start exploring what the best channels are for each category and remain very focused on each niche. Personally, I'm aware of a high level effort to interest young girls in science, so I suggested he do a Look Mommy, I'm A Scientist design for girls and target the organizations that are leading this movement.

Up last was Matt Walters for Sports Spray, a line of water resistant spray products to help amateur and professional athletes excel. His product line includes a stick spray (to enhance grip), slip spray (for under padding and blisters), no sweat spray (antiperspirant for hands or feet), more sweat spray (enhances workout and weight loss), and shoe spray (to keep from slipping). He is ready to go to market but is wondering if he should lead with a product whose competition retailers would already be familiar with or should he introduce the slip spray product, which is totally unique.

I suggest he start with the new, more differentiated product, the slip spray, and manufacture that first. He should focus all the branding around this new product and getting it reviewed by bloggers and social media influencers interested in sports. We discussed very targeted advertising to coaches since he believes it is a cost-effective and reasonably priced channel. I suggested he validates that the demand for this product exists by selling online before chasing retailers to get broader distribution.

In addition, we are offering entrepreneurs access to investors and customers through our substantial channels. Our newly launched 1M/1M Incubation Radar series this week profiles La Grande Dame, and you can also read about several other 1M/1M entrepreneurs on my Forbes column, These Companies Are Built To Enjoy.

You can find the recording of this roundtable session here. Recordings of previous roundtables are all available here. You can register for the next roundtable here.

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Startup Strategy Roundtable: First Validate Your Business Idea With Real Customers

Sramana Mitra — Thu, 20 May 2010 17:00:00 -0800

This morning the Online Strategy Roundtable for entrepreneurs ran very smoothly. The five entrepreneurs who presented are all at various stages of validating who their best customers are. The best conversations during these roundtables usually stem from the businesses that have already been validated to some degree, simply because I am often not the target customer for a product.

All entrepreneurs need to speak directly to their real customers - the people who are willing to pay money for their product or service - in order find out if you are solving a real problem. It is your potential customers who will give you the most valuable feedback, and these conversations should happen very early on, preferably before you have spent precious time and money building a product or service.

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Sramana Mitra is a technology entrepreneur and strategy consultant in Silicon Valley. She has founded three companies and writes a business blog, Sramana Mitra on Strategy. She has a master's degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her three books, Entrepreneur Journeys, Bootstrapping, Weapon Of Mass Reconstruction, and Positioning: How To Test, Validate, and Bring Your Idea To Market are all available from Amazon. Her new book Vision India 2020 was recently released. Mitra is also a columnist for Forbes and runs the 1M/1M initiative.

Ellen Badinelli started off by introducing her business, ScanAvert. This is a mobile dietary application that scans products' barcodes and alerts the consumer to dietary incompatibility based on their user-created profile. For example, if you are following a gluten-free diet or avoiding certain ingredients that may cause a bad reaction to a drug you take, you can scan the bar code and quickly find out if the ingredients you are avoiding are in a given product.

There have been 5,000 users so far, giving Ellen a good idea of who the best demographic is for this product right now. She is looking to get financing to beef up PR efforts as recommended by some angel investors. Unlike advertising, you don't get more PR by spending more money. I recommend she does some more guerilla PR herself Using the demographic information learned from the 5,000 customers who have already downloaded the app. She should target the top bloggers and media for each of the largest segments. I would like to see Ellen ramp up a bit more and get more conversions. As long as she can continue to bootstrap, she will improve the valuation.

Next Bradley Owen presented TxtJet, which delivers email on cell phones for free, as text messages. He plans to use an advertising revenue model which will begin in six months or so to run a short ad tied to key words in the message. The ads are based on key word density and the geography of the user. I have my doubts on how well this will monetize because it would be tricky to target the ads based on the wording of email messages.

I suggested that building an ad server to do this might be a more interesting product, although Google is already working on similar efforts. We discussed using SEO optimization around the key words "free mobile email." I suggested he may also want to explore doing a deal with the carriers by offering a product to help transition text messaging customers into email customers. This, of course, would depend on how strong Bradley's intellectual property is. They won't be interested in something they can easily create for themselves. He's launching this product tomorrow, so he'll soon be able to see exactly where his customer base is coming from. Good luck!

Kendra McKeever was up next to present Sock Monkeys Clothing, which offers clothing appropriate for infants with eczema in 3-month- to 1-year-old sizes. Apparently 20% of babies have eczema in the U.S. - including her daughter - and she is targeting the parents and grandparents of those children. She says there are a handful of competitors, but all are located in Europe, making the products expensive. She has great endorsements from parents and pediatric dermatologists, but this has not converted into sales.

We discussed the importance of focusing on SEO marketing; she needs to be on the top of the page for those searching for infant eczema. I suggest she does a laser-focused outreach to bloggers, especially mommy bloggers who are already discussing this topic, to see if they are willing to write about her product rather than going after the larger iVillage-type bloggers right now. Also, trying to get into publications read by pediatric dermatologists is worth exploring. Although doctors don't sell clothing, this could also help get the word of mouth going.

Then we had Dhaval Sharma, who has been working on a back-end solution to make pooling (as in carpooling) easier to organize. Dhaval spoke about all he has been doing and his ideas, but he has yet to speak to his potential customers to see if they are willing to pay for this. I'm not yet convinced by his value proposition because I think there are free solutions already available.

Dhaval needs to focus on one segment; mass pooling is too large. Once he has found his strongest segment to zero in on, he needs to stay with that one line of thought and go out and validate that there are people willing to pay for his solution. Don't spray and pray! You should always try to validate your idea first, build your product later.

Up last was David Braxton presenting for HighPerformanceU, which will offer an audio program that shares a business coaching methodology he has helped to develop through his one-on-one coaching experience. They would like to eventually offer this as a reasonably priced, customized solution for a company's sales force, for example. He has been able to sell a very similar program to two companies so far, which is a good data point for David. But he really needs to validate his assumptions with his potential customers.

I recommend he speak to 100 sales managers to ask them for feedback, and maybe offer the service for free at first and develop some success metrics. If they like the product, he'll have his first customers. This can be done by phone or through connections on LinkedIn, doesn't need to be done with in-person meetings. More validation needed.

These roundtables are the cornerstone programming of a global initiative that I have started called One Million by One Million (1M/1M). Its mission is to help a million entrepreneurs globally to reach $1 million in revenue and beyond, build $1 trillion in sustainable global GDP, and create 10 million jobs.

In 1M/1M, I teach the EJ Methodology which is based on my Entrepreneur Journeys research, and emphasize bootstrapping, idea validation, and crisp positioning as some of the core principles of building strong fundamentals in early stage ventures.

You can find the recording of this roundtable session here. Recordings of previous roundtables are all available here. You can register for the next roundtable here.

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Startup Strategy Roundtable: Validation is the First Step

Sramana Mitra — Thu, 06 May 2010 15:30:00 -0800

Today five very early stage entrepreneurs presented their businesses to me. They all still have much work to do to validate their businesses. I often tell aspiring entrepreneurs not to build anything until they have validated their business idea with potential customers. You need to find people willing to pay for what you have to offer first. I recommend all entrepreneurs read about all that RightNow CEO Greg Gianforte did to validate his business early on. You can find his story here.

Susan Hess was up first today, presenting Hiland Energy Investment. She has set out to create a geothermal power system in California by implementing an existing technology that utilizes holes previously used for drilling oil.

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]]> Guest author Sramana Mitra is a technology entrepreneur and strategy consultant in Silicon Valley. She has founded three companies and writes a business blog, Sramana Mitra on Strategy. She has a masters degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her three books, Entrepreneur Journeys, Bootstrapping, Weapon Of Mass Reconstruction, and Positioning: How To Test, Validate, and Bring Your Idea To Market are all available from Amazon. Her new book Vision India 2020 was recently released. Mitra is also a columnist for Forbes and runs the 1M/1M initiative.

After discussing the land leasing and permit challenges, she said she anticipates needing $15 million in financing to move forward. I don't see how she can raise $15 million given that the company is simply a system integrator of other people's technology. When I asked her what the value proposition is for an investor, what they will get in return, there was a good deal of fumbling around. An answer to this question should be on the tip of her tongue. Susan really needs to revisit my Clarify Your Story framework to develop a much more compelling pitch that lasts about three minutes, clearly outlines how an investor will make money, and includes real supporting data. Bottom line: not convincing.

Next, Rohan Gulati presented DewInk, a creative online community for 8- to 14-year-olds that helps them to build, share, and exchange stories using his story-building application. So far 300 students have used DewInk, found through their schools or the Web, placing Rohan within the early stages of validating his business. Rohan's plan is to monetize by selling hardcover storybooks to the children's parents and he is targeting high-end schools to reach this niche market. This is an interesting and fun idea, but Rohan still needs to figure out how to make money, and he needs to find a pricing model that has enough profitability.

The comparable businesses he introduced were Club Penguin and Neopets, both subscription services and digital businesses, but right now his is a freemium model with a physical product. I suggested that he take a look at how Shutterfly and iUniverse operate. Then he needs to do a full financial analysis, find out what his margin structure is, as well as assess market size, and clearly define his value proposition. All this will help him find a financing model that will work. This could be a small niche business, but if the P&L structure works, then Rohan can figure out how to build it organically with internal cash flow.

Joshua Crumbaugh was up next to present his technology, still in development apparently, that uses a TV remote to purchase goods during commercials. After about 10 minutes of Joshua trying to explain what he was doing, he still had not covered the value proposition of his business and I had to cut him off. This was just too convoluted, focusing on all the wrong things, and poorly thought through. As I've said before, as an entrepreneur you need to do your homework. I suggest, as I do on the roundtable registration page, that he goes through my Clarify Your Story questions and hope that this exercise will give him some direction.

Then we had Dorai Thodla presenting iMorph InfoEngine. With this product his team aims to simplify business research for product managers, hedge fund managers, analysts, etc. Since one of my businesses was in a similar space, I've done much research of my own in the areas that Dorai was discussing. From my experience, it is in offering a superior framework for the information that would offer great value to his potential customers.

It's not enough to be better at providing more information in this overload era. It is a question of how well the presentation of the information works for the customer's specific workflow. I suggest he choose one vertical at a time and find a hundred possible users to share a mock up with and solicit feedback from. Hedge fund managers and product managers have entirely orthogonal workflows, and simply won't fit the same framework. This is surprising still a very open area and this is a business absolutely worth building.

Up last was Shonta Gooch, who seemed like she did do her homework based on the ease with which she answered the same questions I had asked the others. She has developed a new sanitary product for women, a hybrid of a cup and an absorbent napkin. She owns the technology with the patent pending. She is looking for advice on the best go-to-market strategy, and I think doing a licensing deal with one of the existing big players in this field is the only way to go. They control access to the sales channels, and the advertising alone for such products is way too expensive for anyone else.

I also pointed out that if she can find the product managers who handle this category at major companies like P&G and Johnson & Johnson, they will be the best people to validate her business idea and to tell her whether or not this product will fly. Cold calling is an underrated but still essential tool for many entrepreneurs just starting out.

You can find the recording of this roundtable session here. Recordings of previous roundtables are all available here. You can register for the next roundtable here.

Photo by Claudia Veja.

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Startup Strategy Roundtable: Web 3.0 Choices

Sramana Mitra — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 15:30:00 -0800

This morning I spoke with four entrepreneurs covering a wide range of businesses from an inventory optimization SaaS to an e-commerce site that creates a keepsake of your child's artwork. They each have different choices to make right now. Move to a different platform? Go nonprofit? I developed my Web 3.0 framework to help entrepreneurs make the right choices moving forward. You can find my Web 3.0 formula here.

John Krech kicked things off with Phitch. This SaaS business offers easy inventory optimization for businesses using QuickBooks. This is a validated business with a few dozen customers who are charged a monthly fee based on the number of inventory items the business is tracking, making this service affordable for very small businesses who also happen to be QuickBooks' best customers.

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]]> Sramana Mitra is a technology entrepreneur and strategy consultant in Silicon Valley. She has founded three companies and writes a business blog, Sramana Mitra on Strategy. She has a masters degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her three books, Entrepreneur Journeys, Bootstrapping, Weapon Of Mass Reconstruction, and Positioning: How To Test, Validate, and Bring Your Idea To Market are all available from Amazon. Her new book Vision India 2020 was recently released. Mitra is also a columnist for Forbes and runs the 1M/1M initiative.

Recently John has been getting requests to expand Phitch to work with other platforms, but this is really not the way to go. John has carved out a nice niche for himself - very small businesses that use QuickBooks - where there is not much competition. QuickBooks is widely deployed with millions of users and John says he enjoys a good relationship with QuickBooks. There will be much more competition if he builds compatibility with the platforms used by larger companies. John's current positioning for very small businesses is very compelling and I encourage him to continue to focus on QuickBooks' customer base. In fact, he has the right solution for many of the e-commerce entrepreneurs who have pitched at these 1M/1M roundtables and I encourage him to reach out to them as well.

Heidi Allstop introduced Spill, an online community that offers peer-based mental health support to college students. Heidi explained that there is a lack of mental health services for college students, and even though the universities have a serious interest in providing them to the students, budgets sometimes go unspent. Spill offers a student 24/7 anonymous access to a group of peers on campus to get advice, tough love, a shoulder, etc., and Heidi provides the school with useable data drawn from the interactions.

With a pilot program in place at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and four other institutions, and seven more being set up over the summer, she seems to have a good proof of concept. Her question is if she should become a nonprofit and I don't think that is the way to go. Two reasons: More talented people are attracted to working for a for-profit business than a non-profit. Also, as a for-profit you are not depending on the charity of others, and charity is not reliable. As a for-profit, Heidi has the opportunity to build a stronger foundation for creating a solution that many more schools and students can benefit from.

Heidi needs to discuss pricing ideas with the decision makers at these different schools to figure out what kind of pricing model will work best. She needs to continue moving through the process of validating her business by finding out what her customers are willing to pay and if a repeatable pricing model can be established.

Then Catherine Byers Best presented Arbez. Catherine is an experienced recruiter who has developed a video curriculum based on all the speaking events she has held in recent years sharing her coaching and career advice. I told her this sounded very similar to the pitch on Careerealism I heard during a roundtable just a few weeks ago and encouraged her to take a look.

After further clarification, we narrowed her target customer down to career offices at various institutions of higher education. She has just started having preliminary meetings with those offices to discuss her system for private labeling. I'm not completely convinced myself, but the proof is in the pudding as they say. I told Catherine that if she can close five deals in order to further validate her business idea, then she should come back to me at a future roundtable and I can tell her exactly what to do.

Last up was Dana Hostage pitching her e-commerce business Artimus Art. This idea was a favorite of those participating in the chat today. Parents send Dana a collection of their child's artwork and she will do a high-resolution scan of each item and pull it all together into a high-quality book of art. She also posts the artwork on a Web gallery to share with family and friends.

Since she launched in 2007, other copycat competitors have popped up, which concerns her. When I told her I didn't think a large number of people would be willing to pay so much for this service, she pushed back saying she is okay with this remaining a small business, which of course is perfectly fine with me too. We agreed this is more of a high-end service for parents, so how to reach them while bootstrapping the business is the question. She said she has had some success getting PR placements in the past, and I really think Dana needs to take a more systematic public relations approach and be very diligent about it moving forward. That should help create the word-of-mouth momentum she needs.

If you are an entrepreneur working on an idea or an early stage business, I am also very interested in hearing what you are looking for from 1M/1M. Please weigh in here. We are crowdsourcing the design of 1M/1M, and requests that have come up include Receivables Financing as a way to bridge to a validated business without giving up precious equity, I would love to hear your thoughts.

You can find the recording of this roundtable session here. Recordings of previous roundtables are all available here. You can register for the next roundtable here.

Photo by Sigurd Decroos.

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Startup Strategy Roundtable: Well-Defined Niches Work Best

Sramana Mitra — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 15:30:00 -0800

Today I spoke with a diverse group of new entrepreneurs as part of my ongoing Online Strategy Roundtables. Together, this group illustrates how a business depends on how sharply the target market is defined. One entrepreneur is well on her way and another needs to focus more on his strongest market segment. Like many entrepreneurs, the other two are clearly accomplished people, but don't come from a business background. For such entrepreneurs it is often worth looking for a cofounder who can fill in with expertise in areas where gaps exist.

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Julie Goldman did a nice presentation of her company The Original Runners. In 2003, she was the first to offer non-slip, high-quality fabric aisle runners for weddings and special events. Through her website she offers gorgeous hand-painted runners wholesale, and business has been growing to a revenue of $700,000 last year. I really like how tightly focused this business is. Niched wholesale businesses are great! Her main concern is that two dozen lower-quality copy-cat competitors have popped up over the years. To stay ahead of her competition, whom she describes as mom & pop at-home operations, I suggested she work with bloggers who are influencers with wedding planners (her main customers) to help specifically articulate why her product is superior.

She has already relocated the business from New York City to New Jersey to reduce costs. To further counter the pricing pressure she is feeling from her competitors I suggested she look at relocating somewhere where it will be even less expensive for her to operate, like Vermont perhaps. She plans to launch a new brand as an accessory line and we discussed how it is only when she markets this new brand to her list of existing runner customers will mentioning "from The Original Runners company" hold any weight. New customers will not recognize the name and its association with quality products.

We also spoke about SEO and search engine marketing, on tightly focusing pay-per-click campaigns on higher-end markets rather than going broad with a worldwide campaign. So far Julie's is a great case study of a growing niche business.

Next up was Sonali Roychoudhury presenting for Pursue Natural. Sonali is a scientist who is working with a team that is conducting research to find and bring natural medicinal plants to market that are not in the mainstream. Like many entrepreneurs who do not have a business background, Sonali is risk averse, unwilling to make assumptions, and uncertain as to what the next steps should be.

We discussed the natural breath freshener that they have produced. It seems like the cost of entry into this small niche market is too high for this to make sense. She then explained how a small but loyal customer base has grown for this product through their process of testing the marketplace. By just setting up a direct Web sales business targeting their existing fans and the extremely high end natural product boutiques, I believe she could build a very nice small business selling small quantities month-to-month. As long as it is profitable, a small business is more than worth building.

Lorenz Lannens and his company Online Design Bureau started as a consulting business that grew into to a Web solution for small and medium sized companies that helps them to develop their Web marketing strategies. His product and service enables clients to set up their Web marketing system, and he has metrics from early customers showing the system works.

As we discussed his current customers, it became clear that his service is not really for startups, but more for businesses that are not Web savvy. I believe if he goes after companies that are not doing Web marketing as his segment and targets the verticals that his current clients fall in (like architecture firms), his list of customers will grow. I liked this presentation and clearly there is a need for this service. Many entrepreneurs who have pitched at these roundtables could probably use Lorenz's help. In fact I suggested that both Sonali and Felice tap into his expertise.

Lastly, Felice Gerwitz presented Scholar Square, a beta site targeting the homeschool community. She is an educator and author who specializes in homeschooling and hopes to sell a wide range of presentations and seminar classes through this site. As Felice explained her ideas, it became apparent that she is trying to do too many things for too many people, the classic "spray and pray."

I may have been a bit hard on Felice when she told me she did not go through the Clarify Your Story questionnaire as she was asked to on the roundtable registration page, but I think it needed to be said. There are no shortcuts when you are an entrepreneur. You need to do your homework. Felice needs to focus on the segment of the home school market that she tackles the best and is passionate about, and let the other ideas go. This should help her site find its center of gravity and its customers.

You can find the recording of this roundtable session here. Recordings of previous roundtables are all available here. You can register for the next roundtable here.

Photo by Nick Cowie.]]> Discuss

Startup Strategy Roundtable: Early Stage Business Building

Sramana Mitra — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 13:05:00 -0800

As part of my ongoing Online Strategy Roundtables, I met yesterday with four new entrepreneurs, all at the early stage of validating who their customers are and building their businesses. Entrepreneurs who are just starting out need to ask themselves some hard questions in order to develop a crisp go to market strategy. I pulled together a list of such questions that you can find here and in my Positioning book to help you "Clarify Your Story".

Up first was Martin Calle and his company OraQuel. Martin worked for years on product development for companies like Procter & Gamble and FritoLay, but eventually wanted to create a product that would be his own.

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]]> i>Guest author Sramana Mitra is a technology entrepreneur and strategy consultant in Silicon Valley. She has founded three companies and writes a business blog, Sramana Mitra on Strategy. She has a masters degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her three books, Entrepreneur Journeys, Bootstrapping, Weapon Of Mass Reconstruction, and Positioning: How To Test, Validate, and Bring Your Idea To Market are all available from Amazon. Her new book Vision India 2020 was recently released. Mitra is also a columnist for Forbes and runs the 1M/1M initiative. /p>

After researching what type a product would be best to get behind, Martin came across research showing a strong correlation between gum disease and heart disease, and came up with a heart-smart oral care product. Since large retailer stores won't work with a "little guy" in this category, he has started to approach social media groups like mommy bloggers and TwitterMoms to try to build up a grassroots following. I believe Martin's product does answer a real need, but he has positioned this as a product just for kids. I think he will get better pickup if he positions this as a product for the entire family - a much larger segment of the market. Martin will need to do some controlled experiments to validate whether or not my hunch is correct, and then move forward with his social media PR campaign.

Nick Quay presented for BluNami, a mobile marketing company that has developed a technology to help clients connect to Bluetooth users in a certain proximity. Nick and his team have been working with a wide variety of clients looking to use their technology a many different ways, from a city using it to make emergency announcements to restaurants offering deals to lure in customers.

(As soon as I hear anyone is trying to work with a government entity, especially a startup venture, I immediately want them to stop wasting their time there. Unless they are paying you upfront as some type of consulting situation, most startups need their cash flow and can not sustain the government's slow 12-24 month sales cycles.)

Like many entrepreneurs with a versatile technology, Nick is trying to do too many things right now - the old "spray and pray." While there may be many different segments interested in the product, each requires a unique go-to-market strategy. The best way to scale this business is to figure out what is the best value proposition and the easiest segment to sell to, and then focus time and energy on that while continuing to bootstrap your way to profitability. Later there may be time and money for exploring other avenues.

Frederic Guitton gave a nice presentation for ActivSalesAgent, a business that combines its software with call centers as a way to help convert visitors on client websites into better qualified sales leads. This business is further down the road of validation than the others, and is profitable. As I questioned him about price point, Frederic was ready with metrics to show that what they are doing is indeed working.

We discussed how using solid statistical information along with references from early customers is the best was to convert potential customers into clients - and those reference accounts do not need to be the biggest clients. Small business references work just as well. That's how Salesforce.com did it. I think this business has legs, but urged Frederic to be open to doing some type of offshore chat centers down the road because I think reducing costs will become a bigger issue as this business continues to scale.

Then Linda Muncy, who is just starting out, presented her business idea. She is hired to provide photo-related entertainment at events. Guests are creatively photographed and given the image in some form as a giveaway. She has started reproducing the images onsite on a material similar to Skinit so guests can attach the image to their handhelds, laptops, etc. She would like to develop a product kit so other event planners can do this as well. Linda has yet to truly validate her product and service. I always tell entrepreneurs to validate your idea before building any product. I think Linda will be amazed by what she learns after calling 100 event planners to get their feedback. This may only be a small business, but that is perfectly okay - as long as it is profitable.

i>You can find the recording of this roundtable session here. Recordings of previous roundtables are all available here. You can register for the next roundtable here./p>

em>Photo by Svilen Milev./p>]]> Discuss