Entries Tagged 'StartUp 101' ↓

True to the international dynamic of 1M/1M, during today's roundtable we had entrepreneurs from the U.S., India and Israel pitch their businesses. And in the audience, there were people from at least 30 different corners of the world.

directdialogs

First, Senthil Natchimuthu from Coimbatire, India, discussed directdialogs. Senthil is doing a small business marketing solution that combines loyalty programs with email marketing and campaign management. The product roadmap is quite ambitious, and I was concerned about the viability of a minimum viable product with such a large scope. It turns out that the product has been built over the last two years, and a MVP is already in place. Now, Senthil is working on the positioning and go-to-market strategy for the business.

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tapTank

Next, Yael Greenberg from Tel Aviv, Israel, pitched tapTank, a concept stage business where Yael wants to help consumers barter, collaborate, and compete on specific tasks. She gave a series of use cases from group travel to competing in marathons, and the one that resonated with me was barter. Each of her use cases is potentially a separate business and I advised her to focus on fleshing out the barter concept.

PinkVilla

Then Jeu George from Redmond, Washington, presented PinkVilla, one of the largest user-generated content-driven portals for Bollywood aficionados. The site has 11 million page views a month, and Jeu expects 2011 revenues to be about $250k. The site's unique visitors are at about 600,000 per month.

Jeu is trying to figure out his financing options, and the majority of the discussion today was around target market, product roadmap, and monetization models, which are the factors that would drive investment strategy.

This is a promising business, but clearly under-monetized. The revenue models need to be revisited, and the customer acquisition strategy as well. Their penetration in India seems relatively low, given that Bollywood is really an Indian phenomenon, its international following notwithstanding.

Reach360

Finally, Kiran Nagarajappa and Rajesh Agarwal from Bangalore, India, pitched Reach360, a neat advertising optimization solution to help agencies, advertisers and publishers get better eyeballs and click-throughs out of their current campaigns. The product has been validated on campaigns by a dozen major Indian brands and agencies, and has shown great metrics. Now, Kiran and Rajesh are looking to take this to the next level. Last week, they won Microsoft's Indian Startup Challenge grant of $40k.

Very interesting company with lots of great possibilities of working with major display advertising players, ad networks, and of course, advertisers and agencies.

You can select the business you like best of those discussed today through a poll on the 1M/1M Facebook page.

The recording of today's roundtable can be found here. Recordings of previous roundtables are all available here. We will be holding future roundtables at 8 a.m. PDT on the following dates:

Thursday, June 23, 2011: Register Here

Thursday, June 30, 2011: Register Here

Thursday, July 21, 2011: Register Here

Thursday, July 28, 2011: Register Here

And you can sign up for the 1M/1M premium program here.

Sramana Mitra is the founder of the One Million by One Million (1M/1M) initiative, an educational, business development and incubation program that aims to help one million entrepreneurs globally to reach $1 million in revenue and beyond. She is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and strategy consultant, she writes the blog Sramana Mitra On Strategy and is author of the Entrepreneur Journeys book series and Vision India 2020. From 2008 to 2010, Mitra was a columnist for Forbes. As an entrepreneur CEO, she ran three companies: DAIS, Intarka and Uuma. She has a master's degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Roundtable photo by Shinichi Sugiyama Discuss

We have done almost 90 roundtables so far and, based on this extensive experience of learning directly from entrepreneurs about their core issues, 1M/1M has just launched a new assessment tool for entrepreneurs.

It is a quick self-assessment that you can apply to calibrate where you are in your business-building process. We have also provided relevant 1M/1M curriculum modules that you can use to bridge the gaps in your knowledge and understanding of a robust entrepreneurship methodology. Please note, curriculum modules are only accessible to 1M/1M premium members.

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ShareVolution

As for the pitches today, first, Daniel McPherson from Australia pitched ShareVolution, an app store for the Microsoft SharePoint community. Daniel expects SharePoint's cloud based solution provider eco-system to develop over the next few years. He wants to provide both a branded app store and white-labeled stores for developers to put on their respective sites.

There is one problem with the strategy, though. The SharePoint cloud eco-system is not sufficiently mature, and for Daniel to be able to realize his vision, he needs to get enough application developers active soon. My advice was to keep doing the SharePoint solution development and consulting work the company does today and develop the store project as a side effort until the market is ready. Cash needs to come into the business. For now, it won't come in through the store.

Acelerar Technologies

Anupam Rajey from Lucknow, India, presented Acelerar Technologies, an outsourced accounting services BPO project from India. Anupam has serious segmentation issues. He is heading straight into an intensely competitive market without adequate differentiation or competitive positioning. I asked him to review the TrueCFO project in my Vision India 2020 book. In it, I have mapped out a similar project, but with a clear delineation of the segmentation and positioning as well as a go-to-market strategy. I advised Anupam to come up with a 2011 strategy. He currently has a 1999 strategy.

MyTab

Next, Heddi Cundle from San Francisco, California, discussed MyTab, an online gift-registry of sorts to raise money for travel. Heddi wants to do this, that and the other from wedding registry to charity donations. I asked her to focus squarely on just travel. In addition, her segmentation strikes me as incorrect. Those who need to raise money for travel, most likely, are the disposable income strapped gen Y, as opposed to the gen X or baby-boomers, whom she wants to target the solution to. The idea is interesting, but needs positioning and validation with the right set of target customers.

CareerDhaba

Then, Harshil Parikh, from Bombay, India, pitched CareerDhaba, an online solution for career counseling for the Indian student population in the 16-25 age group. This strikes me as yet another entrepreneur who needs a tightening of his segmentation big time. Age 16 kids have very different career counseling needs from age 18 kids. Age 18 is worried about college and that in itself is a sizable market. I asked Harshil to focus his entire product and go-to-market strategy on the college-bound age 18 market and develop his assessment module, vertical search engine for colleges and trust network to address the needs of that market and that market alone.

Green Earth Aerogels

Last up, Fortunato Cardenas from Barcelona, Spain, presented Green Earth Aerogels, a nano-materials company in Barcelona, Spain focused on developing insulation gels from rice. Fortunato is facing a dreadful economic climate in Spain -- a meltdown of sorts, really -- and is looking for U.S. partners to help bring his product to market. So, if you happen to be an expert in nano materials and green buildings, please feel free to contact him through his website.

You can select the business you like best of those discussed today through a poll on the 1M/1M Facebook page. The recording of today's roundtable can be found here. Recordings of previous roundtables are all available here. We will be holding future roundtables at 8 a.m. PDT on the following dates:

Thursday, June 23, 2011: Register Here

Thursday, June 30, 2011: Register Here

Thursday, July 21, 2011: Register Here Thursday, July 28, 2011: Register Here

And you can sign up for the 1M/1M premium program here.

Sramana Mitra is the founder of the One Million by One Million (1M/1M) initiative, an educational, business development and incubation program that aims to help one million entrepreneurs globally to reach $1 million in revenue and beyond. She is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and strategy consultant, she writes the blog Sramana Mitra On Strategy and is author of the Entrepreneur Journeys book series and Vision India 2020. From 2008 to 2010, Mitra was a columnist for Forbes. As an entrepreneur CEO, she ran three companies: DAIS, Intarka and Uuma. She has a master's degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Discuss

During today's roundtable, we had four Microsoft BizSpark Startup India Challenge grant finalists present.

Two of them, Freshdesk and Bizosys (10Screens), are 1M/1M premium members, and we have already been working on their strategies for a few weeks.

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Freshdesk

First, Girish Mathrubootham from Chennai, India, pitched Freshdesk, a SaaS company that provides small and medium businesses with on-demand customer support software that offers multi-channel social support. Freshdesk introduces itself as a kind of Salesforce.com for customer support so to speak. Small and medium size business owners can set up online customer support platforms that combine the backend help desk system used by agents (ticketing, knowledge management) with an online customer portal (self service, forums, idea management, voting, etc) on the front end.

What I find exciting about Freshdesk is that they may be able to do the same thing in customer support that Zoho did in CRM: a drastic downshifting of the price-point of a full-functionality, differentiated, cutting edge customer support solution. For the uninitiated, Zoho introduced a CRM system that was one-tenth the price of Salesforce.com and penetrated the lower end of the market using an Indian cost structure.

In the case of Freshdesk, their main competitor, Zendesk, is operating with a San Francisco - Copenhagen cost-structure and will find it harder to compete with this strategy. Zendesk is heavily financed by Benchmark and Charles River and has 10,000 customers. They charge $9, $29 and $59 per agent per month and I am eager to see bootstrapped, scrappy Freshdesk morph their pricing structure to aggressively compete with them. Higher end players like ServiceCloud charges $65, $135 & $260 per agent per month. RightNow's per agent price starts at $110 per agent per month.

The space is validated. The game, now, is to push the envelope on price, performance and functionality - a game that 1M/1M looks forward to helping Freshdesk play!

You can read more about Freshdesk on the 1M/1M Incubation Radar today. The company already has paying customers and a validated business model. They have an opportunity ahead to build a billion dollar company.

Bizosys (10Screens)

Then Abinash Karana from Bangalore, India, presented 10Screens from Bizosys. Bizosys Technologies, a Bangalore, India based software engineering company was founded in 2009. The founders, Sunil Guttula and Abinasha Karana, are experienced IT professional with 15 years of experience between them solving various enterprise IT problems. Guttula, Bizosys' CEO, and Karana founded the company with the goal to "simplify software development."

Toward that end, they have created two products. The first is HSearch, a NoSQL technology based search engine for big data that aims to break the barrier of scale of growing information and accessing it across information silos. The second product is 10Screens, a tool to visualize business requirements critical to software development, which tend to be hampered by poor communication among various stakeholders. 10Screens is currently also a finalist in the Microsoft BizSpark India Startup Challenge.

This company is 100% bootstrapped and, like Freshdesk, they are also offering a value proposition at a substantially lower price-point than competitors, making it affordable for small companies. Outsourcing is spreading at a frantic pace today with a global footprint and players like oDesk and eLance have made it very easy for companies to connect with outsourcing vendors. Now, if the communication can be smoothed, the entire process will become a great deal more productive.

In 1M/1M, we are committed to supporting businesses that are not only focusing on billion dollar market opportunities, but also those that focus on $5M, $10M, $20M niches. We see Bizosys as a promising niche vendor with demonstrated capabilities in creative bootstrapping. We look forward to helping them move through the milestones of various levels of validation and market penetration, on the way to becoming a sustainable, profitable company delivering real value to customers.

You can also read more about Bizosys on the 1M/1M Incubation Radar today. The company already has paying customers and a validated product.

Techcello

Next, Ram Kumar, also from Chennai, India, discussed Techcello, a multi-tenant SaaS framework for moving applications from .NET to a cloud architecture. The value proposition is definitely interesting and the company has already validated with customers. In fact, they generated $100k in revenues over the last year, since they first pitched at one of our roundtables. Techcello presented a TAM of about $25M-$50M a year, which I haven't had a chance to study. They need to get a handle on the customer acquisition strategy and I advised Ram Kumar to utilize the Positioning and Customer Acquisition modules of the 1M/1M premium curriculum to work on it further.

Luna Ergonomics

Next, Abhijit Bhattacharjee from Noida, India, pitched Luna Ergonomics' CleverTextingä and the Panini Keypad. The technology has been highly acclaimed in the mobile device community as a way to let users type in multiple, especially non-Latin, languages. LG is licensing the technology and many other device vendors are in the queue. Abhijit foresees primarily a technology licensing business model whereby device vendors would be paying royalty per handset or tablet. This, needless to say, projects a very large TAM.

Having worked on technology licensing businesses, I have a good idea on how challenging those are from a sales cycle and cash flow perspective and, since Abhijit is still running a bootstrapped operation, I asked him about his strategy to manage the long sales cycle and the associated cash flow challenge. Well, Abhijit believes that he can sell enough apps on iTunes and other app stores to mitigate the cash flow challenge and assured me that he runs a very tight shop.

Very cool technology and I think this company has a fair shot at winning the mobile category in the Microsoft challenge. To learn more, you can check out some of the videos here.

Blue Coin

Last up, Sunil Sharma from Walnut Creek, California, presented Blue Coin, a loyalty program management platform and service catering to small to medium size businesses. Effectively, Sunil is speaking to a trend that I have been discussing recently on my blog that companies like Groupon are pointing at: revenue sharing with merchants for providing marketing services. In my recent piece, There's a Trend To Spot In Groupon's Growth Rate, I noted that, "Simply put, they are offering a massive channel and effective customer acquisition strategy for merchants, small and large, and for that they charge a hefty channel fee."

In the future, the channel fee will, perhaps, go down. But Sunil is saying that he can provide yet another kind of marketing service to local merchants where he will also be charging a channel fee.

I like this genre of thinking and would look forward to watching Blue Coin evolve. The company is still very early and has just completed an alpha prototype. But this is not that difficult a business to validate and Sunil intends to bootstrap for another 6-8 months, during which time, I am sure, the business can be sufficiently validated.

You can select the business you like best of those discussed today through a poll on the 1M/1M Facebook page.

The recording of today's roundtable can be found here. Recordings of previous roundtables are all available here. We will be holding future roundtables at 8 a.m. PDT on the following dates:

Thursday, June 23, 2011: Register Here
Thursday, June 30, 2011: Register Here
Thursday, July 21, 2011: Register Here
Thursday, July 28, 2011: Register Here

And you can sign up for the 1M/1M premium program here.

Sramana Mitra is the founder of the One Million by One Million (1M/1M) initiative, an educational, business development and incubation program that aims to help one million entrepreneurs globally to reach $1 million in revenue and beyond. She is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and strategy consultant, she writes the blog Sramana Mitra On Strategy and is author of the Entrepreneur Journeys book series and Vision India 2020. From 2008 to 2010, Mitra was a columnist for Forbes. As an entrepreneur CEO, she ran three companies: DAIS, Intarka and Uuma. She has a master's degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Photo by Alexander Mooij

Discuss

Startups now understand what they should be doing in their early formative days is search for a business model. The process they use to guide that search is "Customer Development"; and to track their progress startups now have a scorecard to document their week-by-week changes – the business model canvas.

Yet even with all these tools, early stage startups still need to physically meet with advisors and investors. That's great if you can get it. But what if you can't?

What's missing is a way to communicate all this complex information and get feedback and guidance for startups who cannot get advice in a formal board meeting.

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We propose that early stage startups communicate in a way that didn't exist in the 20th century: online, collaboratively, through blogs.

We suggest that the founders/CEO invest one hour a week providing advisors and investors with "Continuous Information Access" by blogging and discussing the progress of their startup's search for a business model online. They would:

• Blog their Customer Development progress as a narrative
• Keep score of strategy changes with the Business Model Canvas
• Comment/dialog with advisors and investors on a near-realtime basis

What Does This Change?

Structure: Founders operate in a chaotic regime. So it's useful to have a structure that helps "search" for a business model. The "boardroom as bits" uses The “boardroom as bits” uses Customer Development as the process for the search and the business model canvas as the scorecard to keep track of the progress, while providing a common language for the discussion.

This approach offers VCs and angels a semi-formal framework for measuring progress and offering their guidance in the "search"? for a business model. It turns ad hoc startups into strategy-driven startups.

Asynchronous Updates: Interaction with advisors and board members can now be decoupled from the – once every six weeks, “big event” – board meeting. Now, as soon as the founders post an update, everyone is notified. Comments, help, suggestions and conversation can happen 24/7. For startups with formal boards, it makes it easy to implement, track and follow-up board meeting outcomes.

Monitoring and guiding a small angel investment no longer requires the calculus to decide whether the investment is worth a board commitment. It potentially encourages investors who would invest only if they had more visibility but where the small number of dollars doesn't justify the time commitment.

A board as bits ends the repetition of multiple investor coffees. It's highly time-efficient for investor and founder alike.

Coaching: This approach allows real-time monitoring of a startup's progress and zero-lag for coaching and course-correction. It's not just a way to see how they're doing. It also provides visibility for a deep look at their data over time and facilitates delivery of feedback and advice.

Geography: When the boardroom is bits, angel-funded startups can get experienced advice - independent of geography. An angel investor or VC can multiply their reach and/or depth. In the process it reduces some of the constraints of distance as a barrier to investment.

Imagine if a VC took $4 million (an average Series A investment) and instead spread it across 40 deals at $100K each in a city with a great outward-facing technology university outside of Silicon Valley. In the past they had no way to monitor and manage these investments. Now they can. The result – an instant technology cluster – with equity at a fraction of Silicon Valley prices. It might be possible to create Virtual Valley Ventures.

We Ran the Experiment

At Stanford our Lean Launchpad class ran an experiment that showed when "the boardroom is bits" can make a radical difference in the outcome of an early stage startup.

Our students used Customer Development as the process to search for a business model. The used a blog to record their customer learning and their progress and issues. The blog became a narrative of the search by posting customer interviews, surveys, videos and prototypes. They used the Business Model Canvas as a scorekeeping device to chart their progress. The result invited comment from their “board” of the teaching team.

Here are some examples of how rich the interaction can become when a management team embraces the approach.

We were able to give them near real-time feedback as they posted their results. If we had been a board rather than a teaching team we would have added physical reality checks with Skype and/or face-to-face meetings.

Show Me the Money

While this worked in the classroom, would it work in the real world? I thought this idea was crazy enough to bounce off a five experienced Silicon Valley VC's. I was surprised at the reaction – all of them want to experiment with it. Jon Feiber at MDV is going to try investing in startups emerging from universities with great engineering schools outside of Silicon Valley that have entrepreneurship programs, but minimal venture capital infrastructure. (The University of Michigan is a possible first test.) Kathryn Gould of Foundation Capital and Ann Miura-Ko of Floodgate also want to try it.

Shawn Carolan of Menlo Ventures not only thought the idea had merit but seed-funded the LeanLaunchLab, a startup building software to automate and structure this process. (More than 700 startups signed up for the LeanLaunchLab software the day it was first demo'd.) Other entrepreneurs think this is an idea whose time has come and are also building software to manage this process including Alexander Osterwalder, Groupiter and Angelsoft. Citrix thought this was such a good idea that their Startup Accelerator has offered to provide GoToMeeting and GoToMeeting HD Faces free to participating VC's and startups. Contact them here.

Summary

For startups with traditional boards, I am not suggesting replacing the board meeting - just augmenting it with a more formal, interactive and responsive structure to help guide the search for the business model. There's immense value in face-to-face interaction. You can't replace body language.

But for Angel-funded companies I am proposing that a "board meeting in bits" can dramatically change the odds of success. Not only does this approach provide a way for founders to "show your work" to potential and current investors and advisors, but also it helps expand opportunities to attract investors from outside the local area.

Lessons Learned

• Startups are a search for a business model
• Startups can share their progress/get feedback in the search
• Weekly blog of the customer development narrative
• Weekly summary of the business model canvas
• Interactive comments and questions
• Skype and face-to-face when needed
• This may be a way to augment traditional board meetings
• This might be a way to rethink our notion of geography as a barrier to investments

Read the first post – What's Wrong With Today's Board Meetings?

Discuss

During today's roundtable, we had the program split into three segments. The first was our usual entrepreneur strategy discussion. The second was a scenario from one of our premium members around lead generation and qualification that we collectively strategized around. And the third was a discussion on Silicon Valley: The Next Decade.

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RER

First, Ankit Duggal from Clifton, New Jersey, pitched RER LLC, a firm that currently manages a real estate investment fund and is working on an investment advisory service catering to real estate investors - individuals and small businesses. Ankit has done a nice job of segmenting his market and focusing on two cities in New Jersey. He has started working with some investment clubs. I suggested offering a discounted service to the members of the investment clubs and going to market with them. In addition, I also suggested testing the wealth manager market. In my experience, wealth managers often refer experts to their clients and Ankit could position his service through that channel.

We also had a discussion on market sizing. I provided Ankit with the framework for his analysis. You can listen to the recording of this segment here.

Lead Generation & Qualification With a Channel Partner

Next, we went to a discussion on a scenario that a 1M/1M premium company is facing where they offer an innovative customer support solution to large enterprises like Telecom and Consumer Electronics players and are going to market through a channel partner in the U.S. While they have been able to get in front of some large customers, they need to accelerate this process further and increase the pipeline and feed the channel partner with more qualified leads. We went through a set of lead generation mechanisms and discussed the distribution of roles and responsibilities between the company and the channel partner.

This, by the way, is a real scenario. One of the members of the channel partner team was actually present in the room and shared his point of view as well. He made the point that they had a meeting this week with a very large customer and the executives from the customer's organization reframed the use case with which they started.

The moral of the story is that use cases are really important in selling large deals and often, customers help you frame the use cases. To train a channel, understanding the use cases is crucial. You can listen to the recording of this segment here.

Silicon Valley: The Next Decade

Finally, we had a highly interactive and animated discussion on what the next generation of innovation would look like. I proposed 'human-centric computing' as the lens through which to look at the problem. Referring to my recent blog post, Silicon Valley: The Next Decade, I offered the role of the 'renaissance mind' in the next phase of our evolution where sociology and insights into human behavior would perhaps be more important than pure geeky intelligence. After all, the technologies (especially Internet related) we're working with these days are a lot less complex than what the generation that produced bear chips and networking related innovations in earlier decades worked with.

The audience came up with lots of great points and I strongly recommend you listen to this discussion here.

Recordings of previous roundtables are all available here. We will be holding future roundtables at 8 a.m. PDT on the following dates:

Thursday, June 16, 2011: Register Here
Thursday, June 23, 2011: Register Here
Thursday, June 30, 2011: Register Here
Thursday, July 21, 2011: Register Here
Thursday, July 28, 2011: Register Here

And you can sign up for the 1M/1M premium program here.

Sramana Mitra is the founder of the One Million by One Million (1M/1M) initiative, an educational, business development and incubation program that aims to help one million entrepreneurs globally to reach $1 million in revenue and beyond. She is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and strategy consultant, she writes the blog Sramana Mitra On Strategy and is author of the Entrepreneur Journeys book series and Vision India 2020. From 2008 to 2010, Mitra was a columnist for Forbes. As an entrepreneur CEO, she ran three companies: DAIS, Intarka and Uuma. She has a master's degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Silicon Valley photo by Revol Web

Discuss

During today's roundtable, we worked with two entrepreneurs and also had a segment on our yearlong engagement with incubators around the world.

The 1M/1M team has invested significant resources to engage with and understand the challenges of the Incubator industry around the globe. In our Business Incubator series of interviews, we have invited many leaders from the industry to come share their best practices and challenges with us. We have also facilitated open discussions on Why Do Business Incubators Fail and Incubator Business Models, which turned out to be animated, active and extremely constructive discussions. Last but not the least, my Forbescolumn, An Underused Tool For Job Recovery triggered further debate on the subject.

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Based on this work, we have identified certain areas in the incubator industry where we can add value by acting as a partner and filling in some of the gaps that exist in the eco-system. At today's session, we discussed some of them. You can listen to the recording to learn more, and also find further details here.

QuantGeo

As for the pitches, first , Eddie Godshalk from San Jose, California, presented QuantGeo, a geospatial data service for real estate investors, property buyers, banks, etc., on how different variables like income trends, employment trends, and multiple other factors impact home prices. Eddie has already invested $350,000 in building the solution, but has done an inadequate job of validating with customers. While he has a good feel for the real estate investor market that is willing to pay $40 per month for the data service, he believes that banks may be willing to pay a lot more. However, at this point, this is just a hypothesis. We discussed a strategy to get this validated ASAP before raising any further capital, or investing any more money in building the product.

10Screens

Next, Abinash Karana from Bangalore, India, pitched 10Screens, a software for capturing specs for software projects using visual screen shot mapping and workflow definitions. Abinash is preparing for the Microsoft grant application, and is a 1M/1M premium member. I pointed him to specific modules within the 1M/1M curriculum to beef up his customer acquisition strategy, Value Proposition and Positioning description, etc. He is using way too much text, and his competitive positioning needs more detailed work. I also pointed him to two templates - Investor Pitch and Customer Pitch - to recast his presentation for the Microsoft contest. Abinash needs to spend at least 15-20 hours in the curriculum modules and tweaking his presentation over the next 5-6 days to be ready to submit the application.

I keep saying this - 1M/1M is like a gym membership. You can buy a membership, but unless you put in the work, you won't be able to lose weight or, in this case, make progress with your business.

You can select the business you like best of those discussed today through a poll on the 1M/1M Facebook page.

The recording of today's roundtable can be found here. Recordings of previous roundtables are all available here. You can register for upcoming roundtables here. And you can sign up for the 1M/1M premium program here.

Sramana Mitra is the founder of the One Million by One Million (1M/1M) initiative, an educational, business development and incubation program that aims to help one million entrepreneurs globally to reach $1 million in revenue and beyond. She is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and strategy consultant, she writes the blog Sramana Mitra On Strategy, and is author of the Entrepreneur Journeys book series and Vision India 2020. From 2008 to 2010, Mitra was a columnist for Forbes. As an entrepreneur CEO, she ran three companies: DAIS, Intarka, and Uuma. She has a master's degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Discuss

At this week's One Million by One Million roundtable, we announced our collaboration with Microsoft around a $100,000 grant that they are offering to four Indian entrepreneurs as follows: A $40,000 grant each to two entrepreneurs, one in Mobility and one in Cloud Computing; and a $10,000 grant to two entrepreneurs, also one in each of those two categories.

1M/1M will be working with Microsoft in helping entrepreneurs prepare for these grants. I will be traveling in India in April, and doing live roundtables in three cities: Chennai (April 9), Mumbai (April 16), and Pune (April 17). Girish Joshi, from Microsoft, will be attending the roundtables, and scouting companies for the grants with me. I will be reporting back on the companies we see on this column from the road.

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Mango DVM

At today's session, first up, Ramkumar RS from Chennai, India, presented Mango DVM, an innovative solution to turn vendors of illegal, grey market music to legal distributors using a combination of mobile apps and media server technology. Ramkumar has made certain pricing model and delivery model assumptions that are yet to be validated. We brainstormed about the risks of those assumptions. However, only the market can tell to what extent those assumptions will hold true.

3gSimplified

Next Jigar Doshi, also from Chennai, India, pitched 3gSimplified, in effect, a comparative shopping solution for mobile plans, which are apparently quite complex in the Indian market. As for business model, Jigar wants to sell services like refilling cards.

3gSimplified is a very early concept that has just launched, and the market feedback will be rolling in over the next few months. Our discussion today was around prioritization of the next few critical steps around customer acquisition and validation.

Report Bee

Then Balaganesh S., from Chennai, India, as well, discussed Report Bee, a data visualization solution for schools around report cards and student performance. Report Bee has two paying customers, and we discussed segmentation issues around where to focus for the early market penetration strategy. Clearly, affluent schools that can afford to buy technology, and also parents who have access to computers would be the best early adopters.

Swayam Foods

Janardhan Swahar from Salem, India, presented Swayam Foods, a health food company that is focused on the Indian palette across snacks, quick-to-prepare items, etc. The company has distribution through about 50 retailers in Chennai, and is looking for ways to market their product through online channels. We discussed guerilla p.r., product reviews through blogs, as well as SEO, blogs, and social media marketing.

Promedik

Last up, Rahul Mishra from Bangalore, India, pitched Promedik, a "decision support system" for physicians. I wasn't convinced about the assumptions of the business - there are too many gaps and flawed assumptions around the source and the cost of the data upon which the product is built. I advised Rahul to study Epocrates as a model. I believe, trying to offer a reference manual may be better than trying to offer a decision support system, which is a much more complex value proposition that requires expert systems to implement.

Before I end, let me also point you to an interview we're running on my blog with Naval Ravikant, founder of AngelList, which you may find enlightening.

Also, some of you have asked me questions about the 1M/1M Premium Curriculum, which I have addressed on the blog.

Next week, the 1M/1M roundtable will focus on entrepreneurs in East Asia, Australia and New Zealand. You can register for the next roundtable here.

You can also listen to the recording of today's roundtable here and select the business you like best through a poll on the 1M/1M Facebook page. Recordings of previous roundtables are all available here.

Sramana Mitra is the founder of the One Million by One Million (1M/1M) initiative, an educational, business development and incubation program that aims to help one million entrepreneurs globally to reach $1 million in revenue and beyond. She is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and strategy consultant, she writes the blog Sramana Mitra On Strategy, and is author of the Entrepreneur Journeys book series and Vision India 2020. From 2008 to 2010, Mitra was a columnist for Forbes. As an entrepreneur CEO, she ran three companies: DAIS, Intarka, and Uuma. She has a master's degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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At today?'s roundtable, I started with a presentation on blue sky opportunities in cloud computing based on our Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing (TLCC) research. I took the audience through five cloud-based business ideas, discussed why they are relevant and pointed them to the sources I derived those ideas from.

For you, readers, here they are:

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1. Cloud-based collaboration among bio-medical researchers around large volumes of data

Dr. Marcos Athanasoulis, CTO of Harvard Medical School discussed this idea with me recently. There is a tremendous amount of data sitting at various pockets that bio-medical researchers are trying to collaborate around. The data needs modeling, processing, visualization, etc. – all activities in the domain of computer science, not bio-medical sciences. There is also need for researchers at various institutes to collaborate around this data and models, all problems that point towards a cloud-based solution. An entrepreneur should pick this one up ASAP. From cancer research to genomics, wide arrays of research areas are looking forward to your innovation.

2. Cloud-based legal records management, digitization, archival, retrieval

Michael Aginsky, CTO of Gibbons P.C. pointed me to the vast masses of paper archives sitting at law firms, waiting to be digitized, and archived in meaningful ways along with efficient retrieval capabilities. Law firms are looking for cloud solutions that include security, disaster recovery, and other goodies.

3. Charge-back accounting solution for large enterprises deploying cloud technologies

Ric Telford, VP of cloud services, IBM pointed me to the rather significant move towards rolling out private clouds at large enterprises, a move that IBM is spearheading by providing full stacks of infrastructure technologies. Now, let us say you are an enterprise that has rolled out a rather extensive private cloud, and all your divisions and business units are using it freely. How do you keep track of who is using how much of the resources? How do you account for the charge backs to the business units or functional areas? This is an open opportunity for an entrepreneur to build a custom solution.

4. Cloud-based flexible pricing solution for telecom vendors

Jim Dunlap, CIO of Alaska Telecom discussed with me the increasingly serious problem that telecom vendors are facing due to bandwidth consumption skyrocketing. Today, the telecom industry charges customers based on fixed price business models for data services.

But to keep up with the rate at which bandwidth consumption is scaling, telecom vendors almost certainly will need to adopt a variable pricing model, such that they can charge based on consumption, just as they charge for voice services. The utility industry charges based on how much energy or water is consumed, but the telecom industry assumes unlimited data usage for a fixed fee. Jim?'s interview with me (coming shortly) sheds light on why this will change, and how the infrastructure needs to adapt.

5. Cloud integration services around specific vendors

José Almandoz, CIO of Novell, and several others have brought up how complex the integration issues are around the cloud. With 600-800 vendors with their own specific integration requirements, there is a plethora of opportunities to build integration services companies around specific vendors or specific domains. Appirio is one such company that jumped on this trend way back in 2007 and has now built a significant company in that space. Sequoia has financed them. In fact, using their expertise, they have also successfully productized various connectors and adapters to build unique value.

Anyway, those are just a few blue sky ideas for you to go after. There will be others as you dig deeper!

Next page: Today's Pitches

First off, you do not need a PR firm. The retainer is usually not worth it, especially for a young, growing startup because your product is still drastically changing and because your conversion rates are probably very low.

As a startup that is looking to innovate in your industry, it usually does not make any sense for you to allow someone else to communicate your vision. PR firms do not always get it. Even with stellar communication skills, only you and your core team really understand the message and the vision.

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Danny Wong is the co-founder and lead evangelist of Blank Label, a provider of custom dress shirts. He has been featured in publications like ReadWriteWeb, FastCompany, ABCNews, FoxNews, BusinessWeek and more. He is also a 19-year-old evangelist and rockstar studying full-time at Bentley University.

If you are a first-timer at PR, start small so you do not burn any important bridges (but be aware that every bridge counts). Start pitching to small blogs and websites in your niche and occasionally take a shot at medium-sized blogs. Once you start feeling more comfortable with your email pitch, and are making decent traction with small blogs and websites, move onto pitching to medium-sized sites. Then, as you gain experience, and learn a bit more about tailoring your pitch to specific authors, you can move onto mass-media outlets that can really increase your exposure because of their tremendous reach.

Here are some pieces of advice that will get you featured more often.

Speak Their Language and be Concise

As in all communications practices, you want to make sure that your audience can understand what you are saying without thinking too much. Do not foolishly use inner-office jargon that no one else understands. Not to insult journalists, but pitch as if you were addressing a 14-year-old. Seriously. This manner of communication should be the same for everyone you talk to about your brand. You are not condescending them this way; you are allowing them to easily digest your message.

Make Some Friends

Sometimes it's good to build a relationship with a reporter before pitching them. In our digital age, this is much easier to do too since we have Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn for interacting with new people. In fact, you can also leverage your secondary network (your network's network) to get in contact with writers. Knowing people that know people is a great way to get your foot in the door.

Always be Reading

Keep an eye out for relatable content or news, and pitch writers with a fresh angle since they are obviously interested in related subjects. Or, provide meaningful commentary (typically best with email) that can help kick-start your relationship with the writer through intellectual dialogue.

Indirectly Target Reporters

Sometimes it's not ideal to pitch directly to reporters. It might be better to target media outlets that the influentials are reading. If you know that Om Malik reads some small-time tech blog, you might want to get featured on that blog to get Om Malik's eyes on you without directly contacting him. When you finally do contact him, you will have higher visibility in his overflooded inbox because he has heard of you before.

Do Something Different

No one wants to talk about something that's been done before. What's your angle that makes you so special? Sure, you can do something similar to big businesses, but make sure there's also something distinctly different about what you do. Always be innovating and let people know that!

Do a Giveaway

Blogs and medium-sized websites love this. You are offering value to them and their readers because you are giving something away for free that the publisher and the audience does not have to pay for. This also serves as free publicity for you, so everyone wins. The publisher gets a new piece of content, the audience gets a free prize, and you get some eyes on your product and website. NOTE: This typically does not work on bigger publications or mass-media outlets because they are looking for newsworthy content, or sponsored posts.

Be Part of a Movement

Being part of a movement validates what you're doing as a business, and sometimes gives reporters more newsworthy content than just a solo feature of you because they can profile other businesses within the same space that are doing awesome things.

Have an Actionable Conclusion to Your Pitch

Do not just pitch your story and hope the recipient will email or call. Ask them their thoughts on the pitch, or prompt them to reply via email or call to further discuss the story.

Be Patient, but Persistent

This is very important. Sometimes it takes a while for a journalist to get back to you, and sometimes they forget to reply. I tend to follow up one to two weeks after emailing a journalist to see if they received my email and their thoughts on it. I've closed many more stories this way rather than trying to let my first email do all of the work. Even after you've had an interview or a briefing, it is important to follow up with your media contact until the story is live because it doesn't count unless the public sees it! One recent media hit took a month from initial pitch before being published live, and I've been nurturing one media lead I have had since December of 2009!

Do you have any other wisdoms on how startups can power their media relations? Feel free to add your tips in the comments below.

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With the week coming to a close and the weekend just a few hours away, we thought we would take the opportunity to recommend a few books for the entrepreneur looking to do some weekend reading. Whether you've got a lot of time to sit and read, or just a little time in the car to listen to an audiobook, find some time to knock these off your reading list.

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Perhaps the most well known and most vocal venture capitalist is Guy Kawasaki, author of the aptly named blog How to Change the World and the books The Art of the Start and the more recent Reality Check, among others. If one was to enroll in Startup Entrepreneurialism 101, Kawasaki's books would likely be required reading. Kawasaki's years of experience from the early days at Apple and the Silicon Valley VC scene provides a wealth of information for the eager entrepreneur.

Former Economist writer turned Wired editor-in-chief Chis Anderson is also the author of popular online business books perfect for the budding entrepreneur. The Long Tail was Anderson's first book and was adapted from an article he wrote in Wired. In it, Anderson describes how online marketplaces have opened up the door for small niche businesses to thrive. In his second book, Free, he examines how sometimes giving away your product can make you more money in the end - the so-called "freemium" model. Anderson used this model to sell the book, offering it for free as an online download while at the same time selling the hardcover version in stores and online.

The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand is one of my favorite novels of all time and it recently found itself included in Business Insider's list of 15 Books Every Entrepreneur Should Read. One would not expect a work of fiction to be included on a list littered with business strategy books, but Rand's philosophy of individualism versus collectivism at the core of this novel can be easily applied to entrepreneurialism. Written in 1943, the novel is the story of an architect's struggle to be true to his creative beliefs and not conform to traditional practices. Entrepreneurs looking to change the world should free up few open weekends to finish Rand's dense but worthwhile novel.

Still can't get enough entrepreneurial books? Under30CEO has an excellent list of 10 Books Every Entrepreneur Must Read From 2009, and David Siteman Garland has a great list on his blog The Rise to the Top of 13 Must Read Books For Every Entrepreneur. Have some suggestions for further reading? Let us know in the comments!

Photo by Flickr user Horia Varlan.

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