TravelTriangle.com

First, Sanchit Gurg from Noida, India, pitched TravelTriangle.com, a marketplace for travel agencies offering personalized tour packages for travelers seeking such help. The company already has engaged about 75 travel agencies and some 900 customers. They have started transacting, generating multiple bids for each RFP and taking a commission off closed deals. Reviews, ratings and other core marketplace functions are part of the offering. Sanchit and his team of six have validated the concept already.

The market size, however, is relatively small: 5% of $500M or $25M is the estimated Total Available Market for the foreseeable future. Frankly, that doesn't bother me, since I tend to like small, niche businesses with good, solid execution, which Sanchit's company is demonstrating. Clearly, a multi-million dollar, profitable business can be built here, and I plan to be a user of the service. In fact, I'd like to design a trip to visit Bandhavgarh National Forest in Madhya Pradesh to see tigers, as well as visit the Khajuraho Temple, ideally during the famous dance festival that is held there. Maybe one of the travel agents on TravelTriangle can help put this together for me.

For the time being, the company is seeing maximum interest from travelers who want to visit Rajasthan, Kerala and Sri Lanka.

BabbleTAB

Next, Andrew Jaffa from Jacksonville, Florida, pitched BabbleTAB, a social media marketing service that generates relevant content for the Facebook pages of small businesses like car dealerships, restaurants, retail, etc.

Andrew wants to offer a tablet-based console on location that would capture video and images of customers and post them to the businesses' Facebook pages. The business model is a subscription service with a small fee per loaded image.

We brainstormed today about the adoption barriers and whether consumers would take the trouble to be photographed or recorded. Andrew's preliminary research says that they would if offered the right incentive. In a car dealership, for example, he thinks a $250 discount would be a substantial enough incentive. I am listening to the use cases but would like to see a statistically significant validation exercise done on the idea.

We also discussed Andrew's proposed tiered pricing model, which I felt was too complicated. A simple flat pricing would be more appropriate. Andrew agreed and is planning to change the model.

You can listen to the recording of today's roundtable here. As always, I would very much like to hear about your business, so let me invite you to come and pitch at one of our free 1M/1M public roundtables. We will be holding future roundtables on the following dates starting at 8:00 a.m. PST:
Thursday, February 16, Register Here.
Thursday, February 23, Register Here.
Thursday, March 1, Register Here.
Thursday, March 8, Register Here.
Thursday, March 15, Register Here.

If you want a deeper relationship with me, you are very welcome to join the 1M/1M premium program. If you have any questions about the program, please, first study the website, especially What to expect from the 1M/1M premium program and the FAQs. If you have additional questions, please email me, and I would be very happy to respond. Please note that I work exclusively with 1M/1M entrepreneurs.

I also invite you to join the 1M/1M mailing list for the ease and convenience of getting updates. This way we can stay in touch, and it will help you to decide if 1M/1M is a program for you.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock

In fact, one of the best ways we can delineate this phenomenon is by contrasting 1M/1M with YCombinator. (Video after the jump.)

Bottomline: YC, superb incubator, is a program that applies to less than .01% of entrepreneurs, whereas 1M/1M is an inclusive, global program. The businesses we will discuss today will put this distinction in perspective.

Hooduku

First, Sudhendra Seshachala from Houston, Texas pitched Hooduku, a professional services business that already has significant revenue from cloud integration work. Hooduku is a 1M/1M premium member and is interested in moving away from pure services toward a product+services model.

Sudhi presented the idea of a platform that bridges between Microsoft Azure customers who are also using RackSpace and other Infrastructure-as-a-Service providers for their content management and delivery. He uses a classic and highly successful mode of building products, that of being deeply immersed in customer situations through services projects and using that domain knowledge and relationship to identify opportunities for building products. A major example of such a company is Appirio, which went on to get funded by Sequoia Capital and has since built a strong product-services company in the cloud integration domain.

My advice to Sudhi is to not position his company as a 'platform' but rather pitch the value proposition as an 'integration framework'. These subtle wordings make a huge difference in how a company is viewed.

Buy Or Boycott

Next Doug Lowenthal from Jacksonville, Florida presented Buy Or Boycott, which he came up with at the recent Startup Weekend program. Buy Or Boycott wants to offer consumers an easy way to avoid buying products that have major issues, be it political or environmental. However, the user experience that Doug described to deliver this was not convincing. He proposes to offer a mobile app with which to scan every product in your grocery store shopping cart. I don't believe consumers would do this. When we stand on grocery store lines after a long day or week, the last thing we want to do is scan a bunch of products with our mobile phones.

NXI Group

Then Kaushik Mitra from New Delhi, India, pitched the NXI Group of Companies, a custom hardware vendor that presented itself as a laptop and tablet company. It took me a bit of time to parse through the details and figure out that NXI is NOT a laptop or tablet vendor competing with HP, Dell and Acer. Rather, it is developing custom hardware for consumers with specific needs. For example, they are in the midst of developing RFID-enabled tablets for the universal ID effort by the Indian government.

Kaushik's company already has $400,000 in revenue, and while the business is not a typical venture-fundable one, I see no reason why the company cannot continue to grow in its niche.

Koolaring

Last, Edoe Cohen from Tel Aviv, Israel pitched Koolaring, a SaaS solution for building private alumni networks a la LinkedIn. I have seen numerous startups with this general idea. It makes perfect sense for universities to have their own private alumni networks, and it is only a matter of time before they do. Whether Koolaring will be the winner in that space or not will depend on execution.

So you see, I just shared with you four businesses, none of which would suit YCombinator for a variety of reasons outlined in the video. However, 1M/1M is delighted to help any and all of them.

You can listen to the recording of today's roundtable here. As always, I would very much like to hear about your business, so let me invite you to come and pitch at one of our free 1M/1M public roundtables. We will be holding future roundtables on the following dates starting at 8:00 a.m. PST:
Thursday, February 9, Register Here.
Thursday, February 16, Register Here.
Thursday, February 23, Register Here.

If you want a deeper relationship with me, you are very welcome to join the 1M/1M premium program. If you have any questions about the program, please, first study the website, especially What to expect from the 1M/1M premium program and the FAQs. If you have additional questions, please email me, and I would be very happy to respond. Please note that I work exclusively with 1M/1M entrepreneurs.

I also invite you to join the 1M/1M mailing list for the ease and convenience of getting updates. This way we can stay in touch, and it will help you to decide if 1M/1M is a program for you.

Some of the first companies have launched products or services or are in the process of getting there, according to their entrepreneurs. Most have felt the program worthwhile and given them a jumpstart on their operations.

Jim Dolan, the CEO of Action Online, is looking to launch in May and redo their YoJo.com site. Since joining the program, he has seen an increase in ad sales and also received new investment capital.

Anthony Favazza, CEO of DiningCircle has hired a CTO that will be overseeing a rebuild of our product in early 2012. "We also have an intern from Washington University helping with customer satisfaction and retention, and one of the marketing partners from the program was able to deliver a comprehensive marketing plan for us that included a new logo, website, print marketing, mailers, and a clear message."

Ryan Bell, the CEO of Gremln.com says, "We continue to have advisory meetings to discuss how we will convert free users into paying customers. We have begun the sales cycle with a number of potential clients and are nurturing these relationships during private beta stage and are looking to white label our product."

Jim Eberlin, the CEO of Jbara says, "We are continuing to make enhancements to our current product as sales are increasing. Current customers have helped to improve our analytics. Our customer base pipeline is growing as we're in the process of closing several contracts. We are currently the sole sponsor of a meetup and users group for customer success executives. The group is led by Marqueto, and Exactly, one of our current customers. We have two strategic partnerships in the works that could lead to potential exits. These are in addition to our currently existing partnership with SalesForce."

The new ventures include:

• Bonfyre is a location-based mobile application exclusively for college students that helps them find what's hot around campus, keep up with friends and save money. Bonfyre was created by Off Campus Media, a company focused on creating value for college students and highly relevant advertising opportunities for local merchants and national brands.

• BusyEvent is a profitable live event CRM company monetizing some of the 10 million annual face-to-face transactions at conferences, trade shows and business to business events. They track buyer behavior and present that data as actionable information that multiple stakeholders pay for.

• Click With Me Now makes 1-click Web-sharing for consumers possible; with no cost, no downloads and no frustrations. Supporting businesses that connect with consumers online, they provide tools that let their customers instantly invite friends to co-browse with them. Their SaaS-based, platform-independent solution results in richer experiences, greater conversion and increased sales.

• Material Mix owns and operates an exchange for reusable industrial byproducts. Each year, U.S. manufacturers pay to dispose of 176 million tons of waste, 34% of which is reusable. The online trade of these recoverable materials represents an unrealized $13.2 billion market opportunity.

• RollSale is reducing the need for expensive middlemen in the used car supply chain by providing dealers with a simple, inexpensive, mobile-centric social network for buying and selling inventory.

• Systematic Revenue provides growing businesses with an easy to use and affordable marketing automation software application to consistently follow up with all prospects and customers in a meaningful and relevant way.
  

The media, when pitched a startup story, is interested in who funded the venture. They seldom ask how much revenue the company has or if it is profitable.

And entrepreneurs? They seem to have confused the definition of entrepreneurship altogether. Entrepreneurship, they mistakenly believe, equals financing!

This is wrong.

There are numerous stories of successful businesses that have been built without a penny of outside financing. I want to share with you some wisdom from the heroes of the other 99%. They live in a world of entrepreneurs who enjoy their freedom and are not looking to sell their businesses or take them public. You could say these businesses are built-to-enjoy, as opposed to built-to-flip. Needless to say, outside financing, by definition, requires an "exit," and for most businesses, that means a sale to a larger company.

But the entrepreneurs I will introduce you to today are not interested in selling their companies. They just want to continue doing what they are doing: building value.

Meet Girish Navani, CEO of eClinicalWorks, a super-successful healthcare IT company based in Boston. He has never taken any funding but has built a $100 million-plus business by delivering value to customers.

Girish says, "I don't foresee leaving the company for at least 10 years. I would like to leave it a private company with no external investors and absolutely no thoughts whatsoever about Wall Street. I am having fun and take great pride in my freedom. There is no reason I would give that up. We are a cash flow positive company. We have recurring revenues and no debt. We have a large customer base that is growing exponentially." [You can read Girish's full story here.]

Meet Andrew Fox, CEO of ClubPlanet, a $30 million-plus nightclub ticketing services company that is also 100% founder-owned. Andrew loves nightlife and says, "The business is very successful and has a lot of room for growth. I think that we have a lot of suitors out there who mention really ridiculous numbers at times. This is such a great lifestyle business that I don't know if I could ever sell it. All of my previous businesses I built to sell, but this time around you might find me right here in thirty years. I hope by then it is $300 million a year.

Based on our growth trajectory, we are seeing really good signs of improvement. [You can read more of Andrew's story here.]

Each of these entrepreneurs could raise money in a nanosecond given how much success they've had. The fact that they don't gives you an idea about the advantages of the self-financed, organic growth model. No matter how much Wall Street gyrates, these entrepreneurs experience and demonstrate a level of stability and steadiness that is exemplary.

Imagine if the American economy had many more such steady private companies that are far removed from the movements of the speculative markets, how much more robust things would be? It really is time that the media starts celebrating more of these kinds of heroes: the other 99%.

And for young entrepreneurs, as you evaluate role models to emulate, perhaps it is not a bad idea to also consider some of these lesser-known heroes. They can give you a picture of the realities of an alternate, deeply satisfying universe.

In conclusion, I want to leave you with a 1:49 minute video message. Please listen to it, and stop for a moment to think about your path forward. Is a single-minded focus on fund-raising your only option?

Conference photo by Dell

"We can gamble in Vegas. We can donate on Kiva or Kickstarter. But it's illegal to purchase $100 of stock in a job-creating business? That makes no sense."

That is the tagline to a new project called WeFunder from three TechStars Boston alum who are trying to garner support for the "Democratizing Access to Capital Act" (S.1791) that would allow entrepreneurs to crowdfund startups. Launched yesterday with the hopes of getting $100,000 from 100 pledges, the guys behind WeFunder have already seen near $3 million in promised funds from more than a 1000 supporters if the Senate passes the bill.

The notion of crowd funding a startup is fundamentally different than that of endorsing a project on Kickstarter. At Kickstarter, people fund projects and have no ownership over the project once it is completed. It becomes a lot more complicated when the notion of investing in actual companies is taken into account.

Right now, the only entities that can invest in startups are those that are accredited investors such as venture capital firms or venture banks. What the Democratizing Access to Capital Act of 2011 would do would be to amend the Securities Act of 1933 that outlines when and how investments in companies can be made through the Securities and Exchange Commission. This is where a mess of SEC rules and regulations come into play. Many of the regulations that the SEC implements are designed to protect the investor. The Securities Act of 1933 was put in place in 1933, four years after the 1929 market crash that led to the Great Depression and caused many affluent American's to lose their fortunes. It was a necessary act that helped protect people but also spur U.S. businesses. To a certain extent, the Democratizing Access to Capital Act fits in the same realm.

Sponsored by Sen. Scott Brown of Massachusetts, the bill comes three years after the market bust in 2008 that started what we now refer to as "The Great Recession." Many political and business leaders in the U.S. are looking toward the technology sector to lead America back to the heights of economic prosperity. The Wall Street Journal today published an article saying that the next economy will be based on three pillars: big data, smart manufacturing and the wireless revolution. It is clear that the U.S. has the technological prowess to create a dynamic new economy. Yet, with capital markets spread thin, the next big American company working on a technological advance could die for lack of funding before it even gets its feet off the ground.

Tremendous Impact

The impacts of the Democratizing Access to Capital Act could be tremendous. It would open up the flow of cash to startups from real people. The act would allow a single non-accredited investor to put money into a startup they has the power to create jobs.

"Think of it as Kickstarter for equity, where everyday non-accredited individuals can invest up to $1k in a startup they believe in," said Daniel Sullivan, one of the founders of WeFunder and the founder of crowdsourcing startup Crowdly. "I think this is a really important issue that involves how the general tech consumer can help drive the economy."

The other two founders of WeFunder are Nicholas Tommarello of Escapist and developer Nick Plante.

Some may think that startups like WeFunder are looking to disrupt the venture capital industry. That is far from the truth. Venture capitalists and bankers are not going anywhere. Startups still need guidance, mentors, legal support and infrastructure that VCs can offer them. They also have more money and better insider knowledge than the individual non-accredited investor. For example, just look to the $2.7 billion that VC firm Andreesen Horowitz has raised in the last three years. What the Democratizing Access to Capital Act does is lower the bar for the transference of money for startups looking to build a great idea. The ability of money to flow freely across the ecosystem should be of great benefit to all involved.

I signed up for this past weekend in St. Louis. I could have gone to Nice (France) or Minsk or Bergen (Norway), but the event in my hometown was a lot easier to get to. I met with several different teams who were struggling with their direction and implementations, and helped to refine their focus and mission, and suggest some ways that they could incorporate existing technologies into their process. By the time Sunday rolled around twelve teams were left to present what they had accomplished.

The weekends aren't free: the cost is less than $100 but that covers all your meals and a chance to rub keyboards with other smart folks in your city who are interested in building something new and exciting. You also get a $50 credit for hosting and cloud computing services per each team, something that came in handy for those teams doing some Big Data implementations.

The groups met in the Railway Exchange building in downtown St. Louis, down the hall from the tech accelerator that Capital Innovators is running and which we wrote about here. It was a good choice, because you could see the fortunate companies that have been part of that process: several of their founders were working over the weekend, no surprise given the scrappy nature of these entrepreneurs.

Startup Weekend - Full from Eighteen Eighty on Vimeo.

What I found interesting was the mix of skills and people that came together for the weekend. I was expected a lot of multiple-pierced 20-somethings that were all sizzle and no steak; instead there were lots of minorities and women and people nearing my advanced age sitting around with the Gen Y'ers. That was amazing: everyone had something to contribute. It was a nice mix. Several of them came from other cities that don't have their own weekend code-a-thons.

As the weekend progressed, I was drawn into other teams by just ambling around the building and stopping in to visit and watch them collaborate. Computers were everywhere, and several folks brought their own monitors to connect to their laptops. Several teams also sent around surveys to the group email list to start doing some basic market research.

The master of ceremonies for the weekend was Steve Chau, who hails from Kansas City (about four hours away by car) and who has run several weekends in other places for the past four years. He knew what he was doing, and clearly was having a lot of fun. "I am getting emails from the participants who have had ideas and gotten ignited," he says. "Spending 54 hours with a complete stranger doesn't happen anymore, and it is pretty cool." Now is a full-time employee that works for the operation, but that was a relatively recent circumstance: before he was hired, he volunteered his time. There are more than 80 similar facilitators around the world. "I can't think of any other event that has the diversity of the participants." While there are numerous hackathons held by private software companies, the Startup Weekenders are trying to build new things that could become big successes. Zaarly.com is one of the success stories that started about a year ago, Foodspotting.com is another company that had its origins with one of the Startup Weekend.

I would tell you more specifics about the services and products of the teams that I mentored, but I can't: not just because it wouldn't be fair to them, but also because things are in a state of flux. Several teams even changed the name of their ventures before the weekend was over, and mission statements were flying fast and furious.

This past weekend, the Jacksonville entrepreneurship community hosted their own version of this exciting program. 150 people came together, and 17 businesses were formed. An additional 50 were on the wait-list, an evidence of the energy and enthusiasm that is bubbling in Florida right now. MJ Charmani, founder of iStart Jax, a business accelerator, and one of the key organizers of the event, introduced today's session with additional reports on last weekend's event.

First, Eric Keeler with Armex Industries, Inc. pitched the Armex Zero Suit, a new kind of durable, special-purpose suit with significantly higher heat and cold resistance targeted towards racecar drivers, firefighters, and military personnel. Eric has done some technology scouting, and believes he can deliver on the specs of the product.

The problem, however, is that he is assuming that an investor would fund the product development. Investors rarely fund concepts. Even seed investors generally fund businesses that are already rolling. So, Eric will need to create a method with which to get to paying customers before any investor would invest. In addition, there is significant work to do on market sizing and go-to-market strategy. Direct selling simply is not the right solution for bringing this product to market. The price-point is too low for that to be sustainable.

pay2pitch.com

Next Perry Kaye presented pay2pitch.com, a network where entrepreneurs will come and pitch investors and mentors and pay, say, $1,000 for a twenty-minute interaction. The money, however, will be donated to the investor or mentor's favorite charity.

Perry rightly points out that a miniscule percentage of entrepreneurs get funded. We agree on the observation, and many of you have already seen our The Other 99% video. However, Perry's observation that entrepreneurs don't get funded because they can't get meetings is not entirely accurate. Most entrepreneurs don't get funded because they are simply not fundable. For a variety of different reasons that have to do with the fundamentals of their businesses, entrepreneurs, even if they CAN get meetings, don't get funded. So paying $1,000 to get a 20-minute meeting, in my opinion, is a total wastage of money. Of course, if the assumption is that this is for charity, that is different.

The second problem with the assumption here is that mentoring networks typically do not scale. You can see my video on the subject to get more color on why.

Bottomline, we get this question very often: Can 1M/1M help me get funded? So yes, tons of entrepreneurs are looking for funding, whether or not they should. Most of them are not fundable. So getting them to pay $1,000 for a 20-minute meeting that will most likely result in a rejection seems deceptive to me.

Ziffor

Then Tim LeMaster pitched Ziffor, a service for table restaurants that would like to offer promotions for non-peak times. This is a compelling idea, because many restaurants that have experimented with Groupon-like services have often been overwhelmed with unprofitable customers showing up during peak hours. Tim's idea offers a good solution to this problem.
However, there are some serious operational complexities involved to make a solution like this work at scale. Getting access to restaurant booking data won't be easy. Also, selling to restaurants is expensive, as we have seen in the massive operational expenditure and lack of profitability in the Groupon model.

I reviewed Tim's financial assumptions, and advised him to redo them with the assumption that the team would have to bootstrap the business locally, get enough validation, etc., before any investor would even consider investing.

SustanAbin

Next Rushabh Shah pitched SustainAbin, a concept that anchors on the assumption that 83 million people are searching for how to practice a green lifestyle. Rushabh wants to create a portal that harnesses this traffic, and give them meaningful content, based on which he would be able to generate high value leads for local businesses in the sustainability area such as solar, organic farming, etc.

Rushabh needs to do a lot of studying of how lead-arbitrage businesses work. To make a case of the business he proposes, he would have to, somehow, channel the search traffic from Google to his site. This is the domain of PPC and SEO, and the market is very competitive, buying extremely expensive.

On the business model side, also, some of the assumptions of monetizing with advertising are misplaced. I keep repeating this: there is way too much unmonetized ad inventory out there, driving CPMs down. Dramatically. Rushabh's analysis of the business needs to be significantly more thorough and comprehensive to even assess viability.

Bthere

Vincent Laganella then pitched Bthere, an excellent concept of analyzing 911 data feeds to extract leads for glass repair, door and window repair, and other crime-related contexts that immediately trigger needs in consumers. For example, a consumer has just had a burglar break in to the house through a glass window. The 911 call would generate a lead for a local glass repair shop instantly. And small businesses would be more than happy to pay good money for such immediately actionable leads. Very strong idea, and excellent analysis of the business fundamentals.

Overall, today's roundtable was a window into Jacksonville's efforts at drumming up additional entrepreneurship for regional economic development. The Startup Weekend programs around the world are doing this in different cities, and the organization is supported by the Kauffman Foundation. We look forward to supporting more such efforts through the 1M/1M initiative.

The Roundtable

You can listen to the recording of today's roundtable here. As always, I would very much like to hear about your business, so let me invite you to come and pitch at one of our free 1M/1M public roundtables. We will be holding future roundtables on the following dates starting at 8:00 a.m. PST:

Thursday, February 2, Register Here.
Thursday, February 9, Register Here.
Thursday, February 16, Register Here.
Thursday, February 23, Register Here.

If you want a deeper relationship with me, you are very welcome to join the 1M/1M premium program. If you have any questions about the program, please, first study the website, especially What to expect from the 1M/1M premium program and the FAQs. If you have additional questions, please email me, and I would be very happy to respond. Please note that I work exclusively with 1M/1M entrepreneurs.

I also invite you to join the 1M/1M mailing list for the ease and convenience of getting updates. This way we can stay in touch, and it will help you to decide if 1M/1M is a program for you.

The founders of Boston-based startup Promoboxx must be breathing that sigh of relief. Promoboxx has landed a deal with Chevy to power its Super Bowl commercials from local dealers. Yes, that Super Bowl. The one where Madonna is playing the halftime show this year. How did a little startup out of TechStars Boston make it to the biggest stage in the world?

Think about the logistics behind that for a second. That is 6,000 dealers with their own co-branded commercials. Each dealer has thousands of customers. That is a lot of very specific, locally targeted marketing going on. That means that Promoboxx's platform needs to be very robust and scalable to deliver content at rates that size.

"We built it to be a cloud scalable platform that is able to handle practically simultaneous infinite users and large national brands" said Jamie Fiedler, lead engineer at Promoboxx.

To accommodate Chevy, Promoboxx had to create new user interface and unique experience for each of the 6,000 dealers. That is not easy. Promoboxx teamed with Big Fuel, a social media company out of New York, to handle the issue.

"The design and development team was updating the Promoboxx dealer engagement portion of the platform at the same time as they were revamping the entire product," Promoboxx CEO Ben Carcio told ReadWriteWeb. Therefore, all of this new technology being developed will morph into the overall product offering. This made the Promoboxx technology team realize how flexible the product needed to be when working with such large brands, which forced them to build a Modular RESTful API."

Promoboxx focused on creating a flexible backend to handle the needs of each specific dealer. This will be the biggest test for Promoboxx. With 6,000 dealers of varying degrees of technological prowess, the platform needs to be simple enough to be everything to everybody.

"The way the process works can vary per brand, so the importance of a flexible API/backend was super crucial. There wasn't a defined path that every company or dealer would follow, so flexibility was an essential part," said Fiedler.

Super indeed. Super Bowl that is. Promoboxx has likely hit an inflection point in its evolution. The company got its first big break. Now the real work starts.

Empower Lounge

Misty Gibbs from Austin, Texas, presented Empower Lounge, a concept for a website that focuses on offering inspirational content along four major vectors: work, health, play and giving. In addition, the site will offer some level of professional networking. Misty is folding in a national site, Inspiration Lounge, and a local site, AustinWomen, to bring together her current 10,000-strong subscriber base under the Empower Lounge umbrella.

I also pointed out that there is way too much unmonetized ad inventory online, a challenge that is putting digital publishers through serious heartburns. I have shared my thoughts on this topic over and again on my blog, as well as elsewhere on the Web. We've had substantive discussions on the topic with entrepreneurs such as John Ramey, CEO of iSocket, Kenny Rosenblatt, CEO of Arkadium, and Jay Samit, CEO of SocialVibe, who all attest to the downward pressure on CPM rates and the challenges of low fill-through.

In addition, ad networks taking large cuts of ad revenues put further pressure on the publishers. Vikrant Mathur, CEO of iFood.tv discusses that at length in the blog post here. Vikrant is running a bootstrapped publishing company, and is a 1M/1M premium member. In 1M/1M, we happen to have a great deal of experience dealing with such companies and their challenges.

I don't think I got through to Misty, though. She is 'confident' that she can raise $500,000 for this website right away. Well, good luck, Misty! I hope you are right.

However, for other entrepreneurs who may be listening a bit more seriously to the challenges facing the industry, I would also like you to invest some time and energy in assessing the 'fundability' of your project before making assumptions like this. You can use the 1M/1M Self-Assessment for that purpose. Also, here is a short video on the issue of fundability, addressing some questions that we hear often from entrepreneurs.

In conclusion, I would like to highlight the fact that entrepreneurs really should STOP focusing so much on funding and start worrying more about how to build a sustainable business. Less than 1% of entrepreneurs actually ever get funded. The other 99% who go out to look for financing get rejected. But there is no reason to believe that you cannot succeed even without funding. So, my advice to Misty is to focus on the business fundamentals of how to get to revenues and profits within a realistic time frame. Here is my video message to all entrepreneurs who are focused on raising money and are facing difficulty: The Other 99% (Entrepreneurs).

Themeefy

Also, Titash Neogi from Pune, India, pitched Themeefy, a publishing platform for self-publishers that helps users create, curate and publish books, magazines, etc. I happen to know a great deal about this business because of my own long involvement in publishing. So, we dialoged about the product marketing issues of what constitutes a complete product in this space. For instance, HTML books are simply not enough and all the traditional formats of e-books need to be supported. Similarly, self-publishing platforms like Amazon's CreateSpace need to be supported; iPad apps need to be supported.

In general, when you come to the market with a solution, it needs to meet the needs of the contemporary customers. The proposed solution is an inadequate one for serious book authors to want to use. It is, however, being used for free by about 5,000 educators, travel book authors, etc., which is a good start. But people using your product for free is one thing, getting them to actually pay is quite another. And that's where Themeefy will need to develop a product roadmap and business strategy that takes this minimum viable product and builds a sustainable business out of it. I will be happy to help him accomplish that.

You can listen to the recording of today's roundtable here. As always, I would very much like to hear about your business, so let me invite you to come and pitch at one of our free 1M/1M public roundtables. We will be holding future roundtables on the following dates starting at 8:00 a.m. PST:
Thursday, January 26, Register Here.
Thursday, February 2, Register Here.
Thursday, February 9, Register Here.
Thursday, February 16, Register Here.
Thursday, February 23, Register Here.
Please note, next week's roundtable will be co-hosted with Jacksonville Startup Weekend and a couple of hundred entrepreneurs are participating in this weekend's event in Florida. On January 26, the top five will be presenting at the 1M/1M roundtable.

If you want a deeper relationship with me, you are very welcome to join the 1M/1M premium program. If you have any questions about the program, please, first study the website, especially What to expect from the 1M/1M premium program and the FAQs. If you have additional questions, please email me, and I would be very happy to respond. Please note that I work exclusively with 1M/1M entrepreneurs.

I also invite you to join the 1M/1M mailing list for the ease and convenience of getting updates. This way we can stay in touch, and it will help you to decide if 1M/1M is a program for you.

I have visited IIT KGP many times over the years, and each time I see a marked improvement in the energy and momentum at the campus on entrepreneurship. My 1997 recruitment visit met with tepid response, with the student body largely interested in multinational placements at the time. But a subsequent visit in January 2009 saw a massive change: the students were excited about entrepreneurship.

Before I start discussing the businesses, I'd like to highlight the role the National Entrepreneurship Network (NEN) has played in developing the e-cells at 470 different schools and colleges in India. NEN is part of the Wadhwani Foundation's efforts at entrepreneurship development, and it is great to see how pervasive their success has been. I spoke to Ajay Kela, the CEO of Wadhwani Foundation recently, and got a feel for the breadth of their investment.

The challenge ahead for NEN and the academic institutions in India is to now take the massive interest and enthusiasm that has been generated, and harness it to produce a large number of successful companies.

Today, at IIT KGP, we caught a glimpse of some of the budding heroes of 21^st century India.

mobHUB

First, Piyush Bagaria from IIT KGP pitched mobHUB, a learning management solution with extensive simulation and visualization capability that he proposes to sell to science and technology educational institutions to empower faculty to produce rich media content. Piyush has got some early encouragement from a couple of schools in Calcutta, and while he needs to expand the scope of his validation process, there are some interesting nuggets in his core idea.

Optimum Mobility Services

Next Lakshman Pasala from IIT KGP presented Optimum Mobility Services, a fleet routing and optimization solution for cab companies, their current validation segment, followed by logistics companies operating trucks, etc. Two cab companies have already validated the idea, and OMS is on their way to signing up more cab companies in India as beta customers. Clearly, the solution offers some concrete value, and conceivably, OMS can look at the global market later on in their evolution. The notion of Indian companies bringing software technology to the Western market at dramatically lower price-points is one that I have highlighted on many prior occasions.

BUYHatke

Then Gaurav Dahake from IIT KGP pitched BUYHatke, a penny auction site that is considering three primary segments with a consumer-to-consumer e-commerce business model: net-savvy housewives, IT and BPO professionals, and college students with Internet access. My feedback was that the company needs to enter the market in a business-to-consumer mode because the logistics infrastructure in India is not at a point where a c-to-c business can thrive. A B-to-C business, on the other hand, can use Flipkart's logistics infrastructure, and have a better shot at success. My other feedback was to focus on one of the three segments, because everything else - from customer acquisition, to merchandising, to PR, to SEO would work better if the segmentation is tighter.

Univect Education Solutions

Next Parth Pachoir and Udayan Pandey from IIT KGP presented Univect Education Solutions, a social network for parents, teachers, and students in second and third tier Indian cities, to support online expert networks, mentoring programs, knowledge sharing, etc. The team is short of Computer Science expertise, and is looking for a co-founder to add to their pack. I like their focus on second and third tier Indian cities, and they have already started pilots in Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh.

TransTag

Then Nishant Koul from IIT KGP pitched TransTag, a RFID solution to help check car-theft in India. Well, Nishant's idea, to achieve success, would need the cities to install RFID readers at every street-corner. This is impossible to consider as realistic in the near term. Nishant would turn grey by his mid twenties if he hangs his hat on this idea, so I discouraged him to pursue it. Instead, he should turn his talents elsewhere.

I very much enjoyed getting a peek into IIT KGP's entrepreneurship action tonight, and look forward to working with other campuses - both in India, as well as in the US, Europe, Asia, and Latin America - on similar programs.

You can listen to the recording of today's roundtable here. As always, I would very much like to hear about your business, so let me invite you to come and pitch at one of our free 1M/1M public roundtables.

We will be holding future roundtables on the following dates:
Thursday, January 19, 8:00 a.m. PST, Register Here.
Thursday, January 26, 8:00 a.m. PST, Register Here.

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IIT photo by zimble thimble