Today’s roundtable included a lengthy discussion on a mobile app for fashion consumers. It made me reflect back on the days when I was running one of the first fashion e-commerce companies back in 1999-2000. At the time, I was new to the fashion business, and did not know the dynamics of the industry. Well, today, the fashion industry is seeing lots of entrepreneurship, and some of that is from entrepreneurs who also may not yet know the dynamics of the business.
My word of caution to those entrepreneurs – whether you are building online fashion offerings or mobile apps – be careful about assumptions about the industry. You need to understand how the money flows, who designs, who sells, who produces photographs, who owns copyrights. All of those determine the success of your business. The best entrepreneurs are those who thoroughly analyze the industry they’re in, and ensure that their business assumptions make sense given the realities of that particular industry.
mobella
With that caveat, let me talk about Michael Blank from New York, NY, who pitched mobella, a mobile fashion app. Michael wants to publish high end fashion photography, curated by experts, and monetize via affiliate fees and advertising dollars.
The questions that he needs to answer are who, in the fashion value chain, owns high-end fashion photographs? My experience says, the bulk of those are owned by the designers and magazines. Well, the magazines will, likely, do their own apps. The designers have the incentive to work with mobella, perhaps, as a marketing channel, and pay affiliate commissions for selling their merchandise.
However, there is one more layer of complexity. Most designers don’t ‘sell’ directly. They sell through retailers. That means, the photographs need to be tied to e-commerce sites that are willing to pay affiliate commissions to complete the transaction.
Process Matterz
Then Bibin Radhakrishnan from Bangalore, India, pitched Process Matterz. Bibin identifies the problem of doctors having difficulty recording the transcripts of their sessions with patients. However, he presents his pitch as a healthcare ERP solution, which is a gross overstatement of the problem.
The problem is recording and transcription of sessions between doctors and patients. That’s a very specific problem, for which, he needs to do a thorough competitive analysis and figure out whether he has a differentiated solution to offer.
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 at 8 a.m. PDT on:
Thursday, June 13, Register Here.
Thursday, June 20, Register Here.
Thursday, June 27, 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.
Sramana Mitra is the founder of the One Million by One Million (1M/1M) initiative, a virtual 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. Sramana has a master’s degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.