Today’s roundtable started with an interesting discussion on equity financing from customers.
B2Be
First, Balaji Abbabatulla from London, England, a 1M/1M premium member, pitched B2Be. The company is working with accounting firms in London to validate its concept of a mobile invoicing app. Interestingly, some of these accounting firms have expressed interest in investing in the company.
Well, I am a huge believer of customers as equity investors in a business. Some of you may recall the Modernizing Medicine case study we published earlier. Now is a good time to review that story.
Calasi
Then Dirk Aguilar from San Francisco, California, pitched Calasi, a flight search engine that focuses on providing quality input on specific flights, seats, etc. including carbon footprint, leg room, wifi, and a variety of other parameters. The company wants to syndicate the data to travel search engines to enhance their user experience, and charge for the API calls to their database.
AskForPets
Next, Sumit Arora from New Delhi, India, pitched AskForPets, an online pet supply store in India. The company is faced with the slow growth characteristics of the Indian ecommerce market, but nevertheless, can grow faster by optimizing its own operational metrics like traffic and conversion rates.
Valuvox
Last up, Arun Prabhu from Bangalore, India, pitched Valuvox, as a predictive analytics venture. After some digging, I gathered that the real expertise of the team is in helping staffing firms manage their demand and revenue forecasts. However, the pitch was a 30,000 feet level overview that distracted from that essence.
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, August 22, Register Here.
Thursday, August 29, 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.