We launched a new book at today’s roundtable with a short reading from one of the chapters. The book, The Other 99% (Entrepreneurs): Fortune In The Middle Of The Pyramid, is a collection of essays introducing my current thinking on why over 99% of the entrepreneurs who seek financing get rejected. It is a Kindle edition available from Amazon here. I hope you enjoy it!
Mentron
We started with Anthony Vendhan from Bangalore, India, who pitched Metron, a high-end boutique outsourced product development agency out of Bangalore. With a small portfolio of clients, they have reached about $600k in annual revenue, and are trying to figure out how to grow.
DeuxMeux
Next, Terry Likens, from Austin, Texas, pitched DeuxMeux, a community for spiritual directors and seekers to connect and transact. Terry offers the analogy of mental health counseling as a model, and assumes that spiritual directors will pay $200/month to use the community to connect with their audience, sell books, videos, as well as private, one-on-one counseling. There are many assumptions in the plan, and it could all very well work out just fine. I like the idea, but it requires validation. Like most first-time entrepreneurs, Terry assumes investors are waiting in line to fund his concept. Well, concept financing is pretty much dead.
Scoop Stake
At the end, Avinash Kaushik also from Bangalore, India, pitched Scoop Stake, a community for entrepreneurs to connect with customers who can both help validate their product ideas, as well as suppliers who can help design and build them. The concept is akin to Quirky, a crowdsourced innovation exchange coupled with in-house manufacturing. Avinash wants to do a variation on this theme of co-creation. Precise positioning will be key.
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, October 3, Register Here.
Thursday, October 10, Register Here.
Thursday, October 17, Register Here.
Thursday, October 24, Register Here.
Thursday, October 31, 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.