Better Personal Advertising
First up today was Michael Greenberg presenting Better Personal Advertising. Mike wants to manage online identity on behalf of consumers so that they can maintain multiple identities for different types of sites, say photo, career, etc. and present themselves better in those different contexts.
Mike's customer acquisition strategy is weak at this point, and he also has a rather broad strategy in approaching this market. While I do believe there is an interesting opportunity in identity management, I am going to need to work much more closely with Mike to extract the nuggets out of his idea, and give shape to a viable go to market strategy.
Remote Stylist
Then Kelly Fallis pitched Remote Stylist, a personalized interior decoration advice service coupled with e-commerce in the domain of furniture and furnishings. Kelly's business has already done about $150,000 in revenue in 2010, which tells me that she has successfully validated at least some of her assumptions. Kelly has a lot of gaps in her customer acquisition strategy, as well as positioning, and she is seeing customers from commercial and residential clients. All this is too broad, and needs tightening up on multiple dimensions.
I like the business idea a lot, and in 1M/1M, we know a lot about building Web 3.0 and e-commerce businesses, so I would love to work with Kelly to help her figure out the various nuances of building a successful e-commerce business, especially one that differentiates on personalization. I have repeatedly said that personalization is an open opportunity in Web businesses, and needs to be tapped this decade. For Kelly, a good starting point would be the 1M/1M Curriculum, where we can offer her a lot more on the subject.
BizzGenie
Next Sajeeva Bora with tekMunk Software Solutions discussed BizzGenie, a business software concept to help retailers manage the decision-making between "shop floors and top floors." Sajeeva and his cofounders have good domain knowledge of the retail business, but have not yet done sufficient validation of the idea. He is looking for money and naturally, getting rejected by investors for lack of validation. As I have said before, this is not the right stage to look for money. There's more work to be done to prepare for a funding round.
Food Is Our Medicine Vision
Nwenna Kai then presented Food Is Our Medicine Vision, an online training concept through which she wants to teach community leaders how to create healthier living concepts like organic gardens, etc. in urban areas. Nwenna has surveyed about 200 readers of her blog, and they have told her that they would be willing to pay $400 to $800 for such courses.
Nwenna came to the roundtable with the question: What now? Where do I begin? Well, that's a rather large question to answer in five minutes, but she obviously needs to start validating her business within that group of 200 users who have said they're willing to pay for her offering.
Udemy
Up last was Gagan Biyani pitching Udemy, an online marketplace for educators and experts to teach various topics. Gagan has about 150 completed courses on the site so far, and about 10 of those are monetizing. He has run some experiments within the entrepreneurship training vertical, and has seen success when he has brought on known thought leaders. However, he faces the problem that the top tier thought leaders are unwilling to set up shop on his site. They have their own programs under their own brands.
Interestingly, Nwenna, who pitched right before Gagan, would be very interested in setting up shop on Udemy, and teaching her concepts and bringing her audience onto Udemy. We did this spot validation at the roundtable, and I believe, Gagan got a customer. However, I'd like to see a more focused, vertical specific go-to-market strategy in Udemy. At some level, Gagan's focus on entrepreneurship courses doesn't really align with Nwenna's target audience.
I have thought a lot about how to make an entrepreneurship education and eco-system scalable and accessible to a vastly larger number of people. The answer to that question, I believe, is the 1M/1M Premium Lounge. In fact, at a time when we're facing severe youth unemployment in America and Europe, and the emerging markets are just starting to build their entrepreneurship eco-systems, we really need to think deeply on how more and more young people can be efficiently, rapidly and cost-effectively be trained in entrepreneurship.
You can listen to the recording of today's roundtable here. Recordings of previous roundtables are all available here. You can register for the next roundtable here.
Sramana Mitra is the founder of the One Million by One Million (1M/1M), an educational and incubation program that aims to help one million entrepreneurs globally to reach $1 million in revenue and beyond, build $1 trillion in sustainable global GDP, and create 10 million jobs. She is a Silicon Valley serial entrepreneur and strategy consultant who writes the blog Sramana Mitra On Strategy, and is the author of the Entrepreneur Journeys book series and Vision India 2020. She has a master's degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Photo by Bessarro
The latest to try is Ongo, a two-year-old start-up that will introduce its Web site today, with an iPad app to follow.
Ongo is backed by three major media companies: The Washington Post Company, The New York Times Company and Gannett, which publishes USA Today. Each has invested $4 million.
Ongo is for readers who peruse a variety of publications every day and want to read them all in one place. It shows articles from about 20 publications, and is in talks with dozens more.
The catch: Readers pay $6.99 a month for the service, while most of the Web sites whose articles it shows are free. In exchange, readers see no ads or cluttered pages, and can search for articles, save them and share them with friends — all from one site.
“The key thing is they don’t have to go to the other sites” to read the stories, said Kevin Skaggs, Ongo’s chief content officer and a former producer for The San Francisco Chronicle’s Web site.
Many publications generally flinch at that idea, because they want readers to visit their sites and see their ads. But in this case, they are sharing their content with Ongo because Ongo will share its revenue with them. And, Ongo said, it may attract new readers when its editors highlight stories that readers may not have otherwise seen.
Other apps, like Pulse and Flipboard, offer mobile news readers for free. And people turn to Web sites like The Huffington Post, Twitter and Facebook to see stories aggregated by editors or acquaintances.
Ongo is different because it gathers stories from a large number of publications, people can access it on the Web or on mobile devices, and professional editors choose the top stories, said Alex Kazim, Ongo’s founder and chief executive and a former eBay executive.
“I just don’t think my friends are as good as professional editors in finding stories for me to read,” he said.
For $6.99, readers get all articles from The Washington Post and USA Today and some from The New York Times, the Associated Press and The Financial Times, along with stories from one more publication of their choice. Adding other publications costs an additional fee, between 99 cents and $14 a month, which the publisher sets.
According to Ongo’s research, just 12 percent of people read enough publications online each day that they would want a service like Ongo, Mr. Kazim said. But if it is successful, he hopes to include blogs, magazines and video, making it a one-stop shop for the news.
Ongo looks like a newspaper, with headlines that a team of six editors chooses to highlight and sections like sports, business and opinion. Readers can search a topic in the news and see articles from a variety of publications.
Like other sites, Ongo lets people share articles with friends through e-mail, Facebook and Twitter. But it also lets people set up groups — family members or colleagues, for instance — for sharing, and facilitates chats about articles. If someone who is not an Ongo member signs up after reading a shared story, the sender gets a free month’s membership.
First-time Ongo users can get a free one-day trial pass, and if they register within a month, the first month is free.
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