Today’s roundtable was organized in collaboration with TiE Delhi, and had a special emphasis on the online education sector with three out of the five entrepreneurs presenting education businesses. Ankur Mehra and his associate Aditya started off by introducing GuruVantage . Ankur and Aditya have determined that training managers at various Indian companies need help with vetting the quality, methodology and infrastructures of various training institutes, training vendors and such. Sponsor Sramana Mitra is a technology entrepreneur and strategy consultant in Silicon Valley. She has founded three companies, writes a business blog, Sramana Mitra on Strategy , and runs the 1M/1M initiative. She has a master’s degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her Entrepreneur Journeys book series, Entrepreneur Journeys , Bootstrapping: Weapon Of Mass Reconstruction , Positioning: How To Test, Validate, and Bring Your Idea To Market and her latest volume Innovation: Need Of The Hour , as well as Vision India 2020 , are all available from Amazon. In response to that, they are proposing a solution to do both pre-hiring and post-hiring. Prior to hiring, for example, training managers need to assess where candidates have been trained, and what is the quality of training that they provide. In addition, there are additional training needs post-hiring, which training managers address often by hiring training vendors. The key question that Guruvantage needs to answer is whether training managers are willing to pay for the solution or not. If the answer is yes, then the next question is how much are they willing to pay? What this leads us to is first, value proposition validation, then business model validation, followed by pricing model validation. Each stage of validation helps enhance the valuation of a company. And in 1M/1M, we always emphasize the best practice of building as much value, validation and valuation upfront. In addition, we had a specific discussion about segmentation alternatives – based on size of company, vertical, and geographical. Guruvantage has a large vision of doing this kind of training assessment for a wide variety of sectors ranging from engineering to business to the arts. All very well, but they have to pick a segment to enter through. As I told them, by trying to cater to everybody, you end up catering to nobody. You HAVE to go segment by segment. ARROW Devesh Verma was up next to present ARROW, a finishing school solution that helps college graduates become employable. Devesh addresses the issue that a large portion of Indian college grads are not employable because of a lack of essential skills, especially communication. Devesh has three colleges that have told him that they are willing to pay Rs. 150,000 for training 30 students on ARROW. He expects to be able to deliver a 30-student session within Rs. 130,000. Not bad. Now I want to know whether Devesh can find 100 colleges – tier B and tier C colleges since the tier A colleges tend to have their own offerings – who are willing to pay Rs. 150,000 for ARROW. If he can, then there is a business worth building here. And pay attention to the segmentation of who is adopting vs. who isn’t; it will provide great cues to where the highest velocity entry points to the market are. Devesh asked me, “Is the Indian education sector ready for something like ARROW?” My answer is: “A sector’s readiness is a function of the customers’ readiness. So by answering the question – Will more colleges buy? – you will also be able to answer the broad question.” Global Experts Then Rahul Jain presented Global Experts , a community of business experts who will be tutoring, coaching and mentoring business students. Rahul has assembled a lot of content on business and management curriculums, and wants to use that to attract potential customers who will then pay to access more personal engagements with experts. In essence, he is proposing a freemium model whereby he uses content to draw in users, and then try to convert a percentage of them to paying customers in the U.S. Well, the paid content model in the U.S. has really imploded, so I have some skepticism about the viability. There are some competitors who seem to have validated the business model to a degree, like http://www.studentoffortune.com . So Rahul’s next step is to SEO-optimize the content he has put together and harness a group of users ti see if he can convert a percentage of them (average freemium conversion rate is usually 2%) to paying customers. If Rahul can get to about 5,000 paying customers, paying $250 a year, then he can get to the $1M mark. The question is, can he attract 250,000 students with his free content and then convert 2% of those to paying customers? For these three and other online education entrepreneurs, I would like to take a moment and point you to some online education case studies on my blog. Take a look at Apex Learning , Archipelago Learning , KC Distance Learning , Revolution Prep , and Global English . Intelligent Monitoring Next Vikas Hazrati and Narinder Kumar discussed Intelligent Monitoring. Vikas and Narinder have identified an interesting pain point that IT managers seem to have: a large volume of alerts from various IT monitoring systems without the ability to actionable correlation analysis. They have feedback from three to five IT managers, including one that is willing to pay them to build a solution. To them, my advice is to leverage as much of the “consulting” money that clients are willing to pay to solve the problem, and use that cash to bootstrap the business. I love this kind of customer intimacy through working closely with customers, and getting paid for it. If they can talk to 100 IT managers in the SME segment and get 10 to 15 to pay up, the entire product design and development process can be financed by customers! I referred them to the Bootstrapping To Billions case study in Entrepreneur Journeys, Volume One . Simplogy Up last was Hasnain Zaheer for Simplogy , who wants to offer marketing strategy and execution services from Australia. My advice to him is to zero in on specific marketing processes that can be offered in a remote mode, which could be email marketing, or SEO, SEM, Web design – all those being highly competitive areas – but strategy consulting cannot really be sold online. I started doing my free Online Strategy Roundtables for entrepreneurs in the fall of 2008. These roundtables are the cornerstone programming of a global initiative that I have started called One Million by One Million ( 1M/1M ). Its mission is to help a million entrepreneurs globally to reach $1 million in revenue and beyond, build $1 trillion in sustainable global GDP, and create 10 million jobs. In 1M/1M, I teach the EJ Methodology which is based on my Entrepreneur Journeys research, and emphasize bootstrapping, idea validation, and crisp positioning as some of the core principles of building strong fundamentals in early stage ventures. In addition, we are offering entrepreneurs access to investors and customers through our recently launched our 1M/1M Incubation Radar series . You can pitch to be featured on my blog following these instructions . The recording of this roundtable can be found here . Recordings of previous roundtables are all available here . You can register for the next roundtable here . Photo by Mary Gober . Discuss

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This morning the Online Strategy Roundtable for entrepreneurs ran very smoothly. The five entrepreneurs who presented are all at various stages of validating who their best customers are. The best conversations during these roundtables usually stem from the businesses that have already been validated to some degree, simply because I am often not the target customer for a product. All entrepreneurs need to speak directly to their real customers – the people who are willing to pay money for their product or service – in order find out if you are solving a real problem. It is your potential customers who will give you the most valuable feedback, and these conversations should happen very early on, preferably before you have spent precious time and money building a product or service. Sponsor Sramana Mitra is a technology entrepreneur and strategy consultant in Silicon Valley. She has founded three companies and writes a business blog, Sramana Mitra on Strategy . She has a master’s degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her three books, Entrepreneur Journeys , Bootstrapping, Weapon Of Mass Reconstruction , and Positioning: How To Test, Validate, and Bring Your Idea To Market are all available from Amazon. Her new book Vision India 2020 was recently released. Mitra is also a columnist for Forbes and runs the 1M/1M initiative.  Ellen Badinelli started off by introducing her business, ScanAvert . This is a mobile dietary application that scans products’ barcodes and alerts the consumer to dietary incompatibility based on their user-created profile. For example, if you are following a gluten-free diet or avoiding certain ingredients that may cause a bad reaction to a drug you take, you can scan the bar code and quickly find out if the ingredients you are avoiding are in a given product. There have been 5,000 users so far, giving Ellen a good idea of who the best demographic is for this product right now. She is looking to get financing to beef up PR efforts as recommended by some angel investors. Unlike advertising, you don’t get more PR by spending more money. I recommend she does some more guerilla PR herself Using the demographic information learned from the 5,000 customers who have already downloaded the app. She should target the top bloggers and media for each of the largest segments. I would like to see Ellen ramp up a bit more and get more conversions. As long as she can continue to bootstrap, she will improve the valuation.  Next Bradley Owen presented TxtJet , which delivers email on cell phones for free, as text messages. He plans to use an advertising revenue model which will begin in six months or so to run a short ad tied to key words in the message. The ads are based on key word density and the geography of the user. I have my doubts on how well this will monetize because it would be tricky to target the ads based on the wording of email messages. I suggested that building an ad server to do this might be a more interesting product, although Google is already working on similar efforts. We discussed using SEO optimization around the key words “free mobile email.”  I suggested he may also want to explore doing a deal with the carriers by offering a product to help transition text messaging customers into email customers. This, of course, would depend on how strong Bradley’s intellectual property is. They won’t be interested in something they can easily create for themselves. He’s launching this product tomorrow, so he’ll soon be able to see exactly where his customer base is coming from. Good luck!   Kendra McKeever was up next to present Sock Monkeys Clothing , which offers clothing appropriate for infants with eczema in 3-month- to 1-year-old sizes. Apparently 20% of babies have eczema in the U.S. – including her daughter – and she is targeting the parents and grandparents of those children. She says there are a handful of competitors, but all are located in Europe, making the products expensive. She has great endorsements from parents and pediatric dermatologists, but this has not converted into sales. We discussed the importance of focusing on SEO marketing; she needs to be on the top of the page for those searching for infant eczema. I suggest she does a laser-focused outreach to bloggers, especially mommy bloggers who are already discussing this topic, to see if they are willing to write about her product rather than going after the larger iVillage-type bloggers right now. Also, trying to get into publications read by pediatric dermatologists is worth exploring. Although doctors don’t sell clothing, this could also help get the word of mouth going. Then we had Dhaval Sharma, who has been working on a back-end solution to make pooling (as in carpooling) easier to organize.  Dhaval spoke about all he has been doing and his ideas, but he has yet to speak to his potential customers to see if they are willing to pay for this. I’m not yet convinced by his value proposition because I think there are free solutions already available. Dhaval needs to focus on one segment; mass pooling is too large. Once he has found his strongest segment to zero in on, he needs to stay with that one line of thought and go out and validate that there are people willing to pay for his solution. Don’t spray and pray! You should always try to validate your idea first, build your product later. Up last was David Braxton presenting for HighPerformanceU , which will offer an audio program that shares a business coaching methodology he has helped to develop through his one-on-one coaching experience. They would like to eventually offer this as a reasonably priced, customized solution for a company’s sales force, for example. He has been able to sell a very similar program to two companies so far, which is a good data point for David. But he really needs to validate his assumptions with his potential customers. I recommend he speak to 100 sales managers to ask them for feedback, and maybe offer the service for free at first and develop some success metrics. If they like the product, he’ll have his first customers. This can be done by phone or through connections on LinkedIn, doesn’t need to be done with in-person meetings. More validation needed.  These roundtables are the cornerstone programming of a global initiative that I have started called One Million by One Million ( 1M/1M ). Its mission is to help a million entrepreneurs globally to reach $1 million in revenue and beyond, build $1 trillion in sustainable global GDP, and create 10 million jobs.  In 1M/1M, I teach the EJ Methodology which is based on my Entrepreneur Journeys research, and emphasize bootstrapping, idea validation, and crisp positioning as some of the core principles of building strong fundamentals in early stage ventures. You can find the recording of this roundtable session here . Recordings of previous roundtables are all available here . You can register for the next roundtable here . .   Discuss

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Twitter just made a small, but important change to its search service available at search.twitter.com . It’s now parsing shortened URLs in order to discover additional keywords to aid in searches. In other words, Twitter isn’t only returning tweets where your search term is found in the 140 characters of text contained in the tweet itself, but also when your search term appears in the URL behind the pre-shortened link, like those from Twitter’s default URL-shortening service, bit.ly , for example. Sponsor This change was initially discovered by Chris Pirillo , founder of the Lockergnome network and former TechTV personality, who noted, after running a routine vanity search for his name: “Over three-quarters of the results didn’t have my name anywhere in the tweet. Instead, there were shortened links in the tweets… such as those from bit.ly and ping.fm. Those links went straight to one or another of my sites, such as geeks.pirillo.com or lockergnome.com.” We’ve now done some tests of our own and have found that it doesn’t appear to be a fluke – it’s happening across the board no matter what search term we enter. Good News for Publishers For publishers, this change is welcome news. Most writers who produce content for the Internet take care to make sure their URLs include important keywords that allow the links to be easily indexed by major search engines. But when those same links are sent to Twitter, the carefully crafted keyword-packed URL is obscured behind a shortened link, a necessary evil due to Twitter’s 140-character limit on tweets. Now the time writers spend making SEO-friendly URLs will pay off in Twitter, too. This makes it easier for publishers’ content to be found, of course, but it also makes it easier for publishers to find who’s retweeting their content. Often, people tweet a link without including the “RT” or “@” symbol that allows the original Twitter poster (the publisher) to know that someone found their content worthy of sending to Twitter. This is done either because the re-tweeter wants to claim credit for discovering the link themselves or because they honestly did just that – they found an interesting link on the Web and posted it to Twitter, without realizing the publisher had tweeted it first. In any event, the change seems like a win-win situation for all involved. Publishers can better track their content and have it appear in more searches and Twitter users can more easily find relavent links. Discuss

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One of our favorite new trends here at ReadWriteWeb is the quickly growing field of mobile technology and how we can take more of the Web along with us when we leave our computers. Because of the expanding popularity of smartphones and mobile data use, startups these days need to develop plans for marketing their brand on mobile devices at very early stages of their development. Cindy Krum, CEO of Rank-Mobile , a consulting firm focused on mobile marketing and SEO, is the author of this week’s featured read, Mobile Marketing: Finding Your Customers No Matter Where They Are . Sponsor With chapters on mobile advertising, mobile web development and search engine optimization, Krum’s informative book is a great resource for first time entrepreneurs looking to take advantage of the mobile platform. There is also an entire chapter dedicated to the iPhone, a testament to the device’s influence on the mobile Web space. “The iPhone has brought mobile Web access and mobile search to the masses,” writes Krum. “The iPhone represents only 8% of the mobile handsets but roughly 75% of the mobile search, and iPhones now account for one out of every 333 Web hits worldwide. The desire for Web access and Web search was always there – it was just being slowed by the bad user experience that other mobile phones provided.” “The desire for Web access and Web search was always there – it was just being slowed by the bad user experience that other mobile phones provided.” – Cindy Krum Krum also includes case studies from prominent businesses that have used mobile platforms to market their products. These include Nike , Nationwide Insurance , Land Rover , Visa , Corona Beer and CNN . I was disappointed to not find any mention of the efforts being made by numerous companies to use augmented reality for mobile marketing, but the book does include the use of quick response (QR) codes . Various types of bar codes and QR codes are described, as well as case studies of companies that put the technology to practical use. The book itself even joins in the QR fun by including a ScanLife EZ Code on the back cover. ScanLife is a mobile application and short code provider that allows companies to market specifically to camera phones. Users take a picture of the code using a ScanLife app and can be redirected to various forms of mobile content. The strange thing about the book’s implementation of the ScanLife code is that it failed to include any mobile-specific content. After scanning the code with the ScanLife app on my iPhone, Safari launched and took me to the book’s homepage. Yes, Safari on the iPhone is a fully capable web browser, but it would have made more sense to create a website optimized for the iPhone’s smaller screen. A similar code I found while on a recent trip to Las Vegas took me to a special mobile promotion page with a video and special hotel rates. The lesson to be learned here, and from other forms of mobile marketing, is that the content used should be native to the devices being used to view it. Simply adding a link to your normal webpage on a mobile device is not the best use of the technology. The hotel example was a much better implementation because it provided me with exclusive content that was also optimized for a smaller screen. It isn’t enough to shift the same marketing materials to mobile phones; mobile marketing is all about making the content unique and native. Much more can be learned from the book and from the advice provided straight from the CEO of a company in the trenches of mobile marketing. Research shows that smartphones could be used more than personal computers in just a few years, so getting ahead on mobile marketing strategies is an important step for any early-stage company. If you want to learn more about mobile trends, be sure to register for our ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit on May 7th in Mountain View, California. Photo by Flickr user William Hook . Disclosure: A review copy of this book was provided to ReadWriteWeb by Pearson Education and Que Publishing . Discuss

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Even though we have lots of tools to detect blog comment spam these days, spammers always tend to be one step ahead of our algorithms. While early blog spam was often posted by robots and easily detectable, today’s blog spammers are smarter. Instead of relying on robots, the team behind Automaticc ’s Akismet spam filter reports that modern blog spam is often written by low-paid workers in India, South-East Asia and Turkey. Sponsor The “best written spam,” according to Akismet, comes from South-East Asia. As the Akismet team notes, SEO firms will often hire these low-paid workers and set them up to work out of Internet cafes and local universities. Akismet: “The ‘best written spam’ comes from South-East Asia.” Detecting Human-Posted Spam is Hard We have definitely seen this increase in human-posted spam here at ReadWriteWeb over the last two years or so. While early comment spam was easily detectable because it had nothing to do with the actual post, we now have to take a closer look at all the links our commenters use in their personal profiles in order to weed out the spammers. Often, comments that look perfectly legit will include a link to a Viagra or SEO site in the profile link. What About Regular Spam? Besides the rise of human-powered spam, traditional spam is still going strong as well. Akismet notes that “old-fashioned” pill, porn and malware spam still tends to originate from Eastern Europe and the Russian Federation. Spammers there still operate huge networks of malware-infected machines that run spambots. According to Akismet, the number of fake blog networks on services like Blogspot, Weebly, Tumblr, Ning and WordPress is also becoming more frequent and more highly organized. Instead of just abusing other people’s blogs, these spammers just create their own blog networks. Other forms of blog-related spam that are on the rise are auto-blog pingbacks from people using auto-blogging plugins ( mostly for WordPress sites), as well as hijacked blogs and wikis. From Porn and Pills to Pet Food and Roofing Akismet also notes that while early blog spammers used to focus on the traditional (and highly lucrative) niches around pornography, pills and malware, today’s spammers are often more interested in search engine optimization than hawking fake Viagra. Because of this, modern blog spam often includes links to “dentists, roofing and pet food.” Discuss

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