I attended Sramana Mitra’s Startup Positioning Roundtable last week. Sramana has been an entrepreneur and strategy consultant in Silicon Valley since 1994, and is currently authoring “Entrepreneur Journeys“, a series of books focused on demystifying entrepreneurship.
The Roundtable was a very well organized and involved session. Quite a few startups pitched their ideas in this session and Sramana shared her views on their ideas/pitches.
Sramana was basically looking at three different aspects for a product idea:
1) Is the idea any different compared to what is available in the market? What is the value proposition?
2) Is the product and business sustainable?
3) Who are the target customers?
Many of the startups asked one common question: Is the product/idea fundable?
Sramana referred to various chapters of her series of books, “Entrepreneur Journeys”, when responding to this question and giving several pointers to budding entrepreneurs. Here are some of the things that Sramana stressed on:
- Focus on monetization – how are you going to make money using your product? Consumer oriented products need to think about this a lot more. It is not easy to get consumers to pay for a service as they are spoilt with several free offers on the web. Conversion rate from Free to Premium users is generally low and one should be conscious of this conversion rate. If it is advertisement-supported business model, what is the viability in the long run?
- A B2B / SaaS model (with enterprise customers) could be a better business model as there will be paying customers.
- Work on your go-to-market strategy
- Understand the ecosystem on which you can build your business
- When you go for partnerships, having a win-win relationship is very important.
- Personalization is the biggest unleveraged opportunity today
- Identify the risks of the business early on
- It is very important to do Total Available Market Analysis. Don’t go by gut feeling. Get real numbers. Do your homework.
- Even the name of the company is important: try to choose the right name. Make sure that it is easy to pronounce and write.
I would recommend entrepreneurs-in-the-making or those who have just started your technology ventures to visit http://www.sramanamitra.com and also register yourselves for one of her upcoming positioning roundtable. The experience will be worth it.
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