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At this week’s One Million by One Million roundtable, we announced our collaboration with Microsoft around a $100,000 grant that they are offering to four Indian entrepreneurs as follows: A $40,000 grant each to two entrepreneurs, one in Mobility and one in Cloud Computing; and a $10,000 grant to two entrepreneurs, also one in each of those two categories.

1M/1M will be working with Microsoft in helping entrepreneurs prepare for these grants. I will be traveling in India in April, and doing live roundtables in three cities: Chennai (April 9), Mumbai (April 16), and Pune (April 17). Girish Joshi, from Microsoft, will be attending the roundtables, and scouting companies for the grants with me. I will be reporting back on the companies we see on this column from the road.

Mango DVM

At today’s session, first up, Ramkumar RS from Chennai, India, presented Mango DVM, an innovative solution to turn vendors of illegal, grey market music to legal distributors using a combination of mobile apps and media server technology. Ramkumar has made certain pricing model and delivery model assumptions that are yet to be validated. We brainstormed about the risks of those assumptions. However, only the market can tell to what extent those assumptions will hold true.

3gSimplified

Next Jigar Doshi, also from Chennai, India, pitched 3gSimplified, in effect, a comparative shopping solution for mobile plans, which are apparently quite complex in the Indian market. As for business model, Jigar wants to sell services like refilling cards.

3gSimplified is a very early concept that has just launched, and the market feedback will be rolling in over the next few months. Our discussion today was around prioritization of the next few critical steps around customer acquisition and validation.

Report Bee

Then Balaganesh S., from Chennai, India, as well, discussed Report Bee, a data visualization solution for schools around report cards and student performance. Report Bee has two paying customers, and we discussed segmentation issues around where to focus for the early market penetration strategy. Clearly, affluent schools that can afford to buy technology, and also parents who have access to computers would be the best early adopters.

Swayam Foods

Janardhan Swahar from Salem, India, presented Swayam Foods, a health food company that is focused on the Indian palette across snacks, quick-to-prepare items, etc. The company has distribution through about 50 retailers in Chennai, and is looking for ways to market their product through online channels. We discussed guerilla p.r., product reviews through blogs, as well as SEO, blogs, and social media marketing.

Promedik

Last up, Rahul Mishra from Bangalore, India, pitched Promedik, a “decision support system” for physicians. I wasn’t convinced about the assumptions of the business – there are too many gaps and flawed assumptions around the source and the cost of the data upon which the product is built. I advised Rahul to study Epocrates as a model. I believe, trying to offer a reference manual may be better than trying to offer a decision support system, which is a much more complex value proposition that requires expert systems to implement.

Before I end, let me also point you to an interview we’re running on my blog with Naval Ravikant, founder of AngelList, which you may find enlightening.

Also, some of you have asked me questions about the 1M/1M Premium Curriculum, which I have addressed on the blog.

Next week, the 1M/1M roundtable will focus on entrepreneurs in East Asia, Australia and New Zealand. You can register for the next roundtable here.

You can also listen to the recording of today’s roundtable here and select the business you like best through a poll on the 1M/1M Facebook page. Recordings of previous roundtables are all available here.

Sramana Mitra is the founder of the One Million by One Million (1M/1M) initiative, an educational, business development and 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. She has a master’s degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

For this week’s One Million by One Million roundtable, we turned the spotlight on Latin and Central America. One of the things I have enjoyed tremendously about 1M/1M is its distinctly international nature. Over the years, we’ve had entrepreneurs from all over the world attend and pitch, and I’m delighted to see that we’re propagating the methodology and the platform far and wide.

1M/1M and ENTREPRENEUR JOURNEYS represent my attempt to capture the tribal knowledge accumulated in the private lives of great entrepreneurs and institutionalize it, so entrepreneurs all over the world can use it. In Silicon Valley, we’ve had access to the tribal knowledge, but no one has tried to capture it, derive a methodology out of it, and package it in a way that entrepreneurs around the world can benefit from this knowledge and expertise.

We have done that in 1M/1M.

And over time, I envision that eco-system after eco-system around the world would learn how to use this program to do effective and precise entrepreneurship development, not spray and pray, which is largely what goes on today, with huge amount of resources being wasted.

As I said to an entrepreneur from Hong Kong at a previous roundtable: whether you are building a startup in Silicon Valley or Timbuktu, the methodology of bringing a product or service to market is not that much different.

With that, let’s look at the two entrepreneurs who pitched today from Costa Rica. Entrepreneurs from Latin and Central America were given first priority to pitch their businesses at today’s roundtable co-hosted by Innova Tiquicia and Startup Weekend Costa Rica.

FinqIt

First up, Adrian Montero from Belen, Heredia, Costa Rica, presented FinqIt. Adrian wants to build a location-based service focused on assembling, and then reviewing and rating various services from fixing roofs to plumbing.

What Adrian described sounds to me like a concept arbitrage on Angie’s List, a popular service for the US market, and is a fine value proposition for the Costa Rican market. It is however, still a concept, not yet a business, and Adrian should not be under the misconception that VCs would be lining up outside his door to fund the business. He needs to bootstrap it to a certain level, and following the 1M/1M methodology would be a good start.

HandIt.me

Marcial Cambronero, also from Costa Rica, pitched HandIt.me, an intriguing concept for “social shipping.” Marcial proposes to use friends living in the United States to transport products on behalf of consumers in Costa Rica who are regular customers of products from the US e-commerce vendors.

As I listened to his pitch, however, I felt that a better and more interesting value proposition would be to create a “marketplace” for crowd-commerce, so to speak, where Marcial can create small groups of consumers segmented by location and merchandise interest, and have them aggregate their orders from US merchants, to cut down on expensive shipping charges. Consumers can take turns in placing the order, and Marcial would need to provide the infrastructure to manage the flow of funds, as well as the distribution of merchandise locally. A well designed trust system with reviews and ratings and dispute settlement would be necessary to prevent fraud, the way other exchanges like eBay do.

Overall, I like this notion of social shipping, since as we become a more global world, and as e-commerce takes off in more geographies, this could be a service not only applicable to Costa Rica, but much more broadly in many nations.

Words To Live By

Next, Alexandra Suarez-Mondshein of Miami, Florida, discussed Words To Live By, a neat concept of designing and producing high quality books with fine paper and fabric for special occasion gift giving. The service has the functionality for a group of people to submit custom messages to commemorate occasions like bridal shower, baby shower, milestone birthdays, anniversaries, etc., and each book costs $375 retail.

My feedback to Alex was that the $375 price-point is way too high, and I asked her if she has the provision to pool together the money for a group gift? Well, she doesn’t.

In my opinion, to gain fast adoption, this offering needs to be a group-gift, and it needs to be positioned as such. Ten people paying $37.50 each is much more acceptable than one person paying $375, and my suggestion is to focus on making the product a group-gifting service.

ResortHunt

Adarsh Patil from Bangalore, India, presented ResortHunt. Adarsh observes that there are over 30 million search queries for the term “Resort” and over 25 million for the term “spa”. He wants to convert lookers to buyers by creating a spa and resort booking site with specific advantages for the owners of those properties.

Adarsh really needs to do some thorough competitive analysis and decide which market may have room for him to enter. The travel booking category is excruciatingly competitive, crowded, and continues to attract new entrants all the time. I probed his market entry strategy, and it was all over the place. So, I suggested, as a first order of business, that he determines where there is a gap, and where he can meaningfully compete.

Enzi

Last up was Ashni Mohnot from Mountain View, California, discussing Enzi, an income linked education loan program for students. Ashni wants to create a Kiva-like exchange whereby consumers can fund the education of students in exchange of a percentage of the future income of those students.

While I like the general concept, I feel that the program needs to be specific to alumni associations, and not an open, public exchange. The trust factor needs to come from being part of an alumni association, and as such, it should be a white label solution – software and services – offered by various alumni associations, to their alumni and students as a way of giving back, and directly engaging with students.

I also suggested that Ashni focuses on funding science, technology and engineering program students, since there is so much energy today around America’s role in the world, and whether the country is losing its edge in science and technology. This would be a way to engage alumni around a specific program, and let’s not forget, the employability of the students post-graduation is an important aspect to ensure the loan repayment.

The 1M/1M roundtables are pretty much oversubscribed by at least 250% every week, right now, so if you are trying to get a slot to pitch, I suggest you sign up early, or you can join the premium program to access a broader and more comprehensive range of services.

Next week, the 1M/1M roundtable will be co-hosted with TiE Midwest. You can register for the next roundtable here.

You can also listen to the recording of today’s roundtable here and select the business you like best through a poll on the 1M/1M Facebook page. Recordings of previous roundtables are all available here.

Sramana Mitra is the founder of the One Million by One Million (1M/1M) initiative, an educational, business development and 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. She has a master’s degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

For this week’s One Million by One Million roundtable, we teamed up with the Indian Angel Network (IAN).

First up, Nimesh Khiara from Mumbai, India, discussed StopWaitin, a restaurant reservation system that includes managing waiting lists and is similar in concept to OpenTable. Nimesh has a couple of corporations that are interested in beta testing his solution to offer corporate discounts to their workforces, and a few restaurants are also interested.

One of Nimesh’s questions was that he is discovering that the BPO/call center industry does not give Internet access to employees; hence, the solution would not be accessible to them. Well, this is a clear indicator that he should avoid the BPO/call center industry and focus on industry segments where corporations not only provide Internet access to their employees, but the employees themselves are tech savvy. Fortunately, there are numerous such companies in India.

I advised Nimesh to focus on getting a couple of large corporations in Mumbai and a dozen restaurants in the beta program, and get the business going. As he grows, he can simply focus on increasing the restaurant portfolio and getting more corporate clients. I also advised him to avoid consumer marketing and market his service through the HR departments of the corporations as an employee benefit. It would be much cheaper to acquire customers this way.

FEED

Manivel Karuppasamy from Bangalore, India, presented FEED (Funding Entrepreneurs, Encouraging Dreams), a crowdsourced funding marketplace for India. I did not get the sense that Manivel knows anything about raising money for businesses, and he wants to cover not only entrepreneurial fund-raising but also funding for musicians trying to produce an album, and so on. That’s a broad charter, with huge scope, and I asked Manivel how he proposes to establish trust in the exchange and prevent fraud?

It turns out that Manivel has experience raising money from philanthropic projects from his alumni association, which gave me the idea that he could create and manage whitelabel exchanges on behalf of various alumni associations; this approach would have built-in trust and validation mechanisms to prevent fraud.

I advised Manivel to reposition his company to cater to institutes that want to develop private funding exchanges and conduct a thorough customer validation process based on that assumption.

Subscription Carpool Service

Next, Gurdip Singh from Gurgaon, India, discussed a subscription-based managed carpool service that would create groups of four people, each responsible for driving the others to work one week a month. The ROI is straightforward and compelling; however, how do you prevent people from finding their buddies to drive with and stopping the subscription?

Well, it turns out that Gurdip wants to do reconfiguration of alternatives if one day there is a no-show after 30 minutes, so that all his subscribers have rides without any disruption to their schedules. Now, this is a hard problem to solve, but I can see that if Gurdip can solve it, it would mean that the service is worth subscribing to on an ongoing basis. I advised Gurdip to figure out how he would do the reconfiguration because his business depends on cracking that nut.

i-Globify

Edward Varghese from New Delhi, India, pitched i-Globify, an outsourcing service catering to the niche travel vertical, focusing on building Web 3.0 back ends for medical, religious, sports, and other kinds of tourism solutions.

Edward has a medical tourism portal customer for whom he is building such a solution. I liked his approach to building an outsourcing solution: focusing on a niche and building in-depth skills and credibility within that vertical. I think that Edward can not only build a successful outsourcing services company based on this premise, he can also build an IP portfolio and potentially a platform product that would make it more compelling, specialized, and higher-margin business than any old labor arbitrage shop.

Next week, we are focusing on entrepreneurs in Latin and Central America. You can register for the next roundtable here.

You can also listen to the recording of today’s roundtable here and select the business you like best through a poll on the 1M/1M Facebook page. Recordings of previous roundtables are all available here.

Sramana Mitra is the founder of the One Million by One Million (1M/1M) initiative, an educational, business development and 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. She has a master’s degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.