155th 1M/1M Roundtable For Entrepreneurs: Last Few Hours To Vote For 1M/1M New Year Challenge 2013
By Guest Post at January 4, 2013 | 8:33 am | Print
155th 1M/1M Roundtable For Entrepreneurs: Last Few Hours To Vote For 1M/1M New Year Challenge 2013
The voting phase of the 1M/1M New Year Challenge is coming to a close at midnight on January 3 and several promising entrepreneurs are emerging as the frontrunners. Everyone is now able to view the entries here (according to their ranks) and the 20 finalists will be announced on January 4. If you are a contestant, be sure to collect enough votes to make it to the final 20. We’re watching an exciting finish to the contest in these last remaining hours!
All are invited to join us for the competition finals on January 10 and January 17.
During today’s roundtable, the first for this year, we worked with three entrepreneurs.
Manoel Belem from Sao Paulo, Brazil, pitched SpaceTrip4Us, a motivation training program for schools using Space Travel metaphors. The project is not yet validated, and the first order of business is to substantiate that schools are willing to pay for this offering.
eduberry
Then Niraj Harlalka from Ahmedabad, India, pitched eduberry, an educational institution management software that is currently making some revenues, but has sales cycle issues, as well as positioning issues. We worked on some of those today. We also had a discussion about long sales cycle businesses and their lack of popularity with investors.
Luxury Quotient
Lastly, Deepak Kumar from New Delhi, India, pitched Luxury Quotient, which he conceives as a boutique retail concept focused on the half a million luxury consumers in India who currently spend a billion dollars on luxury. This spans travel, apparel and accessories, jewelry, etc. Deepak wants to get exclusive rights to represent certain high-end brands and sell into this segment.
My hunch is that the billion dollars that get spent in India on luxury gets spent on rather well-known brands such as Gucci and Louis Vuitton, and the unknown brands have a very small niche market.
Gucci and Louis Vuitton will not offer exclusive rights, so I am not convinced about the size of this opportunity. I am sure a niche business can be built on Deepak’s premise, but it is not a billion dollar opportunity.
You can listen to the recording of today’s roundtable here.
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.
