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Strategy Roundtable For Entrepreneurs: Exciting Companies Lined Up For Microsoft Startup Grant Finals

ReadWriteStart

Freshdesk First, Girish Mathrubootham from Chennai, India, pitched Freshdesk , a SaaS company that provides small and medium businesses with on-demand customer support software that offers multi-channel social support. Freshdesk introduces itself as a kind of Salesforce.com for customer support so to speak.

India 123
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Strategy Roundtable: 5 Cloud Computing Opportunities for Entrepreneurs

ReadWriteStart

This is an open opportunity for an entrepreneur to build a custom solution. Today, the telecom industry charges customers based on fixed price business models for data services. SurgeForth has since graduated to paying customers, and is making good progress. Cion has 18 customers and is considering funding.

Cloud 117
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Strategy Roundtable: Try To Get At Least $2M Pre-Money In Seed Round Valuation

ReadWriteStart

Sub-$2 million pre-money, it is better to bootstrap. Our discussion today was largely around her financing strategy, and one of the key milestones that I probed her on was: What does it take to get a validated customer? Well, it turns out that with about $900,000 and 12 months, Siobhan can get to paying customers. Trendy Loot.

Valuation 119
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Strategy Roundtable: Do Not Spray and Pray

ReadWriteStart

Next, Umakant Soni discussed Vimagino.com , a software for Web-based Q&A support to engage customers better on sites that are trying to draw people in and convert them into customers. In addition, we are offering entrepreneurs access to investors and customers through our recently launched our 1M/1M Incubation Radar series.

India 114
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Strategy Roundtable For Entrepreneurs: VCs Are Not Always Right

ReadWriteStart

Having turned down all overtures for investment, Zoho continues merrily on in its bootstrapping path. Parallel6 is already clocking over $1 million in revenue and is looking to enhance its customer acquisition and also raise some financing. Zoho is already over $100 million in revenue and is seeing tremendous traction. Discuss.

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Startup Strategy Roundtable: Where Should You Raise Money?

ReadWriteStart

First, there are two primary aspects that have to be managed: inventory financing and customer acquisition costs. At the same time, we also have seen several examples of entrepreneurs who have successfully bootstrapped their e-commerce companies without any external financing until much later in the game. Or, bootstrap longer.

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Strategy Roundtable: Open Opportunities in Cloud Computing and Rural BPO

ReadWriteStart

This company provides a crowdsourced customer service solution to enterprises. Gio pitched it to me as a crowdsourced BPO, but I think he will have more success if he simply focuses on customer service as his core value proposition. They already have several customers including some telcos, and are at about $350,000 in revenues.

Cloud 115