1M/1M Strategy Roundtable For Entrepreneurs: Making Money From Blogs

Recap of the roundtable on 19 May 2011 by Sramana MitraDuring today’s roundtable, we opened the session with a discussion of the existential crisis in media and how talented bloggers and journalists are facing a tough time sustaining themselves due to lack of business models.

As a business blogger myself, I have given an inordinate amount of thought to the subject, and it has led me to create the 1M/1M Affiliate Program to support the work of media professionals who advocate entrepreneurship and innovation. In my post Making Money With Blogs, I have articulated some of my thoughts on the subject and presented some possible models that would enable blogs and small media properties to sustain themselves with a proper revenue framework. One of them is the 1M/1M Affiliate Program we announced today at the roundtable.

Today, we also had a group of 22 gather at the Microsoft Office in Bangalore for a live meetup around the roundtable. The hosts were Girish Joshi of Microsoft India and 1M/1M Ambassadors, Praveen Karoshi, Rajesh Nair and Thejas Gupta. We’re starting to have more of these meetups, and if you are in a city or town where you’d like to host one, do get in touch with us. We can guide you on how to organize a gathering.

10screens

As for the presenters, first up, Abinash Karana from Bangalore, India, presented Bizosys and his product 10screens, a specification capture technology for software development workflows. Abinash is a premium member of the 1M/1M program and has made some progress with his positioning work. At the roundtable, we evaluated three use cases and pared them down to one. We also did some segmentation work and related exploration of relevant channels.

MyDataOrganizer

Next, Neal Jha from Fremont, California, pitched MyDataOrganizer. Neal envisions this to be a product for organizing data generated by various random business functions of a small business. He presented the concept with the example of our 1M/1M roundtables and illustrated with some mock-up data. Good presentation. The value proposition is clear. However, I don’t believe this is a product. It is, however, a service business that would do well as a rural or small town BPO.

Mango DVM

Then Ram Kumar from Chennai, India, presented Mango DVM, another company that has presented before and has made some progress from its original value proposition of selling music to individual subscribers at the base of the pyramid in India. I met Ram Kumar during my visit to Chennai and advised him to look at the Bioscope project in my Vision India 2020 book. Today, Ram Kumar has framed his business based on the assumptions of that project with the notion of small 25-75 seat theaters in under-served areas of India – also servicing the base of the pyramid and recasting the Mango DVM technology to become the media server powering these theaters. Further validation is, obviously, required, but the movement is in the right direction.

What I like about the dynamics of 1M/1M today is that we’re starting to see entrepreneurs make definitive progress.

You can select the business you like best of those discussed today through a poll on the 1M/1M Facebook page.

The recording of today’s roundtable can be found here. Recordings of previous roundtables are all available here. You can register for upcoming roundtables here. And you can sign up for the 1M/1M premium program here.

About Sramana Mitra

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.