Roundtable Recap: June 11 – Selling SaaS To Indian SMBs

During today’s roundtable, we had Ambarish Gupta, Founder and CEO of Knowlarity, as our guest. If you want to understand the business to selling SaaS to Indian SMBs, this discussion is a must for you to listen to.

Yo! App
As for the pitches, first up, Prasanna Jha from Pune, India, pitched Yo! App, a proposed localized social network that retailers would use to connect with their customers. I didn’t buy into the value proposition, and advised Prasanna to look at other possibilities for morphing his concepts. Prasanna, refreshingly, listened very well.

As I’ve said before, giving negative feedback is hard:

First, it is extremely difficult to give negative feedback to entrepreneurs without triggering a defensive reaction. I was not good at this when we started. I am very good  at analyzing a business scenario, but I was never good at sugar coating the feedback in a way that is particularly nurturing or reassuring. Very early on in our experiments with online mentoring, we told entrepreneurs that this forum is for candid, constructive feedback, and that may include negative feedback. We don’t tell entrepreneurs what they want to hear. We tell them what they need to hear. While some egos get bruised, entrepreneurs have more or less accepted our approach, and have given us permission to ‘critique’ their ventures. I have, personally, gotten better at giving feedback in a palatable way. The biggest thing that has worked well is that we never, ever give negative input gratuitously. Everything has been in the spirit of helping both the entrepreneur (s) and the businesses grow. Nonetheless, if through this process I have offended you or hurt your feelings, let me take this opportunity to apologize. It was not my intent.

You can listen to the recording of today’s roundtable here:

As always, I would very much like to hear about your business, so let me invite you to come and pitch at one of our free 1M/1M public roundtables. We will be holding future roundtables at 8 a.m. PDT on:

Thursday, June 18, Register Here.
Thursday, June 25, Register Here.

If you want a deeper relationship with me, you are very welcome to join the 1M/1M premium program. If you have any questions about the program, please, first study the website, especially What to expect from the 1M/1M premium program and the FAQs. If you have additional questions, please email me, and I would be very happy to respond. Please note that I work exclusively with 1M/1M entrepreneurs.

This segment is a part in the series : Roundtable Recap