12 Udemy Courses on How to Come Up With New Tech Startup Business Ideas

You want to do a startup. So, you need an idea to build around. The Covid-19 pandemic has changed consumer behavior in a major way. As we move through the virus-era, much more will likely change. With this realization, we ran a poll asking which topics readers would like me to cover and discuss. The overwhelming winner was startup ideas. So, after much thought, here are eight of my most recent startup ideas. My hope is to stimulate and help my fellow entrepreneurs catalyze these ideas into profitable businesses.

Bootstrapping Using Services to $10M: Zimit CEO James Cramer (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: That positioning is sharp and well-defined. Does that continue to be your sweet spot?

James Cramer: It continues to be the biggest line share. It is where we focus the most. What we added that expanded our market was partnerships. We sought professional services automation platforms that targeted the same customers knowing that they don’t have our functionality. If they did, we partnered with them and added a competitive differentiation in that deal.

Bootstrapping Using Services to $10M: Zimit CEO James Cramer (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Three out of the fifteen customers you started the process with converted into customers. What kind of average deal size did they convert at?

James Cramer: The initial deal size was maybe $50,000 to $75,000 in ARR.

Sramana Mitra: What time frame are we talking about?

Bootstrapping Using Services to $10M: Zimit CEO James Cramer (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Tell me how you went about it. You used the lesson that you learned on bootstrapping using services. Tell me more about how you applied that principle to this business.

James Cramer: The first thing that we did was, we got into a room with a whiteboard. It was just the two of us. Because we are such experts in this topic, we thought that we would give it a week or two and we will have this thing all white boarded out, and we’ll have a good model of what the problem is and the corresponding solution. We can then start building.

Bootstrapping Using Services to $10M: Zimit CEO James Cramer (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How did the acquisition happen?

James Cramer: We would occasionally get solicitations from bankers. We would always entertain it to get a sense of which company was worth it and what was going on in terms of acquisitions. One day, I got an email from a banker in New York that said, “I have a client that is looking to make an acquisition in the United States for a company that had these criteria.”

Building a Fintech Company from Luxembourg: STOKR CEO Tobias Seidl (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: The game hasn’t been released yet?

Tobias Seidl: No. What we are offering on our platform is for early-stage companies to share future profits. For revenue-making companies, they share a part of their revenues. We always have a balance of these two components.

Sramana Mitra: What is the profile of the investors who are coming onto your platform?

Bootstrapping Using Services to $10M: Zimit CEO James Cramer (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Help me out with one piece of this story. In an entrepreneur journey, the first time you’re doing it without personal money is a different ball game than when you have made money and are doing it a second time. By the time you come to Zimit, you had money. It’s a different situation. The bootstrapping using services story is important in CPG. How did you get your first customer? What got you your first customer? 

James Cramer: My partner and I were both employees of our previous companies. We met on a project that their company and our company were working on together. We were in our mid-20s. You can convince yourself of a lot of things at that age. We started to convince ourselves that we could make it on our own. We convinced ourselves that we could compete with the companies that we worked for even though they were billion-dollar organizations.

Building a Fintech Company from Luxembourg: STOKR CEO Tobias Seidl (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. 

Much is happening by way of innovation in fund raising exchanges in the field of FinTech. Here is a story from Europe.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?