#2 Sellia Labs classified marketplace, the billion dollar Meme market, SaaSBoomi Caravan, The MOM Test, mind of a bee..& more from Vida Patil's desk

A beautiful crisp morning, amidst the Dandia & Dussera celebration week, a whole round of rituals and social get togethers. It is not just a season of festivals but also of tech and startup conferences. Last week was the week of SaaSBoomi Caravan as well, where I met amazing startup founders from so many walks of life Foyr LateShipment.com Omnify, Inc FirstHive | Customer Data Platform Superwin.ai affable.ai [now a Bazaarvoice solution] ZapScale and more. Founders from India on a 10-day visit to get face time with Silicon Valley investors. I enjoyed the story round from startup founders

I heard veteran investors like Vish Mishra share their Insight about how -

Every startup will eventually become a SaaS startup because the software services are now becoming user-centric, coming to the user if you will.

It was fun learning about the WHY of SaasBoomi Caravan from Priya Ramachandran Avinash Harsh Avinash Raghava Aditi Aggarwal

Next,

Why startups fail, I obsess everyday about it, as I co-author startupto.win , and here is what I read lately..

200 Million raised staff unpaid!

One of the reasons could be higher stock compensation than revenues , bad cash flow management, basically...a news bite here -

"Pollen seemed to have pulled off the improbable feat of building a business in the notoriously low margin industry of events, surviving Covid-19, and building a solid software engineering organization. In April this year, the company announced it had raised another $150M in fresh funding.

But just three weeks later, Pollen?laid off ?about 200 people, a third of staff. Leadership assured employees all was well. However, from that point on, things got worse. Leadership later pulled the plug on Slack, employees were not paid wages, pension contributions went missing, and vendors were not paid. Some vendors took matters into their own hands; on 9 August 2022, JIRA was suspended when Atlassian tired of the company’s failure to pay."

Insight -

Check out this highly recommended book The Mom test that could help avert many such failures ("The Mom Test is a quick, practical guide that will save you time, money, and heartbreak.

They say you shouldn't ask your mom whether your business is a good idea, because she loves you and will lie to you. This is technically true, but it misses the point. You shouldn't ask?anyone?if your business is a good idea. It's a bad question and?everyone will lie to you at least a little?. As a matter of fact, it's not their responsibility to tell you the truth. It's your responsibility to find it and?it's worth doing right?.

Talking to customers is one of the foundational skills of both Customer Development and Lean Startup. We all know we're supposed to do it, but nobody seems willing to admit that it's easy to screw up and hard to do right. This book is going to show you how customer conversations go wrong and how you can do better.")

On another note, off late, I am getting obsessed with memes...and here are a few memes that caught my eye.

The Meme market

Meme making is an art and one can be trained, apparently. It is funny how the same image can translate into multiple memes.

Here are top 35 startup memes picked by Larry Kim .

Apparently the meme stock market cap on September 1, 2022, is $4.40 billion - Forbes

Insight -

" A meme stock is a stock that gains popularity among retail investors through social media. The popularity of meme stocks is generally based on internet memes shared among traders, on platforms such as Reddit's r/wallstreetbets. Investors in such stocks are often young and inexperienced investors.?" - Wikipedia

After some refreshing read on memes, I move on to work on my next podcast with Sumeet Gala founder of Sellia Labs, Inc .

Sellia - dirupting the online retail marketplace for corporate employees

To me Sumeet's Sellia is bringing the future of retail = Privacy+Personalization (Trust+Value) to your doorstep in it's what I call massive transformative purpose/big picture. Retail and online marketplace disruptors, and #investors in this space look out for Sellia Labs, Inc ! #hrtech #employeewellness #employeewellnessprograms

So much food for thought, but over the past two weeks I have delved into some other exciting worlds of music and soundtracks , the world of ads , non-human worlds...

The world of bees and termites...

A few fascinating moments in this video that humbles me is thinking about how bees have to remember locations, routes, shapes, colors, scents, etc. while navigating through a flower market, which otherwise requires sophisticated radars to track...

On that note, I would like to pause and reconnect with every micro- and macro- ecosystem that allows me to live and breathe, to be amazed and appreciate life as is...

Wrap up insight -

I would like to wrap up today's newsletter with one of the Sanksrit shloka that I am resonating with in gratitude and compassion-

Signing off..

Here's wishing all of you the path from insight-to-impact,

Upward-and-onward, the very best of everything!

-Vida Patil