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Here seasoned founders make bulbs flash in the heads of newbies

“Are you an accounting company or a finance company?”

The question was addressed to Baskar Ganapathy, co-founder and product head of Numberz. It’s an early stage fintech startup with a software product to help small businesses manage their invoices and cash flow.

What makes it different is an add-on feature that lets businesses get a credit line and working capital loans. Baskar explained that managing accounts gave Numberz the credit profile of a business, which made it easier to provide loans.

Suresh Sambandam, founder and CEO of Kissflow, who was one of the mentors at the iSPIRT ProductNation bootcamp in Pune. Photo credit: Sumit Chakraberty

What’s more, businesses can not only get loans for themselves through Numberz, but prompt their clients to use it too. It has a GetFinance button to send with an invoice to clients who may need loans to pay their dues.

The problem arises in pitching the product. Accounting tools are many, but a financing avenue through an accounting software product is unusual. Shouldn’t this be the highlight instead of an add-on? Hence the question to Baskar on how he was positioning the startup.

The question came from Suresh Sambandam, founder and CEO of Kissflow, one of India’s SaaS success stories from Chennai. It provides workflow automation software on the cloud to over 10,000 companies around the world. Suresh knows a thing or two about being razor-focused in pitching a software product.

Don’t tell me anything more about your product other than how it is going to solve the client’s problem.

A word to the wise is sufficient. Baskar and his co-founder at Numberz, Aditya Tulsian, both worked at Intuit earlier. They led campaigns for adoption of Intuit products like Quickbooks for accountants, and saw a gap in getting small businesses to use accounting software. So the Numberz cashflow management product was a natural extension of what they had done earlier. Now the interaction with Suresh gave them food for thought on positioning their unique financing product for small businesses.

The interaction happened at a bootcamp in Pune organized by non-profit think tank iSPIRT (Indian Software Product Industry Round-Table), whose mission is to transform India from a back office for software services to an innovation hub for software products.

This was the second  in Pune aimed at helping early stage startups looking for product-market fit. ISPIRT holds a similar bootcamp for growth stage companies in Mysore. The bootcamps have a product teardown format for experts to coach startups.

Places like Pune and Mysore are emerging startup hubs which lack the abundance of role models and mentors in India’s Silicon Valley, Bangalore, or its SaaS capital, Chennai. Seasoned entrepreneurs and mentors from the bigger hubs of Delhi, Bangalore, and Chennai had day-long interactions with startups who had signed up for the bootcamp in Pune.

Read the complete story by Sumit Chakraberty at TechInAsia 

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Learnings from #PNCamp

For those who aren’t aware, PNCamp is a bootcamp event for early stage SaaS startups. We were lucky enough to get invited to the event in Pune on Oct 8. The event, like earlier SaaSx event in Chennai, is a no-nonsense event for founders and product folks. The day-long event had two tracks: one for B2B startups and one for B2C startups. We, at Fyle, were part of the B2B track.

learnings-from-pncampThe B2B track consisted of a mix of talks by accomplished folks — Suresh of Kissflow, Krish of ChargeBee and Ankit of AdPushup covering fun anecdotes, practical suggestions and cautionary tales. Here are a couple of interesting ones (more on my twitter).

Apart from these talks, there were “Product Teardown” sessions where a startup gets 10 mins to demo and talk about their product and the next 15 mins is spent in critical evaluation. The framework for the session is aptly summarized by this diagram:

Fyle got to participate in the Product Teardown session and the most important learnings for us were:

  • Pricing page and testimonials are really important to increase confidence in your product
  • Remove unnecessary friction during sign up flow. E.g. we had an email verification step which, in hindsight, is an overkill
  • Pick your audience and get them to a wow really quickly. E.g. you may restrict your app to G-Suite customers and optimize their experience by deep integrations
  • Put some effort into content marketing, it will pay in the long run
  • Saying NO — the lack of focus for a company reflects in its website and affects the product, team and business

Overall, the event was refreshing in the level of candor — founders were openly discussing problems with focus, hiring and customer acquisition and tips and suggestions were extremely practical in nature. It was part-educational and part-therapeutic for me and I highly recommend it for early stage startups.

Special thanks to all the volunteers and facilitators for organizing a fantastic event! One parting thought from Ankit on how to get fresh insights into your product which we’re going to institutionalize 🙂

Guest Post by Sivaramakrishnan Narayanan, Fyle.in. The original post can be accessed on Medium

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How AdPushup Uses Content Marketing To Power Growth #PlaybookRT

Close to about 15 founders gathered on 1st October at the small and cozy office of AdPushup to participate in a Playbook Roundtable on Content Marketing. This was Ankit’s first playbook with iSPIRT and he did a phenomenal job.

AdPushup is a SaaS company that helps web publishers increase their ad revenue by letting them test and optimize their website’s ad layout. Their expertise has been content marketing, and Ankit shared several details of their experience, learning and strategy which have helped AdPushup become a leader in content marketing in the AdTech software space.

Inbound is a Culture

Ankit stressed upon the fact that when starting in inbound practice, founders themselves need to get involved. Inbound is a long term game and requires a lot of patience and perseverance. By getting their hands dirty, founders understand the intricacies involved in inbound and thereby are build the right team and culture.

Buyer Persona

The first step in building your inbound strategy is to put together a buyer persona.  It is basically a description of your ideal customer – someone who will directly benefit from your product or service. Creating content around and for them is what will get you more traffic, engagement and a sustainable growth. You could identify buyer persona by:

  • Interviewing Prospects
  • Feedback from your sales team on the leads they’re interacting with most
  • Looking at your Top 10 customers

A typical buyer persona will consist of the following:

  • Job Role/Title
  • Job Skills
  • Performance KPI
  • Tools used
  • Goals
  • Challenges
  • Personal Demographics (if appropriate)
  • Recent purchase and the decision tree
  • Online communities/websites they use to consume content

A buyer persona will help you identify the kind of content and channels you need to focus on in your inbound strategy.

how-adpushup-uses-content-marketing-to-power-growth-playbookrtContent Creation

There are two types content that founders can focus based on their industry and product:

  • Relevant to business or industry ( informative)
  • Relevant to the Persona (targeted and actionable)

The tone of the content should be educational and non promotional. Create content only keeping in mind – “is this helping someone solve a problem?”. At AdPushup, their target audience is long form bloggers and large web publishers. They write content which either informs them or helps in dealing with a painpoint (e.g. blogging tips, how to get more subscribers, how to get more traffic, user psychology, increasing user engagement, among others).

Each content piece should be:

  • Thorough and meticulously researched
  • Up-to-date
  • Well designed

Content should have:

  • Scannable text – bullet points, sub-headings, short paragraphs, images. Remember bulk of readers do not read but scan the content.
  • Actionable Insights
  • Content Frameworks
  • Citations and sources

Content ideas mostly come from:

  • Keyword research
  • What topics your competitors are writing about
  • Evergreen content (guides, tutorials, how-tos, best-practices)
  • What the industry experts are tweeting, sharing on social media
  • Comments on blogs and from relevant communities
  • Round-up posts

Nail the headline of every post that you publish and you will have won 70% of the battle. If your headline doesn’t inspire confidence, interest, excitement or any sort of emotion then readers wont click on it. Then even though your content might be brilliant and relevant, it will just not get the importance it deserves.

Content Distribution

An important rule of thumb to remember is that whoever is the content creator – allocate 50% of time in creating content and the rest 50% in distributing it.

Some of the channels for content distribution include:

  • Relevant Subreddits
  • Google+
  • FB Groups
  • LinkedIn Groups
  • Pinterest
  • Hacker News
  • Forums
  • Influencer outreach
  • Syndicate/Guest Post
  • Article that will rank on SERP
  • Refurbish for Infographics, SlideShare, etc
  • Competitor URL outreach

When you join communities on social networks, regularly engage with their members. This helps when you have to share your content there and not come across as a spammer.

Reddit is infamous for being ruthless with spammers and self promoters. So the only way you come across as neither is by providing all the value right there in the community post and add a small link in the end which says something like – “to read the full post, here’s the link” (and provide the exact url, not bitly or any short links). Provide the entire outline right there. Anyone reading it should only click on your post when they know exactly what is in the content and they would still want to read it.

Whoever you mention in our post, product or person, make sure to send them or the relevant team members an email telling them about the mention and encourage them to share it on their social media. Most people do actually share if you ask them. Also, it helps if you are relatively well known and the content is really well written.

Look for guest posting opportunities because they are an effective way to make your presence in the industry. And guest post only on sites that are relevant to your audience, have a very high volume of traffic and well respected (e.g. HubSpot, KISSmetrics)

Generating Leads

Once you have created content and distributed, it is imperative you capture details of the readers. You could devise several ways to do that:

  • Opt-in Subscription Forms
  • Banners
  • Email courses via drip campaigns
  • HelloBar
  • Native mentions (with disclosures)
  • eBooks, reports and whitepapers

Make sure your email marketing is sorted out. Put pop-up email capture boxes (and similar lead capture forms/boxes) in your blog to encourage visitors to convert into subscribers. Once you have a decent number of subscribers (300+) and are pushing content out regularly, start rounding them up and email them to your subscribers in the form of a ‘weekly newsletter’.

Here is a screenshot of how AdPushup uses its content to capture user details.

adpushup-blog

Measurement and Analytics

Finally it is important to measure and analyze your inbound activities. As Ankit puts it, “Inbound is a continuous rinse and repeat process”. Few key metrics to track include:

  • The channels that are giving more traffic
  • Channels that are converting better
  • Type of content that gets more organic reach
  • Statements/Emotions in the headline that perform better (e.g. questions, negative statements, suspense, informative etc)
  • Reader Demographics
  • Best time to publish
  • Best channel to distribute for every topic

Once you have a sufficient success in measuring ROI – cut out what is not working and concentrate only on what is getting results. And always keep creating hypotheses and rigorously testing them. You never know what product or customer insight you might stumble across.

Guest Post by Rajat Harlalka, Bellurbis

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India Stack for Smart Cities – Usage and Learnings that can be applied

india-stack-for-smart-cities

Sanjay Jain, Pramod Varma, Ranga Raj

With a lot of momentum being built around Digital India and Smart Cities, we offer a contrarian view of how government agencies and stakeholders should approach this complex problem. While there are many facets towards the journey of Smart Cities – some that are non-technology related – political, bureaucratic, architectural, social, cultural etc.,  and others that are technology driven. We will focus on technology led aspects and approaches to Smart Cities in this blog.

Internet of Cities – Platform for innovation

The impact of Internet and networked societies have led to India Stack – the foundation of Digital India. The learnings of development of these public goods along with others are used as case studies of how smart cities ought to be approached. Tradition within the government, public sector and large entities have been RFP/Tender procurement process. This inherently has some significant limitations:

You cannot tender for Innovation!

You need to conceive and define in great detail what is required in an RFP – Change requests and evolutions prove to be costly mechanisms to incorporate

Restricts solutions to be provided by selected parties and you and other stakeholders live/die by their performance

Constrains participation (Criteria to meet bidding and selection process)

Smart Cities are a journey and not a well-defined destination, so needs to be sustainable. To believe that anyone if capable of anticipating and predicting the needs/technology/standards evolution  over a 50-100 year time frame is impossible. Hence traditional procurement process need to be replaced by a different mindset.

Best principles from India Stack – Design for India Smart Cities Platform

Traditional vertically integrated approaches – pipelines are being replaced now with Platforms (documented in a popular book – Platform Revolution). So thoughts need to shift towards Government as a service or Government as a Platform. The approach adopted by the team in Aadhar were (in no particular order of priority):

Don’t outsource “Thinking” – Build a cross functional team with strong leadership (eg. As Nandan did for Aadhar)

Build internal capacity

The government could not possibly do it all by themselves internally – so the thought process of what was to be done by the government and what was to be done by ecosystem players was outlined

Debate on the ideas of the offering by engaging with thought leaders and stakeholders and subject matter experts that bring in different perspectives

Once the core idea and value proposition(s) are determined – float expression of interest to various parties

Based on feedback repeat the exercise if necessary

Post the outline of the “solution”, strip out the core elements that need to be done by the government and those that can be performed by the ecosystem players

Design core functionality Internally – focus on security, scalability, maximize use of open source and ensuring that the design does not lock oneself to a particular technology or a vendor

Keep it simple and minimalistic – Aadhar focused on a few parameters of storage as compared to other countries attempting to store 50+ parameters that had to be got from multiple sources leading to bureaucratic tangles

Open this core functionality via APIs

Create a strong policy/governance structure and operations management team for the core and how a level playing field can be provided to ecosystem providers

Incentivize ecosystem players (preferably on an outcome based model) to participate in the success of the platform for a win-win model (eg. Ecosystem players invested in technology infrastructure for Aadhar enrolment and were paid post a successful issue of an Aadhar number, which led to ecosystem partners being the marketers of success of Aadhar)

Aadhar did not invest in field infrastructure but just the strong secure scalable back end exposed via APIs and ecosystem partners invested and participated in the fastest growth of a Billion users worldwide!

Smart Cities Platform – Shared Public Goods

Smart Cities are complex, long term initiatives and should not lead to big RFPs, but take an approach similar to what Aadhar and the India Stack took. Design of Smart City platforms need to be capable of sustaining over long period of time as back end systems, front end systems, APIs/Interfaces etc., evolve over time. The figure it for yourself or DIY approach is not economically viable model as well as this will lead to at least a 100+ cities learning and reinventing the wheel and is certainly not an efficient mechanism of using tax money. Governance of municipalities or cities around the county are broadly similar, but have different priorities. A shared economy model of public goods that could be shared/reused and learning and best practices of one applied to another is a healthy approach that the country needs. The EU for example has a governance structure that creates shared public goods that can be leveraged and customized to local environments. Examples of shared economy in transport, accommodation etc have become very popular around the world. Smart Cities should not be funded and built entirely by the government but rather done in a public/private partnership model of a plug and play. An example is private green/alternate energy sources of generation owned by private parties can plug and play into the grid in a win-win model where everyone stands to gain – the utilities body, the private generation entity and the consumers/citizens as a whole. Similar approaches should be adopted by governments with the vertically integrated invest it all/own it all/ operate it all approach should be abandoned in favour of a shared economy model. 

Government as a market maker – spurring innovation (Open APIs, Open Data, Always on RTI)

Some elements of how services are delivered by only trusted parties that belong to the system have to be thrown out of the window. IRTC was available through reservation counters in stations and their website. The experience was not optimum, but when they opened up APIs, numerous ecosystem players offered railway reservations in many forms and that provided choice to consumers. Everyone benefited in the end – Railways, ecosystem players and commuters. Numerous services of governments are offered through only selected offices and a website/portal that often do not work. Government and agencies are not best suited to build and deliver services to customers – ecosystem players are and may the best person win. So governments need to think of themselves as “market maker” – this leads to innovative solutions from startups to well established players including government agencies to provide choice of delivery of these services to public and market forces then take over. Regulation and governance framework to ensure level playing field and not stifle innovation is essential. All of this will lead to greater creation of public goods as the India Stack has demonstrated.

Unique Identity beyond people + Digital Locker + Consent Layer + Payment – Citizen services

Aadhar and India Stack has been leveraged for various schemes such Direct benefit transfer (LPG subsidy, NREGS/PDS..), attendance systems etc. We now explore a few other examples of how India Stack could be leveraged by state agencies for re-thinking how services could be delivered to citizens.

Identity of four sovereign elements that need to be registered are essential

Individuals – Aadhar

Companies/Establishments – PAN/GSTN (Professionals such as directors/doctors/architects/lawyers etc are also distributed in silos but need to be networked and accessible )

Land – Records and Titles – again very distributed and siloed but essential to unlock the value of this asset type as the ability to verify, buy/sell/mortgage/rent could significantly contribute to the GDP of the country. Integrating this with the real estate bill would be a welcome step.

Things (eg. Vehicles) – Agencies such as the Vahan is an attempt to this, but adopts the traditional approach. Ownership/Buy/sell/insurance/permits/taxes/fitness/loan/mortgage/enforcement records when merged provide transparency to transactions.

Voting – Aadhar provides identity which could be used for cleaning up voter registration records for duplication and fraud entries. But with additional layers of entitlement and anonymity, plus digital lockers for documentation proof of residency (ward), remote presence-less digital voting for armed forces and others to exercise their right to vote without physically being present at the ward

Healthcare – Identity + health records + Consent + Insurance (RSBY or private/government players) + Payment/Claims processing/Renewal could make healthcare for all more affordable (lowering costs of transactions) and accessible without the frustration currently associated with it

People Verification – Passports/background checks/Employment/Certification of skills/degrees/Crime/Legal records – police/courts. Today a lot of this data needs to be digitized by distributed in thanas or court jurisdictions. An integrated record system across the country is essential for ensuring people movement and the ability to establish trust or be verified is essential for the employer/issuer/employee. India Stack could significantly contribute to enabling this national grid of information exchange based on consent.

There are numerous other examples in various vertical and horizontal segments that can benefit significantly with the India Stack and many public and private sector players are constantly innovating in this space

Citizens – It is our problem to solve

As we mentioned Smart Cities is a complex difficult journey that can be tackled with a big band approach. Take small problems solve them using these guidelines mentioned above and the use of open data combined with hackathons (bringing in key stakeholders – RWAs, NGOs, Citizens bodies that are deeply interested in the betterment of a city) to allow the ecosystem to innovate solutions to your problems. Seeing is believing and these small initiatives will then recruit more interested parties and a viral effect will take place. As a call to action it means a new thought process and approach by the government to bring in expertise from the outside (as done with Aadhar) and for core committed citizens to rise to the occasion and take up this challenge in a collective manner. It is our city, our government, but by paying taxes and electing a government, we no longer can throw the problem to the other side. The crowd sourced model, the shared economy model, the platform way of thinking are new mindsets that need to creep in to replace the tender raj. 

http://www.indiastack.org/

https://vahan.nic.in/nrservices/

http://www.rsby.gov.in/#

https://data.gov.in/

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Why Did 33% of Prospects Reply to This Cold Email?

Cold emails have earned a bad reputation. Prospects see them as a nuisance, and most just hit delete without even a casual read. Even when the message is highly targeted, the open rate ends up being less than 10% on average. I call it the “Rhino effect”. Most of us have developed a thick skin over the years as a result of the constant barrage of irrelevant email.

Not willing to settle for “status quo”, we worked hard to crack the code of email copy that would put a smile on our prospect’s face. Our formula was not necessarily new or unique – arouse curiosity in the subject and follow it up with a crisp and engaging body. But we pushed ourselves really hard to execute this formula to perfection.

The results of this effort were very encouraging. More than a third of the recipients of these emails choose to reply to our cold emails, and close to 10% of those have converted into solid opportunities.

Here is one of those highly personalized emails:

 

So, what exactly did we do?

1. Searched and Researched

The objective of our research was not just to find out about their business, but to also understand what interests the individual both professionally and personally. In this instance, we reviewed Jack’s Twitter account and learned that he was a keen Manchester United fan. We also found out from LinkedIn that he had recently been appointed as Sales Enablement Manager at a high-growth startup which had recently raised a large round of funding.

2. Mapped Individual KPIs With Their Business’ Objectives

Once we had learned about the business and the individual, we made logical assumptions and weaved them into our message. For example, as Jack’s startup had recently raised big funding, it was safe to assume that the company was experiencing very strong sales growth. As a Sales Enablement Leader, we knew that scalable expansion and shortening ramp-up time for new hires would probably be a key KPI for him.

“At MindTickle I have seen many sales enablement leaders adopt such an approach to improve the sales process and develop new hire training.”

3. Learned About The Person Not The Persona

Most people include personal information on their social media profiles. This gives us an idea of what their interests are so that we can connect with them on a personal level. In this example, we knew from Twitter that Jack liked to ‘coach’ the team by live-tweeting during matches. We leveraged this information to relate his personal interests to his professional objectives:

“Manchester United and sales enablement both create champions out of regular players. Each goal, each strike, each pitch, each value prop, has to be carefully honed and drilled in…

PS: I am also looking forward to the Derby match with Liverpool this weekend :-)”

4. Connected with a Hook That Brings A Smile To Their Face 🙂

None of this research and copy would matter if Jack didn’t even open our email. To get his attention, we crafted a hook that would make him curious, just like we would at a networking event. In this example for instance, we connected his new role with his love of football:

“Why a Man Utd fan is the best fit for sales enablement”

As a result Jack not only opened the email, but he also gave us an opening in his calendar.

5. Empathized

Rather than jumping into a left-brain pitch of why our product is superior, we chose to paint a picture of what we can help him accomplish. We sprinkled credibility on top by calling out recognizable names of companies that had investors or locations in common with Jack’s company. Everyone needs a little reassurance even from someone they don’t know….yet.

“The right technology partner can amplify your training efforts and increase the engagement of your sales reps, while simultaneously reducing their ramp-up time.

Several fast growing tech companies  (Couchbase, Rocket Fuel, AppDynamics, Cloudera and Avalara to name a few) use MindTickle’s sales readiness software to train, coach and keep their sales team updated.”

We’ve been refining these practices over the past year and our response rates have consistently improved. Even when the timing has not been right, the friendly responses to our cold emails have been heartwarming. But don’t just take my word for it, try it for yourself and watch your open and conversion rates improve out of sight too.

Guest Post by Mohit Garg, co-founder and chief customer officer of MindTickle

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#PNCamp2: Shortlisted B2C Products for the Product Teardown Sessions

The volunteer team here at PNCamp are excited to share their list of candidates for the live Product Teardown Session. These companies have been selected to have their products analysed by our expert panel of in minute detail over a 2 hour long session. We expect that the feedback that they’ll get to take back from the session will be relevant and valuable in improving their product’s readiness.

  • Priyanka, Wishberry.in – help independent artists raise money for their projects from their fan communities
  • Sriram, Blue Sky Agriculture – Reimagining the supply chain for fruits and vegetables.
  • Vinay, FinitePaths – Get answers for your questions from people you can trust.
  • Dushyant, PodPitara – Discover curated podcasts.
  • Rohan, Garagehub – One stop for all your vehicle related problems.
  • Ajmal, Spenwise.com – Wise spending for a smart generation.
  • Murukesh, Codeflow.co – a programming platform that lets you build scalable cloud applications by simply composing reusable components.
  • Ashish Sharma, Phynart – building the future in the field of Home Automation.
  • Rohit, Koove.com – Discover exclusive products.

As you can imagine, it wasn’t easy for the curation team to go over the details of each company and pick out the right ones. If you haven’t been selected, or would still like to apply for a slot – do get in touch with us through pncamp.in.

On session day, the panel for the B2C track are:

  • Sampad from Instamojo
  • Amit from Walnut App
  • Sarang from Intouch App
  • Naman from FindYogi
  • Harshit from KPMG(UX)

The panel for the B2C track are:

  • Sampad Swain – Instamojo
  • Amit Bhor – Walnut App
  • Naman Saraogi – FindYogi
  • Sarang Lakhare – InTouch App
  • Harshit Desai – KPMG

To learn more about the format for the Product Teardown Session here.

Look forward to having you!

Guest Post by Santosh Dawara, DeAzzle & Volunteer for PNcamp.

 

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Altizon – Impact of Effectuation

Effectuation (effectuation.org) is a decision-making framework used by expert entrepreneurs. The early morning workshop of PN Camp Introduces this concept and help participants arrive at stakeholder commitments for their product market fit.

vinay_nathanVinay Nathan of Altizon talks about application of effectuation in his company and how it made him do more with less.  Altizon is a Pune based Industrial IoT company. Altizon was founded in April 2013 by Vinay Nathan, Yogesh Kulkarni and Ranjit Nair and is a venture-backed startup. They recently launched state of the art Industry experience center for their product

What was the change in your head with effectual Stakeholder Dev?

Put in a lot more structure and rigor and discipline to something we should have been doing anyway. After 2-3 yrs of doing this startup we got insular. This workshop made us go out and resume our conversations with stakeholders. Really made us think about their affordable loss, make our asks into Affordable Asks for them. We were surprised by how much we got.

We’re an Industrial IoT company, and IoT is ecosystem play, so it was a snap-fit for us. We have to go to SI, App devs, chip guys, OS guys, manufacturers, etc.

What stakeholder development did was when we went across stakeholders with an ask here, and an ask there, and you get surprised by what happens. We did many mini pivots based on our asks and what we got from our stakeholders.

Mainly, while this was something at the back of our mind, we weren’t doing it in a structured way before, and we hadn’t heard about effectuation before. It put in a framework to what we were doing before in a patchy way.

How was affordable loss useful as a concept to you?

We now ask every SI to build a demoware component on our platform, this is affordable loss for them, and an affordable ask we make. Once we found out the affordable loss of our partners, we were able to put together an entire Industry 4.0 experience center with loaned equipment and demoware. So from manufacturers we asked for demo equipment, from Sis we asked for demo software that integrates, and works on our platform. This was nowhere in the picture without asking bunch of affordable things from our already existing stakeholders. In fact the Centre now acts as an interop lab for our SI partners to test their solutions.

For example, we have the entire integration equipment and a mini assembly line for smart manufacturing in our lab that Wipro or Microsoft doesn’t have in their center of excellence. We have the only center where an Industry 4.0 lab things actually has live hardware, integration across these equipment, demos from multiple SIs, and our platform in the background. To get this lab In place we would have had to spend $75k at least, instead we got it all with Affordable Asks for on engineering effort and loaned equipment. The use cases knowhow would not be available even on hire. We have now begun investing in this infrastructure to further enhance it.

Another example, we realized for scale, if we go down the solution route, we will use 50% of our dev bandwidth for that but won’t be setting up for scale. For us scale comes if Sis take our platform and sell/implement on it. So even if it’s more painful invest in the ecosystem, as much as we do ourselves. Category leadership meant we need to grow faster, so made building the SI ecosystem critical. The Affordable Ask/Effectuation framework helped us reach out to Sis and get demoware in return. This was not our approach before Stakeholder Development.

What were 2-3 things that you got?

We weren’t reaching out to competitors. Stakeholder development was breaking barriers of who to reach out to. Logical ones anyway you will meet anyway. But stakeholder development made us go all out to meet competitors. This was a huge mind set shift.

Industry 4.0 experience center was not even a dream before this

While getting customers to our experience center, we became aware of another group in the company, got them as customers

When you go with Asks, you might get new Means, but you also get New Goals. How do you take on ‘new goals’ without getting side-tracked?

We started working with an industry major on courseware for Industrial IoT. We were investing in the courseware since it was a marketing effort for us, and affordable loss for us. While we did that, we got to learn about a parallel product group sitting in Germany, who were looking for a platform/OEM play. We took this opportunity and are now in a sales discussion with them, where they will OEM our product.  We then got in touch with their consulting arm, and they wanted to know how to use us in their consulting practice, and we’re working with them on this. This happened in 8-10 weeks after we learnt about effectuation.

Right now, even more than the leadership, the entire team kind of works on this, and keeps doing it.

How much would it have cost to setup the experience center you vis-à-vis doing the Affordable Asks? Equipment cost, plus demoware cost (in time/money)

Easily we have availed of engineering efforts worth $75k in the first version of the center. Now this is ongoing activity and we will continue to benefit from the partner driven approach to building the center.

How are the Sis working with you in this model? Is it different from how you’ve worked with Sis in the past?

We would sell evaluation kits and hope they built good demos. We would rarely have access to what they built. Now by utilizing our own demo center they are keen to have it running in our center.

The other option we did with some partners was a joint webinar. But the number of stakeholders were too many and it was time consuming. Now we have more of a hackathon approach.

Can you give us some more examples of where you accepted different goals from stakeholders, in exchange for new means you got?

By interacting with our stakeholders across SI and equipment players we believe there is a space to create a Consortium focused on Industrial IOT for India. We now plan to play a leadership role in creating  it.

What were some surprises along the way that made you do mini-pivots? Did you get any Lemons that you made Lemonade from? ☺

We discovered while talking to the SI that there many application ISVs that have built assets on older Historian product lines that would love to move to an IOT stack. This acted as a spur for us to do campaign in that sector. We landed one applications ISV partner through this campaign who is now building an app for the Power sector using our platform. Now this is a customer segment we are actively targeting as it aligns very well with our marketplace model.

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#PNCamp – No BS feedbacks and teardowns to build great products groundup

So, you got a startup. Great! You have a product ready and a few users/customers too, Awesome! I am sure you are super excited to take it to next level, right? But thats when the hurdles begin.

Users just do not understand it
Users don’t go beyond certain point
Our product is awesome, but Product lacks stickiness
I am not sure how to position our product
We have different kinds of users, how to deal with varied expectations of users
I don’t know where to find large number of userbase
I am a technical guy, I don’t know how to market it
User growth is very slow, we need some cool growth hacks

If some of these thoughts/challenges are lingering in your mind too, then you are not the only one. Trust me pretty much every startup goes through these hurdles in its early days. Sad reality is, vast majority fail to cross these initial hurdles and die early death.

“Almost every startup has a product, what they don’t have is users/customers”

If you are an early stage startup with a working product thats been used by a few users/customers and you are struggling through some of the above mentioned challenges, then look nowhere and block your Calendar for Oct 8th, 2016. iSPIRT is bringing PNCamp in Pune focused towards all the early stage startups.

whatsapp-image-2016-09-09-at-11-08-35-amPNCamp in pune is your grand opportunity to get candid feedback on your product and its marketing. If you are a startup with a prototype or product at an early stage with few users/customers but struggling to get further traction, then PNCamp is a great place where you could get an opportunity to showcase your product and seek feedback, inputs and suggestions on specific to your product. At PNCamp, experts will take product teardown sessions on following aspects.

  1. How to build a right product (great and useful product)
  2. How to market your product (product marketing, communication, KPIs)
  3. How to achieve 10X user growth (Use Analytics, customer feedback loop, sales tactics)

At PNCamp, India’s some of the most successful entrepreneurs are coming together to host one day focused camp and work with selected group of startups on their product, market and sales growth strategies. This one day focused action oriented efforts are equivalent to your one year of badly struggling to figure out things in dark.

Here is whats going to happen at PNCamp –

“You involve me and I learn maximum”. Keeping this in mind, PNCamp is structured in a way to maximize real action oriented learning. Its no Gyaan, No B.S. All real action, real stories, real candid feedback, real strategies, real action plan, real work toward real results. At PNCamp, successful entrepreneurs who are expert in their specific area of product, marketing, or sales growth will discuss their observations and learnings.

In case of B2B products, things such as the product quality, security, product learning curve, analytics, integrations, etc might be driving factors for initial success whereas in case of B2C products its visual appeal, user friendliness, pricing, discounts, customer loyalty, social appeal, etc could trigger the success. Hence each product need to be looked at it from various angles. At PNCamp, specific sessions are dedicated to deep dive in these areas. In B2B track, experts will discuss building a right product for B2B market, getting traction for your product, marketing strategies and sales funnel. In case of B2C track, the experts will delve into building products with focus on mobile an analytics, finding right KPI and organizing everything around it, product communication, and building a successful customer development strategy using feedback loop. After every session, a few select product startups will be given an opportunity to present their product, marketing strategy, or growth strategy. Experts and fellow participants will do a product teardown and give a deep dive feedback. In all 12 startups in B2C space and 12 startups in B2B space will get an opportunity to present and get detailed feedback.

Product teardown: In this section, select startups will provide a quick walkthrough of their product website/app. As each startup will get limited time to present, key is to stay focused on most critical or concerning area of your product. Experts and fellow participants will provide feedback on core functionality, usefulness, right fit of the product, visual and experiential aspect of the product. In the past, such product tear down has help entrepreneurs get amazing inputs in matter of minutes. Moreover it has opened up doors for more insightful beta users from the cohart. Product teardown session focuses on product flow, functionality, identifying specific KPIs and using analytics to derive insights, and immediate critical aspect that might be hindering product traction or stickiness. Founders will get actionable inputs that can be applied next day and see improvements.

Marketing/Communication teardown: Great number of startups have good products but fails on its marketing. Product marketing is all about positioning. It is all about clear messaging and creating a “hook” in user’s mind. Unique compelling product positioning is always a challenge, especially when your product has potentially multiple target segments. If your product positioning is correct, then it helps in driving marketing and create a growth strategy. In this section, select startups will get teardown about their marketing and communication strategy, how to build initial traction, building a customer feedback loop, how to think specific KPIs and organize things around it, how to use analytics to tweak marketing funnel, etc. Is the message clear and compelling enough to click with your audience, can it be improved further, etc. In the past, founders used the session feedback to improve their product message, website communication, emails, etc for which the group continued giving feedback.

Growth hack / Sales teardown: This is a piece everybody wants and wish for but is very difficult to achieve. Experts will ask select startups to present their current growth strategy and provide working session on building a growth strategy. B2B sales strategies, setting up sales engine, inside sales strategies, etc will be discussed along with tools and techniques. Useful tools, techniques and trends in B2C market, use of inbound growth hack techniques, from customer acquisition to conversion, retention and achieving viral growth will be discussed in detailed. This is a hands on session where startups will be asked to create a plan of action.

Get naked – At PNcamp, everything is transparent. So, one may think, “How can I disclose my trade secrets with entire group?”. Indeed its a valid concern, but its upto an individual founder whether and how much information they want to share with fellow participants. Our experience is that, getting naked has helped entrepreneurs more than shielding or hiding behind curtains. Plus, one unsaid rule of the camp is, “Whats said in the camp remains within the group”. Product nation is building a community of trustworthy entrepreneurs who are passionate about helping each others. Hence, its expected that you bring a transparency and will maintain confidentiality.

So, enough said about the camp and its structure. PNCamp, with this full action oriented day is looking forward to bring ton of insights to you through direct feedback and critical inputs to help you take your startup next level. This is a MUST attend camp for any early stage product startup. Do not miss this unique opportunity to catch the brains of experts and fellow participants through product feedbacks and interactions. So, if you are an early stage startup looking to take your startup to next orbit, then register yourself right away at www.pncamp.in Lets build great product nation, one prodct at a time! See you at PNCamp.

Guest Post by Abhijit Mhetre, founder at Canvazify. He is passionate about startup innovations and is a volunteer at iSPIRT

 

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5 email marketing myths you shouldn’t believe…

email-marketing-myths-you-shouldnt-believe

Well, just as any other marketing strategy and methodology is important and it works, the concept of email marketing is equally important. Email marketing is sending emails to a group of subscribers promoting your product or services.

In fact, most marketers don’t realize that email marketing is one of the major components of marketing.

But just as everybody has myths about web marketing, there are a number of myths in email marketing too. If you want to make this strategy flawless, you can consider 5 email marketing myths you shouldn’t believe.

  • If you think unsubscribing is bad for your business, then it is time you think again

Yes, that’s correct. Unsubscribing has a far wider concept than you think. The audience who subscribes aren’t necessarily focused on knowing about your product or services. They may have done it in the spur of the moment or to get the information about your product for their own use.

That does not mean they are going to buy it from you. And unsubscribing speaks volumes. First, not interested and the inactivity of the user are about not being very much indulged in reading what you present them in your emails. And then unsubscribing saves you from the trouble of including them in the list of recipients who never respond or express interest.

  • Email is dead

If you think that emailing has lost its charm, then you are absolutely wrong. There are hundreds and thousands and millions of organizations that are making huge sums of money with email marketing.

In fact, email marketing is a major component of traffic for most websites.

  • The length of the subject should be less than 55 characters

If you think you can make a better and the intriguing subject line that exceeds 55 characters, and then feel free to do so, because content is the KING.

It is true that if you make subjects that are shorter, it will of course result in higher rates of opening, but it is never said that it will also result in higher clicks or higher conversions.

  • The best time for sending emails to subscribers is either the Monday or the Tuesday

Yes, it is true that everybody gets back to work on these days. But that is not necessarily true that the subscribers are more open to reading emails on these days only. There are millions of people who read their mails on everyday basis, no matter if it is a weekday or if it is a weekend. So you make sure that you send them emails on everyday basis. Weekends are the two days where the people get enough time to take a detailed look to their emails.

  • If that you send with a trusted automated responder, there is no reason to worry

Organizations like Aweber, Infusionsoft etc. changed the meaning of how marketing is done. There was a while where you must be uncertain about giving your email address online because you could open the ways to interminable spam. Then, some big email marketing names ventured up and led the pack so you would know whether you hit “Unsubscribe,” you would be allowed to sit unbothered.

These myths are the perfect signs that email marketing isn’t bad and can result in the increase of sales and business in ways you wouldn’t think of.

There are companies all over the world that are experiencing the rise in business with the help of email marketing only. They are consistent in sending emails to their subscribers, draw their attention and ensure that on receiving the subscriber responses will take care of their queries and answering their concerns.

So do not take these myths into account and make your email marketing more effective.

Author – Charlie Robinson

(He is a marketer and interim VP of Marketing of multiple tech companies. He is currently heading marketing at Adling, a digital agency in Cupertino).

 

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Payments 4G (aka UPI) The Best is Yet to Come!

Last week was a landmark week for all Indians and by sheer coincidence; the country witnessed the launch of two generational shifts. The one that has everyone excited is Jio, a pure, data-only high-speed mobile network.

The other that perhaps will have equal transformational impact is its peer in the world of digital payments, the Unified Payment Interface (UPI). As soon as I had my first experience with UPI, I realized that its impact has barely been appreciated by most, including me.

Why Payments 4G?

Similar to data networks in telecom, which were built on top of the existing voice/SMS infrastructure, most innovations in Payments are layered on Card platform, a solution conceived in the 70’s. Almost all large-scale payment systems today run on the rails of card-based systems, operated globally by Visa, MasterCard, AmericanExpress and adapted in other regions by companies like UnionPay in China and RuPay in India. While innovators like PayPal, Venmo and Paytm in India have attempted to create close-loop systems, some with more success than others, the interface to the external ecosystem was still mostly card-based.

With UPI, the payment rails have been rethought and built from scratch, a de-novo system that was conceived in the year 2015 and implemented within 12 months. From the ground up the system is built with the idea of SmartPhones and Mobile Internet and like all things in Digital India, ZERO Vendor Lock-in.

A few key capabilities in the UPI architecture are fundamental game changers:

1)   Real-time, inter-bank authorization and settlement from one bank account to another: It sure is fascinating to see a live transaction with someone who receives a notification and can do a balance refresh to see their balance updated instantaneously using ANY application!

2)   SMTP for Payments: Just as you can use any email client (e.g. Outlook, Gmail to access any email account), UPI has decoupled the payment instrument (application) and store of funds (bank account). During the first week of its launch, two of my colleagues showed me a demo of transferring money between each other’s accounts with the same bank and neither of them was using that bank’s mobile application.

3)   Support for all types of payments: It can be anything from one-time, recurring, pull, push, pre-authorized, on-us, off-us, etc. The flexibility in the platform that is exposed to the banking ecosystem as an API is immense.

4)   A concept of Virtual Payment Address (a la email) that enables privacy and security and in effect as much of anonymity with auditability and traceability.

India has largely been a cash economy. For digital payments to takeoff, it is important to be able to bring as many of the real attributes of cash as possible, notably in Real-Time, with 100% value and allowing anonymity between payer and payee. Additionally, digital transactions have the benefit of auditability and traceability, both of which are important in the case of dispute resolution.

For once we have a payment system that is built on a whole new rails and I believe its impact will be nothing short of revolutionary. Coupled with the Smart-Phone and Mobile Internet penetration and an aggressive business model, there are five areas that will be impacted significantly.

1.    P2P – P2P is set for lift-off!

a.   Until now P2P payments in India have been largely done in a batch manner using NEFT or RTGS platforms and even with the launch of IMPS (the underlying foundation of UPI), few had used the slightly clunky interface. With virtual addresses, it becomes easy to send money to someone or send a collect request too. This means Social Payments, Bill Splitting, Gifting and other such use cases will come to the fore.

b.   Additionally two fundamental changes are likely to happen

i.    Informal sector merchants will be happy to accept payments into their bank accounts because they are real-time and zero charge – which can be a great way to get them into the system. Of course once they recognize the value of being in the formal sector, they may have to pay a fee – or alternately a bank may leverage the data for services like loans etc. and keep the payment transactions free.

ii.    Everyone automatically becomes an ATM machine , which in essence can be a catalyst for digital transactions. A large part of the population keeps cash because they may not have access to an ATM, but knowing that an ATM is always around the corner will give people the confidence to keep their money digital. One company has built an app to do just this and could be an exciting one to watch.

2.    Acceptance – from Rates to ROI/Impact will drive decisions

In the enterprise and mid-market sectors, the previous generation of payments innovation, notably SmartPhone-based Mobile POS solutions that have enabled businesses like insurance companies, e-commerce companies, utilities, police departments, and several others to enable digital payments – although on the same rails as the card system. These initial forays have proven the improvement in agent efficiency and productivity, often an increase of up to 10%.

With UPI, the stage is set for SmartPhone/POS to go mainstream and for payments to be integrated into business workflows. Businesses will hence make buying decisions not based on Merchant Discount Rates but more by choice of applications, availability of SDK’s, breadth of payment offerings and by trying to quantify ROI and productivity gains. We expect such sales processes to no longer be driven by banks but done more in partnership with Application or Flexible Payment platform providers.

3. Consumers – Win with rich choice of front-end applications

Until now, consumers could only transact with a card issued by their bank (credit/debit/prepaid) or the mobile banking app of their bank. With the 4-party model of UPI, consumers can use any UPI-certified app to transact via their SmartPhone. This is a breakthrough in that consumers will be spoilt for choice and can pick the best app. While the initial restriction is that a bank must develop such apps, there are some examples of banks allowing third parties to build differentiated experiences. Over time it is clear that there will be an abundant supply of apps and consumers can use any app they like. While this might seem like banks are giving up control but in reality banks that develop a partner-ecosystem can benefit the most by getting visibility into transactions with customers who may not even be banking with them. It’s surely a shift from the banks’ perspective but a big opportunity nonetheless.

4. Convergence – Online & Offline

Historically in Card-based systems, there was a lot of importance given to Card Present vs. Card Not Present . However as we move to a “Phone-present” world, there is fundamentally no difference between a face-to-face transaction and a remote transaction. We are already seeing use-cases like Uber where the service is delivered in a face-to-face manner but the payments are processed in an online manner. We expect more and more of this to happen and business wise the system should start treating all payments the same. I expect to see one simple business model for payments in the near-term.

5. New Metrics – Mining the digital exhaust

Business Metrics will change – from Stores to Flows!

The most fundamental thing that will change with UPI is the business metrics. In the past for banks, CASA (Current Account Savings Account) count and balances were always the primary metrics that were tracked, along with Merchant Discount Rates and transaction fees. However in the UPI-enabled world and the four-party architecture, it is clear that the most important isn’t just to be the store of funds, but to be in the flow of the transaction. As such banks will need to start tracking the use of mobile apps by them or partners, use of such apps by existing customers and customers of competitors as well as the use of competing apps by their customers. With switching costs now becoming close to zero, banks that encourage the creation of an ecosystem and giving the maximum choice to their customers are likely to emerge as winners. Mining the digital exhaust will be key for banks to make the most of UPI.

While exciting, it’s still early days in India. UPI has barely gone live in the past one-week, and already we’re seeing some dramatic impact it is having on the system. The next few months and years promise to be truly exciting for the Indian consumer, retail or corporate, as well as the banking sector which stands to gain a great deal from this innovative approach to payments. Indeed the real-time architecture of UPI will truly make it the envy of many a payment regulator and industry expert around the world.

Watch this space, the best is yet to come – but one thing is for sure – UPI will usher in a disruptive step-function in the growth of digital payments in India. There is no precedent from developed economies – India is blazing a new trail and writing the new chapter in the world of Real-Time Payments!

PS: All images are courtesy iSPIRT

Guest Post by Sanjay Swamy, Entrepreneur & Early-Stage VC! IndiaStack Evangelist. Reblogged from here

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5 ways to increase your CTR on blog posts

For those who don’t know what CTR or Click-Through Rate is, it is the number of times visitors click on the ad placed on your blog divided by the number of views your blog gets. The business rules are simple. You get paid per click that is made on an ad placed in the blog. But, there are certain factors that control the way users click on such ads. The prime reason for placing such ads is to bring the reader close to a purchase decision.

Listed below are 5 ways to increase your CTR on blog posts.

  1. Catchy headline or message

The headline of the ad is like the elevator sales pitch. Learning the art of how to create a blog is not everything. One chance and it’s either a click or ignored. So a catchy meta title and meta description does more than half the work for you. They improve the user engagement by around 500% so the blog post shares a greater chance of CTR. A catchy title is necessary as most of the people on the internet is speed readers who have less time to focus on such ads.

  1. Presentation matters

A well-presented and maintained page is more likely to make the reader feel good than a messy page with ads placed all over. So the layout design of the page, the font size and style along with the quality of images matters. This creates an ambience for the ad as the placement and click on an ad depends on it. A good looking page containing an ad is more likely to get a click, so make sure your blog post looks neat when opened. This is one way in which CTR can be improved.

  1. Dodge ad blocks

A big hurdle your CTR and in turn, ads may face is the ad blocks that are on the host computer or mobile. To get through them, you need to test your ads before by applying it by yourself and check if it is good enough to dodge it. One advice is to use three ad blocks and three links for each page of the site. Do not try to blend your ads in the content or play with the colors or fonts. If people can read the headline and if they feel interested, they will click on it. It’s that simple.

  1. Two in between content

 

It is seen that although it is discouraged to place ads between your content, but the metrics show that those that are placed in between content in a proper manner get the most clicks. Additionally, color influences, but in the right amount. Use maroon red rather than blue to catch attention. The click on ads after the content gets lesser views, so there are more chances for a click on the ad before the content ends, thereby improving your CTR.

  1. Text and image based ad works

Adsense lets you choose between a text-based and an image-based ad. Both yield different results. But text combined with image allows advertisers to bid on it and this increases your overall cost per click thereby improving your CTR. Never expect an exponential increase, but over time, it gives better results than a solely text or an image based ad.

Decoding how to increase CTR doesn’t really have to be difficult, all you have to do is just implement the above mentioned ways in your blog and see the magic!
 

Author – Charlie Robinson

(He is a marketer and interim VP of Marketing of multiple tech companies. He is currently heading marketing at Adling a digital agency in Cupertino).

 

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8 Personal Finance tips for Bootstrapping Entrepreneurs

Starting up is hard, make no mistake about it, while media romanticizes startups and mostly talks about the glorious success stories, what goes behind is months and years of toil, frustration, fighting all kinds of odds. Cliched as it might sound but overnight success is the culmination of years of hard work.

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Bootstrapping a startup is even tougher, apart from challenges of building right product, right team, right marketing plans and dealing with daily operational chaos, you additionally need to worry about money and  cash flows and hence constantly innovate to compete, there are no easy paths, what you need is undivided focus and continued perseverance.

Now with all these challenges last thing a bootstrapping entrepreneur needs are fresh challenges on personal finance front. It can be distracting to least and can even have a debilitating impact on your business, when all your energy and time should be focused on getting your business to move to the next orbit, unforeseen issues on personal finance side can sap your precious energy.

While we cannot mitigate all risks in business, but with a better financial planner you can reduce distractions and also some legitimate business risks, here are few tips that can help you manage your personal finances better.

1. Keep your personal fixed expenses low

As you bootstrap, start with a review of your personal expenses see if you can lower your expenses especially the fixed ones, there are always expenses which can be cut, like a costly dish TV subscription with all the channels you never watch or suboptimal phone bill plans when you can get a better offer or the weekly outings where you splurge or non-healthy junk food, or the gym membership where you never go, maybe a jog in nearby park can be better. Cut expenses wherever you can and migrate to a leaner personal expense structure.

2. Track your expenses and do active budgeting

Last thing you want when you are running a startup is surprises every month on your expenses which can be due to faulty planning. Plan your expenses to the last tee, do active budgeting. If required, use budgeting software. If not, pick up a simple excel sheet. There are a lot of pre-formatted excel workbooks available which can help you plan your budget.

You can use the following sheet for expense planning.

Screen Shot 2016-09-05 at 2.37.32 pm

3. Before you bootstrap plan for the worst

Create multiple cash flow scenarios. A lot of assumptions go bad when you are starting up as there are too many unknowns in a startup environment. Slipping product timelines, fundraising plans going awry, growth not taking off as you expected there are simply too many moving parts. So for any plan you create do a thorough analysis. Hope for the best but always have a plan ready for the worst.

4. Get a good health Insurance for you and your family

One of the major unplanned expense that can hit you is unforeseen health. Cost of health in general has skyrocketed in India. So before you bootstrap, ensure that you have a good health insurance cover for you and your family, the cover should be adequate and should reflect your lifestyle.

5. Do not park money in savings account, Invest in liquid funds

Your day to day money requirements should be parked in instruments which give higher returns. Every additional rupee matters. Therefore, do not keep your money in savings account but invest in short-term liquid funds. They provide 2-3 % higher returns than saving accounts and are almost as liquid as savings account, so you can use your money anytime and also earn higher from your savings.

Let’s say you maintain 5 lakhs rupees balance in your liquid account, this is an account for your emergency funds. Below chart explains what will be your account balance at the end of 3 years, if you see liquid funds will give you 4.3 % and 8.3 % higher return vis-à-vis Fixed deposits and savings accounts respectively.

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6. Avoid speculative investments like daily stock trading

As an entrepreneur, you are already grappling with ambiguities and surprises. The last thing you would want is surprises on your personal finance front. So start avoiding any risky investment you are making and stay away from stuff like daily stock trading or other speculative investments in the stock market or otherwise.

The below infographic explains why day trading is not a good idea 🙂

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(Source: Zerohedge)

7. Create a personal financial plan

You must have created a proper business plan for your startup but what is also equally important is that you create a financial plan for yourself. Look at how your cash flows are going to be like what are your projected expense, both recurring and non-recurring, sources of income, how much savings you have, short term and long term liabilities. Finance planning helps you create a detailed view of what to expect on money front in next few years, here is a simple step by step guide to create a financial plan

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8. Ensure your loan liabilities are taken care off.

Having large loan (personal or home loan ) commitments is not a good idea if you are planning to bootstrap. If you have such commitments relook at them and figure out a way to manage risks arising out of these liabilities. Set up a viable payment plan for all of these liabilities.

Article Credit : Sarabdeep Singh, co-founder of Bodhik.

 

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India in 2030’s – Impact of India Stack

The year is 2030. India is a developed, happy democracy. With a population of over 1.5 billion, it has become a role model for other nations, both developed and developing, in putting public digital infrastructure to enable paperless, presence-less, frictionless transactions.

The new generation does not know what a government office looks like and has not encountered government bureaucracy. Instead, what they interact with is an omnipresent, government digital infrastructure that delivers services instantly — from anywhere with no paperwork, only with their consent and their privacy protected.

We describe the typical activities of life as it progresses from the view of two generations.

The story

Radha and Rahim live in a remote village in India and are expecting their first child. The government provides financial assistance to the pregnant mother, Radha, for a healthy diet. The financial assistance is transferred to the Aadhaar-linked bank a/c using the Unified Payment Interface (UPI) infrastructure. Radha can use the money and the UPI system to pay for nutrition in a cashless manner at any shop for supplies. Her pregnancy monitoring medical reports are delivered to her Digital Locker electronically. With her active consent. she can share these reports electronically with other doctors or agencies to assist her in the decision-making process during the pregnancy period. Further, Radha can, again with her active consent, share her anonymised pregnancy reports for data analytics, which will in turn promote the understanding of major medical trends in the neighbourhood, region, state and country.

Soon, Radha and Rahim are now blessed with a beautiful girl. They name her Rani.

When Rani is just about a month old, her parents get her an Aadhaar identity. Since the day Rani started understanding concepts like her name, her identity, etc, she also knew she has a unique identity number, called the Aadhaar number. Even before she could walk, Rani had a bank account. So as she grew up, Rani would provide her Aadhaar number as part of her identity at various interaction points. Be it getting a scholarship in school, her education progress reports, her medical reports, her insurance policies, her bank a/c details, and so on, all these documents are conveniently available in here Aadhaar-linked Digital Locker. Rani can conveniently access and share these documents with her active consent.

In Rani’s mind, there isn’t much difference between a bank a/c and an email account. While one holds and transacts with money, the other holds and transacts with emails. For Rani, her Digital Locker account is the only locker she understands, and this is where she can find and keep her documents safe. She never has to worry about maintaining physical documents or their photocopies as the Digital Locker is a hassle-free system.

Rani, Radha and Rahim visit the local medical centre periodically for routine check-ups and immunization. Their medical progress records get digitally stored in their respective Digital Locker accounts. If during the medical interaction, a new doctor wishes to refer to their historical medical record, the same is available to the doctor after s/he gets active consent from the patient.

Back in the days…

Rani once went to the ‘bank branch’ to open a new a/c. This field trip was part of a ‘museum tour’ for her class to understand how banks used to work in the past. When she stepped inside the branch, she was shocked to see old photographs showing how people would carry papers and files of their identity papers, stand in long queues at the counter and submit photocopies to have a bank account opened, in the past.

In this museum bank branch, she witnessed old cheque leaflets, passbooks and various forms which were used for withdrawing and depositing money in the bank being preserved in glass displays. This was all very strange for Rani because the only physical currency that she had ever seen was in a preserved format at her home. The visit sparked Rani’s curiosity. When she got home that evening, she asked her parents about how her generation’s life differed from theirs.

Rani’s question took Radha and Rahim on a nostalgia trip to the times before 2010, when they struggled to access basic services. They narrated the ordeal they faced, starting from establishing their identity at various government departments for any service delivery, the umpteen number of photocopies of their psuedo-identity papers such as ration card, voter id, etc, that they would need to submit. In addition, since Radha and Rahim were young and would move depending on where they found work, it would be hellish to establish their identity in different cities and towns in the same country. This was so because one state would not recognise an identity document issued by another state.

Life in 2030

Soon, Rani completes her education and is skilled enough to enter the workforce. She shares her credentials with independent agencies, which anonymize her identity and add the data provided by her to the national skill registry. Such a skill registry can assist the government and other agencies to plan for skill development of the nation. Rani shares her credentials from the Digital Locker with her active consent with a prospective employer. This appears seamless now but she recalls her parents’ struggle that in the pre-2010 times, there used to be an entire industry whose job it was to verify credentials submitted by candidates for prospective employers. This so-called industry was so big that scrupulous elements would run scams of procuring fake certificates to enable unqualified job seekers get jobs.

After working for a few years, Rani decides to become an entrepreneur. As an entrepreneur, Rani interacts with various customers and vendors. She uses the UPI framework for seamlessly receiving and making payments across the country instantaneously.

Rahim often jokes about the ease of payments in the current times, describing how difficult it was to send money to his parents in their village. Today, anyone can send money to someone else by simply knowing the person’s mobile or Aadhaar number at near-zero cost and almost instantaneously. But when he was young, he would be charged 5% of the amount to transfer money, and the transfer itself would take upto a week before the money reached his parents.

Rani gets married, she receives her marriage certificate from the government in her Aadhaar-linked Digital Locker electronically. Rani was able to share her marriage certificate electronically with various authorities and agencies to change her name on documents such as her driving license, bank account, passport, etc. This ensured a seamless and hassle-free name change.

With marriage came the onus of investing in life and non-life insurance policies. Being a digital native, Rani acquired these policies using the E-KYC process with UPI framework for payments. These policies were then issued by the insurance companies and directly resided in Rani’s Digital Locker. She can access these policies from any location and at any time. The best part is that she isn’t afraid of losing the paperwork — unlike her mother Radha, who now has a special affinity for the Digital Locker.

Radha had a particularly trying phase in 2005 when a cloud burst in Bombay led to a massive flood in the metropolis. Radha’s ground floor house went under water and she lost all her documents — her identity cards, education certificates, medical reports, insurance policies. She had to run from pillar to post at several agencies and government offices for an entire year after the floods just to obtain a copy of all the washed out documents.

Every time Rani recalls her mother’s tale of ordeal, she feels blessed to be born in the current time.

The safety of the digital locker makes her sleep peacefully without worrying about paper documents, and being able to share these conveniently with consent. The removal of the big payment processing hurdle has ensured that Rani focuses her energy on improving and expanding her business to serve the larger society. Macro data analytic trends helps her plan for what the society needs and be assured that her services will be required in the future.

Conclusion

India Stack is the term given to a bunch of public digital utilities that have been created by the government since 2010. These include:

1) Aadhaar – a biometric-based, unique identity platform, with a facility to authenticate online

2) E-KYC – A service which empowers an Aadhaar-holder to share his/her Know-Your-Customer information electronically with active biometric consent

3) E-Sign – An online electronic signature service, facilitated via E-KYC to digitally sign a document

4) Digital Locker – A mechanism to issue government documents to Aadhaar-holders in electronic format for convenience of storing and sharing when required

5) Unified Payment Interface (UPI) – A payments architecture that enables universal electronic payments that are cashless and promote financial inclusion

In the pre-IndiaStack days, there was much friction in every transaction of routine business. Concepts like data analytics on anonymized records for prediction could not be envisaged. The extensive adoption of IndiaStack makes all these benefits a reality.

Shrikant Karwa

 

Posted on

Scalability Vs Sustainability – What should come first for a startup?

In the highly competitive market today, it seems like a trick question on whether a startup should focus on scalability, which seemed to be a trend until last year, or sustainability. Though one might toss for scalability at the very outset, facts speak otherwise.

This year, a lot has been written on the high “cash burn rates” of the star online startups and predictions of doom in the areas of growth or funding. This is in stark contrast to last year which was dominated by high valuations, wide ranging expansions, hyper sales and big hiring packages. These high cash burn rates were partly due to investor pressure to scale up, gain market share from the rivals and clock high GMV’s (Is it the right metric anyway?). There was a furious race to achieve this among the top funded companies and a lot of “me too” startups hoping to cash in on the investor gold rush.

However, now this unbridled growth has reached a plateau due to coffers running dry and wavering customer loyalties. So, this frenzy for rapid scalability seems to have come at a cost. The way these companies have been spending cash has raised a big question mark over their long term sustainability. So the moot question is whether it is wise to scale up so fast if it puts your very survival at risk?

A leading Indian brokerage firm made a study of the 22 top Indian e-commerce startups during the financial year 2015 – 16. The prognosis by them was quite grim. In that period, the combined losses grew by 293% to Rs. 7,884 crores on a combined earning of Rs. 16,199 crores. Only one start up, Practo, in the healthcare tech sector, was making more revenues than expenses.

Inspite of the hectic pace of growth, the losses were brought about by ‘below cost’ discount sales to attract customers, big advertising spends across all media, and rapid expansion into smaller cities to achieve scalability. Also, there was a dearth of original ideas or products. Most of them were copycats of each other with similar product offerings. One can’t but be reminded of the egg selling scheme of Milo Minderbinder in Catch 22 of buying high and selling low!

In fact, the first five months of 2016 have witnessed over 18 startups wrapping up operations. Atleast 15 of these startups were funded and just one startup went beyond Series A stage. Not surprisingly, 4 startups were from the food tech space, 4 in the hyper local category and 2 in fashion. They were all crowded landscapes already. Going by a Goldman Sachs report, private equity investments in startups has declined by a whopping 25% as compared to last year. So obviously, focusing on scalability over sustainability may have been a flawed strategy.

High cash burn for scalability and a dependence on investors is not the right survival strategy anymore for Indian startups. Investors too have shifted their focus to startups that have the potential to sustain in the long run rather than those with just high valuations and no ‘real’ returns.

In a way, this year will be the best learning for startups as they are slowly realising the pitfalls of only focusing on scalability. Pepper Tap, the grocery delivery app, had to shut shop in six cities, including the major metros, and still couldn’t survive as it had scaled too fast and were not really prepared with the correct logistics framework to service its customers. It did not spend enough time to gain a stronghold in an already existing market and diversified too fast. Even Grofers, Housing.com, Food Panda and Zomato have scaled down their operations significantly and have shut down or scaled back operations in non- performing cities.

There are quite a few startups like Urban Ladder and Carat Lane that are building world class products and are competing with the top brands in the world. They have managed to organise fragmented markets to create “online” brands with positive unit economics. Oyo rooms and BookMyShow, are examples of such startups which can effectively fill a need in the market and have managed to innovate and grow their market share.

Since 2005, MU Sigma a leading Indian business application software company has been making waves in its respective domain too. It has quietly made a mark in the world without any high valuations or spending sprees because their business has value.

Conclusion

Many lessons have been learnt from startups that have gone bust in the past. Clearly, it is high time that startups start focusing on sustainability first because once a sustainable business model is in place, scalability will automatically follow.

Going forward, only sustainable businesses which are value-driven, with a respect for the bottom line, will draw the attention of the now cautious investors and yield better returns on their investments in the long run as compared to valuation-driven startups. Moreover, only the sustainable business models will be able to scale successfully and prove their real mettle rather than becoming just ‘one-time wonders’. In fact, brick and mortar or e-commerce, the fundamentals don’t change!

 

MN

 

 

An article by Mahesh Nair

Founder at Picsdream

Posted on

Google Analytics For Particularly Curious SaaS People

You are what you measure.

This is especially true for SaaS businesses. Our goals and endeavors center on user growth, delivering consistent value, and profitability. This again depends on the efficiency with which customers can be earned, and nurtured.

All this begs a question: how do you know and measure the most crucial KPIs to achieve said goals?

Well, I know this is subjective. Because it depends on where you stand and where your focus lies at any given point in time.

That being said, Google Analytics comes in handy no matter where you are as a company. And that’s precisely what we’ve set out to explore with the help of Dave McClure’s AARRR framework in an in-depth slide deck.

If you are at the helm of a small to medium sized business, Google Analytics just works, as it is a free/standard analytics tool that is easy to configure and maintain.

Although, when I was introduced to Google Analytics, I found it to be quite irksome to grasp for the following reasons:

1) There is a lot of generic material about Google Analytics on the internet, and its scope of use for a SaaS application is difficult to pin down.

2) Lack of actionable resources (what I really required wasn’t just a frame to understand the tool, but real lessons that I could put to test at my end).

Hence, with that in mind, I’ve put together a deck with things that I’ve learned over the last few months, that’ll (hopefully) give beginners a broad perspective on the use of Google Analytics for a SaaS business, and at the same time provide some actionables to get started.

Now, let’s dive into the deck.

Guest Post by By Preethi Shreeya, ChargeBee