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Why WebEngage’s CEO @avlesh wishes #PNgrowth existed a few years ago?

WebEngage is probably the most important product startup from India’s business capital Mumbai – it builds customer engagement tools for SaaS businesses, is very popular and successful, and is used by thousands of businesses worldwide. Avlesh is one of the original hustlers of the Indian ecosystem, and he has built a world class product company in a matter of just four years.

When we talked to Avlesh about #PNgrowth, he was very excited, and stressed the importance of peer to peer learning in an ecosystem like ours which still hasn’t got as much attention as it should have. As he stresses, it would be very helpful for people if they don’t make mistakes in the first place, rather than learn after making a few. #PNgrowth would have helped him and WebEngage if such an initiative exited when they were starting out, he said.

Avlesh says that #PNgrowth can help entrepreneurs share different ideas of growth among them, and in doing so, share stories of how they scaled, the challenges they faced, and how they got to where they are.

#PNgrowth, in collaboration with Stanford’s Graduate School of Business and Duke’s Fuqua School of Business, iSPIRT’s #PNgrowth initiative aims to get the people who want to learn, and the people they need to ask in a room, and give them the perfect space to learn and grow.

You can learn more and apply for the program here.

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Announcing the biggest software entrepreneur school in India – #PNgrowth

India’s product startup ecosystem is at an exciting stage right now. There are several startups who are being talked about as unicorns, several others which are bring touted as the next big things, and a whole host of others who are in their infancy. Though India’s metres are the ones driving this revolution-in-a-bottle, smaller cities are also catching up.

One reason for the emergence of these companies has been the inspiration that India’s first product startups have been. These were the trailblazers, the ones who went where no one had gone before, and learnt things by making mistakes, and in some cases a lot of them.

And these are the companies that are now going one step ahead. They are coming together, of their own accord, to help India’s growing product companies who are at a particular stage of their lifecycle – the growth curve.

iSPIRT is happy to present to you, in association with Stanford’s Graduate School of Business and Duke’s Fuqua Business School, a new initiative for India’s growth-stage product startups. We call it PNgrowth, under the now-familiar Product Nation banner.

pngrowthWhat are we doing?

PNgrowth is a year long mentorship program with some of India’s top product people and founders, with learning sessions and curriculum prepared in collaboration with the universities of Stanford, Harvard and Duke.

The program, prepared with some of the best minds in business and academia, is aimed at equipping the new age internet entrepreneur with an understanding of every skill he/she needs to build and scale a world class organisation.

Who is eligible?

Applications are now open. The program is open only for growth stage companies and is limited only for 200 entrepreneurs. The companies can be either B2B or B2C, but they will need to have already achieved product-market fit and must be aiming to become category leaders in their space.

We’ve started receiving applications here, and you can also follow us on Twitter or Facebook to keep abreast of everything that’s happening.

What’s the program schedule?

The program will start in January 2016 with a 3 day residential event in Mysore, where everyone will get together to learn how and what they are going to learn and implement in their companies in the course of the next year.

Applications are due by November 15th, and we’ll also be having Selene Delecourt and her team over in Bangalore in August in order to understand the challenges starts are facing and what kind of help they might need. You can reach out to us to participate in that as well.

You can see the entire program schedule here.

We are super-excited about this, and so are the mentors we have brought together for the program. We have here a sneak peek from Pallav Nadhani, CEO of FusionCharts who is telling you why you should be applying to #PNgrowth.

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Inviting the most ambitious product founders to learn growth mantras at PNGrowth

FusionCharts is one of India’s oldest product companies, and easily one of the first to get on the SaaS wave to world recognition. This makes Pallav Nadhani’s company one of the first few in India to actually face the problems that are now ruining the sleep of the nation’s new product company CEOs. As Pallav himself says, building the product and validating is one thing, and scaling it completely another. The challenges are different and tougher, as are the decisions you need to take.

In answering the question as to what would have helped him and his company at the stage when they were reaching the point when they needed to scale, Pallav says what we’ve heard from so many people in the last year or so – that there was no one to guide him and the organisation at that time. Simply put, no one he knew had done this before, and there was no one to go to for advice.

In this short video from us at PNgrowth, Pallav talks about all of this, and how much organisations need this kind of help at that stage, thus making the case for why we are trying to put together PNgrowth, a platform to bring together India’s early stage software product companies. In collaboration with Stanford’s Graduate School of Business and Duke’s Fuqua School of Business, iSPIRT’s #PNgrowth initiative aims to get the people who want to learn, and the people they need to ask in a room, and give them the perfect space to learn and grow.
In this video, Pallav Nadhani talks about FusionCharts’ journey, why he’s part of this initiative, and why he believes that PNgrowth could help product companies take their game to the next level.