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Virtual Teardown Experience

Recently, I got the opportunity to participate in a virtual product teardown session. After attending SaaSx4 teardown, and participating in PNCamp hyderabad tearddown, I was curious to see how it would work in an virtual format. In a teardown, you get critical (sometimes more critical than you expect!) feedback on your product, if you don’t mind being torn down in the process. I wasn’t sure how it would work when this is not done in person and you can’t see each other.  

Post the session, I am happy to report that the effectiveness of the teardown didn’t get diluted too much because of the virtual format. This means that the teardown can be scaled and many such sessions can be run every month. Good news for all startups.

Enough about the process! In this post, I want to share 3 simple lessons someone would have taken from our virtual teardown of 2 companies. They stuck with me also because these were quite similar to what I saw in the PNCamp product teardown session as well.

Lesson 1: Spend time clarifying the messaging on your website

In most cases, I found the messaging to be confusing. When I would question the founder to understand what should be there, they were not very clear themselves. It is important for founders to be extremely clear about the message they want to convey to their potential clients. One way of getting clarity in your own head is to work on your website content copy and if you can nail it down, you will have improved clarity in your head as well.

Lesson 2: Build the differentiation into the product

It wasn’t very clear what the differentiation was in many cases. Even when it was clear, the differentiated messaging didn’t come out from the product. For example, if your product’s differentiated offering is that it is for teams, then the product, in every step of the way to onboarding, should bake the notion of team – setting up team, communication within team, teams working with other teams, manager of the team, etc. Otherwise the differentiation doesn’t sink in. 

Lesson 3: Think like your customer

Most often, I saw founders thinking from their own perspective when describing the product, or building the product. This is cardinal sin. Your customer doesn’t care what you think, they care about what they think and what they get. For example, one of the products competed head-on with another product in WordPress plug-in; competing product had 1M installs, this product had 10 installs. Of course customer wouldn’t choose this product, ever. It is more prudent to think like the customer and position the product differently rather than passionately try to go head-on against this category leader.

These are simple and straightforward ones and it is not that founders don’t know them. Problem is that they get so busy solving their day-to-day problems, sometimes they don’t zoom out and think about these basics. Attending teardowns can sometimes serve as reminders for some of these points. If you are an early stage startup, consider attending one of the teardowns.

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CultureAlley: Simplifying Language Learning

CultureAlley combines the 2 most addictive online habits – Social Media and Gamification, to help people learn foreign languages. It attacks boring, generic, and old school pedagogy in education and turns it on its head. It turns the ridiculous number of hours spent on social media, and the web, into a language lesson. CultureAlley was founded by Nishant Patni and Pranshu Bhandari in 2012. 

Introduction

When I joined Microsoft in Shanghai, the company helpfully offered me 60 hours of 1-1 tutoring so I could learn Mandarin. I was excited to be able to learn the language. My tutor was decent, her English was better than average, and she had good structured lessons she followed through. However, it didn’t prove very useful for me – even after spending 2 years in Shanghai, I couldn’t manage anything more than being able to give driving directions to the taxi driver, and of course the usual greetings.

One of the biggest challenges was that even though the words and phrases that I was being taught were commonplace and important, I didn’t have to use most of them at my workplace or during other interactions with Chinese people. So I kept forgetting those words, and since I didn’t have a way to learn the words my program managers and developers used at workplace, my language skills never went beyond the survival level. And finally, I gave up even trying.

This has been the experience of many language learners, language teaching is not personalized, and it doesn’t take your context and interest into consideration. This means high dropout rate and diminished utility of such teaching.

Nishant Patni, founder of CultureAlley, narrates a similar experience when he had to spend time in China, which prompted him to look for better ways of language learning. He started CultureAlley, along with his co-founder, Pranshu Bhandari, in 2012 to offer a better way of language learning.

CultureAlley makes language learning simple, by personalizing and contextualizing the learning.
The way it does it is by taking the learners’ social media feeds (Facebook, Twitter etc.) and replacing parts of it into the language that the user is trying to learn. E.g. If your friends are saying “Hi” on Facebook it gets replaced with “ni hao” and you get to listen, learn, and collect these new words by tapping on them. Everything is progressive to the learner’s level. Every new word you learn, you get rewarded (think Candy Crush) and you keep competing with your Facebook friends on how many words you learn! The same experience is extended across the web using their Chrome browser plugins.
Learning is supplemented with bite-sized interactive lessons and fun games.

So you may be learning Chinese while browsing Facebook, Wikipedia, and TechCrunch, following your regular lifestyle, and learning words that are relevant for you.

Culture_alley_friends

Culture_alley_translate_friends

The Product

In addition to having regular features of any language learning (audio-visual language lessons, interactive practice games, dictionaries, Q&A forums, online tutoring), CultureAlley is the only major player to utilize web browsing, Social media and gamification techniques to teach languages. This way, they are much more immersive and personalized.

They have Facebook based web offerings for Spanish, Mandarin Chinese, Portuguese, and English for Latin American Speakers. And they have recently launched an Android App that teaches English to Japanese speakers. Another Android App to teach English to Indians (Hindi speakers) is slated to be out very soon. .

Culturealley_japanese

They make the learning process:

  1. Personalized to the learner’s interests – users learn the words and phrases that they are interested in talking about
  2. Highly contextual – You discover new words in a conversation – knowing exactly when to use them
  3. Absolutely real-time – Every time you go to the app you have fresh content to learn with!
  4. Gamified and fun – Everything you do you are rewarded for and you keep competing with your Facebook friends on your learning goals!

Culture_alley_day3

CultureAlley uses a combination of Social media APIs and an intersection of Machine Translation algorithms and human curated data-sets to personalize the learning experience of all the learners. These are used in the Facebook apps, the web-apps, the Browser Plugins and the mobile apps.

They use their own text-to-speech engine to provide speech recognition features to provide feedback on accents and user pronunciation on their mobile apps. There are several games that users play in a candy-crush sort of a journey including a cool Karaoke-like tool that allows learners to learn a language while watching movies, and YouTube videos. The mobile app also has a cool live chat functionality – which allows CultureAlley to push interesting content (including interactive video quizzes) to learners everyday and allows learners to in-turn ask questions to English tutors on a live chat.

Culture_alley_your

Product Development

The product team consists of young engineers from NITs and IIT-B, focusing on technology stack and features.

Maintaining a high level of quality on the content that they create as they scale, is a key challenge for them. They rely on quality control processes in house and work with a bunch of language professionals who do both the content creation and testing – they have a community of ~500 vetted language professionals who teach at CultureAlley as well.

CultureAlley has a very interesting talent strategy for their software development which helps them execute well, even while based out of a tier-2 city like Jaipur:

  • They are located next door to NIT Jaipur so they get good talent access
  • Founder is a hands-on technologist, so technology leadership has not been a challenge for them
  • Finding UX/Design talent is hard, but the founding team has a designer/artist in it
  • Founders spend part of the year in San Francisco where they have created their eco-system to access local design talent, get quick prototyping, and user testing

Being distributed for part of the year doesn’t create problem for them, Skype and Google Docs are used for collaboration all the time, with DropBox for document sharing.

Market

The global market for digital English language learning products reached $1.8 billion in 2013, which is less than 3% of total English language learning market. Global learning (all languages) is around $115B. 1 in 5 in the world are learning English right now. So we are talking of some extremely large market sizes here.

CultureAlley has about 340K users, using its web, facebook, and mobile products, growing at a rapid pace of 25% month on month. They target 3 segments (#1 being their primary target):

  1. Working professionals learning new language (job prospects) – 60% of the market
  2. Students to get better grades
  3. Biz travelers, travel enthusiasts

Their web offering is free, while the mobile app is freemium where the users have to pay to unlock advanced levels (pricing varies based on different language pairs) . They also offer Skype based tuitions and doubt-clearing sessions through a large selection of online tutors.

There are some worthy competitors in this arena – DuoLingo (good mobile interface and gamified learning approach), Rosetta Stone (focused on the US market, old school approach to language learning), OpenEnglish (Latin America based English teaching player, focused on Video Conferencing based group lessons). However, CultureAlley feels its contextual and social media based approach to language learning is highly complementary to most of the content focused players in the industry, providing ample partnership opportunities.

Roadmap

They are focused on the following for the next 12-18 months:

  • 10 different language pairs (language you want to learn, and the language that you know)
  • 4 different channels – Facebook, Browser-plugin, devices (iOS, android, wearable), Twitter based product
  • 1.5M users
  • Continued focus on design and usability of product

Their vision is to provide highly contextual learning, using video content (YouTube) as learning tool (similar to what they do to Facebook feeds), and create compelling content for wearable apps.

The Road Ahead

The language learning space is huge, and is ripe for disruption because of the old school teaching methodology of current products, and CultureAlley has a compelling solution. This seems to be a great opportunity for them to grow very big very fast and capture a large market segment. However, they need to be careful about the moves large publishers (entrenched, largely offline players in English language learning space like Pearson) are making to co-opt the space – busuu (an online language learning company with 40M users) recently tied up with Pearson English to offer a standardized English assessment to its users, for example. This is also a space buzzing with startup activities and ample funding ($3.3M average valuation of 232 language learning startups according to AngelList).

CultureAlley products are compelling to use and their roadmap is rich and headed in the right direction. As they scale to more languages pairs, channels, and engagement techniques, future is very bright for them.

 

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BrowserStack: Redefining Web Testing, Globally

BrowserStack helps you test your website (internal or public) on 300+ desktop and mobile browsers on different Windows, Mac & mobile OS flavors. It solves the problem of not having to setup and maintain multiple Virtual machines and devices to test your website. Ritesh Arora and Nakul Aggarwal are the founding team members. The strength of BrowserStack currently is 50+ employees.

Introduction

You are a web developer, you develop a piece of functionality and you want to test to make sure it works for everyone, irrespective of operating system, device, or browser they use. In an ideal, standards-driven world, this would be a trivial problem: you code using the standard, you run it by a compiler/validator which makes sure your code indeed follows the standard, and you are all set to go.

Unfortunately, the world of web development is much more complex:

  • All web code (HTML, Javascript) are really instructions to Browser (‘interpreted’ by Browser, rather than being ‘compiled’ into machine code that OS understands), so standards-compliance of the particular browser determines the accuracy of your code.
  • HTML and Javascript standards have evolved over the years and so different versions and types of browsers may have different level of standards-compliance. All these different versions of browsers are in use on different systems out there.
  • Given this dependency on Browser (which in turn depends on OS which in turn depends on device), we have a large number of combinations possible, each of which may produce a variance from standard and the code will not work as intended.

Given this complexity, there are 1000s of combinations that may need to be tested to give the confidence your piece of functionality will work for everyone.

Developers (and companies) address this problem by doing one or more of the following:

  1. Identifying a few (10-15) common combinations of OS-Browser-Version and focus all testing there – This is risk-based approach and may be too risky for some companies.
  2. Create Virtual Machines for OS-Browser-Version combination (100-200) and use them as needed – Cost of managing so many virtual machine images can be prohibitive for many companies
  3. ‘Rent’ pre-created virtual machines from 3rd party to make #2 more cost effective.

BrowserStack offers live, web-based browser testing to developers, by ‘renting’ virtual machines with desired configuration. Developer uses a familiar web interface and gets an instance of virtual machine with desired OS-Browser-Version combination to test against.

The founders started BrowserStack to solve their own problems – while consulting (after 3 startups), they found it was very hard to ensure web applications have been tested on all possible configurations.

BrowserStack-Time-line

By May ’14, they had 400K registrations and 20K paying customers.

BrowserStack-CustomerGrowth

The Product

Features

BrowserStack has all the features that a developer needs to effectively test their application.

BrowserStack-Features

Screenshot Service

They also offer screenshot service (how does a page look in different browsers), primarily for web designers who want to ensure their page looks good and consistent across devices.

BrowserStack-Screenshot

BrowserStack-PN

Automation Testing

Browserstack’s Automate Product enables automated testing of your web applications over 300+ browser combinations in 2 ways:

  • Selenium Cloud Testing – You can set it up as a Selenium WebDriver and code your tests in your favorite language. You can use their dashboard or their REST APIs to access information about your test runs.
  • Javascript Testing API – You can use it to run Javascript unit and functional tests, standalone, or with testing tools like Yeti, TestSwarm, etc.

They will soon support real mobile devices for Automate. You could run your tests on real mobile devices, get 100% accurate results and avoid erroneous simulators. This is a big deal.

Differentiators

While they have a full bouquet of feature, there are 3 areas they differentiate themselves from their competitors.

Usability

BrowserStack is easier to use than some of their competitors that I tried. Even configuring the local testing (which is a tricky concept) was straightforward and I could complete it in a few minutes.

BrowserStack-Home

Technology

They pride themselves on the technology they have built to enable these features, and the continued effort they put into it. 80% of their 50+ strong team is developers. This is not visible but can be a key differentiator in such a developer-centric product.

Local Testing

They enable you to test local setup. Given the fact that most of the time you want to test before you make your application public, this is a powerful feature. This has been done well even though many of their competitors also offer it.

BS-Configureyoursite

BrowserStack-Mobile

Product Development

The entire team is 50+ employees with 80% being developers. Technology consists of but not limited to plethora of languages including Ruby and RoR, Python, C/C++, Java, platforms such as AWS and co-located servers as well as iOS and Android development.

Most of the development effort goes into making the existing features awesome and robust. Some of the areas the team continues to innovate are:

  • Infrastructure of real mobile devices
  • Using better streaming technology to make the screen more responsive
  • Improve Local testing
  • Supporting newer browsers/OS mix

Market

Potentially this is a very big market, given the large number of web developers in the world, and this number is going up. However, this also seems to be a crowded space – there are many players offering similar services that are largely undifferentiated (or have hard-to-perceive differences). Their major competitors are Saucelabs, crossbrowsertesting, Browsershots, etc. SauceLabs primarily focuses on automation testing (its founders include founder of Selenium), Crossbrowsertesting doesn’t have good interface, and Browsershots is very limited in functionality. They are much better placed than their competitors. They aim to reach 1M developers.

BrowserStackFacts & Figures

They have some marquee names in their customer list. Also, their partnership with Microsoft through modern.ie (Microsoft’s attempt to help developers test their app on older versions of IE) has been very beneficial to them in bringing customers in.

BrowserStack-Customers

Product Vision and Strategy

They are totally focused on making BrowserStack a technically and usably superior product in the market by far. Their roadmap for the next 12 months includes ability to testing on real mobile devices (sort of a ‘device farm’ available on demand), improving the product speed and doing more aggressive marketing of the product.

From a vision perspective, Ritesh would like to give a browser-on-demand feel to every developer in the world – it should be so easy to load (just like I open a Chrome browser on my machine), so easy to use, that it feels like a native/local instance of the browser that you are testing on. They intend to be the de-facto standard for web testing world-wide.

BrowserStack-Marketshare

The Road Ahead

There is no reason to believe that in future, web technologies will become so standardized that cross-browser testing will not be required. In fact the trend is in opposite direction, with the proliferation of devices, OS and Browsers, we are getting more and more fragmented. Given that future, BrowserStack is well poised to be the first choice for development teams and companies to do cross-browser testing.

Couple of things they need to watch out for:

  1. Enterprise Software Development Process is where lots of engineering dollars get spent – and that usually goes to large organizations (Microsoft, Oracle, HP, and many other process/QA/IDE companies). How BrowserStack fits into that eco-system may very well determine how big BrowserStack can become – developer driving the adoption may be the start but it is unlikely to be the stable state.
  2. Being a technology focused company and located in India has its challenges. Exposure is limited, and also it is hard to get talent in specialized areas like design and product management. They need to address this, and their focus on marketing over next 12 months (as articulated by Ritesh) will help address this.

They have a bright future ahead, good luck to them!

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Appointy: Building a Marketplace of Services

Appointy_logoAppointy is an online scheduling software for small and medium sized businesses to help them grow exponentially.  Today, you can buy a movie ticket, flight or train ticket online. But what about your Salon, Spa, Doctor, Dentist, Hot Air balloon ride or even your pet groomer? Appointy is helping these businesses start scheduling online and fill their open times by reaching their customers faster. The company is founded by Nemesh Singh (CEO) along with home grown 4 key team members.

Introduction

In the good old days, if you needed a haircut, you would walk down to the nearest salon, wait for a while if you happen to go on the weekend, and get the service you desired. Need to see a doctor? No problem – there is one near the market, you go there and wait for your turn, and get treated. Needed a tuition? You talk to a few friends to find a good teacher, go there to register yourself for a year, and you are all set.

Things have changed over the years:

  • Service consumers like us have much less time and patience to wait for the service to be delivered
  • ‘Talk to a few friends’ has gone away as a reference mechanism because living close-by doesn’t mean knowing each other
  • Services (at least in developed economies like US) have become very expensive, service providers have proliferated, and perhaps most importantly, Internet has penetrated most lives.

So today, if you need a haircut, you search online for businesses in your neighborhood, you look for the one with best references/recommendations, you call up to make sure you will have 0 waiting time when you arrive, and you use your smartphone to entertain you if you do have to wait.

Need a doctor? You go to one or more sites that specialize in doctor search and use their recommendations and appointment engine to book a slot online.

Need a tuition? You will look for one that offers trial classes, you will compare prices in addition to credibility of the teachers, research their past results (which are all available online thanks to user generated content), and only then purchase the services – and you do all this without leaving the comfort of your home.

As you can see, in good old days, you bought the service at the time of consuming the service; you walked in, waited in line, got a haircut, and made the payment. Or you walked in, waited in line, got a prescription written by the doctor, you made the payment. Today, you buy the service (you may or may not make the payment at that point), and arrive to receive the service only when it is your time, thus cutting all the waiting time. Buying the service and consuming the service now happen at different points in time.

If you are a business that sells services to consumers – doctor, dentist, career coach, salon, spa – this behavioral change is very impactful. It means that people want to complete the first part of transaction (buy the service, or at least buy the right to get a service by booking an appointment) without arriving at your business – they will transact through phone, mail, and other technological means rather than being physically present at your business. Technology is disrupting the service purchase, and it increasingly resembles a product purchase.

The act of purchasing a service is usually called ‘book an appointment’. I think this is a very misleading description – it hides the commerce part of the act. Given the fact that the business sets aside a slot of time to serve you when you ‘book an appointment’, this in fact should be no different than ordering a printer on Flipkart or Amazon, or ordering in your nearby BestBuy (if you are in US) and driving down to pick it up from the store.

Appointy offers online scheduling for small and medium sized businesses. Here is a better way of saying this: Appointy is the platform through which small and medium sized businesses sell their services. They have helped their clients sell services worth $350M so far and do about $2M sale a day.

Today, Appointy handles 15K appointments and signs up 70 new businesses every single day and this number keeps growing rapidly. They have about 60K businesses using their platform for their scheduling needs, and they are on almost every major street of US.

Appointy works seamlessly on devices and web – experience on mobile has been specifically designed to fit that form factor – to support their clients who increasingly want to do things on the go.

The Product

The story

It is interesting how the appointment product, that Appointy sells, came about. They have been building an appointment tool since 2006, as plug-in to popular CMS platforms (WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, etc.). This was in response to the need for a scheduling page for many businesses who used these CMS to create their website. Idea was to give it for free, and generate revenue from consulting and development projects from these clients.

It didn’t have much traction initially. When Appointy created another product – a free plug-in to add Facebook ‘Like’ support on a site – they used this plug-in to advertise their scheduling plug-in. The Facebook plugin saw 10K downloads in no time, and the word spread about their appointment tool too.

During 2010-2011, the company went into a financial crunch as the development projects dried up. While looking for other sources of revenue, they realized they had about 20K businesses using Appointy, for free!. They had continued to enhance the software based on customer feedback, and it now had a healthy adoption in the market. They also started noticing the mails from some customers enquiring about paid plans – businesses wanted to get better service and support and they were willing to pay for it!

Company pivoted and made Appointy their core product. They created paid plans and started actively developing the product for multiple verticals, while keeping it a generic product.  And rest, as they say, is history!

Features

Appointy boasts of a rich feature-set, including features like easy scheduling without keyboard, drag and drop rescheduling, real-time notification of information like Facebook or Linked-In, online payments at the time of booking,  staff management, weekly customer satisfaction report to  build online reputation and intelligent CRM with powerful marketing tools to reach customers faster, etc.

Appointy is way ahead of its competitors in terms of feature richness, serving around 100 verticals. Here is a look at some of them.

Customized Appointment Site for business

For a business, it is very important that any add-on software like Appointy’s blends into their offering and not create a disruptive experience for the customers. Appointy allows their clients to either have a standalone page for their appointments (via a subdomain under appointy.com) or embed it in their existing site. It also allows them extensive customization of look and feel to ensure exact match in terms of colors, fonts, layout, etc.

Since people can come directly to the subdomain to subdomain directly, Appointy provides options for creating it like a mini product page with lots of business information.

Appointy embedded in a website

Flexibility in configuring availability by business

A business requires a flexible booking system so that it can optimize the slots available with each of its resources (people or machines). Appointy allows the business to configure different available time slots with different resources, and allows various granularity of slot sizes. It also allows a rich integration with personal calendar for the staff so that they can see all their appointments in 1 place.

Setting flexible hours for staff

Google Calendar Integration

Rich Business Management features

Appointy collects lots of data about business performance. It provides the clients with this data via a rich dashboard for quick review of business performance, and a number of reports. Whether it is analyzing the footfalls in the business compared to last month/year, analyzing this month’s revenue, categorizing customers to analyze trends, you can perform all these analyses through Appointy.

Dashboard with monthly appointment data

Customer Management

Given that Appointy manages all the appointments, it has huge amount of data about customer behavior before, during and after service delivery. Appointy offers a rich CRM layer to help their clients leverage this data. The intent is to help the client grow their business. Creating a last minute deal for the slots going empty, driving a loyalty program by giving special discounts to highly active customers, or collecting feedback from the customers when they are visiting the business or through emails, Appointy allows the business to drive customer engagement and create an extremely positive experience for their (clients’) customers.

Creating Deals Through Appointy

Differentiators

There are many appointment scheduling software in the market. However, there are 3 areas in which Appointy differentiates itself from the competition:

Focus on helping clients grow their business

This is part of their strategy and this shows up in the way features are designed and conceptualized and the way data is used to create business opportunities.

Complete CRM system

They are very focused on helping the business manage their customers right from within Appointy and they are successful in doing so.

Data Analytics Platform

Appointy collects lots of data around business performance and customer interactions and provide a platform for their clients to make data-driven decisions.

Development Process

Team

They are a small team of 10 people, most of whom have been working on it since the product was conceptualized. The product is built on Microsoft technologies – .NET & SQL Server. Each person has an expertise in one technology but can multitask at the same time, and as Nemesh says, “jack of all trades and master of one!” Since it is hard to get good people in the small city they are located in, they have outsourced their support and onboarding.

Product management

To identify new feature needs, they rely on customer data analysis, trial users’ behavior, and feature requests from existing customers. Since their support team engages deeply with the customer, they play a major role in surfacing the customer needs. They rank all these new requests and rank them to come up with most requested features every 3 months, and design it in a generic way so that it works for everyone. Idea is to keep the out-of-box experience simple, but allow rich features to those who need it, without cluttering the experience of those who don’t.

They focus on usability of their features a lot. They measure end customer behavior (using MixPanel and Totango) and analyze the data to come up with improvements, which they test with their customers and roll them out. They also borrow ideas from well-known products out there in calendaring space so that they can provide familiar and high-quality experience to their clients and their customers.

Release management

Their pace of adding features has changed over the years. Five years ago, they would add about 200 small and big features a year. Now they add about 20 features in a year. This is not only because there are no more glaring feature gaps, but also because customers get confused when large number of features are getting added at a rapid pace. This is also the reason why they have moved to a quarterly release rhythm from a monthly release one. To aid the customer in wading through multiple features, they added “settings search” page, similar to what Chrome offers for its settings.

A typical feature will be conceptualized, built and staged in their test area, go through some beta testing by select customers, and rolled into the next quarterly release.

Market

Reach

It is a large market that Appointy operates in. There are 26M SMB in USA alone. Appointy supports 100 verticals (lifestyle and health primarily) which is about 10M businesses. 9M of these still use pen and paper for their scheduling needs.  Appointy’s strategy is to focus on the remaining 1M (and growing rapidly) business since they understand online scheduling. Today Appointy is on almost every major street of USA.

They have about 60,000+ registered businesses globally and are growing at the rate of 5-6% month-on-month. Appointy believes that their product is their strength. They haven’t spent a dollar till date on Sales & Marketing!

Their biggest competitor is pen & paper scheduling. A few others are Bookfresh.com (Acquired by Square now), Mindbodyonline.com ($23 million funded company), Appointment-plus.com and Genbook.com. All of them offer similar services. MindBody is interesting because their strategy is to convert businesses that use pen and paper to come online and start using online tools like those for appointment. So they work with a different customer segment than Appointy’s.

Product Vision and Strategy

Currently, Appointy have about 60K businesses signed up. The goal is to get this number to 250K by 2 years and 1M businesses by 5 years, primarily by totally focusing on helping their clients grow their business and becoming their partner in business creation and development. Today, they create service revenue worth $500K for their clients in a year. They want to help the businesses grow 20-25% in a year by bringing new customers to them.

Couple of ways they want to achieve this:

  1. Local directory service (City Pages) with appointment facility – If someone needs a haircut, they can go to Appointy directory and look up the best one that meets their needs and book it there and then. This creates an alternative source of customers for their clients.
  2. Help businesses sell open times – Every service slot going vacant is a revenue opportunity lost. Appointy intends to create solutions that can allow open slots to be sold and revenue generated. Creating last-minute deals is one service that is offered already, they continue to work on more.

They keep exploring alternative revenue sources too. For example, aggregating all the commerce transactions through a single payment gateway can help get lower transaction costs for their customers as well as get an alternative revenue source for Appointy in terms of per-transaction fees.

The Road Ahead

Appointy has come a long way from where they developed Appointy as a free plug-in. They still have a long way to go. There are a few things they need to focus on:

  1. Position the product better – The product has lots of potential to be used in a wide variety of ways – calling it a scheduling software severely restricts these possibilities. Appointy needs to reimagine the product positioning.
  2. Change the playing field –This is related to previous point: they need to get out of the ‘appointment booking’ vocabulary and get into ‘services marketplace’ vocabulary. They need to talk about and think of themselves as an e-commerce company, à la Flipkart of Services.
  3. Get access to talent pool – They also need to make sure they have access to a large talent pool. They have a huge opportunity in their hands, and they need to leverage it quickly. Sitting in a small city, this may be hard to accomplish.

Local services marketplace is heating up, Amazon, eBay, startups are buzzing with activity. Even though these are different kinds of services (hire a painter for your house for 3 days), it is the same space that Appointy operates in. If Appointy (and other online scheduling software companies) don’t play in this market, they can be disrupted by these services marketplace. Time is right for Appointy to change its game, and a huge opportunity awaits them.  Good luck for a bright future ahead!

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Uniken: Delivering Secure Digital Experience

Uniken has developed a path breaking Secure Digital Platform, REL-ID™ – which delivers ubiquitous, rich multi-channel digital experience with military grade security to the customers, employees and partners of an enterprise. Uniken was founded by Sanjay Deshpande, Prakash Salvi, Nanjundeashwar Ganapathy, and Nilesh Dhande in 2003 in Boston, with the goal of setting up a world class innovation center. Uniken today boasts of 1M+ users on its platform. 

Introduction

Network communication is increasingly becoming more vulnerable to attacks. Most such attacks attempt to steal your personal details, card details (credit card or debit card), and various other information that can be put to malicious use, mostly to steal money. Whether it is Target, JPMorgan  or banks that don’t wish to be named (obviously), our information is never safe enough.

Uniken1

These attacks target one or more of these elements in the network:

  1. Network
  2. System
  3. Application

Network

There are 2 kinds of network that we use. Internet is the ubiquitous network that allows us to connect to rest of the world. Intranet is the company-wide network that allows us to connect with rest of the employees in our organization. Security hazards in both these networks are slightly different

Internet

Internet relies on open standards and some special servers like DNS (to find the IP address from the server name) and routers (devices that keep the route map of entire Internet, sending network packets from a source towards the destination). They control the way network communications occur; compromising these special servers can compromise Internet (or a large part of it).

Intranet

Intranet normally assumes that all the nodes in the network are trustworthy, and it sends traffic to every node in the network so that the intended recipient can take it while others discard it. This poses a big threat if one of the machines is compromised; controlling one machine is enough for the attacker to control the network.

With cloud services (using Internet services to replace Intranet services) becoming more prevalent in organizations, the line between intranet and internet keeps blurring.

System

Communication happens between two systems on any network. If one of the systems (either sender or receiver) is controlled by a hacker, even a secure network cannot protect you from attack and theft. Malware and viruses are the primary ways systems get compromised, which can then take over a communication link or mislead your system into thinking it is communicating with X while real communication is happening with Y (X is real bank site, Y is fake site, stealing your bank customer id/username and password).

Application

A network and the system may be safe, but if the application you are using to do the communication (say the browser, or a Torrent application downloaded from Internet) is compromised, you are exposed to attack and theft. Given the prevalence of web applications, Browsers are increasingly becoming target of attacks. With the plug-in/add-in model that all browsers support, it is becoming easier for attackers to compromise the browser and thereby compromising the communication.

Securing the network must mean securing each of these elements of the network communication. This is what Uniken attempts to do for its customers.

Uniken Advantage

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Uniken has developed a path breaking Secure Digital Platform, REL-ID™ – which delivers ubiquitous, rich multi-channel digital experience with military grade security to the customers, employees and partners of an enterprise. Through REL-ID, the end users enjoy a rich and secure digital experience across devices (Mobiles, Tablets, Laptops and Desktops) and platforms (Windows, Mac OS, Android, iOS and Windows Phone).

Currently, over a million end users, employees and partners of very large enterprises rely on REL-ID for a seamless and secure digital experience. These enterprises have witnessed online fraud being reduced up to 100%.

So what is REL-ID (Relative Identity)? In REL-ID communication, identity of a system is dependent on the other system it is communicating with. For example, if A and B need to communicate with each other, A’s identity is established relative to B, and B is identified relative to A (hence the name Relative Identity) – this identity is relevant only for A-B communication. Such an identity is established when A or B express interest in communicating with each other, thus creating a mutually authenticated channel for communication.

The Uniken Product

Through REL-ID, Uniken offers a unique and scalable way to create a secure private network. This is achieved through 3 sub-systems that Uniken deploys for its clients – REL-ID Apps, REL-ID Network, and REL-ID Platform.

REL-ID Apps

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A REL-ID App is the client application that is responsible for providing a secure way to communicate to other clients or to the server. It serves 2 purposes in the REL-ID eco-system:

  1. Provide consistent experience to users in all device and OS configurations
  2. Provide a secure way to connect the communicating end points (client-client or client-server)

A REL-ID App has 2 parts:

  • App Viewer – A native container of the application that is implemented differently for different platforms and abstracts the device-specificity. It enables creation of hybrid apps that use HTML/ HTML5 and Javascript for user interface and the APIs for accessing device specific functionality for security
  • HTML5 app – A standard application (HTML5, JavaScript) that is hosted within the App Viewer

Given that they are hosted inside the App Viewer, these apps provide consistent experience running on all devices (desktops, laptops, tablets and mobiles) and all operating systems (Windows, MacOS, iOS, Android) thereby providing excellent customer experience.

For example, if a customer of a bank (who is a Uniken Client) has to avail of netbanking, customer will install a REL-ID app that allows netbanking, and transact through it. This app can be installed on any device.

REL-ID Network

As mentioned before, the REL-ID platform secures the network by creating secure point-to-point (application to application tunnel) connection between sender and receiver. Usually, such a secure connectivity is achieved through the use of VPN (Virtual Private Network) which is hard, costly to manage and deploy at a large scale in such point to point configuration. Within REL-ID, this is achieved without using VPN, using their patented technology.

Continuing with the above example, if the bank employee wishes to check his official mail from home using Outlook (an application that is not a REL-ID App), she can launch Outlook securely through the App Viewer and App Viewer will provide a secure connection to the Exchange Server hosted by the bank. The employee doesn’t need to use complicated procedures like RSA Token in order to achieve this.

REL-ID Platform

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REL-ID Platform controls the policies, permissions and access management and authentication technologies. It ensures that REL-ID Apps and data is accessible only to authorized users through registered devices. It also hosts a REL-ID Store which is a library of pre-defined REL-ID Apps ready to be deployed through App Viewer.

Differentiators

Uniken differentiates its offering in 3 areas:

  1. Patented Military Grade Secure REL-ID Private Network – Supports Mutual and Multi-factor authentication, and state of the art App-to-App tunneling technology, enabling VPN-Less remote secure access through minimal infrastructure requirement. It creates a secure and private closed digital ecosystem, accessible to only authorized users and devices. Enabling this through VPN is a much more complex affair and impossible to be rolled out to large user base like retail banking customers
  2. Compelling Secure Digital Experience – Normally, highly secure applications/systems have meant poor usability (because of restrictions placed and the focus on non-functional goal like Security). However, Uniken has focused on making its apps highly usable in addition to highly secure.
  3. Quick Apps Framework – REL-ID Digital Platform comes with inbuilt secure private app store. These Apps are available not only on the Mobile Platforms (phones/tablets) but also on the desktops/laptops.

 

Development Process

Team

Overall product development + R&D team size is more than 80, with most of their core technology stack built in C/C++, with operating system and network programming skills. They also have a team for embedded systems, who work on creating special purpose secure appliances and devices. Apps are developed in standard HTML5 technologies.

They also have a Product Management team that works closely with the sales/marketing teams and the technology R&D and Product Development teams.

Process

Developing a security product doesn’t require a drastically different product development process or tools. They operate in an iterative 3-day development cycle.

One of the interesting aspect of their development approach (and which is different than other classes of software) is to create monolithic components rather than modular components (which goes against standard design principles of software development). This is to avoid creating multiple points of failure, which is critical to avoid from security perspective.

The features that are specific to the customers are built by separate customization teams. Customizations, when required, are small changes on top of the pre-built apps in the system, and can be typically done in a 7-day rapid development cycle. These are later analyzed (every month) and brought back in to the main product development roadmap if the sales/marketing team justifies doing so.

Even as a security product, usability is a very important aspect of their development process, performance is close second.

Market

Their target segment includes banking, insurance and defense, with the largest set of current customers coming from Banking, including one of the largest Public Sector banks in India.

Over past 2 years, REL-ID has been rolled out to over 1 million users and the count is rapidly growing.
REL-ID is being seen as the next generation security technology in the most difficult to penetrate security market of Israel. This technology has also been appreciated by Indian Defense & Navy where Uniken is supporting them in their security related requirements.

The information security market is projected to reach $67 billion (Rs 4.1 lakh crore) in 2013 and grow to $95 billion (Rs 5.9 lakh crore) by 2017, according to research firm Gartner.

On the security front, there are various players like Symantec, RSA, Vasco and on the network and virtualization technologies front, Cisco and Citrix. On digital experience front, Backbase and Adobe offer similar products.

However, none of these are scalable and unified/holistic to offer a secure digital platform especially when it comes to delivering secure digital experiences to consumers.

Roadmap

Their product suite is now fairly complete in terms of features and functionality. Over next 12-18 months, they are focusing on a few key areas:

  1. Make offering more broad across BFSI
  2. Go deep in India – Penetrate further in India (BFSI, Defense)
  3. Strategic expansion in other geographies – Execute opportunities in Israel (to build credibility by competing with other security companies in Israel), initiate penetration efforts in the US market.

As they expand, the key challenges are to manage the marketing and PR, and identifying the right partners in each of these markets.

The Road Ahead

Uniken has a vision that there will be a very large number of private networks in the world (built on top of public internet) using their technology, one for each group of people who want to communicate privately and securely with each other. In a way, this is counter to what Internet stands for (openness), but given the security and privacy issues mushrooming all over, this is a laudable vision. To be clear, this is very disruptive too: there are very large companies out there whose business models depend on the fact that they can ‘see’ the traffic generated through individual systems, be it a system in an organization, at home, on the road, in hospital, or anywhere else (think digital advertising, personalized search, etc.). These models will cease to exist (or have to be significantly rewired) if the vision of secure private networks come true.

Uniken is taking small but confident steps towards that vision. In next 12-18 months, they intend to have 5 million users on their system (from 1M currently). They are confident about their model of building in India and selling to the world, and their experience working with Indian PSUs (Banks, defense) has been great. Their global marketing efforts are underway, and they are establishing themselves as a potent force in the home of security products – Israel.

It is great to see hard-core technology product being made in India and we wish them all the best as they penetrate US and other big markets of the world.

 

 

 

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@Helpshift: CRM for Thumb-driven world

Helpshift is a SaaS CRM platform for the mobile first world. Embracing the new world where messaging is more frequent than emails, it provides an in-app messaging channel of communication to connect users with companies from within their mobile apps. Helpshift is founded by Abinash Tripathy and Baishampayan Ghose (BG) who came together to build a technology company out of India with hacker culture, design thinking and customer service as its core DNA.

Introduction

In a mobile eco-system, an app developer has to focus on 3 things:

Development
Distribution
Monetization

Development is getting easier due to platforms that offer Mobile backend, device abstraction layers, and design tools. Distribution is easy now since app stores take care of that. Monetization is where interesting things happen.

Monetization in Mobile eco-system

The web is largely about publishing and it is only natural that the primary monetization model of the web is through advertising. In the mobile app era, ad revenue are still low (around 25% on iOS), and a large chunk of revenue comes from in-app purchases (sale of product or services within an app, usually digital goods that enhance the app experience) and pay-per-download. The difference is important.

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Ad revenue means that those who pay for the product or service (advertisers) are not the ones who consume these products or services (users). While there is an ultimate dependency on users being satisfied, the impact of an unsatisfied user on revenue is usually delayed and sometimes lost. A user walking away doesn’t immediately impact revenue. Expectation of the user is low because they haven’t paid for it.

For in-app and pay-per-download revenue streams, impact of an unsatisfied user is much more evident because those who pay are those who use, and any dissatisfaction can immediately impact the revenue. A user walking away reduces the revenue immediately. Also, the expectation of the user from the app is high because they paid for it.

Customer Service becomes Key

For a mobile world where ad revenue is a less prevalent means of monetization, it is critical for the products or services to keep their users engaged and satisfied; every single one of them.

Customer Service will become the most important function in this type of economy. A mobile game developer has to now act as a commerce company like Amazon and provide customer service to their customers. For example, even a small game studio (one of their customers) who built a top grossing game is seeing 2000+ tickets a day from their customers and needs to effectively manage this massive volume, solve their customers problems and keep them happy and playing the game.

Helpshift Advantage

Servicing customers is not an easy problem to solve because app stores tend to be the intermediaries between app developer and the users, rather than letting the developer and user connect directly. This is the problem Helpshift helps to solve. They offer a SaaS customer service platform for the mobile first world through which app developers and their customers can have a direct, 2-way communication channel right in the app.

App developers can use the Helpshift SDK for their supported platforms (iOS, Android, Unity, Phonegap and HTML5) to build this 2-way communication channel to service their customers as an experience embedded in their app. For example, the small game studio described above built a self-service feature powered by Helpshift that prevents more than 95% of customer issues from turning into tickets and the developer gets a ticket management dashboard that is built with a scalable real-time architecture enabling their 7 agents to be very efficient.

The Helpshift Service

Helpshift is a helpdesk/CRM solution for mobile world. Once integrated in the app, they offer a large number of features to the developers to keep their customers engaged and happy. Here is a look at some of the important benefits app developers get through from Helpshift.

Get feedback from customers

Getting feedback is as simple as communicating with the customers through the in-app messaging that Helpshift provides. This is especially important for the upcoming apps or small developers that need inputs to tweak their offering and reach a scale when monetization will be a possibility. They can also reach out to inactive users (because inactive users don’t delete the app, they just stop using it) and entice them back with offers etc.

 

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Effective issue resolution

Helpshift captures detailed device diagnostics, customer information, and debug logs, which means the developers can troubleshoot with precision and respond quickly and accurately to their customers

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Reduce ticket volume

Customers can quickly find answers to common questions and don’t need to raise a ticket. Solutions to previously resolved issues can be offered to new customers who face similar problems.

HelpShift-Screenshot4

 

Support global audience

Helpshift auto-caters content in local languages, so they can get the help they need. Admins need to provide the localized version of their help content and Helpshift delivers the right content in the right geography.

HelpShift-Screenshot5

 

Easy Integration

Helpshift provides native SDK and rich documentation and support to the app developer, making the integration very easy and quick for the developers. A typical integration can be done in hour, extra activities like language customization, skinning etc. can take up to a week or two.

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Differentiators

Some things stand out as differentiators:

Robust SDK – SDKs are hard to do as they reside inside an app and can do bad things like leak memory, consume CPU resources and crash apps. Mobile App developers have a very high bar for selecting SDKs and they have hundreds of app developers vouching for them within a year of their formal launch.

Scalable Dashboard – Their web-based management dashboard that their clients use is optimized for workflow efficiency and highly scalable and performant.

Big Data/Analytics – As a CRM for the mobile era, they handle massive volumes of data. For example, a top game will see >100M app sessions in a single day and they have to process up to 10,000 customer tickets in a day. They have built a data platform that can store this volume of data and provide insights to companies that they can use to run their business.

Machine Intelligence – To address the scale, they are developing a lot of machine learning technologies to help augment the human process and make them efficient.

Development Process

Team – Their product team consists of a product lead in San Francisco who works with their customers to create the pipeline of what they need to deliver to the market. He works with the 4 product designers in Pune to put together specs and design the features.

Their engineering team is located in Pune, India, and is organized as follows:

Backend team that is largely working on Clojure (a modern Lisp that runs on the JVM) and a variety of infrastructure to support the backend

Mobile SDK team that delivers their mobile SDK on iOS, Android, Unity and Phonegap

Web front-end team that largely does HTML, CSS and JavaScript

Quality engineering team that work on automated testing

Their choice of programming language for their platform is interesting. Clojure is not a common language that people program in. Of course, it helps that one of the co-founders (BG) is a leading authority on Clojure. It helps in another interesting way, that Abinash was quick to point out: since this is not a programming language that people learn to earn their bread as a programmer, people who know this language are most likely to be passionate about coding, which augurs well for any development team. 99.9% of their hiring is inbound, they don’t post job openings.

Process

As a company, they are very design oriented and spend a lot of time in the design process iterating on the best interaction models for their customers. The spec is iterated on by the product lead, a designer, engineers and quality engineering folks until everyone is satisfied that they have a high quality feature that will be delivered. They then schedule it in a sprint and deliver the feature to their customers.

Given this cross-site team structure, they spend lots of time writing a detailed spec to make sure there is no ambiguity in ‘what needs to be built’. They use Google docs for collaboration across time zones. They then create detailed mock-ups, again with a view to make the requirements crystal clear. Spec cycle can take as little as 1 week or as much as 6 weeks. Feature can ship within 2-4 weeks of spec complete.

They are a young team and take their work as craft. The company believes that software products need to be crafted and not built (see this amazing video of their Product Designer Nilesh at work). This is an entirely different approach to product development.

Market

Their market is largely outside India though they have some fairly large Indian customers like Flipkart and Gaana.com (Times Group). Their customers are some of the largest mobile game developers, mobile first commerce companies etc. Their competitors tend to be the traditional web era CRM platforms like Zendesk and Desk.com. There are a few startups that also compete in this space like Apptentive, Appboy and Hipmob. Currently there are more than a million unique apps published in the various app stores and thousands of new apps are being submitted every day. However, there is very low adoption rate for such SDKs by developers (it doesn’t figure in top 12 developer tools).

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A year into the business since their launch, they have over 300 apps live in the app store using their SDK. In the first year, their focus has been to achieve product market fit and work with a few customers as partners and turn them into advocates, and they have been successful in that so far. In this early market, it is really important to win the innovators / leaders in this space. They are very disciplined about adding features in the product and are not shy to tell a customer that they cannot deliver something, if it doesn’t fit the needs of entire customer base or doesn’t fit their vision for the product. They are focused on delivering high quality and workflow efficiency and want to compete on that rather than just features.

Product Roadmap

From product perspective, they have 2 focus areas in next 12 months

Mobile Marketing Automation

The big problem in Mobile apps is that retention rate (% of users continuing to use the app after first use) is very low.

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The industry as a whole has not matured to this yet and most app companies are busy acquiring new customers or getting them to the point of download.

Web apps / services could market to their users by simply making use of cookies to follow a visitor to their website around on the Internet and displaying a banner (also called re-targeting) or by running email campaigns. The mobile app industry does not allow users to be re-targeted. Apple recently cracked down on apps that were using the IDFA to identify users across apps.

Apple also does not allow apps to collect email addresses of users and hence most apps do not have a signup / registration flow unlike web apps (Apple Appstore Review Guideline (developer login required) #17.2: Apps that require users to share personal information, such as email address and date of birth, in order to function, will be rejected).

Helpshift wants to be the company that helps mobile app developers engage and retain customers by simply enabling them to talk to each other. The key to marketing after all is effective communication.

Machine Augmented Workflows

A small app developer can face enormous scale in mobile when the app goes viral. To help small teams process massive volumes of communication from customers, they are working on features to augment the human workflow to address scale, for example, clustering similar issues using machine learning algorithms and responding automatically in bulk. These are hard to do technically but deliver huge benefits to their customers.

The Road Ahead

Helpshift has spent its first year in building a great technology and building a roster of highly satisfied marquee customers. As they go forward, they now need to focus on scaling marketing and sales to grow the business. This is going to be hard for 3 reasons:

1. They may be too early in the app economy. There are more than 700 million web sites out there, but only about a million apps and the focus for most of them is still on customer acquisition rather than retention. So their growth is tied to how app economy is going to grow
2. Competitors – Large CRM providers have mobile aspirations and small startups are coming up quickly who have similar-looking offering as Helpshift.
3. Long sales cycle – Enterprise sales are quite long, and depends on lots more factor than just product quality and richness.

However, the future looks bright for them, because they are in it for the long haul and willing to wait. They are very focused on making customers happy by providing the best product for their needs and not too focused on their competitors. Given that app economy has to eventually focus on customer engagement and retention, Helpshift is positioned as an early mover and can lead the market with their innovative and high-quality offering.

Advice to product companies in India

Based on their experience, Helpshift founders have a few tips to share with other product companies:

Build a product that your customers love.
Have intense focus on quality, ultimately high-quality products will score in the market.
Be the leader, not follower. Innovate, don’t just copy and create a cheaper product
Focus on people

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Shephertz: Powering the Mobile Backend

ShepHertz endeavour is to make App developers successful on the Cloud, irrespective of the technology or platform on which they are developing. They provide a complete cloud ecosystem for app development – Mobile, Web, Social, Gaming and TV Apps. All their products focus on making App developers’ life easy and augment their business. ShepHertz is founded by Siddhartha Chandurkar who was head of architecture team in Wipro’s Software Products Group before starting ShepHertz in 2010. ShepHertz is already in top3-4 platform providers in its space in the world, and it aims to be #1 over next 12-18 months.

Introduction

I am sure many of you have entertained this thought: this is a nice little idea that I can create an app about. Some of you take this thought a step forward, and try to find an easy way to develop (or get developed) such an app. Then you realize that there is a lot of basic but critical stuff that need to be created – managing user login and profile details, handling communication through emails and notifications, incorporating some social engagement features – before you can truly build your neat little idea. The thought of so much work dissuades you and move on, disappointed a bit, marveling at app developers tenacity a lot, and forgetting your idea for a while.

It doesn’t need to be so. Most apps need lots of these basic services to be built which will not create a differentiated product but it will sink the product if not done well. This is like hygiene factor of the product, crucial for its existence. It would be nice if someone could take over these functionalities and let the app developers focus on real differentiators needed to win the market – neat ideas and awesome user experience.

Enter ShepHertz. If you are a wannabe developer described above, or an individual developer toiling in any part of the world, ShepHertz offers you a suite of back-end services in cloud that allow you to dramatically cut the time you spend building your app. Not only that, since they have a robust infrastructure where these services are hosted, you don’t have to worry about building these services at scale, you just focus on building the experience you want to build.

They have really understood the pain of development; on last count, they had SDK for over 18 platforms and languages, and over 2 dozen services for some of these platforms.

Even though we are talking about individual developer, large app and game development companies and studios are their biggest customers and leverage their platform for faster time-to-market and robust backend services.

Development of app is one part of the story however. For a successful game developer (or a company), development, monetization and distribution are key requirements. Shephertz envisions itself to be a technology agnostic ecosystem provider and offer a wide spectrum of products and tools for App developers.

Sidhhartha says, “ShepHertz endeavour is to make App developers successful on the Cloud, irrespective of the technology or platform on which they are developing. All our products focus on making App developer’s life easy and augment their business.”

The Shephertz Service

ShepHertz provides Complete Cloud Ecosystem for Apps – Mobile, Web, Social, Gaming and TV Apps. To achieve this, they have multiple product lines, catering to different types of developers – right from independent developers, app studios to enterprises.

They offer compelling service to developers:

  • Faster time-to-market: Back-end services take time and careful attention to develop. By managing entire back-end, Shephertz dramatically cuts down the development time and cost very significantly for the developers.
  • Allow infinite scaling: Since they manage all the infrastructure and scale challenges for the developers, the developer doesn’t need to worry about implications of overnight success (many apps lose shine because they can’t handle success). They can continue doing what they do best – create beautiful and useful apps.
  • Pay as you grow plans: Independent developers can start with free plans, paid plans start very low to allow everyone to use it and as they grow, they can buy richer functionalities. This allows them to address all levels of developers.
  • In-app analytics: Getting insight into app usage and user behavior is key to monetization and viral distribution. Shephertz provides easy way for the app developers to access the usage data through multiple visualization means and get better understanding and insights.

 

Offerings

They have many product lines, 2 of the most important ones that we discuss here are their Cloud API (App42 API) Mobile Backend-as-a-service (MBaaS) , App42 PaaS – Platform as a Service and Game development platform (AppWarp). Their AppClay and AppHawk are other platforms that developers can leverage.

Cloud APIs

A Rich set of APIs for multiple platforms and multiple modules in each platform significantly reduces the complexity of developing an app. For an app developer, it is as simple as registering and browsing through the SDK and finding the services that he and leverage, and get coding!

Some of the functionalities for which the APIs exist are:

  • User
  • Push Notification
  • Recommendation
  • In-app analytics
  • Review/rating
  • Many more..

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Multiplayer Gaming Network Engine

For game developers, this product takes the complexity of managing the core multi-player interactions away and helps the developers focus on creating engaging games. Multiplayer gaming engine, protocol for message exchange, room/lobby logic, etc. require lots of efforts to build and are a must for any game. Some of the features of this product are:

  • Connection Resiliency
  • Room Properties
  • Match-making
  • Many more..

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Differentiators

Some things stand out as differentiators:

  • Eco-system approach: They are an eco-system provider, unlike other other competitors who offer one piece of the puzzle and the developer has to work with multiple vendors to get a complete solution
  • Technology and Access channel agnostic – They have support almost all popular platforms and technologies through their native SDKs
  • Comprehensiveness: They have a very large number of APIs and services, much more than their competition. This allows them to attract different types of developers because they can cater to all.
  • Large Developer Traffic: They have one of the highest Alexa ranking in the industry, and it has been steadily getting better (Global: 32,214, India: 1656).

 

Development Process

Working with multiple product lines for a startup can be very challenging. Their teams are aligned based on Products. Each product is owned by one of the Product Owners. The Product owner is responsible for all the activities with respect to the product – Technology, Support, Team management, Blogs etc. Common functions like graphics, digital marketing team, etc. are shared by the Product Owners coordinated by the Marketing head.

Development team works using Agile development process which allow them to come up with robust features in a very short time. Instead of documents, they discuss things on whiteboard and take pictures and save the images for record. They have regular vision definition and alignment meetings to discuss strategic issues so that the adhoc meetings have direction and purpose.

It is very tempting for a startup to listen too much to a single early client and end up building products that are too specific and don’t address the market. It is important to keep the balance, and Shephertz has done it well. Siddhartha says, “The germination of any product happens with the combination of two things :- The founders vision on a perceived need which does not exist in the market i.e. the customer does not even know that he has a need and secondly from market research, customer feedback and competition. We have come up with the product line based on what we thought does not exist and later fined tuned it with customer feedback.”

Market

Size

Number of apps are growing steadily and rapidly over last 4-5 years. For example, see the trend on iTunes App Store

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Data Source: 148apps.biz

Marketing

Shephertz is in a good position to tap into this growth. Now that their product lines are fairly complete, their focus is 2-fold:

  • Handling growth as developers come on the platform
  • Manage local offices in different countries to tap into local developer eco-system

 

They are already growing at tremendous speed, and their target is to grow 20X over next 12 months.

Most of their marketing is content marketing – they spend lots of effort in writing in detail about their SDKs, its usage, sample code and examples – essentially lots of supporting content to help developers use their platform effectively and quickly. This has helped them attract a large developer crowd, and build their brand. They also Blog in multiple languages in order to reach and support local developers. There are thousands of apps live that use their libraries and the number is steadily going up.

They also need to deal with the issues of being a hard-core tech company that is based in India and not in US:

  • Branding and Credibility – Made in India brand is still not catchy enough world-wide and so they need to struggle extra-hard to build a credibility of the brand world-wide. This problem is largely solved now with many big customers vouching for them.
  • Lack of eco-system proximity – Developer eco-system is much larger in US than in India, and most of the action is there. It also becomes hard to attract investment and attention.

Competition

Hot segments bring in hot competition. Since they have multiple product lines, they have different competitors for different lines. Parse (acquired by Facebook), Kinvey, Photon and Heroku are some of their competitors or different lines. With Rackspace, Salesforce.com, Amazon, and Google all making a play for this space, competition is really hot and getting hotter in this space. However, given the fact that their product is fairly complete at this point, they are ahead of most of their competitors.

The Road Ahead

There are 3.2 million developers out there and about 2 million apps currently and steadily going up. Given the way web is going mobile, this is a market that is on a steep upward trend. By being the back-end provider for the app and games in a platform and technology agnostic manner, Shephertz can be a game-changer for the industry. With the comprehensive offering, end-to-end solutions approach, and push to be present in all geographies where developers are present, Shephertz is on a good growth path. It is already in top 3-4 game backend provider category.

They do need to simplify their marketing message on their website and otherwise to be less techie and more business-focused so that the value is readily apparent to even a casual visitor to their site – currently it is too technology focused.

This is one of the few technology and platform companies from India with a potential to be a billion dollar one and we wish them good luck!

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Indix: Building the world’s product information repository

Indix is a SaaS + Big Data product intelligence platform that allows businesses to organize, analyze, visualize and act on the world’s product information in real-time. Indix uses big data analytics and visualization to deliver actionable insights. Indix also offers APIs for developers to build product rich applications. It was founded by former Microsoft VP, Sanjay Parthasarathy, who previously led billion dollar divisions at Microsoft. Other co-founders include Sridhar Venkatesh, Rajesh Muppalla, Satya Kaliki and Jonah Stephen Jeremiah. Indix is backed by prominent angel investors as well as Avalon Ventures and Nexus Ventures. 

Introduction

Indix is a platform that intends to be the single complete repository of information about the world’s products that are currently spread all over the Internet.

Consider this scenario: if you are responsible for analyzing price trends of a brand that you manage (say a fast-selling mobile phone) to ensure the market is healthy, you will do one of these two things:

  • Search for the product, filter the results that indicate price, and go through the pages, doing this every few days (or hours)
  • Identify a few top sites that sell the item and monitor prices on these site, every few days (or hours)

As you can imagine, this can be a very time consuming and inaccurate exercise, and may not leave you with enough time to act on the information you gain, (e.g. Why is Flipkart dropping its price every few days while Tradus does not?).

Using the Indix App for retailers and brands, that is built on top of the Indix product intelligence platform, you can get all these numbers from across the Internet at your fingertips, and get access to insights like price drops, new sellers, etc. This allows you to consume this real-time data and get on to your real job: analyzing price trends across various slices and dices of data.

Indix-Apparels

indix-graph2

It is very important to be clear on one point, a point which Sanjay (founder and CEO) emphasized in our interview: Indix is building a platform that provides access to the world’s product information, with all product attributes, in a structured form; the possible ways of using this data are limitless. This Indix App for retailers and brands is just one of the possible uses. A developer ecosystem around the Indix platform will create extremely innovative applications on this platform soon.

The Company

The company was founded to address three problems:

  1. Offer a good view of the products out there to product managers by providing a comprehensive and structured product repository. Today, searching for products using existing search engines yields unstructured and error-prone results, whereas Indix intends to offer structured information about products of the world to everyone.
  2. Today, product managers spend most of their time collecting data. Indix aims to reduce this time to next to nothing. This will allow product managers to do the work that is valued most – analyze data and generate insights for their business.
  3. Enable product awareness of applications, to the point of letting users complete the purchase cycle everywhere a product is mentioned. For example, on whichever page a product is mentioned (say a blog that refers to the recent ad of a deodorant), there can be automatic workflow created by an app (which uses the Indix platform to access details of the product) so that the reader can interact with the product information, get more details and insights, and buy the product from a merchant he likes.

Indix is headquartered in Seattle and has a total team size of 42, with six people based in the Seattle office focused on business development and marketing, and 36 people based in the Chennai office focused on the product development.

It is a startup with a deep engineering focus and great culture.  Here are a few things they do to foster a good workspace environment:

  1. They have an internal app that assigns every engineer a Super Hero status and tracks their attendance at their daily standup.
  2. They have treasure hunts / bounty hunts that involve the engineering teams taking on coding challenges.
  3. They have a monitor that screams when a build breaks and in the future, it will have a missile launcher, which will send a missile in the direction of the engineer who broke the build!

The Indix Platform

Indix is a SaaS + Big Data product intelligence platform that gathers product data from Internet, processes it, and makes it available in a structured form. Comparing two products listed on two different websites and figuring out whether these are the same products or not is a very hard problem, and Indix does a great job in product comparison by doing deeper searches and using multiple attributes to compare. They have a few hundred million products (along with rich attributes) collected so far and their target is to have a billion products on their platform.

The platform offers access to developers for its data who are then able to build various applications on top of this valuable stream of data. While price is the most important attribute of a product, there are many other attributes which can be interesting to app developers and their users.

Currently, Indix offers two products:

  1. Indix App for brands and retailers for better and faster market and product analysis.
  2. Developer API set to access their platform data and build rich applications.

Indix app is priced per user per month, and Developer API access is per company per month.

Indix App

Indix app allows brand managers to explore unlimited product, competitors, and categories; monitor various channels through which the product is being sold; and gain insights on pricing, assortment, and Minimum Advertised Price (MAP), etc.

The way it works is as follows:

  1. The brand manager logs into the app and selects a few products and categories that (s)he is interested in tracking.
  2. The brand manager can also select one or more competitors to track.
  3. Once these are set up, the brand manager can view the dashboard to analyze trends on assortment, prices, promotions, availability, competition, and social news, etc. within selected categories of the products.
  4. Insights can be obtained through the analysis center. These could be analyses done by the brand manager as well as pre-defined insights thrown in by the app (see screenshots below)

indix-app

 

indix-app2

 

Developer API

indix-developerSince Indix is primarily a platform, its value will be best leveraged when outside developers use the data to build rich applications for users and businesses. Developers get access to the large repository of product information, which is easily accessible via RESTFul API that the Indix platform exposes.

 

indix-searchstoresDifferentiators

Here are a few USPs of Indix that are worth noting:

  • Intuitive and visual interface – The Indix app is very user-friendly and designed to be intuitive, with customer use-cases in mind. It provides insights on pricing, assortment, markdown, availability, categories, and competition in real-time in a highly visual fashion; making it easier and faster for product managers to make data-driven decisions.
  • Scale – They have tens of millions products and billions of price points and other product related information. There is no limit on the number of categories, prices, or competitor’s products you can track.
  • Data quality – Their data is highly robust and accurate, thanks to their deep expertise in big data and analytics. They continue to improve their matching algorithm to do deeper comparisons (compare multiple attributes before declaring products the same).
  • Customer Service  – They have integrated help and feedback systems within their product and are very focused on providing an outstanding customer support service. If their testimonials are anything to go by, they have many happy customers.

Market and Roadmap

This is a big market that Indix is operating in. Currently, their product is targeted at pricing analysts, brand managers, category/merchandising managers, and others involved with product information at brands and retailers, broadly referred to as product managers. There are millions of product managers in the US alone.

This is a hard problem to solve, and there aren’t many companies building product intelligence platform at this scale. Some companies have worked in category-specific or attribute-specific (like price) product data space, but not in a category-agnostic way Indix is doing it – Black Locus (acquired by Home Depot), decide.com (acquired by eBay), and Kosmix (acquired by Wal-Mart). So this is an interesting space for them to be in.

Over the next 6-12 months, their priority is to sign-up additional customers, incorporate their feedback, invest in marketing, and achieve an even bigger scale for product data in their platform. There are more than 1 billion products and services on the Internet. Today, the Indix platform has tens of millions of products, billions of price points, and other product related information, and they continue to add new products. They mentioned that the next 6-12 months are crucial towards realizing their vision of organizing, analyzing, and visualizing the world’s product information and making it accessible and actionable in real time.

They also continue to work on refining and improving their API set based on feedback. 

The Road Ahead

As Sanjay writes in their launch post,

“In the future, all applications will be product-aware, just as applications today are people and location aware. The same way Facebook connects you with people and Foursquare connects you with places, Indix can help connect you with products.”

It is a very powerful vision that Indix is running with. They are enabling this by

“..[doing] the hard work of finding, understanding, categorizing, normalizing, matching and, in general, structuring the vast amount of product-related information on the Internet. Our ultimate goal is to provide a view of the Internet through the product lens”.

This is a tough and inspiring challenge for the company, to organize the world’s product information. However, the impact this can have is equally inspiring and this is what is driving the company forward.

Sanjay ran billion dollar businesses at Microsoft, and this one surely is headed in that direction.

Sanjay’s Advice to Startups

  1. To get a billion dollar idea, you need to work on very hard, almost impossible problems. What we are working on at Indix is very hard, and it is inspiring.
  1. Build a strong culture and pour your soul into it. Everyone has a personality, whether writing code, doing design, managing HR – their work should reflect their personality.
  2. Hire great people whom you can trust.
  3. Create a healthy balance between what you think is right (vision and mission) and what customers want; don’t go overboard on one side or the other. We talked to 100 people (not only customers) before we built a line of code, to learn from them. Started coding in Jan 2012, did 7 versions, threw away the first 6. We built for about 6 months (3-4 prototypes), and only then started talking to customers, as guidelines and not as requirements. Only when the product was fleshed out in some detail (alpha release) did we start looking at what customers wanted, and after beta, started taking feature requests.
  4. I don’t believe in Minimum Viable Product (MVP) – critical mass of product is more important, at least in the enterprise space. I had the luxury to do so since I had funding, but it is an important point to think about.
  5. If you build for the US, one of the cofounders must have had significant experience living in the US, or one of the co-founders should move.
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MyParichay – Find jobs by leveraging your network

MyParichay is India’s Largest job search and career network on Facebook. The company consists of a dedicated group of successful entrepreneurs, HR professionals, and computer scientists that want to capture the spirit behind a Parichay (an introduction) from a known person to transform how people achieve their career potential and companies find the best quality talent. The company’s technology prowess and deep understanding of the industry have encouraged several corporates including Genpact, 24X7, IBM, PWC, Grollier, Airbus, EXL Services, Cognizant, Yahoo India and Convergys to adopt MyParichay solutions. MyParichay has two product lines; one a social job board for job seekers, which is an internet consumer product and the other a set of social recruiting management products viz. Employee Parichay and Company Parichay for employers and recruiters. Here we focus on the social job board for job seekers, their B2C product.

The Company

Every job seeker knows that it is much easier to get an interview call when your resume has been referred (or at least forwarded) by an employee of the company, than if you post it through regular job boards or company’s website. However, it is not always easy to find out who amongst your friends and acquaintances can help refer you within the company. Most people still rely on regular channels of job search, which continue to yield poor results.

MyParichay (like other companies in this space) intends to solve this problem of discovery by allowing job seekers to discover their connections (Facebook and LinkedIn for now) within the companies where they see a relevant job opening, and allows them to request them to refer their resume.

It is a social recruitment platform that believes in the power of a ‘Parichay’ – the Sanskrit term for introduction. It was established in 2012 and is co-founded by Ranjan Sinha and Vivek Sinha.

Considering that 6 out of 10 job seekers are only on Facebook and that according to a study by ERE.net, chances of finding a friend increases by 54X when applied through a friend, MyParichay brings the power of social network to Job seekers. Their target segment is 21-30 yrs. which spends a lot of time on Facebook and uses Facebook as both a personal and professional network. They offer a job board for job seekers larger than Naukri and Monster combined! Their job seekers app is in Facebook’s Top 10 business app.

The Product

MyParichay allows their users to sign-in using Facebook (the only sign-in option) and look for jobs in companies, hence acting like a regular job board with a large number of job openings posted. You can add your Linkedin network to your MyParichay account to leverage your connections on LinkedIn. Every job search result is tagged with a list of people from your network who are connected with this company and can potentially refer you. The site then allows the user to apply to these companies by requesting their friends to refer them, thereby increasing the chances of an interview call significantly.

(All pictures and names have been blacked out in screenshots below for privacy reasons)

myparichay1myparichay2myparichay3myparichay4Technology

Their proprietary ConnectedJobs technology is built on a combination of Java, Python, and various Open Source projects. They use a combination of NoSQL and SQL data stores and use AWS. Their website is Android and iPhone friendly today and they will continue to invest in improving the website experience on handheld devices. They are also planning to bring to market a native android app that leverage key capabilities of mobile devices, such as OTT messaging and geo location, to deliver a unique social experience within the career enhancement context.

Differentiators

Their biggest differentiator is the size of the job pool that they have, and which continues to grow. They have tie-ups with various other job boards and thereby act as an aggregator of various jobs out there. They also have tie-ups with various large companies, which allow them early access to the jobs.  They continue to sign job board partnerships around the world and will announce three significant partnerships this quarter; they are also building their own job crawler.

Another advantage of social recruitment solutions like MyParichay is that by using social networks, they provide transparency whereby both job seeker and employer can learn more about each other, much before serious discussions have started. With its B2B solution, MyParichay closes the loop on referrals by both making it easy to refer (for employees) as well as making it easy for companies to track these referrals using MyParichay’s system.

Market

While job portals proliferate in India, hiring good talent remains a tough problem for organizations. Referral continues to remain best channel for good hires, but referrals account for a very small % of total available profiles. Hence it is not surprise that recruiting through social media (and hence job search through this channel) is a hot area, and MyParichay is positioned well. They have signed up some marquee clients and continue to do well in that area. They have 24M+ profiles in their database and continue to sign-up 12000 profiles a day (more than Naukri’s 11,000 a day). This demonstrates the traction they have in the market.

Among their competitors in Social Recruitment space, Career Sonar is best known, with very comparable offering. In addition, traditional job boards are their competitors, as well as their potential partners. Ranjan Sinha, Co-Founder, says, “Apply Button is our competitor, not the job portals.” They recently signed up a deal with Shine.com (HT Media has a stake in myParichay) to allow social bar on Shine.com site, essentially replacing ‘Apply’ with “MyParichay Apply”.

The Road Ahead

Recruitment has always been a social process. Good companies and roles are found by word-of-mouth, good hires are found through referrals and from passive pool of candidates (who are not looking for jobs). Interview process is more about knowing each other and liking each other than comprehensive evaluation of capabilities (which is anyway impossible to do in the short interview window). Job boards traditionally have made it a transactional activity where recruitment has primarily become a resume collection program. Social recruitment tools offer a much needed push towards making hiring social again.

MyParichay is uniquely placed in this space with a product that has excellent traction in the market and which offers some very good capabilities. Here are a few areas that they will do well to focus on as they go forward in this space:

  1. User Experience: Experience of their web site is decent but need to be at par with other consumer products their target segment is used to – it looks more web-like and less app-like.
  2. Relevancy of connections: Currently, I need to choose who do I go through if I have more than one connection who can refer me to a job. Clearly, with more data at their disposal, myParichay is (or should be) in a better position to recommend the person I should go with to have the best results. This will make the process more effective and seamless for the job seekers.
  3. Job Search vs. Recommendation: Job Search is going to be obsolete concept, given that many roles names and job definitions continue to evolve rapidly to fit a globalized world’s new requirements. Given that myParichay knows my profile details, it should be able to recommend jobs for me based on elements of my profile and my online behavior.

MyParichay is in a growing segment and has carved out a good position for itself, and they seem to be on track for a fast growth. Future seems very bright for them.

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Reduce Data – Programmatic Advertising Platform

Reduce Data is a programmatic advertising platform. Reduce Data helps advertisers buy media efficiently using programmatic means – machine learning, real-time data driven optimization and real-time bidding. Asif Ali is the founder of Reduce Data.Asif has over 15 years of technology experience. He previously ran ZestADZ, a mobile ad network (acquired by Komli in 2011). ZestADZ was a global mobile ad network with presence and advertisers in over 25 countries. Before that, Asif was the CTO / Co-founder of a wireless and enterprise startup – Threesixty Technologies Sdn Bhd, in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. ThreeSixty maintained app stores on Carriers, built and rolled out mobile commerce solutions such as prepaid SMS topup solutions and had the top 2 telcos – Maxis, Celcom, Top banks – Public bank and Ministry of Education, Malaysia as its customers. The current team strength I s about 15 with 4 people in US, rest of the team is in India. The team is roughly 40% sales, 40% engineering and 20% operations.

The Company

Reduce Data is an early-stage company offering a programmatic advertising platform. They pivoted recently from being an analytics-focused company to a company that offers an integrated platform for media buying and analytics.

Asif says the idea came about in his last ad network, where he found advertisers unable to effectively measure and optimize ad campaigns across various networks. The scale and size of data that was being generated in advertising was huge and there were very few platforms addressing this scale to drive efficiencies. It is also estimated that nearly 30% of media spends are wasted. Reduce Data was started as an attempt to solve this problem.

Reduce Data is what is called as a Display Advertising Platform. Display Advertising Platforms typically focus on Banner Advertising as opposed to delivering text ads within search results (like the way Google does) – see understanding display advertising for a simple view of the display advertising platform and marketplace.

Any company that needs to buy advertising typically buys media from various platforms (this varies, depending upon their goals). Display advertising is one such kind of platform where media can be bought.

Let’s say if Flipkart wants to buy media to promote its new tablets-only store.

  1. They will sign up with Reduce Data
  2. Either through self-service or with the help of Reduce Data’s team, they will identify and select the right target audience and segment of traffic (for example – Male / Females, aged 25 and above in urban centers only and those who are available within a list of top 10 cities)
  3. Assuming that such audience information is available, Reduce Data’s team will make that available and kick start the campaign.

When a user visits a web page

  1. The publisher (like Times of India) auto requests the ad exchange for an ad
  2. Ad exchange will in turn send this request to Reduce Data and various other buyers to ask them whether they want to buy the user.
  3. Reduce Data, will check whether it has relevant information about the user.
  4. Reduce Data’s machine learning algorithms predict whether the user can be bought and if so at what price.
  5. Assuming that Reduce Data wants to buy the user on Flipkart’s behalf and assuming that this user belongs to the right target audience that Flipkart wants, it will bid and either win or lose the auction.
  6. On a win in the auction, the Flipkart ad is shown to the user.

This automated auction called Real-time Bidding (RTB). This entire process 1,2 and 3 happens in 1/10th of a second.

The Product

Reduce Data provides the best of programmatic and a measurement platform in a single platform to its customers (advertisers and ad agencies). The programmatic ad platform allows them to display ads for their clients on a large number of publishers’ sites, and for the most targeted set of audiences. The measurement platform allows their clients to analyze the impact of their campaigns and make the most efficient utilization of their ad budget. Such an integrated platform allows them to offer a low-cost, integrated solution to its customers.

Some of the features of the platform are:

  1. Programmatic Buying capabilities: Reduce Data is focussed on delivering ROI by leveraging superior programmatic approaches.
  2. Measurement and Programmatic in a single Platform: Advertisers using Reduce Data can leverage Reduce Data’s analytics to measure advertising spends through the same platform they use to purchase ad space.
  3. Rich Media and Video Campaigns: Reduce Data allows video campaigns to be run in addition to other media-rich ad campaigns such as MRAID-compatible (a mobile rich media standard) HTML5 mobile campaigns.
  4. Web and Mobile Advertising: Allows brand advertisers to reach both web and mobile users using a single platform.
  5. Retargeting: Re-targeting enables advertisers to follow the user after a visit to a website. This approach generally enables better conversions and improves ROI for the advertisers.
  6. Audience Segmentation: Reduce Data has partnership with three data providers to enable delivery of highly segmented audiences (available currently for US and UK, more international data providers are being added).
  7. Self Service Console: Reduce Data enables self-service advertising through an easy-to-use, self-service user interface to manage the campaigns and check its effectiveness.

Technology

Core of Reduce Data is a technology platform that participates in Real-Time Bidding as a Demand Side Platform(DSP). Given the fact that the real-time bidding protocol is run across these players for every visit to a site, the turnaround time from a DSP has very stringent requirements. Typically, an Ad exchange expects the response from a DSP within 100 milliseconds; including network latency (turnaround time includes time taken to process the bid request, and time taken for the message to travel from exchange to DSP and back). Hence there are 2 technology challenges they need to solve:

  1. Low response time: The time taken to process the bid request by Reduce Data software has to be very small. Reduce Data currently can process a request in 4-6 milliseconds.
  2. Low network latency: The time taken for roundtrip between Ad Exchange server and Reduce Data server. Hence the location of the servers matter. They have tried to use Amazon Cloud, but aren’t happy with the costs and latencies, and are deploying datacenter infrastructure close to the supply side partners and exchanges.

Differentiators

This is a highly competitive market and many of the features they offer are standard features offered by lots of players. A few features that differentiate them from rest of their competition are:

  1. Measurement Tools: Reduce Data provides an integrated platform which very few players offer. However, integrated doesn’t mean reduced set of features –Reduce Data offers full blown real-time reporting that enables advertisers to effectively measure and optimize their ad spends without having to use a third party platform.
  2. Superior programmatic technology + big data driven optimization
    1. Real-time machine learning systems with various algorithms for various needs
    2. Big data technology driven real-time data processing / analysis capability which is extensively used in the feedback loop to drive highly optimized ad spends

Market

According to EMarketer’s latest forecast, RTB (Real-time bidding, the programmatic advertising) portion of digital display ad spending is steadily increasing, from 8% in 2011 to 19% in 2013, and projected to be around 29% in 2017 – $8.49 billion – a huge opportunity.

Reduce Data has a dedicated Sales team, and even though they have launched very recently, they see 15-16 leads a week, and all their current clients are paying ones. They expect to reach $2-3M revenue within next 12 months.

Building Credibility

They need to build credibility in the market that is filled with competition. To ensure that brand gets built quickly, Asif has moved to US, and is focused on marketing Reduce Data. Through tech meetups, publishing whitepapers, speaking engagements, getting published in print media, and of course by delivering good value to his clients, he hopes to build Reduce Data into a credible player in this space.

India offering

They recently launched an India offering too. This is a smart move from them because this helps them to position themselves as a big player in this space which has presence in multiple countries. India being an important market, some exchanges like Facebook Ad Exchange, tend to give preference to companies that have India presence when they let DSPs connect.

Future releases of their platform are likely to focus extensively on improving algorithmic and data processing capabilities.

Competitive Landscape

This is a highly competitive market. There are a large number of very well-known DSP in the market: Adroll, Dataxu, Mediamath, Turn, Google (InviteMedia), AppNexus, Komli Media, etc. Since all of them connect to same Ad exchanges (and hence have the same access to ad inventory) and offer similar functionality, it is hard to distinguish between them. Competition is based on pricing and ease-of-use. Such a crowded space with little differentiation will mean that prices will be squeezed and this will impact new players like Reduce Data.

If we do try, we can see 2 areas of competitive differentiation (other than pricing, of course!):

  1. Inventory access: Though all DSPs aim to connect to all Ad Exchanges, some have better access than others. For example, Facebook hasn’t allowed all DSPs to come on their Exchange, and so it might disadvantage a few DSPs. Similarly, some publishers (too specialized, localized, etc.) may be available only some specialized exchange, and not all DSPs may be connected to them.
  2. Effectiveness of data-based decisions: DSPs use data to make the decision about which impression to bid on. Decisions depend on proprietary algorithms, data available about the user and processing power, and this distinguishes different DSPs.

As the space evolves, vertical integration is a possibility – DSPs getting acquired by (or acquire) upstream or downstream players. Such a consolidation is more imminent as RTB grows at a rapid pace and become critical to display advertising.

The Road Ahead

Display Advertising is undergoing significant changes over last few years, with technology creating never-before opportunities for innovation as well as disruption. Demand-Side Platforms have the potential to make media buying and campaign management extremely effective and provide significant ROI to the advertisers. Reduce Data is in a very competitive space with large and well-known competitors. This industry will evolve along 3 dimensions:

  1. Data-driven decisions: One of the promises of DSP is to offer compelling value using deep data analysis. Reduce Data needs to continue to focus on its machine learning and big-data capabilities.
  2. Tools: Brand safety, Measurement, ROI calculators, more variety of algorithms etc. are keys to interest brand marketers to switch to new platforms and Reduce Data will continue to innovate and rollout various tools as per the needs of the marketplace.
  3. Media focus – DSPs tend to focus either on Video, Online or Mobile and that is going to continue for a while. Reduce Data will eventually need to choose a sweet spot for itself in one media.

One of the things going for Reduce Data is the credentials of its founder: Asif has deep experience in the advertising space from his prior company (which he sold to Komli). Another is the fact that they are an engineering driven organization and are focussed evolving the platform faster than the incumbents in the marketplace.

If they execute well on these dimensions and leverage their technology focus and industry connect, they have a real good chance of becoming a force in this fast-evolving space and carve out a name for themselves.

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PromptCloud is a powerful cloud-computing DaaS (Data as a Service) engine involved in ‘Big’ data acquisition

PromptCloud is a powerful cloud-computing DaaS (Data as a Service) engine involved in ‘Big’ data acquisition. PromptCloud crawls data that’s spread all across the web and converts it into meaningful insights. It was founded by Prashant Kumar. Before starting PromptCloud in late 2009, Prashant was at Yahoo! with their data team working on Yahoo! Frontpage which was one of its hottest products back then. He was mostly involved in data crunching using big data technologies that were still evolving. Prashant graduated with a B.Tech-M.Tech dual degree in CS from IIT Kanpur in 2007. He was later joined by Arpan Jha in 2012, who is a Carnegie Mellon alumnus and took over the Products & Market Strategy function. Prior to joining PromptCloud, Arpan has worked as a Consultant with KPMG & Deloitte.

Introduction

Let’s consider a scenario: say pn.ispirt.in decides to launch a section on the website where they rank all “Made in India” products based on popularity, usage, quality, and some other criteria. One approach is for them to go out and subscribe to the news feed of all important news sites all over the world and try to track all the news and events about all ‘Made in India’ products. This data can then be used to rank them. Given that data about popularity, usage and quality can be generated all over the web (a product review here, a customer complaint there, a Facebook mention, a tweet, a youtube video gone viral, a buyer praising the product on his blog, you get the idea), such a list of websites will be incomplete at best, and the volume of data will be too much to handle for the ProductNation editors.

Enter PromptCloud. PromptCloud offers its Data-as-a-Service for clients like ProductNation who need large volume of data from all over the web for further analysis (this is just one of the use cases, PromptCloud offer many more services). Continuing with the same example, ProductNation and PromptCloud work through following steps:

  1. ProductNation provides 2 pieces of information to PromptCloud: a list of websites they are interested in, and a list of keywords they are interested in
  2. They will also mention how frequent they want the data to be crawled which is dependent on ProductNation’s estimate of how fast their data is likely to change. If they need fresh data (say every few minutes), they purchase PromptCloud’s ‘Low-latency Crawl’ service
  3. PromptCloud will crawl all the data, matching keywords to find relevant content, and then convert it into structured data (XML, CSV, XLS, etc.) for ProductNation’s consumption
  4. ProductNation can do 2 things with the data
    1. It can fetch all the data through API calls and download them into its own servers for further processing. This will be done at a regular schedule, agreed with PromptCloud
    2. ProductNation may not want (or may not have capability) to host all this data. So they buy PromptCloud’s Hosted Indexing Service and they can now let their editors search this index and only fetch relevant content.
    3. When ProductNation gets the data, they are also provided a relevance score for each data item (as judged by PromptCloud’s algorithm) so that they can optimize their analysis efforts and keep their results very relevant.

If Internet was small, say 1000 sites, this would be a trivial problem to solve – just get all the data and be done with it. Scale of Internet (and the rate at which data is growing) makes this a complex problem to solve. This is a technology problem which needs to solve 4 critical issues:

  1. Velocity: How fast and how quickly can data be fetched?
  2. Structure: How can the data be structured meaningfully when data on the web is largely unstructured?
  3. Volume: How much data can be stored and processed efficiently?
  4. Relevancy: How relevant the data is to the keywords supplied, and to the overall intent of this data crawl?

PromptCloud is a technology company which aims to address all these issues and offer services to businesses who need to analyze web data at scale.

The PromptCloud Service

Offerings

PromptCloud offers services built on top of their cloud-computing DaaS (Data as a Service) engine. They offer custom crawl services to their clients. Specifically, following offerings are available:

Their three primary offerings are:

  1. Site-specific crawl and extraction: Given a set of sites and fields to be extracted, their crawlers will fetch relevant data from the web, which then gets converted into structured data and delivered to the clients via API
  2. Low-latency Crawls: These are highly optimized crawls which can fetch data in intervals as low as 5-10 minutes
  3. Hosted Indexing: Structured data created from custom crawls is hosted and indexed and exposed to clients via query APIs.

PromptCloud Service Offerings

Features

They offer following features as part of their services:

  1. Deep data crawls- all past data on the site
  2. Structured data feeds are available to the clients daily/weekly/n times a day
  3. Ability to supply only incremental data
  4. Crawling data from AJAX/non-AJAX based sites
  5. Indexing of data as per requirements
  6. Custom Analytics

Their technology stack uses a lot of open source solutions right from Linux, Hadoop and NoSQL to various cloud and cluster management tools. These are augmented with custom components they have written to solve their unique challenges and serve their customer needs better. They serve data to their clients via API which can later be synced to their FTP, AWS S3, Google Drive or DropBox accounts.

Differentiators

Offering web-scale crawling services is a hot space and there are many competitors with similar services. When looking at their differentiators, 3 things stand out:

  1. Vertical-Agnostic: Their offerings are based on URLs and the keywords they use to filter the results of their crawl, so they are independent of verticals, and can cater to a large number of verticals. This also helps them quick turnaround on new features which then become available to all their clients.
  2. End-to-end Monitoring – Web sites regularly have dynamic content on their pages, and things can change pretty quickly. While most other providers offer a do-it-yourself solution (essentially making you solve this problem), PromptCloud monitors structure changes on the web and supports clients until data gets imported into their systems.
  3. Large-scale complex crawls – Managing large-scale crawls is one of PromptCloud’s USPs. AJAX elements on the web sites make the pages unique and dynamic. PromptCloud’s platform can crawl pages that use AJAX and interactions very well.

Market

Being a technology-centric company, CTO or Product guys on client side are the decision-makers and buyers for their product. Their adoption has been good so far, catering to clients in US, UK, Canada, Western Europe, Singapore, Hong Kong etc. Being a vertical agnostic solution, they have clients from all domains be it e-commerce, travel, market research or classifieds and across the globe. They are an early growth stage company and are growing at the rate of 4X in revenues each quarter, with healthy pipeline of clients.

Since they offer custom services, their pricing varies a lot – it could be anywhere from $200 to $10K a month for a given customer. Pricing depends on what types of services are being consumed, as well as on crawl frequency, data volume, value added services, etc. Users can control the price by setting limits to data that they fetch in a month. They also can do some sampling of data to get a sense of pricing run rate, before committing to the crawl.

Currently, most of their marketing and sales happen through referrals. As they go forward, brand-building is going to be key marketing strategy and they are investing in that right now.

They are looking to address a larger market and to expand their offerings across more and more geographies. Scale is the #1 imperative for them right now. The aim is to build a brand around their solution and increase the loyal customer base.

Future releases will focus on following themes:

  1. Make data richer by applying AI and Machine Learning
  2. Offer standardized data sets in some verticals

Competitive Landscape

Web Crawling services is a space that is hot and has many players. There is 80Legs (any guesses why they are called so?) which offers a programmable platform for custom data crawling, and there is Grepsr that offers its services to individuals, and there are a lot of them in between – Fetch, Mozenda, Spinn3r (blog, news and social media crawling), and of course an open source web crawler (Apache Nutch).

These products vary along 2 dimensions (and hence they should be visualized in a 2×2 box)

  1. Horizontal (Platform) or Vertical (Business Solutions)
  2. Level of programming required to achieve business value

#1 is obvious, let’s talk about #2. Level of programming required to get value depends on the interface that is exposed by these services and who does it appeal to the most. Most of the consumers of data are business people; however, most of these offerings are technical enough that business teams need to work through their technical teams to get value (one reason why PromptCloud sells to Product guys rather than business guys). It is hard (though possible) to have a platform offering and still provide an interface consumable by business teams (because business value will be generated only when platform outcome is processed using vertical business rules which is hard to do without some amount of programming).

PromptCloud is a horizontal (platform) offering that requires a little programming to get it integrated with business flows of the client. For them, this positioning makes sense for 2 reasons:

  1. Revenue Spread: Horizontal increases addressable market because all verticals can be targeted. However, this also means that value provided per client is less and hence revenue per client is going to be less while number of clients might be large. At this stage of their company, this is a better revenue mix (since it exposes them to a large number of clients).
  2. Cost of Innovation: Vertical requires more business focus and hence innovations that are specific to a vertical may not be applicable to another vertical, while horizontal means every innovation benefits every customer. This makes innovating for every client a costly affair when focusing on a vertical.

However, it is important for them to make sure they are moving continuously along the spectrum of offering vertical solutions (without compromising on their innovation abilities) and offering business-consumable interfaces.

The Road Ahead

The road ahead for PromptCloud is tough but inspiring. They are in a space that will require much more services in future as data continues to proliferate, data-driven insights become the order of the day, and web data continues to become more unstructured. They have a good set of offering and a good list of clients to work with. However, they do face some challenges:

  1. They need to gain more visibility in existing and newer geographies; building their brand is going to be key.
  2. They need to add more products to their bouquet of offerings
  3. To maintain their technology edge, they need to continue to build the team even through the shortage of trained professionals in this area.

They also need to figure out where they want to put themselves on Horizontal-Vertical axis, we feel that they need to move towards offering vertical-focused solutions, in addition to maintaining a horizontal data platform. PromptCloud (and most of its competitors) offers a technology product to business teams to do their data analysis well (and hence business teams need to involve their technology teams to consume PromptCloud services). We feel that a way forward for PromptCloud will be to become a business product that the business people can consume directly and come to build critical business on. They platform approach (vertical-agnosticity) is a good foundation on which such a business product can be built.

They have the right trajectory of growth, and good momentum and team to continue to push and become a name to reckon with in this space.

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Enabling Product Managers to manage Product Experience

In my last post, Product Manager, or Product Experience Manager, I described the disparate features and experiences that got broken in SiteZ and made the case that product management team should be responsible for overall product experience. In the final post of this series, I will present my views on how product management team should manage experience so that such issues can be minimized or avoided. Note that I am not talking about creating initial product experience or its next version, which is a topic of itself. I will focus only on managing the product as it goes through incremental changes.

There are 3 questions that must be answered by product management team at all times (and should be asked periodically):

  1. Are we seeing all the activities we should be seeing?
  2. Are we processing all the activities we see?
  3. Are we making good decisions based on our processing outcomes?

Product Experience Contour

To answer first question, it is important to understand the boundaries of the product experience that you wish to provide, what I call Product Experience Contour. If you define this too narrowly, you will miss out on lots of user and system activities that you should pay attention to. If you define it too broadly, you will be inundated with activities that are not useful and you will be stretched thin. There are 3 approaches to draw this contour:

  1. Persona-driven: If you have created personas (a realistic and detailed description of a fictitious user who represents a category of target audience for the product), they are good starting point to define these contours. Any activity in your organization that impacts or is impacted by a persona is usually a candidate for being on your radar. For example, if I am a persona for SiteZ (someone interested in learning from experienced people, but not interested in changing jobs), the product management team needs to ensure they are plugged into what the other group is promising and offering me. Note that in this case, I may not be a persona SiteZ cares about, which is a marketing and positioning strategy.
  2. Use case driven: If you have created use cases (UML, flowcharts, long documents, whatever) to describe how user roles interact with your system, that also is a good starting point though it may not be comprehensive. You can start by looking at the alternate and adjacent flows the particular user roles can go through on your system and see if those need to be on your radar. Use cases are more constrained because they describe your understanding at the time of product creation, while persona allows for more contemporary interpretation.
  3. Data-driven: While this may be hard (depending on how evolved your data analytics team is), this can be a very useful way to draw the contour. If you are able to analyze the data available for your system for past user interactions, you should be able to enumerate user activities (along with frequency of use) that you are interested in. The problem in this approach is that if some flows can’t be completed successfully by the user, or your data capture is not comprehensive, you may not get to know about some flows.

If possible, you should use more than one approaches above to draw the contours. Usually, persona-driven is a great way to draw initial contours, validate it with the data from your analytics, and then use data-driven approach to detect new user activities that might be important to include in the contour. In my case, it is entirely possible that none of my activities were ever tagged as useful activities to track, since these are not primary use cases (except the first one – trying to register to join the chat with the guest).

Information Sources and Management Systems

To answer second question, it is very important to look at 2 aspects:

  1. Information Source: As a user interacts with the organization, information is generated at many different places. It is very important for product management to be well-connected to these sources and make sure they are getting the information frequently. A few of the sources are:
    1. Data Analytics: As mentioned above, data analytics is a great source for information and must be harnessed properly.
    2. Direct User connect: There are many ways to connect directly with a sample set of users and keep learning about their experiences from them – product blogs, twitter, facebook and other social media channels are very effective if users can stay engaged.
    3. Be the user: It is surprising to see how little product managers use their own products on a regular basis. While being your own user may not be the greatest way to design a new product, it is a great way to keep tab on how things are going. Depending on the product, product managers can enlist their family and friends to be regular users and give feedback.
    4. Other departments in the org: Many departments interact with the users Product Managers want to know about, so it is very important to have a good flow of information from these departments. Typically, Marketing, Sales, Support, and Training teams can have good information about the user that should be captured.
  2. Information Management Systems: How information is captured, stored, and disseminated is very important for effective processing. Most activities can’t be processed in real time. Processing can mean many different things – I mean it in the sense of understanding, clarifying, analyzing, ranking and other handling of data. Product management teams need to procure, and use a management system that serves the purpose, and avoid leaving information in emails, chat boxes, whiteboards, or in their minds.

Good Decision-Making Process

To answer 3rd question, we need to make sure we have a good decision-making process in place which is used all the time. A good decision is a collaborative effort, and it is a process rather than a moment. It requires lots of data (which your information sources and management systems can provide), and it requires following a rational decision-making process. Such a decision-making process has following characteristics:

  1. Right stakeholders in the decision-making are identified.
  2. Participants are contributors and idea-providers, not spectators.
  3. Decision-making criteria (how will different options be ranked and prioritized) is defined before solution options are figured out.
  4. Personal responsible for the decision (and its consequences) is clearly identified (and it must be a person, and not a group).
  5. Once the decision is made, it is communicated, along with the rationale for making this particular decision.

In this context, since we are talking about incremental changes to product, the decision-making criteria should be known upfront and should be applied consistently. Impact of a change needs to be validated against all the known implications to the personas we care for, and this should be a key data in the decision-making process.

Evangelizing Product Management role

Even when you have great answers to the questions above, it is important to enlist the support of rest of the organization in keeping product experience awesome for the user. To do this, product managers need to be product evangelists who go out and talk about the product and their role as the guardian of product experience, to whoever cares to listen, and whichever platform they find. Once enough people in the organization realize that they should talk to you whenever they think about tinkering with the product experience, you will have created the strongest source of information about user activities and your product will thrive.

One final time, let me go through the list of issues, and show how they could be caught if above is done well:

Issue Solution
They misled the user about the time it takes to register. Evangelism would make sure they talk to product team, and good decision-making process would ensure that either advert is corrected, or product is fixed.
They didn’t allow the user to abort the registration attempt gracefully (which left the email address behind and created rest of the mess). Good decision-making process would ensure right prioritization, and if feature is not prioritized, user is provided enough information about what to do in this situation.
They were not forthcoming about who is sending me these spam emails (the email address was hidden with a display name that was the advertiser’s). Being connected to user (or enlisting friends and family as users) might flag the mail as inappropriately crafted (you are receiving this mail because.. line should be at the top somewhere).
They exposed a feature to me (unsubscribe) which didn’t work Good decision-making process should ensure that an alternative exists if this feature is not going to be implemented, and that user is told about it honestly
They didn’t give me an easy way to delete my account – emails bounced, UI didn’t have a button to delete, etc. Good decision-making process would ensure right prioritization, and if feature is not prioritized, user is provided enough information about what to do in this situation.

To be fair to SiteZ, it is hard to do all this because these are elements of organization culture and everything can’t be written down as a process and followed. Also, it is entirely possible, that they are indeed doing all this (though I highly doubt this!) and still I became a victim. Such caveats aside, I think this is a good discussion about product experience and hopefully companies will focus more on product experience than what they do today.

This concludes my series on Product Experience Management. I look forward to your comments and thoughts on the topic.

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Aurus Network CourseHub: Delivering on the promise of classroom-in-the-cloud

Aurus Network was founded in 2010 with the vision to make quality education accessible to masses at affordable prices. It is revolutionizing the way distance/online education is delivered. Aurus offers CourseHub, its flagship product, which is a cloud-based solution for educational institutions (higher education, test prep and training,schools, etc.) to capture, store and deliver (live or on-demand) lectures online. The company has been funded by Indian Angel Networks and is the recipient of Microsoft Bizspark 2012 Startup Challenge in cloud category. This is a review of their flagship product CourseHub and the company.

Introduction

When I was in college and bunked classes (which was fairly often; it was hard to get up for 8 am classes), what usually got me through the course were the notes photocopied from one of the studious guys of the class. It was not the best solution, but was good enough. Then, in my 3rd year, my college introduced a special studio classroom where one of the course professors used to hold his lectures – a sound-proof, sanitized room where the professor used to write on a paper with marker which would show up on screen for us, and for recording. The recording was supposed to be available as a bunch of video cassettes (yes, I am that old!) in the library. It was painful to attend these classes because they felt so unlike a classroom, and of course, it was too complex to watch these recordings so I never watched any, and photocopied notes continued to save the day.

I was 15 years too early! If it was 2013, I probably would be sitting in a regular classroom whose lectures were being recorded, and recordings were available right after the class, on my course portal online, in an easy-to-consume format on the various devices I own. Recorded (and indexed) lectures would allow me to have lectures-on-demand, which is so cool.

This is what Aurus Network offers through its flagship product CourseHub. It is a cloud-based solution for educational institutions (higher education, test prep and training schools, etc.) to capture, store and deliver (live or on-demand) lectures online. CourseHub is also offered to corporates to manage remote training sessions and schools for capturing their classes.

Aurus Network was founded in 2010 by Piyush Agrawal and Sujeet Kumar, and is based in Bangalore. 

The Product

Usage Scenarios

There are 3 primary usage scenarios for CourseHub:

  1. Lecture Capture: A lecturer captures his/her lecture for offline viewing by students or for creating blended learning content (for MOOC or other delivery mechanisms).
  2. Self-paced learning: A lecturer’s class is recorded to be viewed later by students to allow them to review the content at their own pace. Lecturer can edit the video and add pop quizzes and assessments online. This is usually used by universities.
  3. Extend the classroom: In this scenario, a lecturer’s class is streamed in real-time to remotely located classrooms or students. This allows the lecturer to have a very large classroom and have it closer to where the students are, without spending time in physical travel or money to build a single-location large classroom. This is usually used by training and test preparation centers.

For all of these scenarios to work, the capture device needs to be set up in a studio or classroom, which is a 1-time activity.  This is typically done with a server class machine connected to internet via high speed broadband connection (higher the speed, better is the quality of video streamed and stored) and a capture device (HD camera and microphone) connected to the machine.

Development

The product was conceptualized in Nov 2010 in response to the problem posed by their first client. Their V1 was released in Nov 2010 and V2 in Feb 2011 with the first deployment and roll-out to 10 centers across India. Their tech team comprises of about 10 people, who are working on various technologies like video compression, video streaming, computer vision, large scale load balancing and engaging front end technologies.

Most of the innovation in the product has been achieved by applying technically simple but important insights about customer behavior and preferences. For e.g., one of the USPs of the solution is that they are able to deliver almost HD quality videos at as low as 200 Kbps, while other conventional solutions (web conferencing, video conferencing) require atleast 1 Mbps or more for the same. This has been achieved by prioritizing the encoding parameters which matter more for the viewer while watching educational videos (like clear audio, sharp writing etc.) rather than doing a one-size fits all kind of video encoding.

Features

Some of the product features are as follows:

  1. Record video with any HD camera and microphone
  2. Enable automatic focusing on teacher with Intelligent software based tracker
  3. Teachers can teach in their natural style
  4. Schedule captures in advance
  5. Automatic archiving to create media library in the cloud
  6. Integration with client’s website
  7. Integration with Learning Management Systems like Moodle, Blackboard, etc.

Differentiators

There are a few standout features in the product which are well worth the mention:

  1. They can deliver HD video quality at 200Kbps, which makes this available to all students who have a broadband connection. Other solutions use much higher bandwidth (around 1 Mbps in some cases). The reason they are able to do this is because they can optimize their compression algorithms using their knowledge of what is important for students (clear audio and writing is much more important than clearly visible instructor for example).
  2. No human intervention is required (after initial setup) to capture, store and deliver lectures, they have fully automated the solution (including tracking the presenter, managing connectivity disruption, etc.).
  3. It is a cloud-based solution, so clients can try out their solution without any hardware setup.
  4. Aurus provides a home-grown Learning and Content Management System which allows their clients to manage users and lecturers, edit video lectures, and add quizzes and assessments to the videos. This means that the clients get a complete product.

Market Adoption

Typical market for CourseHub in India are test preparation and training institutes like Career Point, Career Launcher, etc. and universities. CourseHub is sold on a monthly/yearly subscription model, for example Rs. 20K a month can get you 500 hours of lecture time (1 lecture + 99 students in a 1-hour lecture will constitute 100 hours of lecture time) and 50GB of storage (500 hours will fit into 50GB). However, for someone in the market for such a solution, there are many options to choose from:

  1. VSAT based classrooms (Hughes is the biggest player) – These are expensive to set up and require dedicated hardware, but offer highly reliable infrastructure
  2. Internet-based classrooms (like Aurus) – Some of these require expensive studio setup, while others, like Aurus, can work with regular hardware.
  3. Ad-hoc systems: You can use youtube (or other video streaming sites), Google Hangouts and some local capture method to enable a large part of functionality of capture, store and distribute, and save some money. Operational hassle will be larger.
  4. No system: this is still not a critical need for educational institutes and a large number of these institutes just don’t have any solution in place.

For all these solutions, technology is an important piece, but so is the overall package (that includes setup, operations, essentially IT-free solution), since the clients are not likely to be tech-savvy enough to manage these technological solutions.

Currently, Aurus is the technology solution provider of type #2 – allowing their clients to create internet-based classrooms. They have about 30 clients out of which around 20 are actively using their system. They have a healthy pipeline of future deals, sales cycle tends to be long and seasonal (because of academic session dependency).

The Roadmap

With the goals of capturing more clients in India in different segments (Corporate, Training and Test Prep, Schools) and also expanding outside India, Aurus has an ambition pipeline of features and innovations.

Product Roadmap

Over next 12 months or so, Aurus intends to deliver the following to its clients:

  1. Launching a completely Do-It-Yourself version of CourseHub, which will allow institutes based out of India to use the product
  2. Launching more features to allow professors/trainers to effectively analyze student performance and take pro-active actions
  3. For professors, adding multiple ways to lecture capture in their classrooms – using a dedicated capture appliance, an android app or manual uploading

Technology Roadmap

Aurus hopes to deliver following technology enhancements in this period:

  1. Enhanced Capture – Enhance and decouple capture process from software so that the solution can work with any kind of capture device and hence can allow them to go global. This includes allowing the use of high-end camera (which ship with Android OS) and remotely controlling it from server through an Android app.
  2. Deep LMS integration – Current LMS integrations are very shallow since it uses LTI. Deeper LMS integrations will enable more complex use cases to be supported.
  3. API solution – Allowing API level access to the video catalog to enable integration into client’s portal will allow CourseHub to be more tightly integrate with client portals.

Competitive Landscape

Companies offering such a solution (capture, store and distribute – live or on-demand) are very hot in US. Echo360 is a Steve Case backed venture that focuses purely on universities and offers socializing the learning (learn in groups and collaborate using social tools) and flipping the classroom (use classroom to discuss and clarify doubts rather than lecturing). Sonic Foundry is a public company, and Tegrity is a McGraw Hill company, both offering solution similar to CourseHub.

One of the reasons for this space being hot is the fact that flipping the classroom is becoming the craze, and with MOOC (Massively Open Online Course) also being the next big thing; capture, store and distribute of video lectures suddenly seems like a key technology piece to allow everyone to offer a MOOC.

In India, it is still early days for flipping classrooms and offering MOOCs. CourseHub is primarily being used to extend the classroom, and make star lecturers available in remote classrooms, in addition to using it for self-paced learning by making recorded lectures available for later viewing. However, as Indian universities catch up to these concepts, Aurus seems to be well-positioned to be a leader in the space if it plays its cards well.

The Road Ahead

If I have to go to college again, I will probably bunk again (while managing the attendances somehow since they are mandatory now). When I do so, I will probably still go for photocopied notes because they are so brief and quick to go through. I would really love to look up appropriate pieces of short video clips of the lecture when I get stuck in the notes so having notes and videos cross-indexed will be so useful; also useful will be the ability to find other lectures on the same micro-topic and try to really understand it from different perspectives. Essentially, videos become any other type of content which can be searched, used and mashed up together to create learning assets that are reusable and easily consumable.

Aurus is a pure technology provider in education space. It becomes apparent when you go through their solutions, their brochure, or the cool features they showcase on their website – they are technology-heavy. However, education sector doesn’t yield itself well to pure technology players, primarily because technology is hard to use, and very few institutes have technical/IT teams on their rolls. So what they need is complete solution (including service, personnel, etc.) so that it becomes plug-and-play for them. Aurus needs to be on top of its clients’ complete technology needs and should be willing to offer various value-added services.

Blended learning holds lots of potential, be it universities, training institutes, corporates or schools. Aurus seems to be well poised to help them deliver on this promise through technology.

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Product Manager, or Product Experience Manager?

In my last post Experiencing the product, or productizing the experience?, I talked about my experience with SiteZ and how their overall experience left much to be desired even though the core product was good enough. In this post, I will try to analyze things that went wrong which shouldn’t have.

Here are 5 things that went wrong for SiteZ if I look from a customer’s perspective:

  1. They misled the user about the time it takes to register. 
  2. They didn’t allow the user to abort the registration attempt gracefully (which left the email address behind and created rest of the mess). 
  3. They were not forthcoming about who is sending me these spam emails (the email address was hidden with a display name that was the advertiser’s). 
  4. They exposed a feature to me (unsubscribe) which didn’t work
  5. They didn’t give me an easy way to delete my account – emails bounced, UI didn’t have a button to delete, etc. 

It is easy to jump to the conclusion that the feature designers have a malicious intention: somehow get people’s email id and keep spamming them. However, let’s assume that is not the case, and that this is a case of incremental features ruining a product. With this assumption in mind, let’s proceed to analyze how each of these situations came to be:

  1. Misleading ad – Assuming it was not intentional, there are 2 possibilities:
    1. Marketing person would have asked someone in products about whether it can be done in 30 seconds, and someone said yes.
    2. Marketing person asked to tweak the flow to make it finish (with basic details) in 30 seconds, but the development team didn’t do the work and instead reused the longer flow.
  2. No graceful registration abort – This is purely a feature design or prioritization issue, probably they didn’t think abort is an important use case.
  3. Spam mail identity – I think the assumption would be that these mails go out after user has agreed to be spammed, so they would know (this information is anyway mentioned at the bottom of the mail in small fonts.
  4. Unsubscribe not working – Again, feature prioritization issue. Not having unsubscribe button is probably illegal in such spams, so the next best thing was to not code the functionality.
  5. Can’t delete account – A feature prioritization issue. Account deletion is usually an expensive operation (complicated to implement and get it right, and heavy on processing) and so someone somewhere decided it was not important.

A question that comes up: are we talking about one feature, one product, or one experience? Should the feature designer of registration flow worry about spam mail identity? Aren’t these very distinct features?

Yes, they are indeed distinct features. At the same time, they need to co-exist peacefully, without causing troubles for each other. SiteZ is one big product, which has multiple features in it which need to plug into each other, and play well with each other. However, if we say SiteZ is a product, it becomes hard to explain #1 above: who should be responsible for advertiser misleading the user. This is the reason why I would like to think of SiteZ as one big experience. Advertising is just augmenting the experience, or in some cases act as the invitation to try the experience. If a restaurant’s brochure misleads the customer and entices him with a 30% discount, which turns out to be only 10%, it is still a problem for the restaurant.

So who is responsible for SiteZ product experience? Enter Product Management team (see this discussion thread too). I would like to think it will be Chief Product Officer or VP – Product Management who has ultimate responsibility for the experience. Is it fair to product management team to have such a broad charter? I think it is fair, because the organization needs it and there is no group better positioned to do this.

To recap, here is what we have established so far:

  1. SiteZ had multiple features and services dysfunctional which combined to give a terrible overall experience.
  2. Even though they are diverse features and services, in the interest of the customer, overall SiteZ experience needs to be treated as one big product experience.
  3. The group that owns this one big product experience is Product Management team. They are in the best position to do so

In the next post, we will see how a product management team should have operated so that such issues can be minimized/avoided. Stay tuned!

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Experiencing the product, or productizing the experience?

About 6 months back, I saw a print advertisement from a well-known job portal (I will call it SiteZ): “Free webinar and live chat with well-known Mr. X”. When I visited their site, they helpfully informed me that I need to be a registered user of their site (which meant I had to be someone looking for a job, which I was not), but it would take only 30 seconds to register. I didn’t mind giving 30 sec and a few bits of personal information to attend this webinar so I proceeded with registration. It took me about 2-3 minutes before I realized that this is going to take quite some time – they wanted all kinds of details about my profile, what kind of job I was looking for, what I had been doing so far in my career, etc.; simply uploading my resume didn’t SiteZ. So I abandoned my effort and tried to find a way of deleting this account I had just created. I couldn’t find it, so I just navigated away from the site and made a mental note not to use SiteZ again since they misled me with their advertisement and were not helpful when I changed my mind about creating an account.

Little did I know that it was not the end of my experience with SiteZ. A few weeks later, I started receiving email ads/spams about properties and other stuff. Spams are nothing new, so I kept ignoring them, till a few months back when I cursorily went down the mail and saw that it (helpfully!) mentioned that I was getting this mail because I registered on SiteZ. It also offered an unsubscribe link, so I was happy. I clicked on it and was informed that I have been unsubscribed. However, that didn’t change anything; mails kept coming. I tried unsubscribing couple more times, with no result. I tried to write to the email address mentioned on their site, the mail bounced. I again searched their website for any link to delete the account, but couldn’t find any. Finally I found that even though the mail sender text says some developer’s name, it actually is sent from a @sitez.com account. So I could block this address, and have some peace of mind.

To be clear, this is not some no-name company, this is one of the top 4-5 job portals in the country. So you would expect them to think more holistically about their product offering and put more efforts in avoiding frustrations for their users, not to talk of delighting them.

In case of SiteZ, incremental tasks/thoughts like below might have gone behind the experience they finally offered to me:

  1. Product Management – We want to be like #1 job portal site, so we will build all the usual features.
  2. Engineering – Let’s not give a delete account button, it is too hard and can be depriortized since these users are anyway leaving the site.
  3. Marketing – Great idea about not giving delete button, this way our metric of # of accounts keeps going up and we can keep using their data (or get them to call us and we can upsell them)
  4. Sales/Marketing – Let’s make sure we enroll all our users into our promotions email list, and also make sure they don’t notice it when they are registering.
  5. Sales/Marketing – We need more users, so let’s run some promotions like free webinars. We will use it to get the user into registering for the site.
  6. Engineering – It is too hard to build a 30-second registration page, so let’s drop the user into the regular registration flow which takes 10 minutes.
  7. Sales – Let’s make some money with all this personal data that we collect by selling email campaigns to 3rd-party.
  8. Engineering – It is too hard to implement unsubscribe, can be deprioritized since these users are anyway leaving the campaign.
  9. Sales – Great idea engineers. This way, our mailing lists will always have lots of subscribers.

Why am I writing this?

First, it left a very bitter experience in my mouth and now I am very skeptical of any site that asks me to register; I have started reading terms and conditions of the sites that ask me to register, which is a painful process!

Second, and more importantly, I want to make the point about considering end to end experience (including support) as the product, rather than just the core feature set you want to offer to the customer. In this case, my experience with SiteZ was what made me to abandon them, not necessarily the core feature I was looking for (webinar, which I could never reach!). To be clear, SiteZ is not an isolated case, there are a large number of products out there which suffer from this problem of focusing just on the product and not on the experience (see ‘experience is the product‘). Product Managers need to exert more control (and influence) over the overall experience and not just focus on core product, otherwise they will be leaving a lot on the table. Maybe the way is to start from experience when building/changing the product, and embrace ‘experience is the product’.

What is your take on product vs. experience question?