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Three Things To Do Before You Launch Your SaaS Startup To Get InBound Leads

There are 3 items you should do quickly, if you are going to launch your SaaS startup or a new product that caters to a new audience.

First, get listed on SaaS marketplaces, Cloud Brokerage Services and Cloud listing providers.

There are over 120 SaaS marketplaces from telcos – AT&T,  T-Mobile and others, to large Cloud Service Providers (AWS, Google, Microsoft, etc.) and other large technology companies (Samsung, DELL, etc.) I would spend at least a few days making sure your SaaS solution gets listed in all these marketplaces under the right categories.

There are between 30 to 40 Cloud Brokerage Services, including Appia, App Carousel, AppDirect, Jamcracker, Appirio, Cloud Nation. Here is a more comprehensive list.

Then ensure that you list on Cloud listing providers such as Capterra, G2Crowd, GetApp, etc. Here is a comprehensive list of Cloud Listing Providers.

Second, focus on Marketplace Listing Optimization (MLO). Like SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and App Store Optimization (ASO), MLO will help you rank higher, which drives leads.

How do you Optimize for marketplace listing: Get real customers to review your products, ensure that you are listed in the right categories, Use the right keywords in your description, show screen shots of your application and showcase a good video for demos. I will detail this more in tomorrow’s post.

Third, optimize your customer on-boarding process for these providers. Find out their rake, the incentive cut-off structure and renewal discount rate. Ensure that a customer coming from these solutions is able to be measured, can setup their account quickly and can easily get the first few “tasks”done on your platform.

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How To Pick And Choose Early Users / Customer For Your #Napkinstage Startup?

The first few customers (or users) usually set the tone for your startup. They are the ones with either acute pain or the burning problem, and the earliest of early adopters. Usually, I have found that most entrepreneurs get their early customers because of the relationship they have with them OR they solve a really pressing problem for their customers.

When I talk to most entrepreneurs, one of the first things I recommend to them is to segment their potential customers.

The discipline of finding the factors that differentiate one set of your potential customers from another based on a set of characteristics is customer segmentation.

There are 3 important questions you will need to answer about your customer segmentation strategy before you recruit potential customers.

Most entrepreneurs, at the napkinStage end up getting customers who they know, but sometimes may not have the pain point as much. Else they end up getting customers who have the pain or are unwilling to try anything “not proven”.

When you have been out trying to get early paying customers, you will realize quickly that customers have one of several reasons for not buying or wanting to try your solution.

1. They are risk averse, and not early adopters, so while they have the pain, they use their existing  manual or alternative techniques to solve the problem.

2. They are able to deal with the pain, since they get a sense of job security knowing that they know how to solve the problem, and no product, machine or algorithm can replace them.

3. They believe the ROI from solving the pain will be negligible and their time and money is better spent elsewhere.

4. They want more mature solutions so they can handle their “special situation”, which is unique enough that no early product can customize it and be less expensive at the same time.

5. They believe the solution will weaken their position since it will solve the problem that exposes their “value-add” to the company.

6. They are not emotionally vested in either you or your startup, so they are not willing to take the leap of faith to try an early version of the product.

7. They actually dont believe your solution will solve the problem and are willing to wait and see some more proof until a point that it does.

These and many other excuses / reasons are the ones I have heard of consistently when I have been trying to get early customers for most of my startups.

If your potential customers sees a big benefit to:

a) their personal agenda (promotion, makes them look good, etc)

b) their position in the company and finally

c) their company’s standing in the market.

Picking your early customers though, is almost always a combination of personal relationships, built over time and solving a problem they have that is so intense that they are willing to try anything to get rid of it.

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The single most frequent mistake #entrepreneurs make during the #customer #development process

There are many assumptions we make about the product or the customer problem, which makes us develop solutions that may be really more complicated than required.

A friend and fellow entrepreneur I met on Friday was showing me a prototype (HML mock up with transitions, with some simple functions implemented) of this SaaS application. He had used a developer on hire at UpWork to develop the initial version. After speaking to and confirming the mockup (wireframes) with 10 different users he was off to develop and deliver the MVP. Overall he had spent about $8000 in design and development and had taken about 13 weeks to develop the MVP. Most of the time was spent back and forth with the design team for the HTML / CSS and the development team for confirming features and transitions.

Of the 13 weeks, his development team spent 2 weeks just implementing a sign up process, a user cancellation process, a payment process, a refund process, a login process, a password retrieval process, etc. Which he did not realize was the tax of developing a SaaS solution. Instead he took the 5 step approach to building a SaaS application and followed it religiously.

The critical mistake during customer development that most entrepreneurs make is to lead with the solution or product instead of spending time learning about the current solutions.

When he was showing it to potential customers, he found that most of them liked the product and said they’d use it and pay for it, if they could find value in 2-3 weeks. He was pretty happy given that most users were ready to pay for the product, which he did believe would solve a critical problem for them.

After developing the MVP and letting his users know about the product, he followed up by asking them to start to use the application. The first two days were great, with lots of feedback and improvements that they gave him about the product.

Then for the next 3 days there was radio silence. Even after his prodding and cajoling, most users were not using the application.

Instead of talking to users face to face, he instead decided to spend time with them (3 hours each user), shadowing them to understand why they were not using the application.

Turns out most of the users needed his product, but either A) did not remember it existed or B) were used to using their workaround – largely using a combination of email and cut and paste into Slack.

The biggest barrier to his adoption and usage was their existing process (although inefficient) was something they were used to and so were able to “optimize” it to make it quick and “fast” for their own usage. So much that they felt that using his product (which I can assure you would be vastly superior) would slow them down.

He then pivoted his product (not idea) to implement the one feature they all wanted as a Chrome plugin. Which worked like a charm.

He then had to remove the top 3 features and undo all the user login and management, infrastructure code and other remaining features, just to support the user behavior for their existing process.

The big takeaway for him was that when you have a hammer, everything seems like a nail.

The biggest takeaway for his wife (who is his cofounder) was not over engineer the solution.

The big takeaway for me was the failed customer development process. With all our biases (which all of us have) – we always tend to lead with the solution (“let me show you a demo”), instead of understanding the problem better to focus on delivering the one feature that matters, without all the bells and whistles.

Image From:  http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2010/05/the-visual-guide-to-cognitive-biases/

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The first 5 steps to building your own SaaS application

This post is for non developer founders who want to build a SaaS application.

Software as a Service (SaaS) is a relatively small market – at $19 Billion in total revenues, it seems large, but compared to $250 Billion of the overall software market it seems minuscule. It has grown from nothing to this large number in the last 10 years. Similar to the eCommerce market, which seems large but is less than 15% of overall retail, the opportunities will start to be in the niches is my prediction.

The big question is when and how will it grow and where are the opportunities. While there are many specialist firms focusing on SaaS alone, the incumbent software companies (the largest of who are Microsoft, SAP, Oracle, etc.) are also making their own investments to move their businesses from selling licensed software to services.

One of the key opportunities I see is that ability for smaller, niche markets to be targeted using SaaS. Since the deployment model, time to value and cost are so much lower now than 10 years ago,  it is easy to build a niche product that can gain rapid fan following among the target customers and *if that customer base* does grow and end up having more budget it can be a lucrative market.

I do get the question often about the steps to build a SaaS business. Even if you dont intend to build a Venture funded business, the economics of SaaS are determined by cost of customer acquisition (CAC) and cost of servicing the customer (developing, operating and maintaining the software).

What I am increasingly starting to see is that most prototypes are either built by a developer founder, or outsourced (by a non technical founder) to “prove that the market exists“.

1. The first step I’d recommend before you start development, is to sign up 15-20 beta customers. Target people you know well who will stick through your crappy alpha, beta and version 1, so you can convince them that the value does exist when you iterate quickly.

For early beta customers, there are many techniques you can use including: a) setting up a launch page and promoting that launch page on social media b) setting up a launch page and buying Google adwords to drive signups and following up with signups via email c) blogging about the topic to share what you know about that market d) interviewing influential users before you launch or e) setup an email newsletter of great content for that industry and have many potential users subscribe to that newsletter.

2. The next step is to create an activity model and user flows.

This step is to ensure that you can know exactly what are the top 3 features you need to implement first which will make your product “must have” to solve the problem for your users.

In fact if you can identify the top feature (just one) that people will come back and use everyday, you should be good to go to the next step. Validate the top feature with your beta customer list, so you are building what they will use.

3. The next step is to create a mockup using wireframes. These are typically good to show the screens your user will go through and the experience as well. I would get a lot of feedback on the list of steps and screens before I build the prototype.

Typically in your first pass stick to under 7 screens would be my suggestion. That’s enough for a 45 second to 1 min “demo” and should give your users a feel for what the app will do. If they ask you for “one” feature that matters more to them than the ones you have, dont mock it up yet, but put it on your list until you have enough users interested.

4. Design your database schema. A database schema is good to share with your developers entities that exist in your application and what their relationship are. I tend to use DB Schema or just Freemind to show to fields without the datatypes.

5. Understand and select your “stack”. Even if you want to outsource your application development I’d recommend you talk to a few developer friends who can educate you on the stacks they use – what the front end languages and libraries would be, what the back end language would be and the database options. You will be more confident when you talk to your outsourcing company and also be able to help make tradeoffs when you need them.

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The 5 most important questions to ask before you price your SaaS product

Over the last few weeks I had a chance to review 89 of the companies to understand their free to paid conversion and also a chance to talk to 13 companies. What I learned was that time spent on the pricing page was a key indicator of conversion and you can A/B test your pricing page for colors, position of your highest and lowest prices, number of plans showed, feature listing and your call to action. The names of your pricing plan also has a significant signalling effect on your customer’s perception of your product. I believe the future of SaaS pricing will move from pay-per-usage to pay-for-outcomes.

The most frequent question I get asked about SaaS companies is how to think about pricing for the product. Here are some constructs to think about and 7 questions to ask before you come up with a pricing model or a price for your product.

1. Understanding your customers current solution and options and their “cost per unit of activity” is the most important thing you should do first. For e.g. if you sell a Sales force automation solution, the customer might be using an Excel spreadsheet to track their sales because they dont have too many opportunities. So in their minds the “cost per unit” is zero, since they have already “paid” for Excel.

2. SaaS pricing is a marketing function not finance or operations. If the team that determines the value of your offering to the customer is another them, then it is their responsibility. The reason for this is that value of your product determines how much you can charge, not what customers are willing to pay. Value cannot be determined as a absolute, only relative. Which is why you have to compare it to their current solution.

3. At the early stages (less than 50-100 customers) optimize for more customers and quicker sales cycles not for profit. To get data and buying patterns you need enough data and a meaningful sample size. When you go beyond the early customers, it is time to optimize for LTV and CAC.

Here are the top 7 questions to ask before you come up with a pricing model for your SaaS product.

1. What are the current options for your customer?

Find out how are they solving the problem your product addresses currently and how much does it cost them to do that.

2. What are the different segments of your customers?

Find out if there are different problems your product can solve and the value associated with those problems. That would be the best indicator of

3. What is your goal from your pricing?

It is not always obvious to say that your goal is to get the “most money” or to be the most expensive product. Some companies want to be the 80% functionality at 20% of the cost option. Determine your pricing goal – profitability (after customer acquisition costs), value creation, marketshare, etc.

4. What is your cost of customer acquisition?

For most parts, your cost of development tends to be fixed (if you hire 3 people, you have to pay their salaries regardless of how many features the ship), but the cost of customer acquisition tends to be a variable. So if your costs dont take CAC into account, you will have a model that wont be profitable.

5. What is your sales model?

Linking Sales and Pricing for SaaS

I usually use the price and complexity of sales / marketing on two axes to understand the sales strategy for a SaaS company.

If you are a company with a lower price point and low complexity of sales, you will have to rely on customers to try and buy (freemium) the product on their own and work on obtaining customers at a low cost.

If you are a very complex product or have a complex sales process and your product costs a lot, you will have to hire a field sales team to help you sell.

If however, your product is priced high and your complexity is low then you will build an inside (phone) sales team.

If you have a high complexity product and sales model and low price, your company will die.

Use this model to determine where you want to be and price the product appropriately.

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How to move from “selling through my network” to “building a sales process”? #entrepreneurSales

MANHATTAN (2)Most every entrepreneur does things initially that don’t scale, and that’s okay to start. Pretty soon they realize that the things that made them successful enough to get initial sales and customers wont work for them to reach the next level at their startup.

One of the most frustrating things for the entrepreneur is when they run out of folks “in the network” who they can sell to. After having sold to their ex colleagues, friends, etc., their network dries up. No longer is it possible to sell via the network to sustain the growth.

That’s when they realize they have to build a sustainable sales process and organization to grow the business and increase revenues.

They then encounter 3 most frustrating things as they try to recruit sales people, define the sales process and grow their sales muscle.

1. How to hire the right sales people who are motivated by commissions alone? 

First, realize that the market tends to be fairly well balanced. It follows consistent demand and supply constraints. Most good sales people have many folks chasing them to work in their company, similar to good engineers. If you wont expect an engineer to work for stock options alone, then expecting a sales person to work for commission alone is something you should be able to relate to.

The problem I hear from many entrepreneurs is that they are unable to determine if the sales person would actually close any deals, so they are unwilling to make a commitment to the sales person. Well, that’s the chicken and egg problem for sure, which means that person who’s more in demand will not make the compromises. Most likely, you the entrepreneur will end up finding some small amount of money to pay as base salary to give the sales person a start to get going. The best sales people are smart about risk and reward. If they see the opportunity to make more money by forgoing their base salary but get a much higher commission, they will.

2. How do they share the details of the “sales process” that they have perfected with the nuances that make the new sales people successful quickly?

As an entrepreneur and the initial sales person, you understand the sales process for your product the best. You have likely sold to many potential prospects and have addressed many objections and handled the toughest questions. So, it is best for you to detail the steps of your sales process to on-board the new sales person. It is best if you do it in a 2 step method.

a) First you can tell – take the sales person through the steps in your sales process via examples. How you sold to the first 5 prospects is more important than how the ideal sales should happen. Take them through the detailed steps in the number of meetings, the different people you met and what questions came up at each stage.

b) Follow this up by showing them – go on the first 5-10 sales calls together so they can learn from your initial pitch, the questions, etc. Show them how you demo, how to position the product, handle pricing questions etc. This also helps you build a bond with the sales person so they can be honest with you later when it comes time to ask the difficult questions.

3. How can they determine if the sales person is on the right track?

Initially you have to be on all / most of the sales calls after you hire a new sales person. Hopefully you have hired someone ambitious and mature, so they will be able to then build a sales organization for you instead of you having to hire a new VP of sales above them. The Tell and Show approach works best for sales people, is my experience.

Use this time to determine and evaluate the sales person – are they able to build relationships with the prospects? Are they able to handle questions effectively? Are they following through on their commitments? Are they able to keep activity level high consistently?

The other thing you should do is to take your average sale cycle time – lets say that is 8 weeks from introduction to close. Double that and evaluate the sales persons ability to close deals in that time period. The reason is that the first cycle time is usually the period of extreme learning. It is rare to get a sales person that will shorten the sales cycle right away unless they come with connections in the industry who have the problem you set out to solve.

 

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Starting with an SMB focus vs. enterprise for SaaS companies. Which is better?

branches&creatures (1)In the initial days of your SaaS startup, when you are doing user development, you may find that your product will help both SMB (Small Medium Business) users as well at Enterpriseusers.

There’s a tendency to then focus more on the “customer” development than the user. Assuming you have spent enough time on the user, there is a serious possibility of getting distracted from your mission by doing “both” at the same time.

Here is a dichotomy for entrepreneurs – Knowing that the milestone of Monthly Recurring Revenue (sans Churn) is the most important metric for SaaS companies, many entrepreneurs try to take the “relatively” easy route to try and get more larger enterprise deals for their product, if that’s what they know.

I have found that most entrepreneurs with an enterprise background end up finding 5-10 early customers who are willing to pay for a good product, but in the bargain they end up flexing their enterprise sales” muscle instead of building the “SMB marketing” muscle.

There is nothing wrong with choosing either market, but there is a big enough difference between both.

The enterprise SaaS market will end up with longer sales cycles (even if you know the decision makers), larger deals and request for integration with many existing tools and processes.

The SMB SaaS market will end up with smaller individual sales, an inbound marketing driven “self service” approach to vending and a extreme focus on seamless “on boarding” of users (sans training).

Many entrepreneurs also convince themselves that they can do both at the same time.

Which cannot be farther from the truth.

So, the question I usually get asked is “Which one do investors prefer“?

The answer is either one, since investors care about quality and quantity of revenue, but above all they also care about empirical evidence that they money they invest in will generate the consistency in the business for the chosen model.

Inconsistencies kill fund raising cycles.

So, if you chose to say you will build an enterprise sales model, you need to show your financial, product, hiring and operational model to support that type of business.

If, however you say your company will build a try and buy model for SMB sales online, with minimal or zero human touch from your side, driven by digital marketing, you need to show evidence that you can do that over a 3-6 month (or more) period.

I have seen many entrepreneurs confuse any revenue with good revenue. Consistency matters.

You have to show investors that you have done what you want to do.

Empirical evidence trumps theories.

So, my suggestion is to pick a model, stick to it for some time, before you decide to pivot if that does not work for you. Before you raise money, showing that the model you are choosing is one you have relevant expertise and knowledge in running is going to be critical.

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The cofounder dilemma – or when the biggest reason for success is also the biggest for failure

MANHATTANOver the last 2.5 years I have had the chance to closely observe over 70 startup teams for more than 6 months each (some a lot more) to find out which of them succeed (by their own definition) and which of them fail.

The thing that struck me 2 nights ago at the TIE dinner was a question that was asked by one of the solo founders – why do investors insist on having co founders if one of the biggest reasons for companies closing is “founder issues”?

If you look at the data from multiple sources about the biggest reason for failure in technology startups, I am struck by how high “co founder issues” comes up in the reasons for a startup folding.

After “no market need” and “ran out of cash” – which by the way is another way of saying there was no market need, the biggest reason was team and co founder issues.

Initially that struck me as odd. I mean, as investors, we keep telling entrepreneurs that we don’t fund solo entrepreneurs. Or that we invest in teams. Or that we like a well rounded hacker, hustler and hipster teams. Most investors have a bias against solo founders. We are prone to say – if you can get one person to join you as a co founder, why should an investor join you?

I have one theory around why we do what we do and say what we say. I am going to say it is a theory for now since I have not validated this and certainly can’t speak for all investors.

The reason is that the biggest reasons for failure (poor co founding teams) is also the biggest indicator of success.

Historically, great technology companies have 2 co founders.

Most investors pattern-match.

So, they tend to talk to 20 folks and form an “informed opinion”. If you look at startups in the technology space historically, the 2 co founders insight has borne out more often than not – Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo, Google, etc.

So, as investors we assume that data (that 2 cofounders is better) trump judgement (that sometimes a solo founder can be just as good – DELL, Amazon, eBay, etc.

So, the question is – why we do insist on having a 2 founder (or more) team than a solo founder?

The answer is fairly simple – investors, like entrepreneurs have biases, or a deviation in our judgement.

If you are a pattern-matching investor, with not much operating experience, then you will go by “best practices”. Then you find other ways to rationalize those decisions. For example – you will quote how startups are very hard and during the hard times you need someone (your co founder to keep your spirits up), or that you need folks with complementary skills to form a company, etc.

Those are largely true and maybe not rationalizations at all, based on the experience of many investors, but I have found that early stage (angel investors) tend to have these biases formed and opinions they have been “handed down” from seasoned investors, who have their own biases.

So, what does this mean if you are a solo founder and still need a “cofounder” since your investors are telling you they invest in teams.

Ideally, you should look for people you want to work with and have worked with before. Note, I did not say “you know well” – that’s necessary, but insufficient. If you worked with them that’s the ticket.

If you don’t have that person and keep getting feedback from investors you are trying to get on board that they don’t fund solo founder companies, what they are really telling you is that there’s other problems that make them not want to invest.

The problem might be that dont know the market, dont understand your product, or any number of other reasons.

That’s the real problem to solve as a solo founder, before you solve “let me get a cofounder” problem.

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A comparison of business software review sites: Credii, ITCentral, G2Crowd, BestVendor and GetApp

There are an estimated 5K to 10K SaaS and enterprise software companies that provide solutions for small, mid-sized and enterprise companies.

The large IT analyst companies such as Gartner, Forrester, IDC, EMR and Burton Group have made a $billion business out of evaluating and ranking these vendors on a magic quadrant or waves.

Over the last few years a host of companies have tried to disrupt the evaluation, comparison, review and ranking portion of the business.

The companies, G2Crowd, SoftwareSuggest, Credii, ITCentralStation, BestVendor and GetApp all pretty much offer a similar service with a few twists. The ability for business users to review, evaluate and filter the software solution for the based on their custom need.

Given the explosion of startups (thanks to the lower cost of starting a company), there are tons of choices for any buyer of software and many deployment models as well – mobile app, mobile web, SaaS, etc.

I had a chance to look at all these companies, and the intent was to review them from the point of view of a buyer of technology. I was initially looking for the best Early stage private company database, and stumbled upon one of these websites and went to research and see if there were others as well providing Yelp-type reviews for startups in a “crowd sourced” way.

There are 3 different approaches taken by these companies. While G2Crowd, ITCentral station and Best Vendor are more crowdsourced platforms, where any user can write a review and rate the vendors, Credii is more like a “Analyst on Demand” or ” Analyst as a Service” solution. GetApp is a pure marketplace and seems to want to follow the App store model with some reviews, but more a listings website.

There were 3 things I was looking for when searching for a database of startups – first a good comprehensive listing of vendors, followed by analysis of their features and pricing, and finally reviews and recommendations by users like me.

Of the 5 solutions (none of who are comprehensive) I found Getapp to have the most listings – for other solutions than the one I was looking for. G2Crowd was a close second. The rest were pretty poor in the comprehensive nature of their coverage of a domain or the products within a domain.

In terms of analysis of features and pricing, company information, I found g2Crowd the best, but Credii very comprehensive. The limited nature of editorial reviews in the other sites, make them hard to take seriously.

Finally in terms of user reviews, getApp was the best by far with the most reviews. followed by G2Crowd. ItCentralStation was poor but definitely better than the other two.

If you are an SMB vendor with an interest in reviewing products and learning more about products before you start to shop, I’d be hard pressed to say an of them will truly meet your needs. They might be a starting point, but if you are expecting an Amazon like listing, with great reviews, multiple feature comparisons, you will be sadly disappointed.

Reblogged from Best Engaging Communities blog

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Top 10 reasons why NASSCOM Product Conclave is #unique this year #NPC2013

1.       Speakers who you will not be able to hear any other place in India. While most other conferences will get you the name-brand speakers or practitioners from India, we went far and wide to get you Rahul Sood (head of Microsoft Ventures, founder of Voodoo PC and entrepreneur), Orna Berry (SVP of EMC, a very successful entrepreneur and Charles Phillips (CEO of Infor, previously at Morgan Stanley and board of directors at Oracle) and 4 more high quality speaker who will not be speaking at any other event in India.

2.       The global business and startup #quiz – the funnest session on the planet. If you are a startup junkie and have a knack for trivia, team up with fellow entrepreneurs and participate in the global startup quiz.  This session promises to have you learn the most useless of trivia, but those that you cannot forget.

3.       The largest gathering of payments experts in India in one place. The #payments track is hosting the top 10 investors, companies, entrepreneurs and innovators all working on sharing with you opportunities in payments in India.

4.       Enough talk, more demos. 25 of India’s best mobile applications, SaaS solutions, a few robotics and hardware companies and very early stage payment companies will demo their solution live to give you a flavor for building awesome applications. Some of them will be launching for the first time.

5.       Open your eyes to the largest opportunities in the biggest markets. For those looking to startup a new company or those already in their own startup, NPC features the large opportunities and the future of Automobile technology, Salesforce application platforms & medical software technologies.

6.       The funniest two technologists will share their top secrets to being spontaneously creative and funny while still being in your startup. Twitter celebrity Ramesh Srivats (@rameshsrivats) and Blogger Krish Ashok (@krishashok) will take you through their recipe for building great stories and still keeping your mind fresh.

7.       One word – BitCoin. Even if you don’t know what it is, or are an expert miner you will see for the first time in India any session on the future of this digital currency. NASSCOM product conclave will feature the session on giving you an overview to bitcoin and its implications on the future of currency.

8.       The best 3 workshops on Design – for the design oriented developer by Intuit, on the design of mobile applications by Source Bits and the design philosophies of award winning designers from Cleartrip.

9.       Networking with Angel investors from the world over who have invested in startups from India – and are looking for interesting opportunities. Early stage angel investors from Singapore, New Zealand, Russia, Switzerland, London, Indonesia and Sri Lanka will be there at NPC. This is the only conference where we are providing a more structured means for you to connect and talk to them about your startup.

10.    The most advanced topics on sales – from making a move from an engineer to a sales person, to the best way to split your base and commission compensation for sales professionals. There’s also a workshop on getting started with your inside sales led by 2 folks who have grown from INR 0 to INR 50 Cr. in revenue. The track also features startup sales managers who have grown their sales teams and will share their hands-on knowledge of how to hire and manage sales people in India.

This year’s NPC promises to help you learn from your peers, get inspired by successful entrepreneurs and network with the right folks to help you build great products- you gotta be at NPC this year.

Register now.

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What should you expect from an accelerator?

I have written previously about how to evaluate accelerators and choosing the right accelerator since there are so many of them these days and also about what the goal of an accelerator is.

I wanted to share somethings that entrepreneurs should expect from an accelerator from a perspective of a startup founder. I think the best thing that has happened is that so many accelerators have opened in the last few years. Similar to eCommerce companies in 2010-11, I expect many to close or shut down within the next 2-3 years.

There are 3 top things an entrepreneur needs according to me:

1. Access to customers: Whether it is beta customers for feedback, early adopters for providing traction (paying customers) or larger customer for growth, startups thrive on customers. Depending on the stage of your company, if an accelerator does not help you get customers, they are not doing their job. That’s the first lens I would adopt to judge accelerators. If you have access to customers, you can practically write your own destiny. If all the accelerator does is provide advice on getting customers but does not provide introductions to customers, or have customers be ready to adopt and review your platform, you are not going to get much traction or be “accelerated”.

2. Access to talent: In India, for startups, good development talent is hard to get , marketing & sales talent is harder and design talent is extremely challenging to get on board. If your accelerator does not help you with talent sourcing or provide talent in house to help you tide these critical areas when you need them most, you should run away. I have heard the notion that the graduates of the accelerator will help you, but entrepreneurs helping other entrepreneurs by providing time  is not very sustainable. Most of the very successful startups and their executives are extremely busy. While a sense of pay-it-forward does exist, its just not sustainable is what I have found. There’s no substitute for dedicated people to help you with development issues, help you with User experience and design (mockups, wireframes, HTML/CSS development and information architecture) or marketing talent to roll up their sleeves and run campaigns.

3. Access to capital for growth: While I am personally not a big fan of funding as a metric for accelerators to gauge their success, capital is nonetheless needed to grow and thrive, especially in India, where most founders are not serial, successful entrepreneurs or those that come from a “rich family”. So look for an accelerator that provides you an extensive and wide set of investors from seed to early stage and from venture to growth. If all the accelerator does is “showcase you in front of several investors” but does not actively nudge investors to help take a closer look at your company, I dont think they are doing their job.

There are several other things that matter which include a support system of the existing entrepreneur network from their previous batches, access to meetings internationally that possibly help get some global exposure, and a great space to work from, besides other things. However if you dont have access to customers, talent and capital, there’s no value in joining an accelerator.

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The Indian startup ecosystem should look at Israel as a role model

I love Israel. Having been there 7-8 times over 5 years when I worked for a company (Mercury Interactive, acquired by HP) that had its development center there, I believe they have some of the best developers, product thinkers and execution oriented folks.

They are also amazing at marketing. They have successfully convinced the world that they are the “startup nation“.

Never mind that they have 1/3 as many product startups as India produces annually and never mind that Indian companies acquire or get acquired twice as much as Israeli companies.Indians also make up 52% of Silicon valley startup founders, whereas Israelis make up less than 8%.

Take a look at those 3 data points and tell me they are not facts. The PWC report is for 2012, so its relatively recent. The # of companies we track in India versus Israel startups in our database is three times as well. The # of companies on Angel list or Crunchbase reveals a similar statistic.

Still its Tel Aviv that creeps up on Silicon Valley as the top startup center. If you read the startup genome report, you’ll be convinced of the same based on their methodology.

What are the arguments I have heard against India being the startup nation?

1. Quantity not quality:  We produce numbers, but not quality. Many of our startups are clones of Silicon Valley companies featured on Tech Crunch 3 months post launch. I looked at the 3 top Israel incubators and found that over 60% of the companies they were helping were clones as well.

2. Exits: We dont have a significant number of $billion or hundreds of million $ exits. I have found that while we do not have those exits, the number of companies listed on the stock market in the US for both Israel and India are comparable.

3. Market access: Israel has excellent knowledge, insights and know-how about US markets. Since Israel itself is a fairly small market, most Israeli entrepreneurs focus on US markets solely, even though they are geographically closer to Europe. Technically the # of people with market knowledge of the US in India far exceeds that of Israel, but they are not in product startups but at large companies.

4. Services mindset & positioning: Thanks to the ginormous success of Indian services companies who helped position India as the “world’s backend” (comparable to China being positioned as the world’s manufacturer) we have been already positioned as low value, low margin, consulting providers.

5. Late start: Even though Israel is 60 years old and India as a nation is a little older, we had a late (2001 or so) start to technology startups. Compared to Israel which had some interesting companies (need references here, what I have heard is mostly anecdotal) in the late 90′s as well.

Why do I still say Indian startups should look at Israel as a role model?

1. They champion their startups very well. They are very well vested in their startups success. They are constantly talking about how good their startups are, how they are possibly better than the valley and why they have the best talent in the world focused on startups.

2. They take significant risky bets. The # of investors in Israel (seed, angel and institutional) is comparable to those in India even though the number of startups is a third.

3. They look out for each other. The community is so well connected with each other that they genuinely look out and help each other. I dont know of any other place that supports their own as much as Israel does.

If you have been to Israel or have lived / worked with Israeli’s please tell me in the comments if there are a few data points I missed.

If you have any good data (not anecdotes, I have enough of those) to counter any of my arguments, feel free to call those out as well.

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3 trends that we noticed from over 500 Indian startups that we reviewed

Over the last few weeks we reviewed over 500 startups and talked (phone, skype, etc.) with over 100 startup founders. This was our shortlisting process to get to 15 companies that will make it to our Spring 2013 batch at the Accelerator.

First, we reviewed a lot of travel startups. Especially the problem of helping travelers with trip planning. A list of things to do, places to see, restaurants to eat, etc. With all the data available from multiple sites including Yelp, Facebook friends recommendations, and other online sources there seems to be enough data to form a more informed trip plan. Unfortunately we picked none of them. Its too hard to see what will differentiate one company from another. Some claim it is their User experience, others their recommendation algorithm and still others their human-powered technology planning.

Second we reviewed many more gaming applications than we did in the previous batch. Zynga’s performance notwithstanding, many folks are jumping on the in-app purchases and social gaming concept. Most start with a web social game though, not mobile. That’s fair, since the number of mobile smartphone early adopters in India is still far and few between. Again, we passed on all of them since the teams did not seem complete and hiring design talent is amazingly hard in India.

Third we reviewed many SaaS applications in the help desk and customer support area. There were 3 teams with excellent experience & background in the space and all had some initial customer traction. Many were gunning for BMC Remedy, but my sense was although the market is fairly large, nothing set one team apart from another. They all pretty much had the same feature set as ZenDesk or FreshDesk.

Bonus trend – we saw many education “ERP” applications. School management, test preparation academy management, College alumni management etc.

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How to get to 1000 startups in India ever year

I will be on a panel with several others at the IAMAI conference next week for the India Digital Summit and the discussion is about how to make 1000 digital startups happen annually in India.

I thought I’d put some thoughts together and get some opinions before I present at the panel.

Currently there are less than half that number of product companies being started each year.

There are various issues across the funnel, but I’ll focus on the #1 issue, which I believe is at the top of the funnel.

Great product entrepreneurs starting great companies.

I wanted to pick a specific example from our accelerator: two of the most amazing hackers and geeks I have worked with – Melchi and Aditya co-founded Cloud Infra after 6 years at Google here in India, building high quality products.

I would fund them just given their background and the quality of hackers they are. Regardless of what they are developing.

Anyplace else (Valley) they would have been funded first and then they would have been asked questions. I worked with them for 4 months.They are amazing.

India needs more of them to increase the number of startups from 500 to 1000.

Unfortunately that’s not happening and is not going to happen.

I may get a lot of brickbats for this statement, but:

I believe the best product entrepreneurs should have built & shipped a world-class product before they start a company.

If you have worked in a services company it does not count. Period.

There are very few software product companies in India – in fact fewer than 20 are really good. Of those 20, many, including Google, are cutting back on hiring and investing in India.

That’s just awful.

Yahoo, Zoho & InMobi in particular have contributed a LOT to the product startup ecosystem in India, given how many good developers they have helped groom.

If you worked at any of these product software companies a few years ago, then you are a candidate for a high quality product startup in India.

Granted, a small number of these folks are actually starting companies, but that can be fixed.

The trouble is there are not too many of them in the first place.

And the bigger issue is that the Google’s and Facebook’s of the world are preferring to hire more folks in the valley.

In fact many of the top IIT graduates who get jobs at Google and Facebook are moving to the valley. 2 years ago they’d be working here in India.

To get 1000+ digital startups each year in India, we have to work on making sure world-class digital software companies hire more of our top people here in India.

I dont think tax breaks will provide them any more incentive to hire here.

I also believe there are enough quality folks here in India they can hire.

I’d love some ideas on what will make them hire more people of high caliber in India and keep them here. I’d love to see them not cut back on hiring in India.

What are your ideas on how we can get these companies to hire great engineering talent in India?

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Announcing the angel investor office hours in Bangalore (soon in Mumbai and Delhi as well)

How to hack your seed round in India, got 63 emails, comments and twitter messages asking me to take the post to its next logical step.

The 3 biggest issues entrepreneurs raised were:

1. They dont have the email addresses of these angel investors. Even if they did send them an email, responses were slow or went into a “black hole”.

2. The angel networks in particular have a fairly arduous process to filter, select and decide on new companies.

3. Many angel investors were not proactive in telling them what areas (sectors) they were interested in funding, so entrepreneurs could tailor their pitch to be more specific and target the right person.

I am extremely pleased to announce that in Bangalore (soon in Mumbai and Delhi as well), we will have a few of the top angel investors from IAN (working on Mumbai Angels and others as well, stay tuned) who are committing to office hours each week to meet entrepreneurs and provide them quick feedback on their funding options.

From January 2013, five of the most prolific IAN investors, Venkat Raju, Manav Garg, Nagaraj Prakasam, Sharad Sharma and Sundi Natrajan will hold monthly office hours in 2 locations – the Microsoft office at Lavelle Road and Eka Software offices in Outer Ring Road.

Update: Anil Joshi of Mumbai Angels has also agreed to host office hours in both Bangalore and Mumbai once a month.

Each session will be for 30 minutes per entrepreneur and a max of 4 entrepreneurs will be given time on a first-come-first-serve basis every month. Only one session per entrepreneur per year will be allowed.

Second, after each investment led by these investors they will write a quick note to tell us more about why they decided to invest. This will tell us more about what their thesis was, the trends they were betting on and other relevant details.

Finally each of these investors will share their investment thesis for 2013 and the sectors or areas they have expertise in or are passionate about. For example, Sharad’s an expert in Internet and advertising, whereas Sundi is passionate about education.

I am very excited that they are committing to these office hours. As entrepreneurs we will get a chance to interact with them and get their initial feedback so we can fine tune our plans and strategies to maximize our funding chances.

I do have one request: We’d like a volunteer to help program manage this effort. You should be willing to commit about 1-2 hours per week. If you are interested, please send an email to: mukund at thrisha dot com.

If you are a seed investor and you’d love to join this program, do send me an email as well.

P.S. A few folks have been asking me about other cities, such as Chennai, Hyderabad, Pune, etc. I wont be able to commit to these investors coming to those cities, but will try and get a few more local investors from those cities to hold office hours.