Author: ProductNation Network

ProductNation has been set up by a team of enthusiasts who have created a platform for entrepreneurs, employees and indeed, onlookers to share ideas, ask questions and gain knowledge about various dimensions of the software product business.
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When to open the purse for that Blockchain-y project of yours?

Blockchain, Blockchain ! The buzz continues to spread from coffee machines to boardrooms. Everyone I speak to nowadays is eager to know how to leverage Blockchain tech and what’s in it for them.

A key question in front of us as solution providers is when to choose Blockchain (and when to stick to relational databases) and more importantly which use case to fund/invest.

Based on my experience of Blockchain technology, if your use case meets all the conditions below, using a Blockchain makes business sense:

  1. A Shared Database: A Blockchain is a distributed ledger. The data contained in a Blockchain is replicated across all nodes within the network and is therefore shared. First step would be to determine if there is a genuine need for data sharing across the entire network.
  2. Multiple Writers: In a Blockchain, the database is written by multiple writers simultaneously. These writers could be a bank’s customers initiating payments, traders trading in a exchange, ATM/POS transactions, multiple companies updating their records in a government portal etc.
  3. Lack of Trust: Does your use case involves multiple users that trust each other? Let me ask it differently. Is one user willing to let other users modify the database entries it owns and is he/she blindly trusts the ‘read-only’ information provided by other users? If your answer is a clear NO, then Blockchain can be the answer. But everyone trusts a Blockchain as transactions are confirmed by ‘autonomous’ nodes (that do not trust each other) and considered immutable.
  4. No need for a central intermediary: If all we needed was a solution that let’s multiple non trusting writers update a shared database, then having a central intermediary that is trusted by all writers could have solved the problem. Everyday we interact with such central intermediaries e.g. Uber, commuter train companies, our banks, government etc. Govt issues us identity documents that are acceptable to all, a bank’s confirmation on a successful transaction is treated as a gospel of truth. Blockchain removes the need of having a central intermediary by its inherent design of immutability, block confirmations, distributed consensus. The transactions performed on a blockchain can thus be trusted by multiple writers who do not trust each other but trust a Blockchain. Do you really need disintermediation and does not having one makes it cheaper , faster , more efficient for your customers.
  5. Transactions Linkage: It means that transactions created by different writers often depend on one other. For example, A sends some money to B who in turn sends it to C. So, C’s balance is dependant on A. Because of this dependency, the transactions naturally belong together in a single shared database. Taking this further, one nice feature of blockchains is that transactions can be created collaboratively by multiple writers, without either party exposing themselves to risk.
  6. Authoritative Final Transaction Log: All nodes agree to the contents of this log. For a new node, downloading the entire previous blockchain is a starting point. If a node is down for some time, it can download the incremental blockchain to know the latest contents of Blockchain. In a peer-to-peer database with no central authority, nodes might have different opinions regarding which transaction to accept, because there is no objective right answer. By requiring transactions to be “confirmed” in a blockchain, we ensure that all nodes converge on the same decision.
  7. Guaranteeing the represented assets: Who stands behind the assets represented on the blockchain? If the database says that I own 10 units of something, who will allow me to claim those 10 units in the real world? Who do I sue if I can’t convert what’s written in the blockchain into traditional physical assets? Is it going to be a bank, a stock exchange, a mineral company? It all depends on the type of asset that is recorded on the Blockchain.

Conclusion: If your use case fulfils the all of the above criteria, using a Blockchain makes sense. Go ahead and invest in it, Blockchain is worth it.

(Disclaimer: Inputs from Gideon. Views expressed are personal and may not necessarily reflect views of my employer.)

Guest Post by Gaurav Singhai, Sopra-Steria

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Setting up Inside Sales to sell SaaS into US – Learning’s from iSPIRT #PlaybookRT

Inside Sales was presented as one of the strategic levers for SAAS companies selling to the US market at a recent Google Accel event. no wonder when

iSPIRT arranged for a round table on this topic there was a buzzing interest.

If you are not familiar with the round tables of iSPIRT check them out here. (Highly recommended)

Suresh of kissflow.com who has been successful in cracking the US market with his DIY Self-service workflow product conducted this round table.

Agenda

What was interesting is when the group was setting an agenda. It sort of covered areas from the complete funnel from marketing to Sales. Here are the sections and key learnings that were discussed in each. End of the article we also have links to tools and resources that can help.

Leads/Marketing
This is concerned with generating leads. These might be signups on your free-trial self-service product or request for demos. [Inbound]

These might also be leads that you have gathered by list building/event which you might be nurturing through email marketing or Inside Sales for outbound.

Learning

  • SEO is a must and early start helps
  • Start with a keyword list (Commercial intent) and then keep building backlinks and writing content. In Suresh’s words its do-able and needs discipline and not hacks. [In my own opinion we as Indian entrepreneurs have done a shoddy job in this area and need to learn this fast]
  • Keywords, which you cannot rank on, go with PPC. The typical signup costs discussed were between 50 USD – 200 USD per signup / MQL
  • Data for outbound prospecting is very important; Mass Emailing does work but it is super important to spend time on defining segment well and crafting messaging which is relevant.
    [In my opinion one would actually have to go a step further with personalization if you are not a mass market solution and selling to mid-large markets]
  • Having a strong Web Engineering team which works on Google Analytics and conversion optimization is a must

Inside Sales

Roles

You may be calling this team with different names. In theory the following are possible

  • Lead Development Rep – Qualify Inbound leads
  • Sales Development / Account Development – Generate Qualified meetings from outbound
  • Other names discussed were BDRs (Same as SDRs or some times channel)
  • Account Executive – Someone who closes
  • Product Specialist – Someone who knows product well and closes
  • Should you have a product specialist closing or Account executive?
  • Self-Serve product with low complexity AE (sometimes even an SDR) can close
  • If a product requires mapping use cases configurations (Like KissFlow) then Product specialist are in the best position to close
  • If you selling 50K + ACV then a field Sales or experienced AE in the US is recommended.

Where to Hire Inside Sales

There were different thoughts and opinions on what talent can fit into this role. Typically the options are

  • Someone who has been in a BPO
  • Fresh Graduate who wants to build a career in Sales
  • Experienced Lead Generation in IT Services / SaaS

It was recommended that if you are starting out get someone who is more experienced and can then train new members. Training was an important aspect of Inside Sales and once you have 2-3 members it’s best to invest into training.

One of the learning I have had is that the player coach model does not work. If you are getting someone to manage / coach a team do not have a individual quota for them.

Compensation Structure

  • At one point this became a discussion of Chennai vs RoW ☺
  • SDRs should be compensated and evaluated on meetings / opportunities passed and accepted.
  • AE should be compensated on MRR addition (and may be a bonus on long term contracts)
  • The starting costs of SDRs discussed varied from 4L – 8L [Inbound is far easier than outbound]

Metrics discussed

  • Inbound leads per Rep per month – 200 – 300 this is for ACV <10K kind of deals. Larger deals lesser leads
  • Outbound accounts per SDR per month – 200 – 300 and aim for 1-2 meetings per day
  • Email Open Rates for Cold Emails – 20% – 30%
  • Right party Conversations per Day – 8 – 12

Tools discussed

Resources/Books

Guest Post by Sachin Bhatia, Founder at InsideSalesBox

 

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India’s reverse Brexit: Passing the GST Bill will create millions of formal sector jobs

Imagine a warehouse of more than one crore square feet in Central India – around five times the size of the largest football stadium in the world. It would have an eight lane highway that is connected to all four corners of the country on one side. It would have one of India’s largest railway container terminals for handling enormous goods trains on another side. It would have an all-cargo airport terminal operated by a partner on another side. And on the fourth side would be a cluster of manufacturers supplying the warehouse in real time based on big data analytics of national demand and inventory for their products.

This warehouse is not even on the radar today but can become a reality with the GST Bill. Passing the GST Bill – India’s reverse Brexit moment that will end state-by-state rules and create a national market for goods to be supplied from anywhere to anywhere – will create millions of formal jobs.

Currently, supply chains for e-commerce companies are not optimised but distorted by regulatory cholesterol that prevents us from offering customers the lowest cost or fastest delivery. We are unable to supply goods worth more than Rs 5,000 to UP because our customers have to go to a tax office and complete paperwork. We are unable to keep goods from our 90,000 suppliers in our warehouses across Karnataka due to double taxation. We often face confiscation of goods and cash in Kerala because of their approach to tax domicile, which conflicts with supplying states.

With GST, all of this will be history.

A seamless national supply chain that is agnostic to supply or demand destination is urgent, important and overdue for three reasons. First, it is India’s development trajectory to reduce poverty. Second, it will improve enterprise productivity. Finally, it is about empowering consumers and producers.

Let’s look at each of them in more detail.

We need to evolve very differently from China as we do not have the same global manufacturing and trade opportunity China had in 1978. Plus, democracy imposed some very desirable but real fixed costs on infrastructure building and growth. Harvard professor Ricardo Hausmann suggests that the best predictor of sustained prosperity is “economic complexity” and India’s economically complex economy is a great opening balance for building on domestic consumption growth to reduce poverty. Essentially, instead of the traditional formula of large manufacturing, exports and large enterprises, i think India’s destiny lies in services, domestic consumption and small and medium enterprises.

The second point of enterprise productivity is important because poverty can be eliminated by improving productivity. We are thinking hard about individual productivity like skills and education, but we must recognise that India’s problem is not jobs but wages. Our official unemployment rate of 4.2% is not fudged. Everybody who wants a job has one, just not at the wages they want. India’s enterprise stack is largely informal, unproductive and built on self-exploitation. Of our 63 million enterprises 12 million don’t have an office, 12 million work from home, only 8.5 million pay taxes, only 1.5 million pay social security, and most tragically, only 18,000 have a paid-up capital of more than Rs 10 crore.

Drying this swamp is key. The US economy is nine times our size but only has 22 million enterprises. Ninety per cent of India works informally (this is the same number as 1991 and means that 100% of net jobs in the last 20 years have been created in informal enterprises). Many factors go into enterprise productivity but the main one is market access: connecting with buyers.

The final point is about consumer and producer empowerment. The majority of India’s 600-million-strong transacting consumers do not have access to quality products at affordable rates. Similarly, lakhs of producers are denied market access. Because of geographical constraints and artificial restrictions placed by the current tax regime, quality products are expensive and affordable products suffer from poor quality.

Here technology can come to the rescue post-GST. The ‘India stack’ framework for transactions (paperless, presenceless and cashless) is being first applied magnificently to finance but has huge implications for production and consumption once GST is passed. An unintended consequence of implementing the India stack across supply chains will be big data analytics for government that will not only improve compliance but greatly expand formal economic activity and create a virtuous cycle for credit, employment and wage rises.

One of the most remarkable books about India is The Integration of Indian States by V P Menon. It describes wonderfully how the 562 maharajas that administered more than 40% of India’s land and 25% of our population in 1947 were brought into the Indian state by 1951 in a project led by Sardar Patel, which secured the political unity of India. Passing GST will have similar impact on our economic unity. It will be a gift to first-generation entrepreneurs who don’t have connections or money but just the courage of their hearts, the sweat of their brow and the strength of their back.

Coming soon after Brexit – the UK’s economically baffling decision to leave the European Union – passing GST would also signal to the world that India’s economic ambitions have new rocket fuel. India’s regulatory cholesterol has been hostile to small entrepreneurs. GST rights that wrong and makes a new appointment with India’s missed tryst with destiny. This is one that she must keep.

Guest Post by Sachin Bansal, Co-founder & Executive Chairman of Flipkart

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Learnings from “Running Inside Sales for US, from India” – iSPIRT Playbook Roundtable

It is an exciting phase for the Indian SaaS eco-system. There are a lot of companies from India trying to build products for the global market. Some of them have been able to scale to tens of thousands of customers and millions of dollars in revenue. Many others are just getting started or want to step up their game. In both cases, there are trying to figure things out, sort of solving a jigsaw puzzle. Sales is a big part of the puzzle. There are many questions to be answered – how to generate leads, how to sell, whom to sell, how to hire for sales etc.

To get answers to some of these questions and more, iSPIRT organized a playbook roundtable – “Running Inside Sales for US, from India”. It was moderated by Suresh Sambandam, CEO, KiSSFLOW and I was fortunate to be part of it.

Running Inside Sales for US, from India

This blog aims to highlight some of the key learnings from the discussion.

Product-Market fit

This may sound cliched but getting Product-Market fit right is critical before you begin your sales process. Without getting this right you are just shooting in the dark.

Branding and positioning needs to be aligned to what the customer thinks/needs. Customers won’t be thinking the way we are – brand needs to solve that. One way to achieve this is to start by having your product / company name synonymous with what your potential customer is looking for. There are plenty of examples out there – Recruiterbox – Recruitment software, Freshdesk & Zendesk – Help desk software, SalesForce & InsideSalesBox – Sales/CRM software, KiSSFLOW – Workflow management software.

Marketing / Demand generation

Most early stages startups work on an inbound lead generation model. This means, getting SEO right and having a website that looks great & conveys the right message to your prospect is a no-brainer.

One point that came up during the discussion about SEO was content marketing. Invest in building great content for your users and they can prove to be a good source of inbound leads. Also important to remember is the role of distribution of content. No point in having great content if it doesn’t reach the right audience.

Interestingly, Quora was mentioned a good source of leads if answers point to content you have generated.

Other lead generation strategies that were discussed

  • Adwords : important to make a list of primary and secondary keywords and bid for them so that you end up in the first page of search
  • Listing on business app marketplaces – Google Apps, Capterra
  • Outbound lead generation : Some tools to get a database of companies – Discovery.org, DataGuru, Datanyze, Rainking. Use tools like Sendee or Amazon SES for outbound email campaigns to get better open, response rates.
  • Doing Paid webinars at domain specific sites : need significant effort and money.
  • Analyst relations : KiSSFLOW has used Capterra, G2CrowdSource, Gartner and Forrester, TrustRadius. Getting listed is not difficult. Improving ratings needs time and effort

Inside Sales Team Roles

Sales team structure

Before setting up the sales team, it is essential for the founders to map the entire sales process. This sets the tone for the sales team to follow.

Suresh raised an important question – Is your product complex enough to necessitate two roles – SDR & AE.

Sales Development Rep (SDR)

  • Should be good with talking and selling and need to do the bulk of talking and writing to customers
  • Generally have about 300-400 leads to work on and set demos for AEs .
  • Incentives – At KiSSFLOW, it is composite – based on email opens (they have some metrics), completed demos and a small portion of booked revenue.
  • Qualify leads based on multiple factors including no of active sessions, user-base, profile of signed up user etc.

Account Executive (AE)

  • Typical AEs are prior pre-sales guys with ~4 years of experience
  • Have very good product knowledge
  • Important metric for AEs is “Time to first WOW / Magic moment”
  • They typically floor the customer during the demo by spontaneously configuring everything needed during the session itself.
  • Should be able to figure out whether a discount would help close the deal.
  • Generate leads on their own other than leads from SDRs

Hiring

An interesting suggestion that came up was hiring AIESEC students for sales roles. These students would be foreign nationals visiting India on an exchange programme and are generally available to work for about 6-12 months and would be a good fit.

Some of the companies mentioned, they have a intensive training program to train SDR’s.

Pricing

Important learning – many make the mistake of making quick decisions when it comes to pricing, and not giving it enough thought. Needs to be very simple, but also needs to be constantly worked and improved.

Tools & Resources

Some of the marketing & sales – tools & resources used by the participant companies

  • LeadSquared : Generate landing pages easily for campaigns
  • Sendee / Amazon SES : For email campaigns
  • Discovery.org, DataGuru, Datanyze, Rainking : Lead database
  • FullStory : Recorded video of user actions/activities. Alternative tool, MouseFlow.
  • Moz : to check SEO ranking
  • Pipedrive, SalesForce : CRM
  • Wappalyzer, BuiltWith – technologies used on website – useful for competitor analysis
  • Guide to marketing & selling in SaaS – A Jump Start Guide To Desk Marketing and Selling For SaaS – thanks iSPIRT for this.

Closing thoughts

It was really a insightful and informative session and a great starting point in Sales for many of us.

Thanks to

  • Amarpreet Kalkat, Frrole & Avinash Raghava, iSPIRT for organizing this round table
  • Suresh Sambandam, CEO, KiSSFLOW for moderating the session
  • Other startup founders for sharing your insights
  • And finally, Sumanth, CEO, Deck App for hosting us and for the sumptuous pizzas, tea and biscuits.
Guest Post by Gautham Sheshadhari, RecruiterBox
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The fundamentals that help us grow more than 100% every quarter

At Mypoolin, we have a consistent and strong belief that a very significant aspect of building a business is keeping the fundamentals strong. The fundamentals are not just the core pillars for making the company stand as an entity, but also serve as defining the form as the firm emerges from its initial amorphous self. When we started the venture last year, we had some basics and an initial direction in mind, but we could not define those at that time.

For the first timers, we are the social payments product company of the country. We enable seamless peer to peer transactions and group transactions for all use cases, varying from movies to events to parties to outings to rent and more. Over the past 12 months, the product has grown both qualitatively and quantitatively. Starting from transactions just worth a few thousands per month to achieving a high growth rate currently, we are intent on making this product an integral part of your social lifestyle.

Mypoolin1

Let us dive into the fundamentals that continue to shape us –

Tackling a big problem

The reasons big problems are so important to be solved, is that once you solve them, half of the battle (or even more) is won. Not only does it ensure that the product can deliver, it also incentivizes the user by default to explore and use the same. Once you hit a raw nerve and resolve a crucial pain point, you ensure that the barriers to adoption are now as low as they can be, from the point of view of motivation of the user. And at the same time, when the vision is big, everyone in the team is driven as well to execute on it and be a part of it.

MyPoolin2

Simplifying a challenging solution

Well, it is one thing to say and another thing to build on it. After defining the problem and realizing the challenge in front, we started iterating on the product and building it piece by piece. All along some factors and pointers helped us in defining the direction of the product –

  • What exactly does the consumer desire? (Putting ourselves in their shoes)
  • Does our solution present itself in its simplest form? (Analyzing)
  • Are users really feeling empowered by using it? (Observing and tracking)

Mypoolin3

The above pointers will answer that whether the customers have the necessary ability to utilize our solution or not. And at the same time, since we are combining two domains of the internet viz – social network and payments into one; the product tends to become intricate in terms of its engineering. This in turn makes sure that the ability of the team is tested as well to its full potential for making the product really polished.

Discipline, Focus and Fun

Another key fundamental in running a growing company, especially in the complex and sensitive infrastructure of payments, is the presence of discipline and focus. This applies to both the phases-

  • Developing the product as well as
  • Tracking the analytics and output

Mypoolin4

At the same time, fun is always a part of the equation and the hidden gem at times for everyone to appreciate the mission as a team. In fact, the point of fun trickles everywhere, including our product as well which portrays the statement of ‘Payments made fun’. Traditionally, payments have been a painful and mundane part of our lives, but not anymore. Time to make them cool….

Wish to join one of the fastest growing ventures in the intricate, growing and powerful domain of fin-tech? Ping us directly at [email protected]

Cheers

Team Mypoolin, Rohit Taneja. 

 

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7 SEO Trends Entrepreneur Should Pay Attention To

Anyone who has been in the business of SEO for long is well aware that this is one of the fastest moving industries in the world. You have to be able to pay attention to the latest SEO trends if you’re going to stay ahead of the competition and preserve your ranking.

This guide is going to introduce you to the seven primary SEO trends you have to pay attention to this year. And if you follow these trends you will be well on your way in being a better marketer who understands not only SEO, but how to effectively grow your business.

  • Higher Google Ranking Doesn’t Correlate to Organic Clicks
    Just because you have a number one ranking website doesn’t mean that you become king of the Internet. The number one spot still has to compete with visual ads and paid search results. It’s still a worthy goal to aim for, but it’s definitely not something that you should become obsessed with.
    There are other ways to promote your brand.
  • Rich Answers are on the Rise
    Rich answers are those webpages that provide a huge amount of information on a specific topic; usually general ones. Unfortunately, publicly available resources tend to form the bulk of rich answers, making it difficult for you to compete.

However, focusing on getting your site featured as part of a rich answer can be hugely beneficial. 2016 is the year to change direction on rich answers.

  • Page Speed is Becoming More Crucial
    With the rise of video content, a lot of site owners are investing in it. The problem is that they are slowing websites down. You need to remain aware of page load times because if they’re slow you’re going to start losing customers. And Google will penalize your website anyway.

A SEO optimized website must have the fastest load times possible.

  • Analytics is Getting Harder
    Dark traffic comes from a range of sources, such as from a non-secure site to a secure site, image searches, and the rampant use of VPNs. This traffic isn’t able to be tracked and Analytics reports are becoming less accurate than ever before. This is making it harder to make decisions.
    You can get around this slightly by creating direct traffic reports within Analytics so you can at least filter out the dark traffic.
  • Keywords are Alive and Well 

Despite what some people think, keywords are not dead. They remain alive and well, but what people have to be aware of is that Google is looking at them differently.

The post-Hummingbird world is one where Google can recognize meanings behind words. Your goal is not to focus on individually themed keywords but on the thematic groups behind them. Your keyword lists will be more varied than ever.

  • This Year You Will Be Removing Link Penalties
    Google penalties have always existed, but they have become more regular in the last few years. They have a zero tolerance policy on low-quality sites or sites that are attempting to game the system. You may have been hit with a penalty before, but it’s not the end of the world.
    Get in touch with Google and ask them about a penalty on your website. Make positive changes and tell them about it. Google has been known to remove penalties. No site is ever completely lost.
  • User Behavior is Becoming a Factor

Google deny that user behavior matters. The independent experiments say otherwise. Social signals are a ranking factor, and they are based on user behavior. It only makes sense that user behavior will become a ranking factor. What they do and how long they do it for will matter.

So what should you do?

Concentrate on enhancing engagement levels. It’s the only way to get ahead of the game before it becomes a factor.

With all this in mind, how are you going to change the direction of your SEO campaign?

Guest Post by Charlie Robinson, a marketer and interim VP of Marketing of multiple tech companies. He is currently heading marketing at Adling a digital agency in Cupertino.

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Crafting experiences, which are awesome. by design #DTSummitBLR

These are exciting days for us at Pensaar. The Summit, which we have planning for a while is right around the corner.

Here’s what you can expect from our Summit workshop (Phase1 on 15, 16 and 17 July hosted at Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore). The co-creation session is carefully designed to be a completely immersive and experiential 3 days. You’ll learn how to understand customers, articulate insights that will inspire innovation, ideate till you get disruptive ideas that you rapidly test with customers. The entire conference is focused on learning by doing. And, what’s more you will learn design thinking with a group of 50 people across startups, large companies and academia. We are envisioning creating change makers. You will walk away – empowered and inspired.

We are thrilled to be partnering with Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore (IIM, Bangalore) to bring the Design Thinking Summit. We are humbled by the tremendous response that’s already poured in.

Designthinking

Our mission is to raise the levels of awareness for Design Thinking in India and elsewhere. Particularly in India, where we think we’ve had a strong legacy of an engineering led culture. Sadly though that legacy is a big factor in India being perceived as an outsourced development center. The opportunity though, as we see in every challenge, is to bring about the perfect marriage of engineering & product development with a design thinking mindset – a mindset posited on a user first, design led solutioning

In our experience, many teams and organisations are deploying a tactical workaround – that of hiring designers. Merely hiring designers isn’t enough, its critical for leadership teams to harness the power of design thinking to create experiences for customers, which are awesome.by design

But I get ahead of myself here. Let me back up here a bit.

What comes to mind when you think of Innovation? Ever so often, it means it’s a flashback to one of three ways we experience the pursuit of innovation across organizations:

  1. The Eureka moment
  2. Start thinking out of the box
  3. BOHICA: Bend Over Here It Comes Again

DT2Not surprising that companies (of every shape, size and origin) are struggling with innovation. Good work is happening, the right interventions are being made but these interventions are happening in silos. One is left with the feeling that “some secret sauce is missing”. Is there a secret sauce? And is it missing?

Design thinking is the answer. It’s missing for sure. But it isn’t missing as an ingredient – it’s missing as a mindset within teams and across organizations.

So, what is Design Thinking (DT)? Design thinking or Human Centered Design is a process for solving problems. It’s a perfect blend of divergent and convergent thinking allowing for a wide exploration of possibilities vs. being fixated on a single solution (a uni-dimensional solution)

We approach DT as a “disciplined pursuit of disruption”. Let me explain the 3 key words there:

  1. Disciplined: It’s disciplined, because innovation isn’t about happy accidents and good fortune (serendipitous innovation). We believe in “engineering serendipity” to get to the future we want to create (note: we don’t say get future ready, which is an ever-shifting frame of reference)
  2. Pursuit: it’s a relentless pursuit with rigour. To fully harness the potential of DT, you have to anchor it within the DNA of the team / organisation. For organizations to realize the full potential of their innovation capabilities, they need to look at it holistically, from up skilling talent, empowering them with the right processes, values and decision making, allowing them to push the boundaries of what’s possible
  3. Disruption: This is an oft quoted (largely misquoted) and we make an effort to make that distinction. Disruption is doing new things that makes old / existing things obsolete. Innovation on the other hand is just doing new things.

We are super excited at how uniquely positioned we are. And the DT Summit is our chance to share this unique perspective with the broader audience. We love diversity and we embrace it wholeheartedly.

We fight educated incapacity, because we bring to bear the power of design thinking, which is domain agnostic in its approach and application.

So, what is that Pensaar way of Design Thinking? Our process: Discovery —> Insight —> Dream —> Disrupt is designed around some core principles:

  1. Co-creation: We love co-creating with our client partners (and in turn, encourage our clients to co-create with their users / customers). We love to share the ownership of problems (product or business or social) and solutions we co-create.
  2. Designing for Human behaviour: We love technologies (emerging and disruptive) but only as the means to the end. We believe humans are the best technology and our emphasis has always been on designing solutions for behaviour change – human-to-human interface. (No we don’t think apps are a business model)
  3. Problems & Goals focused: We are obsessed and fall in love with problems. Our approach has been carefully designed to avoid the path of least resistance. To be honest, it does make a lot of our partners edgy, because we spend a disproportionate amount of effort in building customer empathy, generating insights and carefully crafting that problem statement.
  4. Addressing a genuine human need: Most product / business failures come from lack of customers and NOT products. That’s really from NOT understanding customer’s evolving needs and yet trying to design a fancy product. Unless you’ve understood the customers real pain points and his/her hierarchy of problems, any product, no matter how good it looks on paper – its bound to fall short of its potential
  5. Assumptions test: It’s simple really. Any idea or thought you have, is a hypothesis, which needs to be tested. Without, rapid experimentation to test for assumptions and hypothesis you aren’t managing the risks in favour of success.

We can’t wait to meet you and co-create with you at the workshop. We hope to see you, both at the workshop (15 – 17 July) and at the Unconference on 12 Aug.

Please do share this event ‪#DTSummitBLR http://designthinkingsummit.com and help us spread the word on the summit. 

Guest Post by Venkat Kotamaraju – Growth & Strategy Leader, Pensaar

 

 

 

 

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The power of a question

A few days ago, while I was discussing a rather critical business solution with one of my colleagues, I noticed that there was a strange circularity to our conversation. I kept trying to convince him of the importance of deploying such a solution,but I seemed to fail at eliciting a sense of urgency or enthusiasm from him, even though he did not disagree with me.

It might have been slight vexation on my part when I decided to break the impasse with the question, “So, what’s stopping us from doing this?”

It was then that I discovered that he had concerns about how to go about the task while I was focusing the conversation on why the job mattered.

The communication fog was lifted. We had identified the roadblock.

We often assume that the best way to communicate anything — an idea, a challenge, a solution — is to perfect the art of explaining it to the listener to provide clarity.

However, we tend to overlook the possibility that the questions we are trying to answer are sometimes not the ones that exist in the others’ minds. This could render our efforts at providing clarity, completely irrelevant.

What might be another effective way to communicate, then?

Perhaps, asking questions?

Knowing the answers will help you in school. Knowing how to question will get you through life– Journalist and speaker Warren Berger — ‘A more beautiful Question.’

It turns out that I am not alone in my quest for questions.

A few months ago, the practice of brainstorming gained a fraught reputation, when technology pioneer and author of the book, “How To Fly A Horse”, Kevin Ashton kicked up a storm with his blog post provocatively titled “Why You Shouldn’t Bother Having Brainstorming Meetings”.

Brainstorming, of course, is a highly popular practice; as he noted, it’s the “go-to approach” for all types of organizations. A typical brainstorming session gathers groups of people to focus on collecting original, creative ideas on a set topic. But this apparently benign approach, Ashton goes on to argue, actually gives rise to ideas that are anything but original. That’s because the focus is on churning out answers.

But what if brainstorms were designed to generate questions, not just ideas for answers? It’s an approach that’s garnering support among many advocates around the world.

The latest champion of this approach is Matthew E. May, author of the book, “Winning the Brain Game”. His book describes a question-generation process called “frame-storming,” which uses questions to help in framing the challenge at hand. Several people have found it to be more efficient than traditional brainstorming in sparking fresh thinking in some situations.

What if we use questions as a method to drive home the thought behind an idea, to help the listener generate answers, instead of to generate questions?

Guiding people into answers through relevant questions surrounding a topic may seem counter-intuitive. It is more natural to try and get people to see the answers when we have them worked out. However, this question-based approach can lead to greater clarity than the usual method of having them ask questions for improved clarity.

It also helps to remember that a question triggers our brains to start serving up answers, almost on autopilot. The answers almost always reinforce the assumptions behind the questions.

Naturally, at this point how the question is formulated assumes paramount significance. A question could spark random divergence from the actual problem by introducing more assumptions, or could become a harbinger for radical solutions or ideas by shattering existing assumptions. Either way, the design of a question definitely begs a lot of attention.

For ages, questions have been at the heart of innovations in science, philosophy, medicine — why not extend the power of the question as a tool for sharpening and deepening communication?

About the Author

Shivku is usually found cracking PJs in the office and disrupting people from doing their job. A self-proclaimed foodie, he is the best person to get the local food scene advice from, irrespective of where you aretravelling to. This blog originally appeared on Medium.

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The iSPIRT Roundtable @Pune – 11 Startups share Metric Driven Growth Secrets

As a startup founder or growth marketer, you obsess over metrics: what is my lead-generation rate, how many customers did I win or lose, how is my monthly revenue growing, or how many customer referrals did I get? Analytics is critical for your business, without which you’re flying blind. However, data overload is real and you might not derive the right actionable insights.

To simplify metric-driven growth for product startups, iSPIRIT, on 18th June 2016, organised a half day roundtable of 11 product startups in Pune. The roundtable was moderated by Paras Chopra, Founder, Wingify and Sanket Nadhani, Growth Marketer, Wingify.

The discussion was structured in a way where attendees spoke about the 3 metrics that are most important to them, an “uncommon” metric that they track, and their expectations from the roundtable. The format was kept fluid with attendees pitching in with thoughts and interesting ideas. At the end of this, all of us saw an exciting video about using Lean Analytics for growing your business.

As a growth marketer, I found interesting growth tactics that these startups use and some insightful metrics that they track. I have structured these in Dave McClure’s famous AARRR pirate-metric framework for SaaS businesses.

 

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Acquisition

Where do I get customers from?

Acquiring new customers is hard. Especially for newly born startups. The best way probably is to just throw mud everywhere and see where it sticks. Once you’ve identified a performing channel, or hopefully multiple channels, you build strategies around them to ramp up acquisition.

Invariably all the startups agree tracking the number of enquiries (opportunities) and their conversion rates across channels is crucial. Paras was of the opinion that keeping an eye on weekly trends on the performance of acquisition channels will help uncover tipping points of when the channel is about to take off or when it’s time to forget about a channel if it has not been performing for a while. To identify optimal acquisition channels, Sandeep Khode, WordsMaya, tells us to ask your customers where they came to know about you. Though it’s a manual process, it helps them to identify users’ exact search terms, which is very useful for keyword optimization. WordsMaya leverages Quora to acquire customers by answering questions or starting a topic.

Jayesh Kariya, VP Finance, TouchMagix, contributed an interesting idea that maintaining a trend of number of prospects lost every week is an eye opener. This lends the idea that your startup should improve its own performance week-on-week.

Landing pages and pricing pages plays an important part in customer acquisition. However, due to information overload, 55% percent of visitors spend fewer than 15 seconds on a new website. Optimizing landing page was a top priority for everyone. Paras told us that a landing page should tell a complete story; it should give all the information that the visitor wants in as few words as possible. Amit Mishra, CEO, InterviewMocha shared an excellent framework, HABITS, to design landing pages. He also says that inserting call to action buttons on your own blog posts gives a click-through rate of around 2%, effectively using your own website as an acquisition channel.

Habits_for_Conversion_Optimized_Landing_Pages

 

Activation

Oh! I got 1000 signups in a day but nobody used the product.

This sucks, right? To improve activation rates, answer this question: once someone signs up, how quickly can she actually use your product? In other words, how soon does she realise the product’s value proposition? If it’s not soon enough, the user goes away never to return.

The onboarding experience of a user should be smooth and, importantly, short. You should NOT ask a user to fill out a form with more than four fields. Some of the tactics and metrics that were discussed –

  • Keep the on-boarding experience short. Examining onboarding experiences of other companies will help you design your own.
  • Measure the ratio of number of users who sign-up to number of user who complete onboarding. Make sure that you measure every step if you have a multi-step onboarding process.

Retention

I signed up a 1000 users a month back. Today, only 10 of them are using my product.

Customer Retention is the real growth accelerator. The math is quite simple: 1 – 1 + 1 = 1. If you don’t retain customers, there’s no use acquiring them. Here’s a great infographic with helpful tips to boost customer retention and reduce churn.

Vrushali Babar, Founder, Meatroot, a B2C business, says that it’s crucial for her to retain her customers. She says that sentiment analysis of what her customers are saying online is indispensable. She currently does it manually on Twitter or Facebook but using a tool like Sentiment140 or BuzzLogix could be useful.

A useful exercise could be developing a dashboard that plots the engagement of users with your product on a daily basis. The philosophy is that a customer who is not engaged will leave. Such a dashboard will give you a snapshot of when engagement of a customer is on the decline so that you can take proactive action before the customer cancels. Another useful metric, for SaaS businesses, is to measure the number of sessions for a user during the trial phase. This will let you know which users are more likely to convert to a paid subscription.

To demonstrate how important is customer retention, Sagar Bedmutha, CEO, Optinno Mobitech takes this issue to an obsessive level. When a user submits a rating of less than 4 on their app on the Play Store, he tracks the user, fixes the bug, and sends a test app to the customer! He says, this personal touch often makes the user change her rating and helps Optinno maintain good ratings, the primary driver of app installs.

Paras contributed a great insight on how to properly measure churn rates. He says, that measuring the average churn rate doesn’t help uncover the reason for the churn. Instead, you should do a churn cohort analysis, that is, measure the churn rate segmented by customer cohorts. Examples of cohorts could be the number of months a customer used the product before leaving, the specific features churned customers use, etc.

Screen Shot 2016-06-24 at 11.12.51 AM

 

Let’s say you have 100 customers and 5 of them leave in a given month. Your churn rate turns out to be 5%. However, the graph above makes it clear that the churn is much higher for customers who are less than 6 months old after which the churn is much lower. This points to a problem with activation: customers drop off when they are not fully activated.

Revenue

I have over a 1000 customers, but I am not making any money.

A bad problem to have! Businesses should make money from the customers they serve. This, seemingly obvious, fact sometimes slips away when you are working on many things. Measuring how much revenue you’re generating month-on-month (monthly recurring revenue) is indispensable.

Not only should you track revenue growth, you should work towards increasing it in ways other than signing up new customers. A great way to do that for SaaS businesses is upselling. Upselling lets you get more revenue from one customer and help you define and build the whole product. Kaushal Sanghavi, co-founder, BreathingRoom takes this a step further by saying that maintaining a predictable revenue stream is important. He is trying various techniques and says that incentivizing customers to pre-purchase, or buying in bulk for future use, is showing a lot of promise.

Amit seems to have perfected the art of upselling. He says not to wait to build out a feature before upselling to your customers. Sell as soon as you have an idea. Doing so will give you insights on which are the features customers really want and help you prioritize your product roadmap.

Referral

How I wish my customers referred more customers to me!

A working referral system is what differentiates SaaS companies. An amazing referral system, like that of Dropbox’s Refer-a-Friend, is probably the easiest thing that can bring exponential growth.

Building a working, and non-creepy, referral program for your startup is hard. From my experience, most experiments fail. But you can look at some successful referral implementations and learn from them.

Amit tells that monetarily incentivizing salespeople to follow up with their customers and ask them to write reviews on various web directories has worked well for him to acquire more customers. InterviewMocha, an online assessment software, stores email addresses of people that their system collects, follows them on LinkedIn, and when someone changes a job, reaches out to them to install InterviewMocha in their new companies. Though manual and time-taking, this method, I believe, justifies the ROI.

Final Words

There are a lot of metrics that you can track and you probably are. It’s easy to get lost. The video from Google Ventures that we saw makes a great statement: for a company of a type at any stage of the company, there is one metric that is the most important, which you can’t afford to not track.

As a founder, keep an eye on that one metric and just focus on growing that metric. Here’s a PDF of what that metric is.

At the end of the event, I caught hold of Sanket to pick his brain. One of the main questions I had was what does a founder do when he is just starting out and does not have too much data to derive insights from. Customer Interviews. When you’re small, you can afford to pay attention to each customer. In turn, those customers, often happy with the personal touch, will tell you what they want exactly and give you insights that no market research can.

Customer Interviews are tricky: if you don’t conduct them well, you won’t get the insights that you want. Or more dangerously, you will listen to what you want to listen and fail at validating your assumptions. Spend effort in creating good user interviews and refine over time.

I hope that this post gives you an overview of why metrics are important to grow your business, how to define appropriate business metrics, and learn how startups are already doing so.
About the author – Siddharth Saha – a Product Marketer with an interest in full stack marketing. Questions? Criticisms? Insights? Shoot him an email on [email protected]

 

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What is UPI after all?

India has come a long way in online payments in a very short period of time. With the launch of NEFT and IMPS, cash transfers between accounts has been made electronic, paperless and instant. NPCI (National Payments Corporation of India) has recently launched UPI (Unified Payments Interface) as a new way to transfer money in India. This blog post’s content is based on a recent webinar conducted by Razorpay. You can watch the webinar below or at this youtube link.

UPI holds the potential to change the face of online payments in India, but there is still a lot of confusion around what UPI is supposed to be. Hopefully, by the end of this blog post, you will have a better and clear idea of what the buzz around UPI is all about.

What UPI is

  1. UPI is a way to transfer money
    The easiest way to think of UPI is that it is a payment method to transfer money between 2 parties. It is similar to NEFT or RTGS transfers in that way. Even though it is being promoted as a “Payment Interface” and an API, it is easier to think of it as a way to transfer money.
  2. UPI is interoperable between banks
    This is really important. By standardizing UPI as the “money-transfer-API”, NPCI is forcing banks to improve their interoperability. This will let customers manage their bank accounts on multiple banks over a single banking application (from any of the banks). Huge deal going ahead.
  3. UPI is running on top of the existing IMPS Infrastructure*
    The asterisk is because IMPS is being used “as of now”. This might change in the future as the scope of UPI is increased.
  4. UPI is betting heavily on smartphones in India
    Smartphone penetration in India is on the rise. UPI is heavily betting on smartphones, which means it will require mobile banking applications as a basic minimum. We also have NUUP/*99#, the national based-payments infrastructure run by NPCI and it is somewhat interoperable with UPI. However, to leverage the entire suite of UPI, we’ll need to get smartphones in everyone’s hands.

What UPI is not

  • UPI is not going to be immediately available everywhere
    UPI is currently in beta, with access restricted to certain parties. Even after this period ends, there will be very few parties actually talking to UPI. However, every bank will have its own timeline on their UPI integrated applications going live. Expect to see it getting announced by banks somewhere in Summer this year.
  • UPI is not a mobile wallet killer (yet)
    This is probably the most talked-about question, and the answer is not very clear as of now. As with every new technology, the answer depends on the adoption. UPI does have some barriers to entry, such as smartphone penetration and even things like availability of apps in Indic languages. Mobile Wallets have flourished in India because they have allowed customers to spend money online far more easily compared to other payment methods. UPI is far more easier to use for the end-customer while also having the advantage of being interoperable. (You can’t check your Paytm balance from your MobiKwik app, but you can do that with UPI).
    However, UPI is still not there. This is an early avatar, and it will require a lot of polish before people will start trusting UPI as the payment method for everyone. Meanwhile we’ll still have to rely on payments being made of Credit Cards and the plethora of netbanking options we currently have.
  • UPI is not going to replace Net Banking
    The simple reason being: UPI does one thing and it does it well (money transfers). Netbanking applications provided by banks do far more things. For eg, you can apply for health insurance on your bank portal. UPI gives you the most useful feature from there, in a far more accessible manner.
  • UPI is not a magic bullet for payment processing
    Believe this from someone who works at a fintech company. Payments are hard. Online payments, even more so. UPI might solve some of the problems and solve them really well, but it will take a lot of time and nurturing before UPI can be anywhere close to a single solution. For instance, you can’t ask someone with a non-participating bank account (such as a foreign bank, or a small co-operative bank) to transfer funds using UPI. There is no escrow mechanism in UPI, and rightly so, because it doesn’t belong in such a service. However, there are use-cases for escrow payments that will still require banks or other companies to build on top of UPI, perhaps.

What UPI means for everyone?

  1. Customers can now transfer money far more easily using their phones For a start, as a customer you get to do away with the netbanking websites and bank-specific mobile applications and get a common interface on a single app (which is still provided by any of your banks) to make fund transfers. However, the implementation of these apps is still left to the banks, and they can still add layers of complexity on top of this. For eg, UPI spec recommends an “Add beneficiary details” step before every payment, even on mobile applications as a phishing prevention measure. However, it should lead to a better “common” experience for the end-customer, in general.
  2. Merchants can now collect money from their customers easily A small-time merchant benefits greatly from UPI and can send invoices to their customers from the mobile app. Even small-time kirana stores can start accepting large payments from their regular customers over UPI. All the merchant needs to ask for is your mobile number and send you a “collect” request, which will appear as an option in the mobile app.
  3. Enterprises have to handle the hassle of another payment method This is where it gets complicated. For larger merchants, it gets unwieldy to use a mobile app to ask customers for payments. However, since customers are already paying them via other methods, this is an extra payment method that they need to integrate and test. Even then, every merchant would need to get vetted by NPCI before being granted access to UPI.
  4. Banks can now compete with wallets in mobile payments Banks have a silver-lining: If they work hard enough on their mobile app experience, they can gain back the market they have lost to mobile wallets.
  5. Wallets have to convince NPCI to add them to UPI Wallets are currently not in scope as a provider in UPI. This is more of of a consequence of the decision to use IMPS rather than NPCI ignoring wallets. However, this might change in the future, as wallets might be included in the scope. Expect this to be big news if/when it happens.

UPI Future?

UPI – Future of Indian Payments?

The success of UPI depends on whether it sees mass adoption. And the people who can ensure that are right here in this webinar. NPCI has taken a huge leap by releasing UPI and working on it. Now it is upto companies, developers, merchants, and even customers to make sure that it sees its full potential. Go ask your bank when are they integrating with UPI, and when can you start using it.

No other country in the world can boast of a payment solution as well designed as UPI. However, we need co-operation from all parties, including the Banks, to make UPI the success that it can be.

In case you have any queries regarding UPI, you can reach out to us at [email protected]

Guest Post by Abhay Rana, RazorPay.

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The SaaS Juggernaut: Advantage India

An Indian software company serving majorly clients in the US or Europe is not an unusual thing anymore. However, if anybody were to guess the location of the India office, a company that counts amongst its clients about 100,000 small businesses globally, they would most probably chose Bangalore or Hyderabad. However, Appointy, which is an advanced web-based scheduling software tool and has around 90,000 salons, spas, and dance and yoga classes as its clients in 100 countries does it out of Bhopal. Similarly Kayako, which sells support software to over 30,000 clients including NASA, Peugeot, Sega found its roots in Jalandhar, which as per their own website is “one of the least likely places to establish a technology start-up”.

The emergence of these companies from relatively smaller towns, highlight India’s comparative advantage in terms of ability to build high quality companies in the domain of Software as a Service (SaaS). The inherent model of the SaaS business does not require proximity to the end user. In the simplest terms, it is a software that can be accessed through a web browser, by paying a subscription, either on a monthly or yearly basis. The software is hosted exclusively by the provider, as opposed to being downloaded upon purchase and subsequently hosted by the client. The customer gains by spending less upfront, not having to maintain hardware and not worrying about upgrades & data security. Driven by such factors, the SaaS model is growing exponentially and the global market for 2015 stood at USD 31 billion (NASSCOM). The growth is expected to continue at CAGR of 18% to reach a market size of USD 72 billion by 2020. Another study by Google and Accel Partners estimates the 2020 market to be USD 132 billion.

The Indian SaaS landscape is expected to evolve even faster. The FY16 market is estimated to be USD 407 million, a 34% growth over FY15. This figure is expected to triple by 2020 growing at a CAGR of 27%, 1.5 times the global growth rate. It is easy to see why India is going to be a hotbed of activity for SaaS companies. The cost of product developers is one of the biggest items in a SaaS company’s P&L Statement. A software developer in India costs 25% of what a similarly skilled one based in the US would cost. India has an estimated 36,000 product managers, 25,000 SaaS engineers and 100,000 other engineers with the skills for building a SaaS product. Another critical factor is the adoption of mobiles as the primary device for accessing data. India being a mobile-first nation is well placed to ride this shift as its young companies are more flexible and can focus on mobile platforms.

Buoyed by these advantages, companies have been sprouting in every segment of the sector. NASSCOM estimates that there are around 150 Indian companies offering SaaS solutions. 40% of these companies have been incorporated after 2010. Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Content Collaboration and Communication (CCC) and Enterprise Resource Planning are the hottest segments accounting for more than half the market in FY16.

Screen Shot 2016-06-17 at 8.54.06 am

 

Growth in the domestic market is also expected to be a major boost factor for the Indian companies. A deeper dive into the key underlying sectors which are adopting SaaS brings even more attractive prospects to the fore. Healthcare, E-commerce, BFSI and education sectors have been the most targeted segments by emerging SaaS companies. Each of these sectors is expected to expand at a healthy pace in the near future riding on the overall economy’s consumption led growth. At 7.6%, India’s GDP growth rate for FY16 has been the highest in the last 5 years. Small and Medium sized businesses emerging in these sectors would be much more nimble and receptive of SaaS solutions to avoid upfront large capex on technology.

The investor community, financial and strategic, has also embraced the SaaS opportunity with both hands. A total of USD 650 million was invested in SaaS companies in India till 2014. The funding in 2014 is estimated to be between USD 170 million to USD 200 million. However, the funding skyrocketed in 2015 with USD 450 million in the first half of the year itself. Some of the most active investors who are backing SaaS companies India are as below.

  • Accel Partners (Freshdesk, Hotelogix, Mobstac, Mindtickle, Chargebee, Zettata,)
  • Blume Ventures (Zipdial, Hotelogix, Mettl, FrameBench, WebEngage, Mobstac)
  • Nexus Venture Partners (Druva, Indix, Unmetric, TargetingMantra, Genwi, Helpshift)
  • Norwest Venture Partners (BlueJeans, CRMnext, Act-On, Capillary Technolgies, Attune)
  • Sequoia Capital (Druva, Capillary Technologies, Knowlarity, Practo)

The investors will have their hands full the short to medium term as most of the companies move traverse from Series A to B to C and so on. With companies maturing and cash balances building up, the sector is also expected start throwing up M&A opportunities much faster than any other sector.

The SaaS story hasn’t quite meant curtains for the traditional software licensing business model yet. Currently, SaaS commands only about 9% of the over Indian software market which is estimated to be USD 3.1 billion. However, Indian SaaS companies have already been able to create a market perception of building great products at lower cost. Currently, a large number of Indian SaaS companies would lie in the revenue range of USD 1 to 2 million. However, there are enough cases of rapid scaling up companies (such as Freshdesk, Capillary Technologies and CRMNext) to help us believe that we will soon see companies with multiple billion dollars in revenue emerging from India.

 

Screen Shot 2016-06-17 at 8.57.35 amThis is a guest post by Arvind Yadav, Executive Team Member at Aurum Equity Partners LLP.

 

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“Getting traction for Product Startups” — iSPIRT Playbook Round Table | Notes

It was a warm Saturday morning in Ahmedabad and about 15 to 20 people had gathered at CIIE, IIM-A for this closed-door-day-long session where people who’d been-there-done-that were coming in, at their cost, to share (Read ‘Discuss’) their journey and more importantly, engage into a meaningful conversation about problems faced by Product Startups and their solutions; mainly centred around Traction.

The first iSPIRT Playbook Round table of Ahmedabad, this was that happened on 11th June ’16 and was facilitated by That Being Practical Guy (Pravin Jadhav, Head of Growth at Freecharge) and Rushabh Mehta (Founder atERPnext).

Look up the agenda that we set out with here!

And, here’s the list of Startups that attended:

  • CollegeBol: College Reviews; For Students, By Students
  • MeraCRM: CRM for India
  • Jolly Food Fellow: Making the food experience complete!
  • Plexus MD: A network for Health-care Professionals
  • MyTripKarma: Collective happiness of Stress-free Travel
  • SalesHandy: DataAnalytics & Communication tools for Sales folks
  • SalesMate.io: Intelligent CRM for smart sales team
  • Hubilo: Transforming events into happening hubs
  • Gridle: Productivity suite for teams & enterprises

Kicking off the day!

Pravin kicked the day off at 11 AM sharing some amazing insights into what it takes in building a product! Here are some highlights.

Atomic Unit

An Atomic unit of your product is that single functionality that is central to your product. For Twitter, it’s a ‘tweet’, ‘Post’ for Facebook and ‘a Transaction’ for Freecharge.

The benefit of identifying Atomic unit of your product is that it constraints you into thinking about 90% of your functionality (/perceived value) around that Atomic Unit of the product.

As an example, since a Tweet is atomic unit of Twitter, almost 90% of it’s functionality is built around:

  1. Creating a Tweet
  2. Distributing (/Curating) that tweet on Twitter (Retweet) and outside (Emedding)
  3. Favouriting & Replying to that tweet

So on and so forth. You get the point!

Clarity on what you are building..

Companies that have multiple founders, at an early stage, more often than not, have a different vision for the product. This makes it fairly important to have a short, crisp and simple vision at the start of the company itself.

We did a small exercise where we were asked to come up with our 10 word pitch within 1 minute and guess what!

  • Some companies couldn’t come up with something that short & crisp
  • Some founders had different ideas about their product

More importantly, it was a bit awkward, struggling to come up with 10 words to define what we did in 1 minute even though we had been working on it for atleast a year of more.

MVP = More Value Product!

There are few companies around that are creating a different market altogether for themselves. Minimum Viable Products work there.

Most startups are trying to make existing processes and products incrementally innovative. One thing to make sure here, Pravin said, was that our MVP should provide more value than the existing solutions in the market. It could be lean, agile, bad UI in the early stages, but the product should indefinitely provide more value. That’s the only sure-fire way to find meaning in our existence.

In order to keep it minimal, if the value is reduced, you cannot test the assumptions that you’ve set out to prove.

There were a lot more things that were discussed in this session on Product Management by Pravin. You can find the presentation here>>>>>

ERPNext’s thoughts!

Rushabh Mehta then took over to share his demo and metrics at ERPNext. How they built the company out of their own need, why they chose to go open source and compelling ways to sell softwares to Businesses.

Every Software is B2C

Said Rushabh emphasising on the importance of design, User Interface and User Experience of any Software. We also spoke about acceptable metrics in SaaS cloud-based B2B industry and why everybody should talk about churn.

Startup Presentations

All the 9 startups then did a 10 min demo of their sign up and on boarding processes where one-on-one detailed feedback, constructive criticism and important flaws were pointed out.

Here’s a brief presentation of what we learnt from the demo-session.

It’s more indicative of the depth that the session facilitators went into each and every product & entrepreneur that was present.

Towards the evening..

Pravin took to the stage again and spoke about the Growth Framework at Freecharge. Presentation here.

He shared some of the important lessons that he learn doing Growth Hacking at Freecharge. Apart from the 6 mentioned here, he also spoke about how there’s no one formula that fits all and how Growth hacking is more about quickly iterating to figure out what works best for the product. More importantly, the fact that with time, every Growth hack will lose it’s lustre and ability to bring in results.

Vanity Metrics

He shared an amazing slide as you can see below on the Vanity Metrics Vs. Real Metrics that every entrepreneur, startup and investor should understand and imbibe.

One of the very important things that he pointed out was that it was the founders job to make sure that Real metrics are measured in the company and that ROI on any marketing campaign is measured on the Real Metrics.

Do not Bullsh*t the guy in the mirror!

In Conclusion..

It was an amazingly well invested Saturday. Everyone present went home with a conclusive action point for their products.

Thanks

Hoping to have you guys back soon!

Guest Post by Yash Shah, Gridle.in 

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Because designers need to know *about* code

This is a about a long raging debate on the process of designing and developing great products.

In a recent Medium post, Jesse Weaver said something very simple but powerful — we need more designers who know *about* code. And I agree! Not only because I myself like to experiment with code but also because of the following.

“The reason designers should know about code, is the same reason developers should know about design. Not to become designers, but to empathize with them. To be able to speak their language, and to understand design considerations and thought processes. To know just enough to be dangerous, as they say.” – Jesse Weaver

This thought does enough justice to the whole debate around designers and coding. Now how much should designers know about code and how should engineers reciprocate is a different discussion. Given that we have Chrome DevTools and Framer.js today, it should be simpler.

So what does this lead to? This requires designers to go beyond the usual. Talk to engineers and understand their environment — ask stupid questions. By doing this, our usual work, experiments and hacks become easier and more fun. Now isn’t that worth it?

Guest Blog Post by Amal Tiwari, Yawasa

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There is no such thing as a startup culture

As of April 20th, 2016, Exotel is four years and 10 months old as an organisation. In the start-up investor jargon, Exotel is a VC-funded, high-growth start-up. Our home-grown on-demand cloud telephony services, powers over 1000 businesses of all sizes and shapes.

Now, if that’s a lot to take in in one go, welcome to the startup world. This sense of overwhelm is the reason employees and entrepreneurs alike find it fascinating.

The la-la-land of startups

Entrepreneurs are storytellers of the modern age. They know that the most famous stories are simple. The story’s appeal is founded on fundamental human emotions. There is always a hero and a villain. Surprising twists are always around the corner. They succeed because they’re able to captivate their investors and the initial set of employees with their story.

The early employees in any startup make or break it. Given this, it is essential that startups work with the best people they can find. But today, the world is filled with folks who want to join a start-up but have no idea why. They are replete with myths about start-ups. The biggest one being – there’s something called a startup culture.

The two main points that get listed under startup culture are

  1. one would learn the most in a start-up
  2. success is proportional to the funds raised.

A quick search on the interwebs would list dozens more.

Where then is the disconnect?

In the scramble to stick coloured labels and putting them on various axes to make life easy for themselves and their investors, most entrepreneurs forget the employee side of the story. What should people expect when they join a start-up?

I’ll try and answer that with a number-driven story, backed by the experience of a founder and the HR person.

The story I’m going to recount now is from my personal experience. It’s one of my company and its employees.

chart

Looking at the graph, you can see three distinct phases – Jun 2011 to August 2013, Aug 2013 to September 2014, September 2015 and later.

The myth of the mono-narrative start-up

Can there be a single unifying employee story across the three phases? Was there a single start-up culture. Every founder sets out to create a fantastic place to work. They assume that their company is a great place to work in; the pay, culture, freedom and so on, is on par with the rest of the ecosystem. And this assumption is a result of the founders’ perception of the truth rather than malice.

From the vantage point of a co-founder and the HR person, I have a unique perspective. And this is what I want to tell the people who are eager to work in a start-up. An untainted version of all other versions.

Multiple narratives

Here’s the twist right at the beginning. There isn’t one story. There are three stories. As a person who wants to work in a start-up, it’s important that you understand which stage the company is in, and what you can expect.

The early days

Perks: ESOPs, beer, and camaraderie

The first phase from June 2011 to August 2013 was the soul-searching phase – Product-Market fit, in entrepreneur parlance. The company was trying to find out if there was a market in the real world, and that they’re willing to pay for it.

Note how the average experience of employees in the graph increases steadily. Also, note how there are very few new hires. There was a good problem to solve, and there was light at the end of the tunnel. The problem was so challenging that none of us left. We all put our heads together to solve the problem.  Long work hours and a salary that ran out by the 10th of the month.

You should not join in this phase if you’re looking for:

  1. a safety net
  2. a specialised role
  3. a lucrative health insurance policy, again

You get the idea.

If you are a generalist who has ambitions of running your company in the future, this is your chance. Grab the opportunity by its tail.

The most professionally satisfying phase

Perks: steady paycheque, ESOPs

The second phase was from Aug 2013 to Sep 2014 – the repeatability phase, in entrepreneur parlance.

Having achieved the Product-Market fit, some of the old bunch left us to start their companies. Establishing repeatability for a company that wasn’t founded by them wasn’t an exciting prospect. On the other hand, a new bunch of people joined us – great entrepreneurs, the ones who could take responsibility of one vertical, bringing in fresh blood and new ideas.

You take home a steady pay cheque that’s not your market salary, compensated handsomely with stock options. You get to sell to, and talk to the movers and shakers of the industry – entrepreneurs, established industries, and build your circle of influence. You will get your hands dirty in various aspects of the business and find one best suited for you and the company. You get to participate and define what eventually becomes the startup’s culture.

You need to have the ability to imagine and set your goals. There’s no such thing as a  KRA/KPI that comes to you from the management, and that’s a double-edged sword.

You shouldn’t join in this phase if you’re looking for:

  1. someone to hand you down micro directions
  2. only success and no failure
  3. somebody else to define these successes and failures

The sexy phase

Perks: Everything you’ll get in a corporate job

The third stage from Oct 2014 to now is the scale stage.

The employees who’ve been able to carve out a niche for themselves hit a jackpot, and those that can’t move on. The earlier key employees who can’t think and breathe scale, leave. The company hires a whole lot of specialists – tech, sales, support, operations. You are in a stage where people join you every day/week. You can no longer recall everyone’s names leave alone their hobbies and passion.

At this stage, processes and policies become paramount. You are expected to participate, embrace and adapt them. You are supposed to live up to the numbers and culture that you’ve defined. This stage is the most comfortable stage for most people to join a startup. Of course, you’d be missing the whole multi-tasking phase, which is most exciting.

Advice to the founders and HR

While interviewing potential employees, clearly define what stage you are in and what you expect from them. It is also important to understand what they expect from the company. Do not hire people who won’t fit it.

Advice to people who look to work in start-ups

Startups are not monolithic beasts. They cover the spectrum – all the way from a pigeon to a blue whale. Understand the stage the start-up is in, what you can expect. Do not wait for things to come to you. Keep challenging the management and actively participate in defining the policies and culture.

If you think this is not your cup of tea, join a corporate and live happily ever after.

Guest Post by Ishwar Sridharan, COO & Co-Founder of Exotel