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.
Posted on

1 Critical Analytics Mistake

Why some well funded/big companies miss business targets?

Companies tend to focus 80% of their analytics effort on analysing “Historic Indicators” versus identifying “Leading Indicators” to grow business.

This is biggest mistake I see wrt how some companies leverage Analytics.

3 Examples of how Analytics Numbers should be used:

  1. Spot Contrarian Points: Usually, consumer businesses experience low sales in January after Christmas in December. But I experienced a scenario where January revenue was more than that in December. February sales were even better than January. This defied all historic trends. Analytics diligence gave us some surprising leading indicators that helped grow business.
  2. Customer Buying Trend: To help increase sales, instead of focusing on just why last quarter revenue growth is below expectations, identify leading trends on what customers are likely to buy and how industry cyclicals may impact buying behaviour in future quarters.
  3. Product Innovation: Extrapolate and derive key leading indicators that dictate how your product or service should evolve for sustenance and growth. Kodak missed the digital indicator, Blackberry misread smartphone/Android leading signs and Google missed the Social indicator.

Bottomline: 80% focus on leading analytical indicators and 20% on historic ones… instead of the other way round will substantially increase your chances of meeting business targets.

Guest blog post by Palash Jain, Investor at inFeedo, 

Posted on

fluxday — the internal task management & productivity tracking app of Foradian is now opensource

A no-nonsense, free & opensource task & productivity management tool for growing startups

fluxday was developed by Foradian starting in 2013 and was a critical part of Foradian’s hyper growth and success as a B2B software startup in EdTech space. With a CAGR (compound annual growth rate) of 323 per cent Foradian was listed in Deloitte Tech Fast50 India consecutively for two years. We secured $2mm in funding and grew the company from a small town startup to globally recognized product company. Behind all these success and growth was a small internal app custom developed by our engineering team and adopted by all team members — fluxday

fluxday is engineered on the concepts of OKR — Objectives and Key Results, invented and made popular by John Doerr. OKRs and OKR tools are used today by many companies, including Google, LinkedIn and Twitter. If you are new to OKR read these article 1, article 2

View tasks and work logs for a selected day. You can switch between month and week views.

In fluxday, you can start by creating the departments of your organization and adding the teams in each department. Add users to each team and assign team leads. Each user in fluxday has an OKR that is created for a particular duration. Tasks are created by leads, aligned to an OKR and assigned to team members. A task could be a redesign of your product or trying out a new tool to drive more traffic to your blog. You can also add comments and subtasks on each task. Users log in work done for a task and number of hours put in each day. Team Leads can see tasks assigned to each team member and the number of hours put into it.

View details of tasks like assigned users, duration and priority. You can also add subtasks from here.

With textual and graphical reports from fluxday, get insights into the time put into each task, check the performance of your team members, calculate ROI on that new feature change, take quick decisions and grow your business. Fluxday is designed to provide a simple productivity solution for fast growing teams. Fork it, add features to it, tweak it to your liking and start using it.

Generate visual and textual reports to view performance of users. Chose between OKR, Worklogs, Tasks and Assignment based reports for an employee or employee groups.

fluxday is “your favorite task management system on steroids” with freedom of customization and private hosting

Checkout the official website and/or download and fork fluxday atgithub

Story of fluxday

We started Foradian in 2009 as first generation entrepreneurs without any experience in building and growing a company. First 3 years was about the usual startup struggles, surviving the startup-valley-of-death and establishing product market fit. By 2012 product-market fit was proven forFedena and certain predictable revenue stream was established. That is when we felt the need for a tool to coordinate the tasks of all the team members so that each and every task will be aligned to the goals of the company.

The best teamwork comes from men who are working independently toward one goal in unison. — James Cash Penney

That is when we learnt about OKRs (Objectives & Key Results) and other startups using OKRs. We started implementing the concept through spreadsheets and it picked up momentum. Next step was to choose an app for task management and productivity tracking so that we can reduce the number of daily interruptions to employees to check their work progress. We tried different apps available. There are thousands of apps for managing tasks and projects. But we needed something unique that matched with our culture and process. So we decided to develop a small custom app and fluxday was born. Sooraj T P developed the app based on the design byDeviprasad and guidance by Arvind(co-founder & CTO). I had observed this pattern in other successful companies also. Great leaders develop their custom app for their mission critical system. Read “How Elon Musk Approaches IT at Tesla”

Lessons learned

Implementing a productivity tool is not an easy task. You need a lot of discipline and motivation to use even a simple personal to-do list app daily. So making sure your team members use the productivity tracking system effectively is a herculean task. We understood it, accepted it and simply executed the implementation. That made all the difference.

There will be team members who will hate the system and will not use it. Let them be. But if you can get 90% of the team members to adopt it, you got the greatest law of universe in your favor — mathematics.

Productivity tools should match with your personality type. A planner and visualizer can’t use the same productivity tool to maximum potential.

Are you a prioritizer? A planner? An arranger? Or a visualizer? Once you know, you’ll be able to more effectively manage your work and home life and achieve your goals much more efficiently. Read this HBR article and try the assessment to discover your personal productivity style. Don’t force a productivity system on your team. Develop an organization habit of using a common system with patience, compassion and respect.

Next steps

Today fluxday is not foradian’s secret tool. It is freely available to everyone. You can use it, customize it, enhance it, build a business around it, learn from it or if you don’t like it you can dump it and build another tool from scratch. Fluxday is available under Apache License 2.0 — so that you have the choice to keep the customization done by you as private or public.Download and fork fluxday

“through discipline comes freedom” — Aristotle

Team Foradian

If you liked the story of fluxday, you must checkout what we are doing with Fedena and Uzity. We are always looking for ideas and partners to help us achieve our vision.

Guest Post by Unni Krishnan, Foradian Technologies

Posted on

Payment Bank + Technology = Faster Profitability

Something very exciting is happening in India.Several Payment Banks are about to launch their operations with a dream to provide banking & transaction services esp. to millions of rural and semi urban un-banked & under-banked households. This is expected to greatly boost domestic remittances, rural savings & reduce dependency on cash.

One of the most important questions these banks is how to achieve profitability faster & sustain it while maintaining a low cost structure & capturing volumes.

Using modern digital technology is the answer.

There are 5 ways technology can help a payment bank not just to be operationally efficient but also establish a competitive edge:

Mobility: Total number of mobile phone connections in India crossed 1 billion (1003.49 million) mark in Oct 2015. Out of this, 902,26 million connection were active. 42.39% are rural subscribers & 57.61% are urban.About 1 in 5 uses a smartphone (220 million) and rest use feature phones.This strengthens a key assumption that each & every prospective customer has a mobile phone & he/she will consume most of the banking services on mobile. So, the offering has to be mobile:

  • USSD based for feature phones & app based for smartphones
  • Easy to use & secure
  • In local language
  • Integrated with the ecosystem of Bank Mitra (banking correspondents), Aadhaar enabled payments (AEP), Aadhaar enabled KYC, digital wallets, real time payments (IMPS).

The recent introduction of Unified Payments Interface (UPI) is a very welcome step by NPCI (National Payments Corporation of India).

Analytics: Customers’ data is a gold mine. Their transaction behaviour (deposits, withdrawals, subsidy receipts, categorised expenditures) makes a case for offerings that are truly “personalized”. For example, if a customer has incurred expenses in a hospital, they can automatically be offered a health or a life insurance product. The schemes launched by PM Modi cost Rs 12 (for health) & Rs 330 (for life). If a customer regularly receive say subsidy payments, they can be offered a long term savings product e.g. Atal Pension Yojana. The amount can be directly debited and is totally paperless for customer.

Analytics tools (SAS, R etc) combined with “small data” harnessing abilities will make it possible.

In UK, the banking regulator is encouraging Open APIs which in simpler words means encouraging bank to open up data vaults to fintechs and others who can offer useful products to the customers. BBVA Bank (US & Spain) has made customer data available through APIs. (Note: I assume customer has consented for data sharing).

Cloud Computing: Cloud solutions offer unparalleled scalability, flexible pricing models (you grow – we grow) & tight security. If data privacy concerns can be handled, there is a strong case for using cloud when compared to investing in a private data centre.

Automate Business Processes: More and more back office processes need to automated reducing dependency on human resources. The digital offerings have to be such that they are fully integrated with bank’s core processes and leverage the modern work flow solutions.

Referral Engines: Though the payment banks can’t lend, it doesn’t mean their customers do not need credit. These banks can refer the customer to other ‘full service banks’/NBFCs and earn commissions. Value added data like banks opinion about the customer, risk profile, transaction patterns, income potential can fetch additional revenue for the payment bank. Smart referral engines can be deployed that share info, calculate and track commissions.

India needs these payment banks to succeed & sustain in order to achieve a true Financial Inclusion and bring the Bharat under a financial umbrella.

India’s IT sector’s tech prowess and their ability to innovate/execute is what the country needs the most.

Jai Hind.

Guest Post by 

Posted on

What it truly means to be a full stack company

There are several different types of organizations out there, and the ones that are the leanest in terms of size are mostly product companies. Within the product companies as well, there is a lot of variety in the approach that they take for delivering the desired consumer experience. Some opt for just 1 tool and focus on that (Desktop downloadable products— like early days of Norton antivirus), while others go for emphasis on the consumer touch point rather on the device choice.

We @Mypoolin perceive our product company as a growing tree which can deliver the desired fruits (experiences and outputs) to the customer through its numerous branches. Some of the branches appear to be similar in nature while other vary wildly in size and distribution. The things that bind them in common are the huge trunk as well as the root at the bottom level. The trunk of which we talk about actually refers to the main base (or the core of the application from software standpoint) and the root refers to the stack on which everything gets built from ground up (Sorry, we don’t believe in outsourcing :)). These two unifying factors are what make sure that the multiple touch points are aligned by a common sense of purpose

In line with the approach, it is important to highlight the reasons why we perceive and develop the company in this manner. Every consumer has its own preferred of looking at the product from the outside. And at the same time, the customers fall across various age groups, not to forget, they have even different choices and preferences among the same age group as well. Let us take a look at the end points of the branches, shall we?

1. Native Mobile Apps

I think it is a plain enough truth that nothing beats mobile as a device in today’s age both in terms of the time spent as well as the utility value. The type of person who goes for this device as a major investment of his time can be described in general as — curious, young (at least in his state of mind), likes to follow at least some topics around the world, and likes to be in the midst of the society.

As is evident, this covers a lot of the people out there and hence, the rate of increase of mobile adoption has surpassed all tech inventions to date. And mobile apps are making sure that this will continue to happen at least for the next couple of decades (typical growth cycle of any new technology in the ongoing century). Don’t forget there are players like Samsung and others who are trying to make headway for their own operating systems as well. That will make the play even more interesting.

2. Websites and Micro-sites

Even though the majority of the generation has adopted mobile as their go to devices, yet there are a LOT of people out there who simply can’t or won’t adopt it. In some cases, they do come on board but perform rudimentary tasks like calling and texting, while in some cases, they are simply not too excited as they don’t see value in investing time on a new device! I am sure we all know a few in our own circle and once you add up the numbers, you can see how large it becomes on its own.

Our policy goes in line with Apple’s in this regard, which is to never fear cannibalization. Of course, there might be some people who would keep transacting on the web initially, however we need to ensure that the product being used for that particular use case is ours. The idea needs to be to drive the users gradually to the native app (obviously for a more omni-present and better experience) rather than completely obliterating the web presence.

Since the overall goal is to serve the customer at the right place and the right time, hence micro-sites and embedded plugins (in our case, split payment options present on multiple partners like MakeMyTrip and more) become quite an important factor. As a customer who is in the process of transacting anywhere needs to see his intent transform into action in the most simple and direct way possible.

3. Bots, Watches, Glasses and more!

While the above two end points are absolute necessities (the way we believe), this one falls in the more fantastic range of product delivery as of now. Notably, while still nascent in the present stage, these technologies end points will achieve their full blown growth cycle towards the end of this decade.

This is the precise reason why we are launching two of our bots on Messenger and telegram platforms respectively. These bots will of course be quite naive to begin with, but will be learning along the way, ensuring that our goal of making ‘Payments’ fun and social reaches its pinnacle. For those of you who are keen to explore how peer to peer payments and group payments can happen simply with a text command, welcome to the future!

Remember, this is just the beginning in this category and we will continue to ensure that these end points converge in the purest and simplest form into our goal of making ‘Payments’ fun and social.

Wish to work with some of the best hackers, programmers and designers in the country? Wish to join one of the fastest growing ventures in the intricate, growing and powerful domain of fin-tech? Look no further. Ping us directly at [email protected]. Guest blog post by Rohit Taneja

Posted on

Testing Time for a Bootstrapped Entrepreneur: 7 Practical Lessons for Software Product Testing

What’s a bootstrapped entrepreneur’s favorite three alphabets?

The answer is DIY and there are no prizes for guessing!

One of the things every bootstrapped entrepreneur should do is to take ownership for testing their product and not leave it to the engineering team. Wondering why this is important? Here are four great reasons why you should get your hands dirty!

  1. Keep the working product aligned with your product vision

You are the custodian of the vision for your product and only you (along with your co-founder(s), if you are lucky) know what you wanted to build in the first place. Everybody else is subject to what I call the “idea transmission and distribution” (ID&T) loss.

  1. Wear the customer hat

Hands on testing is the best way to understand how your customers will perceive your product and interact with it. This is especially true if you are not a technical co-founder.

  1. Do you have a great product feature or a giant face palm?

Testing your product is a great way to find out if the key features you defined in the product specifications is actually worth all the hype you created.

  1. You don’t have the money, so…

You probably cannot afford to hire an independent QA team when you are a bootstrapped entrepreneur.

I learnt these lessons when testing my product

Let me share with you some of the practical lessons I learnt the hard way when I launched the beta version of Jodi Logik  Just to make it clear, I am no QA expert and I am also not a hardware guy. My experiences are all about software product testing.

Lesson #1 Are there errors in error messages?

Seemingly simple products have astonishingly a large number of scenarios where the user has to be shown an error message. It is your job to review all these error messages as well as all messages thrown up by the application when it encounters exceptions. I bet my last Rupee that if you have not looked into it yourself, you are screwing up customer experience and missing out on an opportunity to impress your customers.

Look for spelling mistakes, inconsistent language style, grammar mistakes and make sure your customer can understand what the problem is. Use these error messages to set a tone and give your product a personality.

JodiCheck out the message in the screen above. The error message not only has a “personality” but also nudges the user to complete the required task before performing an action.

Use error messages and notifications to create a personality for your product and make sure they are reviewed thoroughly.

Lesson #2 Use simple English that everybody understands

Avoid writing the error notifications like Agent Smith from The Matrix (aka machine). Example: Phrases like “Connection timed out”, “Server error” may be easy to understand if you are already exposed to the IT industry. However, it may not make any sense to the average customer who is already doing you a favor by trying your product. Make your customer’s life easier by using simple phrases that the average Joe or Kumar can understand.

In the case of Jodi Logik, when the Internet goes down, the error message is something along the lines of “It appears your Internet connection is down. Please check your Internet connectivity and try again.” As you can see the application handles this issue elegantly and communicates clearly what the issue is in a simple language.

Use simple and easy to understand language when communicating with your users. Avoid jargons and industry terminologies.

Lesson #3 Test for use cases that’s applicable to your target market

If you are launching a consumer product in India, one of the use cases you should watch out for is what happens to your software product when the Internet goes down. Reliable Internet, along with reliable power continues to be a challenge in most parts of India. Other use cases that’s applicable for markets like India include, low bandwidth performance of your application and support for mobile browsers. Just make sure your application is tested for real world scenarios using devices that your customers use.

Here is a tip – Google Analytics will tell you how your customers use your product (browser / location / operating system) Make sure your test cases takes this data into consideration.

Lesson #4 Banish “Cannot reproduce the error” excuse

Early in the days of testing Jodi Logik, I encountered a strange phenomenon with my engineers. They will outright deny the existence of an issue! Later on, I realized that they are probably overworked and believe in the philosophy – “If you can’t see it, it doesn’t exist”. This is very much like driving in India.

To counter this behavior, I started documenting the issues in a Word document and made it a point to include a screenshot. If a screenshot was not included, I made a note of the date and time when the issue was recorded. This allowed my team to check the server logs and unearth issues that seem to have a habit of disappearing when you actually want them to show up! If you are adventurous, use GitHub or any other open source bug tracking tool.

Document everything you do when you are testing the application.

Lesson #5 Don’t use an issue to introduce scope creep

Every issue or bug you identify during testing can give you ideas for improving the product. This is good and bad. It is good because you know how to improve your product (duh!) and it is really bad because you may go overboard to solve it and end up delaying the launch of the product!

Here is an example. One of the features we have in Jodi Logik is the option to upload the horoscope of the user when creating a marriage biodata. One of the issues I Identified was the inability of the application to handle a scenario where the user uploads a blank horoscope document. It was an easy fix as far as Word documents are concerned but the JavaScript we used did not provide for making sure PDF files and image files aren’t blank. We chose to tackle this issue later and did not attempt to fix it as we felt fixing this issue can is probably time consuming with no commensurate returns. We asked ourselves, “How many times a user will actually upload a blank document?” and then concluded that this will be a rare occurance.

Moral of the story – Don’t fix an issue for the sake for fixing it. Always consider time, costs and returns.

Lesson #6 Catch me if you can…

It doesn’t matter if you are testing your product on your own or if you have an accomplished QA team (highly unlikely), your product will have bugs and you will never catch them. All the bugs that slipped through your fine-toothed reviews will show up when a customer uses your product and that’s how the world works. The reason is simple – What is obvious to you is not obvious to a customer.

One of my customers wrote to me saying that a text field where she writes about herself is not working properly as the text appears spaced out. After some serious head-scratching and suppressing the urge to say, “I cannot reproduce the error”, I figured out that she copied the content into the application directly from a Word document. This introduced the formatting associated with the Word document into our application and completely messed up the interface! This is a scenario we never tested!

Find every opportunity you can to help a customer. You will be surprised with what you will discover.

Lesson #7: Are you looking in the right place?

A man lost a ring when walking in a dark alley. He was found searching for the ring under a lamp far away from where he lost the ring. His excuse was that it was dark! Sounds elementary, but I did just that for the first few product releases.

Here is my sorry tale. Jodi Logik runs on a Linux environment and I did all the testing on a Windows box before moving the code to the Linux server. I quickly realized that not having a staging platform that’s a mirror of the production servers only adds to our misery every time we wanted to ship code. I also realized that the development instances should also have been on Linux to begin with.

Get your staging platform up and running along with your production servers. This is one expense that you should always find a way to pay for.

Conclusion

Testing your product before going live is similar to a chef tasting the dishes he cooked before serving it. It demonstrates your ownership and a commitment to delivering only the best experience for your customers. The lessons I have shared are by no means comprehensive but I will be mighty pleased if you even get a single takeaway from this article. Please share your experiences and any other lesson you may have learned testing your product.

Guest Post by Srinivas K, JodiLogik 

Posted on

Key Takeaways from The Design Thinking Roundtable

When it comes to building a product, I had absolutely no experience before Pricebaba. While building Pricebaba.com I did learn many nuances and tricks for growth. I am grateful to the friends and mentors who have always helped us understand users better and how to build a great product. It was a pleasant coincidence last week when I got two opportunities to understand design better — first, I attended the Design Quicky Mumbai event hosted by 500 Startups and later in the week, iSpirt organised a roundtable session on Design Thinking. Deepa Bachu who is currently running a design consultancy firm Pensaar shared her 15+ years of experience working in the industry with brands like Intuit. Here are some key takeaways from that session.

Tracking Customer/Consumer Benefit Metric

According to Deepa, the key metric to chase / track is customer benefit metric (CBM). It’s simply how do you make your customer’s life easy. For Google, customer benefit metric would how be quickly it’s able serve the result and how relevant they are with user’s search query. This makes so much sense. If you look closely, all the updates Google has made are around that — be it with the Panda or Penguin update, to give the best result in minimal time.

Once you start thinking of serving your current users better, if they are truly benefitted with your product, they are going to use your product again. This leads to increase in MAU, decrease in bounce rate. All of your other metrics will fall in place automatically. Take marketplaces for example, they are serving two kind of customers — Merchants and Shoppers. Their key to success would be to make sure Merchants sell goods regularly and efficiently. They can enable this by reducing returns, empowering logistics and customer support. Whereas on the other hand making sure users get what they want at the right price and their journey to checkout is as smooth as it can be. For us, at Pricebaba it’s quite similar to marketplaces. Our customer benefit metric would be to make sure the returns on the partner’s platform are under control (thereby making sure conversions are higher). On other hand for users it would be how effectively we help them choose the best product for their needs. On Pricebaba a user can be overwhelmed by 175 products from the same manufacturer (eg: see Samsung Phones), our advanced filters is a way to help our users narrow their purchase decision faster. However for us bigger boost comes from helping the user get the top 4 or 8 products accurately in the first fold.

Design is not art, it’s not what you see

Deepa started her talk with how India is still not there when it comes to design thinking or product innovation. We do not think Design while building our Products, she suggested. On that remark, I jumped off my seat and said “this is not true”. People are talking about design. I sincerely believed this is now a key role in the product making, which was not the case 4 years ago. But, by the end of the session I realised she was right. Amongst many missing ingredients in our startup ecosystem, “design thinking” is one of them. We admire good looking design. We love clean, plain and simple. We look at design only by its visual perspective (is it appealing to the eye?). But, we forget to see the functionality or usability. That is arguably more important aspect of design.

IMG_20160409_165323Throughout the session we had one white board on which we wrote what design means to us. We wrote apps we love and products which we consider as good examples and inspiration of good design. The participants initially thought design had a lot to do with ‘Art’, ‘Painting’ or ‘Creativity’. As we went further, our understanding evolved and ‘Emotion’, ‘Customer Journey’, ‘Elegance’ were the new keywords on the whiteboard.

Going further it was ‘Customer understanding’, ‘Outcome’ and ‘Need’. Eventually, it all boiled down to one thing — ‘Metric’. If your numbers (in our case, Consumer Benefit Metric) are not increasing, all your Dev, BD or Marketing efforts don’t matter.

IMG_20160428_105735There is this simple pyramid which is quite self-explanatory for product making. Bottom to Top it reads,

  1. Benefit I care about: What is your service about? What is that one benefit you are serving your users with. The value proposition of your product. Nail that first. Achieve excellence. For my product Pricebaba, it is how a user get the best deal of a gadget suitable to their needs.
  2. Ease: How easily your users are able to get the benefit we talked about. How are you making things simpler for them. UX has a major part to play in phase. For us, it would be how easy are the choices we offer our users to narrow down on the right gadget.
  3. Positive Emotion: This is the part where actual UI comes into play. Users Delight will be the positive outcome of great UX and UI.

To sum it up, focus on what your business has to offer. What is that one benefit you are giving your users for which they will keep coming back to you. Create a good UX to make their journey to avail that benefit easier with great UI. There, you’ve got your “Ahaa!” moment from your users.

Users don’t know what they want

While building a product we often tend to build it the way we perceive things. We build a feature / flow in a certain way we think is the best. So many times we assume we know what users want. Taking some decisions from the gut is good. But building an entire product without interacting with actual users is not. You need to validate that gut-feel by talking to users. Observe them as use your product. We did a exercise where entire company went out on streets and interacted with users. We called it ‘Project Dragon Scroll’. We gave our potential users a simple task to search best price of a mobile phone. We were surprised to see so many of our myths and biases were getting resolved. Deepa shared tons of examples with us, making us realise that it is too difficult for a product to evolve if you don’t include your users in the process. For that you need to go and talk to them. Even understand what they are not saying. Ask questions. There are tons of tools for that. Just asking them question via surveys, making sure your Net Promoter Score is high might not help. Those online activities are needed, along with offline activities too. Also, you need to see the data on interaction, deep dive into metrics, logs, analytics to get a 360 degree view of things. Taking decisions based on only one of the above factors mentioned won’t help. You need to get out there on the streets, deep dive into analytics (GA, Clevertap, Mixpanel) and use online tools to see how users interact (A/B testing, Heatmaps and Surveys).

I am thankful to iSpirit for organising such wonderful event. I learnt a lot of things from this event. Thanks to Deepa who shared her experience and tools with us. It gave a new perspective to look at Design. If you want know anything more about this, feel free to catch me on Twitter @GanatraT

Tirthesh is co-founder of Pricebaba, one of the biggest product research and price comparison platform in India. A developer at heart, Tirthesh had the pleasure of being part of a journey since 2011, where a two-person team grew into a strong workforce in a matter of three years.

Posted on

6 traits that define successful entrepreneurs

The contribution of entrepreneurs to boosting the global economy is undeniable. Right from the Graham Bell to modern day Steve Jobs, their journey of innovation has greatly benefitted their countries and the world in general.

For sure, entrepreneurs are cut from a different cloth, though one cannot really pin down a particular type that defines them. They are driven, creative individuals with a great capacity to overcome hurdles and adverse conditions in order to realise their ‘big dream’. It’s commendable how they manage to fulfil a gap in the market or create a new demand altogether with their disruptive ideas.

Here are some of the most consistent six qualities that define a successful entrepreneur and make them tick in a highly competitive environment:

  1. Risk Taking

They have to have nerves of steel to branch out on their own, do something new, with a dream in their head and little in their pocket. “To win big, you sometimes have to take big risks” in the words of Bill Gates, aptly defines their attitude. It also indicates an acceptance of failure as apart of that risk. Successful entrepreneurs usually chalk out all the aspects of failure and keep resources, plans and bandwidth for dealing with them as a standby before taking the plunge. It is the challenge of making a winner out of nothing which gives them the adrenaline push to make them take the plunge.

  1. Ability to influence others

Entrepreneurs are no less than a firebrand idealist, politician, military strategist and actor rolled into one. They have to be able to sell their dream to their employees, customers, investors, shareholders and other stakeholders. Entrepreneurs possess a very high social intelligence and an ability to build relationships that help in their company’s growth. As a result they are able to get the help of mentors for valuable advice, garner support from fellow entrepreneurs for networking and build a loyal and capable team for the firm as well a loyal customer base. It is this emotional instinct and empathy with others which helps them strike the right cord with others and get things moving in the right direction.

  1. Foresight

Foresight is perhaps what sets the best entrepreneurs apart from the rest. After all, entrepreneurship is all about identifying the right opportunities and seizing them at the right time in order to stay ahead of competitors and conquer a larger share of the pie. The key is to be able to spot the opportunities long before others do. For instance, Steve Jobs was always known to be steps ahead of competitors when it came to technology, and hence was able to launch one iconic product after another while he was at the helm at Apple.

  1. An eye on the ‘Big Picture’

Entrepreneurs are visionaries and always have an eye on the big picture when taking any decision. They understand the implication that the smallest of decisions can have on the organization, and hence, know exactly whether or not it is in its the best interest to implement it. The entrepreneur’s true value is in creating the path to the vision and guiding the company towards it, making sure they never lose focus. In fact, it is very easy to stray as the daily struggles and challenges tend become the biggest distractions. It is during such times that they not to hold fort and lead the way for others to follow, inching closer to the goal with every step. It is best to leave the details and day to day workings to the staff and managers.

  1. Resilience

There are very few guarantees on the path of a start up and an entrepreneur is well aware of that. A few rough knocks and road blocks are treated like learning grounds for the future. Instead of agonising over the wrongs, they analyse what went wrong, and take corrective and preventive steps to correct themselves. Above all, they don’t shame failure, but celebrate it, because with every failure you learn something new that you can use to propel yourself and the startup into ‘something bigger’. Mr. Sunil Mittal, is a great example of this quality. Even after two failed entrepreneurship attempts at a cycle parts business and a capsule making business, he didn’t give up. He started again with a new enterprise of manufacturing push button telephones, and ever since then, there’s been no looking back!

  1. Attitude

More than anything, it is the attitude that sets an entrepreneur apart from others. Real entrepreneurs are never afraid of failure. They are driven by the desire to accomplish their mission, no matter what and have a ‘never say die’ spirit that keeps that going even under the toughest of circumstances. No amount of pressure can make them crumble. Rather, they see every problem as an opportunity to come up with new and unique solutions that’ll work.

Conclusion

It takes a lot more than a great idea to become a successful entrepreneur. Aspiring entrepreneurs can take a cue from these points and imbibe some of the aforementioned qualities, if they plan to prove their mettle and are here to stay and make a difference.

 

VU-Picture

 

Author

Vikram Upadhyaya

Chief Mentor & Accelerator Evangelist at GHV Accelerator

Posted on

Becoming Cash Flow Positive In SaaS Business & Growing Revenue By 3 Times In 3 Months: The ShieldSquare Story

In Q1 2016, we saw our hard work payoff. We achieved some notable milestones. We became cash flow positive and our annual revenue rate (ARR) grew by 3 times in 3 months. We expanded our customer base to 68 countries (with over 90% of the revenues from outside our home base), and doubled our team to 50. Our Average Revenue per account (ARPA per year) has doubled to $10,000. Above all, we pushed ourselves to become one of the top 2 bot prevention vendors across the globe!

This is quite an achievement, and I’d want to share some of my learnings on what worked, and how we got there.

Who Are We?

We are ShieldSquare – a startup based out of Bangalore that has come up with a world-class solution to fight bad bots that scrape content, spam forms and engage in various forms of site abuse. We started off in late 2013 with a founding team of five incubated at Microsoft Ventures Accelerator, Bangalore. We worked hard on building the product and refining it by working with early customers till the first half of 2015. We launched ShieldSquare for the global market in mid 2015 and started getting good traction. We decided to shift gears and accelerate the business growth for the year 2016 and this is how we went about doing the same.

Expanding To Outbound Lead Generation Channels

We initially focused on a low-touch approach in getting leads via inbound channels. With the right keywords, and after a lot of optimisation, we became the No.1 in search ads. We started getting a good number of leads, and this also helped us secure a top global financial portal as our customer.

However, as the average deal sizes through the inbound approach were small, we kickstarted our outbound marketing campaigns with aggressive sales targets. We launched personalised email marketing across different verticals, analysed the technologies our prospective customers were using and focused on them. This helped us reach out to the Europe and US markets, and win marquee customers – still keeping it a low-touch approach.

Incentivising Customers To Opt For Longer Duration Plans

We wanted to have a win-win situation for our customers (lower total cost of ownership) and us (cash flow and predictable business growth). We removed monthly subscriptions, and started providing significant discounts to customers that opt for annual subscriptions. Why? Because we believe that the the cash paid today is many more times valuable than the same amount paid after a year. If the valuation of the company increases by 5 times over 12 months, the cash being realised now is 5 times more valuable than the same amount realised after 12 months. We now plan to expand this strategy to incentivise customers that go for 3-year subscriptions.

Then Came The Growth Hacks!

Our regular efforts resulted in regular leads, but we wanted higher conversions with minimal touch.  We  launched a few growth hacks that are first in this industry, to increase our conversions. Our free-forever diagnosis plan helped our prospects try, and experience our product with no upfront commitments. Our free tools  ScrapeScanner and BadBot Analyser  provided reports that enabled our prospective customers understand the need for ShieldSquare and prioritise it internally.

scrapescanner free tool

Wise Investments To Achieve Growth

One way for businesses to reach positive cash flow is to get the team to work 2 times harder, cut costs, and the like. But our team was already working 2 times harder and our costs were tightly managed.   Another way—the more sustainable way—to reach positive cash flow is to grow revenues! We chose this path for becoming cash-flow positive!

  • Growing revenues require building solid sales, marketing and product teams, and we invested on growing our teams across functions and bringing in passionate talents to drive these teams.
  • There are certain things that might seem unimportant, but rather carry great value. Our employees at Bangalore enjoy free breakfast, lunch and snacks, while the same will be implemented soon for our folks in the Chennai, who are already beating the heat with the free tender coconuts we offer twice a day.

It’s Ok To Say “NO”

In business, priority is everything. 20% of the activities we do contribute to 80% of the results. Here’s how we prioritised things to be more productive:

  • We steered our focus away from activities that are of less or no value to our business, like attending feel-good/networking events. Rather, we reached out to our advisors and mentors whenever we needed guidance and advice.
  • We have restricted ourselves from meeting prospects until we qualify them. But we keep engaging with various players to get better educated about the market, trends and customer requirements.
  • As we were focusing on building the business and not raising funds, we have politely refused the calls and meetings from VCs who wanted to know about the business. Yet, if any of them insist on learning more about the exciting things happening at ShieldSquare, we invite them to our office to meet the team. This really works as only those who are serious will come to our office to have a conversation, while the others drop out.

Strong Foundation

We have promised ourselves that we would never compromise on the core values that took ShieldSquare to the global audience. It would have been impossible for us to be in the global top 2 position in our space, if not for the following:

  • A world-class SaaS internet security product that caters to  the problems of customers
  • Self-serve platform that requires minimal effort to integrate
  • Strong 24×7 support processes to help our customers
  • A great onboarding experience for customers using diverse tools

The aforementioned are the key learnings from our own trial and error experiments as well as interactions with our awesome customers and advisors. The key takeaway from these learnings would be to believe in our own instincts instead of reinventing the wheel.

The overall experience of developing a stellar security SaaS product for the world was amazing! As it turns out, the feedback we get from our customers are equally overwhelming, and yet it reminds us of the fact that the journey has just begun, and we still have a long way to go.

Guest Post by Pavan Thatha, Co-Founder & CEO of ShieldSquare, one of the fastest growing Saas Security company globally.

 

Posted on

Tech Startup Awards launched by the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge

Their Royal Highnesses The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge launched the Tech Rocketship Awards 2016-17, held in Mumbai.

With the intent to identify and support some of India’s best and brightest start-ups, the initiative will assist them to scale globally.

techieThe Tech Rocketship Awards – an initiative by UK Trade and Investment (UKTI) in India – provides top Indian startups with expert business advice and support from leading professional services companies in the UK. This year the competition gets bigger and better: the ten most promising start-ups from the competition will win a week-long business trip to the UK; where they will get access to venture capitalists, experienced industry leaders and entrepreneurs that can help and guide them to set a firm business footing in the UK.

Kumar Iyer, British Deputy High Commissioner Mumbai and Director General of UK Trade and Investment in India said:

“We are delighted to have The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge launch the Tech Rocketship Awards today. We’re looking for the next batch of leading Indian entrepreneurs that will probably change the world through their technology. Some of the young entrepreneurs Their Royal Highnesses met today already have some truly amazing innovations.”

Four innovative and young entrepreneurs showcased their products to a panel of business leaders and iconic figures in the entrepreneurial world – Anand Mahindra; T.V. Mohandas Pai, of Aarin Capital; Saurabh Srivastava of the Indian Angel Network and young entrepreneur Shradha Sharma of YourStory a leading tech media platform.

Mr. Anand Mahindra said: “The UK is a hotbed of technology and we need to deploy that know-how in India. The Tech Rocketship Awards is exactly the platform that can give young Indian entrepreneurs access to the UK’s prowess in this sphere. Mahindra group drives various initiatives to encourage innovation and entrepreneurship both within and outside Mahindra and we are creating a start-up ecosystem that allows it to leverage its strengths and create value for entrepreneurs. I am looking forward to judging the entries for the competition this year”.

Applications are open to entrepreneurs under 40 in India who have been operating a company created from the year 2000 onwards. One winner will be selected from each of five categories – Cleantech, EdTech, Fintech, Medtech and smart manufacturing – and a further five winners will be selected in the ‘Judges Awards’ section, from any sector. The winners will be announced at the UK-India Technology Summit in New Delhi, in November 2016.

The UK provides an excellent platform for Indian companies to grow their businesses overseas, with world leading financial and professional services and a burgeoning technology sector.

Further information

  • Tech Rocketships website
  • GREAT for Collaboration: Launched by Prime Ministers Modi and Cameron, the campaign celebrates and drives trade and investment partnerships between India and the UK, and showcase the great things the UK and India can do together. The two PMs and ten of the countries’ most senior business leaders appeared on a video to launch the campaign.
  • UK Trade and Investment (UKTI) is the government department that helps UK-based companies succeed in the global economy and offers professional, authoritative and personalised assistance to help companies in India locate and expand in the UK.
    • the UK has been a popular destination for Indian investments for over 100 years.
    • with low tax and a talented workforce, Britain is one of the easiest places to grow your business.
    • it takes only 13 days to set up a business in the UK, compared with the world average of 35 days.
    • the UK is ranked 6th globally for Ease of Doing Business. According to World Bank’s report (Oct 2015), the UK has become an easier place to do business in the past year after reforms to red tape and corporate tax
    • in 2014-15, the UK won a record number of inward investment projects and maintains position as top investment destination in Europe.
    • India emerged as Britain’s third biggest job creator in 2014 as the country saw a 65% increase in foreign direct investments (FDI) from India. In 2014-2015 Indian investments in 122 FDI projects created 7,730 new jobs and safeguarded 1,620 jobs in the UK. (Source UKTI)
    • the total number of people in the UK employed by Indian companies has increased by 10%: from 1,00,000 in 2014 to nearly 1,10,000. (Grant Thornton)
    • ICT, advanced engineering and life sciences are among key sectors for investment from India.
    • the UK offers the lowest corporation tax rate in G20, and is a gateway to Europe and the world

 

Posted on

An Indian Fintech Entrepreneur’s Views on UPI

Ever since UPI (Unified Payments Interface) alpha launched on 11th April 2016, I see much confusion amongst various stakeholders. For me, the most relevant question is will UPI kill payment gateway aggregators and PSPs (payment service providers) ?

My answer is No. If you’re interested to know more, please read on…

To understand in detail, let’s understand below 5 pointers:(1) What is UPI (Unified Payments Interface) & what is it’s objective ? And who is an Aggregator /PSP & what is their objective?

For the uninitiated, UPI is a layer on top of the IMPS etc (see image above) which will work on a network of banks, facilitating account-to-account transfers in a simple and secure manner .

In other words, UPI (standalone) will just be another way of transferring funds from ones’ bank account to another without going through the hassles of adding someone as a beneficiary / IFSC / account no (NEFT) or entering MMID / mobile no (IMPS) . The objective is to simplify the payment process vis-a-vis NEFT / IMPS which didn’t reach critical mass required to make India cashless — both from person-to-person (P2P) and merchant payments standpoint.

Whereas, a n aggregator /PSP is one which continuously works towards empowering its customers aka Merchants ( in our case, mostly long-tail online merchants and individuals desirous of collecting online payments) with as many payment options possible & more. For example, debit cards, credit cards, net-banking, cash-on-delivery, IMPS, cash deposits, prepaid wallets etc. The objective is to provide one stop payment collection solution that encompasses all possible payment instruments in one bucket. But that is not all. The PSPs also supports its clients by creating new products & features to enhance their business outcome too!

Now here is what a PSP brings to the table which UPI does not today :

  • Provide other payments instruments which comprises a significant majority portion (~ 60 -80 %) of the total online payments. May be, UPI might become the new net-banking, by replacing it as a payment mode.
  • Detailed information on received payment (who paid & for what), apart from providing transaction management, reconciliation, insights etc.
  • Customisation at every level (payment options, payment page, etc) which is beyond a simple push-n-pull movement of money via UPI.
  • Trust custodian — one who provides protection against any dispute between merchant & consumer (this is completely missing in UPI today).

(2) What UPI adds to existing systems & processes?

The apps that will be built on top of UPI architecture might not only be easy to use — but the mobile first, secure & interoperable ( any bank to any bank) nature of UPI makes it one of a kind. With the learnings of digital wallets and IMPS adoption in the past , NPCI now has all the ingredients to revolutionise the the way Indians pay one another.

(3) Can UPI act as a catalyst and benefit Indian Fintech ecosystem?

We at Instamojo will add “UPI as a payment option” in the checkout page (representation image below) along with other available payment instruments and ride the wave of consumer adoption.

(4) Can UPI adversely affect anyone in the Fintech space?

Launch of UPI at this time is actually a blessing in disguise for payment agnostic players like Instamojo. Because the likely causalities of UPI will be those who have invested time & money in building non-interoperable and siloed products. Namely,

  • Digital wallets — UPI doesn’t allow interoperability of wallets on its platform today. Hence, P2P payments might shift entirely via UPI.
  • Net-banking network providers — Many players in the ecosystem had long enjoyed the relationship they had with each banking partner to put the net-banking infrastructure in place. If UPI picks up, it might become a one stop solution to get connected to all the network of banks due to inter-operability. Thus making all their hard work redundant. Now simply getting connected with UPI architecture via one banking partner will give exposure to all others banks required to process merchant payments.
  • Card network providers — If UPI is going to hurt anyone in a meaningful way, it will be the card networks like VISA/MC which will loose out of the Debit Card interchange to some degree, provided RuPay card become predominant.

Moreover, this revolutionary approach might make more consumers “online payment ready” in a very short span of time. And I hope, what Telecom revolution did for communication, UPI does the same for the Fintech space in India.

(5) What happens if UPI takes off massively?

Most digital wallets will lose relevance in the P2P payments space and will ultimately phase out and die like good old pagers . However, there can be a counter argument that in a winner-take-all or winner-take-most market, the digital wallet provider with largest merchant acceptance network might win due to inter-operability as consumers would gravitate towards the player which provides max fungibility for one’s wallet balance.

So, merchant payment collections via net-banking and wallets will be replaced by UPI. VISA / MasterCard will loose it’s share of revenues from debit card processing since RuPay (India’s own VISA/Mastercard) will share the interchange nuggets which is part of UPI now.

However, aggregators and PSPs will still be central to a Merchant, since such players bring other modes of payment collections too e.g. credit card, unified reconciliations of orders with payments, integration & APIs, customization, industry specific pricing & features, data and analytics and possibly discovery — apart from UPI enabled payments too!

On top of above, an online Merchant who is shifting from NEFTs / Cheque / Cash to PSPs for their payments need, will still turn t o the PSP as the pain-points still remains the same , with or without UPI coming into play i.e.

  • Integration & APIs
  • Order and transaction management
  • Unified reconciliations — orders with payments
  • Refund management
  • Dispute resolution
  • Customization — at every level
  • Industry specific pricing & features
  • Data & analytics
  • Support management
  • Risk management

Even if UPI solves all the above issues for an Online Merchant, they will still solve a portion of their payment collection needs, as UPI does not support VISA / Mastercard led credit card processing which stands at 20–25 Mn active users in India today.

Conclusion

It is evident that UPI is a boon and might be the much needed catalyst to increase the digital shopper base of India and in the process, might take a stab at the real enemy — CASH or unaccounted money exchanging hands; thus hurting the progress of our economy!

Hence, UPI is working very closely with banks under the guidance of RBI. In turn, banks are partnering with various players to take this new payment instrument to merchants & consumers.

Footnote:

  • For an aggregator/PSP , it will all be the same — only the graph of the credit card processing will dip while a new segment will rise.
  • Lastly, if someone thinks that banks will themselves act as an aggregator and offer UPI directly to the Merchants. W ell , they tried that before by offering IMPS to merchants which did not work . For argument s sake if one says it failed because of the complex MMID etc and now with a simpler process it will work, it won’t work for entire suite of payment instruments that a merchant needs.
  • And finally, if one believes that banks would offer a bundled solution of Cards + UPI — well I would say its will be a good debate to be a part of but end of the day, even banks know what they are good at i.e. retail banking / CASA / lending & deposit arbitrage!

Credits:

Guest blog post by Sampad Swain, Instamojo. The original article can be accessed here

Posted on

Design is about Love and Empathy towards the customer

The Design RoundTable last week lead by Deepa Bachu and Rajan, was not what I expected. By and large, design to me was either a part of an application (UI / UX) or a concept which i did’nt know much about. But, when we went in depth with Deepa, I realized that design is an integral part of who we are and what we see around us.

Through detailed discussions, we were made to think about what design is and what design meant to individuals, communities, startups as well as our customers.  The first task started with a a simple question, what is design? One can come up with several ways to describe it and the audience described it as – Design is something that solves a need, brings convenience, humanizes products (i.e. bringing human touch to products), explores empathy, understands customers and is about continuous learning.  What stood out for me was that design is all about Love and passion in order to bring out the best products/services to address a customer need, in a manner that creates value with ease and convenience. This would enable the users to be at ease and fall in love with what it represents. If a design is thought through with love, compassion and empathy, the user’s journey and experience improves.

The first task in the workshop was to work in a group and explore design features (good vs. bad designs) both within and outside a room. This enabled us to look at things from a design lens. The group came up with very interesting insights of how people dry their clothes in modern buildings differently from those who dry clothes on their balconies or how badly the electric poles in India are designed or how cobbled streets are an interesting design element than traditional tar roads.

IMG_20160409_145508This experience made us understand and be aware of the small and subtle difference between good and bad design. I was able to realize and conclude how crucial it is to be empathetic to customer needs and when, where and how they experience a product / service. Hence, it is essential to understand things from the customer’s perspective which eventually helps us improve the utility of the product and services that one offers.

This applies to all our products and services. We are all trying to build a product around enhancing the customer experience and thinking through each aspect from the users point of view is crucial. How does a user discover your product or hears about you? How do you ease the process of sign ups? How important is the design of your website or application? What does the product do for the customers and what are the benefits of it? These are just few examples of how we can think from the customer’s point of view. By allowing ourselves to think from the customer’s perspective, we are enabling us to re-imagine the product and user’s journey through various channels to engage and enrich with the user.

Another interesting insight was around humanizing products as consumers are humans. Adding a human touch to design can make an experience great. For example, addressing consumers in emails by their names or to have a real person to sign off at the end of an email.

There were many other aspects we covered in our conversations. We discussed the importance of elegance in design and a belief that “UI without UX is Superficial”. We also discussed the importance of creating that WOW factor or customer delight in making customers your brand ambassadors. For creating customer delight, one has to first answer what benefits a customer will get and how one can create customer experience through positive emotion. The combination of these simple three stage processes will help us to think through the various customer delight experiences that we can design.

Another tool that Deepa spoke about and is quite helpful is an Empathy Map. It is a 2×2 matrix to understand the journey of a customer. Four questions need to be asked.

1) What do customers say about your product,

2) What do they do while experiencing your product,

3) What are they thinking while they use the service and

4) How do they feel over all.

This is an experiment which should be done periodically with various sets of customers which can make each member of the team sensitive to the customer journey. An interesting point learnt is that every time we have an insight on one of the four touch points — Say, do, think and feel , we could use this as a starting point. For example, while booking a flight online, how is the customer journey when they first login, are they looking for the cheapest price if so what do they say about that experience, what do they think while looking for the cheapest price (will they get the cheapest price on this website and will the price change later) and what do they feel (lets pay it by it before it changes).

By following some basic templates we can rethink our products and imagine the customer journey in a manner that we could live it on a daily basis. The love / empathy towards our customers, which results in benefits for the customer and eventually helps in designing the WOW (delight) moments are what makes a lasting impact and creates a bond between the brand and the customers.

Hence, design is one of the main pillars of building a successful product and I hope we all can make design an integral part of the organization. Our thinking should bring compassion and love to customers through Design.

Thank you Deepa and Rajan for wonderful session on Design thinking

Deepa is a design and product leader who most recently worked at Intuit as the Director of Design and Product Management. Deepa’s passion is to transform customers’ lives by creating products that solve their biggest unmet needs.

Deepa has 20 years of experience in the Tech industry where she has played a variety of roles across Product Development, Experience Design, Product Management and General Manager. Deepa’s experience has given her expertise in creating and taking global products for both emerging markets as well as developed markets across multiple domains.
IMG_20160409_120807
What is Design (Iteration 1)

Iteration1
What is Design (Iteration 2)

Iteration2

What is Design (Iteration 3)

Iteration3

What is design iteration4 ?

Iteration4

Team-Designthinking

Guest post by Gaurang Sanghvi

Posted on

5 Types of People Every Startup Should Hire

It takes passion to start up and convert your idea into a moneymaking business. However, passion alone is never sufficient to succeed in a business. It is people that make business happen; the ‘right’ kind of people.

The core team plays a key role in shaping the future of a startup. It is the moot point that sets the course for the future. Hence, it is imperative that the founding team comprises of people with the right credentials, zest and attitude since they serve as role models for the rest of the team to follow.

The founder or the core team should ideally have the following qualities:

Visionaries

They know how to think long term and can develop a rock solid vision for the company. They have a clear objective with regard to growth and how to take the company forward. They are able enough to provide insights with a panoramic view of the business and know how to meticulously plan long term. They are innovative and have a diverse view with regard to business and its growth.

When starting up, you most certainly need a visionary to provide direction to the team at every stage.

Money specialists

Their key attribute is that they are good with money. They know how to strategically invest and will help the startups keep expenses under control. The right people who specialize in money management can help straighten up your sales strategy and attract money from various sources. They know their numbers and know how to play well with them. Having a golden goose in the company certainly multiplies the chances of success manifold.

People’s persons

Such people have the knack of knowing just what it takes to bring the best out of everyone. They have great interpersonal skills and understanding of what motivates others and can put their influencing skills and tact to good use in the best interest of the business. Be it managing a team to deliver the desired results, to influencing a prospective client or accomplishing some liaising work, they are the go-to people.

The all-rounders

These people have probably been on the other side and handled all aspects of running a business, either as an entrepreneur themselves or as a manager. This is a definite advantage because not many first time entrepreneurs know how a small decision can impact the entire business. Their insights can, therefore, be really handy for a startup.

The connector strategists

The mind of the strategist can create what is important and destroy what is hampering the progress. They bring growth by analyzing every process and tweaking it to it optimum levels. They are capable of creating new processes and strategic goals of the business that help you leapfrog. Without a strategist, your business will lose its sense of direction to proceed in the chosen path. You will get a stepwise heads up on how to go about implementing your business goals. Whether it comes to product launch or sales strategy, these people specialize in how to make a business goal effective and see to its end. They are the geniuses that know to get to the bottom of things and choose the right method to achieve a business goal. They are the experienced insiders who understand the landscape of marketing and sales. They are communicators and connectors who know how to connect you to diverse people to help your business grow.

The core team forms the foundation on which the startup rests. A mix of people with the right expertise, energy and attitude is what is needed to ensure that things fall in place as planned in order to make the vision come alive.

VU-Picture

Guest Post by Vikram Upadhyaya, Chief Mentor & Accelerator Evangelist at GHV Accelerator

 

 

Posted on

3 Marketing Hacks for Bootstrapped Entrepreneurs

If I say “the startup scene in India has taken off in a big way”, it’s probably the biggest understatement of this year! Startups are sprouting from every corner of this country fueled by big success stories. An eager online and print media are doing their best to fan the flames of entrepreneurship. That’s why India has now the third largest base of Startups in the world.

The glamour of starting a company masks a truly challenging task that every brave entrepreneur will confront and that is “how do you market your product idea in a highly competitive marketplace?”. If you are bootstrapping your company and have limited or no seed funding to rely on, you have even more challenges to deal with.

Assuming you have done the basics right, namely, identified a gap in the market that you can address or tap a unmet need and your target market has the required scale to fuel rapid growth for your product, the million Dollar question is how do you market your product or idea without spending money!

Let me narrate my own entrepreneurial journey. I started Jodi Logik in September 2015 with my own money. Till end of February 2016, Jodi Logik was a bootstrapped company and only recently a couple of individuals chose to invest to push my idea to the next level. For over 6-months, I was on my own but managed to move things along in terms of marketing without spending a single Rupee. Let me share 3 lessons I have learnt in my 6-month journey in terms of driving product marketing without spending money.

Lesson #1: Good karma pays off

One of the easiest thing an entrepreneur can do is to help others and let good karma pay you back! Let me explain this idea. Let’s say you have an idea to sell mangoes online. You can just set up an ecommerce site for your mangoes. However in order to attract customers, you will need to spend a lot of money advertising your site through the internet or traditional media outlets. To further compound the problem, you will have to deal with other sites selling mangoes! You will have to outspend your competition even if you are convinced that your mangoes are better than that of your competition!

There is a simple way to get your name out without burning cash.

People are looking for answers and that’s one of the reasons Google exists. As an entrepreneur selling mangoes, all you have to do is to find and answer questions people have about mangoes!

The first thing an entrepreneur should do to get started with product marketing is to seek questions that your target customers have about your product or product category and make sure you make a genuine effort to provide the best answer possible.

Here is an example of what I did. The target audience for my company include young Indians who are single. Jodi Logik offers an online solution to create a biodata for marriage and hence my area of interest was to answer questions from single Indians about marriages, arranged marriages, love marriages, dating and relationships.

So here is what I did. I was already a member of Quora and it has millions of users and a lot of them are young Indians. I quickly figured out that there were plenty of questions on the topics that fall squarely in my product category and the quality of answers for many of the questions that I consider as important were below par. I decided to invest my time in answering as many questions as I can on Quora and in 6-months, the number of views for my answers have grown significantly as seen below.

Quora
Figure 1: Answering questions on Q&A sites is good for business!

When you answer questions on Q&A sites like Quora, Yahoo Answers or in Discussion Forums, make sure you follow these guidelines:

  1. Provide a high quality response. Do your homework before answering anything. Providing an in-depth and meaningful response is always appreciated.
  2. Don’t try to pitch your product. Try answering the question genuinely.
  3. Don’t take a holier than thou stance even if the question is really “bad” or poorly framed.
  4. Don’t get into heated debates with anyone over your responses or someone else’s response.
  5. Humour always helps.
  6. Remain consistent. Find time every week to contribute to the community.

Here is a simple thing you can do on Quora. Create a headline that includes your brand! Every time you answer a question, you give your brand some free publicity and potential traffic!

An added bonus in answering questions is that you become very aware of your target customer’s need and expectations from the product category you are interested in and this feeds directly into your product road-map!

If you are selling a B2B product, LinkedIn and Industry forums / sites are a great place to demonstrate your competence and showcase your unique take on the subject matter.

Lesson #2: Cost of creating great content is ZERO

Google is a great leveler! It provides anyone (with access to the Internet of course) the same information on any topic and this is a boon for bootstrapped entrepreneurs. All you have to do is to create great content that people would love to read and share and see traffic to your site grow organically!

While I am still in the early days of launching a company, I decided to focus on creating great content in addition to a great product. I shared the content I created in two ways:

  1. Started writing detailed blog posts on topics that my target customers were interested about.
  2. Created in-depth guides to help my target customers and made it available free of cost.

Jodilogik

Guess how much I spent to do both? A big, fat zero. But, it’s not easy. Here are the challenges I overcame to create awesome content:

  • I worked almost 14 hours a day including weekends. I was obsessed with publishing once every day for 5 days a week. This went on for over four months. I dialed it back significantly after that and I will explain why later.
  • I had to go through a crash course on content marketing as I was new to online marketing for a consumer product. All my experiences were in the B2B space!
  • I did not have a co-founder who could share my burden and could not initially afford to hire a professional content writer.

Luckily, I was good at a few things that really helped me:

  • I was good at finding answers for questions and giving it my own spin.
  • I have a decent command over grammar and storytelling.
  • I was obsessed with creating great content!

The reason I listed the challenges and my skillset above is that every entrepreneur is different. Some are good at churning out content and some are good at churning out code. But there is one key trait every successful entrepreneur has – i.e. to craft and sell stories! This is a skill that every entrepreneur should develop and improve upon. Irrespective of your own skills, here are some free tools and resources I leveraged to churn out great content:

  1. Read the Quick Sprout Blog from Neil Patel
  2. Read Brian Dean’s Blog
  3. Read HubSpot’s marketing blog
  4. Start using Canva to create awesome images that will supplement your content
  5. Install the Grammarly plugin for Google Chrome to make sure everything you publish is free from grammar errors
  6. Learn to work with WordPress. It’s free and a great platform to launch your awesome content
  7. Familiarize yourself with basic SEO concepts and analyzing keywords for your content
  8. Learn to use Google Analytics to track how your content is performing

Recently, I published a post on The TechPanda listing 11 free tools that every bootstrapped entrepreneur should use.

In summary, it doesn’t cost you anything to create great content as long as you are willing to put in the effort. At least in the beginning, great content is one of the primary requirements to build traffic to your website and you can do it free of cost.

Lesson #3: Unleash your hidden PR skills

While it is true that great content on your website can drive traffic, it’s not that simple. For a while, I was under the impression that churning out great content will get me noticed on Google. Boy! I was wrong. I had great content going up on my blog page every day of the week but traffic was just trickling in and the expected take off never really happened. There is nothing more demotivating than to see your effort are not producing the results you expected.

The reason is simple. Even great content requires a vehicle to be delivered to your target audience. Let me explain a few lessons I learnt on the topic of getting the word out about your content or product.

  • If you are bootstrapping your company, you cannot afford a PR agency. Don’t waste time talking to any agency of any kind! Believe me. I already wasted my time.
  • Hiring a PR agency makes sense when you have traction in terms of customer acquisition and product engagement. Premature publicity can kill your product if you are not ready.
  • You need to back yourself to tell a story about your company or product at every available platform. Here are some simple ways of getting word out about your Startup that worked for me:
    • Use job boards such as Hasjob to advertise for any freelance positions you may have. I used Hasjob to hire UI designers and front-end developers for my product. Advertising for open positions (even if it’s just freelance positions) creates a good impression. Oh! Did I tell you it’s free?
    • Write guest posts on high quality sites. The idea of writing a guest post is not to gain publicity, but to build credibility and reputation. This one article I wrote for Youth Ki Awaaz created a lot of traffic for my site although I had no intention of driving traffic! Reach out to site owners proactively and offer to write. Everybody loves good content and you don’t have to pay anyone to write a guest post.
    • Partner with experts who can share useful insights that your potential customers will love! In my case, I reached out to top notch wedding photographers and I am already working on creating exclusive content that my audience will love. The advantage of this approach is that in addition to getting exclusive content, you can also leverage the expert’s network to get your name out! The key question you need to ask yourself before approaching an expert is “What is that you can offer them in return?”. If you think hard, you will invariably find a compelling answer!
    • Use Facebook groups to your advantage. One simple way to create some publicity for your brand would be identify active and large Facebook groups that may be interested in the awesome content you have created. Sharing relevant content with the right groups will certainly give you some free exposure. For example, if you have awesome content on how your mangoes can make a great mango lassi, try sharing it with a Facebook foodie group. Just remember to read about the group rules before you share your content!
  • If you follow the lessons I learnt in point 3 above, you will reap one more reward. Every time your company name gets mentioned or a backlink to your company is created on other sites, Google will attach a greater importance to your site and that’s good for boosting traffic to your website!

I am already seeing an uptick in traffic to my site. Check out the 6-month site traffic data for Jodi Logik here. Notice how increased focus on promotion in the last three months is boosting the numbers. For a first-time entrepreneur like me, seeing the steady uptick in traffic to my product with no external assistance is encouraging.

Google Analytics

In summary, the three lessons I have learnt in the last 6-months has given me greater appreciation of the fact that the Internet is a great leveler! You don’t have to be a marketing wiz kid nor do you need an army of digital marketing experts to get your brand off the ground. If you are willing to put in the time and effort, you can certainly kick start your marketing campaign for your Startup at no cost! Of course, I have provided only high-level information but will be glad to share in-depth insights. I look forward to your comments

Guest Post by Srinivas Krishnaswamy, Jodi Logik

Posted on

Of Cockroaches, Gazelles and Unicorns

We took a hard look at our company. Was it going to become a unicorn? No. Not close. Was it going to do the proverbial J curve in the near future? Not really.

I could sense the VC and the Angel instantly saying ‘Shark Tank’ style. “I’m out”.

I could sense the other entrepreneurs console us. “Don’t worry, there are other legitimate business styles out there. Nothing wrong in being a ‘lifestyle business”. The tone could be associated with ‘retire’, ‘personal savings’, ‘you’re on your own’ and almost a silent ‘are you crazy doing that when there is so many investors around?’ But the reality is that we don’t fit into a lifestyle business mode too! There must be something else to describe our business model.

A chance article on gazelle companies, gave some hope that there are alternatives. The investopedia definition of the gazelle  indicated that you are a gazelle if you were over a million dollars and grew at 20% for the past 4 years. Many of the leading tech companies in the 80’s and 90’s were actually gazelles.

A closer look at our financials indicated that we were not quite a gazelle in some parts of the definition since our growth rate was more random than the 20% figure.

Another chance article on ‘cockroach’ companies being an alternative to unicorns in these days of constrained VC money, gave some hope. You are a cockroach if you can survive nuclear wars even if you don’t do the J Curve.

Inspiring, I thought. We survived 13 years as an Indian software product company despite delayed payments, a dozen form of taxes, unclear laws, order cancellations, a crowded market, a government that does not care, and other forms of nuclear warfare. But we did not like to be branded as ‘cockroaches’, do we? At different points in our life cycle we could be cockroaches, gazelles and maybe switch to a unicorn, with a delayed J Curve?

An then it dawned on us – as a bootstrapped company, the only definitions worth going after were ‘customer delight’, ‘market focus’, ‘differentiation’, ‘customer value’, ‘growth’ and other forms of real business indicators, while continuously being in the ‘profit zone’.

With 50% growth last year and head above waters in terms of profits, we’re doing something right, and yet we still don’t want to be boxed into definitions. But such definitions test you, and keeps you on your toes. So it’s still worth the time reading up on such articles because when you are an entrepreneur you keep your eyes open 360 degrees all the time even when sleeping.

Gazelles, cockroaches, unicorns and other forms of exotic animals went back to their respective places in the animal world for now, and real business stepped right back into the focus.

Guest Post by George Vettath, Founder Kallos Solutions and KServeHRMS.com