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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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 sidatsaha@gmail.com

 

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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 contact@razorpay.com

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

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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, 

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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

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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 

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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 hello@mypoolin.com. Guest blog post by Rohit Taneja

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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 

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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.

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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.