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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

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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

 

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Innofest in Jaipur.

Without change there is no innovation, creativity, or incentive for improvement. Those who initiate change will have a better opportunity to manage the change that is inevitable.
William Pollard

And that is the change that we are looking driving as part of Innofest. Innofest recently held as part of Rajasthan IT Day in Jaipur saw 3000 people visiting about 15 stalls including the Honourable Chief Minister of Rajasthan Sri.Vasundara Raje.
Innofest1-jaipur

As part of this we had some grassroot level innovations on display including Makersbox setting up a pop-up Makerspace. A mini makers area…

 

Gesture Hardware workshop by Balaji Lakshmanan who runs imakerobots saw very disciplined younsters taking their seats in time for the sessions with their laptops ready to code..His self balancing minibot created a riot running around and making friends with other robots.

Some of them got to build their first robots… using just the following, Styrofoam Cup, a Motor, A Fan, Some Wires, and a bit of Jugaad, spreading the message that everyone can innovate and build.

Workshop on  Open Source Hardware 101 – What is an Arduino, What is a Raspberry Pi – how do they work, can I build something, let’s build a sensor that reacts to sound, to light, to plays music.

And workshops on

3d Printing 101  – What is 3D Printing, what can 3D Printing do – can I 3d Print, what all can I make with it. Experience 3D Printing, and take home your first 3D Printed accessory

Must say were very well received with people, students especially queuing up to take part and waiting patiently for the classes to begin.

Innofest2-jaipur

3d printers built by Aha3d printers their own prototype was on display and gliders, on road vehicles, drones that were not flying but so that people can see and experience the same.

We have heard of vending machines which dispenses cola, but ever heard or seen of vending machines that can dispense papers and files which is very much needed for college students. Ankit and his band of college students did just that and hoping refining the product going forward.

Jaipur Belt which supports the back for long working hours of construction workers was also on display. Jewelry that can keep the track your loved ones safe was also on display. Content Kiosk that can be displayed offline especially in areas with no internet and chairs that can be put together by even a child was on display.

Innofest will come to a city near you.. If you are running a makerspace, or built an innovative product or know of someone who has built an innovative product.

Reach out to me at

@inno_fest

@parthibhasastry

Or just apply at

http://innofest.incubatehub.com/#incubator

Follow our community on Facebook

https://www.facebook.com/Innofest.in/

 

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Scaling from $1m to $5m, lessons learned by Freshdesk

I travel to India once every quarter to catch up with our India team based out of Coimbatore. I was planning to attend SaaSx for a while now and this time, it was perfect timing the event is scheduled on 2nd April, right in the mid weekend of my India trip. This is an invitation-only event, I’m thankful for the organiser to get me involved. With 200 attendees where the majority of them are founders and key people in some of the promising and growing companies on the Indian start-up eco-system, you can sum up the experience in a single word it’s “awesome”. Even though there were lots of sessions, round-table playbooks, product tear-down analysis, countless conversations we had between founders during the event, the one session by Girish from Freshdesk stood out and made everyone speechless. I wanted to highlight more about it here.

When Girish assembled his sales/marketing team on the stage and opened up the statement, please do not share anything I speak on this stage outside this room, and we need to get investors approval to reveal this data, I know something interesting is going to happen. It was kind of nostalgic moment for me, I heard a similar sentence from Peldi from Balsamiq when he opened his speech at Business of Software at Boston last year and that session turned out into one of the best sessions of BoS 2015 (Rookie CEO Grows Up. Reluctantly).

In that session, Peldi literally opened up some of the confidential emails he had with possible acquisition offers, the conversations he had with his team, and how they boldly stood against the offer etc. Girish did something similar down the lines showing the real reports he was sending to the investors, with some key metrics like revenue targets, projections, the goals they were setting for the sales team, how they aligned the marketing and sales team to work together, different experiments they were doing with several revenue channels, how they drop some non-performing channels, and so on. To respect the confidentiality of the subject I’m not going to go into the detail, but cover some interesting general topic Girish highlighted.

Everyone needs inspiration, most of the founders read tons of books, blogs, magazines etc (I haven’t met a single founder who said I never read any books). The problem is to get a single actionable item from reading a book takes hours and weeks, still you won’t be sure and just need to experiment and find it. But what Freshdesk team has shared is real data that took them from $1m to $5m in annual recurring revenue (ARR), which is priceless (note: the $5m is not their latest number). Every slide they shared had something for me to take away and I believe that’s the case for everyone.

I have known Girish personally for few years now and he is a kind of person who goes with the gut feeling and figure out what’s happening. I’ve captured some of his best statements during his presentation “Do best of your potential and you’ll eventually end up somewhere higher up”. This is such a true statement, you set your vision on $5m ARR and align you sales/marketing team towards that goal, and work backwards. Even if you don’t achieve $5m, for sure you are going to end up somewhere higher up than where you are right now.


The second best statement is on utilising the talent in the right way “Don’t try to put something into people, what god intentionally left out”, this is not the first time I’ve heard Girish saying this but this is something worth repeating. To give you a better analogy, if you take Sachin Tendulkar and ask him to do wicket keeping and complain he is not performing well, whose problem is it? Is it Sachin Tendulkar’s or the selectors? Same for start-up founders, understand the real potential of your team (team member) and place them in right places. Jim Collins highlighted this in his popular book “Good to Great”, it’s not just about getting the right people on the bus, and it’s also about setting them in the right places for you to be successful.

When it comes to pricing, Freshdesk made couple of important pricing changes during their journey, first one is introducing the expensive Estate plan (that time) as their last tier, they figured out people are always reluctant to buy the last tier, even if it has some interesting features, it’s more of psychological thing, and they figured out n-1 tier performs better, hence, they introduced the Estate plan with just gamification, the intention is not to push and sell this plan, but to sell the n-1 tier the “Garden” plan. They also made some important pricing decisions on how they structure their free offer. Previously it was 1 free agent on any tier, and they moved it into 3 agents free for life. There are a couple of key factors in this decision if there is only one person doing support then there is no necessity for a help desk system, and also, they are throwing away free agent license on each tier which the customer would have bought anyway. The key takeaway for me in this is when designing the free tier, make sure it’s useful for the people and also it’s aligned with your goal of eventually converting them into paid customer gracefully.

Getting to the unicorn status, the “triple-triple-double-double-double” formula. Girish highlighted this article from Techcrunch “The SaaS Adventure” during his talk as one of the influential blog that helped him to set the target of growing from $1 to $5m. The article explains how you scale to unicorn status, what are the benchmark numbers to hit. It’s $2m > $6m > $18m > $36m > $72m > $144m (i.e. triple-triple-double-double-double). If you need to be listed as the unicorn, then the magic number to hit is $144m ARR.

The other important information he shared is finding the magic number of leads for each sales person. At the early days, each sales person at Freshdesk were handling at an average of 800+ leads per month, which of course is not efficient. In order to fight against time, they were using automated email sequences to improve the lead quality. Girish accidentally bumped into this article from Hubspot “CREATING A SALES PROCESS FOR YOUR INBOUND LEADS: 150 IS A MAGIC NUMBER” where they discuss in detail about the magic number for a number of leads a sales person can optimally handle i.e 150 per SDR, and they scaled the sales team accordingly.

A little bit about customer success team, it’s very important to set up a customer success team as soon as possible to avoid churns. Most of you might know the leaking bucket analogy, if you have holes in your bucket, where your customers are churning regularly, then you’ll be constantly fighting against filling the bucket to maintain the level instead of growing. In a lot of companies it will be a bit late when you realise it, when you call a customer who has already left you, it’s way too late. They might have already set-up a system from your competitor, and you need to sit and wait to hope they won’t like the competitor’s product. Freshdesk has done similar mistakes in the past and now they have the process in place to avoid it.

Even though this article would have given you some interesting tips shared by Girish and Freshdesk team, there is no alternate to hearing directly from horse’s mouth. With the great sense of humour in his speech and ability to instantaneously crack jokes on stage, I thoroughly enjoyed the session, noted down some key tasks and set myself a target where I wanted to take BizTalk360 by the end of this year.

In the future if you get a chance to attend one of the SaaSx events, don’t miss it.

Guest Post by Saravana Kumar, BizTalk360

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Hey Indian SaaS Founders, Are you dreaming big enough and aiming high enough?

I took SaaSy bus to attend SaaSx3, a fun journey networking and ice break session among SaaS founder The sessions were on common challenges from funding to hiring right resources and also instant mini FinTech RoundTable (picture below).

SaasybusThe venue was at Chennai (Mahabalipuram) well described by above tweet and event started with afternoon session by Pallav Nadhani of FusionCharts on Referral Marketing. The discussion started emphasizing needs of marketing starts before existence of the product and continues with product and marketing should not be looked in silos away from the product. One question for SaaS founders is whether their startups are geared to leverage product features to perform self-marketing of the product The session brought some real examples of SaaS firms who have already done this successfully.

The impact of using “Powered by Logo” inside your product features on B2B2C websites that are focused on end user was highlighted and is more effective to target customers from new geographies where your product has not been adopted and are in early stages of entering new geography.

Nemesh of appointy stressed importance of backlinks (two lines of codes in the product), that became part of Google search when someone searched for a tool for appointments. Other suggestions include:

  • Sell lower price plan without option to “White label” product offering. After product is adopted, the lowest price plan can be offered as “Free forever plan” without white label option.
  • Find a WordPress plugin that is active and popular. Buy plugin and add one line in this plugin and publish the plugin.

#OneThing session happened where SaaS founders were asked to share a set of one things that creates significant transformation in their startups.

  • We did not predict, we performed action
  • Upgrade Field on Sales approach to Customer Success approach
  • “Support and train customers for first 45 days increased NPS score” – Think of it as customer Success Channel that is needed in scaling stage.
  • Keep high touch with customer and experiment how to maintain high touch with customers being online and not on-site. Leverage and experiment with cloud telephony, gamification and customer management.

Product Tear Down session where SaaS founders offered their product to be teared down by expert SaaS founder and audience. The experience SaaS founders published guideline template based on which they will provide feedback to brave startup like Zipboard and CanvasFlip and here are comments that apply to lot of startups found here too.

  • You first need to go deep focusing on the right customer segment before going broad.
  • While building a branded website, remember that website home page needs to convey emotional, functional and technical aspirations to connect with your audience. One good example is slack website, it is inspirational.
  • While displaying metrics of your product on the website, show metrics that creates positive impression in mind of prospects. Small number may not create right impression.
  • Remove small irritants. Devil is in details.
  • Does your product features pass Tooth Brush test? Ask, ‘Is this something people use once or twice a day and does it solve a problem?’
  • No right or wrong strategies, only shades of right while building startups.

Product-TearDownPeople who teared down choose right words to share comments to the founder who offered his product for tear down, also adding kind words “Do not become defensive. Their inputs are to improve not to criticize”. SaaS founder in the audience really liked the positive impact of product Tear Down session and followed with asks to #ispirit to have more startups in Product Tear Down sessions and suggestion for virtual Product Tear Down session.

There was another #OneThing session focused on what is one thing that in last 12 months worked well for SaaS startup with Aditya Sangi of Hotelogix , moderated by Prasanna

  • Alliance building approach steps – find complimentary product. Check whether your product adds to their value offering and whether other product have efficient reach to your customer target and whether joint offering creates value for your customer base.
  • Do not keep building a lot of non-core features in to your product and make the world as your competition and end up with no partners.

One attraction in SaaSx#n is story style presentation by Girish of #freshdesk, who genuinely shares learnings from his journey. This time the story had movie effect and learnings from the movie are

  • Everything need not be data driven. You can do things that people would notice and they will notice when things are on high quality bar.
  • Do what is right for customers first. Help sales team to develop focus on customer success by incentivizing to help customers first.
  • Started with sales team of young minds fresh from college and they started with focus on number of agents sold rather than revenue of agents sold. Once they were more customer focused and time arrived to scale, a change was implemented in discussion with sales team to change their focus to revenue earned per sales team member.
  • The importance of alignment between marketing and sales using instances from freshdesk journey.
  • Marketing teams must have targets for sign-ups. Pre-Sales team was useful to prepared customers on the product. He referred to article CREATING A SALES PROCESS FOR YOUR INBOUND LEADS: 150 IS A MAGIC NUMBER
  • Hired fresher’s following hack “Hire them for attitude and you can get them skills”. I liked the fact that the hack was implemented in sales and marketing function and not only in engineering.
  • Similar to other startups, freshdesk also got junks as prospects. They pruned not only junk and also channels where hunk data originated from. More junk arrival from channel lead to removing channel, leading to arrive at list of channels that worked for them.

Girish once again demonstrated that he was a hardcore Rajnikanth fan in real life too by creating a real movie style experiences bringing young talent who accompanied him at the start of #freshdesk journey in sales and marketing on to the stage. He created right impression that success is attributed to team’s effort rather than individual effort. Consider to be special in the days of “Winner takes it all”

Girish complete the movie with some thought provoking questions “Are SaaS founders aiming high?”, “Do you want to be happy with small year on year growth?”

Post by G. Srini, volunteer for iSPIRT

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Announcing the third batch of 15 companies selected for @InTech50 2016

Last week, we announced the second batch of winners of InTech50 2016. It’s been a hectic month for all the stakeholders.

Happy to announce the third and final batch of 15 companies that are selected for InTech50 2016:

  1. Aujas: Security Analytics and Visualization Platform
  1. Canvazify: Canvazify is a visual collaboration tool for team brainstorming and planning. Its a pinterest of team ideas. Canvazify helps you organize and discuss ideas, derive meaningful insights and plan activities
  1. FarEye: FarEye, is a Mobile Workforce Management Platform. It is a customizable Enterprise Mobility Platform., that automates processes and field workforce thus., helping the enterprises in delighting their customers
  1. Germinait Solutions Private Limited: Germin8 Social Intelligence is a product suite that enables brands to get valuable insights from consumers in social media about the products, campaigns, content and customer service.
  1. Happay (VA Tech Ventures): Happay is a first of its kind, VISA card driven, expense management solution that streamlines a company’s expense workflow from purchase-to-accounting and enables real-time visibility and control over business spending.
  1. Indix Internet India Private Limited: Indix offers a variety of products including a Product API, Reports App, and machine learning services using proprietary data science algorithms. Leading brands and retailers use Indix products to boost productivity, drive innovation, and accelerate growth.
  1. Innotion Technologies Pvt Ltd: Protean is a Business Process Management & Field Service Management Platform, which helps the organizations in automating the backend Processes & Field activities.
  1. Lucep: Lucep is a sales acceleration solution for B2B businesses. Using a website widget and our mobile app, Lucep connects leads generated from your site directly with your team in under 60 seconds.
  1. NavStik Autonomous Systems Pvt. Ltd: FlytPOD is the next-generation flight-computer for commercial drones. FlytOS is its operating system that empowers developers build variety of commercial applications for drones. Together they offer a platform for drone-makers to build next-gen drone applications.
  1. Nowfloats: The NowFloats platform helps large enterprises by getting their local channel online in a relevant, meaningful, frictionless manner. Think how to get all of your retail stores, your insurance agents, your branches, etc all being highly discovered by local consumers via latest, frequently updated content by your extended teams.
  1. Propalms Technologies Pvt Ltd: Propalms TSE: Delivers Microsoft Windows client applications from datacenter over browser to users using presentation virtualization technology.
  1. SayPay Technologies: SayPay Authenticator combines voice recognition and speech recognition seamlessly into one single step. By simply speaking the SayPay “crypto-token” into their mobile banking app, users identify the transaction, authenticate themselves, and lock their biometric signature to each authentication.
  1. Tydy: Tydy is an Automated Employee Onboarding & Engagement Platform. Tydy combines automated workflows, pre-defined content modules and engagement hooks resulting in a personalized & amazing onboarding experience.
  1. Vidooly: Vidooly is an SaaS based video analytics and marketing suite that provides actionable insights to content creators, MCNs and brands enabling them to optimize their videos on YouTube and increase the organic reach, build an audience base and take data driven decisions to create content.
  1. Xtreme Media Pvt. Ltd: XM DSS is a Cloud based digital signage solution, it enables brands to centrally control & manage digital screens located anywhere in the world on a single click.

Congratulations again to all the above winners !!

You can see the first batch of winners here.

We will keep you updated on all the action, during and after the event. Keep watching this space.

Guest Post by Arvind Kochar, Terrene Global Leadership Network

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Rajasthan – The Next IT & Startup Hub of India

Enabling Startups to apply for Govt. Projects

Over the past few years, the startup ecosystem has witnessed exponential growth within the country, with a positive impact on the startup framework as well as the economy. Information and communication technology (ICT) has profoundly changed almost all aspects of society. It is now central to how people communicate, interact, make decisions and do business. This includes the way governments operate and deliver services, and startups providing out of the box approach to utilizing Information Technology.

We, with the vision to achieve Good Governance and facilitate inclusive growth, harnessing ICT and evolving eGovernance with improvement in services, bridging the digital divide and evolving Digital Rajasthan, are committed to provide efficient, reliable and transparent government to help startups and grow IT/ITeS, ESDM and Robotics in Rajasthan.

Rajasthan_ITstartupRajasthan intends to play a pivotal role in various dimensions of the startup ecosystem, with the main focus on promotion of Startups and making Rajasthan the Startup, Incubation and Entrepreneurship hub of North India. We, through Rajasthan IT Day on March 21, 2016 forged the inception of a new era for making Rajasthan a platform and destination for Information Technology in India.

Rajasthan is aggressively moving on the path of being the IT Hub of India – ensuring an environment which is dynamic, supportive and reliable for development of IT as a sector.

We are creating IT standards and benchmarks on three pillars – Confidentiality, Integrity and Availability.

Rajasthan has proved to be the trendsetter in eGovernance initiatives, ensuring the maximum ease to residents till the last mile in connecting with the Government as well as getting benefits at their doorstep.

We are the first state in the country to have implemented an integrated and unified eGovernance Framework, ensuring a world class coherent environment of integrated platforms – maximizing utilization and minimizing investment for betterment of eGovernance initiatives in the state.

We are moving aggressively towards making Rajasthan the dream destination of IT investment and promotion in India and SAARC. We are committed to translating our vision into reality, utilizing initiatives like Digital India, Smart City, Smart Grids etc. along with the finer points of Governance – citizen centricity, service orientation and transparency.

We expect the IT Sector and Startups to assist, advise and partner with us in this journey towards achieving the Technology vision with seamless integration between departments and optimal investment encouraging innovation.

The formidable and enlightening support of IT industry shall act as a catalyst for our mission of bringing Information Technology achieve new heights in Rajasthan with an absolutely dynamic IT environment.

At the IT Day, our diverse and dynamic group of speakers and panelists provided in-depth insight, as well as, actionable and practical tools of engagement models, methods and mechanisms (3Ms); and were able to share how the 3Ms could be utilized to promote the IT sector in Rajasthan to become more effective in the on-going efforts of Government of Rajasthan in the sector.

With the aim to fulfil the commitment of promoting startups in Rajasthan, Be Startup – Rajasthan program is envisaged to be initiated by Department of Information Technology & Communication and RajCOMP Info Services Limited, which will ensure providing a platform for Startups in Rajasthan to showcase their skillset and talent, and give ample opportunity to get associated in eGovernance projects benefitting not just themselves, but also the state in the lager perspective.

To further our effort, Government of Rajasthan is initiating the “Be Startup – Empanelment Platform” providing enormous opportunity for the IT Startups to get engaged and work for the Government, getting experience as well as boost to grow. The details for the same are available at our Startup Promotion Platform website: http://itstartup.rajasthan.gov.in RISL envisages obtaining inputs and feedback on the draft RFP for the said empanelment from Startups and Entrepreneurs who intend to get engaged with RISL for its projects.

You are requested to provide your inputs/feedback on [email protected] by April 15, 2016. The same would be evaluated and considered with the final document pertaining to the empanelment.

I urge the IT industry to rise, participate and support whole heartedly to this endeavour of promoting Digital Rajasthan. I assure of our commitment to bring about this evolution in Rajasthan.

Akhil Arora, Secretary & Commissioner, Information Technology & Communication, Government of Rajasthan

Message from the iSPIRT Policy Team:
“We would like the Software Product Companies to share their view on the above RFP process which should enable buying from Product Startups. Please do also feel free to reach out to [email protected] for any comments/thoughts which you may have on the above.”

 

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CRM for startups: Opening the world of endless possibilities

Startups today have become a major driving force for the economies around the globe; they not only contribute to the GDP but also decrease the unemployment ratio of the country. Millennials everywhere are changing work dynamics and do not prefer to sit behind their desk, but to follow their dreams and take risks. Such shift has also being witnessed in India, a country with a majority young workforce that has seen successful start-ups such as Shopclues, Limeroad, OLA cabs, Zomato, and many more. With a lot of venture capitalists funding and backing startups, it is no surprise that a lot of people want to taste the entrepreneurship fruit.

Only last year over $ 3.84 billion was raised by startups in the third quarter. Such rising opportunities have also caught the eyes of many people, resulting in top minds leaving their corporate jobs and following their dreams. It wasn’t long before the Indian government saw this dynamic shift and became keen to bring these startups to unleash their full potential, increase employment opportunity and eventually enhance the economy of the country. It was truly remarkable seeing the government put their best foot forward with the launch of initiatives such as “Start-up India” and “Make in India” to encourage and promote start-ups in the country.

To add more to it, Hon’ble prime minister of India has worked hard to raise the foreign investment too, bringing in investors to venture into the countries brightest startups. If that is not enough, even top names such as Google have their reward set for the best start up plan from the country. And its outcome being a rapid surge in the number of start-ups increasing every year with the current statistics showing more than 4000 startups in the nation.

Startup India

With so much fuss over startup, an obvious question that pops up is what exactly makes a startup eligible to avail the benefits of the scheme? Which can be simply stated as one / few innovative minds putting up a unique business idea or development process in a form of a new business, aging below 5 years and a turnover not exceeding 25 crore rupees. The product should be innovative and commercial while adding value to the consumers. The said startup should be approved from the designated DIPP.

Benefits:

To sum up a startup under this ambitious scheme will enjoy;

  1. IT tax exemption for 3 years
  2. Easy availability of seed funding
  3. 80% return of patent fee
  4. Capital gain tax exemption and more

Since now there is a lot of focus on startups and even growing competition, the question arises: how can a startup keep itself ahead. The answer is simple: a business application platform to seamlessly integrate all processes and give greater control and visibility to the management.
CRM SoftwareCRM for Startups:

Now being compact in size, a startup can manage all the data and contacts on a spreadsheet easily in the start, however when the business grows, various process are incorporated as well as maintaining the clientele becomes a hectic chore and a proficient management of sales and customers becomes a priority. To add more burden to it, competitors keep multiplying every year, which makes retaining your customers as well as getting new ones even more tough. Thus, for efficacy and proficiency in business management, various start-ups opt in for smart business management suites like CRM.

But can CRM software solutions be helpful for startups?

Definitely yes, for a startup, building customers is among the top priorities and CRM software have their proficiency in managing and retaining customers with ease. However, its potential does not ends with it. A smart leader, who can mould out new ways of possibilities for the software, can take its usability to another level. Having said that, let us have a look at some of its cool features that have been proved helpful for the startups.

  1. Share information: When you have your teams working on different processes, sharing information amongst each other can be a tedious task and any missed data can cost you a valuable customer. Nevertheless, the CRM software can function as a platform wherein the team can share the information with ease and initiate further processes.
  1. Opportunity tracking: The saying goes as “Opportunity knocks only once” and CRM solution providers in India have made sure that you not only grab this opportunity but also nurture it until it starts giving you fruits of your hard work. Simply putting, CRM can help you find better leads and turn it into sales easily, which is something very crucial for any startup. Thus, with CRM, never miss any opportunity.
  1. Foresight: CRM for startups can generate precise sales reports on daily to yearly basis, this reports can give you a foresight of how much production is to be done and process marketing and sales strategies. It can also help you track team’s performance based on their areas of operation.
  1. Better and targeted marketing: CRM for startups can draw sales pipeline that can give information on how your marketing strategies is functioning, that can be filtered on location, products, etc. as well as analyse the requirements of the clients. Hence, it can aid you in evaluation of your marketing processes and target better prospects.
  1. Notification and reminders: CRM can automate all your notifications and reminders i.e.
  • Sending notification to your customers related to any updates, offers, packages, etc.
  • Sending reminders of upcoming deadline to submit data, pay bills, renewals, etc.
  • Email and SMS follow up to leads and prospects that can be designed with its inbuilt template designer.
  • It can also remind you for upcoming meeting, follow-ups, demo and implementation, etc.

The above-mentioned gestures can improve customer satisfaction with your start-up as well as bring in new customers. Hence, building up your start-up company in an efficient manner.

  1. Data storing: the modern day CRM software are provided with cloud server, which securely save all your data. For instance, for any mishap occurring in your company, the loss of data with others can be too much for a start-to bear. However, the data stored on the cloud are safe from any such mishaps; moreover, the encryption of your data can secure your data from online threats as well. In addition to it, these data can be made available on any device by multiple (and authorised) users irrespective of their location and time.
  1. Social Media: social media is a necessity for every company, no matter how big or small. The customers/ clients prefer following the company of their choice to get updates and stay connected to it. Moreover, social media can easily help you reach wide and better audience quickly in a cost effective manner, thus CRM software solutions like Social CRM now a days can be integrated to all your social accounts with ease, allowing you to track, monitor and stay connected to all your customers and prospects easily.
  1. Mobility: for a start-up, employing large number of employees can be taxing on their budget and you may be needed to multi task, which is not possible while sitting on a single workstation. The CRM software linked up with mobile apps and cloud servers can grant you the mobility to manage your sales and marketing process as well as manage customer complaints and feedbacks on the go.

To further continue with the list, the CRM software can increase sales, give better ROI, maintain transparency, help you set goals, and the list goes on with endless possibilities. A CRM software cannot only help you manage your start-up but also assist in every stage of its growth. Thus, a CRM software can not only help your startup, but also add wings to it to fly through the stars.

Guest Post by Kalpesh, Sage Software

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5 Social Media Tips for Startups

Social Media. We’ve heard this before. We’ve all been there, been awed by its presence, laughed at the funny cat pictures and marveled at the brilliant campaigns run by Businesses like Star Sports (#MaukaMauka?).

As a startup, we all know and understand the power of Social Media. We would all also like to get in on the action and have our own pages roaring with likes and User Engagement. We want our videos to go viral and we want people to talk about us in their networks.

At this point however, it makes sense to think about the First Moon Landing. Neil Armstrong did not just build a ship out of scrap aluminum, fill it with Kerosene, light a fuse and land on the moon. There were endless hours of trainings, practice landings (first of which required him to parachute out of his ship) and design refinements prior to eventual launch.

Similarly, there is a structured approach to building and maintaining a vivid presence on Social Media. We at Inquirly have been in this space for almost 2 years and after managing Social Media Presence of almost 200 brands, we’ve decided to share some tips that helped our clients grow.

Tip #1: Create a Social Media Strategy before creating your profiles.

The first step would be thinking about what you want to achieve from Social Media. Brand Awareness, Lead Generation, Driving hits on your website, Customer Engagement there are a large number of things Social Media can do for you. We usually prefer to host brainstorming sessions with Startup founders to decide what their strategies should be. We remove the clutter and present simple, workable ideas that founders can then choose.

SocialMedia1Tip #2 – Identify your target group

This is important. More-so because each target group responds to a different type of messaging on Social Media. Take the example of SpaceX. SpaceX knows its target group and a large number of its followers will be people who love…wait for it…Space!! It’s target group is mostly comprised of tech-savvy adults, people who like Science and geeks/nerds (just like us). SpaceX therefore tailors its tweets to appeal to its target audience. Building content that appeals to target groups is usually handled by the founders at very early stage startups, however some founders do prefer to stick to what they’re best at, be it Product design, sales or hunting down investors.

Social-media2Tip #3 – How much do you post?

One point commonly noticed by us during our interactions with various startups is that they have created a presence on Social Media but eventually stopped posting because they decided to focus on other, more important things. This should be avoided at all costs. An inactive presence on Social Media gives your followers and customers the impression that you are unreliable and sloppy. These negative aspects are automatically attributed to your product or service and voila, you suddenly have a negative brand perception in the mind of your customer.

Here’s the solution – If you cannot actively engage on Social Media, DON’T POST ON SOCIAL MEDIA. We understand start-ups don’t have time to look beyond daily operations, cannot afford expensive agencies but brand creation through social channels is one of the most important aspects in your Go to Market strategy. There are several tools available for a DIY model which can be leveraged for saving time. For example we have reduced the time required to manage all the different channels by creating an omni channel platform with industry specific templates and images.

Tip #4 – Types of Posts

In an ideal world, we would like to post content, have visitors engage with the post and then have these same visitors BUY our product or service. The real world works a little differently. At Inquirly, one of the first things we tell our customers is that before trotting out their lovely campaigns with Incredibly Creative calls-to-action (BUY NOW! CLAIM COUPON NOW!), they need to engage with their audience, build a place in their minds, show them a solution and then sell them the solution. Customer engagement has a value all of its own and sometimes that value rivals that of a closed sale. By engaging with your customers, you are not just interacting with them, but you’re also visible to their immediate network. Suddenly, your reach is multiples greater than the page-likes or followers that you have!

Tip #5 – Measure, Measure and Measure some more

You absolutely need to keep track of how your posts are doing. Which ones are performing the best and which ones get absolutely no engagement. A/B testing is essential for your Social Media campaigns. It is the job of a Great Digital Marketing Strategist to run these tests and identify ways of improving your campaigns. There needs to be a keen belief in your team or your partner agency that things can always be improved upon. Forming good habits at an early stage helps any startup manage its growth in a more effective manner.

Fun Fact – For some of our more “complex” clients, at Inquirly, we have in-fact deputed a team (not One or Two) of strategists to brainstorm, create and execute amazing campaigns

Once you’ve incorporated a few of the tips mentioned above, you’ll be on your way to setting up a great Social Media presence. We are working with a lot of start-ups and in fact planning to open start up specific cells in key co-working spaces as with a combination of one of a kind technology, data-driven expertise and a world class team, our goal is to save time for the start-ups through a unique ‘we do it for you’ model and enable start-ups to build relationships to drive customer satisfaction, increase revenues and manage their Sales and Marketing workflows. And we do it all at a price that’s just right. You can learn more about us on www.inquirly.com

Guest Post by Anjan Choudhary, Inquirly

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Your Product Roadmap is your Product

After building, marketing and selling lots of software, I’m convinced that the single most underutilized component to driving growth is your roadmap.

In SaaS or consumer products monetized via an enterprise budget, you make your numbers because of your current feature set. But you blow out your quarter because your product and sales teams present a roadmap that explains the customer’s future state, if they have you as a partner.

When done correctly, the roadmap expands the number of tentacles to grab more customers and dramatically raises the value of every deal.

In the formative stages of building and selling your product, your current feature set is absolutely vital. At growth stage however, your in-market product is not really your product but it’s your proof point. It’s your cheapest and most effective form of marketing. At growth stage it’s your product roadmap that’s really the product that’s going to attract senior executives making 3–4–5 year bets. Because with continuous deployment or daily / weekly releases, the in-market version your positioning is obsolete by the time the customer gets value from it.

Here’s what it’s not.

A roadmap used during the sales cycle is not the same deliverable you share with engineers. That’s necessarily tactical and solution driven. It isn’t a litany of features broken out by quarter for the next 18 months. That would likely break forward-looking rules anyway.

Here’s what it is.

  1. Its the ethos of your business that guides the choices you will make when enriching the offering. In our case, we have a track record (21M+ subscribers) of finding white spaces left behind by traditional transaction software. The design ethos that guides and motivates us is to continue to employ collaborative models to go after these white spaces to deliver big efficiency breakthroughs for our customer’s employees, customers, and partners.
  2. Its a thematic, executive-ready, sales consumable illustration of what problems you will keep solving for. A commitment to solving thematic problems that your target customer base struggles with to consistently drive revenue, reduce cost or mitigate business risk. Or you will have missed the mark. Jared Spool and Bruce McCarthy astutely describe themes “a promise to solve problems, not build features”. And that these themes must remain consistent.
  3. Yes, a healthy dose of tactical capabilities. In practical terms, you are always 5–10 features away from completeness, in the program owners mind. The program owner needs to know you are on it (or be clear the you don’t plan to) to be comfortable that she can get quick wins with the purchase. So by all means, include this. But know that whilst its one of the needed components, it isn’t the one that expresses the strategic thrust behind your offering.

Elon Musk epitomizes this. He presents what problems he will keep solving for, in the coming 24 months. Take speed: He markets the Ludicrous Button. Because a stated top speed is a feature. And that’s finite, and therefore limiting. Tesla’s Ludicrous Button is a design ethos that will keep drawing customers. Because they know exactly what future state of the art they are buying into.

It’s amazing how much time a product and sales team will focus on tactical capabilities or agonize around pricing options of current products to make its past as attractive and available as possible. Yet they will guard their future plans by restricting access to the roadmap like it’s the secret sauce.

Well the customer facing roadmap is the secret sauce in your sale.

Executives know that they, nor you, can predict the needed solutions of the future. All they want to be convinced of is that both they and you will be aligned on the same problems that need solving. That’s the only constant.

Expressing your roadmap is the basis for competing effectively. And this needs to be ingrained in your key product management, product marketing, sales enablement and sales execution processes.

It’s a hard slog to make your number based on your current features. So consider selling your roadmap. I’m convinced that it’s like wearing flippers to a swim meet.

Guest Blog Post by Sameer Patel, SVP, Product Management and Go-to-Market, SAP Cloud / Successfactors. the original article can be accessed here. 

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The Bootstrapper’s Dilemma

You have an idea, and you start up. Then you quit your job, and pursue it full-time. What follows next is the quintessential dilemma of a startup founder — “Should I raise money now?” Unless you have a machine that mints money, you will find yourself wondering about it in your startup journey. In mine, I reached stages where I had questions in my mind to which raising money was one of the answers.

You Have An Idea And It Needs Investment

You have an idea which you need to transform into a functional product. You will need resources for that. Times have changed, and nowadays, investors rarely prefer to invest in startups in the idea stage. Having a fabulous idea is not enough; it’s the successful implementation of the idea that eggs the investors on to invest in you. Raising money in the idea stage is not entirely impossible, though. You might still stand a chance if you have graduated from an Ivy league college, have a great work experience, or have built a successful startup previously.

If you have a prototype ready, you can always pitch to the investors. Raising money from your friends and family is also an option, but I’m strongly against it.

My story: I did not have to hire someone to develop the first version of our product, or outsource it as I was a software developer myself. Moreover, my savings came to my aid as I was working part-time to sustain myself. So, I coded the app and launched it in February, 2010 while I was still working.

You Have A Product And A Question: Make Money Or Raise Money?

Pull all your PR strings at the time of your product launch as this is the only thing that will fetch you your first batch of users. If your product exceeds users’ expectations, you will not need to spend money on marketing it. You can take a cue from WhatsApp, Slack or even my own product, Crowdfire. However, you will definitely require money to incur operational and other expenses to keep the product up and running. That’s when you have to either find ways to make money, or raise money.

After 6 months of starting up, Crowdfire had reached a point where the server charges had eaten up almost all of my savings, and we needed to make money somehow in order to survive. I realised that there were only two ways to do it — look for funding or find a way to monetise the product. Back then, I had no connections within the investor community. Besides, raising money is a full-time task, and I was already juggling my day job as well as my startup.

With no other alternative in sight, I decided to go ahead and monetise my product.

Now the thing is, if you’re a consumer product, making money can be difficult in the beginning because charging users before they even use the product might not be the best idea. However, if your target audience is not the consumers, i.e., you have a B2B model, and you want to make a viable business out of it, you should totally monetise it. We monetised Crowdfire and decided to go the freemium way.

Do You Have The Money To Put Together An A-Team?

People are using your product, but you would want to grow it. There will, again, come a point when you (and your teammates or co-founder) will realise that you want more — to level up and build a company. You need people in order to build a company. Finding people of your tribe, people who are willing to take the risk of an early stage startup is tougher than you can ever imagine. In 2012, I quit my job and went full-time with Crowdfire because it was making me more money than my job was. Moreover, I made my co-founder quit his job too, and together the two of us decided that it was time to build a company. We had 600K users back then, and only one thing in mind: To build the best marketing product. We met investors, and even got the term sheet. However, there was a catch: The investors offered us $ 500,000 and in turn set a target in front of us — to reach 5 million users in 24 months. With the amount of money offered, the target seemed almost unachievable. After a lot of discussions, we decided that if we were to go down, we might as well do so without wasting the investors’ money. To us, it was a risk not worth the rewards that it offered. And 15 months later, as a bootstrapped startup we had 7 million users, and a revenue of over million dollars. If not money, we did take a big lesson away with us during our first tryst with the investors: The first step to success is to aim high.

It’s Time To Go All Out And Capture The Market

For some of you, raising money may have been the answer in the third stage itself. Looking back, we realised that we didn’t really need the money back then, and hence, going for funding just for the heck of it would have been disastrous.

After a point, even great traction doesn’t seem good enough. Fast isn’t fast enough. You want greater traction, and faster progress. Even though we were making enough money to sustain ourselves, the revenue wasn’t enough to fuel our growth. On top of it, we wanted to shed our image as a “follow-unfollow feature” as we had surpassed that stage long ago. It was evident that external funding was needed to fuel our product growth as well as help us increase our market share.

In February, 2015, we raised a Series A funding of $ 2.5 million from Kalaari Capital. It’s been a year, and we’ve just released the beta version of Crowdfire 2.0 — your marketing assistant on iOS (you can get early access here), and I’ve never felt prouder of my team. Crowdfire 2.0 is going to help small businesses like e-sellers, cafe owners, bloggers, authors, youtubers, influencers, photographers, freelancers and startups market themselves by being their marketing assistant. These small businesses would not be at a disadvantage anymore for lack of a marketing team compared to big businesses that can afford one.

We’re just getting started. But, there’s one thing that I firmly believe in. Stay bootstrapped for as long as you can. In Paul Graham’s words:

Don’t raise money unless you want it and it wants you.

Guest Post by Nischal Shetty, CrowdFire

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Nuts & Bolts of Marketing & Selling in US for First Timers: A crash course playbook!!

After releasing recently SoftALM and SoftAgile (Agile Project & ALM Tools), we at JamBuster were trying to decide on how to sell these tools in US.  We had sold software services in US earlier, but selling software product to US from India is new to us. So we were looking for some help!

They say- we start seeing things, when we start looking for them.  I noticed an email from Avinash Raghava, the co-founder of iSPIRT Foundation, about a PlayBook on Nuts & Bolts of Marketing & Selling in US for First Timers, in Hyderabad on 27th February. It was to be led by Suresh Sambandam of KiSSFLOW.

Playbook Roundtables are the small, intimate and intense experiential learning sessions that iSPIRT have pioneered.  Suresh is a iSPIRT maven, meaning trusted expert who pass knowledge to others in a pay-forward model. Suresh is a kind of celebrity in selling products or productize services in US from India! He led KiSSFLOW to have more than 10,000+ customers across the globe, in less than 3.5 years. That is absolutely phenomenal success in SaaS world, doing it from India!

Looking at these credentials, I registered for the event and got a quick reply from Chaitanya Chokkareddy of Ozonetel.  Ozonetel was to host the event. Ozonetel offers CloudAgent -a Cloud Call Center Solution that was already successful in India and was also starting on their US go-to-market strategy.  On Saturday morning I met with Vikas & Aditya from FirstHive, who have recently introduced a customer engagement SaaS offering.  I could see this was going to be informative.

Suresh’s presentation was logical, down to earth, like him. He started with timing or relevance of this phase (after Product-Market Fit), followed by knowing your customer through B2B Customers Characterization.  Next focus was on Product, inversion of selling model, freemium vs free trial, and the price.  This is then followed by digital marketing toolset, such as website, SEO, Adwords, Content writing and email marketing. Similarly, Suresh went through step by step in sales, founders and each and every aspect, as available on following presentation: https://www.slideshare.net/mobile/ProductNation/nuts-and-bolts-of-marketing-selling-saas-products-to-us-customers-from-india-for-first-timers

Few quick take aways:

  1. SaaS is a tough business, even when done correct.That is evidenced from the fact that 1st $1MM in revenues is almost impossible, while first $10MM is improbable, but if you do pass $10MM, then $50MM is almost inevitable. Hence the lure.
  2. SaaS models lends itself to simpler applications and focus is on
    SOHO / VSB  : no touch
    SMB & Midmarket : low touch
    Enterprise : high touch
  3. For SaaS, traditional model of marketing, sales and products gets inverted. The marketing’s job is to bring horse to pond, the product is the water and sales is understanding what the horse did with water.

I think the success of Playbook was in small size (8-12 companies), along with focus on making it relevant to your business.  While some topics may feel dry on slide, Suresh made them very interactive by first sharing his experience and then asking participants to chip in their experience.  Suresh used these chip-in opportunities for people to get honest feedback. He suggested to Sainath Gupta of AnythingAI to who go through Product Market Fit analysis for his offerings of AI Platform along with Data Science Team as service. In our case, SaaS turns out to be not a path for now, as our solution focuses on end-to-end Agile Application Development platform for teams of 25-2500.

An interesting contribution here comes from Avinash Raghava, who is walking encyclopedia of Indian Software Product ecosystem, its history.  He is focussed on making this even successful from back end, but during the event, he is the source of amazing information on who’s who, what and when!

While registering, I had asked for payment getaway, Chaitanya mentioned that it was a free event. He was surprised that someone from Pune was traveling to Hyderabad for essentially a six hours long workshop.  For me the timing of it and Suresh’s experience was an immense draw.  Turned out the open discussion with fellow product or productize services companies on their way to sell in US and Suresh guiding with refreshing openness really made it icing on the top.

Thank you Suresh for sharing the blue print, that took you 1-2 years to discover through sheer hard work. Thank you Avinash for the event and the fellow product entrepreneurs for such a debates. Thank you iSPIRIT for building this wonderful ecosystem!

I highly recommend all entrepreneurs, whether you are about to or already started or even successful selling in US to attend this and other Playbook Roundtable. I thought these 6 hours saved me at least 100 hours of discovery work. Even more importantly, it is making Indian Product Ecosystem come alive!!!

Guest post by Satish Kamat, Jambuster Technologies

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Going From Negative To Cashflow Positive

This is not a new story. At least, not the first part of it.

About two months ago, the company I had founded, Synup had grown 4000% in a year but, we were still burning money like crazy.

It was really bugging me that we were growing so fast, adding so much more revenue, but still had to depend on external sources for growth capital. This is not how truly strong businesses are built, at least not in B2B SaaS.

We had two options — give up on trying to get profitable and raise more money. Or, do the logical thing, get cash-flow positive.

I needed to break the news

On a Friday, I brought the entire team in for a meeting and told them what had to be told. We were not going to be raising money any time soon, not because we couldn’t, because it wasn’t the right thing to do.

We needed to be cash-flow positive, otherwise, we’re yet another struggling startup dependent on handouts for survival.

I needed to take responsibility

Being unprofitable is really a founder responsibility. More so, the CEO’s responsibility. I have the title; now, I needed to play the part.

I told my team that I wouldn’t take a salary, even though I had practically zero savings and would tough it out until we got to a point where the company could afford to pay me.

Call this a moral high, taking responsibility or cliched, but this needed to be done.

There needed to be a physical reminder

It wasn’t enough to just make an announcement. There needed to be a physical reminder that drove the point into everyone’s head that we were still not where we needed to be. It had to be something that people couldn’t miss.

So, I offered not to shave. At least until we reached the point of breakeven.

It was so friggin hard

Everyone had to make sacrifices, work 2x harder and we had to cut costs. But, we did it.

We could no longer afford “breathing room”; we had to be shipping, selling and busting balls everyday. This wasn’t the kiddie pool anymore, it was the real deal. I’m sure everyone who worked with me had to push themselves to the limit, but they still did, because they believed in what we’re doing and for that I will be forever indebted.

On a personal front, I realized that I couldn’t grow much of a beard and had to bum food off my employees. Nothing, I repeat, nothing can be as bad as not shaving when you obviously can’t grow a proper beard.

There were times when I just wanted to give up and take the money

There were still people willing to give us money, not a lot, but enough to make the pain stop. The entire startup ecosystem in our country, unfortunately, encourages you to take as much money as frequently as possible. It’s almost like we’ve become a society that actually celebrates raising more venture capital.

But, I resisted. I knew in my heart that taking more money when were so close to getting there wasn’t the right thing to do. Nothing can really be accomplished in life without a little pain.

We became cash-flow positive this month and doubled revenue

It was the greatest feeling in the world. To have a goal, something that drove everyone in the organization, something that seemed impossible; and, actually make it happen. We had actually grown 100% in two months to make this happen.

We are now in control of our own destiny, in a small way. We don’t need external capital to pay the bills. Any capital we take will be from the right people and for the right reasons.

My advise to fellow entrepreneurs

Try getting profitable. Even if you don’t have to or need to, just try doing it once. It’s one of the best feelings in the world. Do it as an exercise in restrain and a test of your grit.

You will realize that nothing brings your team together as much as this will. I never thought we could do this as quickly as we did, but I underestimated how much more motivated everyone gets when there’s a common cause.

Guest Post by Ashwin Ramesh, A (s)crappy entrepreneur who runs http://synup.com and tweets @ashwin_ramesh

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Reactions from #iSPIRT to the Union Budget presentation

iSPIRT is happy to note the Union Finance Minister, Mr. Arun Jaitley’s thrust in the direction of boosting the digital infrastructure in the country with specific reference to the Aadhar.

Aadhar powered by India Stack will allow people to offer presence less, cashless paperless service delivery to millions. Also digital literacy will also provide a big impetus in the rural areas.

The second initiative of iSPIRT which has been positively impacted by the Union budget is the ease of doing business in India and therefore the incentive for companies to Stay-In-India through the capital gains incentives where there will be no capital gains tax applicable if the funds so received are invested in a notified fund of funds by individuals in specific start-ups. The other major step is the decision to tax the Royalty Income from Patents developed and filed in India at only 10%, this we believe will certainly encourage companies to file more IPR in the country.

That said, we are disappointed with no attention being given to easing taxation norms of software companies where there is significant friction, the confusion on “goods” verses “service” tax on online downloads, TDS on sale of Software products and competition from foreign selling B2C products without any tax in India.

iSPIRT continues to work closely with the Government of India to enable the software product companies and start-ups to make the next leap with incentives from the Government. The Union Budget just presented is semi-sweet with specific sops being given to the start-up community in continuation of earlier policy announcements made by the Prime Minister Mr. Narendra Modi. There is a lot more that could be done to incentivize innovation and specifically ease the TDS conundrum which start-up and product companies find themselves adversely caught in.

Here are some specific comments from the iSPIRT team:

According to Mohandas Pai, Advisor, iSPIRT, “The Government continues to incentivize the start-up ecosystem as we have seen in the recent budget pronouncement. I am glad that the Government clearly recognizes that start-ups can be powerful problem solvers for the myriad issues facing the country and in turn generate employment as well. The Government’s decision to allow for 100% deduction of profits for 3 out of 5 years between April 2016 and March 2019 is certainly a welcome step that will boost start-ups.”

“While there are no major sops announced for the software product industry, the Government must understand that incentives to this segment of the industry will result in an exponential leap in exports and place India in an unshakable position on the world software product stage. That said, the decision to tax the Royalty Income from Patents developed and filed in India at only 10%  is a good move by the Government and will certainly encourage companies to develop and file more IPR in the country ,“ says Vishnu Dusad, Co-Founder & Governing Council member of iSPIRT & MD, Nucleus Software Exports Ltd.

Sharad Sharma Co-Founder & Governing Council member of iSPIRT says, “Start-ups in the country will certainly benefit from the budget announcement of amending the Companies Act to announce easier and swifter registration of companies. Another positive announcement from the budget speech by Mr. Arun Jaitley has been the focus on Aadhar for subsidy delivery. The Aadhar powered India stack from authentication to exection, coupled with the open API policy in India, can certainly transform the way in which digitally focused companies can reach the masses quicker and more effectively.”

Says Jay Pullur, Governing Council member of iSPIRT & CEO & Founder of Pramati Technologies.“The Government through the Union Budget has done well to do away with capital gains taxation if the funds so received are invested in a notified fund of funds or in specific start-ups. Of course, a lot more can be done to ease working norms for the software industry by looking into issues like dividends from overseas subsidiaries and a clearer and unambiguous definition of digital goods and digital services from a taxation point of view.”

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India Stack to bridge the digital divide in our country

India’s digital startups have an analog problem. They face a kagaz ka pahad. Literally. Many of them are designing for the digital desh of Bunty, the 37-yearold Udaipur shoe-seller who gets 40% of his business on his smartphone. Or, Chaitanya Bharti, Guntur’s 30-year-old single-room school teacher who gets remittances on her basic phone.

But every time they collect and store paper records, scrutinise “wet signatures”, and handle lots of physical cash, they can’t grow as fast, be as affordable or innovate to create the digital desh Bunty aur Bharti aspire to.

Nowhere is this more visible than in financial services where the kagaz ka pahad unwittingly aids what Prime Minister Modi called “financial untouchability”.

There is good news. The JAM trinity — a basic account like Jan Dhan, Aadhaar and mobile phones — makes it possible for digital services to reach every Indian. JAM is much more than aslogan — it is the result of public policy and technology that made this foundation a reality. With that foundation in place, public policy can go further. It must go further.

We don’t just give digital pioneers wings, we strap on booster rockets to launch them well over and past that kagaz ka pahad.

India Stack is just that. It is a series of new-age digital infrastructure which, when used together, makes it easier for digital pioneers to run faster, reach more people.

The Stack has four layers: (1) a presence-less layer where a universal biometric digital identity allows people to participate in any service from anywhere in the country; (2) a paper-less layer where digital records move with an individual’s digital identity eliminating the kagaz ka pahad; (3) cashless layer where a single interface to all the country’s bank accounts and wallets democratises payments; and (4) a consent layer which allows data to move freely and securely to democratise the market for data.

Each layer has a specific technology — Aadhaar authentication and eKYC, eSign and Digilocker, Unified Payments Interface, and consent architecture — with corresponding public APIs, under India’s Open API policy.

The National Payments Corporation of India released APIs for the Unified Payments Interface and is now running a hackathon for businesses to experiment.

You can go to indiastack-.org to participate. Each layer is managed as a public good. This is important. This makes the India Stack not just new-age technology but a smart policy. Technology stacks are not new. Uber, the highest valued startup on the planet, rose to success on GPS, Google maps, electronic payments and more.

In Kenya, the mobile payment service of M-PESA is like the cashless layer enabling a whole slew of digital businesses. What is different about the India Stack is that it is designed to level the playing field for newer, smaller entrants.

There is no one company or a handful of companies controlling access, behaving like bottleneck monopolies.

India Stack sets a global precedent. It is of Indian origin but not India-specific. Bits and pieces exist elsewhere in the world but nowhere under such a common frame and vision. For example, globally, data has become a battleground for the future of business.

The consent architecture, arguably, is a breakthrough to democratise the market for data without compromising on security. The India Stack is designed to propel the digital world forward in India or anywhere.

Guest Post by Kabir Kumar leads FinTech initiatives at CGAP. Sanjay Jain is a volunteer with iSPIRT Open API team. 

This was first published in Economic times