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Tech Startup Awards launched by the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further information

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

 

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An Indian Fintech Entrepreneur’s Views on UPI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(5) What happens if UPI takes off massively?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

Footnote:

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

Credits:

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

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Design is about Love and Empathy towards the customer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1) What do customers say about your product,

2) What do they do while experiencing your product,

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

4) How do they feel over all.

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

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

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

Thank you Deepa and Rajan for wonderful session on Design thinking

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

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

Iteration1
What is Design (Iteration 2)

Iteration2

What is Design (Iteration 3)

Iteration3

What is design iteration4 ?

Iteration4

Team-Designthinking

Guest post by Gaurang Sanghvi

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5 Types of People Every Startup Should Hire

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

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

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

Visionaries

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

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

Money specialists

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

People’s persons

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

The all-rounders

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

The connector strategists

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

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

VU-Picture

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

 

 

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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 itday@rajasthan.gov.in 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 Naku@isipirt.in 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