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Key Takeaways from The Design Thinking Roundtable

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

Tracking Customer/Consumer Benefit Metric

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Users don’t know what they want

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

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

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

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6 traits that define successful entrepreneurs

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

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

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

  1. Risk Taking

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

  1. Ability to influence others

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

  1. Foresight

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

  1. An eye on the ‘Big Picture’

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

  1. Resilience

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

  1. Attitude

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

Conclusion

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

 

VU-Picture

 

Author

Vikram Upadhyaya

Chief Mentor & Accelerator Evangelist at GHV Accelerator

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

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

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

Who Are We?

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

Expanding To Outbound Lead Generation Channels

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

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

Incentivising Customers To Opt For Longer Duration Plans

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

Then Came The Growth Hacks!

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

scrapescanner free tool

Wise Investments To Achieve Growth

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

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

It’s Ok To Say “NO”

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

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

Strong Foundation

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

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

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

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

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

 

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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 [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