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Pricing your SaaS Product and how we did it at Sosio

In case you aren’t updated on the current affairs, 2014 is shaping up to be a controversial year; and we’re not referring to Justin Bieber’s antics, Mr. Kejriwal’s dharnas or Mr. Modi’s development stories. Instead, a new contention is brewing in the annals for us which is every entrepreneur’s one of the worst nightmare: deciding how much to charge for your product 😉

Pricing is one of the most difficult things to get right. There are several questions that come to us, and its good if we can get an answer for each of them. Should my MVP be free? When should I start charging? How much should I charge? Will I lose my first customer, if I start charging higher? Will the freemium model work?

We get into these FUDs(fears, uncertainties, doubts) because whenever you ask for money, there is friction, which cannot be removed, it can only be minimized. The best way to overcome these objections is to prevent them from happening. Well, I tried to study, how other people, were addressing the same problem, and tried to come up with one for my own product. Its taken more than 6 months, and hours of brainstorming with few of the amazing folks for me to reach here. I will try and summarize few of them.

The trouble with software pricing

Pricing is a basic economics thing. Unlike traditional manufacturing products, where there is a fixed cost of raw material, labour, transportation etc. a cost price for each unit is pretty clear. On this objective value for each of the unit, the sales team, tries to create a perceived value of the product, based on reference points of competing products, and after a basic survey of the demand curve, a price point is generally arrived.

For softwares, the case is slightly different. After break even, the price of a new unit, tends to be negligible. So defining an objective value for each unit becomes tough. Chances may be, the product you are creating may not have a direct competitor, or if there is an alternative it might be free. In that case, extrapolating from a reference point becomes tough.

The price tag you put on your software, is one of the most challenging thing to get right. Not only, it keeps you in business, it also signals your branding and positioning. Iterating on the product, is far more easier than on the price. Lowering the price is generally easy and appreciated but it takes to be an Amazon to demonstrate it profitably. Increasing the price, is tough, because it adds to the churn. So doing the most you can, to get it right, generally accounts for a successful business in making.

Addressing few of the initial Questions

Should I charge for my MVP?

Despite validating the problem that I was solving, and clearly mentioning the price point during the customer interviews in my initial stages, I used to be afraid of asking money for the product, because I had a fear, the product is not ready, the Minimum Viable Product was minimal, I was not sure of the hidden bugs and I was not sure, how deeply have I solved the problem.

The two thought leaders Steve Blank and Sean Ellis had the following to offer –

Steve mentions pricing to be one of the important questions in your customer interview, this helps you validate that the product’s value proposition is compelling enough for them to pay, and the problem is worth solving. Once the MVP is built, Steve asks you to sell it to your early customers. There is no clearer customer validation than a sale.

Sean Ellis, removes pricing to the post-product/market fit stage:

“I think that it is easier to evolve toward product/market fit without a business model in place (users are free to try everything without worrying about price). As soon as you have enough users saying they would be very disappointed without your product, then it is critical to quickly implement a business model. And it will be much easier to map the business model to user perceived value.”

Well both of them have their own merits. So I did an A/B with my customers. I offered two of them, the software for free, and mentioned to the other that we will be charging. The folks who were given free product, did not use it and it got shelved, whereas the ones who were paying, had feature requests, reported few of the bugs they came across, solving these bugs, and responding pro-actively helped me develop better relations with them. The free users asked for additional features, whereas the paying users asked for improved features, which eventually meant a better product.

Personally, I align more towards Steve’s side, because, the best validation you can get for products value prop. is the customers’ bucks, and if it gets figured out initially, nothing like it.

Should I go for a freemium model?

Lincoln Murphy has a white paper on The Reality of Freemium in SaaS which covers many important aspects to weigh when considering Freemium, such as the concept of quid pro quo where even free users have to give something back. In services with high network effects, participation is enough. But most businesses don’t have high enough network effects and wrongly chase users versus customers. The notable point in the above paper is – “Freemium is a marketing tactic, not a business model.”

People have struggled with freemium, and dropped it, with few exceptions of Wufoo and FreshBooks. The conversion for free to paid accounts has been relatively low even for Pandora, Evernote, and MailChimp. 37signals has greatly deemphasized their free plans to almost being fine print on their pricing pages.

Its not impossible to launch successfully with a free plan but things can get easy, when we simplify freemium, not look at it as a business model, with the only objective for it being to get people using your product in a manner that makes them want to pay for more advanced features.

What should I consider while pricing my software?

There are a number of ways to approach this problem.

The amount of money a customer is willing to pay, primarily depends on the following two factors –

  1. Value extracted from use of the product
  2. Emotional Willingness to Pay, which is an after effect of perceived value of the product.

And hence, two of the most obvious pricing strategies are –

Pricing based on the value provided

This is customer-first strategy. The amount of value each customer gets out of using Sosio, corresponds with the amount they pay us. Tried doing it, but devising an excel sheet, where in we could go and show, that you used sosio for X, and it increased your value Y times, is something, we are yet to find.

Pricing based on cost

This strategy takes care of our engineering team, sales cost, server and other rentals. This is generally intuitive from an engineering perspective. Pricing based on the number of accounts, the amount of data that is processed and saved, give us a good number, as to how much we should charge.

But the above approach makes it a uni dimensional pricing strategy. Our product is not just the product, its the customer support, its the number of users, its the problem that we are attempting to solve. The Quality of Support we provide, the response time of the support, Email Support versus phone support versus in person support, number of support incidents, product features and depth of usage are other metrics are other dimensions to reflect upon while deciding the pricing.

There are several params, to consider, and you can go on complicating your pricing and creating complex tiers. Even, I was doing one, till I read this post by Dharmesh Shah, and how he randomly arrived at a price of USD 250. I could have gone for a ballpark of maybe 20k INR, but here is how I arrived at what I arrived – I had few features, which other softwares, were providing as well. I have tied down features, uniquely, but my software, as of now, lacks the depth that these enterprise softwares offer, primarily for 2 reasons –

  1. those features will add to the complexity of the product and cost.
  2. the customer segment, I am targeting, does not require such depth.

What I tried was, brutally trimmed the price 10 times, of each of the features, and talked to customers. They were not willing to pay that much, but because I wanted to get started, I reduced it 50% further, the ones who were, happy, continued, the rest were a good bye.

With subsequent improvisation of the product, the prices will increase, and we will keep iterating on it.

Another advice, I got, while I was discussing my pricing strategy with Prof. Prem was to charge for the service and strategy. Well I don’t want to go into the details of how, an analogy can be if you are selling Adobe Photoshop, reduce the price of software, and charge for educational offers. It is working for me, two of my customers are happy with it.

Deciding a pricing tier

The four things to be taken care of, while deciding on pricing are –

  1. The price tier should be simple(Mixergy just uses the names of the plans as calls to action)
  2. It should be easy to compare, with the competitors.
  3. You should help people choose a plan.
  4. Avoid giving, too many choices. (The paradox of Choice)

An easy way of arriving at the tier is, creating customer persona, and segregating them.Your pricing tiers are a visual representation of where your buyers fit in your business model, and each tier should align to one type of customer.

Tiers makes sense for a lot of startups. But as of now, we are doing without it. Because based on the 50 customers I talked to during the sales process, most of them, got stuck, while I was explaining them the pricing model. If you’re a startup (or any software company) consider if your customers really need the additional pricing levels.

To end it all –

“Although scientifically purer, it often doesn’t make sense to change a single variable at a time. Theoretically, you shouldn’t change the price of your product, your discounting strategy and the types of bundle that you sell, all at the same time. But practically, it can be the right thing to do. It’s more useful to fix the problem than to understand why it’s broken. When a scientist goes on a blind date that doesn’t work out then, in theory, he should fix one variable at a time, and re-run the date. first, he should change the partner but go to the same film and buy the same flowers. Next, he should keep the partner the same, vary the film and keep the flowers the same, and so forth. but the pragmatist in him will, or should, change the girl, the film, the flowers, and buy some new clothes and shave too. If it works, he might not understand why, but at least he’ll have girlfriend.” – Neil Davidson

And this awesome piece by Seth Godin –

Go ahead and act as if your decisions are temporary. Because they are. Be bold, make mistakes, learn a lesson and fix what doesn’t work. No sweat, no need to hyperventilate.”

Guest Post by Saket Bhushan, ADFL at Sosio Technologies

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Bootstrap vs. Venture funded route? Lessons from Kiln vs. Trello #SaaS

I am a big fan of Joel On Software blog & FogCreek Software.

Yesterday Joel announced that, Trello, their visual Project Management product, is now an independent venture funded entity, spun off FogCreek Software. One of the comments in HackerNews caught my attention and got me thinking about an issue — how do you decide if your product idea needs external funding or not?.

“I am no longer a Fog Creek employee (I left to join an education startup a bit ago), so this is not an official opinion, but anyway: Joel wants Trello to grow a lot faster than Fog Creek could bootstrap it. In my personal opinion, a big reason why Copilot and Kiln never quite made it was that we didn’t have the developer resources to dominate the market when we were in a good position to do so. Because we insisted on bootstrapping, we necessarily had very small teams, meaning that competitors, who were willing to go into debt to have larger teams, were able to come from behind and surpass us in both marketing and features. In other words, while both products are successful and profitable, they likely could’ve been a lot more successful and profitable if Fog Creek had thrown a lot more resources onto them back at the beginning.”

How do you decide if you should bootstrap to profitability or raise funds at the beginning?

There is always an ongoing debate of raising venture funds vs. bootstrapping your way to profitability and sustained growth.

There is 37signals and Zoho school of thought to bootstrap your way to success. And then there is SalesForce at the other extreme. There is no generalized right or wrong answer to this question and very often you find startups challenging these norms.

There are a few aspects like competitive landscape, market trends and the adoption curve of product itself, that can guide you to make this decision. So, what are those?

Bootstrapped model: If you are in an established (read commoditized) market with lots of competitors it makes sense to build your way to profitability by bootstrapping. If you are building yet another Mailchimp competitor, solving “bulk emailing” for a niche ignored by them, and solving it elegantly while building your way to profitability may be the best approach.

Venture funded model: If you are in a new market with lots of business model or technology innovation happening around it, you should try to build / grow as fast as you can. At Chargebee, we are in this category with a fast changing Subscription business model that is disrupting the way you think about customers & sales, and creating new growth opportunities across sectors.

In the case of applications like CRM, you always evaluate something like SalesForce though you may like a Close.io or a Pipedrive. And you tend to hear opposing voices within your team, advising you to choose an established solution because “it can scale”. By scale, they mean feature richness, integrations, small aspects of product features that makes every day life easy — the benefits of being in market for years & having fixed nagging issues for customers (ex: SalesForce automatically creates follow-up tasks based on rules. It is a simple thing, but I have repeatedly seen this being a reason for sales managers to choose this because it is important for them).

Though you can get funded as a new player in the CRM space, it takes years to challenge the established player unless you are complimented by market forces. Ex: Cloud + Behavioral Analytics + Inside Sales could be a game changer & could leave SalesForce behind. Let me explain. If behavioral analytics becomes the key to doing sales in SaaS (like it is now), established products like SalesForce can be challenged by players like Intercom that provides a totally different dimension to doing online sales and they can dominate that market. Everybody else in CRM space, playing by established rules is trying to play catch with the leader and not disrupting in a big way. This is one category.

Another category is one in which the market leaders are not well established, yet. The market itself is being defined by new way of doing things, across several verticals and products are still maturing. The early mover is even probably at a disadvantage making mistakes along the way, building & rebuilding stuff while lots of new players are emerging building better solutions (this is the space we believe we operate in with Subscriptions).

The comment in HackerNews resonates well here with the second category explained above — the opportunity probably missed by Kiln & Copilot, when they could have totally dominated the market. Github totally dominates the market. Kiln probably missed the bus by not moving fast with Git & SaaS model. If they had deep pockets, they could have been the market leader taking on Github.

And they sensed the opportunity early with StackExchange and now Trello, and have spun them off into separate entities off FogCreek, so they can thrive on their own.

Both these models work and there are always exceptions (isn’t that exactly why we startups exist, to buck the trend?). Choose whichever suits your style. But if you are in second bucket, we should be aware that competitors may take the market further away from you, if you don’t do justice to your startup with right resources at the right stage.

Guest Post by Krish Subramaniam, Co-Founder & CEO, ChargeBee 

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Raja the Raja ! We miss you!

Dear Raja,

Rajendra RajaWe have collaborated on many blog posts in the past but we are struggling to shoulder the burden of this one. People say you are 63, but you worked like a 23! You didn’t care what people thought about your views – you boldly put them forward. You worked for a large company but you cared for the success of innovation in smaller startups. While your mates were fighting for their promotions you were fighting to promote the eco-system. When everyone is having hard time adapting to change, you learned twitter, facebook and what not, with the curiosity of a teenager. While everyone safely choose an MNC product, you took the risk choosing Made-in-India products within your organization and also forced your network to follow you. You saw no boundary and went across NASSCOM, Ignita, iSPIRT with the only goal of building a solid ecosystem. It is hard to merge companies but you easily united iSPIRT and Ignita. When people hesitate to accept friends requests in FB, you made us part of your family by including us in your 60th anniversary celebrations. You are great friend to all of us and we miss you! Raja the Raja !

With limitless love and affection,

Akshay Shah, Avinash Raghava, Dilip Ittyera, George Vettath, Lakshman Pillai, Nari Kannan, Purushothaman K, Sharad Sharma, Suresh Sambandam

 

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Your Opportunity to Win a FREE Trip & Meet Businesses & Startups in Israel #StartTelAviv

iSPIRT partners with TiE Delhi – NCR & Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs to present Start Tel Aviv

Israel is known for its startups and Tel Aviv is a leading hub with a local  ecosystem  of  world  class  tech  talent,  dozens of  leading  multinationals  and  hundreds  of  tech  star  startups.

Start-TelAvivStart Tel Aviv from September 14th to 19th 2014 is an  International competition  in  the  framework  of  which  startups  from  different  countries  will  compete  for  the opportunity of a 5 day intense startup experience to learn from the startup ecosystem in Tel Aviv.  The prize is a paid trip where the 13 startup founders winners from around the world, joined by local Israeli entrepreneurs, to participate in “Start Tel Aviv” during the DLD Festival week, and participants have the opportunity to meet the coolest and smartest companies, techies, startups, designers, artists, scientists, investors, and cultural drivers from Israel and abroad.

The events at Startup Tel Aviv are as follows:
Day 1: Mentoring, Industry & Professional meets, M&A opportunities.
Day 2: Pitch to Investors and VCs. Visit Cities Summit Conference
Day 3: Tel Aviv DLD Conference
Day 4: Open Startup event across the city
Day 5: Tour Israel: Visit Jerusalem and the Dead Sea

Here’s your chance to connect with your Israeli counterparts, investors and VCs.  You should also use this opportunity to figure out if you can collaborate with your counterparts to go global.

Interested?  Here are the criteria based on which the selection will be made:
Criteria
1. Age of submitting founder: 25 – 40
2. Sectors: Web, Mobile, Security
3. Stage: Seed Stage

Competition Judging Parameters
1. Innovation
2. Team
3. Business
4. General
5. Creativity – Use a creative video to prove why this startup should go to Tel Aviv? Each company may submit a 45 second clip (maximum) explaining “Why should my startup go to Tel Aviv, Israel?” (this should be the first slide of the clip). Early submissions to be promoted on Social Media

For those of you interested, please submit the online application here

Initiative led by Rinka Singh, CEO, Co-Founder at AccelerateFire, on behalf of iSPIRT.

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Are you missing out in Digital Marketing?

mullen-marketing-ecosystemThe way that we have done business in the past and the way it is now have undergone a transformation, a digital revolution indeed.   A few years ago, Facebook was hardly known; LinkedIn’s presence was not felt.  But today digital is all over the place.  With marketing undergoing major transformation, and will continue to evolve as we move forward, as a CEO or a CMO, have you utilized the ‘Power of Digital Marketing’ in your business?

This article could help uncover areas that your businesses should explore to make your company stand out, improve upon your brand image, reach out to more customers and building a solid foundation to your business.

Business buyer is today a lot sophisticated, and they have a need to buy.  They now have plethora of information, lot of data to analyze, and more so, their purchasing decisions are influenced by the complexity involved in the buying process.

The first step is to define your Digital Marketing Strategy.

  •      What are we trying to sell?
  •      Who is the target audience?
  •      What is the message that we would like to share with the audience?
  •      What are your marketing objectives and how do you plan to track the ROI through these efforts?

It is essential that the management and marketing team addresses the above questions so as to have clarity and objectivity.  The message needs to be consistent across various channels.  Hence integrated messaging is the key and it should flow across both ways, both from your company and from your audience.

There were days when the buyer relied heavily on information from a manufacturer or a service provider, in order to buy.  Today the customer has more than enough information at their finger tips.  So treat the ‘Data like a King’, and ‘Content like a Queen’.  The crux is that the context should be relevant to the customer.  Proper use of information and analytics will help weave a perfect story which your audience wants to see or know about.

Another disruption in marketing has come up in the recent past, which is the ‘Mobility’.  Organizations need to have a mobile strategy in place.  Web and mobile strategies must meet, and it is becoming mandatory to have a mobile site that renders the website well across desktops/laptops, smartphones, tablets and e-readers.

Digital marketing is measurable, customizable, and can be executed effectively at a lower cost.  It has various components and each of it needs to have a specific objective and results tracked.  It starts with the website that should have a good design (good UI), clear messaging, ease of navigation and speed.  SEO, SEM and Social media are some of the components one needs to pay close attention to.

SEO: Search Engine Optimization helps to optimize your website.  It also increases visibility of your content through proper usage of keywords.  It helps in ranking up your site based on your keywords, its density, etc.  This is organic and cost effective, but takes time for results to be seen.

SEM: Search Engine Marketing is ad based where you bid for keywords.  You can play with your budgets but sometimes minimum bid amount can itself be higher.

Social media involves social groups, networks, blogs, videos, reviews, etc.  Most popular amongst them are LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, etc.

Companies can derive significant benefits if they are able to leverage the power of Online Marketing.  It can be further classified as ‘traditional’ and ‘gorilla’ marketing.

Email marketing and banner advertisements can be classified traditional where as gorilla marketing helps to generate inquiries and close sales through cost per acquisition deals, affiliate programs, CPC (cost per click), etc.

The points discussed above are just the tip of the iceberg, and the marketing team needs to include a well thought out Inbound and Outbound digital strategy.

Inbound marketing can be done through blogs, videos, social media, SEO, discussion forums, whitepaper, etc.

Outbound marketing includes email campaign, webinars, virtual conference, display ads like Google adwords, etc.

A right mix of inbound and outbound marketing is the key, when you are looking at targeting prospective buyers for your product or a service or a solution.

Customer today has multiple touch points before they make their buying decision.  Hence it is essential that we provide one integrated message, across all channels of communication.

With so much of avenues to reach out to your customers, and with lots of action happening in the marketplace, be conscious to cut the noise, make yours stand out, and fish where the fishes are.

Guest Post by Shyam Sekar S, Chief Mentor & Strategist at Startup Xperts

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The Threat of Termination

The emergence of high speed Internet services and the ability to outsource the networking and processing requirements has generated a plethora of opportunities for various companies to avail these emerging services and reduce their overheads and speed up product delivery.  There are however, various critical termination and post termination issues that are encountered by IT companies who are operating on a Software as a Service (SaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) business model.

cyber-security-a-growing-issue-small-businesses1A typical SaaS Agreement is akin to a “property lease agreement” whereby the user would pay rent for the property as long as it is used and on termination of such a lease, the user would cease from using the said property.

However, unlike property, the services rendered by a SaaS operator would need not only require protection in-terms of asserting its rights over the underlying software program, but also for ensuring that only the right to use are assigned to the end user for the limited period.

From the end user perspective, the SaaS model of business operations raise a whole new gamut of issues given the nascency of this Industry. A common concern that is being raised by them is “what would happen if the service contract were to be terminated by the service provider”.

While many a client/end user would brave the odds and accept the risks associated with the industry, it is critical to address the concerns discussed herein. In a standard SaaS agreement, it should be viable for having an amicable exit option so as the interests of the end users are protected especially with respect to migrating to a new platform so as to ensure business continuity and guarantee data security post termination. If the agreement secures these rights of the end users in case of a termination, the agreement will be deemed to be not too restrictive so as to attract anti competition regulations, if any. The end user in which case can easily migrate to another platform or use services of a different service provider in an effective manner.

Takeaways

A SaaS or PaaS business model is susceptible to Anti-Competitive regulations especially if the arrangement is in exercise of a dominant market position. It would also be a concern for the client to have an exit option and not be wholly dependent on a single SaaS provider. Following are some of the tools to be used in negotiating a contract in these scenarios:

  • Use a Post Termination clause to assist the client in identifying alternatives
  • Assert IPRs in the underlying software
  • Non-disclosure and Non-compete agreements may be entered into between the parties
  • Post termination cleanse of all traces of the software
  • Build in adequate clauses for protection on data and codes during migration to the new provider

Guest Post contributed by Aashish Somansi and Shantanu Sahay, Anand & Anand

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My learning from taking an idea to product to business – Sampad Swain, Instamojo

Instamojo.com was released to public on 24th April, 2012. That’s little over 2 years back. Here’s a screenshot of how it looked then with the boilerplate message:

Although, we haven’t shifted from our core vision but we definitely have learnt a lot more about who are our customers, what do they want and what should we do to make them happy which in turn will help us meet our business goals as well.

Now, here’s our homepage today in all its glory (WIP):

Along the way, we have learnt a lot about e-commerce, payments, laws & regulations, fraud detection, security, distribution & much more.

Most importantly, we learnt over a period of time how to marry design with commerce for the right final outcome for our customers (thanks to@sengupta and @kingsidharth)

Shameless promotion: Today, Instamojo.com has one of the highest payment conversion rates in the e-commerce industry.

1. Idea phase

We never spent much time on perfecting from the start. Main idea was to release the product to an initial set of customers quickly (we took around 3 week’s time); then start iterating vigorously based on that feedback. However, we never got distracted by others’ worldview of our product vision. So, we took that as an opportunity to learn and shape it accordingly.

Our initial estimate was, let’s build 80% of our core promise and iterate at a supersonic speed. Hence, lot of our core technology decisions was around this hypothesis like choosing Heroku over Amazon AWS for faster deployments & freeing engineering bandwidth (thanks to @hiway). However, we recently shifted over core infrastructure to AWS (thanks to @saiprasadch) since at scale it works best, both economically & reliability point of view.

Also from business point of view, we decided we will never chase moving targets (learning from our previous pivot). In simpler words, we narrowed down our focus & made decision making process almost binary. That, in a way set forth our straightforward, no-nonsense, more data-driven culture from day 1 which we keep following across functions (much thanks to@gehani).

2. Product building phase

This is the most exciting phase of any startup. But truth be told that this phase is also the most treacherous too.

I’ve known many smart founders fall in the trap of loving their product way too much (including me in my last startup) and slowly decay to oblivion even before reaching the business phase.

I think this is due to the fact that technical founders find this phase most apt to their persona i.e. building, hacking without much interaction with customer(s). Hence, they fall into the trap of just building and not selling or interacting with customers enough to understand what should be built & what shouldn’t.

We at Instamojo heavily relied on past data to help us cross this phase. Fortunately, we had got some customers who kept us on our toes to keep improving the product and add more. While at it, we kept on charting our product road-map into 3 buckets:

  1. Reach
  2. Revenue
  3. Retention

And depending on the impact of each bucket to the business then, we decided our product road-map.

During this phase, we released 25+ big features in 9 months depending on each bucket’s impact on the business & customer-set, thus balancing both growth in business metrics & customer development.

3. Business building phase

This phase, according to me is the most hardest phase; and one we are experiencing. In this phase, we get to hear good’ol phrases like “good problems to have than having none” which frankly is so true.

This phase is all about numbers (for both internal & external stakeholders) like

  • Figuring out all possible customer acquisition channels (both paid & non-paid).
  • Market sizing with absolute TAM (target addressable market) etc.

In simpler terms, business phase is all about growth:

  1. Growth in revenue metrics
  2. Growth in user acquisition metrics
  3. Growth in ________________ (fill in the blanks for your business)

We at Instamojo are experiencing this from all corners. We grew almost +10X in last 6 months in all possible business metrics. We finally hired our 1st full-time sales person last month. We are growing at a rate of almost 1 hire every 2 weeks across engineering, sales, operations, risk/safety, marketing etc functions (P.S. if you’re interested, here’s our careers page).

Closing words

“Growth” is any startup’s much needed oxygen. But I couldn’t stress more on the fact that with scale comes newer issues, more responsibilities, pressure to deliver always etc. However in my opinion, the fundamentals of growth has to be laid down much before the “business phase” with clear focus on long-term sustenance.

We at Instamojo tackle these with being completely clear about our “big vision” and “what we stand for” to start with.

So over-communication is a great tool to garner more steam and momentum, so that we have less time to worry and more time to build against odds.

Reblogged from Sampad Swain’s blog.

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Tools to make your life easier as a Product Manager

If you are a product manager like me, working at a startup, you are already wearing lot of hats and always finding scrappy ways to get things done. On a typical day you help define the roadmap, spec features, triage bugs, analyze experiments and shephered launches. Now, How in the world do you maintain your sanity while being on top of all these things? For me the answer has partially been found in the set of tools which I use on a daily basis.

Workflowy

Use for: Note-taking 

As a product manager I’m always taking notes whether it be over a quick feature discussion, the customer feedback session or quickly jotting down a piece of information. Over the years I have used Microsoft OneNote, Evernote, Trello and many other softwares along side some clever ways like writing emails to myself, but in the end none has stuck

But I turned a corner. Nearly an year ago, when I discovered WorkFlowy —so far— it seems to be the best note-taking and organizational program I’ve ever tried. This app is the easiest, best-designed, and most-flexible note-taker I’ve ever come across, and it solves many of the problems I’ve had with other software. In the year I’ve been using it, it has become one of two tabs that I keep open in my browser, along with Gmail.

Get it: https://workflowy.com/

Easel.io

Use for: Rapid Prototyping 

As a product manager, who cares deeply about user-centric design, I like to create clickable prototypes of the features I work on, to get a sense of how the feature is going to be used by the end-user. With Easel I can import elements from existing sites, make a clickable prototype and get feedback from all the stakeholders pretty early in the product development life cycle.

Get it: https://www.easel.io/

Awesome Screenshot — Chrome Plugin

Use for: Capturing screenshots, annotating pages

As a product manager I end up taking lot of screenshots, be it for reporting defects, researching other products for ideas or simply specifying a feature request. After trying a number of options, I’ve opted for a handy little plugin for my Chrome browser, which stays at my fingertips at the top of the browser, and lets me snap a whole page (beyond the fold and everything) or snips of the screen.

The result is loaded in a new tab, complete with tools to annotate, black/blur out sensitive information, and draw all the red arrows and squares I desire.

From there, the screenshot can be copied to your clipboard, saved to your computer, printed out, or shared with a variety of other services like google drive.

It’s fast and useful, and has never given me reason to complain. Plus it’s free.

Get it: Awesome Screentshot — Chrome Web Store

UsabilityHub

Use for: Quick, anonymous feedback

UsabilityHub gives you 3 tools each enabling you to post images (or a series of images, in the case of Nav Flow) and gather feedback from random users over the web.

It works on a virtual currency called ‘Karma’ — you can earn Karma by doing tests posted by others, or you can pay to buy Karma in bulk. Ideally, you can run through a handful during lunch break to earn just enough to spend them on tests in the afternoon.

Get it: https://usabilityhub.com/

ProdPad

Use for: Defining Roadmap, Spec features, Creating Personas 

As a product manager alongside taking notes, rapid prototyping, taking awesome screenshots and gathering quick, anonymous feedback you need to come up with rock solid product roadmaps, be able to define personas and spec out feature details and share it with people across the board.

ProdPad is the only proper Product Management Software that allows you to gather ideas from your team, flesh them out into specs, outline your products and your product lines, and put it all on to a Product Roadmaps.

Best of all, it also has packages that will fit your company, whether you’re a startup or whether you’re part of a huge team with a big product portfolio.

Get it: https://www.prodpad.com/

Of course, this list is by no means exhaustive, and there’s plenty of room for debate on which other tools offer a better experience, richer feature set, or more attractive pricing. I look forward to finding out in the comments.

Guest Post by Chetan Kapoor, Product Manager working with SuperProfs.com design and engineering team. Serving as a linchpin between product management, engineering and customers to ensure that product is developed in a way to maximise all stakeholders success and contribute to SuperProfs.com overall strategy. Twitter – @kapoorcs

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How do you handle customer requirements of “depositing” product source codes?

escrowIn todays exacting times, large corporations like to secure their business continuity on IT products and services sourced from smaller companies, by seeking access to the basic product source code. While the smaller IT companies spend man years developing cutting edge technology solutions, this sharing of the source code could kill their future and business.

The way out is an “Software Escrow Account” a win-win solution for both !!!

With due protection and security built into the storage / access and building adequate clauses on infringement and penalties at the customer end, this is a well established and acceptable process, helping  maximise the business potential for both.

The changing paradigms of the software and IT industry as well as increasing customer expectations have raised the stress on start up software and IT companies. On the one hand software start ups face threat of losing their valuable software to the infringers and on the other hand their clients demanding source code of the software for enabling better management of customizations are on the rise. Now here lies an underlying problem, the moment these software companies reveal their source code to their clients, the software would become vulnerable to infringement as there will be a high probability that a new product could easily be developed/ reverse engineered. On the flip side if they don’t reveal the source code, the client would not be satisfied and eventually these companies would lose their client base in an increasing competitive market.

Legally speaking, the standard approach in such situations would be to enter into Non disclosure agreements and non compete agreements which can only offer limited protection. These measures are merely paper measures which assert already existing rights of the software developer and actually fail to protect the copyright in the existing software product as the source code which when revealed by these software companies to the clients is hard to detect if it gets infringed.

The alternative therefore is to take affirmative measures which would prevent such an infringement. Escrow agreement and using the technology protection measures to give only limited access to the source code are win-win solutions for both client and the software developer whereby:

  • The client would have the desired access to the source code subject to terms of contract.
  • The Software developer has rights under the contract which would in-turn ensure that the client could not reverse engineer the product.

Successfully implementing these legal solutions can help software industry to maximize its potential and minimize the risks by using legal tools that have been tried and tested in finance and banking industry.

Guest Post contributed by Taron Mohan (Next Gen Solutions) and Aasish Somasi (Anand & Anand)

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Online Survey for Indian Mobile App Developer Enterprises

The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) recently released an online survey for mobile app developers to respond on their legal practices within their work, as well as their business models and familiarity with India’s laws. Through this research initiative, CIS hopes to better understand the dynamics of India’s mobile app ecosystem amongst stakeholders, and how developers are directly or indirectly affected by the laws in place governing this ecosystem.

survey-buttonDevelopers, designers, and product managers of all sorts are invited to participate within CIS’s research survey initiative so long as they are based in India and contribute to the development of at least one mobile application within a company or enterprise. Built in collaboration with HasGeek, a community-oriented enterprise for developers in Bangalore, the survey asks participants to respond to questions on their practices related to ownership, licensing, contracts and protection of their works as intellectual property (IP). Questions also seek out background information and information related to one’s business model to best contextualize responses, as well as personal insight on understandings of India’s copyright laws and IP more generally.

The survey can be accessed here, and will be available for completion until Tuesday, April 29, 2014.

Ultimately, CIS intends to comment on whether the current laws in place related to intellectual property are a causal factor in either encouraging or hindering mobile app development in India. In this sense, this initiative serves as preliminary policy research and strives to provide a comprehensive understanding on the widespread legal practices of developers as the supporting stakeholders of this mobile app ecosystem.

By the end of this survey’s running, we hope to be able to better illustrate the complexities within an ever-growing ecosystem that are typically only considered at a level of technical or legal abstraction. For instance, it is quite common for discourse to reference the specific activities that developers might undergo while potentially violating another’s rights to their works, such as those involving the direct copying of software code without the permission to do so. Other sources might advocate for the patenting of one’s mobile app products and entail the complexities of the patent filing process to ensure the optimal likelihood of the application being granted.

But what are the trends that exist across developers related to such activities? What are the ways in which they carry out these activities, and most importantly, why?

What determines who patents their product or copies another’s? And what factors are at play in the shaping of an enterprise’s business model and the methods that they adopt to meet their objectives?

What barriers do enterprises encounter along the way, from the startup to the corporate, and how do they get around them accordingly?

We hope that through this online survey, CIS will begin to be able to address these areas of greyed understanding, and to identify existing correlation, if any, between the business models, legal practices and personal understandings related to IP, and how one’s work within mobile app development is affected as a result.

Guest Post by Samantha Cassar, Centre for Internet & Society

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Practical Mantras for Lean Startup

Talk to anyone running a startup or working in a big company turning new idea into products, they would tell you that their journey is fraught with far too many uncertainties

Lore that Lean Startup is a savior for this has spread far and wide but ask these folks and they will nod their head in agreement that they face huge struggle in adopting it. One of the big challenges is that Lean Startup is thought of as new magical management theory which it is surely not; instead it is a methodical approach in reducing market uncertainties. Lean Startup is at best described as codified past best practices by startups and individuals that have been able to successfully reduce customer and market risk.

Adopting Lean Startup is no different from any other behavior change that one goes through personally or in an organization. To change behavior and adopt new practice work on several dimensions is required which includes changed mindset, a clear understanding of principle, devoid of jargons, a simplified set of tools to aid, hands-on practice of the tools and many a times a community of peer support.

What Mindset for Lean?

Most of our life starting from school we have had an execution mindset, we were always given a set of task to do and we were graded on how we executed on them and thus behavior is quite strong. We view everything as an execution problem and solve for it

Ask anyone that has experienced running a startup and they will tell you how everything is a moving target and things change very fast. Almost everything in a startup is an assumption and needs to be fundamentally questioned even when you are executing assuming it to be true

Thus one should have a learning mindset, until key assumptions have been validated

Principle at Work

Studies suggest that the number one reason that startup fail is because they don’t have customer or market. Key principle of Lean Startup suggest that if startups prioritize and focus on eliminating the customer or market risk before others then the odds of failure can be reduced drastically.

Tools for use

Disciplined approach of listing assumption, turning them into experiments to validate, art of talking to customers, prototyping to learn customer behavior and iterating through Build > Measure > Learn loop are some of the tools available practitioners disposal to methodically address market risk

LeanMantr’s bootcamp is designed to hands-on practice scenario with real life startup ideas for folks to learn the benefit of using Lean. Last year alone 6 workshops were held in Bangalore. The next one is happening on 11-13 April (www.leanmantra.explara.com). If you would like to get immersed in the how to, then do join us

Lean Startup Circle Bangalore  monthly meetups are for practitioners to trade notes and offer peer support in this behavior change journey to reduce failures of startups in general.  Join any of the next meetup (attendance is free)

Guest Post by Rammohan Reddy, Lean Startup Evangelist atLeanMantra

 

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Redefining Retail Stores – Weavedin

In our candid conversation with Jose and Jacob founders of Weavedln Technologies Pvt. Ltd., we have discovered a team of four entrepreneurs on their way to transform retail industry with their product – Weaver. They intend to redesign the way retail outlets work, by converting ‘point of sale’ with a smart cloud based device.

The Team: The founding team consists of JoseKuttan , Jacob, Dheepan and Jibin. Jose has done his MS in Telecommunications and Venture Practicum from University of Maryland, Washington. Thereafter he decided to come back to India to pursue his startup dream. He has worked in bunch of Bay Area Companies  along with couple of startups and a VC firm as an associate while in the US. Jacob was in the founding team of the first Incubator in Kerala (southern state of India) by name Innovation Lab. He is a graduate from Govt. Model Engineering College, Cochin and has worked with EMC Corporation prior to WeavedIn.

Dheepan leads technology and backend at WeavedIn. He is a graduate from College of Engineering, Guindy in Tamil Nadu and has experience working with Apigee, Hashcube and other startups. While Jibin leads the mobile side of technology. A hard core techie brings experience working with companies like Infineon particularly in the embedded technology.

weavedin - homeThe Product: Put together their brains they have introduced ‘Weaver’, a new species of product in the retail segment that takes care of virtually everything about a retail store. It has three facet benefit system that solves pressing problems in sales, inventory management and customer experience of retail businesses. Weaver works on native android on the front end and has a powerful web based backend. The technology stack which powers our backend is LEMP (Linux, (E) Nginx, Mysql, Python). The product has a 2048 bit SSL encryption to protect  customer’s data transfers.

Weaver handles store’s key sales problems via cloud based POS system along with its automated inventory management. It helps retail businesses to enhance their store management and in-store customer engagement experience. Their analytically driven dashboard ensures store owners/managers are updated with every single aspect of the store on real time basis on their move. It has in-built facility to generate bills for your sales either on paper or the smarter way through an email or a SMS. It helps in managing accounts, vouchers and other important sheets along with monthly tax data and Profit & Loss statements.

Weaver creates purchase orders, share them with vendors via SMS/Email, updates inventory once the items arrives, links them as components (or whole) to sales catalogue. All this components mapped to keep a watch on inventory status and get automatic alerts if inventory falls below a threshold.

In regards to customer engagement, Weaver helps store managers to stay connected with customers by capturing their details to be able to give them personalized experience. Weaver ensures data is always protected and derives maximum value out of it.

The USPs: Weaver has:

  • Cloud based touch device that integrates multiple activities of a store to a single interface in its hardware plus software package.
  • High level of automation in terms of inventory management that helps the store owners save money
  • Simple user interface design that minimizes the learning curve for employees and promises higher level of customer engagement
  • Scalable model in an affordable package, that gives absolute value of money with pay as you grow model

In this niche segment some of the players like Posiflex, Wincor Nixdorf, IBM catering to the upper segment of the pyramid and are present on an international level. While other players in the international market are Revel Systems, Square Register and Shoppify POS. Indian domestic market has players like Gofrugal, shawman, Lucid, Posist. Posist is a cloud based system that works from a browser and is a near competition in terms of the features.

In the next 12 months Weavedln is focused on sales networks and developing partnerships to enhance the product feature set. Weaver is designed to plug in the brick and mortar stores to the cloud. Productnation team would wish Weavedln team luck in their plans to build a set of features that would leverage the same and would add value to the stores.

Conversation led by Praveen Gupta, Rategain.

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How we funded and developed our products through services (Bootstrapping)

You will find many of the articles on bootstrapping on the web. But today I would like to share with you how we developed our two products Shimbi CMS Budo and ShimBi MyBilling through Bootstrapping.

“The basics of bootstrapping is simple – Earn money, spend less” Jofin Joseph.

When we started ShimBi Labs in 2005;  we had a clear vision that we will develop 4 best products for SMBs (Small and Medium size Businesses). But the situation was that neither we had enough funds to develop our products, nor an idea about products to be developed.

First and foremost challenge before us was to raise funds to build our dream products.

Bootstrapping

We had decided to opt for Bootstrapping (as no other options were available.  Angel investor or VC will not fund any biz without even a product idea!)  So our first focus was to have sufficient funds for the survival of the startup and then to invest in product developments.  For that,  we chose very unconventional market for Indian software company; we decided to focus on Japan as our primary market. Yes, market with high potential and hardly tapped by Indian software industry.  At the same time, not an easy task to enter the industry if we had not lucky enough to get the industry veteran of Japan as our Mentor, who was courteous and introduced us to potential customers.

With 9 years of rich experience in providing services (software development and consultancy) in Japan, we got better insights into the problems that can later evolve into a product.  We understood and learnt how to achieve the highest quality in any software. All this, later helped us build our own products.

While doing this we never forgot our original vision of building products for SMBs. We had to remain extremely careful to keep the service track completely independent of the product track. Thumb rule was: never use the same developer to be working on the services.

Product Ideas

So how we got ideas about Products?

Honestly we never brainstorm. “Necessity is the mother of invention”  Exactly !!! that is what had happened.

1. Content Management System

As a service company, prime necessity is to have an official website with the ability to update it often. Being all techies in the company, as a founder; I was forced to quit coding and focus on all other activities necessary to run the business, which includes regular website updation. For this, I was in need of a website with easy to use CMS (Content Management System).  Surprisingly, instead of using the existing solutions available, we built our own CMS. That’s how CMS Budo taken birth.

2. Online Invoicing Application

Next, it was essential to have Simple Invoicing Application.

Being all engineer company, we were reluctant to learn any accounting software. So I decided to learn few basic things, about how to write an invoice and started making them in Excel. Wow that was a huge mess, almost every second invoice was with some silly mistakes. Tracking them, save them in folders and send reminders was the big pain in the ass.

I decided to repeated the same idea (as CMS Budo) of having our own online invoicing application, instead of availing the solutions that already exists in the market. Later, it was named as ShimBi MyBilling!  First we sold it as license version to 100s of customers, and now we converted it into SaaS (Software as a Service) model.

We realise that these softwares (Web Applications) are useful for us and making a lot of sense. Creating value, increasing efficiency. Now we can spend more time on our core competency.

We also realised that if these softwares (Web Applications) are useful to us then they can be useful to other SMBs too.

Find customers before you build

To validate our idea we started to communicate with our existing customers, and many of them were readily convinced.  They asked us for demos; it was a great chance for us & we made use of the opportunity without any delay. Right after the demo, several feedbacks and customisations’ requests flooded in our mailbox.  Hence, we decided to make CMS Budo and MyBilling generalize & convert them as a product useful to all. We convinced some of our customers to fund in the customisation and development of the product and in turn offered them a copy of the full product at a nominal price.

As a result, today both the products had crossed several iterations and versions in the market. All by bootstrapping. I strongly believe that the product must create value for small businesses than excite VCs.

  • ShimBi MyBilling is available as SaaS
  • and CMS Budo will be soon available as SaaS

Goal is to build Innovative Solutions … Simple, Powerful yet Affordable

Please share your experience of bootstrapping with us.

Guest Blog Post by Siddharth Deshmukh, Founder and CEO at ShimBi Labs. A passionate about product building. Single minded, manic, in pursuit of quality and excellence … I am an entrepreneur building our product – MyBilling and CMS Budo.

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Why Startups are opting for Ruby to build their MVPs

“By the time that product is ready to be distributed widely, it will already have established customers”~ From the pages of “The Lean Startup” by Eric Ries.

It is essentially true that by the time you finish building your product completely, your customers are already looking for something new! Demands of your customers change in a snap. So, in order to match this lightening speed of change in demands, you need to be pro-active in identifying the problem and develop a minimum viable product (MVP) so that the product refinement process can be jumpstarted.

Once your MVP is ready, your startup can now work on modulating the engine and move ahead. Since speed is what a startup looks for when building a product, most developers are now turning to Ruby for web application development. Ruby can give you speed and ease in building your MVP. It is extremely efficient in assisting you to build a highly scalable app.

There are a number of reasons why Ruby is the top choice for developers building a minimum viable product for their startups. In case you are wondering why Ruby and not other languages, then –

  • Ruby comes with a low “learning curve”, which means that once you have crossed the initial hiccups, it is the most natural language to work with.

  • Ruby is a mature language with features like OOP, functional programming, multi-platform compatibility (WIndows, UNIX variants, Linux, BeOS, MS-DOS), minimum exceptions, Garbage Collection.

  • With flexible syntax and without any pointers, Ruby has great web development frameworks (like Rails, Sinatra).

  • Ruby does not incur any cost if you want to copy, modify, distribute and use it.Since coders can modify it according to their needs, coding does not seem restricted anymore.

  • Ruby has a vibrant open source community and a great support system. You can have a look at the source of the code, or suggest a patch, or get connected to helpful user communities as well the creator.

Ruby definitely comes handy to a startup trying to build a MVP. Time constraint is always there on startups. In such a state if a programming language comes with too many restrictions, it makes the task more difficult.There is no denial that startups with their MVPs are actually making it big. Any developer competent with Ruby language is the first choice of a startup. If you want to be in the coding world, Ruby should be the first language to learn. Not just because it is simple, but because it is rewarding as well. It has features that are convincing and can handle almost all exception well with its robust nature.

So, without delay, join Venturesity’s Ruby course. It is comprehensive in its course modules and is taught by industry experts. Expect the best guidance from our instructors who teach our students over live classes. What can be better than a hands-on training, an interactive class and project work to validate your learning! Register with us soon before time runs out!

“Startup success can be engineered by following the process, which means it can be learned, which means it can be taught” ~ Eric Ries

Guest Post by Pritha Bose, Content Writer for Venturesity

 

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If a picture speaks a thousand words, a video does that 24 times per second.

Video advertising is increasingly becoming a necessity for a business in today’s fast paced world. Gone are the days when you would pen down tons of text in the “About Us” section of your website. A crisp video about your start-up can definitely make you go a long way in explaining what you offer to the right set of target audience. There are lot of tools like Powtoon, GoAnimate, Wideo etc available online where you can create your own awesome videos. However, always remember that a Video is not just yet another creative asset, it’s a packaged marketing message and if carefully drafted, can make a lot of difference to your business. So, spend your thoughts and time generously to get this right.

Here are 5 tips to keep in mind to ensure that the impact of your video reaches its maximum potential.

1: Get the Narrative Right

Should the video be humorous, informative or emotional? It is very important to think about the target audience thoroughly. If humour can connect to some people, some prospective customers look for a straight-forward problem-solution approach. You should always put yourself in a customer’s shoes and try to understand whether the video would appeal to him or not. While it is important to depict the salient features of your product or service, the video should not be overloaded with information. Demographics such as age, geography, gender, profession etc along with the kind of product/service offered by you should be well considered in choosing the right appeal for the video.

2: Pay Attention to the Building Blocks

Narration, music, visuals and voices are the building blocks of a video. It’s very important to choose a right combination based on the appeal you want. While a product video might look good with a strong and engaging narration about the features of the product, an emotional video with just background music and a strong visual story could go viral on social media.

3: Say It Quick

Brevity is the soul of wit. With so much happening on internet, your audience will switch tabs as soon as you start stuffing them with information they don’t need. Ideally, a video of not more than 90 seconds should be able to tell your message to a prospective customer.

4: Call to Action: Convert those Views into Leads

This is one of the most forgotten, but crucial elements: Focus your message on the task or action you would like your viewer to do. Whether you are getting them to visit your website or download your app from the play store, get the message out clear and simple, and tell them how to do it. Remember, the aim of the video is not just to get appreciation, but to also get more leads and customers.

5: Campaigns can Capture Minds

If you are looking for brand retention in viewer’s minds, you can consider circulating a series of really short videos (20-30 seconds) with different use-cases about your product/service, but keeping a unique appeal and structure. The advantage in this approach is the anticipation among the audience who have already seen your previous videos. This also creates an imprint of your brand deep inside the viewer’s mind and will definitely help your business in the long run.

So stop writing long documents about your brand and ‘Videofy’ your idea. A video of 90 seconds is all you need to tell your story to the world.

Guest Post by Jatin Rastogi, co-founder of WildBeez, a video solutions start-up that has produced corporate videos for brands such as OlaCabs, Fabmart, InMobi and more.