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.

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

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)

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 CassarCentre for Internet & Society

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

 

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.

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.

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

 

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.

Meet the Rickshaw Rising Challenge Winners!

The Rickshaw Rising Challenge finale took place in the first week of February 2014 in Mumbai. Fourteen entrepreneurs representing 8 teams went through a two day long boot-camp. Read more about Day-1 and Day-2.

unnamedOn Day 3, they pitched their business to Robin Chase (ZipCar), Harish Hande (SELCO), Judith Pollock (Shell Foundation), and Madhav Pai (EMBARQ India).
We are truly excited to announce the results of the Rickshaw Rising Challenge.

Ubida
The first award of $50,000 and 6-months business support went to Mukesh Jha and Janardan Prasad of Ubida from Pune. The company addresses auto rickshaw hailing problems on the consumer side and optimizes rides and income for drivers.

AutoRaja
The second award of $25,000 and 6-months business support went to Aishwarya Raman and Anubhav Agarwal of AutoRaja from Chennai. AutoRaja runs auto-rickshaws on call with the aim of creating dignified lives for drivers by increasing business and facilitating access to finance, healthcare, and education.

Three Wheels United
The third award of $25,000 and 6-months business support went to Ramesh Prabhu of Three Wheels United from Bangalore. TWU addresses problems in the auto-rickshaw ecosystem through financial services, alternate channels of revenue, and bringing in a shift to cleaner engines.
We would also like to congratulate our 5 other finalists and 38 other applicants to the Challenge.

We look forward to finding other channels to support and work with you.

Guest Post by Jyot Chadha, Embarq India.

Sales Wisdom from Million Dollar Product Companies

Why Buy Mine? This is the question I have kept asking myself ever since Pallav and Paras did their “Global Lean Sales” session at the #PNCamp in November. I used to send a long email before and often had to explain a lot to why we charge higher. Now I just use the below message and it does the job. There is nothing different from what we were doing earlier. But our message to our market is now very different and converts them into trusting buyers faster .

“Industry Leaders like Freshdesk ( Customer HelpDesk ), WebEngage ( On-site Customer Engagement), Flipkart’s Payzippy ( Online Payments) have chosen MyPromoVideos for their videos because we were able to consistently deliver “magic” to our client’s brands, not just videos.”

I was so much in love with two of their slides from their presentation that our team here decided to do a beautiful “Info-Graphic” around the same. If you are not satisfied with just 10% growth every month and want to grow exponentially on steroids, you need to build your sales team. This is the infographic to keep by your desktop.

Sales Evolution - Wingify and FusionCharts (1)Thanks to Pallav, Paras and the Product Nation for helping Entrepreneurs succeed.

Guest Post by Gopal Krishnan, MyPromoVideos. Gopal is the Co-Founder of www.MyPromoVideos.com and takes care of Sales and Marketing. He builds trust with his Sales Systems and brings in the customers

for MyPromoVideos

Ezmove – Redefining the Movers and Packers Services

Businesses succeed with a mission to serve customers and related ecosystem. Ezmove is following the same path.

I recently got a chance to catch-up with Ezmove co-founders – Anand & Vishwajeet. Ezmove aims to be a guiding agent, to whom consumers can just outsource their movers & packers requirements.

Q:Why do you guys feel there is need of guiding agent?

Founders: Most Movers & Packers lack professionalism, accountability and efficiency. Also, Majority of players are not equipped with solution to deliver as per customer preferences. We are here to address all such basic issues.

Q: How Ezmove plans to deliver? Any success till now?

Founders:To begin with, we have been able to process 200 Moves till now in 3 months. Here, I can talk about the process we followed to deliver these movements.

On behalf of consumers, EZMove filteredmovers through stringent screening.  A dedicated Relocation manager took care of the movementfrom request until completion. In addition, we have built CRM & Enterprise products for our vendors to achieve backward integration& produce cost benefits for the industry. Hence, our aim is to make our vendors more efficient through technology. In turn, producing value for the customers.

Q: How big is this market?  What’s the average revenue per customer?

Founders :In India, We believe its $2 billion to $5 billion. AverageTicket size is about $300.

Q: What’s the customer conversion rate till now?

Founders: Conversion rate is around 24%

Q: Considering such a huge market, what are your plans?

Founders: Our focus is to resolve problems & set new trends with innovation. We wish to empower the customers as well as Packers and Movers with better tracking & communication tools.  Team has a vision to introduce the usage of data analytics techniques to foresee demand & make estimates.

Last but not least, Ezmove plan to make your relocation or home shifting or vehicle transfer a promising and optimal experience.

Guest Post by Gaurav Lakhani 

Raja of v-shesh on how social impact can be “greater through a business model”

Mr. P Rajasekharan (Raja) is the founder of v-shesh, a social impact enterprise that enables people with disabilities find employment. Working with both job-seekers and employers, v-shesh has placed over 90% of its trainees in banks, ITES, hospitality and manufacturing sectors. Prior to founding v-shesh, Raja worked in development sector and project finance at Japan Bank for Regional Cooperation (JICA) and IDBI. He is also the India advisor to American nonprofit Corstone. He has an MS in Public Policy from Carnegie Mellon University, an MBA from NMIMS, Mumbai and is an engineer from VJTI, Mumbai.

[Innovate Delhi] What prompted you to start v-shesh? Tell us about your idea to start a for-profit social enterprise for people with disability?

Raja-e1352368409931-150x150[Raja] Shashaank and I knew each other, both personally and professionally for a long time but we had had no idea regarding what we wanted to do. We always thought that we should do something that resolves the dichotomy that we see all the time in India but we never decided on anything for several years. Both of us were doing well professionally – Shashaank was a corporate banker and I had a cushy job in a development bank. We wanted to do something that was professionally challenging, had a clear impact element and was run business like because that is where our strengths lay.

Then came the question of what we wanted to do. Coincidentally, we got an opportunity to spend time with each other through an assignment not related to our day jobs. That is when we decided that jobs or something that allows people to earn income is very powerful. Additionally, it has a very strong ripple effect among one’s peers, cohorts and society. By providing income to people, we could bridge the opportunity divide that exists in the society around us.

We came back from the assignment with the seed planted in our heads. From there on, it took 5 months for v-shesh to materialize. I worked on the weekends and holidays. By working remotely and part time, we gained some traction and realized that these are issues required far more engagement and close interactions. After 6 months of running small projects we decided to go full time. I quit my job and took up v-shesh full time. I moved to Chennai and the story started in 2008.

Frankly, we were always highly confident and highly motivated. There was no question of failing. We had to succeed.

Did you intend to go full time? Or did you gain traction along the way that inspired you to go full time?

We always intended to go full time. It was a question of when. The only issue I had to resolve was financial security for my family and myself. To study in the US, I had taken some loans. I essentially had to get rid of my loans before I could make the jump!

What other challenges you faced while starting v-shesh?

Being an entrepreneur in India is itself a challenge. Selling the story to your family- your parents, your spouse – is very difficult. It did take a while. As an entrepreneur, you are essentially a loner. So getting the family onboard is nice but also challenging. Ofcourse there were other challenges in building the enterprise but getting the consensus from family was the most important and difficult one.

While having your family alongside you is critical, what is the importance of having a professional network before starting one’s venture?

Both of us did well in our jobs and had good professional relationships that gave us the confidence to go ahead with our plans. We knew that they were people we could fall back on incase something went wrong. Frankly, we were always highly confident and highly motivated. There was no question of failing. We had to succeed. Only health reasons would prevent us from doing so and for that scenario we have insurance. There was a good support base that we were able to leverage in the start.

And once you started, was that network of people helpful or did you have to build a new network of people who were more embedded in the entrepreneurship ecosystem? Were there crossovers in those sets of people?

As bankers we had no idea about disability, hiring, HR and such. But we had our networks that we used to build newer networks. I still continue to have networks from jobs I had fifteen years ago in JICA and IDBI. So it was a combination of the two.

v-shesh is a for profit enterprise which is a relatively new model for social enterprises in India. How did you resolve the for-profit v/s non-profit debate and what would be your adice to an entrepreneur who wants to start a social enterprise?

For us, there was no debate. For profit was what we knew. We knew how markets worked, how to acquire customers, how to deliver goods. At the same time, having worked for a development bank, I knew the structure of NGOs as a legal entity did not serve the needs of the people at the required scale. We knew that our impact would be greater through a business model.But for people entering the system, my advice always has been that it is upto the individual to make the decision. Whatever model you choose, nonprofit or for-profit, the end goal – to serve the customer – should be met. For us, profit was the best way to attract the best talent and capital. So we chose that route.

We knew that our impact would be greater through a business model.

What is the culture at v-shesh? How do you ensure that your big picture values translate into day-to-day operations and you don’t lose sight of your larger goal in dealing with the red tape?

That’s an excellent question! Maintaining the culture of the organization is the biggest responsibility of the founder, especially for an impact enterprise. We are a team of 20 and we are 5 years old. I am proud to say that we have no attrition. Nobody quit v-shesh. We look at people who have passion for serving the unreached segment and some skillset that we can hone over a period of time. We want that careful blend of understanding the customer’s needs as well as that of the workplace, because our job is to put people in the workplace. Usually, everyone spends 3-4 months familiarizing themselves with the culture before the final offer comes. While we have social harmony, we are also a very diverse group. We have six people with disability, people from different geographical regions and people speaking different languages. We know 30 languages amongst my team!

I am proud to say that we have no attrition. Nobody quit v-shesh.

If you were a judge at Innovate Delhi, what would be the top three qualities you will look for in an entrepreneur?

I will look for people with a spirit of enterprise. Secondly, a sound understanding of how to run a business. One need not have done an MBA or an accounting degree but understanding of the basics, such as cashflows, is critical to keep the business running. The third is the ability to build a team. It’s all about the power of the people. If someone can’t build a good team, he can’t build a good enterprise.

What do you when you are not building an equitable workplace?

Spend time with my daughter! Frankly I do v-shesh all the time and the only time I spend away from it is when I am with my daughters and my family. I have very happy brought what I do into my kids and they like what I do which makes it much easier for me.

This blog post was written by Sonal J Goyal for Innovate Delhi Entrepreneurship Academy. Innovate Delhi is a three-week long academy that works with aspiring entrepreneurs to hone their skills in innovation, team-building, and strategy. Applications are due on 1st February. Apply at www.innovatedelhi.com/apply

iSPIRT wishes you a Happy New Year!

Since our inception a year ago, we have been relentlessly working toward the cause of creating an amenable ecosystem for software products development in India. We greatly appreciate your support in helping us reach where we are in such a short time.

We have done a great deal over the last one year to implement and achieve our goals and the pursuit of our vision is our primary and unwavering focus. Whether you have been an iSPIRT member or are just following us, we want to assure you that our first priority is to serve the cause of software product industry in India.

As we welcome 2014, we are both proud and grateful for all we have achieved thus far with your invaluable support – be it in terms of ideas, inspiration, guidance or feedback and look forward to our mutual successes in the future.

With best wishes,
The iSPIRT ProductNation Team

“Potential of Software Products from India” – Insights from an interview with Prof. Rishikesha T Krishnan, IIM Bangalore

In an interview with Govindraj Ethiraj on the changing paradigm of the Indian software industry, Professor Rishikesha T Krishnan, IIM, Bangalore, talks about how the software industry is getting transformed from a services oriented model to creating successful products. He cites FusionCharts as a great example of finding a niche market and moving to the cloud as an efficient mechanism to deliver and service customers.