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M & A – The most preferred option to grow in uncertain times

It is a typical Monday 9 AM! Ready to kick-start another challenging week! Fine day in Chennai !! Not so hot like a typical Chennai climate. But, for first generation entrepreneurs it is an ordeal to pass thru weekly pressures of Cash flow, Attrition, New business and opportunities etc. etc. This experience is collectively described as “Monday Morning Blues”.

The growth dilemma

There has always been a great dilemma for entrepreneurs during fund raising exercise especially when it comes to taking the company to the next level of growth. The dilemma does not stop by simply raising the money for growth, but it goes on till such time one is able to strike a balance between how much stakes to dilute and the tangible benefits that the venture will get.Then comes the business and revenue models. The previous eras have brought countless innovations in the theory and practice of running businesses. Many are now staples of contemporary management, but others were ephemeral distractions that led companies down the wrong roads. Too often, leaders have sought the appearance of success rather than its reality – size for the sake of size, book-keeping profits as opposed to intrinsic value, earnings growth manipulated to please the stock markets. This era’s changes are already redefining management theory and practice. Raising competitiveness intensity forces a return to basic again. Going down to basics today means first and foremost focusing on how you can create intrinsic or fundamental value for your business. Your ability to create fundamental value rests on how good you are at finding the right balance between your external and internal realities and your financial aspirations; in other words, how skilfully you develop and use your business model. The major reason to focus on the fundamentals is that growth won’t come easily. Organic growth will not often produce the double-digit gains that were routine and even obligatory in the last era.

Leaders who hope to grow their way to success through mergers and acquisitions in the present market scenario are left with umpteen no of options. Needless to mention that M & As promises to increase economies of scale and yield efficiencies from synergy – or at least show the kind of revenue growth that looks like progress. And some players thrive by picking up battlefield causalities on the chips and hammering them to shape. Many people viewed General Electric’s acquisitions in the late 1980s of troubled RCA as a misconceived diversifications ploy. But after selling off RCA’s consumer electronics and aerospace businesses, GE wound up with NBC for a song, turned it around and went on to build it into a network powerhouse. NBC generated significant profits year in and year out, and with the addition of Vivendi Universal’s entertainment assets which greatly helped GE’s future growth.

The courage to change

Many first generation entrepreneurs lack with the intelligence to recognize that they have reached a crossroad but don’t follow through and head down the new path. Their inner core isn’t tough enough to allow them to acknowledge and deal with an unpleasant reality, whether it is closing a loss making division or taking realistic look at the business model and tweaking to market expectations. Many would like to continue in their comfort zone of their familiar managerial routines and protecting their pay checks. They may be afraid: change means taking risks and taking risks raises the possibility of failure. The fear failure occupies most of entrepreneur’s growth dilemma of raising money, divesting their stakes and working under a different management culture.

These entrepreneurs often don’t recognize that failing to make a shift can be riskier than making none. The entrepreneurs who have the appetite for tough actions have the inner strength. They are willing to look at clearly at the business model that has been highly successful and is no longer relevant.

To raise funds for growth or get merged is a difficulty and at times too difficult to get consensus from founder/ promoters. This leaves the emerging organizations with fewer options such as the following:

  1. Tag along with a bigger player and pitch for bigger contracts – on a case-to-case basis
  2. Dilute promoters’ stake heavily and raise money from PEs or VCs at the cost of losing control of the company in your eyes and also not knowing the business outcome after fund infusion
  3. Be a captive IT Partner for a big group and get acquired by them eventually once a decent value is built. The flip-side to this approach is that one does not know the time it will take to realise decent value

The current era of business offers promising option than the usual organic growth for entrepreneurs.

M & A – The most preferred option to grow in uncertain times

While an acquisition may have higher risk of failure than any other expansion strategy, it also provides a much superior return profile in comparison to organic growth strategy. M & As is intrinsically risky and predicting the aftermath of any acquisition is almost impossible. The fact remains that predicting the aftermath of any business plan execution is also an impossible task. But there are learnings from the past that can mitigate the risk of failure. Most M& A s fail due to inadequate articulation of two key enablers of a deal: transaction management, which is all about paying the right value, conducting a thorough due diligence and appointing the right transaction adviser; and integration management, which is about devising a detailed integration strategy ahead of the buy decision to keep the rationale of the acquisition intact. The fact of the matter,however is that any corporate strategy can go bad despite putting safeguards against any possible fallout in future. And so can simple business decisions related to marketing and research and development will lead to unpredictable business outcome.

If there are precedents where shareholders’ wealth has been written off as fallout of ill-planned M & A, there are more than a handful of cases in history through well executed M & A strategy that delivered immense value to share-holders:

  1. IBM’s market value of USD 227 Billion has been created virtually through acquisitions. It has acquired 187 companies since 200 for about USD 200 billion
  2. SAP has made 5 major acquisitions since 2001 for a whopping sum of USD 20 billion to reach its current position of Euro 17 Billion
  3. Cisco built the current sales turnover of USD 47 billion from USD 4 billion in 1996. Cisco has acquired more than 450 companies since its inception. Cisco’s fundamental growth strategy has been M & A
  1. GE has acquired more than 18 companies since 1952 ranging from Aerospace, Process Industry, Financial Services , Healthcare for whopping sum of USD 14 billion to reach its current revenue of USD 150 billion
  2. Exxon Mobile, It is what today on the back of a merger between two energy giants which clearly didn’t happen without the risk of failure in 1999. Exxon Mobile has surpassed Apple’s market cap and reached the USD 385 billion in April 2013.
  3. Maersk has acquired P & O Nedlloyd in 2005 to create one of the largest shipping lines in the world.
  4. P & O and Nedlloyd were merged together in 1996 which was yet another record in the history of shipping lines.

It is all about convincing the company’s management on the risks associated with a strategy like M & A on the back of statistics of successful transactions.

The entrepreneurs who are looking at raising money must do the following reality check and decide whether M & A is an option.

  1. Research and evaluate your competition
  2. Measure share-holders value year-on-year and see whether it is increasing
  3. Your ability to raise funds and offer significant returns within a short period of time e.g. 3 years to 5 years
  4. Ability to devote time on innovation and offer more customer value

The IT/ ITeS industry are moving towards consolidation and better economies of scale and efficiencies.The market is swamped by competition and the technological advancements are determining new way of delivering customer value. Therefore, IT services companies have to seriously consider M & A as their growth strategy to protect investor’s wealth, IP, customers, business.

Guest Post Contributed by Rangarajan Sriraman. The views expressed in this article are personal. The author is a serial entrepreneur, mentor and strategic advisor to start-ups in IT and ITeS segment based in Chennai and has been involved in 2 start-ups so far from the concept to execution stage and later on successfully exiting.

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Don’t try to solve every customer problem by a line of code.

My First playbook roundtable. iSPIRT’s first initiative at Hyderabad, was a 4 hour insightful RoundTable that was  organised by the ProductNation free of cost for the attendees, which most Hyderabadi entrepreneurs gave a miss and are sure to be regretting the missed opportunity and the learning possibility that it offered.

Sridhar Ranganathan, ex-VP of InMobi, a Product Guru and Aneesh Reddy, the CEO of Capillary Technologies, which is in the business of providing mobile-based customer acquisition, tracking, and loyalty business, were the key speakers for the day .The first half of the session was mostly participants- driven where each of us were asked to share our day-to-day stories at work along with our expectations from the workshop.

Below were the most common challenges that emerged from our discussions:

  1. How to validate the need for a product?
  2. How to prioritize from the features wish list?
  3. What is the exact role of a Product Manager to drive successful product deliveries?

Validating the product need

Sridhar began the afternoon session by saying that, “The best way to validate the need for a product was constantly interacting with the customers and understanding their requirements.” He said there are 2 primary things for a product startup to be successful in the long run. One is Speed- wherein it is important for start-ups to be iterating faster as its always better to Fail Fast and recover quickly.

The second is to be data-driven wherein start-ups should be religiously looking and researching in terms of numbers both externally and internally .He recalled a popular quote, “Data is God and code is only a messenger”, which was truly an eye-opener as it made me realize the importance of constantly looking at data and then using that to validate the need of the product.

Aneesh shared a few of his real-life examples on how during their initial days at Capillary Technologies, they had spent over 6 months talking to every store owner be it big or small, to understand their needs and how they literally changed their product idea thrice before conceiving the final version. He also said that listening to customers played a prominent role in shaping the product rather than merely selling. He also spoke of how Capillary mainly stuck to one mantra i.e.- “Locking down on the cheque with the customer even before building a feature for them,” which not only drives a sense of stickiness and commitment with the customer but  also ensures the right customer need is addressed.

Priortizing from the Features Wish list

This is by far the most common challenge faced by all of us today, which Sridhar strongly advocated by highlighting the need for PMs to start questioning  every feature-benefit ratio in order to prevent any feature overload. He also stressed on the need for every PM to evaluate if every feature was designed for the ease of the end user. He added that it is important to add features in a disciplined manner and remove the excessive features ruthlessly. Bottom-line being – “Don’t try to solve every customer problem by a line of code.”

Aneesh also shared on how Capillary builds prototypes and demonstrates them to customers to ensure if the customer’s wish list has been fulfilled or not and that this has helped Capillary to keep the fine balance between what their customers are looking for and how the future of the product would shape up.

Role of a Product Manager (PM)

Sridhar began asking each of us to define what we considered the role of a PM to be and after everyone was done presenting their respective  viewpoints, he mentioned the below as some of the qualities he would expect a PM to possess:

  1. Empathy towards customers – the willingness to engage, understand and appreciate customer needs.
  2. Confidence to have a point of view
  3. Ready to build a product for the future
  4. Culture of experimentation and being data-driven

Personally what I considered the best piece of advice for PMs is, “to be responsible for the Outcome and not the Output”. This actually accelerates the need for PMs to question every effort for a feature request and evaluate what would be its ability to generate revenue.

Overall, it was an immensely insightful session. I would also like to thank Sridhar for taking time out from his busy schedule to enlighten us. Huge thanks to Aneesh for being extremely patient and for responding to all our queries.

I highly appreciate the efforts of Avinash to create such a splendid product management session wherein we not only get a chance to meet/network with product gurus but also help us rethink our working strategies. Last but not the least, I would also like to thank Pramati Technologies for being an excellent host for this Roundtable.

Eagerly looking forward to the follow-up session soon!

Post Contributed by Thulasi, Associate Product Manager at Versant Online Solutions Pvt Ltd and can be reached at thulasi(at)moozup.com

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Learning and growing together at the iSPIRT #Playbook Roundtable

iSPIRT Playbook Roundtable in Delhi Flickr Stream

The Product Management Playbook roundtable repeated last week with an intent to check progress. The mentors – Amit Ranjan & Amit Somani were keen to know the problems product managers faced while they executed on ideas discussed in the previous episode.

We could guess this would be one power packed session, especially from the conversations that ensued over lunch. There were active discussions, funny anecdotes and heartfelt laughter which filled the Eko cafeteria. New bonds were built and older ones renewed as we savored the delicious dishes.

The RoundTable was started with Vikram Bahl of Yavvy.com presenting his product management approach. Presenting a meticulously planned mind-map, his presentation discussed the challenges, the solutions and their outcomes. Elements from the previous round-table were clearly visible. “All of our metrics have now been divided into 1/1/1 (1 day/1 week/1 month)”, he told picking up on the 1/1/1 metric philosophy suggested by Amit Somani of MakeMyTrip in the previous round-table. He also mentioned that the “email-suggestion” and “leveraging-existing-paradigm” suggestions by Amit Ranjan (of Slideshare) had done them loads of good and the results were very encouraging. “This time, I got advice on stuff that goes beyond traditional product management, it was more around positioning and marketing”, said Vikram as he reflected upon the discussions.

Next, Bishal Lachhiramka of Drishti soft spoke about his own product management approach. Touching upon organisational structure, product manager roles and global benchmarks, this was another amazing discussion. Participants shared their own experiences and what has worked for them and what hasn’t.

Tarun Matta of IIMJobs also got some amazing feedback on some of the things they intent to do. Picking up on the experience in the room, he picked up on strategy and executive advice on what could propel IIMjobs onto the next orbit of growth.

We also had Shantanu Mathur introducing ‘Smartwards’ and Mayank Dhingra of Paytm bouncing off ideas on how to build product-management metrics for online products. Even though, this was their first round-table, they found themselves brought upto speed by the mentors.

The final few minutes of the day were spent discussing “how to divide and structure roles and responsibilities of different program managers”. Avinash Agarwal and Abhishek Sinha of Eko, presented a delightful case-study which helped sum up the discussion.

As Nakul Saxena of iSPIRT summed up, “I just see so many product managers negotiating the learning curve together. That is the surest way to move quicker and grow faster. In contrast to any other conference or discussions, the round-table presents every product-team with a close-knit group to discuss personal challenges and personal experiences. ”  

Doesn’t that sum up what these round-tables are all about. Participate in the next one to find out!
With inputs from Vikram Bahl of Yavvy.com
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Cybersecurity: Israel’s Innovation as India’s Opportunity

India is one of the leading victims of cyber-crime and the cybersecurity market is estimated at around US$218 million. Indian cybersecurity companies have developed indigenous products to address rising cyber-threats, but, with limited success. By contrast, Israel is famed for its prowess in developing innovative solutions for fields that encompass agriculture, medicine, clean-tech, hi-tech etc., and this also extends to the emerging field of cybersecurity. Israel’s cybersecurity industry possesses the potential to be a willing partner in defying India’s cyber-world problems.

The essence of India’s ongoing cybersecurity partnership with Israel has primarily been characterized by Israeli cybersecurity companies serving requests of the Indian governmental sector. However, the flow of the collaborative needs to take another direction, and more partnerships need to be formulated in the corporate world. India’s reliance on data systems continues to increase rapidly and corporate entities including start-ups will undoubtedly play a pivotal role in shaping the cyber-domain.

Joint-product development is possibly the most vital area of cybersecurity-cooperation for the Indian and Israeli private sectors. Indian cybersecurity corporations and start-ups are certainly gifted with an enormous market, great ideas, and skilled manpower; but have had limited success in creating innovative products. However, a great idea will not suffice to build a successful product; something ‘extra’ must be added to the existing idea! Israel’s expertise in innovation promises to grant the much-needed edge for the Indian cybersecurity industry to develop world-class products.

A true goldmine for innovative partnerships in Israel is embedded in the globally renowned “Start-Up Culture”. It is very common to see Israeli cybersecurity start-ups being founded by fearless-entrepreneurs with considerable military experience, as they understand the nature of cyber-threats, and the intuitive methodology to pioneer relevant solutions. The start-up community is a significant segment of Israel’s cybersecurity ecosystem that provides valuable partnership and investment openings for Indian corporations/start-ups.

Cybersecurity remains a field where the numbers of threats are growing rapidly; but so are opportunities for collaboration. Securely connecting India’s existing and ever-expanding infrastructure to data systems is an enormous task which continues to open avenues for constructing strategic alliances with Israel. Indian cybersecurity entities must recognize, and capitalize, on opportunities to partner with Israeli counterparts to address India’s cybersecurity challenges.

Guest Post Contributed by Vishal Dharmadhikari, the concept initiator of a business-event – India-Israel Cybersecurity Connect (IICC), which featured as a sub-event in Israel’s largest cybersecurity event i.e. the 3rd Annual International Cybersecurity Conference. 

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7th #PNMeetup – Get to millions of visitors without spending money

3 founders, 25 good listeners and a rainy Delhi afternoon. Topic: “Get to millions of visitors without spending money”. It was a perfect setting for sharing of experiences by those 3 doers (Ankur@Akosha, Rajat@Socialappshq, Pallav@Knowlarity) about their own experiences of getting users, when they started. Keeping in its tradition, Avinash and Nakul organized this month’s meet-up in the office of Akosha.

Ankur, started the afternoon with his thoughts on “Zero” cost marketing. He shared many simple things that start-ups can do or shouldn’t do. It is not easy in the beginning to get people to know about your product and/or brand. One would typically need to find innovative ways. He shared some of this tricks that Akosha followed and what worked and what not worked. One of the key takeaway was that one should never outsource SEO. The product is yours, outside people cannot help you out. You have to learn, try and make it perfect. One also need to know about google analytics, if one is launching a web product (or if I think about it, any web connected product. It could be a website or it could be an app). Audience also shared their experiences with SEO and many felt that if done correctly, it can do wonders.

Rajat also shared some neat ways where companies have taken help of SEO. If your product allows (or if you can find ways of doing so), you make others do your SEO work. e.g. you can do content partnerships where your content is shown by other leading websites.

  Many other consumer connect ways were discussed like Twitter, email marketing. Email marketing generated quite a bit of discussion given that different people had different experience. However this is also a fact that email is a very powerful tool. A trick, which I find worth mentioning is, always run your campaign in 2 steps. You always get email databases from market or from “someone”. Run a dummy campaign to exclude bad addresses (you can use a dummy domain as well for this). In Part 2, exclude bad addresses and use your actual domain to send your emails. 


For finding leads, in your early days, one need to think out of the box. e.g. if you are in classifieds business, visiting your competitor sites would give you quite a number of leads. It is also true that finding fist few customers if often way more difficult than getting your next 1000 users. When you start, many a times you believe that world is your playground. Problem is that you keep looking for that first mate to play with. As Pallav (Founder Knowlarity) shared an anecdote about how he got first customer, there were many oohs and aahas I could hear among audience. Getting you first customer also tests one’s persistence as was evident in the anecdote shared by Rajat. 

In startup, we always need people who can hit the ground from day 1. There is no, as they say it, settling in time. This was very well explained by Pallav. An interesting graph shared by Pallav


In a Start-up, you are typically looking for a Maverick sales person.

Overall, an afternoon, from which I could find many practical take-aways. There may not really be Zero cost way to reach million users, however there are many ways to do this in price effective way.

Guest Post Contributed by Ajay Bansal, Director, Product Management at U2opia Mobile

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#DesignThinking: Desirable. Feasible. Viable

We all know quite well the value of Design to business, and Design Thinking to problem solving. But what remains a bit fuzzy for many start-ups, organizations & individuals is the gap between thinking and doing or making it happen.

In this time of volatility and complexity, the role of design to drive meaningful innovation and change is growing and while there are multitude of factors that need to be taken into consideration for a product design that is desirable, feasible & viable the design thinking process can help overcome these product characteristics. 

Yes, great design starts with design thinking! Reminds me of David Kelly from IDEO who puts this together as empathy or being empathetic. In other words focusing on what users value the most and building on top of the ideas they share with every incremental value we deliver to make designs better.

In an effort to bring all designers, engineers, product managers & entrepreneurs together via an informal coalition of like minded design thinkers community to help promote the how-to’s of design thinking, MakeMyTrip in co-ordination with #PNMeetup hosted a day long #DesignThinking event in its premises inviting them to discover the stories, solutions and tools that design thinkers are putting to work, from start ups to multinationals helping them find inspiration and learn how real world solutions are provided using innovation & technology to work to solve complex global challenges. 

This event was a first step in NCR UX community with series in pipeline with start of an exciting thought-leadership plank in the UX ecosystem in the country towards creating a platform to nurture design thinking & promoting design thinker’s community fostering an ecosystem that promotes delivering great experiential online products. Industry experts from LinkedIn, Mettl & Anagram Research supported the event with inspirational talks on subject and sharing how they practice the same in their respective job functions, startup’s & organizations thereby embracing the process in their day-to-day routine while driving the product vision at their setup. The experts also covered upon bootstrap strategies for startups who cannot afford the UX agencies or a big design team and face design challenges day in day out during their product design journey. Some even illustrated the design thinking approach to problem solving of product features design and helped them uncover the latent needs, behaviors, and desires for their users. 

Altogether,  #Design thinking event saw noteworthy achievement with 40+ design thinkers joining us from NCR and could leverage the platform listening some inspirational talks from speakers and meeting few like minded folks around. Had participant mix from passionate startup entrepreneurs to designers & dev engineers. Audience was glued to program embracing the talks & interactive workshop from functional experts in domain. 

Check out what happened at the First #DesignThinking Workshop on http://t.co/g0DDFbP7kS  

Guest Post by Dushyanth Arora, Head, User Experience & Design MakeMyTrip

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Designing Great Products: A Startup CEO’s perspective

I had the opportunity to attend iSpirit Foundation’s #PNMeetup: Design great products through experiments – Product Leadership Workshop on 20th April 2013 at TLabs in Noida. 

Avi from iSPIRT put together a delightful, half-day session that brought together a smattering of product people from Delhi-NCR region.  In addition to product managers, CEOs, and senior executives from a wide range of Delhi startups, the icing on the cake was the presence of a hard-hitting product team from Intuit that had travelled all the way from Bangalore to share their experiences with the assembled audience. The Intuit Team included Deepa Bachu (Director, Emerging Market Innovation at Intuit), Samarjit Ghosh, Lalitha Ramani, Vivek Vijayan & ThiyagaRajan ) 

The Intuit posse had experiences working on a variety of products from the uber-popular Turbo Tax to the socially relevant Fasal and an engaging discussion on their diverse experiences exposed the audience to a wide range of challenges that the Intuit teams faced and the teams’ approach to overcome these challenges.  Many an aspiring entrepreneur has been flummoxed with multiple questions vis-à-vis product development, not limited to prioritizing features, costs, and release cycles and the Intuit team cleared a lot of misconceptions around commonly accepted best-process with their highly structured product management approach.  Intuit’s product management model is largely based around the hypotheses driven approach that, in addition to software development, is the bedrock for business decision-making from optimizing scientific discoveries to underpinning most strategy consulting engagements.  We were walked through a detailed explanation of the Intuit way and were then led to put our newfound knowledge to task with an actual exercise on the streets.

The hour spent on the streets by 25 eager entrepreneurs, braving the Noida summer-heat led to the thread baring of multiple, seemingly unambiguous truths about how we thought about product research, design, and development.  The interesting aspect of the exercise was that that like many frameworks, the Intuit approach brought out its share of naysayers and skeptics among the assembled audience but the healthy discussion that followed enabled multiple perspectives to heard and discussed. 

 

As a startup-CEO at Studycopter, managing the product development process is an integral part of what I do, day in and day out.  Sharing of notes and perspectives with fellow CEOs and product managers was a unique opportunity for me to test my assumptions and build a new way of looking at problems and coming up with solutions. 

I can write with a reasonable degree of certainty that all participants would share my thoughts about the utility of the aforementioned session and moving forward, I look forward to the Studycopter team and I participating in multiple such meetups to build the intellectual rigor that would be critical in delivering breakthrough product experiences for our customers.

Guest Post by Adi Jain, Founder and Chief Awesomeness Officer at Studycopter, a mobile + online learning platform to enable students to get their best possible scores in competitive exams such as the GMAT and GRE.  

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Top 10 things to look for a digital marketing roadmap.

Today the biggest challenge for any of us as entrepreneurs is not to build kickass products or services but to reach out to the relevant target audience. Many of products fail not because they were not awesome but because of poor marketing strategies. I have myself made terrible mistakes which costed me and my company a lot but it’s just part of a learning experience and entrepreneurial curve. Lot of people think digital marketing or social media marketing is free or easy but I fell it’s the make or break for any company whose customers are online. It needs the same amount of attention and effort you had put in while building your product / services. It needs a lot of thinking, prioritization, knowledge and off course a lot time investment. Today there is so much noise on digital mediums that you need to be remarkable to stand out or youwill be just one out of many. Here are my top 10 learnings from the many digital campaigns I ran.

  1. Map your efforts to the end goal: Most of the time startups do not have a clear end goal in mind and they map the entire campaign to a wrong goal. What is you end goal? Drive traffic? What is your KPI which will make you successful this quarter? Does your organization’s goal is to drive sales or build user base for this quarter. Once you decide on your KPI for this quarter do not change it. Stick to it. Do everything to achieve your goals, tweak strategy to achieve it but not the goals.
  2. Don’t be scared of spending: Most of the digital campaigns are bound to fail. Just that one of your campaigns failed doesn’t mean that platform is not good for you. It just takes a fair amount of money and time to optimize your campaigns and make them successful. I have typically spend around 2Cr. on Facebook platform in last 4 years and still may of my campaigns fail today. If you want fast results hire an expert of the platform.
  3. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket: Diversify your mediums to generate leads or traffic. Typically any medium should not drive more than 20% of your sales. It becomes really lucrative to go deeper and deeper into a medium when we taste success on it. I have learnt this hard way. There was time when Thrillophilia was driving 80% of the traffic through Search engines and then suddenly the website was hacked by Chinese hacker who did lot of artificial link building. We realized this 3 months later when we got penalized by Google and traffic dropped to 1/10. We had a nightmare on sales side and had to diversify in hurry which really isn’t the best approach.
  4. Build smart email lists: Emails are still going to exist for next 10 years so it’s a good idea to invest on them. The more you know your customers, what they want and better segregated your email lists are, the lesser you will spam your consumer and the more leads you will generate. Keep a close eye on subscription/ unsubscribing and see what drives them.
  5. UI is the key: Drive emotions. Lot of impulsive buying happens over internet. People get carried away with emotions, drive them to do what you really wanted them to do. A good visual can be 5 times more powerful than an average one. No other thing can have such an effect on your campaigns. I again say drive emotions. It can be anger, humor, inquisitiveness etc.
  6. Have a short term strategy and a long term strategy: Your short term strategy could be have a good user base to feed your platform or generate leads to feed your sales team. Paid advertising might be really helpful in doing that. Your long term strategy should be to build a sustainable long term engine based on active user base, repeat customers, reviews or organic traffic.
  7. FANS and no fans: When I talk to many startup friends they ask for tips of building fan base seeing that we at Thrillophilia have done a good job in building a 32000+ Fan base on Facebook. It’s just the most false metrics to look at. We have never ever done a single campaign to increase our Fanbase. It’s not going to take you anywhere unless you plan to sell your company to a not so tech guy. A better metrics could be active users on page, virality of posts or traffic on website from Facebook.
  8. Keep a close eye on 24 hour results: It’s very imp to know what the world is thinking about your company at this point of time. I am just addicted to 24 hour results of keyword “Thrillophilia” on Google. A simple way to do it is go to Google and type in your brand name. In Search tools select in “Past 24 hours” This will show you the results of your brand in the last 24 hours over net indexed by Google. It will help you to identify if some is talking negative about your brand or if you just had a fake review from a competitor. Also set you your key Google alerts.
  9. Lessen up the dependency on other platforms: Let’s say today your 80% of the traffic is driven by Google and Facebook. How can you bring it to 50%? Building better email lists, having more repeat traffic, people who love you and are addicted to your website, affiliates etc. You never know if Google of FB will exist after 5 years but I assume you are building a company that probably will.
  10. Build relationships: Nothing works better than this. Start helping people in your ecosystem. If you design T-shirts design it for free for a NGO, a startup or for a big company. If you run a blog, give links to other good websites. Take your vendors for a dinner. Soon your 24 hours result will start getting better. We recently did a camp for Make a Difference, and yesterday they posted a Video on Youtube with our special mention – Let people talk good about you and enjoy the ride. In the end you were here to disrupt something and build something better.
Guest Post by Abhishek, Co-Founder of Thrillophilia.com, the biggest activity travel website of India and comes with 6+ years of digital marketing experience. Before Co-Founding Thrillophilia he has helped national and international companies like Biocon, Flying machine, Discovery Channel to build their digital marketing presence
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Notes on Product Management – insights from Slideshare / MMT / ex-Google PM

Avinash Raghava, who is doing a wonderful job of getting product start-ups together all over India, organized a product management roundtable with the help of Aneesh Reddy(CEO, Capillary). They invited Amit Ranjan (Cofounder, Slideshare – acquired by LinkedIn) and Amit Somani (Chief Product Officer, Makemytrip, ex-Google) to share their insights with a small set of entrepreneurs.

Credit for all the good stuff goes to Amit Ranjan, Amit Somani and Aneesh Reddy. Notes are rough. If anything is unclear, feel free to comment.

Here are some quick notes/thoughts from the event:

Who would make a good product manager?
Someone who can do 70% of everything (coding, design, listening to users etc.)

Best way to find a product manager in India is to find someone who did a startup but failed – he/she is likely to know all the various aspects that go into managing a product.

Someone who can lead by influence and manage to juggle all the balls in the air. Should be someone who can say NO.

It’s a very tough position to hire for – you need to have patience – you might go wrong the first few times. Once hired, give them around 5-6 months to get the hang of the whole thing.

What does a product manager do? What is his role about?
A good product manager would understand the requirements from various constituents and write a detailed specification, plan for bugs, testing, urgent requests and then create a product roadmap/deadlines.

A product manager has to identify and write down what metrics will move once the product is launched (e.g launching the mobile app will increase our repeat orders by 9%) – in some cases it is just to ensure that people work on things that matter but overtime it also brings more accountability.

User specs should have – what all do you need, who will use it and why – need to be elaborate it before you give it – need a hypothesis that will it move an X metric. Read thetwo page spec document that Joel Spolsky wrote for a fictional website What time is it? It should also have non-goals – what the product does NOT try to do.

Engineers tend to underestimate the time it’ll take – product manager needs to be able to correctly estimate how long something should take. And you will get better at it with time.

Use the 1/1/1 rule – sit with the engineering team and plan what needs to be accomplished in 1 week, 1 month and 1 six-month period.

People want to see the product roadmap – it is important for the CEO / Product Manager to communicate this to their team mates since a lot of people feel uncomfortable if they don’t have a clear idea of where the product is headed. (Amit Ranjan mentioned that people may even leave if they feel that the founding team does not have a clear vision – but the nature of start-ups is such that it is bound to happen that the product roadmap keeps evolving)

You need to hire coders who have a design sense (that eliminates 70% of work later).

Role of special data or analytics person has become very important (Amit Ranjan said that he could see that products of the future will be decided and influenced by data scientists). It is very important to get such a person on board early. Someone who has crunched SQL and nosql logs etc and can find trends and look up aberrations. Read up on Hal Varian and DJ Patil to understand more about this.

Difference between customer requirements and product requirements – customer requirement only becomes product requirement when more than 3 people require it (it’s a rule of thumb) – (People shared various tricks they use to ensure that the customer requirement is serious – “just wait for a few days and see if they come back with the same request”, “ask them to email it and not take feedback over the phone” etc. – these are situations where there is too much feedback coming your way. In most cases, it is best to make it as easy as possible for people to give you feedback).

Keep product engineering teams small – Amit Somani mentioned Jeff Bezos Two Pizza rule i.e. if the team cannot be fed by two pizzas alone, it is too big. Read more here.

Try to do daily scrum – gives everyone a sense of what everyone else is doing and ensures that people are making progress

Everything is a 6 page document – another Jeff Bezos funda for getting clarity. So a specification or a product request could be a 6 page long form document which ensures that the person achieves clarity before building anything.

You need to benchmark your product against other products especially in enterprise. When starting a product from scratch this can be a really useful exercise.

Amit Somani suggested a mental trick – before building a product, write a one page press release for the product that comes out upon product launch – what will this press release have? What the key features? The target audience etc. This PR drafting exercise could help you decide what to build, what is critical, and for which audience.

Don’t ignore email as a channel for activation and returning visitors

Product activation – Use banners on your own website – do get them to take action – on landing page – on other parts of the website

Track at your mobile traffic – people at the roundtable reported some crazy growth numbers for mobile internet usage – huge sites are now getting 20% to 60% of their traffic on mobile. Mobile traffic is split 50%-50% on mobile browser (including WAP) and mobile apps. This was a big eye opener for many people.

Tools people recommended

Use Trello (a Joel Spolsky product) to manage your product

Use Zapier business tool to connect various sources of product input (e.g. taking Zendesk tickets and automatically creating Github issues)

Use Clicktale or Inspectlet to record user sessions

Use Morae for recording users’ reactions when they are using your product ((Amit Somani mentioned how they put a live usage recording on a LCD screen in the technology room so that engineers could understand how their products were being used – it lead to a lot “can’t he just click on the button! Why is he scrolling up and down!”). One way to get users for such recordings is to ask interview candidates who come to your office to use your product and see their reactions.

Use a call-outs software when introducing new product features (like Cleartrip / WordPress / Facebook do).

Concluding notes
This was one of the most gyan-heavy sessions that I’ve attended. It was useful to hear things from people who had been there done that. Aneesh (even though he is based out of Bangalore) had taken the lead to do this with Avinash and our hope is that the group meets every 6 weeks to keep the conversation going. We’ll keep you posted.

Feel free to email me at ankur AT Akosha dot com if you’d like me to give more details to you.

On a related note, there was some basic debate about what a “product” is. We didn’t get into it at length because everyone in the room intuitively understood what a “product” was. However, we had internally debated about it – if you are interested, do read –Understanding Product v. Service [ThinkLabs Notes 1].

Reblogged from the Akosha Blog by Ankur Singla

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The day Zest.Md picked on smartest brain for inputs at #PNMeetup

I met Avinash a few weeks back to share details about zest.md, and to discuss some of the challenges which we are facing. Avinash, helped me to understand a lot of issues better, and invited me to be a part of the #PNMeetup to discuss it with a larger group. To be honest, I was apprehensive initially, but seeing the conviction with which Avinash said that it would help us, I agreed and I am so glad that we did go and share our challenges at the #PNMeetup! 

Zest.Md is a SaaS platform which provides with medical practitioners with a solution to get started with online consultation process, using their own website. One of the key challenges which we shared with the group was on how to drive initial engagement with the medical practitioners who sign up. Another aspect which we discussed was around pricing. Currently we have a single price solution, and we were in the process of considering Freemium model – what should we keep in mind while designing Freemium so that we don’t end up losing paying clients. 

#PNMeetup was a great experience it was very refreshing to be amongst people who have been involved with various stages of product development, themselves. It was a very different space than the other entrepreneurship events that I have been in, almost everybody here was currently running an online product company, and they understood dilemma and the criticality of the decision around such questions. 

I had attended along with two other members of my team, and the one of the greatest reaffirmation was that, there is no single answer or a single point of view when it comes to even simple questions pertaining to a product. Many a times we, as young start-ups, tend to get bogged down or keep changing paths based on feedback from a single person. Being at #PNMeetup gave a reassurance that it is justified that we were so concerned about our decisions on these questions as they are not so straightforward, and at the same time the forum was a great place for us to take feedback from a group as a whole, and it helped us to identify the range of possible solutions from which we could chart out our own solution. 🙂

Thanks Amit, Devendra & Avinash for helping me in the presentation and briefing you provided and for the opportunity.  I really liked the venue and seating arrangement, and I feel that the ambience was instrumental in creating an informal atmosphere where people could exchange frank and honest opinions.  

P.S.: The highlight of the day was meeting up with Amit Ranjan, co-founder Slideshare and to see him share his thoughts candidly! 🙂

My name is Vinayak and I’m the Founder & CEO at Zest.md. 

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Entreprenuers should’t sweat small stuff!

Was going through popular book “Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff … and it’s all small stuff” by Richard Carlson, PhD and realized lot of the points outlined by Richard are applicable precisely for enterpreneurs in their startup journey.

Make peace with imperfection:

As a startup, we always are short of resources that are typically available for a big corporation. When resources are scarce, its difficult and often impossible to achieve perfection in all things. Its better to accept the same and make peace with imperfection. The same applies to all activities in startup – whether it is do with kind of talent we might want in the team, the kind of expectations you have with the sub-ordinates/peers or simple things like the way office is maintained, non availability of admin support when you have your important meetings scheduled in the office.

Remember that having zero items in ToDo list doesn’t mean success:

As an entrepreneur, your To-Do list is almost infinite. You have hundreds of things to do and the more you complete the activities in your to-do list, the more seem to get added. Don’t worry about this as this is more than natural for all entrepreneurs. So never get yourself so tensed up to complete all activities in your ToDo list. Prioritize and work on important tasks and move on.

Learn to Live in the Present Moment:

It’s important to learn from the mistakes in the past and plan for the future. But the most important success factor for any startup is execution. And key for succesful execution is to focus on the present moment. Focusing on present moment, important tasks that we are working on hand will give us best results and success.

Allow Yourself to Be Bored:

As entrepreneurs, thanks to the infinite ToDo list, we will ending up having no time for ourself or to relax. It’s a good idea to take some time out of our busy schedules and be idle. Being idle atleast for few minutes each day will give us new perspective and believe me this is the time most of us will come up with breakthrough ideas to scale the venture to the next level.

Repeat to Yourself, “Startup Isn’t an Emergency”

One can’t run a startup or a business as an emergency. Startup will usually go on if things don’t go according to the plan. And infact most of times in startups, things will not go per the plan. If one feels it as an emergency, things will only go worse from where they are.

Do One Thing at a Time:

Multi-tasking will do no good to any entrepreneur. Focus is the key. Work on one thing at a time, complete the same and move on to the next one. Your productivity will go manifold by just focusing on one thing at a time.

Get Comfortable Not Knowing:

You will not know about many areas of the business. Instead of feeling overwhelmed on multiple facets of business which you don’t know, get comfortable with the same. Most of the times, it will turn out to be a blessing in disguise. People who know all the things, will end up not doing anything as they are scared how tough it is to do!!

Give Up on the Idea that “More Is Better”

It’s always easy to believe that “More is Better”. Who doesn’t want more funding, more people in the team? But the point is that if you always want/desire more then you will not be able to focus on achieving results in what you have. Focus on what you have and maximise the results from it. If you do it right, automatically more will come to you.

Keep Asking Yourself, “What’s Really Important?”

With limited resources, limited time its important that one focuses only on few important things that have a maximum impact. In the rush of things, lot of us end up spending lot of time on things which are not really important. Always take a step back and keep thinking what’s really important and that will help you to focus and maximise the success.

Startup Is a Test. It Is Only a Test

When you look at startup and its many challenges as a test, or series of tests, you begin to see each issue you face as an opportunity to grow, a chance to roll with the punches. Whether you’re being bombarded with problems, responsibilities, even insurmountable hurdles, when looked at as a test, you always have a chance to succeed, in the sense of rising above that which is challenging you. If, on the other hand, you see each new issue you face as a serious battle that must be won in order to survive, you’re probably in for a very rocky journey. The only time you’re likely to be happy is when everything is working out just right. And we all know that won’t happen anytime.

Do add to the list of the “small stuff” that entrepreneurs should not sweat about based on your experiences in the comments section!

Guest Post contributed by Pawan Thatha, CEO, Arrayshield Technologies
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Inspiring quotes from Woman Leaders in the Product Space

Everywhere you look, there is an Indian woman in pursuit of an entrepreneurial dream. With a GDP growth rate of 8.2%, women product leaders have a whole reason to be bullish. This International Women’s Day, we choose to celebrate pioneering Woman Product Leaders among us, choose to celebrate the success of these efficacious women. This is not a comprehensive list, and if there are some Women Product Leaders whom we have missed and should be in this list, please feel free to email us or drop in a comment and we will add it to the list. 

Read along as these women share what advice would they like to impart to aspiring women product leaders. Please find the views in an alphabetical order below.

Anuradha Acharya, Ocimum Biosolutions: CEO with a vision for better health for Indians using technology, Anuradha believes in management as a fine balance between delegating and getting things done. More than often one needs to get theirs hands dirty, she quotes. 

Anuradha Bansal, Verity Solutions: Anuradha admires the women who juggle the pressures of corporate life and rear a family. She considers Failure and Success a sinusoidal wave that indicates the state of affairs in the organization during different points in time. Even if one were to wind up an enterprise – the terrific learning that one takes away cannot be ignored. Even the most substantial started small.

Entrepreneurship in common parlance often gets construed as “risky”. To her it’s a misnomer – everything is risky, just that the risk matrix differs. 

Pooja Goyal, Intellitots: As an entrepreneur so many benefits which seemed meagre in a corporate. Environment feel like hefty perks be it IT support or HR support or for that matter janitorial support. It is a tough transition especially in the early days when you have to be extremely hands on and set the tone for the company culture. Having said that it is also the most fulfilling opportunity to create something from scratch and shape it and grow it.

What I have learnt in my two entrepreneurial ventures is ‘ a bad decision is better than no decision.

Sairee Chahal, Fleximoms: The co-founder for the most women inspiring start-up, FlexiMoms, assures us product is less about code and more about people skills, conversation and trend spotting. Our constant job is to keep looking for the best people and move their discretion in our favour. Sometimes the best brains don’t come from expected quarters but the most unlikely places hence it’s most important to invest time in ourselves and people around us. And one has to enjoy the process and the journey – the most exciting part. 

Sangeeta Patni, Extensio Software: Sangeeta Patni, President, Extensio Software, considers the journey as a worthy mountain to climb. She affirms that entrepreneurship is all about leadership. A product leader will always tell you “What to do” and not “How to do”. 

She admits that a woman is a product leader because she has the passion for your product, and vision for her business. To embark on being a Product Leader means being able to have a very clear vision of the value you want to bring to the world, and the immense passion required to execute the vision, and also to be able to successfully make money from it – in face of competition, the technology changes that render the window of opportunity to be really short, and to be able to have confidence in ones ability to change and innovate. 

Sangeetha Banerjee, Apartment Adda: Sangeetha is convinced of a woman’s natural virtue of sincere empathy, which enables them to understand Customer Pain Points and pump those into their Product Strategy.  The founder for Apartment Adda, Sangeetha shares that while Building or Enhancing a Product substantial forethought is required towards After-Sales Support – Deployment & On-going Support, which is critical for the survival of a SaaS product. 

Interestingly, she connects it with a woman’s natural instincts, because when we buy that cosy bulky Sofa, we are not thinking only about the Comfort. Women are thinking how easy or difficult will it be to clean or move around, and whether the maid will double her rates just at the sight of it in her Living Room! 

Zeba Zaidi, GameOnIndia: ‘As a woman you lack nothing that would bring you success’,  Zeba Zaidi, Co-Founder and CEO, Game On India, believes that the satisfaction you get from running your own business is something worth striving for. The economy in India is perfectly poised to support new business, people are getting more and more open to newer ideas, there are enough funding options out there and all in all it’s a fantastic time to be thinking about your own business. There is a lot of knowledge sharing and avenues where your goals can get support. So my advice would be to just go for it.  

Our goal is to highlight what worked for these successful product leaders. Every input is appreciated for raising a new challenge for women in the entrepreneurial world. 

As mentioned, if (and we must have) we have missed out on some names, either yours or another you know of, and would like it to be added to the list, please comment below here, or email us. 

With Inputs from Kanika Bhatia, Boring Brands

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Lean way of sales

“Not meeting desired sales target?” is perhaps the most important question in any of senior management meetings.  But how do most companies react? Answer: “Re”setting the targets,“Re”structuring marketing campaigns and finally “Re”placing sales team (starting from executives ending up replacing sales director) and what will happen by doing several “Re’s” together…absolutely nothing. On the contrary such measures can damage team morale.

It is time to change, to replace traditional methodologies, to innovate and to spark. Time to analyse the mistakes.

Let’s rethink

What is a sale?  Act of selling a product or service in return for money or other compensation

Whats makes a sale?

  • Make the relevant presentation – Yes.. its necessary
  • Create connection between product/service and prospects. .. – Yes.. its necessary
  • Get to the point – Yes…its essential
  • Be animated … OK
  • Use showmanship… Ok ok
  • Use physical demonstration … Yes It’s necessary.
  • Believe on your product and Services… Aaahhhhhh….Its impossible….I have never seen it never utilized it ..how can i.. yes but I have capability to convenience customer though I haven’t  Utilized it …” True Salesmanship J”

And How much % this “making of a sale” will individually or contributed generate sales ?…Can’t Say. May be our sales guys are not proper… (In reality, sales guys are the most smartest guys in any of the organization).

It’s time for thinking…and changing. Let’s  make it the Lean Way…change “Re’s with Do’s

  • Do we are really addressing customer problems, completely?
  • Have we minimized cost of consumption (Price+ Time+Hassle)?
  • Do we provide exactly what customer wants?
  • Do we deliver value where customer wants?
  • Do we supply value where customer wants?

Remember, first sale to a customer could be important but it is the second sale that matters the most. Second sale will happen only if customer the is satisfied. Maximum value and minimized organizational waste is key to customer satisfaction. These are the only things that make a sale, make a customer buy, make it a competitive.

Guest Post Contributed by Meghshyam Gholap, Lean Sales Specialist

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#FoundersMeet 3 – Collective learning of 20 Early Stage Startups

Background – I was fortunate to be invited for the #FoundersMeet 2; informal get-together of 7 startup founders last year. This time around Anirudh, Sid, Nischal, Deven and I suggested to move it beyond our circle and extend it to 20 startups to come together and share our small success stories, failures and challenges. We also wanted to create a strong connect for ‘Mumbai-Pune Start-up Ecosystem’ which sort of never existed.

The 3rd #FoundersMeet happened in Mumbai on Wednesday 23rd Jan 2013 (a working day)., was expected to go on for about 7 hours, the interaction continued for 13.5 hours (yes!) with some amazing insights discussed and shared. I’m sharing this post on behalf of all the startups (& their founders) who participated.

Selling a SaaS Product:

  • International Customers are more inclined towards using self-service products. Indian counterparts expect hand holding and need assurance of customer service at arm’s length even when not required.
  • Customers in India will insist even on customizing a standard SaaS product. This tends to be service-model trap, best avoided.
  • As long as the user-proposition communicated during sales pitch or on the product is fulfilled, International customers are satisfied. They will switch the product fast if they find another product delivering more value. On other hand, Indian customers take time to switch product if a good relationship is established.
  • If a competitor is offering a product for free, users will not like to pay you for that product.
  • Sell the product to the poster-boys of the industry, rest will follow by themselves. 

Product Pricing:

  • There is a disproportionate value in the word ‘Free’. Use it whenever you can.
  • Over 90% of users will sign-up on the Free plan. When they move to the premium plan, they are most likely to use the plan that has the lowest value. Ensure that this low value plan has a disproportionate value for its price. That makes customers love you instantly.
  • When someone is making money because of your product, make sure you are making money out of it too.
  • Positioning your product / business is important. It can either be in Income side or Expense side. Always pitch / present your product on income side – “we help you generate money / your earnings will increase / your savings will multiply.”

Up-selling Product:

  • Acquire with freemium plans. Ensure enough hooks are in place that leads the customer to purchase the product post the free period or upgrade to the next paid plan.

Identifying Product Drivers:

  • A SaaS based product will not be driven by technical people, its driven by functional people. Build a product that can be installed by techies in less than 5 minutes, and can be driven by functional people without interference of tech people.
  • Sell the product to decision makers. Never pitch any product to a tech person. The tech person will always think that he can build it by himself.

User Acquisition Hacks:

  • For B2C products: Sell traction of existing users to new users. Create a feel that – Yes, there are people here, you’re not alone. That gives new users confidence about the product.
    Example – In Mumbai when you see 3 Vadapav stalls on a street, unknowingly you will go towards one that has maximum people eating and buy from there.
  • For B2C products: Show activity. Existing activities drive more activities.
    Example – IRCTC, startup folks and early adopters think the platform sucks and fails whiles booking; common people think of IRCTC to be a big corporation that there is always high demand. That leads to perception of credibility for IRCTC.
  • Use Associations for Endorsements – IRCTC mentions – ‘A Government of India Enterprise’. This is a big endorsement for IRCTC and brings credibility to it.
  • Bounce Rate Reduction – A transactional consumer site was featured in leading newspapers. When they mentioned ‘As seen on Newspaper A, B and C’ on their homepage – it boosted its credibility and reduced the bounce rate.
  • Social Proof for User Acquisition – The Facebook widget that displays people who have liked the brand also builds credibility.
  • Real People – A SaaS based startup focusing on product for Chartered Accountant features a local/prominent CA on its homepage. That quickly build credibility for itself in eyes other CAs. It was easy to acquire more customers.
  • Investor Hack – For SaaS startups, whenever any VC reaches out to you, get them to introduce to its portfolio companies. Its quickest way to demonstrate more traction and more importantly to add new customers.
  • Physical World – Example., Printed Coupons redeemed at Restaurants are social proofs in real world. Makes other users curious on how did a customer get discount / where did he get the redemption coupon from.

Ecommerce:

  • Thoughts on heavy discounting in current Ecommerce business in India, its like ‘Selling a Rs.100 note for Rs. 90′.
  • Potential in disrupting offline business is huge. All online businesses are not even 1% of the offline businesses.
  • Offline products are indeed cheaper than online. Consumers researching online and transacting offline is big. This market is ripe for disruption.
  • Ecommerce players are now less focused on doing marketing campaigns, but more focused on increasing conversion ratios of existing traffic.

User Experience:

  • UI is ‘relative’. Focus on User Experience.
  • Cleartrip is loved by all of us; but its clearly MakeMyTrip / Yatra that works with masses.
  • Make the product work 100% of time for what you promise.

Entrepreneurship:

  • Don’t fall in love with your product. Fall in love with being successful.
  • Things that work in west don’t work in India. Specially with funding and investments. Currency for investment in India is not traction, its revenue.
  • Be a salesman. Never miss a opportunity to make noise about your product.
  • Don’t focus on a niche market, there are very high chances of failure. Instead focus on a large market opportunity, its more likely to find success here.
  • Notice early signs if things are not going your way. Pivot fast.

Product Distribution:

  • SaaS products: Explore opportunities to integrate with large platform players – Domain Cpanels, or ecosystem creators like Shopify, BigCommerce, etc.
  • SaaS products: Label your widgets – ‘Powered by You’. They are most valuable for Inbound leads.

Product Scaling:

  • Don’t just design products for scale / growth; also ensure you design the business model for scale.

Essential Traits of Consumer Product:

  • Curiosity. Rely on Curiosity – (Example LinkedIn – 2 people have seen your profile today).
  • Build the – Theory of Reciprocation into your product.
  • Gamify some features, let users do free marketing for you before unlocking information. (Example – Tweet about something to show details).
  • Understand show-off value in your product. People love to show off on Twitter & Facebook. Capture such points to your product.

Social Media Marketing:

  • Twitter links have a CTR of 0.5% to 0.8%. Customer acquisition here happens in scale. Spend energy wisely.
  • Don’t spend time on talking to random folks on Twitter based on their conversations. Extremely time consuming and most unlikely to convert.
  • Facebook advertising does not lead to conversion. Its best suited for brand building.
  • Facebook Contests that involve sharing real pictures of users online brings lot of credibility to brand.

Competition:

  • Once a user has signed up for the product; make sure it works it. Don’t bother about competition. He has taken pain to signup to your product, make the promise work.
  • You’re the only one who know about your competitors; not your customers.
  • Many SaaS verticals are getting crowded to an extent that price remains only factor to decide. Only the ones that are able to innovate will survive.

Visibility:

  • Founders should be visible on Social Media. Talk about the product and should be able to convince their followers about their passion. Only passion attracts initial traction.

Market Penetration:

  • If you are doing something innovative (either B2C or B2B) – you will need to spend good amount of time on educating your users / customers. Its easy to get frustrated in this loop.

Content Focus:

  • Don’t get carried away by ‘Content Marketing’ or ‘Content Sharing’.
  • Building products that have content plays is difficult – content creators are few and content sharers are in plenty (Usually 1% to 99%)
  • Look for plays that involves sharing of content already created.

Building Relationships:

  • B2B: Build great relationships with your marquee customers. Keep them educated on new initiatives, new market dynamics and help them monetize better.
  • B2C: Continuously stay connected with your early adopters and take feedback from them. Keep them informed of new updates, they’ll love you. Whenever any suggestion is considered, incorporated into the product – communicate to users.

Driving Engagement:

  • Build features that would enable discovery of relevant / contextual information – that leads to higher engagement on the product.
  • Keep users involved… the trick is dashboard views. They create the “I’m in control” feeling for users.

Search Engine Optimization:

  • Figure out what you are optimizing for & the competition on that. Example., if you are trying to optimize now for ‘Apple iPhone’ – you would be the millionth website trying to do that. Get your own niche, it works best.

Mobile Apps:

  • Discovery of mobile apps is biggest challenge for them. Notice that many apps are trying a generic name for better discovery while users are searching for any other app.
  • Integrate app with key functions of phone. For example, on Android – phone book integration, and so on.
  • There are many hurdles in mobile app development cycle, best to understand from multiple startups who have built mobile apps earlier.
  • App Ratings matters, a big consideration factor for user to download the app. Get the initial ratings by distributing the app between family & friends.

PR:

  • A press release in India goes not get you much traffic. Its great channel for visibility, but don’t depend too much on this channel.
  • International Blogs & Coverage had a higher conversion ratio for products. International users give a try to product, sign-up, explore and use it.

Mobile Advertising:

  • Despite all the hype, Mobile Advertising is still considered as experimental budget.
  • Mobile Industry – one cannot be stuck in a region or one product for more than 18 months. Fast innovation required.

Venture Capital:

  • Stop chasing VCs or attending events that have VC meets or Demo Days. Hardly any investments happens that way.
  • A VC is most likely to invest in your startup when he is chasing you.
  • Indian VCs are yet to understand product driven consumer web-plays despite traction. Skip them and move to the west, it also brings lot of traction.

Biggest Learning of #FoundersMeet: Keep Plumbing. (Those who were present would understand this!)

Note: Some of these thoughts/hacks listed above may sound very generic since we have decided not to mention the context / startup involved. Providing too much information in public domain would not be right for startups who participated. You can connect with any of them directly, the founders would be glad to help you.

#FoundersMeet 3 Participating founders:  Anirudh, Deven, Nishcal, Siddharth, Kunal, Sahil,Pravin, Kulin, Sameer, Talvinder, Gargi,
Garima, Shekhar, Avlesh, Rohan, Sushrut, Sarang, Raxit,Noel, Soum, Nitin, Ronak, Pranay,
Annkur, Divyanshu

Many thanks to all startups who participated in the #FoundersMeet 3. Thanks to Nischal, Deven, Anirudh and Sid for reading/editing the draft of this post. Special Thanks to the wonderful folks at The Playce (a great co-working place for startups), Mumbai for hosting us.

Stay tuned for the next #FoundersMeet 4!

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Enterprise customers Vs Startup customers

When you are selling a product to a customer, you will have to understand the characteristics of the customer. This is especially true if your product solves the problems of both Enterprises and Startups. Both are unique in the way they buy products. Enterprises have a process in place and hence you need to be very very patient(sometimes, it may take an year for an Enterprise to decide to go with your product). Startups are more willing to experiment and will try out your product more willingly if they think that will help them gain an advantage. The selling points are also different. For Enterprises, you have to be able to convince them that your product is very stable and has already been tested in a production environment. They will give more weightage to existing customer references. Startups are more interested in the feature set. They want the latest bleeding edge feature set which will help them in getting an advantage over the competition.
Based on my experiences, I have listed down the happy and sad characteristics of Enterprise and Startup customers.
Enterprises
Startups
 
So, to put it in a nutshell, Startups decide fast and are willing to take the risk with you, whereas Enterprises are more slow in decision making, but once they decide, they stick with you and pay well.