Indian E-commerce: Moving on from GMV

It has been a nervous month for the professionals working for internet and e-commerce companies in India. Shutdowns and layoffs have been the flavour of the month, and business models have come under scrutiny. The effects of recent events at Stayzilla and Snapdeal have not been limited to job losses only. Weighed down by these developments in the sector, Rakuten, the Japanese e-tailer, has puts its India plans on the back-burner.

Stayzilla, an alternate and homestay aggregator, has shut operations. Investors including Nexus Venture Partners and Matrix Partners have invested USD 33 million across multiple rounds in the company. The founders have promised to bounce back ‘with a different business model’.

Snapdeal, announced that it will lay-off about 600 employees from the company including from its Vulcan (logistics) and Freecharge (payments) business divisions. The company has so far raised USD 1.75 billion from investors which include global heavyweights such as Softbank, Kalaari Capital, Temasek, Alibaba Group and eBay. However, Snapdeal reportedly is left with less than enough cash to survive the next 12 months. The merger talks with Paytm, facilitated by the common investor Alibaba, are not murmurs anymore and seem to be the logical next step in many ways. A very honest and important insight on the business model emerged from this episode, in which the founders admitted to ‘doing too many things’ and ‘diversifying and starting new projects while we still hadn’t perfected the first or made it profitable’.

The above incidents highlight the fact that Indian e-commerce in 2016 has been significantly different from its ‘glory days’ in 2015. GMV growth in 2016 was flat, even though long term prospects remain intact for now. The year-end sales were also impacted due to the demonetisation exercise carried out by the government. The cash on delivery (CoD) transactions, which account for approximately 50% of total GMV, were severely impacted due to the lack of availability of the new currency notes.

Figure 1: India e-tailing GMV (USD mn)

Source: Company data, IAMAI, Euromonitor, Credit Suisse

GMV, as the supreme emperor of metrics, has lost its sheen and the challengers which have come to the fore include revenue per customer (function of number of orders per year, value per order and commission), net promoter score (a measure of customer satisfaction) and overall user monetisation (including alternative sources such as advertising as well as new service offerings such as hyperlocal services).

The sustainability of business model is back in focus as a tool to evaluate potential winners and losers. Throwing money at the customers as discounts has not worked out very well for a lot of players. There has been a definite move towards trying to find other means of retaining customers. Going forward, winners are most likely to be companies that provide a differentiated customer experience. An obvious example is Amazon Prime which now brings more personalized experience to the company’s customers. Flipkart (Flipkart Assured) and Snapdeal (Snapdeal Gold) have similar offerings to enhance the stickiness of their customers. While ‘Flipkart Assured’ has seen limited success so far, Amazon Prime, launched at a very attractive price point of INR 499 per year, seems to be more suited for success going forward. Amazon has also clubbed its Netflix challenge – Prime Video offering with Amazon Prime subscription. With these offerings, the companies are trying to take focus away from discounts and towards customisation, quick delivery, consistency and reliability of shopping experience.

The control over supply side is a key element of constructing an enhanced and consistent experience for customers. Logistics is one of most prominent cost items for ecommerce firms, and depending on the category and value of the goods being delivered, could be 10% to 20% of GMV.

In India, the number of Amazon fulfilment centres has grown to 27 by the end of 2016. Shipping from stores is less efficient than from dedicated fulfilment centres. Amazon is looking to replicate their success in North America where they have invested billions in network of fulfilment centres. It has more than 75 such centres in North America, covering 25 US states. This gives Amazon an easy two-day reach over the entire US. Snapdeal has opened 6 logistics hub during 2016, with an estimated investment of USD 300 million. Paytm, flush with a USD 200 million funding from Alibaba, is reportedly firming up plans for a significant strategic investment in a logistics firm to improve its deliveries process.

The key growth drivers for e-commerce in India remain in place. There is a large aspirational population, faster and wider internet access, a never before push on digital payments and an opportunity to further penetrate the offline organised retail market. Nevertheless, the year 2016 has been a reality check. The Indian players have had to review their business models and take some tough calls to focus on sustainability. While the market may continue to be volatile in the short term, with more potential shutdowns and/or consolidation in the offing, we can now be more confident that the firms that do survive will turn profitable soon.

This is a guest post by Arvind Yadav,

Principal at Aurum Equity Partners LLP.

09/03/201714/03/2017

Going Digital – A simple framework

Today, everyone talks about going Digital. Renowned strategy and customer experience consulting firms have renewed themselves as Digital Transformation agency. Softskill trainers have become Digital marketing consultants. Large industrial conglomerates have become Digital industrial company by a creating a platform for Digital aficionados to develop custom apps.

New roles such as Chief Digital Office, Data scientist, Experience designer, Digital evangelist and many more. What are these roles to do with? Where should I start my Digital journey?

Here is a very simple framework!

Going Digital

Remember!

To keep up the Brand promise,always deliver

Speed (Adopt Agile & DevOps)

Accuracy & Authenticity ( Create Cognitive / Sentient Systems)

Codify ‘Trust’

Courtesy

1. Book titled ‘Disrupting Digital Business’ – Ray ‘R’ Wang
2. Book titled ‘Leading Digital’ – Didier Bonnet
3. eBook titled ‘Digitally Remastered’ – CA Technologies

Guest Post by R Ragavendra Prasath, a volunteer for iSPIRT. An avid reader, wannabe entrepreneur and Digital enthusiast…! He tweets @ragavendra1

06/03/201712/03/2017

“Vertical SaaS” Deep Dive #PlaybookRT in Bangalore

If I were a Cobbler it would be my pride..

The best of all Cobblers to be..

If I were a Tinker, no Tinker beside

Should mend an old kettle like me..

The above poem defines vertical SaaS to a T!

When I got an invite from iSPIRT that there was going to be a roundtable on Vertical SaaS, I jumped from my chair with joy!

First of all I discovered only recently via iSPIRT that there’s a buzzing ecosystem of SaaS startups in India! Not SaaS enabled Marketplaces, but SaaS products that are built worldclass and sell to the world.

So when I discovered that within that little ecosystem, we can go further narrow into sharing knowledge specific to vertical SaaS, I could have given iSPIRT a bear hug!

So last Saturday, in the cosy n energetic office of Hotelogix, few of us vertical SaaS folks gathered around Sudheer Koneru – cofounder of Zenoti.

As with the iSPIRT roundtables this one was also a treasure-trove of experiences shared, founder dilemmas discussed, the unavoidable pain points bantered about.

The 2 main takeaways from Sudheer’s session were

1) Narrow Focus

So when you are starting a business you want everyone to buy your product right? Especially if your product is an Online Software that needs least feet-on-street selling.

Now you have chosen a vertical as your karmabhoomi, at least in that vertical, you want everyone, right? In case of Sudheer who builds a kickass product that makes wellness service/spa owners’ life easy, one would expect him to want every Spa, Massage Parlor and Beauty Parlor to use his product. There are at least 5 Beauty Parlors in any 1KM radius of any metro/tier-1 city!

The answer is a resounding No. Sudheer chose to focus further narrow on that – upon Customers whose pain point is the most acute. Those are the multiple outlet chains. Now that Zenoti has an established market, it is exploring expanding the customer segment.

Apart from the customer segment Zenoti also sets an example in going narrow on geography. Sudheer started Zenoti from Seattle, worked on winning the Seattle market and then looking elsewhere.

Reminded me very much how we limited ADDA to Whitefield in Bangalore before spreading wide to rest of India.

2) Empathy

Sudheer highlighted how employees in a StartUp may miss out on the Empathy factor in our dealings with the Customer.

To the Cofounder of a Vertical SaaS product Empathy would come naturally. If you are a cobbler all you care about are the feet of customers. When your customer mentions a stitch was sticking out in the shoe, you grimace, you know how annoying it must be to the Customer. Not only you know how it feels you makes sure your Customer knows that you feel her pain. And then of course you fix it

But, how do you pass on that Empathy to your employees!

Interesting inputs flowed in from all present.

Overall, this roundtable set us few steps forward on the path of overall Wellness and Growth!

Of course the final credits goes to Natwar who moderated the session like the pro he is!

Guest Post by San Banerjee, ApartmentAdda

03/03/201712/03/2017

You may have a viable product but do you have a viable business?

(Also posted on LinkedIn here).

I’m a big fan of the “Lean startup” movement. Steve Blank, Ash Maurya and others have done amazing work around innovative, startup companies. Two of my most recommended books in this area are The 4 Steps to Epiphany and Running Lean. I strongly recommend every founder read these. Shockingly, most haven’t!

I’ve come across a new breed of founders who are well versed in the lean startup methodology. They understand the importance of customer discovery, a minimum viable product and the power of testing. These are all necessary to build new products.

I submit that they are not sufficient to create a company.

Here’s why.

A feature isn’t a product; a product isn’t a business; a business isn’t a company; a company isn’t an organisation.

Sanjay Anandaram.

Here are four additional questions you need to look into before you startup.

1) Are you talking to the right, representative prospects to validate your idea?

I’m a big believer of getting out in the field and talking to customers. Dozens even 100’s of them. It is an order of magnitude better than sitting in your office and pontificating. However, talking to 200 people does not make your idea into a viable business opportunity.

Are these 200 people truly representative of the prospective customer pool ?

Or, is there a selection bias? Perhaps, these are only tech-savvy customers in urban areas or the upwardly mobile. You need to estimate how big is that addressable market over the couple of years.

Secondly, how critical of a pain point is it for these users?

Is it an ongoing pain or a one an infrequent, perhaps even a one time, problem ? In general technology has made people be more open to saying “yes” more often to new ideas. This is the classic Aspirin vs. Multi-Vitamin question that VCs often talk about. While new ideas area interesting, it often takes years to change customer behaviour unless it a dire problem for a large number of prospective customers.

Don’t try to “invent” demand. Find basic human needs and solve them better, cheaper and faster.

Evan Williams, Co-founder of Twitter.

Market creation is hard for a variety of reasons; one of the primary reasons is that the cost of distribution is continually getting more expensive.

Lastly, would customers pay — ideally with money or at least with their time(e.g. Snapchat, Instagram, Google)?

2) Can you get effective distribution of your product or service ?

Human beings and businesses alike are being bombarded with a breathtaking innovations at a rapid pace. However, the amount of time, energy and money they have is limited.

How will you reach a large number of customers whether they be consumers or businesses? Are there existing channels that you can tap into ? Would they be cost effective?

Every innovator believes that their product will have strong word of mouth, virality and/or some kind of network effects? Well, most don’t. For most ideas, esp. in B2C, I would be very dubious if you don’t have strong, organic user acquisition channels to grow.

3) Are the unit economics viable?

So you have a problem worth solving, a solution that’s differentiated and a shot at distribution. Now comes the question about “Unit economics”. The simplest place to start is with your gross and net margin. How much money would you make per transaction (or unit of engagement)? This is not GMV or Transaction Value but the money that your business makes.

The first step for this is to calculate your Contribution Margin, or the money you make per transaction less your variable costs. For most businesses, variable costs are marketing, payment gateway charges, delivery/logistics charges, etc. This does not account for fixed charges for your employees, server costs, etc.

Is your margin or take rate (%) enough to cover your variable costs per unit?

If you are relying on scale to get your contribution margin positive, you are barking up the wrong tree! You may never get there.

4) Is there a large enough profit pool to tap into?

If you’ve gotten this far, you clearly have a problem, distribution channel and business that’s worthwhile.

Is there a large enough market size and profit pool in the area that you are in?

I don’t know about these new valuation metrics, but remember that the only way to value a business that will always be true is: present value of discounted future cash flows

Prof. Bill Sahlman, HBS, Circa 1999

If you don’t have a large enough profit pool, you may build a company with great unit economics on a large enough market but have little discounted future cash flow (e.g. IRCTC — Indian Railways). See Rajan Anandan’s prescient comments on the Indian B2C e-commerce marketplaces.

Now comes the source of capital to build your business. If you are aiming for something big and ready to scale fast, then I would recommend using venture capital (if you can affirmatively answer all 4 of these questions, give us a shout at Prime Venture Partners). However, VC money may not be appropriate or relevant for your business or your approach. Here’s one representative list of questions to ask yourself before raising VC money.

All of this won’t be empirically figured out on Day 0 of a startup. Of course, you will learn along the journey. However, you won’t be able to change the contours of the market or the availability of profit pools once you are 6–12 months into your startup.

It behooves you to spend a few weeks or even months to think through these questions before you commit yourself to a new company!

Guest Post by Amit Somani. He is a Managing Partner at Prime Venture Partners, an early stage VC firm based out of Bangalore, India. Prime invests in category creating, early stage companies founded by rock star teams. Prior, Amit has held leadership positions at Makemytrip, Google and IBM. He is also deeply engaged with the early stage startup ecosystem in India and actively volunteers with iSpirt, TiE and NASSCOM. He tweets occassionally @amitsomani and is trying to become an active, late blooming blogger.

02/03/201702/03/2017

5 reasons why you should NOT attend #SaaSx4

SaaSx4 is here! It is an event for SaaS founders, by SaaS founders.
SaaSx

Generally, event invites to entrepreneurs focus on why it is imperative to network and learn at the event.

SaaSx is different though. Here are 5 reasons why you shouldn’t attend the event!

You hate criticism!

SaaSx is all about learning. The speakers and mentors at the event will be honest and brutal in the feedback they dish out about your strategies. All their experience combined is out there for you to take! If you won’t be comfortable with that, you should skive it off.

SaaSx2

You like the Status Quo

Entrepreneurship is all about taking risks, calculated ones that pay big dividends. There are a lot of people who prefer playing it safe and do make good progress.SaaSx4 is about how ‘Survival is not enough’ and if you do not wish to explore uncharted territories of SaaS entrepreneurship, SaaSx might not be your cup of tea.

SaaSx4 home

You don’t love networking

If all you wanted to do was learn, a webinar or even a YouTube video would suffice! Events are all about networking with people and gaining contacts and SaaSx is the best place to meet like-minded entrepreneurs from all over the country.

Have you figured out your product, have a scalable plan for your company and sorted out your marketing roadblocks? If not, there is a good chance that you can learn a lot from SaaSx4.

You know the whole nine yards!

Some like fun learning, some don’t! If you fall into the later category, you will feel out of place at SaaSx. Here, we believe in infusing a learning opportunity with every opportunity for fun. If you hate the crowd and getting social, you might not fit it at SaaSx.

You don’t like mixing work and fun

Of course, if any of these reasons seem inappropriate you must get on a SaaSy ride to Chennai on the 17th of March to experience SaaSx4 in all its glory! SaaSx4

Guest Post by Arvind Parthiban, Zarget

13/02/201712/03/2017

Why No One Responds To Your Customer Success Managers

Who am I writing this for: people who are building or managing a Customer Success function.

What’s my key point: your CSMs need to provide value, and for that it’s better they specialize based on industry (or business-type) versus round-robin or regional distribution.

Our experience with the Hubspot CSM

When we bought Hubspot as our marketing automation platform, we were assigned a customer success manager (CSM). Our CSM did everything right; she got the entire marketing team and the CEO on a call, asked us questions like what will make us successful, what does failure with Hubspot look like, what our goals were, and more.

Then she gave us links to all of Hubspot’s training videos and said she’ll get back to us with a preliminary marketing plan that’ll help us get started. So we waited. When we got the plan we realized she didn’t know that we were a SaaS product. Instead, she mistook us for a marketing agency. It could mean that our website at the time did a shitty job, but I invite you to have a look for yourself.

After we corrected her, she got back with some other campaign ideas which were all a variant of:

Create an ebook
Add a bunch of automated, follow-up emails

Unfortunately, there was zero context of SaaS, about our goals, about how a visitor signing up for a 30 day free-trial is better than getting back to us to talk to Sales. We felt like she had very little understanding of who we were, of martech, or of the SaaS business model.

And Hubspot had 24/7 phone support for our plan level, has all their KB and documentation on the web, has all their training videos available in the Academy, so basically we soon had no need for the Customer Success Manager. That’s a good thing, when customers have everything at their disposal that they don’t need a human touch.

But it’s bad because we had zero need of the CSM. We knew she couldn’t really help us with our key goals. We knew getting on a call with her was not going to bring us much value. Soon enough, we just completely ignored her. And it wasn’t her fault. I’d put it on the person who planned that CSMs will be distributed region-wise without getting the ability to gain experience and expertise in any one industry.

Our experience with the Google Adwords rep

Our experience with the Google Adwords rep has been worse. While the Hubspot CSM just checked-in once in a while if everything was okay, the Adwords rep seems intent on getting us to run more campaigns and campaign types, tweak settings to what we know isn’t optimal for us (they might be good for Google though), and make us spend more budget in general.

She’ll make promises about doing some competitor benchmarking and give us best-practice recommendations, or going through our account and telling us how to optimize, but invariably those aren’t relevant and I now actively avoid getting on calls with her. In fact whenever anyone in the company or in my network asks me about talking to their Adwords rep, I discourage them from it.

So what do I think is the solution

Context. To be valuable, the Customer Success Manager needs to know and understand my problems, and be like a consultant who has seen these same problems and solutions at so many different clients that they can give me useful feedback, leading me to trust and respect them. In fact, the best case scenario would be if I pay extra to get a few more hours of their time every month or quarter.

After all, it’s their expertise that’s valuable, not the fact that they’re easily available.

Other reasons why industry based specialization is valuable

Content marketing: Something written by a CSM who is basically an industry expert is extremely valuable and immediately appeals to readers, because in their language, in their suggestions and in their content resonates the voice of the customers.
Product development: I’ll wager that they’ll end up giving more valuable product feedback than even Sales to your PM team because while Sales will close a deal and move on, it’s the CSMs who then work with customers to actually understand and solve their problems.
A new revenue line: CSMs so valuable that customers pay for their time and help. Like the Forresters, Gartners or ZS Associates of the world.

Guest Post by Siddharth Deswal, Lead Marketing at VWO.

09/02/201708/02/2017

How limited access to paid tools as a startup made me realize the need for a community

When I started out as an entrepreneur the journey was fueled by big dreams that were perhaps a bit too daring. It wasn’t smooth sailing and early days were tough. Life in a startup is dotted with challenges that can be overcome only by sacrifice.

Bootstrapping required a lot of restraint – both professionally and personally. Leaving a good-paying job at Zoho and trying to build a company meant cutting a lot of corners. We had to forgo luxuries, back out from family & vacation time, self-inflict pay cuts and moved into an apartment-turned office.

However, the biggest gripe was lack of access to the tools and services we loved. From basic necessities like Mail or CRM solution to universally used tools like Photoshop and Invision seem like a luxury when bootstrapping. As the saying goes ‘Nothing good comes for free’. We were pushed to try and find open-source alternatives. But they were nothing but painful compromises! It hurt us a lot – we couldn’t get things done in the same timescale as we could’ve.

A lot of products, tools and services do have offers but there were none tailor-made for the struggling startups. We had to make do with the free stuff and somehow managed to get our product out! Our product attracted funding and things slowly started to change and got to a better place. However, we still remember the struggles of our startup life!

Here is a small tribute to startups and the struggles we face:

Somewhere amidst the mad rush of shifting to our new office and redesigning our logo, I realized that it’s time I gave back to the startup community. The easiest option was to provide a free trial extension for startups but it rather made sense to initiate a change!

Every solution, product or service a startup requires is most likely what another startup is working on and if we are able to set up a mutual sharing, we can surge ahead as a single startup ecosystem!

This is the idea behind #RespectStartups, powered by Zarget, for the startup community. It is an opportunity for every startup, no matter how small, to make an impact and reach out in a big way. I personally urge every entrepreneur to look at this as an opportune moment to give back to the community.

Share your offers and claim the ones you need at www.respectstartups.com

Voice your opinions about the movement with #RespectStartups on social media.

Let’s say “No!” to startup sacrifices! Let’s march ahead as a startup ecosystem…

Guest Post by Arvind Parthiban, Co-founder & CEO of Zarget. He loves travelling, is a foodie and is crazy about football, a Chelsea fanatic. With 12 years of experience in the SaaS industry, now into startup life.

08/02/201712/03/2017

I am the Product Manager

Of the various hats I have worn all these years – Founder, Sales guy, Deployment Specialist, Level 1 and Level 2 Support, DevOps, Coder, Cheque depositor – I have come to realize I was a Product Manager all along – right from the get go.

Putting a label on what you do is extremely important. It helps you define the job you do, appreciate it, read more on it and helps you improve on that particular skill.

If you are the guy/girl in charge of making the Product among the Founding Team – you are the Product Manager. Say it out aloud – “I am the Product Manager”. The fate of your entire Startup lies in your decisions.

All other designations – CEO, CTO, Director, Co-Founder all are important – for the outside world and your team-mates – but nothing is as critical as the “Product Manager” hat you are wearing now.

Strap the Product Manager Hat tight.

When I gave Sales demo – I was not trying to get a Cheque out of the customer. I was listening to their pain points, and my mind was frantically scanning to see how my Startup could alleviate those paint points. I was trying to find patterns among Customers – so my solution can solve them all. I was trying to see how much value we can give them, and price our product as a fraction of the value ( and not just features ).

When I was paying the monthly bill for AWS account – and saw it was increasing gradually, asked myself – Are such resource hogging servers really necessary – and promptly turned them off – and found better cost effective alternatives. Also when I plan a feature, I keep the cost in mind – I am not going to get sold on the hype of a technology.

When I got a customer to go live – I realised how a few small features created some of the biggest headaches and heartburns. Promptly booted them off or tweaked them.

When I had to do Marketing – do SEO, or write content for Brochrures, or create Competitor analysis – I had to analyse inwardly as well as the competition and could identify the areas we were strong and weak. I knew what areas we could pull ahead of the competition – become more stronger, and what areas we had to improve – so we cannot be beaten down with.

If you are the Product Manager of a Startup – and working 9 to 5, doing a few customer interviews, talking to the CEO/CTO/Founder, browsing competitors website/Apps, STOP – you have to do more. [ ps : Startup founders, if you have hired Product Managers – here is what they have to start doing ]

1. Accompany the Sales guys in a few demos. In fact you should constantly do this – product keeps changing, market keeps changing, competiton keeps changing.

2. Get your hands dirty and deploy a few accounts – from start to finish.

3. Write the next set of marketing material, do the next Competitor Analysis document yourself – instead of just giving inputs.

4. Do SEO, plan the adwords campaign yourself.

5. Be the DevOps and/or pay the AWS bill from your pocket and get it reimbursed – and see for yourself that one cool feature which hardly anyone uses is costing a bomb.

And for Founders of Product Startups – Say it aloud. Print and Stick this in big fonts right in front of you.

“I am the Product Manager”

Guest Post by Venkat Kandaswamy, CoFounder, ApartmentAdda

07/02/201712/03/2017

A Framework For Building SaaS Products That Don’t Churn

When you say “reduce SaaS churn”, most people will immediately imagine tactics like drip email campaigns, great onboarding, customer marketing, gamification and automated alerts when users show signs of leaving. But this post is not about tactics. This post recognizes that users are smarter than any of the cute tricks we can come up with, and it attempts to get to the core of why there are some products that business users keep paying for, and others they discard.

If you’re a founder or product manager, I’ll encourage you to think deeply about this stuff, versus thinking about your next “growth hack”.

Products on which company processes are based

There are products on which organizational functions are dependent and processes are built. These are usually CRMs, Marketing Automation, HR software and Support software. The defining features are

they’re used by decision makers for reporting purposes and are often used to track teams’ KPIs and goals
they’re used to run day-to-day functions of the team and organization, for example, the process of applying for and approving employee leaves, or changing the stage of a sales opportunity
some people are logged in to the system during their entire working day
others log in once in a while to complete certain tasks
the system collects and retains valuable data that companies are not comfortable losing

Some observations about these products are

the sales cycles are usually longer than a month
customers will rarely buy these products without first being sure of the processes that are dependent on them
they need extensive API support and data integrations, because the data they collect becomes more valuable once combined with other data
heavy cross-functional training is required after the sale, and the product takes the blame if a customer org. doesn’t adopt and use it to the best of its capability
you need a lot of quality documentation so that you’re not overburdened with support tickets

An important note about products used by decision makers

When I started out at VWO a few years ago, the most important metrics were “free-trial signups” and “paid customers” (about 95% were self-service monthly subscriptions). Back then, Google Analytics (GA) was our most important source of data. We recorded free-trial signups, upgrades to a paid subscription and revenue in GA so it was what we looked at everyday.

In the past couple of years, we’ve started serving more mid-market and enterprise customers. Because of this, a few things have changed:

The average deal size has increased from $x00 to $x0000
The quality of free-trial signups matters as much as the quantity
A large amount of revenue comes from payments made through bank-transfers and other offline methods
“New MRR” is now more important than “new customers”

Because of all these changes, Google Analytics isn’t important anymore. Instead, the big decision are made after looking at reports in the CRM and our database, where all lead/deal/customer/revenue data sits. Through this shift I observed how when businesses evolve, the metrics that matter to them change, and this has a domino effect on the SaaS products that fall in and out of favor.

Now here’s another interesting anecdote: VWO has a large number of ecommerce customers. For the majority of these businesses, Google Analytics is the “source of truth”, so we simply had to build an integration with GA. In fact, we once lost a big customer because their VWO test reports didn’t agree with their GA data (completely possible and for good reasons, read this to understand why). The internal VWO champion tried to fight it out and explain the difference to management, but we lost the customer after some time.

So my point is this… it is well worth your while to build capabilities that will be used to make the important decisions, and if that’s not possible, then align your product with the primary reporting tool used by your target market.

Products that give results with minimal effort after initial setup

Some of these are:

Lead generation pop-ups, sidebars
Landing page software (specially when tied to on-going PPC campaigns or SEO keywords)
Retargeting software, like Perfect Audience and AdRoll
Exit intent pop-ups, almost always tied to lead generation
Personalization and behavioral targeting
Email automation like Vero and Intercom

While you’re building a product that keeps producing results with minimal interference, give a thought to how you can add public branding for that little bit of ‘virality’.

It’s also important to note that products tied to performance will quickly be removed when that performance isn’t enough. In this case, the product itself may be great, but it is dependent on something else working. For example, landing page software gets abandoned when the Adwords campaigns it was used for aren’t working out.

Products that monitor and provide reports and alerts on a recurring basis without needing additional effort

Few that come to mind are

Mention (social mention tracking, we’ve had it on for at least a couple years… rarely log in but open almost every daily email report)
Server Density (server monitoring)
SEOKeywordRanking (SEO keyword rank tracking; old school interface and not updated in a long time, but am sure its creator Will Reinhardt doesn’t need to work anymore)

While building your product, talk to users about the data they find most useful and want to look at everyday, or see what parts of your reports are accessed most often, then send that data out as daily/weekly emails. It becomes a part of users’ morning routine to check the emails and note/discuss/alert if something’s going right or wrong.

Products that enable data flow between different systems

Think Zapier, PipeMonk, Jitterbit and Informatica. Admittedly, data integration is more of an enterprise problem, but the good thing is that once put in, they’re very difficult to remove. That’s because they’re usually implemented after someone high enough has identified the need to have all the various data silos talking to each other, and that robust decisions can’t be made without a complete picture of the issue at hand.

Case study: Hubspot

Processes are based around the product? Yes, for marketing and sales
There’s someone almost always logged in? Yes, marketing
Managers use the product to report on performance? Yes, primarily marketing qualified leads, then customers and revenue
Product collects and retains valuable data that customers are not comfortable losing? Yes
Has components that produce results without needing on-going effort? Yes, lead-gen landing pages, website personalization, automated rule-based emails
Components that monitor and alert automatically? Yes, primarily alerts to sales owners about lead activity, and other alerts around social media, monthly/quarterly goals, etc.
Components that enable data flow between different systems? A well maintained and documented Salesforce connector, otherwise they have a platform for developers

As you can see, Hubspot is doing pretty well in minimizing churn. It seems to me that would be the case with most large, successful SaaS products. In fact, understanding the reasons why organizations keep paying for products is why large successful software are large and successful, as compared to just large.

I hope you’re able to use this post as a framework to think about what makes products stick, and apply those principles to the products you’re managing or building. Also, do you have anything else I can add to this? For some reason it seems to me the list is incomplete.

Guest Post by Siddharth Deswal, Lead Marketing at VWO.

06/02/201712/03/2017

Volunteer Hero: Vivek Raghavan

iSPIRT volunteers build public goods inspired by open-source Linux and Wikipedia. Our volunteers are selfless, committed and conflict-free. They are animated by a burning cause.

One such cause is about creating technology platforms that will help make India a Product Nation. Building a successful country-scale technology platform is hard. And doing this as an open and public platform is even more challenging. It takes talent, sweat, and toil to do this.

Vivek Raghavan for instance. He stepped in as a part-time volunteer to help build Aadhaar back in late-2010. Soon he was working as a full-time volunteer. Had he known that he would be volunteering full-time even after so many years, he might not have taken the plunge! In fact, two years ago, he gave up. After all, it’s not easy to work in a government system to make things happen. But, his sense of mission sprinkled with some emotional appeal from other iSPIRT volunteers had him back in action again.

We have many full-time volunteers in iSPIRT who take a year or two to give back to the ecosystem. But few have done it for six years! Here is a successful entrepreneur – with two notable exits in the US – waking up every morning to make the world better for all of us. His example inspires other volunteers. He kindles the fire that keeps iSPIRT running.

Vivek’s uncommon ownership and determination make him an iSPIRT volunteer hero.

Guest post by Pramod Varma & Sanjay Jain

“True heroism is remarkably sober, very undramatic. It is not the urge to surpass all others at whatever cost, but the urge to serve others at whatever cost.” – Arthur Ashe

01/02/201731/01/2017

Are AI and Automation dirty words for some?

Man being replaced by machines has been a topic very well documented in our academic and social history. While, designing machines that can replicate human intelligence is ‘the dream’ for many, the idea has seen its fair share of resistance from anxious workers afraid to lose their livelihood. It would be a mistake to think that the phenomenon is only very recent. The Luddite movement, which began in Nottingham in 1811, was named after a disgruntled weaver who broke two stocking frames in a fit of rage. Destruction of machinery, as a form of protest, was carried out throughout England by groups of English textile workers and self-employed weavers. Since then, the term ‘Luddite’ has become a reference to someone opposed to industrialisation, automation, computerisation or new technologies in general.

Back to the 21st Century, Infosys’s human resources head Krishnamurthy Shankar has revealed that the company had “released” 8,000-9,000 employees in the last 12 months due to automation of lower-end jobs. The employees are not necessarily jobless and have been retrained and absorbed to carry out ‘more advanced projects’. The company also reduced its hiring in the Jan to December 2016 period to 5,700 compared to 17,000 in the first nine months of previous fiscal year. Infosys is not alone in their journey towards automation. Most Indian and global IT services companies are investing in automation of processes in their core businesses such as Application Management, Infrastructure Management and Business Process Management (BPM).

India’s IT giants are leaving no stones unturned to fill the gaps in their digital portfolio of products and services. The subjects of Internet of Things, Cloud, Artificial Intelligence and Automation figure high on each company’s organic strategy and also in their shopping list for inorganic growth (Table 1).

Table 1: Select Digital Acquisitions by Indian IT majors

Acquirer		Target	Value (USD mn)		Brief
Infosys	Panaya			200	Provider of automation technology for large scale enterprise software management
Wipro	Healthplan Services			460	A technology and Business Process as a Service (BPaaS) provider in the U.S. Health Insurance market
Wipro	Appiro			500	A services company that helps customers create next-generation Worker and Customer Experience using the latest cloud technologies
Infosys	Skava			120	A provider of digital experience solutions, including mobile commerce and in-store shopping experiences to large retail clients
Tech Mahindra	The BIO Agency			52	UK-based digital transformation firm
Tech Mahindra	Target Group			164	A provider of business process outsourcing and software solutions

Automation is heralding the age of Industry 4.0 which is characterised by a diminishing boundary between the cyber and physical systems. In October 2016, World Bank research announced that Automation threatens 69 % of the jobs in India, while 77% in China. Google’s AI research lab, Google Brain is working on building AI software that can build more AI software. I wouldn’t blame anyone if they started thinking about the Skynet from Terminator or the writings of James Barrat – Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era.

As per research by Gartner, IT process automation (ITPA) is very underpenetrated (only 15-20%) and will move towards maturity over the next 5-10 years. Most leading vendors in the IT services space have launched an automation platform to boost delivery efficiency.

Table 2: Automation/ AI Platforms of Indian IT Players

Company	Platform	Offerings
Wipro	Holmes	An artificial-intelligence platform built on opensource computing aimed at optimising resource utilisation and reducing costs
Infosys	Aikido	Enables creation of intelligent robots that can resolve incident related to customer orders
TCS	Ignio	An Artificial intelligence-based automation platform which automates and optimizes IT processes within an organisation.
Tech Mahindra	Carexa Uno	Customer care, with agent virtualisation, analytics, assisted interactions and digital channels.
HCL Technologies	DryIce	A digital service exchange platform enabled by ServiceNOW

Source: NASSCOM, Edelweiss

Platforms based on novel technologies will minimise the human effort required. Are the coders coding away their jobs then? Thankfully, there are learned people who believe otherwise. As per NASSCOM, the future may not be as dire. There is a distinct possibility that repetitive and labour intensive jobs such as data entry and testing may get completely automated, but there will be augmentation of cognitive jobs. New roles will emerge which will focus on training, learning and maintenance requirements of AI systems. Indian companies will also need to invest in re-training its employees or importing talent in the short term. In the long term, a joint effort with technology schools such as IITs and IISc will be needed to build a supply chain of talent. 65% of Google DeepMind’s hires were directly from academia.

The Indian IT services sector is worth approximately USD 150 billion, and it is largely export dependent. The Indian players need to enhance their digital capabilities to compete globally. Automation is a key area of this digital growth and so is the evolution of skilled workforce and their job profiles. The fear of technology destroying all the jobs is as unreasonable now as it was in the 18th century. Also, it is evident from history that technology has always led to creation of more jobs than it has destroyed.

The workforce engaged in IT services by nature is flexible and open to evolving work profiles. Workers in some other sectors may not have that option, especially at the jobs requiring less complexity. HDFC bank just announced that it has witnessed a head count reduction of 4,500 due to efficiency improvements and attritions in the last quarter alone. The Bank is planning to install up to 20 humanoids named “Íra” at its branches in the two years to assist customers. Ira has been developed by Kochi-based Asimov Robotics and the company has already received queries from airports, hospitality industry and retail chains to deploy similar humanoids. It would be a good move for all professionals in all sectors to ask themselves – “Can a Robot do my job?”, and upgrade their professional skills accordingly.

This is a guest post by Arvind Yadav,

Principal at Aurum Equity Partners LLP.

31/01/201712/03/2017

The Product Manager’s RuleBook

This post is not about “tools” which will make you (integral)dx more productive. This post is about telling you rules of the Jungle called Product Management.

So you are the Product Manager, Right ?

You just graduated out of B-School (or even worse completed your bachelors degree) and you have been given the product manager tag in the company you decided to work in. Welcome to the Jungle. Unless you have a really f**ed up CEO or a clueless CTO, you are in for a hell of a ride. There are a dozen of definitions of a Product Manager but, here is the one that sticks –

You are the mini ‘CEO’

Welcome to the Jungle. People don’t follow rules here. Especially when it comes to product. Here are 49 rules that I have curated, over the course of 7 years, across Product, Operations and Sales.

Rules

As a Product Manager, you will be exposed to attention, and a lot of it. Mostly unwanted and discomforting. Don’t be surprised if your peers are jealous of your role. You will get pulled into every meeting. You will looked upto/at for every release. For every feature. For almost every client meeting/call. But that is least of your worries. Unless you have been a PM before, your biggest challenge would be not having a benchmark. You have no way to draw the line. Follow these rules and you will stumble less- I am personally still trying to master the art.

Get sold to the product. Believe in the product yourself. If you don’t, try again. If you still can’t make your self believe it, drop it and find something else.
You will get sucked up in your work schedule. Be ready for it.
Don’t get sucked up every time. At times, drop the bomb on Sales and Marketing. Reality check can never hurt
Learn the art of saying no. At least in your head. Practice it over a period of time with/on your CEO, CTO, Sales and Marketing (in that order)
Develop a healthy relationship with your developers, QA and designers.
Avoid making value judgements. What are value judgements ? The statement that you say aloud in your head without ANY authority or reliable data to back it. You always know when you are speaking from the gut. (You know who else spoke from the gut ? George W Bush)
Trust your developers. Back them up. Stand for them. Pat their back and give them credit.
Bet on your Sales and Marketing. Support them. Be their favourite cheer leader. Always
Keep some buffer from Day 0 itself on your delivery schedule. You are surrounded by uncertainties. Every client wanted “it” yesterday and no dev will have it ready by tomorrow.
Split roles between you and your CTO. Decide, who will plan and who will drive the execution. Don’t fuck this one up. Don’t take planning, because you most likely don’t understand your dev’s code.
Between your CEO, CMO and you, figure out who will OBSESS about “organic growth” (SEO). You don’t have bandwidth, don’t ever opt-in for this one.
Coin and propagate your own product terminology/nomenclature, before sales “oversimplifies” it or dev “rocket-sciences” it. This is a critical to build and manage perception.
Write emails with keywords that you can search. Chat with keywords that you can recall and search again. You will spend significant time in forwarding old emails to dev, sales, marketing, CEO. Skip the CTO. Your CTO barely opens your email.
Park your personal choices of colors, fonts and design at home. Product is being built for customer’s delight, not yours (or your investors)
Like a rhetoric, keep telling point #14 to your CEO.
Get a Tee that says “Good is not fast and fast is not cheap.” Boring, cliche but still right.
Pulling an all nighter for product release is cool and fun, but not if you are releasing thrice a week.
Remember that you don’t understand quality assurance or testing. Like everything else, QA is a skill. Unless you have learnt it, avoid claiming it.
If you are building a B2B product, you definitely need a QA. If you are building a B2C product, hell as sure you need more than 1 QA.
Be friends with QA and Designer. Make them feel special. You won’t exist without them.
Assumption is the mother of all fuck-ups. Under communication is an assumption. Hence, under communication is a fuck up. Over communicate and play safe.
Build your own narrative as an objective and data driven person. Understand and question the objective before jumping into anything (including that market research slide for the investor deck)
Document everything that is made and not made. At least try.
Begin you conversations with developers and designers with context. They will feel involved, aware and productive. Context helps. Always.
In the same breathe, demand context from Sales, Marketing and CEO. You will be able to address their requirement faster.
You will always be able to sell better than your entire sales team combined. But again, don’t do it.
Keep your Company Logo Product Logo, favicon, Product Description (1 liner, 5 lines and 1 pager) always ready. Anyone can ask for this. Anytime.
Plan ahead for a week. Do so on a Saturday/Friday Evening. Do it on a Sunday night if you have to but NEVER on a Monday morning.
CEO’s often talk sense. Listen to them.
Not everything that your CEO said was actionable. Don’t act on everything that your CEO says. They most likely didn’t expect action themselves.
Build your own opinion about the industry, domain, and the product. Attend conferences/events focused on your industry.
CTO’s can/will have walls. Be inquisitive ( read pushy)
You need to be aligned with your CEO, Sales, Marketing and CTO. Don’t forget your actual job (Mini CEO/Get-Shit-Done)
There is nothing better than pen paper when it comes to maintaining lists. There is nothing better than pen paper when it comes to wire-framing.
Don’t boil the ocean with every release planning. Every dog has his(/her) day. You will have yours on the day of bug bashing.
Avoid falling sick. Exercise daily. Meditate daily. And buy a Macbook air
Nothing will go wrong if you are late by two minutes late in sending that presentation/ releasing your product update. Be right and late rather than being sorry and on time. If your Sales team can’t hold for a client for 2 mins, imagine..Again, plan better next time and avoid being sorry.
Next time, a Sales guy says that “it was you and your product” that costed him/her a sale. Gulp down your ego. Hear them out. They are ranting. The next day, give it back to them. Patiently.
Your role needs you to seek feedback. Proactively. Ideally once a month, from all your peers. Similarly, your feedback for your peers is critical.
Sales folks are hired for selling. They most likely, can’t make presentations. Live with this fact. Make a template for them. Engage your sales team by changing the template’s colours every 10th week.
There is never a bad time for having chai/coffee. Though Obama doesn’t drink coffee. But again, you are not Obama.
Content writing is NOT your forte. Nevertheless, write the copy for your website or someone else will write something that you never made/promised/planned. Rant about it, if you ever hire a content writer
Create your own reports, dashboards and product performance benchmarks. Do this before the developers starts developing.
Start your day with numbers of the previous day.
Learn to let go, of things you like. Your favourite features, CEO’s favorite feature, colors, fonts, processes and evening dates.
In hindsight, you will always be right. Move on.
You job needs you to be a swinging pendulum. Hah. Self-Pity mode is awesome. But, don’t let it stretch for more than few hours
Last but not the least, remember to laugh about that how, once upon a time, everyone including your head of sales, marketing lead, CEO, CTO and dev ops were clueless about the house of cards that “you” got “built”
In the end, make your own list. And pass it on.

Author – Vivek Khandelwal

Founder of Datability Solutions, a technology startup building iZooto, a web push notification platform for user engagement and retention.

30/01/201731/01/2017

Union Budget 2017 : How’s it Set to Impact These #5 Key Domains in India

Alright, before I take the plunge into revealing what I expect from the impending budget, let’s take a quick glance at numbers on how the Government has fared since its inception:

Modi’s flagship Make in India initiative launched to create employment & self-employment saw huge traction with India’s gross FDI flow jumping by 27% a.k.a $45 billion in 2015-16, an all-time high.
Jan Dhan Yojana witnessed 11.5 crore Indians opening bank accounts, that’s getting 99.74% households bankable.
Under the Swachch Bharat initiative, a total of 31.83 lakh toilets have been built between April 2014 and January 2015, 25.4% of the target. World bank has also invested $1 Bn in PM’s pet project.
In Feb 2016 alone, under the Skill India initiative, 3,222 training centres were opened, more than 55 lakh people trained and 50% placed.
Nasscom had launched the “10,000 Startups programme” in 2013 in which 700 tech-driven startups were set up. After the launch of the Startup India, Stand up India initiative by 2015, the number had increased by 70% to around 1200. It is expected, there will be a 75% increase in the number to 2100 by 2020.

All said and done, looks like NDA government has fared decently in their term thus far and as the run up to the elections in 2019 rapidly advances, this year’s budget is going to be epic!

For starters this is going to be the first time that a Union Budget will be passed in February. The reason is concrete! When a budget is declared in March, it gets passed by both the houses only by mid-May thus delaying the entire process. By having a budget in Feb, the govt is making sure that it’s passed and ready to be implemented before the start of the new financial calendar.

Secondly, thanks to the demonetization move, digital commerce has been given a massive push. Furthermore, a year after PM Modi launched the visionary ‘Startup India Campaign’, there’s a lot of heat building up in the startup community which is expecting a series of initiatives that will be in their favor. 2017 is surely poised to be an exciting year.

1. For Startups

Widening of tax-free regime from the current 3 years to 5 years along with easier procedural clearances. Considering startups take a while to register profits, this move will promote entrepreneurship and innovation.
The government may also make regulations on FDI and ease institutional investment while also reducing governmental charges and taxes on it. In the long run, this will help in solving the capital need for startups since, majority of funding for startups come from venture capital funds that rely heavily on foreign investments.
With the Start-up initiative at the fore, we can see a new set of concessions on employee stock options, unlisted securities and convertible instruments.

2. Womenpreneurs: Easy access to funds

When it comes to women entrepreneurs, though, the government has been supportive in promoting women entrepreneurship, what most of us need is an easy access to funds. Additionally, since the implementation of GST will be on table for this budget, the government will come up with the new rationalized tax structure. We, women entrepreneurs, should definitely be a part of consideration in corporate taxes and loans.

3. Definitive SOPs, tax rebates, indirect taxes

The sole goal of demonetization was to put India on the path towards a cashless economy. Keeping this in mind, the Budget should include definitive SOPs and tax rebates to encourage and boost e-payments. Moreover, to achieve the goal of financial inclusion, the government should also rationalize indirect taxes and charges levied with respect to digital payment transactions and further incentivize companies operating within this space. To adapt to the need of time, government should also rationalize income tax provisions including provisions related to employee tax benefits such that payments/documents in the digital medium are treated at par with physical instruments.

4. Corporate taxes

I’m even looking at the reduction of corporate tax rate from 35 to 25% percent for startups and companies in the digital payments ecosystem. Transactions worth trillions are done in India yearly. Of these, hardly 10% are on digital platforms. The government must take more concrete steps to make digital payments ubiquitous. This budget should announce measures to upgrade digital infrastructure across the country. Steps should be taken to promote digital literacy and connect cities, towns and villages with high-speed internet networks.

5. Digital payment

While, the government has pushed for digitalization, post the demonetization move, I believe a lot still needs to be done on promoting digital payments. For instance, the government needs to reconcile and even reduce all indirect taxes on digital payments to nil. The government needs to work on a concerted effort to cut the payment gateway and bank charges on online transactions. Only then would people be truly incentivized to pay online.

The sector wants more tax concessions for customers and shopkeepers who go digital. The incentives can come in the form of income tax, service tax etc. What the budget can offer is extend the nuggets of sops on e-payments through UPI, add a dash of income tax rebates on e-payments and facilitate retailer-rebates on grocery bills, LPG payments, bus or metro card recharges and so on. The government has already introduced waiver of service tax on debit and credit card transactions of up to Rs 2,000.

In conclusion…

2016 had witnessed several markdowns in India’s ecosystem and I’m definitely looking forward to the budget and what it has in store.

Guest Post by Dr. Som Singh, Entrepreneur, Investor and founder of Unspun Consulting. This post was written for the Entrepreneur India magazine.

28/01/201731/01/2017

Why Your OnPage Chat Is Not Working? [How To Fix It]

A Step by Step guide on how product marketers should evaluate on page chat tools, implement and use them to start generating leads for sales.

We had rolled out the first version of our product in March. It was only in April when we saw a spike in customers signing up and we started getting lot of support enquiries. The reason for the latter was obvious – the product was broken. While we nearly choked on the support requests, we ended up creating a Ver 2 of the product. While the queries continued to flow in, the questions were different. The learning was simple – constant customer interaction and hand holding can prove to be extremely critical, especially when you are driving product adoption. The feedback that flows in, is worth its weight in gold. But again, not every beta user is an email fan and unless you are speaking to everyone ( less likely ), you will potentially be missing out on lot of feedback. It was at this stage, we decided to extend onpage chat as a support channel. The idea was simple – capture feedback whenever you can. And hence started our hunt for drilling down to the ultimate chat tool. We had a very clear requirement – we wanted to talk to people who are inside our product. Nothing more. Nothing less. We played with as many as 7 tools ( we rejected lot many ) and finally drilled down to Drift for onpage chat. I will talk about the choice in detail but before that here is how we went around with our primary research.

What’s Your Requirement ?

We tried a ticketing solution and we failed at using it. Ticketing solutions are meant for dedicated support teams. Back in March, we were 9 people. 3 of us were doing (trying to do) everything. Our requirement was very simple – we were not looking for a blown ticketing solution. At least not yet. But we also identified what we were looking for in the ideal solution –

Query First. Details Later – Most of the messaging platforms, first ask users to fill in a form. These forms can have anything between 1-4 fields. That’s a catchy catch. Situations which trigger support are often desperate. Yes, desperate times call for desperate measures and the user will end up providing all details to log in a support request. The experience is clumsy and far from being ideal. The ideal experience should be the other way round, allowing users to first push their question / query and then asking them for contact details.
Design Centric / Clean UI – Nothing much to say here. The design must encourage user to chat / talk.
Mobile First- The day your product adoption goes beyond 3 times zones, your luxury of operating as per your own time zone goes away. Expect customers to send you emails / chats at hours which would be unearthly for you. You will realise the need to have the ability to handle these chat requests right from a mobile app. Expect your support staff to be answering queries at 2AM, on lunch desk or while sipping chai.

What Options Do We Have – “The List”

First things first – Find the list. Best thing is to go to G2Crowd or GetApp and start from top to bottom. This will save a lot of time. Our first website was built on WordPress, so the WordPress plugin could also be a great place to start your primary research. Not that it’s critical to have a plugin but again it’s a handy. Here are some other places to start your hunt

G2Crowd: Live Chat Reviews / GetApp Live Chat Reviews– This can be overwhelming
WordPress Plugin – Not a great list
Google for – Live Chat / OnPage Chat tools / Chat Based Support Tools. Scan through the first 3 pages on Google.
Product Hunt is a great place to search for the newer tools – This can be great because you get on to the Beta list and have access to early bird pricing. Pricing which typically changes after 4-8 weeks ( depending upon the product’s release cycle et al )

“The Free List” – Getting these out of the way

Elimination is extremely helpful, especially when you are hunting for a software and have a couple of dozen options to choose from. There are a dozen free live website chat tools out there. I have always believed that there are no free lunches. These tools come at a cost – user data, limiting experience, weird packaging or dev involvement. I am not saying that these tools are bad. For a business up to a certain scale, free might work. For most, it does not. If you are looking at messaging/chat seriously (Read Here On Why You Should), throw this list out of the window.

Experiencing the Experience

For obvious reasons, all these tools, without fail use their own product for onpage live chat. While experiencing the onpage chat support and talking to sales reps on chat, we realised some key points that influenced our decision.

Live Means “Real Time”. Nothing Else Is Acceptable

Unlike Yahoo chat rooms where users had a lifetime to respond, in case of an onpage chat, the expected response time is seconds. If you are a B2B SaaS product, your average bounce rate ranges between 50% – 70%. Top this up with the fact that the average attention span of a human is less than that of a Goldfish. If your response time exceeds 30-45 seconds, the user has most likely moved on from the page. You have lost a potential lead and valuable feedback. You have to be on your toes to respond to these incoming chats within seconds. This is the real game changer. When you attend a visitor on chat within seconds, you have already won of half of your battle. The rest half is won, when you address their query. Yes, you can’t be available 24*7 but again that’s the idea. You can put together some great copy telling them how you are busy fighting aliens in a parallel universe and are offline but that’s a second option. And you should treat it like that.

Mobile Interface Is Super Critical

Because the conversation with the end visitor must be in real time, having a mobile interface for your customer support team / agents is critical. You are strapped out of resources and money to have dedicated agents manning the chat window. It is because of this reason, your Sales / Marketing / Content team should have the ability to reply to these incoming chats – right from their mobile device. This allows them to respond swiftly when you cannot. Imagine being on a client call / heading back home late night / being in the elevator and still converting visitors into paying leads. Most of the tools do offer a dedicated App ( both for iOS and Android) for agents.

Chatting But Only At The Right Time

If you could build an offline store for your product, would you want your sales reps nagging your visitors the minute they entered the store ? If the answer is no, identify simple metrics on when / where / on doing what – you want to prompt your users. These could be basic triggers such as –

Amount of the page scrolled

Time spent on the page

Did a specific action / event on the page

These proxy signals will help you in filtering the spam. Gauging the user’s intent basis some proxies is extremely important – especially when your sales reps will be investing time here.

Getting The Messaging Right

More than often, most of the onpage chat prompts that popped up on the website, irrespective of the page had the same messaging. One size fits all approach really doesn’t work. This messaging can be far more personalised basis the history of user or your knowledge about the user – again, something that needs to be done at a later date. Not Day 0. If you were to build an offline store for your product with every page of the website as a full blown section in the store and you had the luxury of having dedicated reps manning each station, how would you like these reps to greet the visitors ? Can this be quirky – Why not. No harm in experimenting.

Smart Conversations with Context

In the Utopian world, I would want to know everything about the visitor who I am talking with. Where they are from, which company do they work in, what is their function, what is their objective and so on. Conversations with context are far better than just plain hello. Pick up a tool that allows you to know bit more about the customer. You don’t need to know which other website they are looking at but simpler things like which city they are from – can help your sales reps in break the ice. This is referred to as data enrichment / knowing more about your customer. This can literally take you down the rabbit hole but remember, you don’t have to boil the ocean by knowing everything about the visitor. After all, you do have the option of talking. 🙂

Alright. What Are Your Drilled Down Options ?

Here is what our final list looked like before you apply filters of cost, features, support, API’s, customization et al.

Zeroing In

As a young startup, we follow a simple framework while evaluating third party tools –

Time vs Value
Effort vs Value
Cost vs Value

The semantics of an early stage startup require the software value to follow the Brontosaurus Curve.

Stage 1- In the initial stage, Founders want to see value without investing too many resources. Stage can be defined as Trial period / Trial period + another month. Once the value is established in the product and support has been evaluated, you are fundamentally good to go.
Stage 2 -Post this, the team would put the tool on an auto pilot mode, moving to the next task. Waiting for developer bandwidth to get allocated.
Stage 3 -Once developer bandwidth, the next level of value is unlocked. This typically involves personalisation, integration with CRM et al.

Good to have’s at this stage are pre-built integration with CRM, 1 Click Installation ( like a WordPress plugin / Zapier based integration et al )

It is for this reason, we went ahead with Drift. Drift is not a live chat software – it is a customer support and sales tool. Drift’s slack integration is what makes it indispensable for our customer support and sales team. It comes in with a pre-built integration with Hubspot – helping us push and pull data fluently. The fact that it is priced optimally – only helped us pick up the paid version immediately. Today, 10% of our current leads / signups are because of conversations that our website visitors have with our sales and support team. This number is improving on a daily basis and we are excited about scaling up this channel. Here are some of the handy metrics to be tracked are simple –

Open Rates
Click Through Rates
New Subscribers and
New Leads

We @iZooto work hard every week to ensure that we beat our past week stats for all the 4 pointers. There really are no benchmarks besides whatever it is that you have achieved so far. The focus area is simple – to outperform the numbers of last week. Tools in hand – limited dev bandwidth. Access to creative resources for copy and design, followed by sheer execution and constant iteration.

Author – Vivek Khandelwal

Founder of Datability Solutions, a technology startup building iZooto, a web push notification platform for user engagement and retention.

24/01/201724/01/2017

What the U.S. can learn from India’s move toward a cashless society

Looking from Silicon Valley upon the progress that India has made in building a digital infrastructure, I am in awe. The U.S. tech industry fancies itself as the global leader in innovation, yet India has leapt far ahead of it. Silicon Valley’s tech investors hype complex technologies such as Bitcoin and blockchain. But India, with simple and practical innovations and massive grunt work, has built a digital infrastructure that will soon process billions more transactions than these do.

India is about to skip two generations of financial technologies and build something as monumental as China’s Great Wall and America’s interstate highways.

Though few people in the West know of Aadhar, it has been the largest and most successful I.T. project in the world. There was widespread skepticism that a billion people could be provided with a verifiable digital identity, yet it has occurred, in a short six years. Hundreds of millions of people who were doomed to live in the shadows of the informal economy can now participate as equals in the global economy. Thanks to Jan Dhan Yojana, they also have bank accounts; these already haveRs. 69000 crores in deposits.

The reason investors are pouring billions of dollars into technologies such as Bitcoin is that they provide a secure way of linking a person to and recording a transaction. But Bitcoin requires massive, wasteful, computing resources to do what is called mining: transactions’ mathematical verification. And this complex computing infrastructure needs constantly improvement as it hits transaction limits.

The simple design of India’s digital payments infrastructure, Unified Payments Interface (UPI), allows banks to transfer money directly to each other based on an Aadhar number or mobile-phone number plus pin. Yes, this doesn’t have the anonymity of Bitcoin, but I would argue that anonymity is mainly for money laundering and tax evasion—which need to be eliminated. There is almost no overhead in UPI, and transactions happen within seconds rather than the 10 minutes that Bitcoin takes.

In the U.S., we pay an indirect tax of 2–3% on consumer transactions because of the use of credit cards. Companies such as Visa, Mastercard, and American Express don’t even manage the money or provide banking services; all they do is to act as an intermediary between banks. The merchant has the responsibility of verifying the identity of a customer. With UPI, India doesn’t need credit cards or middlemen, it can build the next generation of finance.

The instant and non-repudiable proof of identity that Aadhaar’s know your customer technology, e-KYC, provides, gives India a big advantage. Most people in the U.S. have drivers licenses and social security numbers. But these are not verifiable with biometrics or mobile numbers, so complex verification technologies need to be built into every financial system. Indian entrepreneurs building applications don’t need to worry about all this.

Going beyond money, India Stack provides a digital locker through which to store and share personal data such as addresses, medical records, and employment records. With this, the government is providing a public service that is the digital equivalent of roads and electricity. I don’t know of any other country that has anything comparable; India will soon have the digital equivalent of super-highways.

There are all sorts of benefits. For example, the opening of a mobile-phone account is a lengthy process everywhere, because telecom carriers must verify the user’s identity and credit history. With India Stack, all it requires is a thumbprint or retina scan and permission to share digital documents. The typical villager presently has no chance of getting a small-business loan, because he or she does not have a credit history or verifiable credentials. With India Stack, he or she can share digital copies of bank statements and utility-bill payments, and life-insurance policies and loans can receive instantaneous approval.

Nandan Nilekeni is right when he says that these advances “represent the biggest advance globally in public digital infrastructure since the Internet and GPS”. In an email to me, he predicted that they will “lead to a leapfrogging on many fronts, including a digital financial platform for a billion people which does not require cards, POS machines or ATMs but will be entirely driven by what is in your hand—your finger and your phone”.

Prime Minister Modi has taken a lot of fire for demonetization. This is understandable, given the hardships and the disruption to the economy that it created. But it was a bold move and one that will produce tremendous long-term benefit—because it will accelerate the push to digital currency. India has the opportunity to enter an age of transparency and be at the forefront of digital technologies.

Nobel Prize–winning economist Joseph Stiglitz said in Davos that the U.S. should follow Modi’s lead in phasing out currency and moving toward a digital economy, because it would have “benefits that outweigh the cost”. Speaking of the inequity and corruption that is becoming an issue in the U.S. and all over the world, he said “I believe very strongly that countries like the United States could and should move to a digital currency so that you would have the ability to trace this kind of corruption”.

Yes, India is ahead and America can learn from it.

Guest post by Prof. Vivek Wadhwa, Distinguished Fellow, Carnegie Mellon University Engineering at Silicon Valley. Former entrepreneur. Syndicated columnist for Washington Post. 