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Bootstrapping is certainly possible until and unless the business model requires exponential growth in a short span of time, Nikhil Nath – CEO, Knowcross #BootUpINDIA

Last week I got a chance to speak with Nikhil Nath, Founder and CEO of Knowcross that provides technology solutions to leading hotels of the world in over 30 countries. Started in 2002, Knowcross has built a range of smart and intelligent products that address specific problems of running Hotel operations. From systems that allow Hotel staff to quickly respond to complaints raised by guests through careful assignment and tracking to systems that turn the manual Housekeeping nightmare into a smooth process by mathematically calculating which room needs to be cleaned when based on real time data such as check-out time, expected check-in time, room moves etc. This product called Know Housekeeping was listed as one of the top seven mobility products in India after an exhaustive assessment by Frost & Sullivan. They also have a product that allows staff to make-up for services failures and missing guest expectations by alerting them in real time and giving them a chance to make a goodwill gesture and increase loyalty.

Each of the products Knowcross offers seems to be extremely well thought out and is solving real problems hotels face in their day to day operations. No wonder they boast of customers such as Kempinski, Hyatt, Oberoi, IHG, Hilton, Sofitel, Taj, Swissôtel, Shangri-La, Radisson, Rosewood, Dusit Thani, to name a few of their chain customers, and marquee independents like the Ritz Paris, Le Bristol Paris, and The Halkin London.

KnowcrossAfter the hour long interview, I was left completely inspired listening to the journey of starting and growing Knowcross. Here is the compilation of the interview for you learn more about Nikhil’s journey of building Knowcross.

Tell us about Knowcross.

At Knowcross, we offer a suite of products for the Hotel Industry.  We started in 2002 with our first product, a rapid response system to resolve guest complaints in time, every time. This was our main product until 3 years ago. As we thought of expanding our offerings, we had two choices – either to grow horizontally by offering the same solution to other industries or to go vertical by providing more solutions to the Hotel industry. We decided to go vertical as we had developed a deep expertise and understanding of the Hotel Industry and it made more sense to leverage that learning.

We looked for other problem areas in the Hotel industry and came up with three other products – that are now known as Know Housekeeping, Know Glitch, and Know Mobile. These products eliminate much of the manual communication and chaos that currently exists in hotel operations and have a direct impact on staff productivity and guest satisfaction.

Take us through your journey of starting Knowcross.

We started by accident. In my early teens I was an avid self-taught programmer – and honed by skills on Sinclair Spectrums, Commodores, and BBC Micros computers. However, I left this passion to pursue a more traditional Economics-MBA-Banking-Consulting career path…until life came full circle!  In 2002, a friend and I were doodling around and we put some developers together to work on different software projects. Because of the dotcom bust the market soon dried up. One of the projects we worked on was for a hotel. That experience got us interested in the space and we ended up developing a product. We created a few prototypes, went out to the market and got some positive early reactions. That gave us the encouragement we needed to continue in the space. In hindsight, I think we selectively saw the data we wanted to support our belief and desire to continue developing the product!

With a team of four, we built a product and started approaching potential customers. We implemented the product for a Radisson, an Intercontinental and Oberoi’s new property in Udaipur, Udaivilas. Those first few installs were crucial. We learnt a lot from those experiences and almost rebuilt the product from scratch.

From this point onwards it was a hotel by hotel pitching and negotiating game. Once we signed up 15 customers, we stopped bleeding month on month. Soon we hired someone from the Hospitality industry to bring in the knowledge and knowhow. We stretched our boundaries and pitched to international hotels as well. We won a customer in Dubai. The deal was $40K, equivalent of 4 Indian customers. That experience made us realize that the market outside India is much more interesting. We got to pitch to the Hyatt top brass in Chicago and signed up Grand Hyatt in Mumbai as the test property.

We continued to make a lot of mistakes and learned from the experiences. The worst time was between 2008 and 2010. By 2008, we had built quite a bit of momentum and the financial market collapse hurt us terribly because a lot of upcoming hotels lost their funding and stopped mid-way through construction. With all the developers we had hired, our burn rate was very high and we didn’t have anyone to sell our products to. In 2009-2010 we were almost about to go belly up. But I didn’t want to give up. I got the team size down and had to let go of many talented people. From there on we restarted the journey slowly and steadily and were able to recover from the near death experience.

I am happy to say that over the last three years, we have seen very good success and have been growing at about 75% year on year.

You have been mostly bootstrapping your venture except for the small angel round. Tell us more about your experience managing the venture without much external financing.

Though Knowcross has been mostly a bootstrapped venture, we did raise a small angel round of $500K in early 2006 from “Band of Angels” (now called Indian Angel Network) and a few other individual investors. We did think of raising a VC round in 2007 but eventually didn’t go ahead. As a result, we have grown the company through internal accruals.

In our most strained period, 2008 to 2010, one thing that became our lifeline was a credit line we managed to negotiate from an Indian public sector bank. This was against our receivables and gave us the cash flow to manage the business… Raising money from Angels and VCs is the not the only way..if you talk to bankers, they often come up with many ways of borrowing money…ultimately, equity is always more expensive than debt and an entrepreneur shouldn’t forget this.

Having said that, both bootstrapping and raising external capital have their own sets of pros and cons.

With a bootstrapped company, I am the majority shareholder and have a much tighter control over the company. The growth is organic and takes time but in the process we have built a strong foundation. We won’t get knocked out that easily even if finances dry up.

On the other side, having money in the bank allows one to think long term and build a business without cash flow concerns. For e.g, in our case, the angel investment allowed us to hire the right people even if we had to pay more. Underfunded companies can’t hire the right people. Having capital also provides some mental stability. There was a time when our revenues were way below our expenses and I had exhausted all my life savings. I was not taking any salary and was using just the minimal amount of money to sustain myself. This kind of situation is a real blow to one’s motivation.

One needs to decide for themselves what the right way to manage finances is. We were not in highly scalable dotcom type of business and just wanted to build a profitable company. We could bootstrap our way up. But this might not work for every type of business.

How did you build your team at a stage when revenues had not started flowing in yet? What motivated those people to join you?

We started with four people initially. The biggest motivation for people to join us has been the kind of work we are doing. The time when we started, there were hardly any product companies in India. Still the product industry is small but 10 years ago it was miniscule. The people who joined us were specifically looking for such opportunities and that aligned our needs.

Two of the key people who joined us in our early days are still working with us. One is an IIT graduate and other from Hyatt, Mumbai. We did have to shell out a lot in compensation to hire these talented individuals but that was money well spent. They are still part of our key team.

I must say that hiring was much easier 10 years ago. The market was smaller and quality of talent was better. We got more value for the money paid. Now hiring is much more difficult. There is a lot of competition especially from VC backed start-ups that have driven salaries up – in some cases, to levels that simply don’t make sense. At these levels, it is better for us to set up a development center in a first world country!

Marketing is another area that requires a lot of investment. Tell us more about how you managed marketing.

Historically, we didn’t spend much on marketing. In fact we didn’t even have a sales team until 3 years ago. Sales for us were a door to door exercise. We were quite limited in our resources. So we had to cut costs at every step. We would fly cheap and stay cheap. We would stay only for few days and setup a maximum number of meetings in those few days to get the most out of our visits. I remember the time when I travelled to London to pitch to some potential customers. I slept on a friend’s couch and would step out everyday like a travelling salesman.

It was a slow, tiring and arduous journey. But the hard work did pay off. We built the customer base organically with the biggest growth seen in last three years. We spent many years building our financial strength and now we are investing heavily in building a sales organization and in marketing to support the salespeople. We set up our US presence about a year ago and now have three people based there. We are also about to open an office in London to cover Europe.

Another advantage VCs bring in is the guidance on building the business, contacts, references etc. Your clients include some of the big names such as Kempinski, Hyatt, Oberoi, IHG, Hilton, Sofitel, Taj and many more. As a bootstrapped company, how did you build this clientele? Where did you get guidance on how to run the business?

Almost everyone has some initial resources to work with. People do want to help others. If you look out for help and people know you are trying hard, they would come forward to help. In our case too, we got a few lucky breaks. Some of my good friends shared some references and made some connections. As we signed few initial customers and delivered good work, others came by.

In hindsight, I would say that it is important to have mentors to guide a first time entrepreneur on things such as which clients to take, how to approach them, when to raise money etc. These decisions are often tricky and it helps if someone who has been there and done that can provide advice. Best would be to bring someone who has started a business before. Incentivize them with stock options. Irrespective of whether one has VCs or not, mentorship is required. Such mentorship can’t be provided by a board. One needs an individual like a friendly uncle. Chances of success would be much higher if quality mentoring is available to teams early on.

From your own experience, what advice do you have for start-ups who are currently bootstrapping?

Bootstrapping is certainly possible until and unless the business model requires exponential growth in a short span of time.

If bootstrapping, one needs to prepare well and think through it. How much can you starve yourself? How long can you manage the business without revenue? How long will your savings last? You should draw your limits and know when to stop as there is an opportunity cost and the same money can be put to some other use.

If you go on for many years without showing positive cash flow, then it is concerning as your business is not sustainable. Make a realistic assessment of your situation and add a buffer around it. Many people don’t think through all this and then hit a wall.

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Pallav Nadhani @FusionCharts on Bootstrapping your Startup the right way, all the way #BootUpINDIA

Success is often measured by how much limelight you managed to get. Real success however, belongs to those who dig in and chart the fabled hockey stick growth path. Companies like Fusioncharts, Rategain and Wingify are but a few examples of globe scale bootstrapped Startups from India. Does Bootstrapping happen out of accident or by choice? Is it a long term bet or a compulsion? What are the other myths behind Bootstrapped vs Funded startups?

Pallav shares the secret sauce of successful Bootstrapping in this heart-to-heart chat with Sandeep Todi, iSPIRT volunteer and himself a bootstrapped entrepreneur. Listen to him talk about the challenges he faced and how iSPIRT #BootUpINDIA will help you as a Bootstrapped startup. You can view the video and post a question to Pallav right here.

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Lessons for Customer-Funded Entrepreneurs #BootUpINDIA

More than two generations ago, the venture capital community – VCs, business angels, incubators, and others – convinced the entrepreneurial world that writing business plans and raising venture capital constituted the twin centerpieces of entrepreneurial endeavor. They did so for good reasons: the sometimes astonishing returns they’ve delivered and the incredibly large and valuable companies that their ecosystem has created. But the vast majority of fast growing companies don’t take venture capital, at least at the outset. Are they on to something that most of today’s entrepreneurial ecosystem – VCs, business angels, incubators and accelerators, and all the rest – have missed? Do their stories hold lessons we can learn?

Is there an alternative to VC? Indeed, there are five!

There are five novel approaches that scrappy and innovative twenty-first century entrepreneurs have ingeniously adapted from their predecessors – like Michael Dell, Bill Gates, and Banana Republic’s Mel and Patricia Ziegler. What Dell, Gates, and the Zieglers have in common is that they all started and grew their companies largely with their customers’ funds. Here are some of the lessons their stories hold:

    • Lesson 1 – Matchmaker models: By bringing together buyers and sellers, but not owning what is bought and sold, today’s matchmakers build great companies with virtually no startup capital. For Airbnb, the initial investment in 2007 was for a couple of air mattresses on the founders’ San Francisco apartment floor. By narrowly focusing on conventions that were too big for the city’s hotel inventory, Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia built their business one step at a time until they got noticed in 2008. VC funding eventually followed, and the rest is history: 500,000 properties in 192 countries!
    • Lesson 2 – Pay-in-advance models: Bangalore’s Vinay Gupta built Via into the “Intel Inside” of the Indian travel industry. How? By asking India’s mom-and-pop travel agents for a rolling $5,000 deposit in advance in return for real-time ticketing capability and better commissions than the airlines were giving them. Do the maths: 200 agents in the first few months gave Gupta $1 million in cash with which to start and grow his business!
    • Lesson 3 – Subscription models: Krishnan Ganesh started TutorVista with three Indian teachers and a VoIP internet connection reaching American teens who needed help with their homework. He quickly learned that $100 per month for “all you can eat” – paid monthly in advance – was just what the teens’ parents wanted. When renewal rates after the trial subscription quickly materialized at north of 50 per cent, growing the business was simply a matter of adding more fuel. He sold the business to Pearson in six short years for more than $200 million.
    • Lesson 4 – Scarcity models: Jean-Jacques Granjon and his partners created the flash-sales phenomenon by doing something simple for Parisian designer apparel makers who needed to move unwanted inventory. By collecting payment from his online members who responded to the limited 3-day sales and limited quantity available at discounted prices, and paying his vendors long after the goods had been ordered and shipped, Granjon didn’t need any capital to start or grow what became one of France’s hottest fashion brands.
    • Lesson 5 – Service-to-product models: Claus Moseholm and Jimmy Maymann of GoViral, a Danish company created in 2003 to harness the then-emerging power of the Internet to deliver advertisers’ video content in viral fashion, funded their company’s startup and growth with the proceeds of one successful viral video campaign after another. In 2011, after having turned their service business (creating and hosting viral video campaigns) into a product platform that stood on its own, GoViral was sold for $97 million, having never taken a single krone or euro of investment capital.

The way forward: Lessons learned

If you’re a bootstrapping entrepreneur lacking the startup capital you need, an early-stage entrepreneur trying to get your cash-starved venture into take-off mode, or an angel investor, mentor, or business accelerator or incubator professional who supports high-potential entrepreneurial ventures, a customer-funded approach may offer the most sure-footed path to starting, financing, or growing your business or one you support. In the words of Shanghai’s entrepreneur and angel investor Bernard Auyang, “The customer is not just king, he can be your VC too!”

Post contributed by John Mullins, Associate Professor of Management Practice in Marketing and Entrepreneurship at London Business School. His latest book is The Customer-Funded Business: Start, Finance, or Grow Your Company with Your Customers’ Cash (Wiley, August 2014), from which this post has been adapted. 

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Bootstrapping, not an excuse for being cheap #BootUpINDIA

I witness the scenario on both sides of the table.  A startup provides a solution to a problem; solves it elegantly. And makes it seamless for its users. They use a few other products too – that solves some of their non-core functions elegantly. They grow out of its free usage, but they don’t pay.

And they sit and break their heads, day in and day out as to why on earth,  many of its heavy users not converting. I too do wonder why.

Karma, is a bitch.

We don’t negotiate with the entity that provides the electricity, nor the ISP who provides the pipeline, nor the bank who keeps our accounts, or the lawyer who manages our legalities, or the accountant who keeps our day sane. Why then are we being partial to teams solving our operational headaches with tools they built, burning midnight oil? Especially if its a tool that does its job and is a revenue expense for you.

We don’t bicker about the sunk costs, but are cutting corners on the revenue expenses. You understand how that makes no sense whatsoever right?

If you really want to throw around bootstrapping as an excuse, take a lower bandwidth plan and save costs. Buy a Dell or a Lenova and not a Macbook Pro (or one with a retina display). Keep a feature phone, nor a smart phone. Work out of your bedroom, and not a fancy office. Print your business cards on modest paper, and at your corner print store, rather than throwing around Moo cards; catch the train or the bus instead of flying around or travelling in luxury. After you’ve followed all this, if you still are short, then use a hack – use google docs, notepad, or one of the many free tools out there which do the job, will make you put in twice in amount of work and time – because it looks like time is the only currency you have. If your time is precious and you value it, and you are a growing business, then you have no excuse to be a cheapo.

You can spot a good team, by their ability to differentiate, what’s their core competency, where they can make a difference, and what is non-core and can rely on dependable tools, and pay for it.

Next time, you look at the conversion funnel and ponder why your customers are not converting, make sure you are not looking at a version of you on the other side. Bootstrapping, and being a cheapo, are two very different things.

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Bootstrapping – What To Do When You Get Rejected #BootUpINDIA

Very few product companies make it big without taking external funding. The stories that are shared in the industry are all about companies that have targeted large markets, hit a phase of extremely high growth and have taken external capital to fund that growth. There are very few large (in terms of size / impact) companies that have bootstrapped their way to a product company. This is because products are notoriously hard and take a long time to build and become profitable.

Assume that you have spent a year or so building a prototype for a product and got some initial customers and realised that you need more resources to complete your product. For whatever reasons, assume your proposal gets rejected by Angel or Venture investors you approach. This comes a huge setback to you. Not able get the resources you hoped for means that you have to go back to the drawing board and rethink your plans. What should you do now? Here is a basic outline to help you rethink. None of this advice is new, but it would still help to put it in the context.

Understand Why

The first question to ask is, are you planning to be a large company? A large company does not mean a profitable or successful company in a niche market. A large company is a company that addresses a large market and needs to reach a sizable revenue, say $50 million in 5 years. If you are not targeting a large market, you are probably not looking to become a large company.

If you are not attempting to break into a large market, you are probably not of much interest to investors or you may not even need that much investment. Products built for niche markets are easier to break and sustain and if you survive the initial torrid years, can be very profitable too. The trick is to survive the torrid initial years.

Get Into Hermit Mode

If you are totally committed to be a product company and have no other sources of funding (i.e. services), you have to conserve every bit of cash you can. This means you cannot hire. Now before you think that this will be dreadful, think about the power of one. Gabriel Weinberg of DuckDuckGo was a one man army against Google for many years. His post on not hiring changed my thinking a lot. Evan Williams ran Blogger.com all by himself after he could not pay salaries to the team. Also read blogs that celebrate bootstrapping, like 37Signal’s SignalVsNoise.

Learn All Skills

This means that you will have to learn all the skills yourself. These include:

  1. Web Design
  2. Writing
  3. Software Development
  4. Deployment
  5. Growth Hacking
  6. Web Marketing.

Though it may seem like a long list, it is not that hard. Tools and help are readily available and you will get better as time goes on. Read this very interesting story recently shared on HackerNews of a developer who built a simple product as a side project and that is now earning $50k per year.

Teach and Share

One of the big advantages of our times is that it is very easy to publish something. So keep a blog and keep updating it. If you write honestly and share your learnings, you will start building an audience slowly. Slowly you will get recognized as a thought leader in the space and people will start respecting you. Also by sharing your learnings, you will present a face to your product. People like to buy from real people and feel a human connection, rather than buying from nameless, faceless large companies.

Tune Out From the Ecosystem

This is a tough one, but understand that the goal of the ecosystem is to celebrate funded startups and is stacked in the favour of those who get funded. The reason is simple, it is an existential reason for the ecosystem. If more and more bootstrapped companies start becoming successful, then what is the use of the ecosystem? So don’t waste your time attending networking events or making presentations too often at these places. It is more important that you utilize your mindspace in creating something unique and beautiful.

Stay in The Game

Finally, the most common advice you will get from anywhere is “hang in there”. I know there is this other one that goes like “he who runs away, lives to fight another day”. But in this phase of your life, the most important word for you is grit. You will have to find a way to stay motivated. This means that you will have to slow down and think of this as a marathon. Work reasonable hours, take breaks, do what you like, read books etc. If you are feeling lonely, think about Nelson Mandela who spent years in solitary confinement or if you are feeling under appreciated, think about Vincent Van Gogh, who was never celebrated in his lifetime. Or Galileo who was killed for discovering the truth and challenging conventional wisdom. Progress in this world has never come cheap.

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Bootstrapping – Boon or Bane for Product Startups #BootUpINDIA

On August 14th, 2014 iSPIRT, the industry enabler that is creating a vibrant eco-system for promoting, encouraging, supporting and enabling product companies out of India, organized a very useful online discussion on the concept of bootstrapping. Titled ‘Bootstrapping – Boon or Bane’, the discussion explored various facets of bootstrapping, including its relevance, benefits, limitations, and challenges.

Sharad Sharma, founder of iSPIRT kicked off the conversation with a very incisive observation that the startup community, largely driven by the media, tends to celebrate and showcase startups only when they receive angel or institutional funding. How true is that!!! There are a number of very successful and modestly successful startups, many of who are deserving of the praise and showcase, but they get reported about only when they close an investment round. (I am not sure if the media is to blame entirely. I suspect companies too reach out to media only after they have received an investment round, perhaps because they believe that funding makes the ‘story saleable’ for the media.).

Avinash Raghava, startup eco-system builder and the driving force behind iSpirit shared that over 65 of the 140+ companies they have profiled, were indeed bootstrapped. Of course, some of them may have tried to seek VC money and started to bootstrap if they were not successful in raising capital. However, that they have succeeded in being showcase-worthy by iSPIRT, is indeed commendable.

The panel explored whether bootstrapping & angel/VC funding are either-or strategies or is there merit in a hybrid model. While the panel agreed that building a business with customer’s money is nicer than building a business with VC money, Bhanu Chopra, founder of Rategain(who has built a globally successful company that was bootstrapped) and Sharad Sharma suggested that there are no set rules, and companies should evaluate their strategies depending on the merits of the options available. (It is relatively easier to bootstrap for companies that address enterprise customers than B2B companies.).

Ramesh Loganathan of Progress Software added that while startups have to evaluate what’s the right way for them to fund their venture, it’s not just about the money, but the mentoring and advisory that comes along with that money, that is more valuable at the early stages. First-time entrepreneurs who have no experience of building a business, or even a full product, can benefit enormously from the perspectives and learnings of more experienced individuals. Now, whether this advice is available with or without money is immaterial.

Bootstrapping is not equally relevant or appropriate for all concepts/products/services: In some cases, it maybe possible to build the foundation or a company through bootstrapping, but you may need external capital to grow. In some cases, it may be possible to grow at a healthy rate through bootstrapping, and internal accruals may enable the company to even grow at a healthy rate. However, Bhanu elaborated that at some stage, the company may need to explore inorganic growth and may have to seek external capital.

Shekhar Kirani of Accel Partners, who has a unique perspective as a member of two hugely successful bootstrapped ventures, and is now a part of the investor community, was of the view that since all ventures need capital, the entrepreneur has to make an assessment on whether the idea needs VC money or are the idea & market conditions more suitable for bootstrapping.

He further explained that companies like Facebook, Twitter, Quora, etc. could not have been built without VC money as these businesses needed to invest a lot to build scale so that monetization opportunities arise. He added the once there are others in the market offering similar benefits, it is almost always difficult to leapfrog without adequate capital, and in such situations, bootstrapping may not be the right approach.

VCs have a lot of respect for companies that are bootstrapped. Bootstrapping demonstrates the entrepreneur’s commitment and conviction, both critical parameters for investors. In fact, Shekhar shared that even in the US, Accel invests in a number of companies that have built a reasonably sized business through bootstrapping, and Accel was the first institutional investor for scaling up.

Bootstrapping forces you to focus on building a strong ‘business’: For, Ahimanikya of DocEngage, one of the benefits of bootstrapping is that you are forced to think of revenues from day one. He added that it has become fashionable for entrepreneurs to seek VC money to pay for their lifestyle or for their own salaries, and felt that this approach, which does not have an element of risk-taking by the entrepreneurs was damaging for the startup community.

Bhanu mentioned that bootstrapping allowed them to focus on building a fundamentally strong product with a strong customer value proposition. It also instilled very strong fiscal discipline within the company.

All panelists agreed that for bootstrapping to be successful, it was important for an entrepreneur to be adequately prepared to multi-task and to be a multi-skilled. Else it becomes very difficult to sustain a bootstrapped venture. Panelists also agreed that at some stage, if the company needs to change gears to scale up using VC funding, they need to be prepared for a fundamentally different way of growing the business. If they are not prepared, they may miss out on some large opportunities.

To summarize: It was, as Sharad Sharma put it, a very thoughtful discussion, do watch the video for mode details.

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#BootUpINDIA – Giving Independence to Indian Startups!

Being Independent is a fundamental right of all living being. But, as entrepreneurs and startups, when we face tons of challenge and deal with sheer hardship we end up submitting to various ideas that may or may not resemble our need.

Think about why you become an entrepreneur in the first place –  what is it that you wanted to solve and how you are creating value. The support system around us tends to make us believe that there is always one way to excel. So we start with a dream and then end up getting formated to a belief that we never subscribed to.

As an entrepreneur I wanted to build a business and I wanted to make money. But creating value has been always on top of my head. Solving a real problem and finding someone to pay for it is not such a hard thing, as long as you stay with the problem instead of dreaming to become rich overnight. There is no shortcut to success. There is no easy path.

So Bootstrappers, rejoice!

Finally, there is something for you that celebrates your independence.

BootUpINDIA is for you. So, spread the word. Get your friends to apply.

BootUPIndia-home

BootUpINDIA is the result of intense internal discussions within iSPIRT. Check out how we think about these issues and sharpen our thinking about making the ecosystem better in this video

Happy Independence Day! BootUpINDIA today!

 

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BrowserStack: Redefining Web Testing, Globally

BrowserStack helps you test your website (internal or public) on 300+ desktop and mobile browsers on different Windows, Mac & mobile OS flavors. It solves the problem of not having to setup and maintain multiple Virtual machines and devices to test your website. Ritesh Arora and Nakul Aggarwal are the founding team members. The strength of BrowserStack currently is 50+ employees.

Introduction

You are a web developer, you develop a piece of functionality and you want to test to make sure it works for everyone, irrespective of operating system, device, or browser they use. In an ideal, standards-driven world, this would be a trivial problem: you code using the standard, you run it by a compiler/validator which makes sure your code indeed follows the standard, and you are all set to go.

Unfortunately, the world of web development is much more complex:

  • All web code (HTML, Javascript) are really instructions to Browser (‘interpreted’ by Browser, rather than being ‘compiled’ into machine code that OS understands), so standards-compliance of the particular browser determines the accuracy of your code.
  • HTML and Javascript standards have evolved over the years and so different versions and types of browsers may have different level of standards-compliance. All these different versions of browsers are in use on different systems out there.
  • Given this dependency on Browser (which in turn depends on OS which in turn depends on device), we have a large number of combinations possible, each of which may produce a variance from standard and the code will not work as intended.

Given this complexity, there are 1000s of combinations that may need to be tested to give the confidence your piece of functionality will work for everyone.

Developers (and companies) address this problem by doing one or more of the following:

  1. Identifying a few (10-15) common combinations of OS-Browser-Version and focus all testing there – This is risk-based approach and may be too risky for some companies.
  2. Create Virtual Machines for OS-Browser-Version combination (100-200) and use them as needed – Cost of managing so many virtual machine images can be prohibitive for many companies
  3. ‘Rent’ pre-created virtual machines from 3rd party to make #2 more cost effective.

BrowserStack offers live, web-based browser testing to developers, by ‘renting’ virtual machines with desired configuration. Developer uses a familiar web interface and gets an instance of virtual machine with desired OS-Browser-Version combination to test against.

The founders started BrowserStack to solve their own problems – while consulting (after 3 startups), they found it was very hard to ensure web applications have been tested on all possible configurations.

BrowserStack-Time-line

By May ’14, they had 400K registrations and 20K paying customers.

BrowserStack-CustomerGrowth

The Product

Features

BrowserStack has all the features that a developer needs to effectively test their application.

BrowserStack-Features

Screenshot Service

They also offer screenshot service (how does a page look in different browsers), primarily for web designers who want to ensure their page looks good and consistent across devices.

BrowserStack-Screenshot

BrowserStack-PN

Automation Testing

Browserstack’s Automate Product enables automated testing of your web applications over 300+ browser combinations in 2 ways:

  • Selenium Cloud Testing – You can set it up as a Selenium WebDriver and code your tests in your favorite language. You can use their dashboard or their REST APIs to access information about your test runs.
  • Javascript Testing API – You can use it to run Javascript unit and functional tests, standalone, or with testing tools like Yeti, TestSwarm, etc.

They will soon support real mobile devices for Automate. You could run your tests on real mobile devices, get 100% accurate results and avoid erroneous simulators. This is a big deal.

Differentiators

While they have a full bouquet of feature, there are 3 areas they differentiate themselves from their competitors.

Usability

BrowserStack is easier to use than some of their competitors that I tried. Even configuring the local testing (which is a tricky concept) was straightforward and I could complete it in a few minutes.

BrowserStack-Home

Technology

They pride themselves on the technology they have built to enable these features, and the continued effort they put into it. 80% of their 50+ strong team is developers. This is not visible but can be a key differentiator in such a developer-centric product.

Local Testing

They enable you to test local setup. Given the fact that most of the time you want to test before you make your application public, this is a powerful feature. This has been done well even though many of their competitors also offer it.

BS-Configureyoursite

BrowserStack-Mobile

Product Development

The entire team is 50+ employees with 80% being developers. Technology consists of but not limited to plethora of languages including Ruby and RoR, Python, C/C++, Java, platforms such as AWS and co-located servers as well as iOS and Android development.

Most of the development effort goes into making the existing features awesome and robust. Some of the areas the team continues to innovate are:

  • Infrastructure of real mobile devices
  • Using better streaming technology to make the screen more responsive
  • Improve Local testing
  • Supporting newer browsers/OS mix

Market

Potentially this is a very big market, given the large number of web developers in the world, and this number is going up. However, this also seems to be a crowded space – there are many players offering similar services that are largely undifferentiated (or have hard-to-perceive differences). Their major competitors are Saucelabs, crossbrowsertesting, Browsershots, etc. SauceLabs primarily focuses on automation testing (its founders include founder of Selenium), Crossbrowsertesting doesn’t have good interface, and Browsershots is very limited in functionality. They are much better placed than their competitors. They aim to reach 1M developers.

BrowserStackFacts & Figures

They have some marquee names in their customer list. Also, their partnership with Microsoft through modern.ie (Microsoft’s attempt to help developers test their app on older versions of IE) has been very beneficial to them in bringing customers in.

BrowserStack-Customers

Product Vision and Strategy

They are totally focused on making BrowserStack a technically and usably superior product in the market by far. Their roadmap for the next 12 months includes ability to testing on real mobile devices (sort of a ‘device farm’ available on demand), improving the product speed and doing more aggressive marketing of the product.

From a vision perspective, Ritesh would like to give a browser-on-demand feel to every developer in the world – it should be so easy to load (just like I open a Chrome browser on my machine), so easy to use, that it feels like a native/local instance of the browser that you are testing on. They intend to be the de-facto standard for web testing world-wide.

BrowserStack-Marketshare

The Road Ahead

There is no reason to believe that in future, web technologies will become so standardized that cross-browser testing will not be required. In fact the trend is in opposite direction, with the proliferation of devices, OS and Browsers, we are getting more and more fragmented. Given that future, BrowserStack is well poised to be the first choice for development teams and companies to do cross-browser testing.

Couple of things they need to watch out for:

  1. Enterprise Software Development Process is where lots of engineering dollars get spent – and that usually goes to large organizations (Microsoft, Oracle, HP, and many other process/QA/IDE companies). How BrowserStack fits into that eco-system may very well determine how big BrowserStack can become – developer driving the adoption may be the start but it is unlikely to be the stable state.
  2. Being a technology focused company and located in India has its challenges. Exposure is limited, and also it is hard to get talent in specialized areas like design and product management. They need to address this, and their focus on marketing over next 12 months (as articulated by Ritesh) will help address this.

They have a bright future ahead, good luck to them!

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Appointy: Building a Marketplace of Services

Appointy_logoAppointy is an online scheduling software for small and medium sized businesses to help them grow exponentially.  Today, you can buy a movie ticket, flight or train ticket online. But what about your Salon, Spa, Doctor, Dentist, Hot Air balloon ride or even your pet groomer? Appointy is helping these businesses start scheduling online and fill their open times by reaching their customers faster. The company is founded by Nemesh Singh (CEO) along with home grown 4 key team members.

Introduction

In the good old days, if you needed a haircut, you would walk down to the nearest salon, wait for a while if you happen to go on the weekend, and get the service you desired. Need to see a doctor? No problem – there is one near the market, you go there and wait for your turn, and get treated. Needed a tuition? You talk to a few friends to find a good teacher, go there to register yourself for a year, and you are all set.

Things have changed over the years:

  • Service consumers like us have much less time and patience to wait for the service to be delivered
  • ‘Talk to a few friends’ has gone away as a reference mechanism because living close-by doesn’t mean knowing each other
  • Services (at least in developed economies like US) have become very expensive, service providers have proliferated, and perhaps most importantly, Internet has penetrated most lives.

So today, if you need a haircut, you search online for businesses in your neighborhood, you look for the one with best references/recommendations, you call up to make sure you will have 0 waiting time when you arrive, and you use your smartphone to entertain you if you do have to wait.

Need a doctor? You go to one or more sites that specialize in doctor search and use their recommendations and appointment engine to book a slot online.

Need a tuition? You will look for one that offers trial classes, you will compare prices in addition to credibility of the teachers, research their past results (which are all available online thanks to user generated content), and only then purchase the services – and you do all this without leaving the comfort of your home.

As you can see, in good old days, you bought the service at the time of consuming the service; you walked in, waited in line, got a haircut, and made the payment. Or you walked in, waited in line, got a prescription written by the doctor, you made the payment. Today, you buy the service (you may or may not make the payment at that point), and arrive to receive the service only when it is your time, thus cutting all the waiting time. Buying the service and consuming the service now happen at different points in time.

If you are a business that sells services to consumers – doctor, dentist, career coach, salon, spa – this behavioral change is very impactful. It means that people want to complete the first part of transaction (buy the service, or at least buy the right to get a service by booking an appointment) without arriving at your business – they will transact through phone, mail, and other technological means rather than being physically present at your business. Technology is disrupting the service purchase, and it increasingly resembles a product purchase.

The act of purchasing a service is usually called ‘book an appointment’. I think this is a very misleading description – it hides the commerce part of the act. Given the fact that the business sets aside a slot of time to serve you when you ‘book an appointment’, this in fact should be no different than ordering a printer on Flipkart or Amazon, or ordering in your nearby BestBuy (if you are in US) and driving down to pick it up from the store.

Appointy offers online scheduling for small and medium sized businesses. Here is a better way of saying this: Appointy is the platform through which small and medium sized businesses sell their services. They have helped their clients sell services worth $350M so far and do about $2M sale a day.

Today, Appointy handles 15K appointments and signs up 70 new businesses every single day and this number keeps growing rapidly. They have about 60K businesses using their platform for their scheduling needs, and they are on almost every major street of US.

Appointy works seamlessly on devices and web – experience on mobile has been specifically designed to fit that form factor – to support their clients who increasingly want to do things on the go.

The Product

The story

It is interesting how the appointment product, that Appointy sells, came about. They have been building an appointment tool since 2006, as plug-in to popular CMS platforms (WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, etc.). This was in response to the need for a scheduling page for many businesses who used these CMS to create their website. Idea was to give it for free, and generate revenue from consulting and development projects from these clients.

It didn’t have much traction initially. When Appointy created another product – a free plug-in to add Facebook ‘Like’ support on a site – they used this plug-in to advertise their scheduling plug-in. The Facebook plugin saw 10K downloads in no time, and the word spread about their appointment tool too.

During 2010-2011, the company went into a financial crunch as the development projects dried up. While looking for other sources of revenue, they realized they had about 20K businesses using Appointy, for free!. They had continued to enhance the software based on customer feedback, and it now had a healthy adoption in the market. They also started noticing the mails from some customers enquiring about paid plans – businesses wanted to get better service and support and they were willing to pay for it!

Company pivoted and made Appointy their core product. They created paid plans and started actively developing the product for multiple verticals, while keeping it a generic product.  And rest, as they say, is history!

Features

Appointy boasts of a rich feature-set, including features like easy scheduling without keyboard, drag and drop rescheduling, real-time notification of information like Facebook or Linked-In, online payments at the time of booking,  staff management, weekly customer satisfaction report to  build online reputation and intelligent CRM with powerful marketing tools to reach customers faster, etc.

Appointy is way ahead of its competitors in terms of feature richness, serving around 100 verticals. Here is a look at some of them.

Customized Appointment Site for business

For a business, it is very important that any add-on software like Appointy’s blends into their offering and not create a disruptive experience for the customers. Appointy allows their clients to either have a standalone page for their appointments (via a subdomain under appointy.com) or embed it in their existing site. It also allows them extensive customization of look and feel to ensure exact match in terms of colors, fonts, layout, etc.

Since people can come directly to the subdomain to subdomain directly, Appointy provides options for creating it like a mini product page with lots of business information.

Appointy embedded in a website

Flexibility in configuring availability by business

A business requires a flexible booking system so that it can optimize the slots available with each of its resources (people or machines). Appointy allows the business to configure different available time slots with different resources, and allows various granularity of slot sizes. It also allows a rich integration with personal calendar for the staff so that they can see all their appointments in 1 place.

Setting flexible hours for staff

Google Calendar Integration

Rich Business Management features

Appointy collects lots of data about business performance. It provides the clients with this data via a rich dashboard for quick review of business performance, and a number of reports. Whether it is analyzing the footfalls in the business compared to last month/year, analyzing this month’s revenue, categorizing customers to analyze trends, you can perform all these analyses through Appointy.

Dashboard with monthly appointment data

Customer Management

Given that Appointy manages all the appointments, it has huge amount of data about customer behavior before, during and after service delivery. Appointy offers a rich CRM layer to help their clients leverage this data. The intent is to help the client grow their business. Creating a last minute deal for the slots going empty, driving a loyalty program by giving special discounts to highly active customers, or collecting feedback from the customers when they are visiting the business or through emails, Appointy allows the business to drive customer engagement and create an extremely positive experience for their (clients’) customers.

Creating Deals Through Appointy

Differentiators

There are many appointment scheduling software in the market. However, there are 3 areas in which Appointy differentiates itself from the competition:

Focus on helping clients grow their business

This is part of their strategy and this shows up in the way features are designed and conceptualized and the way data is used to create business opportunities.

Complete CRM system

They are very focused on helping the business manage their customers right from within Appointy and they are successful in doing so.

Data Analytics Platform

Appointy collects lots of data around business performance and customer interactions and provide a platform for their clients to make data-driven decisions.

Development Process

Team

They are a small team of 10 people, most of whom have been working on it since the product was conceptualized. The product is built on Microsoft technologies – .NET & SQL Server. Each person has an expertise in one technology but can multitask at the same time, and as Nemesh says, “jack of all trades and master of one!” Since it is hard to get good people in the small city they are located in, they have outsourced their support and onboarding.

Product management

To identify new feature needs, they rely on customer data analysis, trial users’ behavior, and feature requests from existing customers. Since their support team engages deeply with the customer, they play a major role in surfacing the customer needs. They rank all these new requests and rank them to come up with most requested features every 3 months, and design it in a generic way so that it works for everyone. Idea is to keep the out-of-box experience simple, but allow rich features to those who need it, without cluttering the experience of those who don’t.

They focus on usability of their features a lot. They measure end customer behavior (using MixPanel and Totango) and analyze the data to come up with improvements, which they test with their customers and roll them out. They also borrow ideas from well-known products out there in calendaring space so that they can provide familiar and high-quality experience to their clients and their customers.

Release management

Their pace of adding features has changed over the years. Five years ago, they would add about 200 small and big features a year. Now they add about 20 features in a year. This is not only because there are no more glaring feature gaps, but also because customers get confused when large number of features are getting added at a rapid pace. This is also the reason why they have moved to a quarterly release rhythm from a monthly release one. To aid the customer in wading through multiple features, they added “settings search” page, similar to what Chrome offers for its settings.

A typical feature will be conceptualized, built and staged in their test area, go through some beta testing by select customers, and rolled into the next quarterly release.

Market

Reach

It is a large market that Appointy operates in. There are 26M SMB in USA alone. Appointy supports 100 verticals (lifestyle and health primarily) which is about 10M businesses. 9M of these still use pen and paper for their scheduling needs.  Appointy’s strategy is to focus on the remaining 1M (and growing rapidly) business since they understand online scheduling. Today Appointy is on almost every major street of USA.

They have about 60,000+ registered businesses globally and are growing at the rate of 5-6% month-on-month. Appointy believes that their product is their strength. They haven’t spent a dollar till date on Sales & Marketing!

Their biggest competitor is pen & paper scheduling. A few others are Bookfresh.com (Acquired by Square now), Mindbodyonline.com ($23 million funded company), Appointment-plus.com and Genbook.com. All of them offer similar services. MindBody is interesting because their strategy is to convert businesses that use pen and paper to come online and start using online tools like those for appointment. So they work with a different customer segment than Appointy’s.

Product Vision and Strategy

Currently, Appointy have about 60K businesses signed up. The goal is to get this number to 250K by 2 years and 1M businesses by 5 years, primarily by totally focusing on helping their clients grow their business and becoming their partner in business creation and development. Today, they create service revenue worth $500K for their clients in a year. They want to help the businesses grow 20-25% in a year by bringing new customers to them.

Couple of ways they want to achieve this:

  1. Local directory service (City Pages) with appointment facility – If someone needs a haircut, they can go to Appointy directory and look up the best one that meets their needs and book it there and then. This creates an alternative source of customers for their clients.
  2. Help businesses sell open times – Every service slot going vacant is a revenue opportunity lost. Appointy intends to create solutions that can allow open slots to be sold and revenue generated. Creating last-minute deals is one service that is offered already, they continue to work on more.

They keep exploring alternative revenue sources too. For example, aggregating all the commerce transactions through a single payment gateway can help get lower transaction costs for their customers as well as get an alternative revenue source for Appointy in terms of per-transaction fees.

The Road Ahead

Appointy has come a long way from where they developed Appointy as a free plug-in. They still have a long way to go. There are a few things they need to focus on:

  1. Position the product better – The product has lots of potential to be used in a wide variety of ways – calling it a scheduling software severely restricts these possibilities. Appointy needs to reimagine the product positioning.
  2. Change the playing field –This is related to previous point: they need to get out of the ‘appointment booking’ vocabulary and get into ‘services marketplace’ vocabulary. They need to talk about and think of themselves as an e-commerce company, à la Flipkart of Services.
  3. Get access to talent pool – They also need to make sure they have access to a large talent pool. They have a huge opportunity in their hands, and they need to leverage it quickly. Sitting in a small city, this may be hard to accomplish.

Local services marketplace is heating up, Amazon, eBay, startups are buzzing with activity. Even though these are different kinds of services (hire a painter for your house for 3 days), it is the same space that Appointy operates in. If Appointy (and other online scheduling software companies) don’t play in this market, they can be disrupted by these services marketplace. Time is right for Appointy to change its game, and a huge opportunity awaits them.  Good luck for a bright future ahead!

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Wooqer – Successful customer adoptions validate product tagline

logo-2Wooqer is a platform primarily designed to drive communication & engagement across cross-functional, geo-distributed enterprise groups. Wooqer tagline reads “One platform. Unlimited possibilities” and true to this statement, its customers have leveraged it in many use cases where people communicate & engage, specifically in:

– Training & assessments: Induction, product, soft skills or other customer training – replace/supplement face-to-face efforts.
– HO & Branch Operations: Operational activities like SOP into checklists with tasks & workflows that are track-able, real-time.
– Mobile Reporting: Supporting field teams operating out of office (e.g., sales) to report/order in real-time, from mobile devices.
– Knowledge Management: Enterprise knowledge store with right information, accessible by right stakeholders as needed.
– Audits, visits & compliance: Run business on hard data gathered exactly what needed, on-time & without 3rd parties

As you’ll see in this review, all this seems possible and the secret behind Wooqer’s “#1 adoption platform” marketing chest-thumping, comes from adhering to basic tenets of product management – Create products customers’ need, build it well and above all set & meet their expectations. Wooqer team has gone about systematically uncovering enterprise customers’ engagement and communication needs and then built a platform from well-thought-out building blocks. Their promise is to get IT department out of businesses’ way with a Do-It-Yourself (DIY) solution. Going by customer testimonials such as

DIY method allows you to do business understand/enabling processes without taking recourse on IT personnel […] works very well if you want to add value to business.” from Rakesh Pandey Ex-President, Raymond Shop, a Wooqer Customer, they have delivered on it.

This is not to say their journey so far was easy, or slam-dunk. In this fast-paced business world, even SMB owners are moving away from Do-it-for-me model to keep up, and that is definitely the case in large companies. CIOs just provide infrastructure and get out of the businesses’ way. Such trends bode well for platforms like Wooqer, as they provide flexibility for “continuous” business process deployments. Wooqer like solutions are very much a need of the day as organizations nowadays bank on resulting employee productivity improvements.

Wooqer Customers  & Why adoption matters?

Paid customers in Retail sector & Banking/BFSI using Wooqer are:

Wooqer Customers

It is definitely important for any company to have paying customers for various reasons beyond financial. It is equally important for early-stage product companies, to stay focused on adoption (by customers and users if they are different). This is because monetization/revenue does not equate to adoption by satisfied customer who continues to use the product long after purchase and it is function of the business model and pricing strategy (eg freemium). Adoption, on the other hand, is always an opportunity to monetize and is purely a function of product value. Thus using appropriate (read as non-vanity) metric – such as Wooqer’s “#1 adoption platform”–  is important internally and for marketing communication, as it calls out how a business keeps its scores. Interestingly in Wooqer’s case, this focus on successful customer adoption has not only helped them to pivot better but also improve the value they are bringing to customers from what I gather. Any venture – be it an India-first company going after newer high-growth sectors in India (e.g. ecommerce, retail) or Global company coming out of India – after all has to have a metric that is nothing but a measure of the impact it creates in the market place.

The Need – What is the pain being addressed?

Take Brand or Marketing Managers for instance. It is not uncommon they are asked to measure the effectiveness of post-launch product GTM activities and spend along each milestone of this journey below.

Track Leads - Wooqer

   When Wooqer started in 2009, initial focus was to help Brand Managers to be more efficient in creating right content. Once they set out to address their pain point, market gave them the insight into other areas of this post-launch GTM activities journey that are far more fundamental and timely. By staying focused on adoption, I’d opine, founders pivoted their attention there.

In early part of this decade in India’s high-growth sectors (e.g. ecommerce, retail), one of the major problems was the lack of consistency that came from rapid growth. Take retailer Aditya Birla group Madura F&L. With the rapid evolution and expansion of the Indian retail environment they were rolling outlets at a fast pace, as their ability to morph in response to market demands and consumer needs is nonnegotiable. Wooqer focused on these consistency issues.

Engaging and managing their workforce is highly important as success within the retail industry is directly correlated to supporting a consistent brand image and providing superior customer experience. Retail Stores staff count is between 2-4 in small stores to 13-15 in bigger ones, and they have high-school level education. With broadly distributed locations and employee base, it is crucial that consistent standard operating procedures be established and implemented to facilitate their ambitious expansion plans. Marketing and managing many hundreds or thousands of retail products is difficult as is, but once inconsistencies start creeping in around employee knowledge about business workflow and processes, it causes productivity loss.

The Product

My Wooqer - 4 stepsWooqer’s solution to such class of problems that demand improved employee productivity, is synthesized into this platform comprised of tools that enables integrated, two-way, real-time and measurable content exchange channel between the employee producers and consumers of content in a large corporate setting. It is deployed as a multi-tenant, tenant-isolated, elastic cloud-based SaaS offering (a delivery model but not SaaS as a sales model i.e., direct sales, not self-service). It enables each of the Wooqer’s clients to exchange & track the content between any of their business producer and content consumers using a simple 4-step methodology as shown in the adjacent picture.

 

So what are the key insights that Wooqer had? Ones that told them that they can solve an enterprise pain point such as employee productivity with a software application? I would contend the following ones they had uncovered during their systematic search may have something to do with it as these ideas underpin the Wooqer platform.

1. Building block approach

Organizations and teams can explore productivity improvement opportunities through automation where none existed before by equipping their employees with tools, scripted processes & workflows. Wooqer achieves operational effectiveness while enabling flexibility and real time collaboration by reorienting Information, Communication and Collaboration. Modeling how organization groups communicate across distance say between Head Office or Corporate and field offices to support consistency and innovation is a key insight.

Wooqer-Home

Wooqer supports various type of content (files, processes) and gets feedback in a fastest manner thru modular building blocks, which is packaged as checklist, audit, appraisal, data collection, assessments (see picture for sample list). Product collateral like Wooqer compass is also used to mentor, message, monitor and measure the process scripting that users do in the platform.

2. Flexibility to change (sans IT) and track business processes

Information technologies enable key divisions of an organization such as HR, Training, Operations, and Legal, to achieve operational efficiency. In addition, “socially” engaging ecosystem of stakeholders like employees, suppliers, and customers are some of the ways IT partners with business to enhance company’s strategic positioning. For this, the company’s back-end IT infrastructure (“Systems of Record”) must be linked up with the front-line (“Systems of Engagement”), so that information can flow smoothly, and important decisions can be taken in real-time. Wooqer being such platform of engagement, it facilitates user communities to function independently. Supporting business groups that tackle a variety of problems, without requiring them to see scarce IT personnel assistance is a big plus.

3. Look at technology requirements – UX is key to user adoption

One of the pitfalls many application development projects fall into is the failure to take into account the technology changes and the value of the user experience. Needless to say mobile app is very different from a traditional or web app design for the desktop or laptop. Consequently, one needs to take a very different approach for UX and interaction design across these platforms.

To participate in today’s digital economy trends having a platform API is must. Ability to build modular capabilities with lightweight interfaces that don’t require heavy integration are key to connect with business services. Having recently completed Wooqer mobile launch (see above), these important aspects of technology and UX is evidently established well with the team.

Wooqer-on-mobile

Thoughtfully engineering and UX for its target user base has unearthed some contra thinking which comes from deep customer empathy. For instance, staff attrition in retail sector is high (130%) so a single-click handover of work to another employee demonstrates this empathy. Retails users are also not highly educated so Wooqer UX in some areas “deviated” intentionally from standards initially, to enable these users overcome brittleness fear that was felt with slick interfaces shown in prototypes. Even in mobile, they have leveraged both the ergonomics and capabilities of the device and married it well to the existing back-end services to offer a full feature rollout.

It is worth calling out that Wooqer is built as a Private Internet that enables any user ‘to be more’ by creating solutions to their work challenges on their own without sms, email, or phone calls in the shortest possible time by structuring work and measuring results. Prashant A Bhonsle, President at Wooqer adds their adoption drive goes well beyond enterprise users into SME as “Wooqer can not only give cost efficiencies to startups but also help build a culture of collaboration & quick response to market changes because of seamless data & information flow across organization“.

Platform Bells and Whistles  – ‘Have More’

Platform has 5 core features and many add on but all comes as a part of the base subscription fee. Content consumers get access to all assigned content either via native apps in mobile devices (iOS and Android) or web-based interface in desktop that content producers have published typically from their desktop. The content can be in (m)any format(s) like video, documents, audio, flash, etc and all sizes are supported. Assigning is a simple process that “publishes” the content to a list of selected group business consumers. Fine-grain publisher control for publishing like collating them into chapters & modules, ability to verify detailed content understanding, get feedback & start private or social discussion are all built-in.

3 steps - Wooqer

Business users are tracked by the roles they play in the organization – though the platform personalizes to individuals who fill the role. The separation between role and individual is maintained at the platform level which help retain role context & knowledge thru people change.

4 simple workfowsBusiness processes are launched with a workflow that is custom-built around the content at the time of publishing. Creating a process to gather data can be as simple as a survey or more involved to collect any kind of business data. Processes to map workflows in real-time exists including canned workflows like Approvals, Reviews, Complaint Management, Audits, Reports. Adding due dates, escalations, milestones, notifications, and conditions like parallel or sequential branching are supported along with maintaining records for posterity. Workflows can be created in a few minutes and kept current, by updating them in a few seconds.

Support to create alerts, reminders & milestones to summarize business reports and download then into tools like Excel or archive them as per business/IT practices require, are built-out. All this enables Wooqer users (producers) to run their business on data. Getting reports as well as submitting or seeing them or asking any question getting response either periodically or one-time from users (consumers) are possible even when they are away from office.

5 surveysOther personalization and socialization features include spotlighting a personal document, real time talk and feedback (using SMS, with urgency indicator) in the context of a document or business social context. The product is evolving with the users and sector adoption without customer-specific customization and retaining the platform nature. For instance when the banking sector customers came onboard to use Wooqer, issues such as security, uptime and regulation related features were added that also benefitted the retail segment without additional cost or upgrade burden. As they foray into addition sectors (emerging, industrial) and geographies(US, UK), the team seems confident in their ability to sustain a vibrant roadmap with “dip-in, dip-out” product management focus to zoom in and out to see the big picture without loosing the details of a requirement or feature.

The Market

Wooqer platform is primarily designed to drive communication & engagement and hence belongs in the business application market.  It shares this space the likes of Microsoft with its Sharepoint product that was recently strengthened by the $1.2B Yammer acquisition.  With social HR tech, IT and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software as adjacent spaces, it is part of the broader circle. IDC analysis pegs this market worth for business social networking at $4.5B by 2016, a clear indication that there’s still a lot of open space in the social technology realm — especially in the employee productivity application market where Wooqer squarely sits.

Testimonials & Publications

testimonialsCustomer and industry testimonials for Wooqer are very positive especially from the likes of Retail Association of India, in academic publications (IIMB case study that is currently a Harvard Business Case, SHRM paper on “Solving emerging HR challenges – The Wooqer Way”) as well as in commercial press. Impact they have created in their areas of focus is also worth noting.

• Communication & Engagement: Create a culture of inclusion; work towards a common goal with reduced attrition & higher motivation

• Training & assessments: 100% coverage, more knowledgeable staff and lower cost of training

• HO & Branch Operations: A more consistent experience for your customers and objective data on operational parameters

To quote a Wooqer customer from a press article : Wooqer is becoming a single point of contact with the entire network and for all operational activities. Training emerged as a large-use case as we found ourselves being able to achieve a lot more with the same set of resources. Wooqer has assisted in the democratization of ideas by making sharing of ideas and thoughts more free and open. It has also helped in seeking a majority opinion before implementing the key operational decisions. Hence Wooqer as a platform has been able to address many loopholes. It did take us some time to get started with the platform and discover our own ways of working. The discovery continues till date, as the organization continues to find new uses of the platform.

The Company & Competition

Wooqer is a 5+ year old, bootstrapped product startup company with significant market traction. They pivoted early on with their India-first market learnings. They have established a strong foothold in Retail sector in India and foraying into other sectors like Banking/BFSI and industrial houses in India and abroad (US & UK). They see email and spreadsheet use and ad-hoc way of doing as the primary competition (Sharepoint  & Salesforce to a lesser degree) to displace or be compared with. Annual Licensing on per-user/per-store basis with professional consulting for initial deployment is their monetization model. The Company took first two years to build the platform and it is in commercial operation for the past three years.

The Founders & the team

Vishal Purohit, with his co-founder Pavitra Saxena, started Wooqer in 2008. Vishal was founder for GarageAgain Ventures and co-founder of CoreObjects (later acquired by Symphony Services) as well as everse/Velocient prior to bootstrapping Wooqer. His technology, sales, operations, chief-executive and advisory roles paved his path to Wooqer. Co-founder Pavitra Saxena started as an engineer in Cognizant and soon become senior architect there and later at CoreObjects. Pavitra is Wooqer #1 and together, they have over 40 years of technology & enterprise software experience.  Currently, Wooqer team’s strength is about 40+ with a few outside Bangalore/ abroad. The team includes IIT/NIT and IIM grads, and is roughly 60% engineering/quality and the rest in sales and operations like customer advocacy. They have a unique video-based hiring process and are investing in skill-building.

Road ahead

Though Wooqer currently caters to the banking or retail sectors, predominantly, the use cases described above can certainly be applicable to many verticals. Mobility is also changing everything.

All business will have customers or employees undoubtedly facing business challenges that can and need to be addressed through a front-line “System of Engagement”, so that information can flow smoothly, and important decisions can be taken in real-time.  Every industry all over the globe is looking to benefit from this increased employee productivity and efficiency, so their prospects look bright.

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workXmate – A cloud based ERP and On Demand SaaS App ecosystem for SMEs

workXmate LogoProduct Nation interviewed Kamal Mansharamani and Atul Bhatia, founders of workXmate – a cloud based ERP & CRM solution designed for SMEs. During the discussion, they share their insights on how technology and external environment changes are creating favorable opportunities for tech entrepreneurs to offer products to the market. Read on…

Can you tell us about your background and motivation to start workXmate?

Kamal Mansharamani, Co-Founder, workXmate

Both Atul and I have been in the software product and services industry for over 2 decades now. We were part of the senior leadership team at DCM – one of the earliest product companies operating out of India. After our stints at DCM each of us has dabbled in to starting our ventures. Atul set up nSys which was a niche player in the verification IP and chip design space. nSys became a market leader within a short span of time, which led to its acquisition by Synopsys. I joined Birlasoft’s leadership team and led its transformation from a 400 member team to about 5000 people over a 7 year span. Post that, I started a startup AlmaMate Info Tech that focused on making graduates employable. I gained great experience running it.

A couple of years ago, we scanned the marketplace searching the next big opportunity that we could work up on. We converged on the resource planning and automation space for SMBs as the segment to target. This was driven by two factors; one by our own past experiences where we faced difficulties to chose the right ERP tool for our startups and second – the technology and globalization changes that are affecting the SMBs. Both of these convinced us that we should provide a practical and effective solution in this space – and this led to setting up of workXmate Technologies.

Could you elaborate a bit more on how the technology and globalization changes are affecting SMBs, and how does your product help SMBs to deal with these? 

Atul Bhatia, Co-Founder, workXmate

Cloud as a technology change has a huge impact on SMB sector world wide. Due to provision of computing services with no upfront investment, it is most attractive to cash strapped SMBs. Also due to the maturity and acceptance of Cloud, most SMBs are now looking to leverage this disruption to their advantage. On a different note, due to liberalization of Indian economy and the proliferation of Internet in India, SMBs operating out of India now have to compete with global players. This has forced them to consider efficiency enhancing solutions.

Our product helps customers to leverage the benefits of cloud based deployment. However, the key differentiator from competition is that our product actually integrates functionality of all point solutions which SMBs use across different departments and offers the same capabilities at affordable costs. Usually, we find most customers managing all their work processes using Tally and excel sheets. workXmate has Apps like CRM, HCM, Project Management, Inventory, Knowledge Management and Intranet seamlessly integrated and working on a single database with a single login. Due to the globalization pressures, as SMEs look to optimize their work activities, our product becomes a compelling proposition.

Great insights! How has your experience been, selling to the initial set of customers and what learning have you had thus far?

We have got off to a very good start, clocking about 25 customers in our first quarter since we formally launched our product. We also have about 50 more customers in the pipeline. The quick ramp up of customers for the product is a good validation of the value that our product provides to our customers. Secondly, it also validates our business model of targeting the services based companies to begin with. We are able to convert most of our leads to paying customers due to our deep understanding and prior experience in services sector. Also, due to the nature of work in the services sector, these segments of customers tend to be more tech-savvy and need to adapt to new technology solutions at a faster pace.

We also realize that all customer acquisition cannot be organic. Hence we are actively looking out for partners and alliances to help proliferate our offerings to the wider market.

Good to hear about your increasing customer base… What are your future plans for the product and the company?

We first want to establish ourselves firmly as the vendor of choice for the Indian SMB customer segment. The next logical step for us is to start selling in International markets. We are studying about the changes we need to make to suit or incorporate geography specific practices in to our product. We expect to target all English speaking countries as part of the first phase of selling abroad.

Excellent! In closing, would you like to provide your thoughts to fellow product entrepreneurs operating out of India?

As product entrepreneurs operating out of India, we believe that these are very exciting times for us. We have a great opportunity to build truly global products, thanks to the globalization and advent of new technologies which provide a level playing ground to entrepreneurs across the world. We would like to be the enabler of success to thousands of small businesses and start-ups as they embark on leading our country to further prosperity.

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A Story of Mobile App. AutoCop, App That Will Make Your Auto Rickshaw Ride Pleasant

AutoCop Android App by ShimBi Labs. AutoCop is social awareness app that allows users to share their experiences of Auto Rickshaw ride with others. It helps a rider to channelize his frustration or good experience of Auto Rickshaw ride and share it on various social media platforms. We aim to facilitate people in India (including Auto Rickshaw drivers) to be more aware of the benefit achieved by accumulating the day­to­day service quality.

We interviewed Siddharth Deshmukh, Founder and CEO of ShimBi Labs. In this conversation, Siddharth explains about the idea behind the AutoCop App, how it can help to solve many of the problem today Auto Rickshaw riders as well as service providers face, his vision and much more…

How did the idea of AutoCop into being?

Early in life I use to use a lot of Auto Rickshaw, later once I bought my car naturally I stopped using them, but in recent for business, I was travelling across the country and sometimes I decided to use Auto Rickshaw. Whenever I am looking for Auto Rickshaw two things I experienced most prominently, it is likely that I will face either of these situations, refuses to go to destination or charges excess money. Earlier also it was the same experience, but this time, I decided to get to the root cause of it and decided to talk to stakeholders. Listen to what they say:

Passenger
“There is no way that the situation is going to change unless the traffic police department take strict measures. An auto rickshaw wala (Auto­rickshaw operator) going to charge excess or refuse to go.”

Auto Rickshaw Wala
“For some destinations, I found it difficult to get passengers. On many occasions, I had to return without any passenger.”

Police
“We are taking action against the errant drivers. But unless there is an active public participation the issue will remain the same”page1image18496page1image18656

I think there is an element of truth in each side, and every point of view needs to be answered after comprehensive study. Moreover, such study is only possible, if we have structured data, if not for all but the majority of such incidents.

So what is solution that you thought?

I think the solution lies in Big Data. We need to collect huge data if possible from users of Auto Rickshaw every time they use it. Once we have uniformly structured data from small Towns to Major Cities and Metropolitan Areas of India. Based on such structured data, It is possible to learn trends, generate heat maps and pinpoint some facts that need to investigate in great details.

For example in Pune at Magarpatta City many Auto Rickshaw Drivers are charging extra. In Navi Mumbai Auto, Rickshaw Drivers are refusing to go to Mumbai. Why because they have their own reasons, sometimes they are valid reason but not always. To take proper action and to find a sustainable solution needs large data, which can through insight and tell us many trends and facts.

How will you collect such data?

We at ShimBi Labs thought of addressing this problem. First step was to create one simple to use Mobile App. to capture user experiences and save them in uniform and structured format.

Then make it available to related Authorities, Auto Rickshaw Unions, NGOs, Data Scientist and Policy Makers. So that it can help making proper decisions and policies.

However, before we create this app. we were very clear on certain points.

1. This app is not for registering complaints.
2. This app is not for abusing anyone.
3. This app is to share your experience of auto rickshaw ride.
4. This app will gather user experience and help setting trends and heat maps.

So what should this App do?

1. Provide an easy way to capture the required data.
2. Data such as Auto Rickshaw number, time and location of the incident.
3. and exactly what happened such as Fare denied, Charge Extra, Meter Tempered and or everything was fine.
4. Provide some useful utilities such as virtual meter, route map etc.
5. Share your Auto Rickshaw ride experience with friends on Facebook and twitter So that is how AutoCop Android App took birth. Learn more about AutoCop App

Any examples of data and trend capture through AutoCop?

App is in very early stage so we are waiting for enough data. But following are few examples how it can through some insight information.

*These are just indicative figures

Example 1

In Pune we collect data:
Start Point: Laxmi Road Day: Wednesday Time: 7 pm Destination: Koregaon Park, Kalyani Nagar, Viman Nagar

Data was collected from 15 March to 18th March 2014

Above data clearly shows that it seems most of the time Auto Rickshaw on Lakshmi Road are reluctant to go to Koregaon Park, Kalyani Nagar, Viman Nagar or they over charge the passenger.

So find the solution to it, all stakeholders must find out real cause and proper solution to it.

AutoCop1page3image10000

Example 2

Start Point: Bangalore Railway Station
Day: All Days Time: 9 pm Destination: Any destination beyond 10 Km.

autocop2

Data was collected from 10 February to 20th February 2014

Above data is indicating that most of the time Auto Rickshaw at Railways Station are overcharging passengers. Great number of such Passengers may be a tourist or temporary visitor.

In both examples reasons can be many but such systematic data (Geo tagged and time stamped) is very useful to start an investigation.

Any further decision based on such solid data will be of more effective.

Example 3

Here is another example of Profiling Auto Rickshaw Number.

autocop3

These data will easily alert authorities to keep a regular check on these Auto Rickshaw Numbers. More details on what offends they are doing also can be obtained from data, including Geo location and Time.

What are the key execution challenges you have faced?

This complex task and unless active participation of people it is impossible to solve the problem. We request all stakeholders to help us. Spread awareness.

Auto Rickshaw transportation is going to stay here for long, and there is huge scope we can work together. If you share same thoughts and believe in this idea that it will work, some funding is welcome. Your suggestions are welcome, if anyone of you have some good idea, you are welcome to join our team.

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“Software distribution in India is limited to only moving products to warehouses, and not really encouraging its use. This needs to change.” Jayaraman Kesavardhanan, K7 Computing

K7 Computing LogoK7 Computing is a leading provider of information security solutions that protect individuals and organizations from IT threats like viruses, malware and hacker attacks. The company, which builds world-class products and competes with global market leaders like McAfee and Symantec, first achieved major success in a foreign market like Japan, where it has a near 28% market share. The Chennai-based firm has now shifted focus to India and is poised to repeat its triumph in the domestic market.

Founded in 1991 by Jayaraman Kesavardhanan, K7 Computing has come a long way. Today, its products are installed on more than 11 million systems across the world. It has set up a sophisticated ‘Threat Control and Prevention Lab’ that monitors and identifies threats and helps improve product development.The company’s strategy is simple: not compromising on customer needs and sharing maximum profits with partners.

In an interview with ProductNation, Kesavardhanan talks about the challenges facing India’s product ecosystem, the lessons he has learned and how he hopes to make K7 Computing a global product company out of India. 

How did you get into building security systems?

Photo KesevenWhen I passed out of class x in 1984-85, I joined a computer programming course during my summer vacation. It was an occurrence that changed my life. I enjoyed programming so much that I decided this is what I wanted to do. System level assembly languages are what interested me most. While both software and hardware were equally exciting, I decided to get into antivirus solutions – more as a challenge to help people facing virus attacks.

Inspired by McAfee and Norton, I decided to develop a security product as nobody in those days was focusing on developing an indigenous antivirus solution. So in 1991, we founded K7 Computing to develop an antivirus product from India.

How has the company evolved over the years to its present state?

We faced a lot of challenges in our early days. First, we lacked the experience or marketing skills to make the company grow. Our mindset was only to help others by creating and sharing solutions for latest virus signatures. We did not really understand the commercial aspects of business or taking products to bigger markets. We were just good at building products. We decided to move from antivirus solution to offering security suite – this included having separate solution for firewalls and making our product to a better one.

In year 1991, we launched our first product VX2000, said to be the first-ever DOS-based antivirus software. The solution was a great success and got us firmly established in the antivirus software arena.

In 2003, we got our first major break in the overseas market with an attractive partnership with a Japanese software firm SourceNext to promote our suite of K7 security systems in Japan. Our foray into the Japanese market proved to be a great success as people appreciated our products and customer support. Even today, we have a strong relationship with our sales partner in Japan. We are now also working in USA, APAC and the Middle East markets.

Like every other company, K7 too also faced stagnant growth. For instance from 2007 onwards, our turnover failed to grow significantly for five years (2007-2012). This was largely due to slow growth in India as well as flat sales in Japan. However, a revamped sales strategy helped the firm make a quick turnaround and enabled us to record Rs 50 crore in FY13. This year we hope to achieve a significant rise in revenues.

To what reasons would you attribute your dominant position in the Japanese market?

It was in 2002 when our product K7 Total Security was getting completed that we met one of the biggest publishers in Japan called SourceNext. They were looking at new products. As the channel partner had worked with McAfee before, they got greatly interested in seeing our passion and creativity and decided to support our product.

Our partnership with SourceNext was the real turning point for our company and realization of a dream. The new opportunity meant getting entry into a big market and competing with established players like MacAfee, Norton etc. in a market which has been traditionally difficult for Indian products to crack. We started focusing heavily on the product and enhancing its quality to stay competitive.

Thanks to our amazing channel partner, we started doing very well in Japan. We were eventually able to garner 28% of the Japanese market share.

How optimistic were you about making an impact in the Indian market after achieving success in a foreign market?

In 2008, when after making good profitability from the Japanese market, we decided to shift the focus to India. We had a success story behind us and we were confident we would do well in the home market. We set up a team, moved to a bigger office and got sales and marketing strategy in place. But we faced tremendous problems here.

What challenges did you face in the Indian market?

India is a very difficult market to penetrate. You need to learn a lot about the market before you can establish yourself. Users are still using old hardware and there is piracy going on. One thing we realized is that India never had a good distribution system for software products. So we tied up with a few software distributors. What we later learnt was that the distributors work more like logistics partner and do not push sales. They just ship products from one place to another without understanding the concept of packaging, or collecting user feedback. Therefore, this makes the customer acquisition pace slow. Also we don’t have the concept of publishers here, unlike Japan.

We realized that if we wanted to succeed, we would have to step up our focus on marketing. We started becoming a marketing company. We established the entire channel network that took us 2-3 years. Another major shift was to focus on customer service and bring in end-to-end enterprise products.

Today, an antivirus solution is like a commodity product. We decided to sell our products through a typical IT distribution channel just as any other FMCG product. We set up a strong sales team with 120 sales guys promoting our products. Our radical change in marketing approach resulted in 500% growth and we started doing well.

In this highly cut-throat market, what efforts do you take to stay competitive?

We strongly believe in technology and building a product from the start. Some companies are building a solution on top of other services.  We start from ground up and then build end to end products which are efficient and superior. We don’t scare users with technology, we believe in educating them about the product and then selling our product.

What is the company’s vision?

The vision is getting bigger. We want touch Rs 500 crore revenue in the next 3 years. We are determined to remain a globally top rated product firm in scanning and performance benchmarks by independent labs like AV Comparatives, AV-TEST, CheckMark Platinum, VB100 award or SoftDisk Magazine. When we can lead in other markets, why not in our own country? The domestic market is growing really fast and we are also hearing about the government’s focus on cyber security and stronger security regulation for corporates. Besides, we already have a good market share in the enterprise section.

We are also expanding our product portfolio from antivirus to other domains of enterprise security. We have been investing heavily in product research and development over the last 3 years.

What has inspired you to get this far?

It is very important to stay focused and have patience. Besides, products take time to mature and you have to continuously improve upon it. Indian market has been growing thanks to IT & ITES, Indian companies have started adopting new technologies, we don’t find technology gaps between India & USA any more, and so it is worth to focus on India all the more.We strongly believe that there is no real leader in enterprise security space from this part of the world, and our aim now is to attain that leadership position.

What changes would you like to see in India’s eco-system for product development?

We would like to see government stepping in with initiatives to promote indigenous software product companies that can incubate from India, scale and compete in the global marketplace through tax incentives like they had earlier given to IT service providers through STPIs, SEZs, etc. We would also like to have legal issues around service tax resolved at the earliest,

iSPIRT can play a significant role in consolidating the voice of product industry and communicating with government. I wish them good luck in this endeavor.

 

 

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‘Customers buy your product does not mean they will use it!’ – Kishore Mandyam, Founder and CEO, PK4 Technologies

ProductNation interviewed Kishore Mandyam, Founder and CEO of PK4 Technologies, the company that owns the Impel CRM offerings. During this interview, Kishore shares some of his experiences in creating a product suited for Indian customers, and discusses his learning from dealing with customers and technological developments. Read on…

What was the motivation to start Impel?

There were a couple of factors that came together in influencing creation of Impel. During 2006-07 timeline, after having successful career and managing different aspects of business around the world, I was looking at what could be the next big challenge to take on. Frequent travels to different parts of the globe also had started to become taxing. The domestic market was showing encouraging signs of robust demand for product based solutions. All these factors influenced in we taking the decision to set up Impel, a product company based out of India.

Impel Home page screen shot

What were your experiences during the initial years of operation and what was the learning? 

As we setup Impel, we converged on the CRM area as our focus to provide solutions, since we understood that many customers in the target segment that we were aiming were not very organized in dealing with Sales leads and customer centric operations. We invested our initial 18 months to build the product and made it available for customers by 2009. Given our previous corporate experience, we initially started leveraging the state of the art marketing and selling techniques and were able to land about 120 customers during the first year of operations.

However, the biggest learning came next year, when we could not retain most of these customers. When we analyzed what went wrong, we discovered that our method of signing in customers using web based sales ensured that customers bought the product – but just purchasing the product did not mean that they would use it. It turned out that most customers had not tried the various features and capabilities of our product offering and hence were skeptical to renew the relationship with us for the next year.

As an organization, how did you respond to this learning and what new measures did you take to overcome these limitations? 

We all gathered back at the drawing board, analyzed the developments and worked on how we could enhance our offering to ensure more usage and hence more engagement from the customers. We further segmented our target customer base, identified the key sub-segments that showed more promise and started working closely with leads from that bucket. During 2011 and 2012 we got very good traction from lifestyle businesses and rural businesses that focused on selling and marketing seeds, solar lamps, pesticides, FMCG and so on. The targeted and focused engagement with this sub-segment yielded very good results for us, and by 2013, we had about 120 to 130 stable customers.

During the same year, based on our experiences thus far, we shifted our focus to engage with mid size companies and fast growing small companies. This shift in focus helped us to increase our profitability and ensured diversification into another segment of customers.

What are your observations on the Indian market based on your dealing with them over these years?

The Indian small and medium companies have many challenges for which they desire solutions. However, they currently are unable to articulate their problems and explain the desired solutions to the vendors who approach them. On the other end, if any vendor is able to identify these gaps in their operations, clearly articulate the pain points and propose a technology based solution that adds value / solves their pain points, the customers will lap it up.

In our own case, we started off with a CRM offering – we wanted to be the Salesforce for India. However, as we listened to our customers, we discovered that they were buying our software to solve a variety of problems around the CRM domain of which we had no initial knowledge of. This interaction made us tweak our offerings based on their feedback.

Secondly, the perception of Indian customers about cloud has drastically changed since the past 5 years. Customers now accept cloud as an alternative and secure medium of deployment. They realize that it provides them certain benefits than the traditional modes of deployment. This development, combined with the rapid acceptance of mobile and smart phones in the Indian ecosystem is creating a market of significant size that are willing to look at mobile and cloud based solutions to solve their challenges.

What are some of the areas which you wish you could have executed better on?

Being a bootstrapped startup, one needs to always prioritize on the areas that need the focus and attention to attain growth. Having said that, as I reflect back, there are a few things that I think we could have executed better. One of them is about the trial process we have to let our prospective customers try out our offerings. We notice that despite our best efforts, we were not able to better engage our prospects in ensuring their conversion.

While the above one was on pre-sales, I also think we needed to do one thing better – on providing better documentation of our product, on the post-sales and support side. I notice that a few startups in India have been very good in this regard – and they have good customer retention and lesser support costs on account of this. I think that if we can simplify the usage of the product to the end user, and support the end user with description of how to use different features of the product; this combination will help in long term sustainability for our company.

Interesting insights! In closing, what are the three things that you would like to share with your fellow entrepreneurs who are targeting the Indian market?

I think we are at very interesting times as regards to targeting the Indian customers with our technology solutions. The first thing I want to let other entrepreneurs know is that the average Indian manager is much more willing to engage and evaluate your technology offerings. This is a very encouraging sign for all entrepreneurs. Secondly, mobility as a technology development is a big disruptive force, especially in the emerging markets. Hence, plan to leverage the power of mobility in all your solutions and that will surely delight your customers. Lastly, Indian customers take really long cycles to decide to buy. Continuously engage with them through marketing and other touch points, even when you may have ruled out immediate purchase in this quarter. If the customer is engaged, he will simply come back to you when he decides to buy and will close the deal in a day!