#BootStrapping Archives - Page 7 of 7

22/11/201215/08/2014

Best products are built, keeping its user experience in mind says Shalin Jain from Tenmiles…

Hypothetically speaking, if one was offered a job and the decision to accept or reject was based on how far one had to travel, would “Tenmiles” be a round enough estimate, to base a rejection on? The answer is locked away somewhere in this piece. Read on to find out…

Education, bunking and creation

Shalin Jain’s enchantment towards Internet started way back, when he was in high school and the thought dawned on him how powerful a tool it was for connecting people. Blog, as a platform for communicating ideas caught on early and he used WordPress as effortlessly and seamlessly as one uses notebooks to make personal notes. Doing B.Sc in Statistics from Loyola college, proved beneficial in many ways. It helped develop an analytical mind and the flexibility to work during those years. At the company that he worked for, Indchem Software Technology, Shalin learnt the ropes in design through ASP & JSP Applications. Submerged in work, college attendance was to take a nosedive. At the behest of the Principal and some paternal advice, Shalin almost took the brow-beaten path of doing an MBA. While still mulling over his future, one day he got a job offer from his old organisation. Though a seasoned hand by now, yet some parts of the student in him remained alive. The distance to workplace and back was approximately 10 Miles. He decided to chuck it. Tenmiles Tenmiles Tenmiles, the words reverberated – what could have been and what he chose.

The Brand Tenmiles

Instantaneously, his creative mind went on an overdrive. What if he started a company with a name like “Tenmiles” and live his dreams. A “no” to something is really about saying “yes” to something else. Thus was born the idea. Initially it was a garage-level operation and the focus of business was on Web Design & Flash programming. Functioning out of the domestic market is very challenging for a startup. The constant “back and forth” approach can be unnerving and puts additional pressure on time and deadline. It also did not help that there were many companies claiming to develop products.

Screenswift, creates installable Flash screensavers from any Flash movie, took only 16 days to develop. There were two versions: Personal edition & the Premium edition later in 2001. This product would gain huge popularity amongst design agencies. The desktop screensaver market was big towards the end of 90’s and early 00’s. Not off late. In 2005, Helpdesk Pilot, another very successful product was launched. In the first month itself, the product got in 11 customers and umpteen sales enquiries. It’s a platform built to help you provide excellent customer support effortlessly. HappyFox was another cloud based customer support software which got launched soon and now happens to be the flagship product. In the words of Shalin, the design element in this product was very good. In 2010, launch of DoAttend established the company’s reputation on strong customer driven focus.

SWOT Analysis

Self admittedly, the company did not have a structured approach to Marketing and only started investing in it, after the launch of DoAttend. Shalin gave the example of a painter, who paints not with “awards” in mind but what the painting is going to look like. Best products are built, keeping its user experience in mind. DoAttend was a very successful product and word-of-mouth marketing, worked to its advantage. The focus was the “customer” and never the media. This approach worked well and brought customers in droves.

The organisation also believes in lean staffing which in a way has resulted in optimising productivity. Shalin is of the firm belief that in case of a multi-product approach, each product must be self sustainable. A half-baked approach never works.

The company has been bootstrapped to generate funds.

Inspiration

In college, Shalin had a neighbour – another youngster who was only older by a few years. This was in the year 1998 – 99. Shalin was in a stage in life where he wasn’t easily distracted and thus had the opportunity to study his neighbour’s methods, his drive, passion. This was perhaps the single-most important trigger.

Building Successful Products

A product can be very good, but with average business scope, whereas it can also be average but with a huge business potential. Every product developer needs to figure out which market they would like to operate in. Here are some tips offered by Shalin for startups:

Have the end consumer in mind and build accordingly
Be clear on what is the exact problem you’d like to address by building this product
Trying to build too much. Too many functionalities might not be the right way
All great products have a solid focus on design and make sure you have one!

On Product Ecosystem

When he started in 2000, there was nothing of the kind. Developers at that stage, including Shalin were used to experimenting and working without much support. Having said that, it was important to get the right advice, inspiration and a direction. There should be a system in place to do a reality-check. Mentoring sessions usually turn out to be hype. The need of the hour was to get away from jargon-throwing and hand-hold some of the young boys and girls who are only equipped with a brilliant idea. And, there are many.

The country has huge potential and an opportunity to come up with top-notch products which can be world beaters.

15/11/201215/08/2014

You May Not Like Your Payslip, but We…Love It

SAP acquired Success Factors and Oracle acquired Taleo in billion dollar transactions. Workday recently listed at a billion dollar valuation. The boring enterprise HR software market is suddenly hot – red hot. This excitement is also rubbing off onto a decade old HR Software Product company from Bangalore that aspires to be the first choice provider of HR and Payroll Software to businesses in India.

Today, we hear their story in an interview with the Chief Executive of GreyTip Software – Girish Rowjee.
ProductNation: Welcome to ProductNation. We are really excited to speak to you. Please share your story and your journey towards founding GreyTip. Why did you get started and what prompted you? Please tell us all.
Girish: When we were studying in the 1990’s, the normal practice for most of the engineering pass outs was to do the GRE, get an MS and then get into a job.
Obviously, my co-founder and I did not belong to that dataset. So, during engineering, most of the times we were hanging around the Computer Lab, keen to do a few things around software. Primarily, we wanted to do something in India, not that we had any business plan, but that was the intent. We were driven by the sheer excitement of doing something real. Our first fling was with a Bulletin Board System in 1994, when we had just passed out of college in Mysore.

That is how the whole thing started.

Just to jog the readers’ memory, this was the time when the internet was nascent – dialup modem and text interfaces. But, we were thrilled at the prospect of writing software.

ProductNation: Girish, can you please share details on the equipment you had at that time?
Girish: We had ONE assembled 386 machine ably supported by a stabilizer. The big debate back then was whether we should take a 40 MB or a 120 MB hard disk, as the three thousand rupee difference was 30% of the capital that we had borrowed.

The Bulletin Board Service (BBS) had developed did not take off in Mysore, so we decided to move to Bangalore in November 1994 and start this company. It was called Delphi Software. We decided to stick to BBS in the endeavor to be an information portal for Indian consumers. We realized quickly that this may not work.

At the same time, we got an opportunity to work for a company called Brooke Bond Lipton. This was around developing reporting tools for their HR management information database. It was a new area and a new experience for us as we ourselves were getting introduced to data warehousing. But, we pulled off the project successfully.

Following that the HR team also asked us to build a HR database. It was a critical assignment as it was part of their KRA’s and the appraisal season was just a month away. We were able to do that job successfully as well.

That is how it all truly began. And when the HR staff from Brooke Bond moved to other companies, we followed and that is how we got more work.

ProductNation: That means in the initial period, you guys were helping out companies with IT services and special projects. Is that correct?
Girish: Yes. We even wrote ERP software for a garment manufacturer. At that time, it was the thrill of writing software that was driving us rather than money, business plan, topline and the works. We were making enough money from a self-employment perspective.

It was in 1999 when we started thinking on the need to move beyond a generic IT Services for Business approach. We started focusing on the HR software product. We already had 20 – 25 installations of the product. Payroll was an area we were comfortable with. At that time, many companies were doing payroll but the quality wasn’t enterprise class. That was the gap we were after and we had the competency to address it. With this the HR software product idea got crystallized. We stopped doing everything else and just focused on doing HR software product.

ProductNation: Those were the dotcom days. How did it all go? What did you name the product?
Girish: Yes. During the 90s, eight character names were needed as DOS supported only 8 character file names. And since our product stood for people, we had named it Folklore. We were one of the firsts to do e-pay slips in companies like Microland and Compaq. Customer referrals helped us acquire more business. Referrals have always been our critical channel and explain why we haven’t really invested big time into marketing initiatives.
Not everything was good. At the height of the dotcom boom, our development team left for better opportunities. So we had our share of ups and downs. But, we persisted and hung in there.

We drifted for some time and it was only in 2007 that we decided to go for the SaaS option in the pursuit of scale. It took us two years to commission the cloud based product. In the first year, we managed only 50 users in the Bangalore area. The cloud concept was still very new and market acceptance was very cold as compared to today. But, over the years companies started developing comfort with SaaS and cloud concepts. This helped our case.
2011 was a very good year and we currently have more than 1000+ accounts on our cloud platform. We expect more growth going forward and are feeling confident.

ProductNation: Girish, what have been you BIG lessons in your entrepreneurial journey – personal and professional? And what would you like to share with other young product entrepreneurs?
Girish: Any entrepreneur who is setting out for the first time would do well to develop an initial set of customers. These customers should see enough value in the offering. These customers should miss you when you are not around. This also gives the entrepreneur valuable validation of the idea – pricing, potential and scale. This I believe is a much durable milestone to target than VC funding or exciting financial models on spreadsheets.

ProductNation: Well put Girish. An initial set of paying customers sounds really logical, simple and powerful. What about lessons on the personal front? How has it been for you? Any tips here.
Girish: Couple of things. One, an ability to dream and visualize your future realty now is extremely important. You should develop a fair idea how things are going to look two to three years down the line. And of course, an ability to follow that path in a planner manner.

Another is that you should have an ability to convince a few set of people into your vision. These people should be other than your customer – your employees. If you are able to develop this initial set of employees, it would help in your go-to-market.

Passion and desperation are absolutely critical to success. It is only when one is desperate that things start to happen. Money is just a corollary to the value one brings to customers. This is what I believe.

ProductNation: Nicely articulated, Girish. What is next for GreyTip? Could you share some of your future plans?
Girish: We want to the first choice provider of HR and Payroll Software to businesses in India. Across India, we cover about 51 cities and 1000+ accounts. We have gained traction online as well and we would like to focus on the online channel in the future. For this we would endeavor to reach out to Tier II cities helping out organizations with their payroll automation and statutory obligations. We are catering to both enterprise and SME organizations in this pursuit.

ProductNation: Thanks for sharing that. Any moments that you would always cherish as part of the GreyTip story. Would you like to share?
Girish: I would like to narrate an incident. There was a client of ours, a fairly senior person in the corporate World. He said that he wanted to come to our Bangalore office and talk to us. Generally, people don’t come over. So, we were a little unsure. He came over. And shared –“Look, We have used five softwares in the past. But after using your software, the only reason why I am making this visit is to say ‘Thank You’. You have done it for us and relieved us of our headache.” And coming from a fairly senior person, it just made our day. We were really happy that we could make a difference.

It is instances like this that drive us. It is moments like these that mean more than any award or bank balance. In the end, it is the joy of the customers that does the trick for us.

ProductNation: Thank you for speaking to Product Nation. We wish you and your team many more such unusual client visits. Good Luck, Team GreyTip.

06/11/201215/08/2014

Conversation with Customer Interaction Management Provider, Drishti-Soft Solutions

Launched in 2003, Drishti-Soft Solutions specializes in software products for Customer Interaction Management and now empowers more than 10 million customer interactions per day for customers in 40 countries. We interviewed CEO Bishal Lachhiramka about the company’s product development journey and other advice for startup CEOs.

SandHill.com: How did your company originate?

Bishal Lachhiramka: When I and the other founders (Sachin Bhatia, VP Business Development, and Nayan Jain, CTO) were in college 10 years ago, an idea clicked in our heads to build a technology to manage information better than existing ways, something that would stand ahead of its time even if we take today’s scenario.

While talking to seniors and advisors, we were told that India was not the location for building software products. Call it youthful exuberance or passion — whatever it was, we believed that we could succeed. This was the seed of Drishti, but we wanted to learn business fundamentals first before turning on our geek personas.

We provide innovative solutions that help businesses improve and manage their customer experience and customer reach. We were adamant that this technology would change how information is managed. Looking towards the future now, we aspire to be one of the top 10 recognized CIM solution providers across the globe.

SandHill.com: Is there a story behind your company name?

Bishal Lachhiramka: The meaning of the word Drishti is “vision.” When we started the company, we only had a vision. That vision was to build a successful technology from India and change people’s perception on our capability. The strongest thing we had when we started the company was purpose and vision.

SandHill.com: What is your target market, and did it change from what you envisioned at the outset?

Bishal Lachhiramka: Our target customers include: Hospitality, Healthcare, BPO providers, BFSI, Entertainment, Travel & Tourism, and B2C enterprises.

We initially catered our solution to enterprises and BPO providers. But small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) have always been an important segment for our company. Our biggest challenge to date is scaling our solution to this segment, not only in terms of acquiring new clientele but to also help their businesses grow in the long-term.

Through hard work, several revisions and iterations, and constant learning with external help, we developed a better understanding of the SMB customer segment, sales process and success criteria. Thereafter, we were able to establish effective sales practices (including CRM development) that helped us address the challenges in this market.

Read the complete article here

02/11/201202/11/2012

And You thought Friday was just a Day of the Week…

What happens when six engineers with cushy corporate jobs decide to invest? And that too in a Whiteboard and an imported Smartphone. Yes, they grow up into mobile entrepreneurs creating android apps that millions the World over love. If you are reading this on an Android device, quickly search for “Friday” on the Play Store.

Today, we hear their story in an interview with the Chief Executive of Dexetra – Narayan Babu.

ProductNation: Welcome to Product Nation. We are really looking forward to hear your story. So please share all the excitement and emotion that you have gone through in your journey as a product entrepreneur.
Narayan: I was mentored by my Dad. My father used to be a CDAC Scientist (it was called ER&DCI then) and a member of the team that created Param – The First Supercomputer from India. So, Binary and Boolean Logic all came to me at an early age.

When I came into college after school, I realized that I could do technical stuff well. I could code and program, but I had no people skills for a startup. But I always wanted to do a startup like my father. So this startup was always playing at the back of my mind. While at college, I did create a portfolio of websites and apps (they were called applications then) but never made money as I hesitated to ask.

After college, I joined Bosch as an engineer. Bosch had an amazing culture and it gave me a nice view of the Corporate World. But it is a great place for the 9 to 6 crowd. The only problem – I did not find the work challenging enough. In three years at Bosch, I also found a good team. And it dawned on us that we better do something before growing old. So I pulled in two hackers from my college and two others from Bosch.

At that point in time, there was no idea. But we were all excited about doing a startup. So we began thinking, what to do?

Luckily, at that time Android was just announced. Incidentally, I was working on the WinCE and few other mobile platforms at Bosch. The platform was unwieldy and so I began experimenting with Android. The Android interface and features were just fascinating. At that time, Google conducted the android app developer contest and giving away US $ 100,000 as prize. We could not participate in the first edition, but it was a fascinating entry into the world of apps. We saw very simple apps being awarded US $ 50k and US $ 100k. We found it pretty cool and thought that we should do something around Smartphones.

Our first investment was in a Whiteboard, to brainstorm what all could be done on a smartphone. So, we listed down all the features of the smartphone and we realized that there were 7 – 8 data point sensors on a smartphone compared to almost no features in a desktop computer. And then in an “Aha” moment we thought we could do something using all those sensors – A diary of one’s life maybe. We really went crazy with the possibilities. Crazy because at that moment neither we had any smartphone nor there was any android phone available in the market.

Coming back to our senses, we decided to create a basic version and participate in the next Google App Developer contest. We only had a month and we were able to put together a crude version of it, and eventually we didn’t submit our app. When the winners were announced, we saw that most of the apps were very basic and not as grand as what we were thinking. This made us think if our idea was too grandiose. But, we worked on it and after two months of effort, we felt that we could pull it off.

ProductNation: What was the name you gave to this initial app?

Narayan: First, we called it Chrone (for chronology) and then owing to the confusion with the Google product, we called it “Instinct”.

ProductNation: Ok. Please continue
Narayan: So, it was end of 2009 and we got our first android phone. It was an HTC phone with a 3.5 inch screen – a rare feature then. We ordered it from the US and specially took leave from office to receive the courier. And when tried running our app on it, it crashed. That is when we realized that emulator and the phone were different. So we had to work on the app, again.

Meanwhile, the android app marketplace had reached thousand apps or so. We decided to try something simpler. An android game which was a cross between pacman and Mario. We called it tintumon. And we launched that game. The app became popular, got 10,000 download and qualified for the Google Nexus One phone prize. It went on to do about 60,000 downloads. This was a big morale booster. That was when we started thinking about leaving our jobs and doing this full time. I had support from home and my other team members though concerned were way too excited about starting up.

This is when things got serious and we got our 6th founder. I reached out to one of our college mate who had done his MS and asked him to help us raise some money so that we could move into a place and leave our jobs. Basically he was the business guy we wanted in our tech team. He spoke about the app to a number of people and then finally an Investor who used to do only investments in rubber estates got really excited about it and put twenty lakhs into the business. So we quit our jobs and started Dexetra in April, 2010.

For a couple of months, we played around with all the mobile platforms – iOS, Blackberry, Android. We used to make apps, sell them for Free and also some for paid. One of our iOS games apps became the top 50 paid app in the App store. It was exciting. But it was time to focus on the main idea – Friday.

In the end of 2010, we shut down everything else and just focused on Friday. In two months we released the Alpha version and the users loved it. It was like SIRI but almost a year before SIRI. We got covered by Techcrunch and it was good fun speaking to all who covered us.

In this version, all the data was being collected locally on the phone. So the next step was to move all this data to the cloud. And we started working on the Friday cloud part. Quickly we realized that we had to build for scale. Since, we had been in a startup mode for close to a year, we understood issues of scale. So we consumed lot of information on scalable architecture to put it all together.

This was the time we met Vijay (Founder – One97). He instantly liked the cloud first version and the next day he signed the term sheet and put in a crore of rupees. This way we could recruit a couple of more guys into the team. Around this moment, the product was a little more than fifty percent ready. But in cases like this it is the last 20% that really takes the time.

ProductNation: Was that time when the Apple SIRI came by? Tell us about it and the eight hour SIRI bet.
Narayan: Yes. It was October 2012 when Apple launched SIRI. The World was touting it as the next big thing. We were irritated as we had been trying to put something together since 2009. And SIRI was not even close to what we had planned for Friday. But yes, conceptually similar.
Internally, we took up a bet to create an app exactly like SIRI in 8 hours flat. We managed a version and called it IRIS. It wasn’t for the public marketplace, but a tweet was picked up and it went viral. So we released it into the public marketplace. It got a million downloads in the first month, two million the next. Then, Micromax Aisha also leveraged IRIS.

IRIS becoming a sort of distraction and it was becoming hard to manage two entities. After spending a couple of man months, the team gathered itself and decided to focus most of its efforts into Friday. And it made good sense since we were just ten people then.

ProductNation: What prompted your team not to pursue IRIS?
Narayan: One, we were occupied with Friday. Second, for IRIS to scale, it needed a strong content pipeline. This would have entailed partnering with a number of content providers. All this meant a different set of skill sets. That doesn’t mean we gave up on iris, just that we put most of our tech energy behind Friday.

ProductNation: So, you guys got back to Friday.
Narayan: Yes. February 2012 end, we launched Friday beta on a closed basis. After four months of improvisation based on user feedback, we released it into the Android marketplace in July, 2012. Friday sees about 100 million documents in the cloud with a 30% daily user engagement.

ProductNation: What should we expect from Friday, going forward?
Narayan: We are focusing on making smartphones intelligent. We are making efforts to put context into smartphones with powerful software. e.g. your smartphone instead of showing “recently dialed numbers” should prompt you with the names of people depending on the context of location or time.

Those are the things we are working on. Plus we are working on building the UX as well. You would soon see a major new release on Friday.

ProductNation: Are you doing the UX internally?
Narayan: I am doing it myself, internally. It is challenging to get external UX guys working on a consistent basis. And UX needs sharp focus. And it has been painful to source UX guys. I have tried freelancers and outsourcing it to experts overseas. The problem of getting UX done outside the team, is to really get the job done. The creative guys are a different set altogether and they have a challenge adhering to timelines. Also, the external guys are not able to experience first-hand what is happening with the product. So, you need a UX person internally who can feel what’s happening.

ProductNation: Narayan, why the name Friday? Do you guys take off that day, is it?
Narayan: We wanted a simple one word name. We started with Chrone that came too close to Google Chrome. We tried Instinct. Then we hit upon Friday. It sounded crazy, it sounded bizarre, so it sounded good. ‘Friday’ sounded happy and it went well with the established meaning of “Man Friday”. And above all, it was easy to remember unlike the names of other apps, which you struggle to recollect at the right time.

ProductNation: What has been your learning’s during this journey? What would you like to share with an entrepreneur?
Narayan: We went all in. There was no plan B. We went all in with one plan. Many people ask us quizzically that you spent two years just building an app. But we did that and survived well too. It just makes sense to sell out to one meaningful idea.

I like the quote by Drew Houston, the founder of Dropbox – “It is better to fail than building a mediocre product”.

ProductNation: Before we let you go, would you like to share the complexity of your six-member founding team?
Narayan: Yeah. Investors used to express shock on the size of our founding team. Fortunately, inspite of having different backgrounds and personalities, all of us were excited about the startup. We do have differences but is mostly around the product. And most powerful bonding force is that all differences apart, we all want to build something really praiseworthy. This single thought ties all our efforts together.

ProductNation: Narayan, thank you for talking to Product Nation.
We wish the entire Dexetra team many more million downloads soon.

26/10/201215/08/2014

Pallav Nadhani’s list of Top 10 mistakes entrepreneurs make…(Part 2 of 2)

Pallav Nadhani, CEO and Co-founder of FusionCharts, was just 17 when he started the data visualization product company in 2002. The company today is one of India’s most successful product stories and happens to be one of the first Indian start-ups to have caught the eye of the Obama administration. FusionCharts has a user base of 450,000 across 118 countries, and the company celebrates its 10th year of existence on October 22, 2012. In the second half of a two-part interview with pn.ispirt.in, Pallav Nadhani tells us about keeping a product relevant in the constantly evolving market, how he communicates with team members and what it’s like to work with teams from two very different cities in the country!

This is part 2 of the interview titled – Find out what inspired Pallav Nadhani to start FusionCharts on their 10th anniversary.

How do you manage to keep your product relevant in the market? How do you keep yourself in the game even after going through the process of scaling and maturing? Usually after this it’s a case of either re-birth or death, right?

For us a couple of things work well : there are nearly half a million developers out there who use our product, so we get more feedback than we can sometimes handle and implement. This is huge repository for us to understand where the market is going. There are some developers out there saying in a few months or few years we see ourselves using the product this way so we require this functionality. So there’s a lot of consolidated information that we get from both our existing clients and prospects, and we add some amount of research and gut-feel to this so that we can improve the different versions.

If you had to pick three functions in the company which are critical for a product company like yours, which ones would you choose?

I’d choose engineering and marketing together first. In our case, marketing and engineering go together because the value proposition and positioning done by the marketing team is done in consultation with the engineering division. Similarly, right from day one of product development, marketing defines the product features such as labels so there is a lot of interaction. I would choose the support function next, because ours is a B2B product so implementation does require some amount of support.

What are some of the tools and techniques that you use internally to keep communication alive? What are some the things that you do keep communication going right from the top to the most junior most employee?

The advantage we have is that we are a really small company — we have a team size of about 60 people. So anything that’s happening gets communicated within the team quite easily. The next advantage that we have is that most of the team is based in Kolkata, and I like to say that the Kolkata team is more like family because of the inherent nature of the city! In terms of messaging, We’ve divided teams into functions so if a team needs to know something, we tell the team head and the trickle down effect just ensures the right communication. All the heads are supposed to involve their team members, and this is relatively easy because there are only four to five members per team. Then we have layers of communication protocols built over this, so engineering has its own system which is visible to everybody within the team. For cross-company communication its either face-to-face or I send out an e-mail — since this is quite rare (like once in three months), people do read them. I also ensure that I ask a question or engage the reader somehow so that I know who is involved. We also use Yammer, the enterprise social network. Another thing we do is celebrate birthdays, so this becomes a one or two hour event which does involve some discussion.

How do you manage the culture difference between Bangalore and Kolkata? Both the cities and their people are very different — Bangalore is more fast paced and Kolkata is not like that.

Like I mentioned, I tend to say Bangalore is the team, Kolkata is family! There are some inherent challenges : when we brought in some senior management in Kolkata there were some issues as most people were used reporting to me and suddenly it wasn’t the case anymore. Now the senior management is trying to put in more systems and processes so that that Kolkata team can work more professionally! There was some resistance, of course, but once they were able to see the value of the changes then things changed. Now there is data to react to, and today they are able to pin-point where things went wrong and fix it. Overall, I’ve not had any major problems. Initially, for the first six months I had to go to Kolkata once every week to act as a mediator. Now I go once in six months so I guess that really shows how far we’ve come!

So FusionCharts has now matured and you’ve been in the business ten years — what are the nuggets of information you’d give product company entrepreneurs out there?

There is nothing thats right or wrong. It depends on the context of the product your are building. A few things that you need to get right are even if you are a developer, you need to focus on packaging your product. Packaging and marketing has an important role to play as no product can really be sold on it’s own — there are only exceptional cases like popular apps which get downloaded millions of times. Team building is another important thing — once your product starts getting traction, your company will get split across so many different functions that you will require help with this. You’d like to believe that you can solve every problem, but it’s not very scalable. Specifically in India, an entrepreneur requires a lot of focus. If there’s a new product idea every week and there’s no focus on one thing, it can disastrous. For the last ten years, we’ve just focussed on data visualization — despite the audience we have and despite our capabilities, we’ve not ventured into other areas because we know that this particular category has a lot of scope and if we branch out into too many other things we won’t be very good at any one thing.

What is the leadership style that you employ? What do people typically have to say about your leadership style?

I would say mine is more of a laissez-faire style of leadership. It’s very different from the concept that people are not trustworthy. I prefer not micro-manage — I believe in giving people work and a broad outline and let them go about it. At the end of it I’ll tell them how I feel about what they’ve done.

Pallav Nadhani’s list of Top 10 mistakes entrepreneurs make

Not delegating early and enough for the fear of things not getting done correctly
Hiring senior people who don’t fit and have different expectations and lesser hunger
Not setting culture right – focus is more oriented towards result, than behavior. Also setting unreasonable deadlines which set the wrong culture.
Using the same team to deliver multiple products – bandwidth bottleneck
Not establishing clear communication channels and ownership between teams when moving from generic team members to specialists.
Not getting enough exposure locally for hiring — like the first 4-5 years I lived a cocooned life in Kolkata.
Not bringing in a sales team early — they bring in more deals to close and also free up your time
Losing focus in between — too many products and extensions
Not saying ‘no’ enough to many employee and customer requests
Building custom additions for a few customer along with the main product — upgrade issues.

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22/10/201215/08/2014

Find out what inspired Pallav Nadhani to start FusionCharts on their 10th anniversary.(Part 1 of 2)

Pallav Nadhani, CEO and Co-founder of FusionCharts, was just 17 when he started the data visualization product company in 2002. The company today is one of India’s most successful product stories and happens to be one of the first Indian start-ups to have caught the eye of the Obama administration. FusionCharts has a user base of 450,000 across 118 countries, and the company celebrates its 10th year of existence on October 22, 2012. In the first part of a two-part interview with pn.ispirt.in, Pallav Nadhani talks to us about what inspired him to start FusionCharts, the importance of marketing in a commoditized industry and how the company believes in training and retaining its talent. (Don’t forget to download the Free copy which has the complete story of FusionCharts)

Pallav, congratulations to your team and you on FusionCharts’ 10th anniversary. We’re curious to know — when did you decide that you wanted to get into the product space and start a company? What was your inspiration?

I call myself an accidental entrepreneur for a reason. When I started thinking about FusionCharts, I had no idea I was going to develop a product or even run a company. It was something I wanted to do for pocket money! In 1999, I was in Class 11 when I came across this site that accepted innovative articles on technology. By then I had already done a bit of coding (there’d been a computer in my house since I was eight years old) and I was using Microsoft Excel in school, and I hated the boring charts that the program created. I thought — why not convert those boring Excel charts into a lively format for the web? So I wrote some code, and then wrote an article based on that code which got picked up by a website called ASPToday.com. I got paid $1500 for the article which is a lot of money when you’re 16! I got a lot of feedback from developers on the article, and it got me thinking: if so many people were interested in the concept and were giving me inputs, why not consolidate all the modifications and start selling the concept as a product? So there was no market research as such. However, I did make a clear-cut decision when it came to choosing between developing a product and a service: despite the fact that I had some experience working in a service model (I worked in my dad’s web design firm), I knew that there were problems like working with only one client at a time, and the fact that people didn’t trust you as a 17 year old! So for a while my dad fronted me: he would bring in the clients and I would do the work.

In a product company there are guys who develop and then the guys who package, market and sell the product. Traditionally, in the services model it’s the developers who tend to take center stage but in the product space people usually say it’s the marketing which makes the difference. What’s your take on this?

I absolutely agree. When we set up FusionCharts we were very aware of the fact that we were going to be operating in a commoditized world. Our top five competitors are amongst the biggest companies today: Microsoft, Yahoo, IBM, Google and Adobe give competing products for free and there are others who also offer charting libraries like ours. On an average, our product is 10 to 100 times more expensive than our nearest competitors. Still, we’ve grown in this fiercely competitive market, and this is not just because of our product: it’s because of our positing, our story telling and the whole packaging. Other products out there directly appeal to developers who often have limited budgets when it comes to purchasing components — but our approach involves appealing to the level just above the developers who are often the decision makers and this has worked well for us.

Much of a product’s success relies not only on quality of the development but also on the kind of people who are part of the team. You have guys who are hesitant about joining a smaller setup because they are worried about stability and are unsure about joining a place which gives no guarantee whether it will exist the next year or not. What’s your strategy when it comes to hiring good people?

The only time when we found trained talent is when we shifted to Bangalore, but this was for the middle management level. We’ve found it quite rare to find ready-made talent at the development level. At this level, almost everybody who is on our team has come to us fresh out of college, and have been trained by us for anywhere between 12 and 36 months. We’ve trained them with the approach of building the product. This is important because one of the issues we had with people who came from bigger companies was the difficulty they had in adjusting to the fast and agile environment of a product company like ours. So we decided it would be better to concentrate on hiring high intensity guys, giving them some light projects to work on and training them so that they’d be good to go in a couple of years. This also helps create a sense of loyalty because we’re taking them on board at a very early level in their career and this means we have a lower attrition rate.

You make a very valuable point. So what do you feel about the fear in the market about spending time training freshers and then watching them jump ship after spending about two years with you?

I look at it as an engineering challenge: if a guy is willing to move to the competition, what are the incentives that he’s getting? Nobody moves from a product company to a services company purely because of the type of work. Sure, some companies sell to employees just like they sell to customers and the employee may want to opt for a bigger brand name but this is often at the cost of his or her engineering lifestyle. What you do at a product company like ours is something that you can talk about to your friends, you know where your code is going, you have a complete idea about the product and you can proudly point out what your contribution is. In a large organization this is not really the case, and often you don’t have a clear idea of why you are writing a certain piece of code, and you may not be able to talk to your friends about what you do because of confidentiality clauses. Whereas here, you’re given a problem statement and given the freedom to figure out how you want to approach it. Then there are things like the US President Obama selling FusionCharts in 2010 to design digital dashboards for the federal administration. These things inspire confidence in employees, and give them a level of satisfaction. So the employee has to make a decision if this is something he or she wants to give up, as well as give up working with a team he or she has grown comfortable with.

Read the second part of the interview where Pallav shares the list of Top 10 mistakes entrepreneurs make…(Part 2 of 2)

03/10/201215/08/2014

Jalandhar School Kid drops University builds a Global Software Product Company

NASA.GE. Disney. A global software product – Kayako. Jalandhar – a growing city in Punjab,India. And a school kid who opted out of University. Sounds like the script of the next “The Social Network” hollywood movie. The truth – the movie might have to wait. Because this success story from India’s hinterland is only getting started.

And yes the school kid who was only seventeen in 2001 at the time of launching this enterprise helpdesk product is still leading from the front as the Founder and CEO.

ProductNation is excited to bring to you this riveting story through a heart-to-heart talk with Mr Varun Shoor. A lunch interview was quickly planned and Varun suggested “Punjabi By Nature” at Cyber City Gurgaon.

On interview day, we met at Varun’s swanky 16th floor office at Cyber City Gurgaon that houses the product engineering team. RFID check-ins, Apple Machines, top of the line interiors, extensive use of glass and a panoramic view of Gurgaon would be some add-ons if you consider employment opportunities here. After exchanging pleasantries and a quick discussion on the quirky weather, we did a quick jaunt across the road to the “Punjabi By Nature” restaurant.

Raghav Arora – Varun’s schoolmate and core member of the Management team also joined in. A quick scan of the Menu slate (yes, it is a wooden slate) and we were sorted with our orders. It was time. 1-2-3 Action!

ProductNation: So Varun, we are eager to listen to your story.
Varun Shoor: Right from childhood, I was a geeky kid. None of my sister’s electronic dogs survived the second day. My dad felt that if I went to a hostel, some sense would dawn on me.

At the hostel, I saw computers for the first time. 286, DOS, monochromatic display and there I learnt the programming language LOGO where in you draw shapes by issuing commands. That was fascinating. The first four years in hostel, I used to hungrily look forward to the Computer Class each day and excelled with 90% marks.

After I came back from hostel I asked dad for a computer. This was 1996. Fortunately, my dad could afford one. It was a Packard Bell 286 with Windows 3.1.

Back then there was no internet in Jalandhar, only in Delhi and metros. Luckily there was a cyber café in Jalandhar which used to dial out to Delhi. I used it to look up the latest apps, download them. Fascinating it was, especially the noise of dial up and Rs 15 per minute internet charge.

We all burst into a nostalgic laughter. If you are wondering why, then your association with the Internet is at best recent.

ProductNation: Please continue
Varun Shoor: Sabeer Bhatia then had sold off Hotmail. That was when I decided to start a web design firm – Cyfox Graphics – using Dad’s card to buy a domain name – domains were US $ 100 then and web hosting. But as I devoted more time to computers, academics went down and long distance STD call bills were going up. One day, an internet bill of Rs Rs 60,000 greeted my family. Promptly, Dad took away the credit card. That dream was over.

Studies was tough. In Class VIII, I was conditionally promoted. And in class IX, I was kicked out as I had just 39%. From the beginning though I was not good in studies, I was a bookworm. I always knew more than the teachers. But, I was never good in cramming for the exams.

Parallely, I did couple of websites and a solution called Shoutbox service that provided chat rooms on websites where visitors could enter. This became popular but I could not pay for the server. Then I came up with a service called Deskpost that was like hotscripts, a script directory.

Since I was into web hosting, I used to be active on a web hosting forum called Web Hosting Talk. I saw people buying a service called Wonderdesk at US $2000. I made something similar called Active Support and wanted to try selling it.

For that I needed three things – domain, hosting and credit card processing. So I went to dad and no guesses for what he told me. So here I am, with a product but no resources.

So I went into IRC chat rooms asking for a domain I could use. I was banned but I kept trying with proxys. Finally one guy reverts saying he has two domain names – kayako.com and akimbomedia.com. You know what happened next.

Then I needed hosting. My friend in Jalandhar agreed on the condition that I would pay him in six months.

Last was a credit card processing tool. I wanted Tool Check Out. It is still very popular. It came for US $ 50. Where do I get US $ 50? I go back to the chat rooms announcing that I will give a US $ 2000 product for US $ 50. And I didn’t need the money, just the Tool Check Out account. So again banned, kicked out of forums.

Then a guy who runs a hosting company becomes interested and transfers the Tool Check Out account to my name. Then I create a website and launch the product. Version 1 comes into picture.

Money accumulates to US $2000 which is the minimum withdrawal threshold for Tool CheckOut. I wire that money to a friend’s account and ask him to ship a Compaq Laptop to me. I tell my dad that I have bought a laptop and it would reach in a week’s time.

A week, no laptop. Two weeks, no laptop. Three weeks, no laptop. Every day I am asking about the laptop parcel and dad was pretty irritated. On a positive note, the money started accumulating again. I tell my dad, I have US $2000 and please give me your bank details and I will wire it. Reluctantly lest I hack his account, he gave me the bank details.

So I take the details and tell mom and dad that by next Thursday they would see a wire transfer of US $2000. Thursday is here, but no money. Friday, no money. And I am pestering them every hour if there is any credit. They were sick by then.

Come Monday. Since I used to work in the night, I was sleeping when my Mom jolts me out of my slumber in the afternoon. She says – “paise aa gaye, paise aa gaye, tu jhooth nahin bol raha tha” (The money is here, money is here, you were not lying). And I say – “I was always telling the truth. You never believed me”.

The very next day, the Laptop arrives. And that was how the company began. No money, no nothing and we started this company. Closer to Class XII, I told my father that I did not want to go to college and wanted to do Kayako for life. My Dad having heard about Sabeer Bhatia stories encouraged me to go ahead.
And we started Kayako in November 2001.

By that time, the Raan and the Tikkis had soaked the story enough to be guided to their rightful destination. The Raan was sliced just right to whet our appetite even further. Yeah, it is highly recommended.

ProductNation: Very interesting. When you were setting up Kayako, companies like Infosys, Wipro were playing the IT services card. Did you ever contemplate that?
Varun Shoor: I am an introvert who was forced to become an extrovert. And I did not have it in me to meet clients, convince people, sell something. So services were out of the question. Secondly, I was enjoying what I was doing.

The Raan was just awesome. There was no need to outdo it. So, the simple fare of yellow dal and makhni murg with Naan that followed was just right.

ProductNation: Nowadays, IT entrepreneurs in India are focused more on products and not services. What would be your message to them?
Varun Shoor: First, do not chase money. If you do, you will lose focus. Second, your product has to have a VOW factor. It has to be awesome, period.
Third, start building around things that actually generate sales – a good website and a strong trust factor. How do you do that? Testimonials, client portfolio, live chat, updated news feed, active social media accounts, phone number on the site answered and engaging plus trusting website copy. Last, Think global, thing Big. Then your standards go up and your market has no limitations. And this also cushions you against business cycles.

Product Nation: Where do you want to see Kayako in next 3 – 5 years? How do you want to position Kayako?
Varun Shoor: Honestly, we are going with the flow. We are trying to be better than yesterday. Where this takes us, we have no idea. On positioning, we are focused completely on the product. On what really matters. Making sure each of our customers is happy. We are passionate about support and helpdesk. And we want to continue with our sharp focus on that.

It was time to focus on the desserts now. So it was a sinful hot chocolate fudge for Varun and Gulab Jamuns – the size of golf balls – for Raghav and us. A quick check out and we were out into the hustle bustle of Cyber City Gurgaon.

We then ask Varun – “What is the next opportunity you would like to pursue?” Without batting an eye lid, he responds – “A Five Star hotel”. And adds. “I like change and I am fascinated by architecture. And if I find something interesting in IT, I could take that up as well.”

And as we prepare to bid good bye, he says, “We are planning a strong initiative that we intend to go live in March next year. So watch out”.

Good Luck, Kayako!