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The first #PNSummit – Are you ready to report for BootCamp? Yes, that’s right. BootCamp. For Product Leaders.

It has been a pretty frenzied two weeks or so for us #PNSummit volunteers, but here we are, and we have something to show you and the world. 

But first, what went into it.

We brainstormed. We chatted. We argued. We used all that, and combined that with actual user feedback gleaned from the dozens of Playbook RoundTables, meetings conducted by iSPIRT.

The whole team put their thinking caps on, and the most important question was which was the best format to adopt. To reiterate, we wanted to ensure that every single participant of the #PNSummit can take away not just valuable insights, but stuff they can put to work the very next day. Stuff that’s been home cooked by product entrepreneurs and is enhanced by the flavour of intense brainstorming.

So this was the aim.

We arrived at the BootCamp format.

Why?

We want the people who go through #PNSummit to come out changed. As people, as entrepreneurs, as innovators, as doers. Like the United States’ Delta Force. Very few even get into training. Very few pass out. None of them are ever the same people.

We want to do that, except for entrepreneurs, and with a lot less running and shooting.

The #PNSummit will home in on Product Entrepreneurs, and will lead them through two critical stages of the startup life cycle –

1.       Customer Discovery Hacking, or getting razor sharp on getting paying Customers. Repeatedly. This is the Day 1 event and has cohorts of 20 folks only. Only a 100 Startups will be attending. If you are here, you’d be typically 9-12 months in operation, with a ready product. You have zero customers, or very few maybe.

2.       Scale Hacking. The secret sauce of turning on the afterburners of your jet engine and skyrocket your startup. This launches on Day 2 of #PNSummit and has groups of 20. Only 80 Startups will be attending. If you are here, you’d be doing INR 2 Lacs in monthly revenue, more than a year in business, and have raised (a little) funding.

You can attend any one of the above tracks, depending on where you think you are.

The sessions will be interactive and actual case driven. We are looking at one on one interaction, problem resolution and immediate, actionable, specific insights through learning that you experience.

Which means the people invited to the #PNSummit will be less; this will be a curated group, hand-picked from the many that would want to attend.

And that is by choice. We want it to be this way.

Military boot camps are successful for a reason. Every soldier is given his due; every soldier has to carry his kit and run miles.

We are hoping that with a small group of committed, curated product people, each one of them gets his due, each one of them goes back with answers to his specific questions, and each one has a plan to implement for the next few months.

We are putting together a bootcamp that is special, unique and completely volunteer driven. Volunteers are folks in the same product ecosystem that you come from. You can even connect with them here to know more about #PNSummit. If you want to attend, hurry and request for an invitation right here. If you have been to a iSPIRT Playbook Roundtable earlier, just type “Roundtable” when you fill in “Referred By” in the form.

And yes, you can tweet about this… use the hashtag #PNSummit. We’ll be listening!

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What to expect in the first #PNSummit – 4th & 5th December, Pune

The #PNSummit is going to be an event like none other. Volunteers who are from the Product community themselves, are putting it together and building it on the pillars of intensity, focus and exclusivity (only practicising product professionals attend the PNSummit).

Here’s a quick peek into what #PNSummit is all about

At present, most product companies in India are clustered around two specific life stages:

  • Getting their first 0-10 customers, OR
  • Going beyond their initial 50-100 customers (for B2C one could say 200,000 users). These are also called as being in the Happy Confused Stage (post product/market fit)

It is with these life stages in mind that these two themes have been designed:

Customer discovery hacking – curated by Pallav Nadhani (CEO of FusionCharts)

Customer growth hacking – curated by Bala Parthasarathy (Managing Partner, AngelPrime)

Each of these themes comes with a series of sessions where participants are grouped into circles based on their life stages and will be immersed in an experience of deep discussions, brainstorming and hands-on exercises.

Invited delegates will be grouped into circles based on their life stages and Broadly these circles are:

  • Circle 1  – In Discovery Hacking Stage.
  • Circle 2 –  Happy Confused Stage
  • Circle 3 –  In Discovery Hacking & Just crossed Happy Confused Stage

 

We’re putting together each circle with a lot of effort and each session will be facilitated by an expert in that area. The mode of discussion is expert-facilitated and not expert-advice and that is what will make the discovery process truthful and meaningful!

If you are a product company then you are at some point in the spectrum of  discovery hacking -> product/market fit -> successful product business and are you are pushing yourself to move the next stage.

Reach out to any of the delegate experience volunteers of #PNSummit, Sandeep Todi, Sameer Agarwal, Dilip Ittyera, Seema Joshi, Vijay Sharma, Avinash Raghava,  Aditya Bhelande  & Sairam K to find the right inner circle for you. We’re keen to invite as many companies as we can accommodate, and the quicker we hear from you, the better we can make your experience.

 

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How does an Ecosystem need to help itself? The Zensar way of doing it!!

As part of the iSPIRT ProductNation initiative, we work together helping product startups to connect to the enterprises to find, build and utilize the synergies and in the process helping the product startups as well as the enterprises have a inclusive growth. As part of this initiative we are very proud to bring in such a TechShowcase organized by Zensar Technologies from Pune.

When we approached Ganesh Natarajan of Zensar, he was more than happy to make this happen. Later we worked with many other heads at Zensar and we were astonished really at their eagerness and the hurriedness and for a second we were confused at the speed of execution. We have so far never seen this sense of urgency from a large enterprise. Anyways we got around 73 applications for this coveted TechShowcase and Zensar as promised chose the top 10, which makes a lot of synergy for their offerings and for their customers.


Last Saturday (Sept 8 2013) they flew us all the ten companies to Pune and the startups had to do a double presentation – one in front of the executive council and the other in front of the tech council. To be frank we were amazed at the preparations at Zensar with the kind of welcome we got, the setup, the welcome boards, the executive & the technology council being ready and on time considering it was a Saturday and it was a long weekend, and of course the goodies we got. Just amazing!! I think if Zensar is anything to go by the discipline and sense of urgency and the diligence they showed they have a great future for sure!!

Thank You ZENSAR – we appreciate all your efforts and your hospitality – from iSPIRT as well as all the participating companies.

Here is the list of 10 companies that Demo’d @ Zensar (& in the order they presented)

    1. Germin8 – Mumbai based company, which works on big data analytics on social media mainly that is text based. They started in 2007 and they mainly target Marketing and Corporate Communications team in an organization.

 

  • TriggerO – Delhi based; working mainly in the Rewards & Recognition space and employee engagement via Social. Their tag line is “Recognition is Social”. They provide smart analytics about employee engagement as well as ROI.

 

 

  • GoDB – Chennai based; started on 1999; Creates vertical focused mobile apps, which come with scalability and security, and is based of their platform and their main focus is on FMCG, BFSI and Retail verticals.

 

 

  • Kreeo – Bangalore based; Started in 2007; Helps share knowledge within an enterprise like what you do in the social outside. They call it a Collective intelligence and a unification platform for enterprises.

 

 

  • Seclore – Mumbai based; Started in 2007; they work in the space of information security policy based. Their tag line is security not at the cost of collaboration.

 

 

  • i7 Networks – Bangalore based; Started in June 2012; they work on the space of BYOD security; Their sweet spot is 100% Agentless device discovery, fingerprinting and health-check and then denying infected/malicious devices from connecting to corporate network.

 

 

  • Teritree – Bangalore based; Provides social commerce platform

 

 

  • Knowledge Foundry – Bangalore based; Advanced segmentation and profiling to target Ads and helps run smart campaigns and helps ecommerce with tools with Amazon-like recommendations.

 

 

  • Vondasoft – Mumbai and Bangalore based; Scans multiple social media for your relevant brand, filters data based on many attributes and provides the true social image metrics for your brand.

 

 

  • MeshLabs – Bangalore based firm; has a text analytics platform. Listens to all stake holders and unlocks the hidden value via text analytics.

 

As next steps, Zensar will shortlist those companies that they and their customers will find value to take them to their customers. We are sure this will be a huge value to the selected startups and ofcourse for the whole ecosystem. Can we have some more bigger companies doing the Zensar way?

We would like to thank Kumar Gaurav, Vice President at Zensar to lead this initiative with the support of Ajay Bhandari, Chief Corporate Development Officer, Sanjay Marathe – Head, Strategic Services Unit and CTO, Krishna Ramaswami – Senior Vice President, Healthcare Vertical & Global Infrastructure Management Business, Lavanya Jayaram – Head – Marketing and Sales Enablement & Vivek R Sarnobat – Marketing, for their support.

We also feel that these kind of events can be a huge boost to the whole ecosystem as well as a win-win proposition for both service comapnies which now can innovate and provide services that make a difference to their customer while the product companies can benefit hugely as their biggest problem today is not the product development itself but taking them to market. These kind of partnerships and differentiated solutions will help both and in the end help customers to get better, innovative and faster solutions.

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Next Gear into ProductNation Summit

The journey is unstoppable. India has started building software products that the world recognizes… a far cry from the days when it was known only for software programmers and not for software. Through its successful Playbook RoundTables and Community platform, iSPIRT’s ProductNation initiative has touched the lives of hundreds of product entrepreneurs across India.

ProductNation thrives on the strengths of our Volunteer community who are people just like you. This community is proud to announce the ProductNation Summit coming this December in 2013. We will soon be on twitter, just follow us @Product_Nation and the #PNSummit hashtag.

#PNSummit is selflessly hand-crafted by Product folks, a Summit attended exclusively by Product folks. A lot is going to be talked about Customer Discovery and Growth Hacking. #PNSummit has lean forward and lean back sessions and is practitioner led with over 70% of the sessions being interactive. These sessions are no holds barred. They are practical, frank and maybe even brutal. It will be a gurukul, where teacher and taught share the same platform, only the roles are reversed. Yet there is no sage on stage, only like minded peers.

If this sounds like just what you are missing, we’ll be delighted to send you an invite. Just let us know a little more about you, so we can ensure the other folks in the room are also passionate Product folks. Seats are extremely limited and there is a marginal Attendee fee. What gets you in is not the fee, but your passion, i.e., what you do.

Once you’ve been there, you can take back a lot more that what you learn in 2 days. Insights from great like minded people like you, a platform to share and learn for 4-6 months after the summit, and friendships for a lifetime. Seats are extremely limited and open only for the first 100 who get invited.

Your current situation is not important. If you have the mindset, Invites for the lucky 100 will not remain available for long. Gates close on 30th September.

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Events Landscape 2.0

About four months ago, most of the core volunteers that had built NASSCOM Product Conclave into a successful event gracefully handed over the keys for NPC’13 to a new team. Thereafter, in an effort to address the remaining gaps in the product ecosystem, multiple initiatives were born. Playbook Round Tables was one of them which has been immensely successful right from the word go. They have already brought unmatched experiential and peer learning to 120+ product startups.

Playbook Round Tables are an example of small, highly-curated, nation-wide events that are hyper focused on specific real-world problems most product startups face. Back in 2009, and I know it’s hard to picture this now, NPC was reimagined just along these lines. We saw it as the specialized version of the mega event of those times – the TiE Entrepreneurial Summit. In fact, we kept the format as-is and just populated it with very product-centric and highly curated content. This clicked and NPC went on to become the mega event that it is today.

Now, the wheels are turning again and further specialization is happening in the ecosystem.

UnPluggd, DEMO, etc. have become places where early stage angel and VC investors get together to hear curated entrepreneurial pitches. This category came to life when the self-help volunteer community created Proto.in.

Now the same powerful energy is at work in building another specialized event. This will bring many global CIOs in front of dozens of curated startups. Watch out for more about this important event in the coming months!

There is another fundamental shift afoot not just here, but all over the world.

Community powered learning is becoming the new norm. This trend has been in the works in our ecosystem for years. A wonderful example of this is The Fifth Elephant, a three-day workshop and conference on big data, storage and analytics, with product demos and hacker corners.

Early next week an important new community powered learning event will be launched. This will take the Playbook Round Tables to their logical conclusion. It will be a 2-day “learning orgy” (yes, that is an acceptable phrase now!) for practicing product entrepreneurs where they’ll fluidly exchange knowledge about playbooks. It’ll be a transformative experience. To maintain high quality of peer learning, it’ll be invite only! Somebody who is already attending will need to pull you in.

Defying economic gloom, Indian Product entrepreneurs are gaining confidence.

They are now reaching out to eclectic groups beyond their immediate ecosystem in The Goa Project. They are taking a bit of Bangalore to other countries with Startup Festivals. The self-help volunteer community is on a roll. In the next few months, you will see the event game go up one more notch.

We are now creating open-source based “public goods” that small buyers (e.g. jewelers, tier 2 manufacturers, etc.) can use to drive their own learning programs. The initial pilots have gone very well. And these are leading to some powerful partnerships with trade associations. So, together with our new partners we are planning to rapidly grow the pool of informed software product buyers. We are talking about delivering our “Be an Informed Software Product Buyer” sessions to, not thousands, but hundreds of thousand small businesses in India.

There is lots of new stuff on its way.

Step by step, we are fixing critical product ecosystem gaps on our own using the pay-forward model. We, the self-help volunteer team, won’t rest till India becomes a Product Nation!

[Thanks to ThiyagaRajan, Avinash Raghava, Bala Parthasarthy, Pallav Nadhani, Sridhar Ranganathan, Vijay Anand and Kiran Jonnalagadda for reading drafts of this and suggesting improvements.]

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Are you a #MadeInIndia Software product company with solution built on SMAC stack that sells to Enterprise segment?

If yes here is a great not-to-be-missed opportunity for you to explore partnership with Zensar Technologies….then Read on.

Zensar Technologies is a technology partner of choice for global organizations looking to strategically transform, grow, and lead in today’s challenging business environment. ProductNation is pleased to partner with Zensar to make this opportunity available for Indian Product Startups. Zensar is looking at hungry, innovative product startups that have built exciting products based on SMAC(Social, Mobile, Analytics & Cloud) technologies from India and showcase them to their Leadership Team, with a goal of offering these innovative products for their existing customers, prospects and partners

Details of Zensar TechShowcase are as follows: Date: 7th September 2013 (Tentative), Location: Pune

  • Format 40 minute slot, with 20 minutes of demo cum presentation, followed by 20 minutes Q&A session for about 12 companies. Expected to be a full day event.
  • Audience – Leadership Team of Zensar and Key Vertical heads.
    • Areas where the Zensar is looking for Products – Mobile Solutions, Mobile Analytics, Device Management, Social networking, Web 2.0, Application Integration, Intelligent Customer Interaction Solution, partner interactions, and internal business processes. If you have an area which is not listed here, please do send us an email at showcase(at)pn.ispirt.in

What you get? An opportunity to showcase your product to one of the leading technology companies which has customers across the globe. More details can be found at www.zensar.com

  • An opportunity to get feedback about your product from the team that engages with enterprise buyer community, giving you great inputs for your future engineering and design decisions
  • An opportunity to partner and take your product to international markets. And all this with no sales qualification cost!

Interested? Great. Here is how you can participate:

  1. Provide the information desired in the online form by 20th August 2013(Now extended to 23rd August 2013). Completed submissions will be sent to the Zensar for short-listing and selection by 30th August 2013
  2. A selection committee will peruse the submissions, and based on their need and interest, will shortlist a set of 10 to 12 companies, and invite them to be present at the  Zensar TechShowcase Event, on 7th September 2013
  3. All expenses for the participating in this event will be done by the participants themselves. Zensar will provide the venue, and the audience.
  4. There are no participation charges for this event.
  5. If you have already provided information about your product for the ProductNation OutSights, please do send us an email at [email protected]

If you have any questions, please write to us at us at [email protected] and we shall try to answer them.

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Key SaaS product innovations to be showcased at Techcircle SaaS Forum on August 7 in Bengaluru

ProductNation is pleased to support Techcircle SaaS Forum, now in its second edition, which will be held on August 7 at Chancery Pavilion Hotel in Bengaluru. The conference will host a special session called Techcircle Runway where handpicked SaaS products and companies will be showcased.

Techcircle Runway presentations will cover product details, innovations, market opportunities, business models and how these products will disrupt existing markets to create value, followed by live feedback and Q&A with a panel of jury members. Each presenter will have five minutes on stage.

If you are a SaaS product/company and would like to showcase your innovation at Techcircle Runway, you can click here to fill the application form. For any query, contact Kanika at [email protected] or call 0120-4171111. Click here for more details about the event.

While mapping the opportunities in this sector, Techcircle SaaS Forum 2013 will bring together more than 150 stakeholders, including CEOs representing top and  emerging SaaS firms, innovators as well as private equity and venture capital investors betting on this space. Click here for more details.

Read the complete post here.

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Oogwave gained insights from CIOs at the 8th #PNMeetup

5 CIOs/Mentors, 2 startups showcasing their products, 12 good listeners and a rainy Noida morning at Adobe campus. We had a different setting this time, 15 minute of product demo and 60 minutes of quality one-on-one with the CIO community. We had two startups – Gaurav Jain, Founder & CEO of Oogwave & Vikram Bahl, Founder & CEO, Yavvy who got mentoring/guidance on their product strategy, Go-To-Market (GTM), scaling and sales among other things. Sharing some takeaways which Oogwave shared with us.

Oogwave is the content sharing platform for Enterprises, albeit the medium sized ones, and they wanted a ‘peek’ into a CIO’s perspective in order to better position themselves in the crowded market-space.

Some of the takeaways from the #PNMeetup were:

The biggest takeaway for us was that we do not need to necessarily focus on smaller/medium companies and if we are able to increase productivity, the CTOs of larger companies are more than likely to take notice, especially if we can reduce the total cost of ownership.

As we are in the business of becoming the platform of choice for enterprise collaboration, it’s priceless for us to gain insights into priorities in a CIO’s scheme of things. So while we do employ all the right technology for data security and already work on the principles of compartmentalization and least privileges, we hadn’t given much thought towards getting ourselves ISO certified. It really helps to know we can improve our prospects substantially by demonstrating that we have adequate process maturity and robust safeguards to ensure data security in line with industry standards as per ISO.

Sitting across country’s top CIO’s is quite an elucidating experience, but at the #PNMeetup we additionally got to interact with other passionate young entrepreneurs. This invigorating passion improves everyone’s morale especially when the going is tough, which is not that rare when you are an entrepreneur fighting to carve out a niche for yourself and your product. Talking to fellow product creators, understanding their challenges and accomplishments, builds up a camaraderie and is great for the startup ecosystem in the sense of building ties and establishing mutually beneficial relationships among entrepreneur community. Gaurav Jain, Founder, Oogwave

We hope to build this program on a monthly basis. If you are interested to be part of this program, do share us an email at pnmeetup(at)pn.ispirt.in

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Cybersecurity: Israel’s Innovation as India’s Opportunity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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#PNMeetup – Showcase your Product & Get Advice from leading CIOs

We are pleased to partner with APAC CXO Forum to put together the 8th #PNMeetup in Noida.  If you have a brilliant Enterprise Product and you just know that its the best out there, here is an opportunity for you showcase your product and get one hour of quality one-on-one time with the CIO community. In this one hour, you not only get a chance to showcase your product to the CIOs but also get one-on-one mentoring/guidance on product strategy, Go-To-Market (GTM), scaling and sales among other things.

Interested?

Please click on the following link to apply. Alternatively, send us an email at pnmeetup(at)pn.ispirt.in 

Only 3 companies will be selected so that each startup gets quality time of one hour with the CIOs.

Process:

Your application will be vetted by the CIOs. Final selection of companies will be done by the CIOs themselves.

We are expecting some very senior and eminent CIOs in this session, supported by APAC CXO Forum. The session is scheduled for 20th July in Noida. Stay tuned for more details.

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

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

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

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

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


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

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


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

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

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

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#DesignThinking: Desirable. Feasible. Viable

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Designing Great Products: A Startup CEO’s perspective

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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Promoting Design Thinking in the NCR

design thinking

In the last 2-3 years there have been well designed products coming out of the NCR startup ecosystem. Mettl, Visual Website Optimizer, Paytm, and Oogwave, especially come to mind where Design Thinking has been an integral part of the product development process, and not an after thought by giving it just a cosmetic veneer.

There is a noticeable increase in design sensibility while attending various Meetups and pitching design services to startups. However, there is still a gap in how to make it happen. In other words, how do startups and product managers cover the distance between thinking of design and making it actually happen.

With support from ProductNation, a few design professionals from Design For Use, MakeMyTrip, WoodApple, DSYN, Zomato and U2opia Mobile have formed an informal coalition to help promote the how-tos of design thinking,

Please join us for our launch session this Saturday (May 18th) at the MakeMyTrip office. There will be a talk by Mettl founder, Tonmoy Shinghal, followed up a 3-hour workshop on how to practice Design Thinking in your company by Devika Ganapathy of Anagram Research. Not to mention plenty of networking opportunities during coffee breaks and lunch. Please check out the details and register soon (only 30 participants).

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Showcase of 8 Innovative companies for #IndiaInternetDay – A TiE event

It’s here! The India Internet Day(a TiE event) celebration is beginning, and you’re all a part of it. You may be an outelier, an insider, a veteran, an investor, a trend spotter, an experimentor or an industry driver, but this is your go-to event this year.

Why? We’re looking at the long-term horizon and paradigm shifts in the internet industry globally and translating that in the Indian context. We will debate and discuss strategic drivers of the industry and will attract the top players.

Eight Indian startups get their “4 minutes of fame” at the event – an unprecedented happening. No wonder that when we opened the call for applications, we received more than 55 of them.

The competition was tight, and the job of the jury was not easy. The jury – Rajiv Prakash(Next in Advisory Partners , Saumya Meattle (ModuleOne), Srikant Sastri (Vivaki), Vivek Agarwal (Liqvid eLearning) and Vimalendu Verma (Magic Software) – rated the startups on the following parameters: originality, impact, practicability and applicability of the Innovation. After a lot many conversations and debates, 8 companies were shortlisted.

The big question: Will you be there to see the innovations being put forward by these companies? Next year could well be your turn.

Bluegape helps brands in setting up fan merchandising stores. Fan merchandising is ignored by most brands in India and is also a unique way of promotion for brands.

Cite Communities is an open online community for management professionals and serves more than 28 lakh people worldwide. The community offers a free-to-use knowledgebase with a discussion forum. This is where professionals can share career-related queries, which are answered by experts and mentors. The trump card? Anonymity.

Dineout is a table reservation website that enables customers to book a table, online and on the phone, at their favourite restaurants in town. It provides fantastic discounts – something not on offer if customers go to a restaurant directly.

Huntshire helps solve the problem of finding the right talent in a given time frame. Right now, companies must post vacancies on job websites and wait for 30 days to get maximum applications. Post this, the candidates are screened. The entire process takes 30-45 days. Huntshire does all this in 3 days, eliminating the need for a two-step process.

PerfectMyEnglish is a Web and Mobile App enabling tangible improvements in English communication skills for students and professionals. They offer personalised mentorship, detailed analytics, spoken English skill remediation through VoIP services and end-to-end solutions, helping businesses and recruiters achieve key English training and assessment objectives.

NowFloats: With 850M mobile phones (over 90 per cent feature phones) and SMS being a pervasive technology, NowFloats enables creation and updating of websites through SMS for small and medium businesses in India. Smartphone owners can use mobile Apps.

MindHelix: Sentinel is the first app designed with women’s security in mind. The app can send instant alerts in case of any problems. A forced power-off of the phone or an improper exit of the application will trigger an alert to be sent. Prolonged signal loss will also cause a ‘fail safe’ alert SMS and email to be sent from the company’s server.

Mobile Harvest is a two-way oral and intuitive literacy neutral community and networking platform, much like an oral Wikipedia for our emerging billion. It attempts to bring the benefits of social media to people who are not comfortable with reading or writing.