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Hey Indian SaaS Founders, Are you dreaming big enough and aiming high enough?

I took SaaSy bus to attend SaaSx3, a fun journey networking and ice break session among SaaS founder The sessions were on common challenges from funding to hiring right resources and also instant mini FinTech RoundTable (picture below).

SaasybusThe venue was at Chennai (Mahabalipuram) well described by above tweet and event started with afternoon session by Pallav Nadhani of FusionCharts on Referral Marketing. The discussion started emphasizing needs of marketing starts before existence of the product and continues with product and marketing should not be looked in silos away from the product. One question for SaaS founders is whether their startups are geared to leverage product features to perform self-marketing of the product The session brought some real examples of SaaS firms who have already done this successfully.

The impact of using “Powered by Logo” inside your product features on B2B2C websites that are focused on end user was highlighted and is more effective to target customers from new geographies where your product has not been adopted and are in early stages of entering new geography.

Nemesh of appointy stressed importance of backlinks (two lines of codes in the product), that became part of Google search when someone searched for a tool for appointments. Other suggestions include:

  • Sell lower price plan without option to “White label” product offering. After product is adopted, the lowest price plan can be offered as “Free forever plan” without white label option.
  • Find a WordPress plugin that is active and popular. Buy plugin and add one line in this plugin and publish the plugin.

#OneThing session happened where SaaS founders were asked to share a set of one things that creates significant transformation in their startups.

  • We did not predict, we performed action
  • Upgrade Field on Sales approach to Customer Success approach
  • “Support and train customers for first 45 days increased NPS score” – Think of it as customer Success Channel that is needed in scaling stage.
  • Keep high touch with customer and experiment how to maintain high touch with customers being online and not on-site. Leverage and experiment with cloud telephony, gamification and customer management.

Product Tear Down session where SaaS founders offered their product to be teared down by expert SaaS founder and audience. The experience SaaS founders published guideline template based on which they will provide feedback to brave startup like Zipboard and CanvasFlip and here are comments that apply to lot of startups found here too.

  • You first need to go deep focusing on the right customer segment before going broad.
  • While building a branded website, remember that website home page needs to convey emotional, functional and technical aspirations to connect with your audience. One good example is slack website, it is inspirational.
  • While displaying metrics of your product on the website, show metrics that creates positive impression in mind of prospects. Small number may not create right impression.
  • Remove small irritants. Devil is in details.
  • Does your product features pass Tooth Brush test? Ask, ‘Is this something people use once or twice a day and does it solve a problem?’
  • No right or wrong strategies, only shades of right while building startups.

Product-TearDownPeople who teared down choose right words to share comments to the founder who offered his product for tear down, also adding kind words “Do not become defensive. Their inputs are to improve not to criticize”. SaaS founder in the audience really liked the positive impact of product Tear Down session and followed with asks to #ispirit to have more startups in Product Tear Down sessions and suggestion for virtual Product Tear Down session.

There was another #OneThing session focused on what is one thing that in last 12 months worked well for SaaS startup with Aditya Sangi of Hotelogix , moderated by Prasanna

  • Alliance building approach steps – find complimentary product. Check whether your product adds to their value offering and whether other product have efficient reach to your customer target and whether joint offering creates value for your customer base.
  • Do not keep building a lot of non-core features in to your product and make the world as your competition and end up with no partners.

One attraction in SaaSx#n is story style presentation by Girish of #freshdesk, who genuinely shares learnings from his journey. This time the story had movie effect and learnings from the movie are

  • Everything need not be data driven. You can do things that people would notice and they will notice when things are on high quality bar.
  • Do what is right for customers first. Help sales team to develop focus on customer success by incentivizing to help customers first.
  • Started with sales team of young minds fresh from college and they started with focus on number of agents sold rather than revenue of agents sold. Once they were more customer focused and time arrived to scale, a change was implemented in discussion with sales team to change their focus to revenue earned per sales team member.
  • The importance of alignment between marketing and sales using instances from freshdesk journey.
  • Marketing teams must have targets for sign-ups. Pre-Sales team was useful to prepared customers on the product. He referred to article CREATING A SALES PROCESS FOR YOUR INBOUND LEADS: 150 IS A MAGIC NUMBER
  • Hired fresher’s following hack “Hire them for attitude and you can get them skills”. I liked the fact that the hack was implemented in sales and marketing function and not only in engineering.
  • Similar to other startups, freshdesk also got junks as prospects. They pruned not only junk and also channels where hunk data originated from. More junk arrival from channel lead to removing channel, leading to arrive at list of channels that worked for them.

Girish once again demonstrated that he was a hardcore Rajnikanth fan in real life too by creating a real movie style experiences bringing young talent who accompanied him at the start of #freshdesk journey in sales and marketing on to the stage. He created right impression that success is attributed to team’s effort rather than individual effort. Consider to be special in the days of “Winner takes it all”

Girish complete the movie with some thought provoking questions “Are SaaS founders aiming high?”, “Do you want to be happy with small year on year growth?”

Post by G. Srini, volunteer for iSPIRT

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Product Teardown at the “SaaS”y Day at Chennai: Chapter 2 on SaaSx3

The sea breeze was cool. And the SaaSy people went cool as well. Kiruba unleashed some tricks for networking that had the participants engaging in banter, fun and games on the lawn. It also wore off the participants from postprandial somnolence (carb coma) after lunch. The SaaSy bus by then had arrived from Bengaluru, and the participant number swelled to 150 or so.

Using your product as a marketing tool

Pallav Nadhani set the theme for #OneThing discussion involving of Siddharth of Practo, Nemesh of Appointy, and Ankit of AdPushup. He cited examples of MailChimp, which sends annual reports about the number of mails sent through its service, and Rancore, a research organisation that sent reports about Share Point, a Microsoft product for developers. He said that research reports set benchmarks for what works. He spoke of referral marketing and commission paid on referrals to existing customers as strategies to acquire customers without much of a marketing spend. Avlesh of WebEngage said that marketing does not exist in silos away the product. He spoke of incorporating the marketing element inside the product itself.

webengageOne strategy is using the “powered by *product logo*” inside the product to attract more prospects. This was especially used in a novel way. WebEngage chose a customer (of course, after a due diligence) to sell its low-priced product in an unpresent geography. Then the logo was added in the product to attract more customers in the region. The customer acquisition cost is reduced as a result. Nemesh of Appointy (which helps businesses to schedule appointments) has 118,000 customers, all of them acquired at zero cost of marketing. This was done through backlinks (two lines of codes in the product), which would indirectly show up in the Google search when someone searched for a tool for appointments. Ankit spoke of four strategies to customer acquisition without much marketing spend.

The VC speak

Mohan from Norwest said the SaaS multiples have compressed in the United States – it’s five times the revenue now rather than the 10x number that was the norm until sometime ago. He also said that SaaS companies have a history of not making a profit but was confident that it is possible to build a profitable SaaS company in India, which is capital-efficient.

Tarun of Matrix Partners clarified that now the focus has shifted to profitability of SaaS companies rather than growth. He said that growth expectations are tempered according to existing market conditions. Now, liquid capital is not available easily. He agreed that there was a time when growth was the focus when the capital was easily available. Now that capital has shrunk, it’s difficult to have a growth at the cost of profit strategy but the one focused on profits is the best.

Tearing down the product

Frictionless sign-up, a clutter-free website and a shortest path to functional wow! are some of the elements of the SaaS product that is self-serving and sold to remote customers. Three products were at the receiving end … er … learning end from Suresh Sambandam of KissFlow, Bharat, head of UX at Freshdesk, and Shekar Kirani of Accel. While Suresh focused on the sign-up aspects, Bharat gave feedback on design whereas Shekar pinpointed the market focus. Zipboard, Hummingbill and Canvas Flip were the three products that were reviewed on stage.

product etear down

This was easily the most popular segment of the day. There was laughter, there were learnings, there were moments of revelation, and on top of it, the three products wouldn’t have received such an honest feedback elsewhere. Shekar’s advice was worth a weight in gold especially for Zipboard and CanvasFlip. He was laser sharp in identifying the right customer segment and market and the entrepreneurs in the audience were overawed by his clarity.

The audience felt that Product Teardown deserves to be expanded in future editions of SaaSx. Peer feedback is valuable and helps to refine the product to make it efficient to acquire more customers.

The grand finale of the day was Girish making a fantastic presentation on his journey – from $1 million to $5 million. At each stage in the presentation, he called in the team members who worked on identifying a specific problem and explained what worked and what didn’t. What came through was the endeavour that propelled everyone at Freshdesk to work towards a common goal. What made these young guys work like men (and women) possessed is the specialty of the Freshdesk culture. Not much detail can be revealed, as we have to respect the fact that Freshdesk is a funded company. But what Girish said at cocktail was taut: “When I am on stage, if some guy thinks if he can do it, I can also do it, I am happy about it” It is suffice to say those who were at the hall were pumped with inspiration by Girish to think big and if you need that, you have to make it to SaaSx. See you there!

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It Was a “SaaS”y Day at Chennai: Chapter 1#SaaSx3

The April sun wasn’t evident at the beach side locale, near the historic town of Mamallapuram, which hold relics of exceptional beauty on its rocks sculpted under the patronage of the Pallava kings. Had it been the early part of last century, in all probability, we could have reached this place in passenger boats sailing through the Buckingham Canal, now condemned to history. It was using this canal route that the national poet Subramanya Bharatiar escaped to Pondicherry to prevent an imminent arrest by the British to endow us with memorable literary gifts in Tamil.

By favourable alignment of choicest factors, Chennai is home to successful SaaS enterprises. To say SaaS is the preserve of Chennai is surely an overstatement. To put it in perspective, it is a worldwide phenomenon and Chennai has made a mark in India. Undoubtedly, the success of Girish Mathrubootham (Freshdesk) has a lot to do with Chennai hailed as the SaaS capital of India, with Suresh Sambandam (KissFlow), Sanjay Parthasarathy (Indix), Krish Subramanian (Chargebee) and Lux (Unmetric) in the elite SaaS league giving an aura to Chennai, not to forget that it was Zoho that made it to the big SaaS league, taking on Salesforce, from Chennai.

At SaaSx3 it was a day filled with peer-to-peer learning, some fun, and a super-duper end. Playbook roundtables, One Thing Series, Product Teardown, and a presentation of “superscaling” (my term!) by Girish as the grand finale completed the agenda. Pallav Nadhani of Fusion Charts and Krish Subramanian of Chargebee (in partnership with Suresh Sambandam of KissFlow) engaged select SaaS startups on a roundtable each. iSPIRT’s agenda of peer-to-peer learning and networking, with the intention of forming a vibrant community of product entrepreneurs, took the form of playbook roundtables where the successful entrepreneurs share the secret of their product success with the product startups. The focus of both the roundtables, where I spent some time in each, was on the product. While Krish focused on taking the product from 0 to $1 million, Pallav chose the marketing as a tool for product’s success.

Find out why the customer chooses your product

Krish spent a considerable time in explaining the key to product success – understanding the persona of the buyer. “Product-market fit is constantly evolving,” he said. The process doesn’t stop with customer acquisition and onboarding but continues with retention of the customer, on what is now called the customer success. Acquiring the customer is a tedious process for which several methods and processes come in handy. The important take-away from this session was understanding the customer’s intent to buy the product. Krish liberally quoted from Chargebee’s experience to explain his perspective – their assumption of why the customer bought Chargebee flipped on its head when they saw the real data on why they did. How to find out? It is best to ask – first through a non-intrusive e-mail followed up by conversations and further e-mail exchanges.

The whole point of the discussion hovered around the 10% conversion rate – of prospects into buyers. But Suresh clarified that it is a benchmark for large enterprises, but the real numbers that convert is the key rather than the percentage if the customers are SMBs.

Krish said that the choice between free trial vs freemium is loaded in favour of freemium. But what usually happens is that the free trial users pump up the numbers (the customer count) but largely the free trial customers don’t turn buyers. The truth is freemium works well but free trial also works. The real answer is it all depends on the product. What also works is adding a “powered by *product logo*.” This has worked WebEngage and Freshdesk. WebEngage had a “powered by *logo*” on its product design (for a cheaper priced version) so that it gets more prospects into the funnel. If the customer is not paying, at least he can be used as a channel for prospecting. Freshdesk used the “powered by *logo*” on all its customer support e-mails (which is actually generated by Freshdesk) sent by the free user in its forever free product.

Another important aspect touched upon was making the pricing transparent and known, especially if the target customers are SMBs in the case of self-servicing SaaS products. If the customer base is large enterprises, the price conversation can happen offline and it is not necessary to provide price information on the website.

Constantly evaluate your customers and look for influencers

When I entered the conversation, Pallav was focusing on why, how and what of the product. He defined customer cohorts as influencers, buyers and users. Pallav’s proposition was a lot deeper – a good product markets itself. But you also ask deeper questions – even the reason why you (your product) exist to answer the other defining aspects of why the product sells (Pallav’s recommendation: view Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle video on why, how, what). The why exists converts simply into what problem is the product solving. But identifying the customer is a continuous evaluation process. Only if you know why you exist can you target the most appropriate buyers for your product so that your solution is aligned to their needs. For targeting customers at the right time, you must understand the customer behaviour a bit deeply. Pallav gave examples of how customer habits can be known from data. His marketing pitch was a bit philosophical quoting Seth Godin, who said, “The valuable forms of marketing are consumed voluntarily” (read Three Changes of Marketing). The network effect is powerful, as Avilesh Singh of WebEngage explained using his product marketing strategy. He said how changing his focus from marketing execs to developers as customers reaped rich dividends.

But, beyond all this, remember the most essential aspect is the product itself, which should be flawless from the customer experience point of view. Then other aspects are built on top of it.

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Announcing the third batch of 15 companies selected for @InTech50 2016

Last week, we announced the second batch of winners of InTech50 2016. It’s been a hectic month for all the stakeholders.

Happy to announce the third and final batch of 15 companies that are selected for InTech50 2016:

  1. Aujas: Security Analytics and Visualization Platform
  1. Canvazify: Canvazify is a visual collaboration tool for team brainstorming and planning. Its a pinterest of team ideas. Canvazify helps you organize and discuss ideas, derive meaningful insights and plan activities
  1. FarEye: FarEye, is a Mobile Workforce Management Platform. It is a customizable Enterprise Mobility Platform., that automates processes and field workforce thus., helping the enterprises in delighting their customers
  1. Germinait Solutions Private Limited: Germin8 Social Intelligence is a product suite that enables brands to get valuable insights from consumers in social media about the products, campaigns, content and customer service.
  1. Happay (VA Tech Ventures): Happay is a first of its kind, VISA card driven, expense management solution that streamlines a company’s expense workflow from purchase-to-accounting and enables real-time visibility and control over business spending.
  1. Indix Internet India Private Limited: Indix offers a variety of products including a Product API, Reports App, and machine learning services using proprietary data science algorithms. Leading brands and retailers use Indix products to boost productivity, drive innovation, and accelerate growth.
  1. Innotion Technologies Pvt Ltd: Protean is a Business Process Management & Field Service Management Platform, which helps the organizations in automating the backend Processes & Field activities.
  1. Lucep: Lucep is a sales acceleration solution for B2B businesses. Using a website widget and our mobile app, Lucep connects leads generated from your site directly with your team in under 60 seconds.
  1. NavStik Autonomous Systems Pvt. Ltd: FlytPOD is the next-generation flight-computer for commercial drones. FlytOS is its operating system that empowers developers build variety of commercial applications for drones. Together they offer a platform for drone-makers to build next-gen drone applications.
  1. Nowfloats: The NowFloats platform helps large enterprises by getting their local channel online in a relevant, meaningful, frictionless manner. Think how to get all of your retail stores, your insurance agents, your branches, etc all being highly discovered by local consumers via latest, frequently updated content by your extended teams.
  1. Propalms Technologies Pvt Ltd: Propalms TSE: Delivers Microsoft Windows client applications from datacenter over browser to users using presentation virtualization technology.
  1. SayPay Technologies: SayPay Authenticator combines voice recognition and speech recognition seamlessly into one single step. By simply speaking the SayPay “crypto-token” into their mobile banking app, users identify the transaction, authenticate themselves, and lock their biometric signature to each authentication.
  1. Tydy: Tydy is an Automated Employee Onboarding & Engagement Platform. Tydy combines automated workflows, pre-defined content modules and engagement hooks resulting in a personalized & amazing onboarding experience.
  1. Vidooly: Vidooly is an SaaS based video analytics and marketing suite that provides actionable insights to content creators, MCNs and brands enabling them to optimize their videos on YouTube and increase the organic reach, build an audience base and take data driven decisions to create content.
  1. Xtreme Media Pvt. Ltd: XM DSS is a Cloud based digital signage solution, it enables brands to centrally control & manage digital screens located anywhere in the world on a single click.

Congratulations again to all the above winners !!

You can see the first batch of winners here.

We will keep you updated on all the action, during and after the event. Keep watching this space.

Guest Post by Arvind Kochar, Terrene Global Leadership Network

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SaaSx3 is here!

It’s that time of the year when some of the most passionate founders of promising startups meet, connect, learn and engage.

It’s that time of the year, when the SaaS quotient of Chennai shoots up the sky.

SaaSx3 is back with a powerful line-up of sessions, and this time we head to the beach.

Saasx3Here are some of the interesting events you can look forward to at SaaSx3:

3 Playbook RoundTables with SaaS CEOs, a must attend session for new founders. This is one of the greatest ways to get some expert pearls of wisdom from some of the finest SaaS leaders.

Round Table #1 : Hands on Workshop on SaaS Metrics, hosted by: Suresh Sambandam, Founder & CEO KiSSFLOW
Round Table #2: Getting Marketing basics Right (for First Timers), Hosted by Pallav Nadhani of Founder/CEO of Fusioncharts
Round Table #3: Going from $1,000 to $100,000 MRR, Hosted by Krish Subramaniam, Co-Founder & CEO, ChargeBee
The One Thing series, a brainchild of SaaSx2 makes an appearance in this edition as well. Watch out as founders talk on the one thing that they would do all over again, the one thing that was the turning point in their startups’ growth, the One Thing that made a difference,

Product Tear Down is a one of a kind event which debuts on the SaaSx this year. A great opportunity for new startups to have their product analysed by an expert panel from various angles such as Opportunity, UI/UX, Funding etc.

Another session you can’t miss is the Inside Story is where Girish talks about how Freshdesk grew from $1m to $5m.

With a Startup Comedy event(yeah, startup) and some fun Networking Games, this edition of the SaaSx3 won’t disappoint.

And not to mention the dinner, drinks and networking.

So here’s the detailed agenda for the meticulous folks.

Register for a spot if you would like to be a part of this fun filled, unconference!

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Announcing the second batch of 15 companies selected for @InTech50 2016

Last week, we announced the first batch of winners of InTech50 2016 amidst a lot of excitement and enthusiasm. The judges and panelists are having a great, yet tough time.

With much deliberation and discussion, we are very happy to announce the second batch of 15 companies that are selected for InTech50 2016:

  1. CanvasFlip Solutions Pvt Ltd: CanvasFlip is a User Research and prototyping tool for UX teams and product managers to record User Videos, Conversion Funnel and Interaction Heatmap.
  1. Entersoft Information Systems Pvt Ltd: EnProbe is a cloud based vulnerability assessment tool designed to help developers, website owners and administrators to identify security vulnerabilities in their website. EnProbe provides a “One-click, configuration free” scanner that helps in identifying the security health map of a website.
  1. FourthLion Technologies: The product is an offline retail behavioral analytics platform that offers a superior than e-commerce experience – (a) Personalization based on offline retail behavioral signals (e.g. with how many people you come, what time you walk in – and based on this give you timely offers, and give you a enhanced menu experience); (b) Using IoT to detect retail behavioral signals (capturing what table you prefer, how much do you walk around when in store); (c) Making IoT intelligent to aid the offline retail experience (e.g. vending machine suggesting what you should buy right now to stay in line with your diet)
  1. FRSLABS Research Systems Pvt. Ltd. Detects and prevents fraud at the point of application. Patent Pending technology that detects fraud faster with fewer false positives resulting in reduced operating costs (over 50%) and improved customer experience.
  1. Gradatim IT Ventures (India) Private Limited: The Gradatim MFInsure OnDemand Insurance System, is a flexible system for the core processes of life and non-life insurance companies and agents. It is a cloud based, analytics driven, web and mobile-enabled, policy and claims administration system for life and non-life insurance products.
  1. IgrenEnergi Inc: It has three hardware products supported by a common underlying IOT and cloud analytics platform: the Solar Optimizer, the OptiVerter and the OptiPVStore. The Optimizer boosts lifetime energy production by minimizing module mismatch losses. It connects 8 modules independently, operates each at its maximum power point and extracts the highest generated power at all times.
  1. Innovaccer Inc: This Integrated Enterprise Analytics Platform enables organizations to integrate disparate enterprise data sources / applications on a big data lake (Hadoop and Spark based) and democratizes access to enterprise wide data without having to write code.
  1. I-exceed technology solutions private limited: Appzillon Digital Banking Suite consists of pre-built banking solutions that help the bank go digital in a very short time frame. The solutions under the Appzillon Digital Banking Suite are Appzillon Consumer Banking, Appzillon Corporate Banking, Appzillon Branch Banking, Appzillon Relationship Management, and Appzillon Onboarding System. Appzillon Digital Banking Suite enables the bank to offer end-to-end digital experience for its consumers, corporates and internal users.
  1. Nextgen Project Management Systems: Platform for corporate social responsibility (CSR)
  1. Quicko Technosoft Labs Pvt Ltd: Whatfix is a SaaS solution which helps companies to accelerate user on-boarding, reduce support queries and remove training needs.
  1. Qustn Technologies: Capabiliti is a mobile first SaaS platform used by large enterprises to train and engage with their remote users (employees / clients / vendors). The platform allows a company to have a one view of their entire business – and ensure that harmonised communication / training / sales support is reaching the last mile.
  2. Vistara (VistaraIT India Pvt Ltd): Vistara is the software defined IT operations management (ITOM) platform. They offer the only SaaS based ITOM suite that delivers a policy based framework for visibility and control across hybrid IT infrastructure.
  1. Spoors Technology Solutions India Pvt Ltd: EFFORT is a one stop solution to all field challenges for all verticals. EFFORT a fludic mobile+Cloud based SaaS solution, helps companies quickly configure any field business process in just few mins, deploy and start using EFFORT to monitor and execute field operation with ease.
  1. Ttatva innovation labs pvt ltd: Offers a cost effective Tele care as a service platform to enable remote patient care transformation and reduce overall cost of care for patient. This platform will help patient receive care through moving patient clinical and diagnosis information and not moving people
  1. ZingHR: ZingHR is a new-age End-to-End HR platform that delivers Real Business Value with a combination of latest Cloud Technologies, Best Practices and Employee Centric Mobile Applications, rather than just HR process automation.

Congratulations to all the above winners !!

Watch this space for the announcement of the third batch of 15 winners.

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Announcing the first batch of 15 companies selected for @InTech50 2016

InTech50, a flagship event of iSPIRT & Terenne Global, running in its third year, is a platform for showcasing of some of the most promising software products created by entrepreneurs from India.

50 companies are shortlisted every year, by an eminent panel comprising of Chief Information Officers (CIOs) of global companies, VCs, and senior executives from Product companies.

The chosen 50 companies will receive advice, on-going mentoring, product marketing support, and funding to scale their offering to the global markets.

This year, we received over 300 applications. The criteria for the first phase of shortlisting were as follows:

  • Products that were already operating in the market were preferred to those at a concept / POC stage
  • Products that addressed horizontal opportunities were preferred over those that focused very deep on a vertical
  • Products that were easy to implement & use were preferred over products that needed deeper integration with enterprise systems (like ERP)
  • Solutions that could be an “add-on”/”bolt-on” to the existing eco-system

Here is the list of the first batch of 15 companies that are selected for InTech50 2016:

  1. CloudCherry: Cloudcherry is a real-time, Omni-channel customer experience management platform that helps customer-facing brands track, measure & improve Customer Delight – thereby resulting in greater customer loyalty and profitability for the brand.
  2. Drona HQ: a mCaaS – mobile container as a service. It offers mobile app as a container preloaded with various engineering components like SSO, push notification, Security and various other features which can be extended by any 3rd party web app that can be loaded on top of DronaHQ.
  3. FT Cash: ftcash aims to empower micro-merchants, small businesses, retail chains and home based entrepreneurs with the power of mobile payments..
  4. Ideal Analytics: Ideal Analytics provides proactive business suggestions using business rules and advanced statistical & data mining techniques.
  5. Ideapoke: Ideapoke is a B2B software platform, which helps companies to find technology partners, connect and collaborate with them to acquire new innovations fast and at reduced cost.
  6. Indusface: Indusface Total Application Security (TAS) is industry’s first truly integrated web application security and compliance solution. It helps organizations detect application-layer vulnerabilities accurately with web application scanning (detect), patch them instantly with web application firewall (protect), and monitor traffic continuously for emerging threats and DDoS attacks, to mitigate them (monitor).
  7. In10stech: A comprehensive application development and deployment platform that is being built on modular architecture of OSGI that helps large enterprises improve business agility.
  8. Reverie Inc: Cloud based platform hosted in AWS which enables web and mobile based applications to go multilingual. The platform provides SDKs which comprises of APIs for content localization and transliteration.
  9. Senseforth: Senseforth’s humanlike conversation platform helps enterprises chat with millions of customers simultaneously. Senseforth’s intelligent assistants can address queries, resolve issues, perform tasks and even help customers shop.
  10. Teamchat: Gupshup is a smart messaging platform that offers APIs for developers to build interactive, programmable, omni-channel messaging bots and services as well as SDKs to enable in-app and in-web messaging.
  11. Tone Tag: ToneTag is a product first company driven to realize mobile payments and revolutionize the payment ecosystem with innovative payment products.
  12. Uncanny Vision: UncannyDL provides Vision framework for using Deep Learning models based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). UncannyDL is the 1st Deep Learning-based SDK available for ARM Cortex-A series processors.
  13. Vymo: Google Now’ for enterprise sales teams
  14. Wavemaker: WaveMaker RAD Platform helps enterprises build custom applications quickly, saving money and time on application development and maintenance. WaveMaker can be used to build both responsive web (browser based) as well as Hybrid mobile (smart phone installed Apps).
  15. Yogurt Labs: FLIX is a business-grade video maker mobile app that is easy enough for business of any size to use, yet powerful enough to create cost-effective, professional looking, on-brand videos within few minutes.

Congratulations to all the above winners !!

Watch this space for the announcement of the next batch of 15 winners.

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Nuts & Bolts of Marketing & Selling in US for First Timers: A crash course playbook!!

After releasing recently SoftALM and SoftAgile (Agile Project & ALM Tools), we at JamBuster were trying to decide on how to sell these tools in US.  We had sold software services in US earlier, but selling software product to US from India is new to us. So we were looking for some help!

They say- we start seeing things, when we start looking for them.  I noticed an email from Avinash Raghava, the co-founder of iSPIRT Foundation, about a PlayBook on Nuts & Bolts of Marketing & Selling in US for First Timers, in Hyderabad on 27th February. It was to be led by Suresh Sambandam of KiSSFLOW.

Playbook Roundtables are the small, intimate and intense experiential learning sessions that iSPIRT have pioneered.  Suresh is a iSPIRT maven, meaning trusted expert who pass knowledge to others in a pay-forward model. Suresh is a kind of celebrity in selling products or productize services in US from India! He led KiSSFLOW to have more than 10,000+ customers across the globe, in less than 3.5 years. That is absolutely phenomenal success in SaaS world, doing it from India!

Looking at these credentials, I registered for the event and got a quick reply from Chaitanya Chokkareddy of Ozonetel.  Ozonetel was to host the event. Ozonetel offers CloudAgent -a Cloud Call Center Solution that was already successful in India and was also starting on their US go-to-market strategy.  On Saturday morning I met with Vikas & Aditya from FirstHive, who have recently introduced a customer engagement SaaS offering.  I could see this was going to be informative.

Suresh’s presentation was logical, down to earth, like him. He started with timing or relevance of this phase (after Product-Market Fit), followed by knowing your customer through B2B Customers Characterization.  Next focus was on Product, inversion of selling model, freemium vs free trial, and the price.  This is then followed by digital marketing toolset, such as website, SEO, Adwords, Content writing and email marketing. Similarly, Suresh went through step by step in sales, founders and each and every aspect, as available on following presentation: https://www.slideshare.net/mobile/ProductNation/nuts-and-bolts-of-marketing-selling-saas-products-to-us-customers-from-india-for-first-timers

Few quick take aways:

  1. SaaS is a tough business, even when done correct.That is evidenced from the fact that 1st $1MM in revenues is almost impossible, while first $10MM is improbable, but if you do pass $10MM, then $50MM is almost inevitable. Hence the lure.
  2. SaaS models lends itself to simpler applications and focus is on
    SOHO / VSB  : no touch
    SMB & Midmarket : low touch
    Enterprise : high touch
  3. For SaaS, traditional model of marketing, sales and products gets inverted. The marketing’s job is to bring horse to pond, the product is the water and sales is understanding what the horse did with water.

I think the success of Playbook was in small size (8-12 companies), along with focus on making it relevant to your business.  While some topics may feel dry on slide, Suresh made them very interactive by first sharing his experience and then asking participants to chip in their experience.  Suresh used these chip-in opportunities for people to get honest feedback. He suggested to Sainath Gupta of AnythingAI to who go through Product Market Fit analysis for his offerings of AI Platform along with Data Science Team as service. In our case, SaaS turns out to be not a path for now, as our solution focuses on end-to-end Agile Application Development platform for teams of 25-2500.

An interesting contribution here comes from Avinash Raghava, who is walking encyclopedia of Indian Software Product ecosystem, its history.  He is focussed on making this even successful from back end, but during the event, he is the source of amazing information on who’s who, what and when!

While registering, I had asked for payment getaway, Chaitanya mentioned that it was a free event. He was surprised that someone from Pune was traveling to Hyderabad for essentially a six hours long workshop.  For me the timing of it and Suresh’s experience was an immense draw.  Turned out the open discussion with fellow product or productize services companies on their way to sell in US and Suresh guiding with refreshing openness really made it icing on the top.

Thank you Suresh for sharing the blue print, that took you 1-2 years to discover through sheer hard work. Thank you Avinash for the event and the fellow product entrepreneurs for such a debates. Thank you iSPIRIT for building this wonderful ecosystem!

I highly recommend all entrepreneurs, whether you are about to or already started or even successful selling in US to attend this and other Playbook Roundtable. I thought these 6 hours saved me at least 100 hours of discovery work. Even more importantly, it is making Indian Product Ecosystem come alive!!!

Guest post by Satish Kamat, Jambuster Technologies

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SaaS-y marketing with Nuns: How @ChargeBee used guerilla marketing to promote an unsexy B2B product.

This is the story of how we spiced up our marketing campaign, brought a lot of smiles and drew attention during the recent SaaStr Annual event.

Background

The objective is to create the largest Enterprise Software company from India. This can be accomplished if top entrepreneurs can learn each other and then pass the learning to others.

When doing your job right involves going unnoticed, how do people find out about your product? Managing subscriptions and recurring billing for Software as a Service (SaaS) companies places us in this category. This is the story of our latest efforts to get the word out about Chargebee.

“This is a revolution, there will be a Before Chargebee (B.C.) and an After Disruption (A.D.), in the industry!”

“O.K. but how do we get people’s attention?”

“We play on the B.C. and A.D. theme; this is year 0 for subscription management.”

“O.K. but HOW do we get people’s attention?”

“Let’s have people dressed as evangelists hand-out flyers.”

“Why not sexy nuns?”

“Hmm, na, company image? We’re a billing company, we must stay somewhat serious. ”

“OK, regular nuns? Nuns handing out the 10 Commandments of SaaS?”

“Might work! But how do we go about it?”

Guerilla Marketing Nuns

SaaStr annual would be full of attendees from our target audience; it was approaching fast. We had just a couple weeks to write out the 10 Commandments of SaaS, get our design team to run its magic, print the mini tablets, and find the nuns!

On opening day, we were struck by divine luck, the SaaStr Annual was being held across the street from a Cathedral!! It was meant to be.

Our plan was to distribute the “10 Commandments of SaaS” as flyers. We included the hashtag #SaaS10 hoping this would become a little social media event. As it turned out, we were violating the event regulations by distributing marketing materials without sponsoring the event. We were gently warned by SaaStr folks to keep it out of the venue. In all fairness, they were right and we moved to corner of street to distribute.

But we then ran into another problem; the building’s agreement with the city forbids distribution of materials in front of the venue. We were however, told the sister could stand in the area in front of the conference entrance if we weren’t distributing anything. We had to regroup.

“Let’s print this tablet size?”

“You mean like the actual 10 Commandments?”

On the second day, the sisters were holding tablet sized commandments. And the result was surprising!

When the sisters had been trying to distribute flyers, people thought they were authentic nuns protesting the conference.

By having them hold big tablet sized SaaS Commandments, people realized this was just good fun, and started asking the nuns to take pictures with them. The social media fall-out was much stronger than the first day!

We brought a lot of smiles. More pictures and even more Tweets.

Plus we landed a 90 second interview. 🙂

Prior to the event we were a bit worried that doing something edgy to spread the word about us might affect our corporate image.

As it turns out, this had a hugely positive impact and we had a lot of fun doing it. Your smiles and pictures made us so happy! Thank You!

Here is a quick run-down of the operation :

  • $400 number of dollars spent for costume, printing.
  • A few hours of planning, design & execution.
  • Finding people for the sister act
  • 5000 SaaStr attendees.
  • 3-4 hours of exposure when most folks are walking in.
  • 2000 views. 100 likes. 25 retweets.

And the 10 Commandments :

Be My Valentine

Feeling the buzz from this event’s success, we had 24 hours to complete another marketing tactic if we were to be in time for Valentine’s Day.

Earlier in the month, we had decided we wanted to occupy mind-space. We decided to send a Valentine’s Day card (yes an actual paper card) to 200 start-up C.E.O.s, to grab their attention, and hopefully make them smile.

We created this :

Chargebee-Valentine

We spent the better part of the afternoon stuffing envelopes, finding mailing addresses, licking stamps, and placing a heart sticker on the back so these wouldn’t be considered “junk mail”.

We managed to ship them all out in time….the only problem is that we have no way to trace the effectiveness of this method. No “open, click-through” stats for snail-mail.

Our next step is to reach out to the 200 people via an email about this blog post to see what the response is. Fingers crossed!

We’re happy to share our tactics but remember the 10th Commandment of SaaS : “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s growth hacks.” 😉

If you think managing recurring revenue, subscriptions and invoicing is a pain in the SaaS, let us help you

Starting-up ? Check out our Launch Plan !

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SaaS Pricing and Value Metrics – Lessons from the Top Seeds

Two libraries. One charges you based on the number of books that you pick, while for the other, the rental period forms the basis of its prices.

Now, which one would you prefer to get your books from?

There’s no right or wrong answer in this scenario. What matters here is how you were able to make your choice, with a single criteria.

Both libraries cater to the same audience, with the same service, and the single element that tells them apart (besides their librarians’ temperaments) is their pricing strategy. And this one aspect is enough to determine if the libraries will make a fortune or fall headlong.

Your pricing model and strategy could make-or-break your SaaS business; apart from the tangible monetary consequences, it is one of those intangible yardsticks that have a major share of influence on your customer’s/prospect’s perception of your business.

An article published by the Harvard Business Review in 1992 states that a 1% improvement in pricing leads to a whopping 11.1% hike in the operating profit.

”..in SaaS, pricing is tightly coupled to the product itself, which is different from other types of software and non-tech products where the price is decoupled from the product.” – Lincoln Murphy, Customer Success Evangelist

It is that one thread that’s intertwined with every other facet of your business, right from the product, the marketing strategy, the sales strategy, to the company’s bottom line.

Many SaaS ventures who’ve acknowledged its worth have taken the reins to constantly innovate, experiment, and uncover the ideal pricing strategy for their business models. And among the many differentingredients that they employ in putting together a SaaS pricing model, is the “Value Metric”, which is also the protagonist of this post.

Why it’s worth talking about (and why you should keep reading further):

A value metric (also called a pricing dimension or a pricing axis) is basically the foundation of your pricing model – it is the metric depending on which you set your prices. In our earlier illustration of the two libraries, the number of books and the rental period are the metrics of the corresponding libraries.

Looks effortless, huh? There’s more to it than meets the eye.

The value metric literally decides your pricing strategy. It conveys the value each plan proposes to offer your customers, and gives them a valid reason to fork out money for your product. According to Patrick Campbell (the CEO and co-founder of Price Intelligently), the perfect metric should align with your customers’ needs, grow with them and be easy to wrap one’s mind around.

Select the wrong metric and you risk devaluing your offering. Opt for the right one – your customers would actually be happy to upgrade to the next level, as they understand the value that they’ll be receiving by doing so.

“If you are running a SaaS business (or any other kind of software business), it pays to spend some time thinking about your pricing axes. This represents one of the very powerful levers that are available to you to grow your business. (I am surprised by how often I find this has been ignored.)” – David Skok, five-time entrepreneur and General Partner at Matrix Partners

So let’s give this factor the importance that it deserves, and learn a few tricks from these SaaS guys who got it right.

Lesson 1- The Deceptively Simple Pricing Model:

Take a look at Hubspot’s pricing for instance.

They have segmented their plans according to the number of contacts – a deceptively simple move.

This is why. The metric they’ve resorted to is simple and straightforward – no ifs and buts; no little asterisk marks that point to a list of conditions. And yet, the way it works is nowhere close to simple.

Think about it – with its pricing, Hubspot brings more1 value to its customers (who are essentially marketers and salespeople – leads/contacts are the bread and butter for these folks) by letting them manage more contacts, and in the process, it gets a share of the value generated. Even if a customer doesn’t want to upgrade, their growth still benefits Hubspot through the overage charges (based on the extra contacts). In essence, this model allows for a smooth transition of customers from one pricing level to a higher one.

The customer receives value for what they’re paying, a value that the product had promised to give them in the first place. So for a customer, paying more translates to handling more contacts and making more conversions. Hubspot grows, as the customer’s business grows. A win-win!

Lesson 2 – The Aspirational Quotient and the Unambiguous Metric:

Here’s what Freshdesk’s pricing looks like:

Basically, they have a user-based pricing, “users” referring to customer support agents. And they start with a freemium tier, which encompasses almost all the basic features, but with a tiny tweak.

If you look closer, you’ll notice that the freemium plan limits the number of users to 3. This means that a customer who initially signs up for the free scheme would automatically be moved to a paid plan as soon as their user count goes beyond 3. A changeover that’s as smooth as silk.

Another point to make note of, is how they’ve infused an aspirational quotient in their pricing, so that a lower-tier user looks at the higher tiers with an “I want that!” gaze in their eyes.

Let’s say a startup founder signs up for the Sprout plan, a good place to begin with. Once their customer base starts to scale, they start receiving more support questions, and consequently their help desk requirements start increasing as well.

The first demand would obviously be to accommodate more than 3 support staffs. Apart from that, they would also realise the necessity of certain plan-exclusive features. For example the “Agent Collision Detection” feature (which shows a support agent if another agent is working on a ticket) plays a major role in avoiding embarrassment in front of your customers, and in turn improves the team’s efficiency. So in an effort to equip their customer support soldiers with the best possible ammo, the company automatically moves to the pricier plan.

As you can see, Freshdesk has worked out a simple approach to show the users what they’re missing out on and how they would be gaining more from an upgrade.

Another common value metric for customer support and help desk softwares is the number of support tickets. A customer would never be able to pinpoint the exact number of tickets that would be generated for a given period, and they wouldn’t really be pleased to pay for a metric that’s ambiguous.

The key is to have a pricing strategy that works in the interest of the customers as well as that of the business. Groove’s pricing experimentvalidates this fact. They initially grouped their pricing bundles based on the ticket count (with no limit on users), and it clearly didn’t turn out well. They finally settled with the simplest per user pricing model, and this time, they were right with their strategy.

“If our uniqueness comes from being the simplest, easiest app, then our pricing has to reflect that, too.” – Alex Turnbull, CEO & Founder of Groove

Lesson 3 – The Multi-dimensional pricing and the Choice Paradox:

A similar pattern can be found in the Electronic Signature Software segment as well. There’s Adobe’s eSign, where the pricing is hinged on the number of “seats”, or “users” in the common tongue.

Then there’s DocuSign, which bases its pricing bundles on the number of users and at the same time, restricts the number of documents for the two smaller plans. This way, the customer will move up the pricing ladder when the number of documents exceeds the specified limit. And that’s where the deceptively simple pricing comes into play.

Also, both of these pricing slabs have one other common characteristic: plan-specific features. What’s going on here, is that they’ve added another “dimension” or value metric to their pricing model. Freshdesk’s model belongs to this category as well – by making their plans both user and volume driven, they flaunt a multi-dimensional pricing model.

In a one-dimensional model, by focussing on a single dimension, you’re only narrowing your scope, rendering the other differentiating dimensions useless. In other words, you fail to unearth the full revenue potential of your product.

Chargebee’s earlier pricing model was established on just the number of invoices, with all the features available for all the plans. We then realised the flaw in our approach, and what we were losing out on because of this. Subsequently, we’re working on making certain prominent features exclusive for specific packages, and thus making our pricing model a multi-dimensional one.

A word of caution: Multi-dimensional pricing is good. But overdoing it and incorporating a lot of value metrics in your pricing strategy would only backfire, leading to a “Choice Paradox”, where the prospect gets too confused to decide. Use dimensions that are clear, concise and comprehensible, and know where to stop – keep in mind that the buyer’s decision process has to be as frictionless as possible. David Skok recommends a maximum of 3 pricing axes and suggests 2 axes to be the optimal choice.

Lesson 4 – A few other short pointers:

Among the umpteen slip-ups that companies make while arriving at a pricing strategy, is the fixing on the wrong metric(s); this is one error that could lead to critical damage. A research conducted by PWC showed that SaaS pricing leaders have two things in common when it came to their pricing strategy:

  • Their value metrics are derived from their customers’ perceptions
  • Their strategy is easily intelligible, measurable, and workable

In one of our previous posts, we delved deep into the enigmatic question of “What is the right approach to SaaS pricing?”, which led us to some rather interesting conclusions. This was one of them:

There are two interesting rules to SaaS pricing –

  • NEVER break your promises, stick to what you’ve committed.
  • No pricing strategy is perfect. Always be testing.

An inference from that second point right there – “There’s no one-size-fits-all pricing strategy”.

So there you have it.

Choose the metric that would mean something to your customers, and would justify the price that you’re charging them.

Choose the metric that is tied to the core value of your entire offering/promise.

Choose the metric that would set the scene for a win-win situation. Evaluate, rinse, repeat.

Maybe your best possible value metric (and pricing strategy) is just a turn away.

Guest Post by , ChargeBee

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Brace up all Product Entrepreneurs; InTech50 is back…

InTech50, iSPIRT ’s flagship event is back. The first two editions have been very successful and InTech50 has become the ‘must-go-to’ platform for enterprise CXO’s and product entrepreneurs. Over the past two years, we have hosted CXO’s and business leaders from global companies like AllState, Citibank, HCC Insurance, Standard Chartered, Colgate Palmolive, Time, AirTel, Yes Bank, Exide Life, Mother Diary and the likes. Here are some quick high points from the last two years of InTech50:

  • 18 enterprise deals that got originated and closed from conversations at InTech50
  • 42 enterprise PoC’s offered to InTech50 companies
  • 120+ innovation leaders (read: buyers & influencers) exposed to Indian product entrepreneurs

We have already managed to showcase over a 100 companies, and we have made 50 global investors and CIO’s travel to India to interact and associate with these companies, and happily so.

Here are a few portfolio companies from our past events – Capillary, Uniken, Seclore, Freshdesk, Reverie, Sapience, NowFloats, ToneTag to name a few.

Just to share the impact that we have created, and how these 50 companies have benefitted from this initiative, hear hear what some of them had to say –

“Intech50 is a phenomenal event. It is probably the highest RoI initiative we have ever participated in. With 50+ Global CIOs turning up, it is a great platform to validate your product. Met some of the largest enterprises, found use cases we weren’t aware of and closed marquee deals. Highly recommended!” Yamini Bhat, Vymo.in

“Intech50 was extremely useful in 3 ways. First, making a presentation of just 5 minutes to an extremely discerning audience helped us make our value proposition very crisp. Second, demoing our product to several heads of technology helped validate our product and use cases, and resulted in actual business deals getting signed. And most importantly, we were able to bag a large client with whom we’ve been able to co-create 2 completely new products. I wholeheartedly and highly recommend Intech50 to all B2B startups who have demonstrable products that are ready for large enterprises” – Ranjit Nair, Germin8

“Being a part of InTech50 2015 was a great opportunity for ToneTag. It was exhilarating when ToneTag was selected in the first batch as one of the top 10 products. The event gave us the exposure, guidance and support we needed. InTech50 enabled us to pitch our product to a global panel of curators and the media coverage we received was also been beneficiary to the company. Since winning InTech50, ToneTag has been expanding rapidly. We acquired many leads through the event that led us to PoC’s and commercial deals in the making. The resources we received through InTech50 have been invaluable as it has helped us build exciting partnerships with many in India and around the world” – Kumar Abhishek, ToneTag

If you are a product entrepreneur and your product is solving a problem for the enterprise CXO, InTech50 is your chance to showcase your product to the who’s who in the enterprise buyer community.

Apply before Feb 22nd 2016 and experience a bigger and better InTech50 in 2016.

To know more, click here.

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Calling all Indian B2B companies: InTech50 2016 – the global platform beckons again!!

With two super successful events in 2014 and 2015, InTech50 2016 is back – bigger than ever before.

For the uninitiated, InTech50 is a showcase of some of the most promising software products created by entrepreneurs from India. A panel of Chief Information Officers (CIOs), Venture Capitalists, and Product Leaders from previous successes will look out for fifty companies to make the cut to InTech50 selection criteria. Here are few reasons why you should apply( last date is 22nd Feb ’16).

  • An opportunity to showcase, get validation of the concept and product direction, better understanding of business value in the enterprise from Global CIOs.
  • High probability of being selected by Global CIO’s for pilot or early adoption.
  • Possibility of being selected by large product companies for add-on/bolt-on value add/partnerships to their large scale product solution sets.

Is it relevant for you? Yes it is, if you are a software product company that has aspirations to go global. Most importantly, you don’t need to travel abroad to seek your fortunes but rather the panel of experts comes to you in Bangalore, in India.

17220053885_5aa4bbf407_bThe program combines prospective buyers (CIOs) who will constructively critique your offering, funders (VCs and other investors) who will tell you why they will fund your product and mentors who will offer you that timely bit of advice that will give you the extra edge.

What’s in it for me? To answer that question, we are sharing some enthusiastic and overwhelming responses from people who were a part of InTech50 2015.

InTech 50 was an excellent opportunity to get attention from some of the top decision makers from India and US. I am very happy to say that some of the largest deals we did in the past year had their origins in Intech 50. It is probably the best networking and showcasing platforms for Enterprise technology companies in India. Sanjoe Jose, CEO, InterviewMaster

Congrats to you both on amazingly successful and proactive event. I have always had so much respect for how you all do all the right things to build be ecosystem. It is really commendable and we all entrepreneurs appreciate it so greatly. Thanks again! Valerie R Wagoner, Founder & CEO, ZipDial

This is a very unique event happening in India where in you are getting Global CIOs under one roof. I think this is god send for Indian CIO-focussed product companies like ours who want to go global. Manjunath M Gowda, CEO, i7networks

In my view, this was one of the best organized events in Bangalore in the recent past! I was quite impressed with the concept, companies that participated, their offerings, their passion and expertise etc. I have decided to buy the solutions offered by 2 of the companies for our internal use Kris Nair, President and Chief Executive Officer, Ascemdum

Thinkflow was one of the 50 companies that was chosen to be part of the first edition of InTech50 2014. It turned out to be a wonderful platform because we got an opportunity to showcase Thinkflow to a 50 global CIO’s and Intech50 gave us the opportunity to interact 101 with CIO and VC community. Conversations on the sidelines of InTech50 2014 led to multiple discussions on funding for Thinkflow and connecting with people who have helped us open conversations around sales and partnerships. Although we had a few good customers by April 2014, our selection to InTech50 and the press mentions made people take note of Thinkflow and our reach and recall with the CIO community increased substantially. For start-ups who are selling to the west, you cannot miss the InTech50 opportunity. Praveen Hari, Director – Alliances & Partnerships, ThinkFlow

When we at Whatfix decided to participate in inTech50, our initial expectations were limited to networking. But, the event turned out to be much more than that thanks to amazing participation by investors, start-ups and Fortune 500 company CIO’s. We were able to close big name clients like Procter & Gamble, iLantus and Nanobi. We are most definitely going to return every year! Khadim Bhatti, Whatfix

Thanks for organizing a wonderful event, esp, getting the top buyers in one place, is no easy task. KiSSFLOW had 5-6 inquiries and few VC interests too” Suresh Sambandam, Founder & CEO, KiSSFLOW

This year again, our Global Advisory Team has stalwarts like Ned Curic, Suren Gupta, Harmeen Mehta, Jack Pressman, Sashi Reddy, Narendra Kale and more… The startups will get an opportunity to showcase their wares to this highly selective team, giving them the opportunity to get a global footprint, right here in India.

Startups, please note – There is no application fee. 50 companies will be shortlisted by the Advisory Board comprising global and Indian CIO’s, product company heads, venture capitalists, and analysts. The selected companies will need to pay a fee of Rs. 25,000 to cover the expenses for two attendees. Only the 50 shortlisted companies will get to attend the event.

22nd February, 2016 is the deadline to submit your entry.

Apply now for the InTech50 2016, 13-14th April in Bangalore. Click here to submit your application.

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Tech Startups: Here Is A Chance To Take Your Rocketships To The UK

The Great Tech Rocketships Initiative (GTRS) 2016 is back again – only bigger and better. It is all set to introduce high-potential tech companies from India to the best in the UK.

The initiative was started last year with the intent to provide a platform to startups with innovative and disruptive ideas that have the potential to scale up globally.

Screen Shot 2016-01-11 at 9.11.54 pm

If you think you have the potential to grow overseas, or are looking to expand globally, the GTRS initiative may just be the platform to help you explore global markets.

RocketShips to the UK – an initiative by UK-India Tech Bridge, with UK Trade and Investment (UKTI), and iSPIRT – is tailor made for startups with impressive and unique ideas that can be transformed into fast-moving and hyper-growth ‘rocketships’ globally.

UK is an excellent platform for Indian companies to get access to the right exposure and a wide gamut of resources that can assist them to go global. It is the number one destination for FDI in Europe, having attracted a record number of FDI projects, bringing in the largest financial value and associated jobs over the past year. It has a vast pool of experienced industry leaders, veterans, venture capitalists and mentors that can provide the right direction to startups to establish a firm footing abroad.

Networking plays a pivotal role in fast-tracking the growth of a startup. Platforms like GTRS can provide startups global connections that are otherwise not easy to develop. Good mentoring and access to vital resources can be a great help for early-growth stage companies, and this is exactly what the GTRS initiative aims to help accomplish.

The winners of this program will get a fully paid (flights + accommodation) week-long trip to UK where they will get a chance to interact with world class investors, local entrepreneurs, policy makers, accelerators and incubators. There will be a guided tour of Tech City, Europe’s most vibrant innovation hub and science tech-park, where they can network with like-minded entrepreneurs, start-ups, research scholars and pioneering companies, explore the local entrepreneurship eco-system in the country and identify opportunities to scale up their business in the global level.

All participants shortlisted in round two will get a detailed feedback and assessment report from Applyifi. Moreover, the Top 10 finalists will be invited to join a mentoring program, where they will get advice and inputs from experienced entrepreneurs and investors.

Last year, close to 300 startups had sent their nominations for this coveted Program, of which 61 ideas were shortlisted after thorough screening by our prestigious jury, and 5 of them were declared the winners after a round of presentations at Demo Nights held across 5 Indian cities, viz., Delhi, Bangalore, Pune, Hyderabad and Chennai. The winners (Agrima Infotech, Congruent, Frilp, ToneTag and Talview) spanned diverse sectors and got a chance to visit UK to explore expansion opportunities.

If you think you have it in you to make it to the coveted list of startups that’ll head to UK, fill up our application form and explain why you think your company is ready for the UK global adventure. The shortlisted applicants will be invited to pitch to a panel of experts at various locations – Bangalore, Chennai, Mumbai, and Gurgaon.

The last date for applications is JANUARY 31st 2016.

For more follow us on UKTI_India on twitter and Linked In; #GREAT4Collaboration; #ifnotnowthenwhen

 

 

 

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Welcome to DrupalCon Asia!

It was in 2011 that Srijan spearheaded the first ever Drupal Camp in Delhi. A few meetups had happened before this. There were barely 50­-60 of us at the Camp, but the interest in Drupal was high. Some of us even dared to think that one day we could have Drupal’s global conference, DrupalCon, right here in India.

Cut to today. We have the very first DrupalCon of the continent being hosted in Mumbai in Feb 2016. And when we look back, as a community we have grown and come a long way!

Drupal started off as blogging platform in 2001, today Drupal is recognized as a robust enterprise-ready web content management. The latest release, Drupal 8, has a modern development framework and technical improvements to help us build multilingual, mobile and highly personalized experiences of the future. But technical wizardry aside, the best feature of Drupal is the community. With over 1,000,000 passionate developers, designers, strategists and architects, Drupal has one of the largest open source communities in the world.

Increasing number of Drupalers: India has over 70,000 registered ‘Drupalers’ and is  the second highest source of traffic on Drupal.org, the global community portal

Huge contributions to Drupal code: Developers from various Drupal agencies and IT companies in India have committed their time and skill into resolving critical issues for Drupal. In fact, India had the second largest number of contributors working on the Drupal 8 core.

Camps to encourage Drupal talent: All this has been made possible because of the efforts of Drupal agencies, and their efforts to build the community by conducting Drupal Camps in various cities. Delhi, Chennai, Hyderabad, Bangalore, Pune and Mumbai and many other cities have been conducting Camps, and it is heartening to see the Camps getting bigger each year.

Global events, the DrupalCons: DrupalCons are mega events for the community, drawing Drupalers from across the globe. These are held across the US and Europe and give the community a chance to come together and participate in learning sessions, talks, code sprints and social events. Indian companies have been regular participants at DrupalCon events in Los Angeles, Austin, Barcelona, London, Munich and more.

IIT, Mumbai will be the venue for the first Drupal Con in Asia: That India is avenue for a DrupalCon speaks volumes about the strength and passion of the Drupal community in India. DrupalCon Asia has lined up top speakers from the Drupal community across the world to present valuable tech and business sessions. A key highlight of the event is the one­day Business Summit, where Drupal agencies will discuss trends and challenges for their businesses today.

Engage with DrupalCon: We would like to invite the Indian IT community to engage with DrupalCon. There are many ways one can do that. IT companies can send their Drupal and PHP developers to attend the event and keep abreast with the latest in code. Companies seeking Drupal development, and Drupal agencies will find the one­day Business Summit very insightful. Companies can also be sponsors for the event, details of which are here.

DrupalCon Asia 2016 is going to be an exciting event, and pathbreaking for the Indian Drupal community. Come, be a part of it!

Contributed by Rahul Dewan an entrepreneur, open source and agile evangelist, blogger, green activist and yoga & meditation practitioner. He is the founder of Srijan Technologies, a 13­ year­old consulting company with expertise in building high­traffic websites and building online business applications.

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Dymystifying Valuations & Investors – an opinion from an entrepreneur!

Valuations often have seemed to be a “Black Art”, but they seem to be crucial in determining your strategy for outside investment!

Are they really? How is the early stage entrepreneur going to decide what is reasonable?

Some other questions that routinely come up in the mind of entrepreneurs:

1. How does the process of creating value effect me, my co-founders, my team & investors?
2. How do I maximize value for everyone?
3. How do I get the best valuation in case of an exit?

Entrepreneurs need to understand how money works and see the world from the investors world.

One of the area VCs in the US once described to me this scene sometime back, just after their firm had decided to invest in the start-up:

“There was a lot of interest in this company, and the founders had a fair amount of leverage. They used every ounce of it to extract a higher valuation,” he said. We kept saying that our firm would bring a lot more to the table than money, and that the mentoring, strategic advice, network resources, and political capital we could offer were almost unmatched.”

“The founders however set all that aside and made it about the money. It left a bad taste in our mouth. The deal was still worth doing—barely. But we have less of an equity stake in the company than we would ordinarily want, and given all the other portfolio companies that need my attention, I don’t feel any obligation or desire to give these guys additional assistance.”

The point is that the founders undervalued the non monetary value resources the VC firm had to offer, or they assumed that mentoring and strategic support would inevitably be available from the firm. Given that the negotiation for money and term-sheets is a high stakes exercise with various emotions and personalities
present in the mix, one should not forget that the document at the end lays out how much equity and control a VC will have in return for its cash is all about assigning rights, carving out protections, and haggling over claims to future returns.

So these negotiations are fundamentally about picking the right long-term partner and forging a relationship that can survive the inevitable disappointments, resolve the unforeseen conflicts, and monetize the mutually earned successes to come.

Now as a management consultant, I have tried to put these dynamics into some of the mistakes and solutions of how to avoid them in this blog.

At the end of the day, term sheets can be difficult to understand, and you may need help determining what the various provisions—liquidation preference, anti-dilution protection, pay to play, drag along rights, vesting schedules, no-shop clauses, and so on—imply for your current and future rights and obligations. At the very least, you should contact other companies in the VC firm’s portfolio to find out what was negotiable, why they made the choices they did, and what terms were the most consequential in the months and years after the deal.

So try to check out various VCs and see who you can work with, who has done investments in your space (target market you address) and what it has been for others to work with them.

“Remember you are looking for a partner for the long term and people who you work with will matter in terms of bringing value to your startup especially

the non monetary type!”

So here are some things to consider –

Understand your leverage

One of the thing is the more alternatives you have which means number of other VCs who are interested in your startup, it gives your more leverage. Try to use this to fight for the terms that are important for you. Sometimes one common problem is running out of cash since its hard to forecast the burn rate, and too little willingness to give up equity. As a result, you may fail to take in enough money during early rounds of funding. So look for someone who is willing to fund subsequent rounds or offer bridge loans without significant dilution of founder equity. Its better to negotiate this during the first round of financing when you have numerous alternatives and could command a better price. Many founders have discovered that doing a slightly bigger first round than seems necessary—or perhaps negotiating an acceptable formula for future bridge loans at the outset—can pay off in the
long run: It’s bad when you have few options, but considerably worse when you are running out of options and out of money!

Its okay to look at the long-term goals of the VC partner and take the time to understand what the other side cares about and hope for from their investment which includes accepting money in installments tied to milestones with no dilution in equity.

“So don’t just focus only on your own options.

Understanding the other party’s interests can give you leverage”.

Strive to maximize thrust for win-win situation

Imagine you are the verge of closing a big financing round at the end of the month. When you pitched
last month, the business was gaining momentum and you are on target for all your financial projections. Since then, a major customer deal you were counting on falls apart, and a key employee is on the verge of leaving. Question would be if you would have any legal obligation to reveal this situation, probably not, but imagine you picked up the phone and revealed it. Maybe you think they may re-negotiate the terms of the deal. But most often than not, VCs would reward you for your honesty since they would like to put a premium on your trust! They would value your upfront gesture of delivering bad news as you would deliver good news to them!

Another thing would be around terms, to comparison shop, and to use whatever leverage you have to renegotiate the deal. Its all okay as VCs expect you to ask for better terms, but not after you have given your word on an agreement. The VC world is small and they all keep cross checking on each others deal flows all the time.

“In VC relationships, as in any long-term partnership,

It’s much easier to build  trust than to rebuild it.”

Focus on value and not valuations

If you’re selling your house, for instance, you might not even meet the buyers, and despite issues such as inspections, financing contingencies, and the closing date, the selling price is far and away the top priority. In this case focusing on a single, top-line number sometimes makes sense!

But in case of accepting someone’s money at a startup, the signed contract is the beginning of the relationship, so its a mistake to focus too narrowly on price and not enough on drivers of long-term value. Its like when negotiating a job offer, for example, people tend to obsess over the starting compensation, but factors such as geography, responsibilities, prospects for learning and advancement, and even length of commute can have a greater impact on their enduring happiness and success.

More than one VC has identified this shortsighted emphasis as founders’ biggest mistake.

“Entrepreneurs focus too much on valuation and not enough on control,” one VC told me. “It’s amazing how much control founders are willing to sacrifice in order to obtain a $4 million valuation instead of $3.5 million. These numbers don’t matter much in the long run, but the impact of diminished control can last forever.” The tendency is especially remarkable when you consider the passion most founders have for what they are trying to create, for their company’s mission, and for their vision of its future. Once founders have sacrificed board control or ceded voting rights on too broad a category of decisions, those decisions are, of course, technically out of their hands. Most VCs are very reluctant to use their control rights to contravene the wishes and objectives of management, but if conflict or a breakdown in trust between management and the board occurs, founders may find themselves severely constrained, if not replaced.None of this means you should ignore valuation—it’s an important consideration. But it’s a mistake to confuse it with value, given that most founders also care a lot about factors such as their role, prestige, self-identity, and autonomy.

“To maximize valuation without regard for non-financial considerations

is to sign something of a Faustian bargain.”

Strive for Understanding not Conflict

Even when control is not the concern, you ought to pay close attention to terms other than valuation; there are additional provisions that can have a huge impact on how much money you’ll eventually see. And if you look at them carefully, the terms a VC firm proposes can help you understand its unspoken concerns and assessments of your start-up’s future.

Well as in any relationship you need to look well beyond the contract and far beyond today. The lessons offered above are targeted toward those who are striving to create strong partnerships with VCs—but they are relevant for anyone negotiating in a world where a signed contract is not the end but merely the beginning.

So folks go develop products & solutions and please don’t forget to connect your wares to a customer persona and a pain-point they may have to resolve and rest will follow!

I will do more posts on understanding terms like liquidation preference vs. participation for example in term-sheets from the perspective of an entrepreneur.