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Have a product idea for the enterprise? Validate it with @InTech50 Validation Tank

The first 2 editions of Validation Tank have yielded better than expected results. True to the name, it has served as the platform for idea and proto-type stage entrepreneurs to validate their product idea. The entrepreneurs got an opportunity to present their idea to a CIO panel comprising of Darshan Appayanna (Happiest Minds), Sudhir Reddy (Aricent), Yatendra Kumar (Gokaldas Exports), Vijay Ramachandra (Editor-in-chief, CIO Magazine), Satish Das (Cognizant) and Murali Krishna (Ex- SVP, Infosys). The CIO’s judged the idea on a range of parameters and provided actionable insights on the idea and what can be improved when it comes to pitching to the enterprise buyer.

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So, what is InTech50 Validation Tank and who is it for?

InTech50 Validation Tank is for idea and proto-type stage product entrepreneurs. It is an opportunity for founders to pitch their idea to the ultimate enterprise buyer (CIO) and understand

a)      If the problem they are trying to address through the idea is major concern for the CIO

b)      If it is a market that is well served

c)       If the CIOs can make a business case for a product or allocate buying budgets

d)      If adding a feature or a functionality will make it a great product 

The CIOs will also provide actionable insights in to the opportunity size, technical viability, business model and importantly the buyer’s perspective. All this at a concept/idea stage and even before you start developing the prototype. It is a great opportunity to get an honest feedback about your product idea. It is a platform to engage with IT leaders, product champions, mentors and early adopters for your product.

Who can apply for Validation Tank?

If you are company founded/incorporated after 2014 and working on a product idea for enterprises or in the process of building a prototype, you are the ideal company for Validation Tank. You need not have a working prototype but if you are a little ahead and already started product development, we can still consider you. 

When is the next Validation Tank happening?

The next edition of the Validation Tank is happening on 25th of June 2015 in Bangalore. We are soon going to announce the dates for Validation Tank in Chennai and Pune too.

How do I apply?

APPLY NOW ! 19th June, 2015 is the last day for rushing in your entries.

 

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Building Marketing & Sales Engine for Your Global B2B SaaS Product

Recently, India has seen many success stories of product startups in the SaaS category, which are building products for the global market. Here is what we did –

Suresh Sambandam, Founder and CEO of OrangeScape (the company behind KissFlow), in collaboration with the iSPIRT team, conducted the 49th #PlayBookRT on building SaaS products for the world. Sokrati (Pune) played a gracious host for this event, and saw around 14 product entrepreneurs from different cities.


Avinash Raghava introduced Suresh and the RT was kicked off with a round of introduction from all the participants.

Suresh laid out the purpose of the round table and defined the scope. This PlayBookRT was for the B2B SaaS startups with a product that has a global audience. These companies have achieved a product-market fit with a MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue) in the range of $1K to $5K. These companies are looking to move the needle to $50K-$100K MRR. Essentially, early startups that are looking to grow at least 110x.

B2B customers need to be segmented with certain metrics. For KissFlow, the number of employees was a key metric to identify customer segments. The segments were –

  • SOHO (<10 employees),
  • Very Small Business (10-50),
  • SMB (50-500),
  • Mid-Market (500-5000) and
  • Enterprises (5000+)

Depending on your product, you may segment the customers by their revenues.

It is unlikely that your product will work across all segments as it is. The sweet spot for KissFlow is the SMB and Mid Market, as the value proposition is stronger for these customers. You have to pick your own sweet spot.

There was some discussion on why Enterprise segment is different from the others. There were multiple views on that. It was discussed that the marketing and sales processes are different for large customers. Their buying process is different too. They want “vendors” to come to them. Often, the product itself doesn’t work. Example – for KissFlow, Enterprise’s would need integration with their existing systems like SAP or Oracle. The SMB or Mid-Market customers do not have such requirements. For enterprises, you may have to package your product as a custom solution. Instead of the entire company, you may find it easier to get your product rolled out in a specific department.

The Mid-Market segment opens a big opportunity in US market. Typically, in the US, $5,000 is the approval limit in this segment. Most of the SaaS products fit in this limit. That makes decision making easier and fast. These companies are willing to spend money on products that help them compete with big guys.

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The discussion then moved on to the core elements of a successful SaaS business.

The role of the product in SaaS is very high. For enterprise products, the product comes at the end of the sales cycle. For SaaS products, the opposite is true. So, your product has to solve a problem.

While product is at the core of your business, marketing comes before the product. Your marketing communication needs to match the product promise.

Before accelerating your marketing, you need to decide on the product positioning. Your product is either a category creator, or provides a novel approach to an existing and well-understood category, or low cost alternative. Often, most of the SaaS businesses will fall in the second or third category. It’s also possible that product positioning could be mix of last two categories. The category creator products are hardest to pull off. The low-cost alternative need not be a low-priced alternative. Being in India, we can enjoy the advantage of low cost structures. Some companies do pass on the cost benefits to the customer via low price. While offering a low price option, it is important to ensure that you are not perceived as a low-quality option.

The next topic of discussion was offering a Freemium product vs Free trial. Often, for SaaS, this choice does not depend on the cost. The general consensus seemed to emerge that a free trial is the best option. Even if it doesn’t cost you much to offer part of the product for free, the effort to convert that free user to being a ‘paid’ user is high. Plus, when the user is ready to pay for the product, the user still may go out to look for other options. There are “free” products that make you pay with say a link to their website. This is not really free as your customers are paying with a different currency.

Like all discussions, this one too took a detour and we discussed about sales for the global customer base. To serve the US market, you need to have a night shift. For KissFlow, the newly signed up customer receives two emails – one automated and one personal email. The automated email is to schedule a demo of the product. KISSFlow has reduced the friction to sign up dramatically. You sign up with just an email. They have a team to find out information about that person based on the email address. All the new leads get assigned to the sales team automatically based on timezones and available bandwidth with the sales team. Each sales person handles about 200 leads per month with an annual contract value of less than $5,000.

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The next topic of discuss was pricing. People visit the homepage and then the ‘pricing’ page. They are qualifying themselves by looking at pricing. There are various ways to price your product. For the well-established category, competition will be a huge influencer in your pricing. You can also price your product based on value offered, though, you need to clearly demonstrate the value of the product. For KissFlow, the anchor was Google Apps. At the start, they focused on a niche of companies who have adopted Google Apps, which costs $5 per user per month. So, they picked the price of $3 per month.

For SaaS companies, raising the prices is usually not a problem. You can grandfather your existing customers who will continue to enjoy the same price, but the newer customers will pay a higher price. The real problem is lowering the prices, as it upsets existing customers. If your customers are not complaining about the prices, you are leaving money on the table and you should raise the price.

You should make users pay every month irrespective of their usage. You shouldn’t have to sell your product every month to the customers. That’s why your customers need to keep paying every month. Setting the expectations also ensures that customers are not thinking about pricing often.

Marketing was the next topic of discussion. Your website is a core marketing asset. You should avoid outsourcing the site development and have an in-house team for updating and maintaining the website.

Your home page should have a crisp headline with some value proposition. Jargon should be avoided. Make it easy for customers to understand and take a decision about your product. You should create a “customers” page for social proof. Highlight your major customers on this page. If you are running a blog, it will have visitors who are not aware about your product. You should create ads for your own product and run them on your blog.

You can use SEO and AdWords to bring the organic and paid traffic. SEO needs a lot of time to ramp up. So, start early with a dedicated team, even if it is a one-person team. AdWords needs a specialist to handle the paid traffic. Here, you can define your key metrics like costs per sign up. AdWords can deliver a sign up at $10-$25 for search and $2-$10 for display ads. These are only sign ups and not conversions. You need to measure conversion to paid subscription. That would be your true cost of customer acquisition.

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You need to have a responsive site as mobile traffic is growing. Even though most business users will sign up for your product with a desktop, they might discover your product on the mobile (maybe while reading a blog). They need to have a good experience when they are on mobile.

You can run re-marketing ads. This will provide you multiple opportunities to reach out to the user. Test out different messaging in the re-targeting. You can do smarter remarketing by finding the users’ point of interaction. For paid ads, start with only the US and then keep adding more countries depending on the quality of the traffic. There was a brief discussion on content marketing, focused on the disciplined approach to creating valuable content that will start delivering results over a period of time.

This was an excellent round table that covered most of the aspects of building SaaS products for the global market.

Contributed by Shashikant Kore, Co-founder of Karooya.

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The 5 most important questions to ask before you price your SaaS product

Over the last few weeks I had a chance to review 89 of the companies to understand their free to paid conversion and also a chance to talk to 13 companies. What I learned was that time spent on the pricing page was a key indicator of conversion and you can A/B test your pricing page for colors, position of your highest and lowest prices, number of plans showed, feature listing and your call to action. The names of your pricing plan also has a significant signalling effect on your customer’s perception of your product. I believe the future of SaaS pricing will move from pay-per-usage to pay-for-outcomes.

The most frequent question I get asked about SaaS companies is how to think about pricing for the product. Here are some constructs to think about and 7 questions to ask before you come up with a pricing model or a price for your product.

1. Understanding your customers current solution and options and their “cost per unit of activity” is the most important thing you should do first. For e.g. if you sell a Sales force automation solution, the customer might be using an Excel spreadsheet to track their sales because they dont have too many opportunities. So in their minds the “cost per unit” is zero, since they have already “paid” for Excel.

2. SaaS pricing is a marketing function not finance or operations. If the team that determines the value of your offering to the customer is another them, then it is their responsibility. The reason for this is that value of your product determines how much you can charge, not what customers are willing to pay. Value cannot be determined as a absolute, only relative. Which is why you have to compare it to their current solution.

3. At the early stages (less than 50-100 customers) optimize for more customers and quicker sales cycles not for profit. To get data and buying patterns you need enough data and a meaningful sample size. When you go beyond the early customers, it is time to optimize for LTV and CAC.

Here are the top 7 questions to ask before you come up with a pricing model for your SaaS product.

1. What are the current options for your customer?

Find out how are they solving the problem your product addresses currently and how much does it cost them to do that.

2. What are the different segments of your customers?

Find out if there are different problems your product can solve and the value associated with those problems. That would be the best indicator of

3. What is your goal from your pricing?

It is not always obvious to say that your goal is to get the “most money” or to be the most expensive product. Some companies want to be the 80% functionality at 20% of the cost option. Determine your pricing goal – profitability (after customer acquisition costs), value creation, marketshare, etc.

4. What is your cost of customer acquisition?

For most parts, your cost of development tends to be fixed (if you hire 3 people, you have to pay their salaries regardless of how many features the ship), but the cost of customer acquisition tends to be a variable. So if your costs dont take CAC into account, you will have a model that wont be profitable.

5. What is your sales model?

Linking Sales and Pricing for SaaS

I usually use the price and complexity of sales / marketing on two axes to understand the sales strategy for a SaaS company.

If you are a company with a lower price point and low complexity of sales, you will have to rely on customers to try and buy (freemium) the product on their own and work on obtaining customers at a low cost.

If you are a very complex product or have a complex sales process and your product costs a lot, you will have to hire a field sales team to help you sell.

If however, your product is priced high and your complexity is low then you will build an inside (phone) sales team.

If you have a high complexity product and sales model and low price, your company will die.

Use this model to determine where you want to be and price the product appropriately.

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SaaS Metrics for India B2B

When we started selling our Cloud telephony platform, we had very little idea of what metrics to concentrate on. So we just built the product and winged it 🙂

Now after 4 years, we have a pretty good command of what metrics to concentrate on. What works, what doesn’t. Which channels are better and which sales techniques work. We learnt this the hard way and by reading blogs by David Skok, Jason Lemkin and Tom Tunguz. They did provide some benchmarks to go on. But nothing specific to the circumstances in India.

Looking around, we realize that we are in a very special situation. Since we concentrated only on India for our product, we have SaaS revenue from only Indian customers. This gives a nice opportunity to start creating some benchmarks.

Unfortunately there are not many hard numbers out there which can help new India B2B SaaS companies. So in the interest of transparency, we are sharing the SaaS metrics for our Cloudagent product. Some important points:

  • Cloudagent is a contact center product. It is a high touch point product with a big sales cycle.
  • All revenues and numbers are based only on Indian customers. We are in fact one of the very few companies out there serving only Indian customers :). May not hold true this year though.
  • We are doing this as an experiment. Looking at how it goes, we will open up more and more of our numbers, similar to what Buffer did. So be good to us 🙂
  • None of the metrics are set in stone. This is what works for our business and we are all learning. Please comment here our mail me at [email protected] or follow me @nutanc on twitter. Would love to hear your thoughts.
  • We will be updating this page on the 10th of every month. So please check back in to see how our business is doing 🙂

Building a SaaS machine is hard. But once it starts rolling, it is almost like clockwork. The numbers presented are what helped us to fine tune our process. Looking at isolation, each number may not make sense. But the way they all interact to run the SaaS machine is what is most important.

Kookoo

Since a lot of people were asking for the base spreadsheet used to calculate these metrics, I have created a template in Google docs. Feel free to download and use it as you see fit. You can just modify the “blue” numbers with your own numbers and see your metrics. Base Spreadsheet

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Seeking a Program Evangelist for #PNCamp Program

#PNCamp Program, an iSPIRT initiative, is growing the Indian StartUp ecosystem by connecting founders and executives from high potential startups. We work with successful VCs and entrepreneurs to source the most promising entrepreneurs and help them on their journey. Once we have identified these startups, we build a multi-dimensional profile of each startup using surveys and algorithms developed by Stanford and Duke Researchers.  Using this data we connect founders with the resources they need, link them with mentors who can help them grow, and introduce them to peers who can provide advice. In collaboration with iSPIRT selected members are invited to workshops to build their networks and accelerate their startup’s growth. PNCamp Program is a living laboratory whose aim is to help startups accelerate the Indian startup ecosystem with cutting edge innovation science.

About the Program Evangelist Role

PNCamp is seeking a program evangelist to join our growing team.  The Project Consultant will be responsible for building relationships and trust with promising StartUp founders and executives. You should have a track record of getting things done with minimal supervision. In collaboration with our partners, your will be responsible for identifying, then emailing, calling and meeting with potential members. While membership in the program is free, this role will require you to convince founders and executives why they should join as members. Once they join, you will serve as a “data concierge” helping the startups provide the information we need to better match them with resources and connections. You will also be responsible for the day-to-day operation of PNCamp program, making sure emails are answered, tweets sent out, thank-you gifts mailed, and that our team is on the same page. People skills are a must. Entrepreneurial mindset is a must. This job provides you with an exceptional opportunity to get to know the most successful StartUps in the Indian ecosystem.

  • You will be the first full-time team member of the PNCamp Program team in India. The rest of the team is US-based so flexibility on early/late phone calls is required.
  • Comfortable with spreadsheets and love to dig into data. You may not know how to use SQL but you would not be afraid to learn.
  • Social media inclined
  • Experience organizing and running events.
  • 2 years of work experience at a startup or technology firm desired, but not required
  • 1.5 Year Commitment
  • Willing to relocate to Bangalore
  • Strong Presentation Skills
  • Programming experience and Design skills a bonus, but not required.

Please send a cover letter, resume, and two references to my email at rkoning(at)stanford.edu

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Validated: InTech50 – boosting India’s next-gen tech innovations

Did you know that India is ranked as the fourth largest startup hub in the world with over 3,100 startups? According to the economic Survey 2014-15, the startup scene has been mainly driven by ‘hyper-growth’ in the technology startup and software product landscape. Owing to some great software product innovations of late, India is no more tagged merely as a technology service provider, but is also known for its innovations. Investors and big tech giants from across the world globe are acknowledging the tech startup momentum in India, thanks to initiatives like InTech50 which have given these companies a platform to showcase their products and potential to the world.

InTech50A joint initiative of iSPIRT and Terrene Global Leadership Network, the InTech50 event was held at Bangalore on April 15th and 16th this year and received great acclaim from startups, investors and the industry in general. India’s ‘fantastic fifty’ innovative software product startups, that had made it to the finale, got a unique opportunity to interact closely with a panel of renowned CIOs/CTO’s and investors from across the globe, in this two-day action-packed event.

‘Know-it-all’ before you hit the launch pad is the mantra at InTech50 and startups are made to do their homework quite well, before they meet the CIOs. In keeping with this, when the countdown for the event was on, Mr. NRK Raman, Co-Founder of iFlex, the man behind closing the famous USD 909 million iFlex acquisition deal with Oracle back in 2005, was instrumental in helping the startups fine-tune their pitch for investors so they could derive maximum value at the event and get a POC from the investors. To further complement the effort, the Business Catalyst Program that we had launched this year, helped in generating the required traction for these startups, a crucial step in ensuring their long-term success.

Overall, InTech50 lived up to its promise of connecting the startups with investors and CIOs of global repute so they could interact and explore synergies in their operations, thereby mutually benefitting in the process. The startups managed to forge ties with the right people in every field right from funding, product marketing to sales etc., which could not have been possible otherwise in such a short time frame, that too without spending a bomb. It is now the prerogative of these startups to convert these relationships into business opportunities and prove their mettle.

Here are some testimonials from the participants this year:

“InTech50 gave our small startup the opportunity to mingle with industry leaders and titans, something that we would never have dreamt of before!” – Kiran, Tydy

“Amazing effort by the iSPIRT team! Makes it possible for Indian innovators to get direct feedback and prospects from the global markets, which would otherwise entail a substantial financial investment.” – Eashwar, Uniken

“InTech50 was a wonderful platform to meet Global CIO’s, Indian CIO’s and ecosystem enablers. We received good interest from multiple companies and thank the team for putting together a flawlessly executed event. Thank you for being a strong enabler for the Indian product ecosystem.” – Sudarshan, RippleHire

“It’s a must for all startups looking for strategic consult, marketing support and media exposure to validate ideas, scale-up business or expand into Western markets. A great place where great products meet great people.” – Sumit Goswami, KeyPoint Technologies

“InTech50 is a well organised event giving product companies a good opportunity to interact with some of the top CIOs from India and US. Some of the CIOs also spent time with us discussing about our product roadmap and how we should prioritize some features for roll out.” –  Tom, Talview

“InTech50 2015 was a super-useful event for Reverie. It helped us pitch better, position ourselves well, open business partnerships with some dream prospects, expand tech partnerships to enrich our Language Gateway, explore sales channel alliances, and above all, build some great relationships.” – Dheeraj, Reverie

Please note that we intend to continue the process of mentoring and advising the companies, even after the conclusion of the event.

Feel free to reach out to us …

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Announcing 2015 India SaaS Survey – A Joint initiative by Signal Hill & iSPIRT

The Indian SaaS market, which is still in its nascent stage, according to a report by Gartner, shows immense potential for growth in the next few years. It is estimated that the Indian SaaS market is set to grow from USD 246 million in 2014 to a whopping USD 707 million in 2018, with CRMs as the major contributor.

Despite the favourable projections, there are quite a few challenges faced by those that are currently operating in the space and those who plan to launch their own SaaS enterprise. These challenges, if not addressed by the industry as a whole, can hamper the growth of the market.

Lack of funding, product distribution, and availability of quality human resources are some of the major challenges that companies in this industry are currently facing. We believe that there are numerous more challenges – payment gateways, the cost of customer acquisition etc – need to be mapped, in order for them to be addressed and resolved.

saas-survey-9To understand the challenges mentioned above and gain insight into the current SaaS landscape, Signal Hill, a reputed independent advisory boutique and iSPIRT Foundation are conducting the India SaaS Survey 2015 – which is open to all software/ product companies in India that have a subscription based (SaaS) revenue model.

With this survey, we aim to create a single reference point for all players in the SaaS ecosystem on aspects such as –

  • current investment
  • estimated future investment
  • expansion plans
  • services offered
  • delivery mechanisms
  • target customers
  • current revenues
  • lifetime value of the product to the client
  • most importantly – their funding needs – both current and future

To participate in the survey, respondents just need to fill in two simple forms Form A (devoid of company information to keep it anonymous enabling more people to come forward and share accurate data) and Form B, requiring 22 minutes of your time. For ease of navigation, start with Form A and on completion you will be automatically guided to Form B. As mentioned above, the information shared in both parts of the survey will be kept completely confidential and responses to Form A of the survey will be independent to responses to Form B of the survey.

Apart from the analysis of the industry trends and a glimpse into how the future of SaaS is being shaped, participants can also look forward to their company logo featuring in the report and a surprise gift from the organizers as a token of appreciation for their support, time and valuable inputs.

 

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Everything you need to know to build and scale a SaaS business

While new-age global SaaS startups like Zenefits & Slack continue to grow at a feverish pace, India too is beginning to see the emergence of quality SaaS companies like Practo, Freshdesk and Capillary among others. These companies have attractive unit economics, are capital efficient and have demonstrated the ability to compete in international markets. As a result there is strong investor interest in India SaaS companies.

Matrix Partners India, one of the leading venture capital firms in India, has invested in startups such as Practo, Limetray, GrownOut to name a few, which are building scalable businesses with a SaaS delivery model.

Matrix Partners India, is hosting a meetup on May 7th, 2015 in Bengaluru with the theme of ‘Everything SaaS.’

Davik Skok, General Partner, Matrix Partners, has a wealth of experience running companies. David will share his insights & experience of helping build & scale SaaS businesses. The talk will be followed by a panel discussion on the same theme. Panelists include David Skok, General Partner, Matrix Partners; Shashank ND, co-founder & CEO, Practo, Suresh Sambandam, CEO, KissFlow and Vijay Sharma, co-founder, Belong.

If you are a current or aspiring SaaS entrepreneur interested in attending this event, please register here.

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Validation Tank @ InTech50

This year’s InTech50 saw a new addition to the format. While InTech5 was designed to give global exposure to companies that have got paying customers and product-market fit, this year we have introduced Validation Tank to help companies in idea and proto-type stage companies to validate the potential for their idea. The format is designed to help the founder get a feedback on their product idea. Read more about Validation Tank here.

After a couple of pilots, we have chosen 5 companies to pitch their product idea to the CIO’s and they got first hand feedback from the ultimate technology buyer in the enterprise. Validation Tank was moderated by Ranga Raj and to judge the idea we got Harmeen Mehta – CIO Airtel, Akshaya Gaur – CIO Mashreq Bank, Jon Walters – CIO Direct General Insurance and Ravi Narayan – Head Microsoft Ventures. Each company got 10 mins to slot and they pitched their idea for 3 mins and the 7 mins slot was used for Q&A and feedback from the CIO’s. The jury was honest with the feedback and more importantly the companies got actionable feedback making it very attractive for someone who is at an idea/proto-type stage get first hand feedback of what the enterprise buyer thinks. Here are the five companies that pitched at InTech50 Validation Tank 2015.

Contentivo – It is a tool for helping enterprises increase its social media reach exponentially through employee networks

ConvFlow – A product that helps enterprises collaborate on problems and ideas in real-time on mobile and web

FixNix – Cloud based Governance, Risk and Compliance solution for the enterprise

Nous – Product that helps match people and skills in the enterprise

PlayLyfe – Gamification platform for the enterprise. Helps companies gamify internal applications with a few clicks

If you are a product entrepreneur, working on a product idea for the enterprise and would like to get the idea validated, please apply here for the next edition of Validation Tank.

Validation Tank is curated by Praveen Hari(Thinkflow) & Ranga Raj(Thinxtream)

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InTech50: an outside-in perspective

After a gap of 10 years, I recently returned to Bangalore to attend InTech50. The excitement started from the get go when I was flown from Delhi to Bangalore by an all-female Indigo cockpit – itself a reflection of our fast changing times.

Variration Banner 1.0-01The age of tech startups in India has dawned. With 3500+ registered startups & counting, India is well poised to become the second largest startup hub in the world (after the US) by the end of this decade. The quality of product design & engineering has also increased since entrepreneurship has become a career of choice. Top notch talent including IIT engineers and IIM MBAs are no longer flocking to high paying corporate jobs. A significant number are taking the leap to build new technology products. At the same time a broader ecosystem of venture capitalists and corporate partners have emerged, supported by institutions like NASSCOM and iSPIRT – which have tirelessly worked to galvanize stakeholders and unlock the value chain. None of this “software product industry architecture” visibly existed when I last left India 8 years ago!

InTech50 was a great example of how far we’ve come. 50 exciting B2B startups were showcased across key enterprise spaces – big data analytics, security & infrastructure, enterprise mobility & collaboration, compliance & HR management, and industry specific solutions in finance, manufacturing, retail and health. Across the board, the teams were impressive, in that the founders reflected original thinking & IP, and made their pitches with both passion and data. A few were established companies like Qubole, FreshDesk and Druva; others were earlier in their journeys. Some of my favorites were: Reverie, a “language gateway” that helps businesses localize their products across linguistic contexts; Vymo a simplified Saleforce-like tool for mobile foot force effectiveness; Clary5, a cross-product and cross-channel enterprise fraud management platform targeting financial institutions; low overhead & easy-to-use enterprise content & collaboration tools like Tydy and FrameBench; and hyperlocal retail analytics software like Nifty Window and NowFloats that bring online-grade data capabilities to offline retailers

InTech50-FinalistsThe event saw active participation from industry CIOs – both global and domestic – who provided rich and relevant perspectives to startups. We heard from the media, hardware & software technology, telecom, general & speciality insurance, and banking sectors. The program sparked rich interactions that highlighted core industry needs & product gaps, provided feedback to early stage concepts, and introduced prospective customers and operational partners to startups much in need of them.

Two interesting models of deeper corporate engagement with startups were explored. First, the role of corporates as enterprise startup customers. Here, given reputational risks involved, CIOs are more likely to test new products internally or with non-core services before extending them to customer facing or core operations. Not surprisingly, data security was highlighted as a dominant theme as many corporates – particularly the financial sector – continue to face fraud and data leakage risks. In addition, mobility, cloud-based digitization, large data analytics, & cognitive intelligence were areas championed by the industry representatives. Second, with traditional services companies, including Telcos and ITeS, moving away from time based billing models and rolling out hybrid product-service offerings, they are looking for startups as partners who may help them plug key portfolio gaps. This requires considerable thought around a joint go-to-market strategy leveraging both parties’ expertise to drive customer acquisition.

A third interesting perspective was offered by the son how certain software apps – notably Slack with its transparent, multi-channel collaboration functionality – when adopted in a corporate setting had potential to become a powerful cultural transformation catalyst. Slack has changed my world as well – exposing the massive inefficiencies of email as a collaboration tool – so I can completely relate.

With India as a major R&D hub (as well as a destination market) for US tech companies, the right skills and context will continue to infuse into the ecosystem and power India’s potential as a product nation. iSPIRT’s goal with InTech50 is to drive M&As from the current rate of one-per-quarter to one-per-month by the end of the year. The ecosystem is ripe for this. New & creative corporate relationships are needed to build trust and awareness. This is a must for corporates to stay relevant and innovative, whereas access to corporate customers, expertise and funding can help accelerate startups. This will in turn require numerous actors to join forces and build collaboration platforms that further strengthen the digital product ecosystem.

Guest post by Badal Malick – Co-founder of Nirvana Labs, a digital platform to drive global startup-corporate partnerships

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D-Day at InTech50 (2015 edition)

Finally…

Here is wishing all of you – happy pitching, selling and buying…

Today, ‘fantastic fifty’ Product Founders will showcase their solution potential, and work collaboratively with buyers, investors and partners to shape, and create a plan to take their solutions to global markets—a true sign of India’s potential in innovation.

We are satisfied to see not only the quantity, but the impressive quality of our startups this year. It was indeed a tough call to curate ‘the fifty.’  Go on people, enjoy your place under the sun.

We would like to reiterate here that we are not seasonal. Please feel free to reach out to us, whenever…

Look forward to some ‘real’ business today and tomorrow.

Cheers

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Announcing the 5th and final batch of 10 companies @InTech50 2015

Happy to announce the final and last batch of finalists (out of a total of 50) of InTech50 2015, a flagship event of iSPIRT and Terenne Global.

Congratulations to them all!

The first, second, third and fourth batch of finalists has already been announced in our previous blogs.

Here is the final list –

  • Crayon –  MAYA is a personal concierge, powered by Crayon’s SimplerChoices™ platform. SimplerChoices™ maps affinities based on taste (from review sites, social networks), influence (from social networks), context (from public data, location-based data), and behavior (from internal enterprise data) to build a massive cross-category taste graph.
  • Datonis – Altizon helps the industrial world create smart, connected products within a very short span of time and with minimum investment in infrastructure. Altizon’s flagship product the Datonis™ platform is offered in PaaS and on-premise models and is built to handle a Billion events a day from a million devices.
  • Druva in Sync – Druva’s inSync endpoint data protection and governance suite UNIQUELY integrates secure, scalable, high-performance endpoint backup, file sync across all user endpoints, remote file access, data loss prevention, IT-managed file sharing, and governance – including eDiscovery enablement – in a single platform.
  • Nifty Window – Nifty Window is a hyper-local marketing based new customer acquisition platform that helps offline brands and businesses attract consumers online. The platform uses content marketing and distribution to help brick & mortar businesses drive in-store sales across search, social media and mobile channels.
  • Nowfloats – NowFloats enables local businesses to get online, generate relevant content, and be highly discovered for online users to consumer this information in a meaningful way.Using the NowFloats platform, any enterprise whose channel is a small business, can bring the entire local channel online and drive local consumers towards that business.
  • RateGain – RevGain is an ultra sophisticated price recommendation engine for hotels. It continuously tracks over 11 big-data, environmental factors such as market supply, competitor prices, inventory levels and more to tell hotels how much they should price their rooms at.
  • RippleHire – RippleHire is a technology product that gamifies employee referrals and enables social recruiting. By empowering the best way you hire (Employee Referrals), we reduce your hiring costs & efforts. Game mechanics make the process fun, engaging and drives great results.
  • RobusTest – RobusTest is providing SAAS based Automation Solution for Web/Native/Hybrid applications. Its does not require any pre-configuration or setup. User can automate any mobile application from their browser without any scripting/coding knowledge.RobusTest also provides detailed Automation Test reports (including CPU, Memory, network and battery usage).
  • Vymo – Our vision is to help sales teams make a Million Smarter Decisions every minute. Our marquee product is a mobile first Lead Management System. Our operational analytics help in better lead prioritisation, smarter allocation, better pitches, quicker conversions and higher frontline productivity.
  • Zing HR – ZingHR is an End-to-End INTEGRATED Hire-to-Retire Management Cloud platform. You name any process, right from the time a potential talent is called for an interview, through the employee’s entire lifecycle with the organisation, till the employee moves on. Talent Acquisition, eRecruitment, Onboarding, Leave, Time & Attendance, Claims, Payroll, Compliance, Performance Management…more.

There will be no greater joy for us than to see our finalists leverage the associations they’ve built and emerge as truly global companies over the next few years, further validating the credibility of India as a ‘product nation’. That is exactly what we had set out to achieve in the first place.

Looking forward to meeting the ‘Fanastic Fifty’ at InTech50 in Bangalore.

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What make ‘enterprise sales’ challenging for startups?

Getting a startup anyway is hard. But when you have a software product aimed at enterprise customers, you have to be prepared for even more daunting challenges, and to overcome those challenges, entrepreneurs have to have a plan in place.

Enterprise customers are not accustomed to buying from startups, and hence their buying process is designed to deal with large enterprise vendors.

Here’s a look at some of the major roadblocks that make the ‘enterprise sales’ journey a challenging one for startups:- 

Drawing the attention of CIOs of large corporations

So you have a great idea, a great team and a great product! But what will it take to draw the attention of CIOs of large corporations? How do you even reach them?

Enterprise SalesStartups therefore have to try a variety of things to access relevant customers. Most effective usually is warm introductions by someone known to the CIOs. And for you to get warm introductions, you need to network and meet with individuals who can make those introductions. It could be ex-clients, old bosses, someone you met at a networking event or industry conference, or even VCs, etc. But people don’t make introductions simply because you ask them to. Because it is their credibility on the line too. Hence, it is important for startups to keep potential recommenders informed about your product and progress so that when you request them to make introductions, they can do it with confidence.

Is there a compelling reason to switch?

Large corporations prefer to partner with no less than the best companies in the industry to add value to their own offerings. They would need very compelling reasons to even consider providing you an opportunity to give a demo of your product.

So unless your product fills a gap or addresses an important pain-point that existing players do not offer, there is no real reason for large enterprises to consider switching from a proven vendor to a startup.

It is important to note that for large enterprise customers, a slightly lower price is not a compelling enough reason for switching. Even if the price is much lower, or even if you offer the product free, the implementation and training of the users will generally cost lot more and will impact ROI benefits the customer can derive. Further, the risk with a start-up of a failed implementation is perceived high and impact of failure can be bigger than product costs. (E.g. for a USD 2 bn company, a HR management software product by a known vendor at USD 100K might be a safer bet than a USD 10K software from a startup as a failed implementation will impact HR / payroll / appraisal for all employees).

Proving credibility of the product AND the company

If you did get an opportunity to give a demo of your product to the decision makers in a large corporation, the very fact that you are a startup will make them reluctant in giving their approval because you have no prior track record to prove that your product will be as effective and successful as you claim it to be., and that you will have the organizational maturity or competence to deploy and service the product across the country (sometimes across the world).

Established vendors have the advantage of sharing references and recommendations of existing clients to add a stamp of credibility to their product, which is not possible in the case of the startup. So even though a product looks convincing, investing in technology needs serious consideration, because if your product does not deliver on its promise or if you are not able to service the product well, switching to another product is can prove to be both, costly and cumbersome.

The seed of doubt regarding the startup’s survival

Working with or buying a software product from a startup can be a risky affair, simply because there is fear that it will survive beyond a certain period if it doesn’t have a steady revenue stream or is unable to find suitable investors.

This often becomes one of the prime reasons for opting in favour an established company. It tilts the scale in their favour even if their product doesn’t really measure up to what the startup is offering.

Here are some things that startups can do to help their customers overcome this fear:

  • Build a strong advisory board
  • Focus on customers known to take risks (lead adopters) – ask them which other startups they are working with. If they have not bought from other startups, they are unlikely to buy from you. Innovators and lead adopters generally boast about it and love to tell everybody.
  • Build a credible partner ecosystem – partners who are selling, implementing at your target customer. They can bring credibility to your products. Budget some presales and post sales $ for these partners.
  • Identify key stakeholders – especially in LOB, IT and procurement. Most deals will need a sponsor in each of these departments and anybody can say no to a startup risk. Take time to understand you has authority to say Yes.
  • Plan for in person meetings with key stakeholders. Nothing builds credibility than the enthusiasm of a founder in front of a customer.
  • Highlight advantages relevant to function you are speaking to (example talk about new revenue to LOB, less price to procurement etc.).
  • Identify who your stakeholders consider as experts – industry analysts, industry peers. Etc. They will absolutely look for external validations.
  • If you have investors, ask those investors to accompany you for final sales closure meetings (or at least offer to the potential customer to speak to the investors)
  • Start small to minimize perceived risk – example start with a department specific deal

At iSPIRT we recognize these challenges and have undertaken initiatives to bridge the gap between large corporations and software product startups. InTech50 is one such initiative where we shortlist promising software product companies in India and showcase them to large enterprise customers.

Launched last year, the initiative is now in its second leg and will be held on April 15 – 16 in Bangalore. InTech50 is a collaboration between iSPIRT and Terrene Global Leadership Network and aims to facilitate both startups and established large corporations to leverage from each other in their endeavour to grow bigger and better. While the larger corporations can benefit from the expertise that startups offer, the startups get to work with the best clients and give their business a stable foundation.

The unique initiative brings both, startups and CIOs from the best global companies on a common platform, and explore ways to find synergies in their operations. For CIOs, InTech50 curates the best product startups from across India.

Startups get a rare opportunity to gain easy access to and pitch to 50 global CIOs, all under one roof.

InTech50 Business Catalyst program

In addition, this year, InTech 50 will include Business Catalysts program. Business Catalyst Program connects startups with senior sales leaders and sales consultants from across the globe. These consultants can help you with lead generation; they can identify project sponsors in LOB, IT and procurement. They can help you identify who has tendency to buy from startups and who will never. And they can help you with in-person meetings with stakeholders when you cannot travel. Intech50 is not charging for participation in the program. If you engage with Business Consultants, you can pay them directly for their services. See more about business Catalyst program here.

So, come to listen to catalysts on how they can engage with you.

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Announcing the 4th batch of 10 companies @InTech50 2015

InTech50 2015 (a flagship event of iSPIRT & Terenne Global) is happy to announce the fourth batch of 10 finalists.

InTech50Congratulations to all the following finalists…listed alphabetically. The first, second and third batch of 10 companies has been announced before.

  • Accelpro Technology – transforming better technology ideas into business growth and better economies while addressing the much-needed requirement for faster secure remote access solution. AccelPro delivers Next Generation of SSL VPN solution, which has revolutionized mobility VPN market.
  • DataWeave – delivers real time actionable retail insights to you with its extensive feature set. Millions of products related data points curated across categories, geographies, and languages.
  • Drishti Soft-Solutions – Ameyo is a pioneering, all-in-one communication suite from Drishti. A multi-channel and multi-modal communication solution, Ameyo can be integrated easily in centralized and distributed (multi-site) contact centers and improves efficiency and productivity.
  • DeepBiz – ICareU is an innovative cloud platform to provide an end-to-end Usage Based Insurance Solution to an Indian Motor Insurance Companies to adopt and implement a cost effective Insurance service to their customers.
  • GoDB Tech – GoDB’s Mobility platform is a comprehensive Mobile Enterprise Application Platform (MEAP) that enables enterprises to extend their business processes outside their corporate walls.
  • InspireOne – We help companies convert their human potential to organizational capability, through comprehensive solutions in the areas of Leadership Development, Sales Management, Productivity Enhancement, and Organizational Change.
  • Ilantus – IDaaS express is cloud based Identity and Access Management product which offers enterprises the ability to address all Identity and Access Management business challenges, such as user provisioning, access governance, password management, single sign-on, federation, security intelligence and BYOD security – without any need for costly and complex on-premise infrastructure.
  • Kissflow – Built as a self-service cloud workflow software, KiSSFLOW is ready to use and can be set up in minutes as against traditional business process management software and customized workflow software which requires huge investments and takes days to set up.
  • NanoBi – a simple to use, interactive and visual full-stack platform delivered as subscription software on cloud or on-premise. Nanobi’s shared data platform provides the most unified views in the form of virtual information.
  • Quintype – Quintype is the next generation editorial management and digital publishing service. And it runs in the cloud. addresses the needs of modern digital publishers, and gives today’s connected Internet users the means to consume and engage with content the way they want, where they want.

Watch this space, as we announce the fifth and final batch shortly.

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Growth Hackers Will Share Their Secrets at SaaSx Chennai

This Thursday evening will witness the largest gathering of SaaS founders in India. In the event conceived by iSPIRT called SaaSx Chennai, more than 100 people, largely SaaS founders, apart from a few handful of product industry influencers, will brainstorm on various aspects of a SaaS business, especially taking the SaaS organization from a $10 million revenue to a $100 million revenue.

Girish Mathrubootham, CEO of Freshdesk, talks of Aaron Ross, the author of Predictable Revenue, as the brain behind Salesforce.com’s recurring $100 million revenue year on year. He initially started a company, raised $5 million, burnt the whole cash, and shut down the company. Then he joined Salesforce.com as a cold caller. Finding cold calling to be a bit arduous in winning customers, he conceived what Girish calls Cold Calling 2.0. His idea was to first interact with the customer on email and then establish a rapport, before calling the customer. The idea behind this exercise to first zeroing in on the most suitable customer for your product. This turns the prospect into a paying customer quickly.

SaaSx_headerAt SaaSx Chennai, Aaron Ross will deliver the keynote as SaaSx via video and will release the Jump Start Guide Desk Marketing and Selling for SaaS, co-authored by Suresh Sambandam, founder of KissFlow, Krish Subramaniam, co-founder of ChargeBee, Niraj Ranjan Rout, founder of GrexIt, and Sahil Parikh, founder of BrightPod.

jumpstart-guid-1Suresh says the event was conceived on the lines of SaaStr Conference, hosted by Jason Lemkin. He attended the event in San Francisco this February. Buoyed by the 300 to 400 founders coming together from all over the world in SaaSter, he wanted to bring together the SaaS founders in India. SaaS companies are witnessing phenomenal growth all over the world, and India is also seeing an uptick in this sector. Chennai is emerging as the SaaS hub of India, thanks to six big companies that are running their operations here. There are startups emerging as well. “Just two days after we announced the event, 65 signups happened and SaaS founders were excited by the idea,” says Suresh.

“In a focused event, founders can discuss real problems,” says Girish. A conference of a general nature does not give a beneficial take-away for an entrepreneur. “The idea is to bring similar people at similar stages of growth and discuss their pain points,” says Krish of Chargebee. He says cross-learning from each other will be useful in solving many problems the SaaS entrepreneurs face. “Even before the event, many one-on-one meetings are happening among SaaS entrepreneurs,” says Krish.

The event will have four parts. A My Story session with three SaaS founders, followed by an open house on Anything and Everything on SaaS moderated by Girish, aided by Suresh and Krish.

Aaron Ross will deliver the keynote then and finally, the Jumpstart Guide will be released