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“What’s your Unfair Advantage ?” #PNgrowth

This was one of the questions posed as a challenge to all startup founders at the #PNGrowth Camp last week. We all thought that we had the magic sauce or the unfair advantage that will help us build category leadership companies, only to realise that most of us did not.

200 startup founders across the country, spanning different domains had participated in the PNGrowth Camp at the Mysore Infosys Campus last week (Jan 8-10). It was the first ever such large gathering of Indian Founders at a single bootcamp.   This was organised by iSpirt to nurture the Indian startup Ecosystem to help founders create more successful ventures.

The Advantage had to pass the following criteria to be qualified as an Unfair Competitive advantage.

– An Advantage that

  • you could derive value out of.
  • cannot be copied.
  • is quantifiable.

Putting this to test, most of us realised that we did not have the unfair advantage.

In the “North Star” module, we explored how much we have stayed true to the core goals and vision we started out with and how much we have steered away from. A small digression initially looking harmless, takes us far far away from the original goal over a period of time. In the day to day running of a startup and firefighting, we often forget the big picture, missing the forest for the trees. This module bought us back to the core.

“Your network is your networth” is a well known adage.

In the “IPO module”, we got to know where we stood w.r.t leveraging our network (Information, People and Organisations – IPO). We explored what missing connections we needed to take our startups to the next level.

In the “Shark Tank” module,  mentors reviewed our actions plans and gave us candid and honest feedback on what we need to do. This was the best part of the whole program for me to be picked and my startup strategy reviewed, and getting candid feedback.

Overall, this 3 day bootcamp was a great transformation experience to get my bearings right, get honest feedback from mentors and peers, make a lot of new connections, revisit some of the assumptions and have a solid plan to execute.

Thanks to iSPIRT team and #PNGrowth program team members for giving us this “Unfair Advantage”!

Guest Post by Shashi Bhushan, HealthMacro

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Le lo PANGA- Let’s make India a Product Nation

PNgrowth

I am Amit Mishra – running a SaaS venture Interview Mocha, a pre-employment skill testing company. In this blog I am sharing my experiences from PNgrowth 2016 and how it transformed the way we (Indian product startups) think.

Brief about PNgrowth

  • PNgrowth helps you redesign your startup to win.
  • 2 1/2 days resident full-time programme organized at Infosys Mysore campus from 8th Jan 2016 to 10th Jan 2016.
  • Arranged by iSPIRT and supported by Stanford, Duke.
  • 200 curated Indian product startup founders attended it from every corner of India – metro, non-metro.

Who I am writing this for?

  • Thousands of Indian product startup founders who couldn’t attend it or are willing to attend it in future.

Why am I writing this?

  • To let Indian product startup founders know that you are not alone.
  • To boost up their confidence.
  • My cent to promote iSPIRT to make India a product nation.

My takeaways, thoughts, learnings as below –

1.  Good News! We are supported by reliable Ecosystem.

Acche din ane wale hai!

I was amazed and ecstatic to see, we are genuinely supported by iSPIRT, Infosys, Stanford, Duke and dozens of entrepreneurs who have been there and done that. Infosys (an IT services company) helping us (product startups) made me write a slogan for PNGrowth programme– “Powered by Infosys, Driven by Intellects”.

2.  The Journey is not lonely.

Journey_Is_Not_Lonely

Here, there, everywhere – all product startups.

200 product startups at one place – amazing feeling to know that we are not lonely. The road less travelled is not so lonely and dark anymore.

3.  Bade Bhai log are at rescue.

Bade_bhai_log

Bade Bhai (and behan) log were selflessly helping, sharing experiences, showing realities, shaping up our dream, challenging us to take PANGA (to take on fight) with world leaders, saying bullshit quite often to what we do ;)

Thanks, Hats off, Salute bade Bhai log. Keep helping :-) I will join your bandwagon soon :-)

4.  What was told? and What it meant?

Below I list down the crux of what was told and what it meant during numerous sessions, peer reviews, seminars, campfire sessions, spark sessions, coffee/meal breaks in the programme. Key points are

  1. Learn to say no.
  2. Aim to take category leadership position in your own category. Otherwise, you are in bullshit.
  3. Having Vision (belief) and North Star for your business is a must.
  4. Companies in the past are not successful by accidents or incidents. Unfair advantage is the key to success.
  5. Leverage ecosystem – PIO(People, Information and Organizations).
  6. Take PANGA with the leaders in your category from the day one.
  7. Have action plan to grow 10x in 2016.

So, all the startup guys out there – are you ready for the great Indian PANGA!

And yes, YARO MAINE PANGA LE LIYA ;)

Guest Post by Amit Mishra, InterviewMocha

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Top 10 Observations of #PNgrowth camp

#1. Volunteers: They deserve beyond a standing ovation. They have not only just volunteered- they passionately executed – Awesome job, and hats off.

#2. Participants: They are the best part of this program. Everywhere there is energy, and everyone wants to meet someone new. Great listeners who are wholeheartedly and passionately pursuing their dreams. Everyone of them will be a great leader and make India very proud. They think, live, breathe, every moment about how they can make a meaningful difference to someone’s life. Their ideas are amazing and are solving very specific problem.

Good to see so many first time entrepreneurs with over 15 years of professional experience. The domain knowledge brings completely different value to the ecosystem. Instead of building completely different and disruptive ideas, they are optimizing and creating an incremental value by solving problems in the current system itself. These are big opportunities especially with country over a billion population, great opportunity for many category leaders.

#3. Speakers & Coaches: Amazing delivery. Very interactive and precise. Rather than being on the stage, they walked around showed us that the were with us and available within arms-reach. I enjoyed every second.

#4. Program: It was planned, designed and delivered well by accomplished entrepreneurs and top academicians. The simple and easy workflow streamlined thoughts and reiterated quickly, brilliant!

#5. Discipline: There was Pin drop silence many times during the workshop- hard to do with 200 high energy founders in one room. No cell phone rings, no side conversations, or laptop clicks. It was a bold idea to use whistling many times to override the energetic tea breaks

  #6. Campus: It was inspiring and majestic. Every inch was sparkling clean and amazing positive vibes everywhere. The choice of this campus was brilliant as it was designed and built to create great leaders. Thanks to Infosys for the opportunity.   #7: Food: There was a question once about how many of you are still following your new year resolution diet and only few hands were up. I think most of us took diet as one of our resolutions and we gave up these three days. Believe me, it was hard to resist.

#8. Brutal Feedback: Many may disagree about the first day “Brutally Strong” feedback, but it was a needed one to push out of the comfort zone and give more power to the peer-to-peer learning. The next two days were completely unbiased and brutally honest discussions. We are warriors and came here to train to win the battle. If we get hurt ,we don’t look at our wounds or worry about the bleeding-we will swing our sword stronger and push the enemy back so we took it in the right spirit.

#9. Schedule: The program was designed for 16 hours a day, from 6 am to 10 pm. After that we caught up on burning issues or socialized beyond midnight and showed up at 6 am next day. We are all entrepreneurs and used to the 18 hours days, so thanks to the organizers for your confidence in us to give our all.

#10. Giving back: The camp is giving back to the country by highly successful entrepreneurs and thought leaders to create more winners and more jobs. It refueled and reignited the startup engine for a long journey.We all have an opportunity to give back every day by sharing the knowledge and mistakes or feedback to the fellow entrepreneurs as participants. What I’ve realized in my last 8 years as an entrepreneur is giving back is actually getting back in bigger value. (Mostly in the form of knowledge of do’s and don’t’s.) We all have an obligation to support the great initiatives of iSpirt to make India a great nation.
prabhakan

Guest post by Prabakaran “Praba” Murugaiah, TechFetch.com 

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iSPIx is a Public Good that will help us in our vision of making India a Product Nation.

The Indian Software Product industry has undoubtedly become a burgeoning sector. It is on way to claim a significant share of the global mutli-billion dollar enterprise software product industry. iSPIx-B2B is an initiative from iSPIRT to put exact numbers on this exciting growth story.

iSPIx stands for ‘Indian Software Product Industry Index’ and read as ‘i-specs’. The index essentially captures the value of the top 30 Indian B2B Software Product companies along with a bunch of other statistics and information (employee numbers, company profile, product focus, funding type etc.). While the general data is used to get a broad picture of the industry profile, the key piece of information in this exercise, is the anonymize and aggregated valuation figure of the top 30 companies. This is used as a metric to gauge the size and growth of the Indian Software Product industry.

To our pleasant surprise, this turned out to be a $10.25 Billion figure recording double digit growth rates!  These 30 companies are gunning across the business horizontals and verticals with their strong product portfolios. They directly employ over 21000 people. Click on this info-graphic to know who these 30 companies are (listed alphabetically and not terms of value size).


This iSPIRT hangout did provide an overview of the iSPIX initiative by iSPIRT and why it is necessary for the product ecosystem with its focus on B2B companies in the Indian context. The Indian B2B software product industry has been growing nicely outside of the spotlight – the enterprise value of the top 30 companies is $10.25 billion (₹65,500 crores) and they employ over 21,000 people. With such encouraging growth and global focus, it becomes important to see what insights we can gather about this relatively unsung group of companies.

The Hangout was moderated by Sharad Sharma, Co-Founder, iSPIRT and had Dev Khare, Fellow at iSPIRT & Partner at LightSpeed India & Raghu, Fellow at iSPIRT

To our pleasant surprise, this turned out to be a $10.25 Billion figure recording double digit growth rates!  These 30 companies are gunning across business horizontals and verticals with their strong product portfolios and directly employ over 21000 people. Click on this info-graphic to know who these 30 companies are (listed alphabetically and not terms of value size).

Read the November 2015 edition of the iSPIx-B2B report to know more and watch the video if you are curious about how we put the index together.

We believe iSPIx is a Public Good that will help us in our vision of making India a Product Nation.

Guest Post by Raghu, Fellow at iSPIRT

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Scaling Revenue Roundtable

Enterprise Sales, Marketing & Inside Sales Team Build Out, First International Customers Acquisition, Enterprise Pricing etc. I understand, we have heard these topics in multiple events & conferences, so why this round table be different? The difference is gyan vs hearing from real person with real experience which sometimes exactly what you want to hear, even reading 10 books will not help compared to one line coming from a CEO who has done it over and over again and seen the success.

AiAfOYoopNK2-JpnERWxOZdUFD5vPYd5ajC8OOkJg_tPIn this Round table, Aneesh was leading and moderating the discussion. He leveraged the experience of other founders which made the most out of few hrs of interaction. The participants are founders of mid-stage startups, who have good-size customers and have decent ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue), growing and scaling.

This blog narrates the learning in the form of Q&A.

How to establish a meaningful and sustaining Partnership for your B2B enterprise business and grow your business?

  • Partner are those who have done similar product sales in medium/large scale before, so ask them for their sales targets (region wise) and their profile of B2B partnership in their existing set up. That is a good validation point for partnership. {It is like validating by their current and past experience in partnership}
  • Partners could be the companies who are into services (in your industry vertical like healthcare or retail etc) and likes to have monthly revenues.
  • If your product sit on top of other product and integrates then go for a partnership program to the base product. For instance, if your product complements or built on top of Salesforce, then you can enroll in Salesforce has AppExchange program wherein you can list your product and generate good visibility and leads. Partners, could be the product that your software compliments or built upon it.
  • Partners could be the implementation companies of the product that your product built on or compliment. Say your software built on Salesforce, then the service companies who are implementing Salesforce solution could be your partners.
  • You could also go for two-way partnership, like I push your product and you push mine, sometimes one partner performs a lot better than the other, in that case, be open and refine the terms as you go in the journey.
  • If you are enrolling in partnership programs from large companies like IBM, Salesforce etc and see if you can use their promotion events and brand your product, many gives a free offer for promotion. You might end up in getting leads worth a lot that might seems impossible to generate by the solo marketing you do on your own.  These large companies also have paid outreach which has high outreach and see if it is worth investing.
  • Incubator and Accelerator, if you are part of any incubation center or accelerator that helps a lot in getting the right partnership e.g  Microsoft accelerator
  • How to bring transparency in partnership? You might also want to try “Lead Protection Program” which creates 100% transparency in the leads generated, let your partners enter the leads in your CRM & both of you can track the status and you can also make sure that right analytics are coming out.
  • If the partners are asking for exclusivity, ask for minimum guarantee e.g 30 qualified leads per quarter per area
  • Partnership takes time to achieve, so keep experimenting, be conservative and go slow, do a some sort of pilot before you sign larger partnership contract. And ready to fail as it takes time to get into right partnership.

AtT1H_5g3UkqxqIvC6jRlOknnwXUZPnMjQ0GkhyzAymFHow to acquire customers in new international market?

  • You can go with the existing customers and if they have business overseas then you can approach them for the initial open door to international market.
  • Another suggestion is to participate in events and have a booth or something so your product gets exposure and you might end-up in getting partners or customers
  • LinkedIn is a great source to find first few pilot customers in that region.
  • Overseas partnership also you can explore using LinkedIn or Quora, but it is not that easy to find viable partnership
  • And also cold calling for opening doors also worked for few startups.
  • If your product is like B2C then publishing in appstore, Appstore marketing, google adwords would be a good start, but if you are in B2B and enterprise sales, then the steps mentioned in the beginning are the way to go.
  • Once you have handful of customers internationally, select a country where you could open a small sales team may be start with one or two guys and these guys need not be very senior like VP level, 2 yrs to 5 yrs exp and they have to work with India Sales team parallaly. You might need to travel and stay there for a while for initial years to establish a sales pattern oversees.

Ar3dOzl_O6w-FGfJzAg_J7VarpANJbdP-uJ4bFiora6FHow is to do pricing for your product?

  • See your competitor price and product features and how much it solves the customer problem, how your product makes them dependable, this combination will help you to arrive at pricing.
  • If your product a lot better than your competitor, do not lower your price to compete, you need to stay at a price tag for the right product.
  • If your product does not have India based competitor, see the US pricing and create some kind of benchmark value to arrive your pricing.
  • You can have different packaging but not too many, max 3 to 4.
  • You kind of have to experiment with pricing, for e.g one of the enterprise product was priced it 5k for the first few customer during pilot (initial years) and when they need to sell the product in the second year to a bigger organization, they tried quoting 1L and end up in selling at 60k.  So you need to try and see how market is reacting for your new pricing, first few year keep experimenting, you will be able to arrive at pricing between 1 to 3 yrs if not before.
  • When you sell enterprise product, make the price attractive in the pilot stage and after showing the desired results, you can go for high price and the customers would not mind paying it as they have seen the results which impacted their top line.
  • The pricing could be geography based and can be different. And again, find the right pricing by seeing your competitor and demand in that market.
  • If you want to give freemium version, give it free but let the customer give you some kind of asset that you can use for your business like marketing or brand building. For e.g refer 2 friends to get the free version or share in your facebook page to get the access. Some kind of exchange of benefits for freemium version.

What is the most painful growth in the entire journey of the startup?

  • 1M to 5M growth is the most painful where you are likely to make mistakes
  • While growing fast, you need to be careful when reaching to new markets, not all regions works great for your product. US need not be the best market for all products. If you have invested in one region and seems like it is not working, then shutdown and alternate your sales strategy in overseas.
  • Please refer “acquiring customers in new international market” for more details.

How to upsell and cross-sell to your existing customers?

  • There are two ways, first upsell more apps/ additional features to the same customer
  • Second is find out other departments or other sister organization and do a cross sell
  • An customer account is usually handled by an account manager, the upsell/cross sell need be done by different person say group account manager.
  • Every group account manager handles multiple accounts, like 5 to 10 accounts, is responsible for upselling. The account manager finds opportunities for upsell. Do not mix up the account manager dealing with customer on day-to-day basis to do upsell as the negotiation will become very tricky otherwise.

How to give discounts to the customers in SaaS product?

  • The discounts needs to be distributed, do not give them at one go.
  • For instance, do a yearly subscription with 2 months off. Those two months are going to be 11th and 12th month. So incase they leave in 6 months, these discounts does not qualify.
  • Another way you could spread across 3 years like 3rd month, 6th month off, 22th month off for discounts.

How much is the typical yearly renewal increase in ARR for the Enterprise Product?

  • 8 to 10%
  • We need to say 10% increase is very common and if the customer creeps, bring down to 8%

How to get testimonials and referrals?

  • Usually testimonials are done after building a strong relationship with a customer. Usually after 1 or 2 years. Make sure that the account managers and CXO’s of the company has a good relation built with customers to ask for testimonials. Once you establish those soft links, whenever the customer delightness go very high and initiate the process. e.g Release of product feature which solves one of their pain point which the customer demanded for a while.
  • Another idea is to mention this in the subscription or contract time itself. Suppose if the customer is asking for discounts then you can tell him that you can enroll in the “Loyalty Program”  in which you might have to give testimonial & also give 2 referrals and participate in the case study within the first 2 years and you are eligible for this much discounts. This way the customer is well aware of the expectation and also enjoys discounts. Do not give discounts for free, make him have some benefits offered to us.

Does awards and recognizing important for startup?

  • This comes directly into credibility building so it is good to get some recognition
  • The important point is apply for recognition that are credible and genuine with a selection process like boot up awards by ispirit
  • Have some sort of recognition award or have an article or mention in international news & media like Techcrunch, Harvard Business Review, Gartner, Marketing Magazine, Forbes, Wall Street Journal etc.This will help both India & international brand building.
  • You can use a PR agency to reach out these media and appear for the competition or for the product review

Name some books good for Inside Sales and for Complete Sales?

  • Predictable Revenue by Aaron Ross
  • Sales Acceleration formula by Mark Roberge

Is there any online tests used as a first-cut of sales roles?

AkKzIBAt4w99IJ_Uj2_8mQGs0EyU9dnA03l9hY6xQA1qHow to provide incentives for your IS(Inside sales) team?

  • Incentive are always a motivating factor for the Inside Sales team. We have laid out some numbers as a sample for you to see below.
    • 2% to 3% of Annual Recurring  Revenue(ARR) for new customer acquisition.
    • 2% to 2.5% of annual revenue for UpSell/Cross Sell or  have a fixed amount like 10k for all revenue of 3L to 5L per year, 5K for 2L to 3L etc.
    • You can also say, if you get a referral from a customer then the account manager gets 5% of revenue.
    • You can also include testimonial incentives for e.g Video testimonials 10k, Text testimonial 5k, Case Study like 10% of ARR
  • Even you can add some incentive for first go-live means successful deployment and this is applicable for enterprise products
  • Make sure these numbers are published and you make sure the check is given to him as soon as you receive them from the customer.

We would be writing another blog on a related & demanding topic “How to set up a Inside Sales Team from scratch & generates Leads?” in the upcoming week.Stay Tuned and Happy Reading!

Contributed by Asha Satapathy, DocEngage

 

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A new year, a new dawn: Startup INDIA, Standup INDIA

Sh. Amitabh Kant, Secretary of DIPP brainstorms with iSPIRT.

Greeting_Card_for_website_v2 (1)He is the author of the book Branding INDIA, a key driver behind many successful branding INDIA campaigns like Make-In India, Incredible India, and Athethi Devo Bhava (Guest is God) campaigns. He is a decision maker par excellence and above all the Secretary of DIPP (Department of Industrial Policy & Promotion). Mr. Amitabh Kant. who is now also in charge of Startup India, Standup India campaign, met up with iSPIRT, in Bangalore to understand the plethora of Technological Break-throughs and Policy Transformations that iSPIRT is facilitating for the benefit of the Startup Community. He provided some very useful advise by participating in interactive session for close to 2.5 hours.

Prime Minister Mr. Modi in his Mann-ki Baat radio address had announced that the Start-Up India, Stand-Up India initiative will unfold on January 16. The initiative will be anchored by the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion (DIPP). Mr. Amitabh Kant, and his team consulted and deliberated extensively, on opportunities that can be Game Changers for Indian Startups.

On Tuesday, at Shangri-La in Bangalore, iSPIRT with its team of Volunteers which included Sharad Sharma, Co-founder of iSPIRT, Sharique Hassan from the Stanford Graduate School of Business, Shashank from Practo, Sanjay Jain from Ekstep, Jas Gulati from Nowfloats and other volunteers, presented the INDIA STACK, PNGrowth and various other Leap-frogging breakthroughs which will help INDIA innovate for the next 6 Billion people.

Below are some of the key highlights of the Session.

AmitabhKant1iSPIRT Show-case of various Ongoing Initiatives

The session started with a presentation by Sanjay Jain on IndiaStack, a suite of technology-led services, currently being developed to solve identity, payments and personal data management for all Indian citizens. It was followed by Shashank from Practo, about Healthcare, which highlighted how Accessibility and Affordability is helping Health care reach the masses in INDIA. Mr. Amitabh’s participation on both these were highly involved, and he pointed out how States like Rajasthan have taken a pioneering approach, especially in Healthcare. He was quick to point out that if we can create a FEW champion states adopting the IndiaStack and its suite, the rest of the states will quickly follow.

This was followed by Jas Gulati presenting both the book and details around Digital Desh (Impact of Internet on Indian MSMEs).. It was clear that 2nd Tier and 3 Tier India is waiting to explode and join the Internet and Digital revolution in INDIA. iSPIRT also presented its SPiX Index and M&A initiatives helping Quantitatively track the progress and market growth of Indian Startups.

The most intense session was when Mr. Sharique Hassan presented the PNGrowth Initiative Details. China has had an exponential growth in Innovation in the past 15 years, and India now has the Opportunity to repeat the same. However to unleash India’s innovation potential, INDIA needs to capitalize on the Founders hunger and also harness the Institutional assets created by Educational Universities like Stanford, Harvard, Duke etc. Mr. Amitabh was very impressed by the PNGrowth agenda, and commented that it would make an Orbital shift in the Organizational Skills and Strategic Thinking levels of Entrepreneurs in INDIA. He wanted such programs to reach all academic incubation facilities in INDIA.

Ak2Insights and Advise from Mr. Amitabh Kant

If Indian Entrepreneurs focus on Fundamental Science and if they can create a competitive advantage, Mr. Amitabh felt that there was nothing stopping us from leap-frogging the WEST. He was immensely supportive to all programs and in-fact extended financial support for PILOT Projects in various spheres discussed. However, he had 5 important pieces of advice.

  • Pilot projects need to achieve success in at least some corners of INDIA.
  • Nothing Succeeds like Success, so it was imperative that we quickly implement ideas.
  • Institutional Mechanics will follow Innovation, there are several District level funds, MP Lad Funds and also Innovation Funds.
  • Startup challenges can be addressed quickly by Joint Inter-ministerial committees provided we can carve out clear definitions and scope for those challenges.
  • Policy Levers will respond to fast changing needs of Startups. Startup India, Standup India will make sure that ease of doing business is a top priority.
Conclusion
Mr. Amitabh Kant was highly impressed with the body of work presented to him. He said that everything from Challenge Grants supplementing the various RFP tendering processes, of the Govt, to the Inter-ministerial committees quickly acting to enable the Growth levers, were geared to make sure that the Startup Entrepreneur is successful. iSPIRT on its part is fostering and facilitating many such conversations to nudge Policy Makers help the Startup Ecosystem. For the Entrepreneurs, its now up to you to Stand-up and Start-up, to create a new dawn and a new beginning. Happy 2016 to all change makers!
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Fin-Tech: Financial Services To Come

IGIDR Finance Research Group partnered with iSPIRT to help conduct a Fintech Session in their 6th edition of Emerging Markets Finance (EMF) Conference held at Sofitel, BKC – Mumbai. The chosen theme for the Fintech Session was “Financial Services to come”. The session was divided into two parts – (1) inform the disruptions in financial services together with the showcase of select software product companies that are offering products leveraging these disruptive influences, and (2) panel discussions to get thought leaderships on the disruptions in payments, including the role of the regulators.

Mr. Nandan Nilekani delivered the keynote address and he enthralled the audience in his inimitable style. His session started by giving insights into the influences driving the disruptions in financial services, including a real-time demo of one such influence i.e. eKYC using Aadhaar. He then took the audience on a journey of how software product companies are leveraging these influences to introduce innovative business models that would fundamentally change the way financial services are conceived and delivered, laying stress on cashless payments. Nandan, not only, laid stress on the current but also gave the audience a glimpse of the possibilities.

2015-12-18 14.10.18The keynote address was followed by sessions and demos by four select software product companies that have introduced innovative products and / or business models leveraging these influences and making the ‘new’ Fintech happen.

The second half of the Fintech session was designed as panel discussions to engage thought leaders and first movers on their perspectives of these disruptions.

The first panel discussion was on Future of payments, moderated by Sanjay Jain (Volunteer, iSpirt). The discussion was wide ranging, with Mr. A P Hota (MD and CEO, National Payments Corporation of India) providing us the perspective on the infrastructure that has been setup by the NPCI to interconnect banks, which is the basis for payments in India, and Mr. G V Nageswara Rao (MD and CEO, NSDL) on how Payment Banks will bring in technology led business models and change the way payments are done in India. Prof. Bhagwan Chowdhry (Professor, UCLA Anderson School of Management), and David Katz (Deputy Head, Global Govt. Relations at Paypal) brought an international perspective to the panel. The conversation included perspectives on how transaction costs, and the removal of friction play an important role in the growth of digital payments and the move to a cash less society.

2015-12-18 14.47.08The panel where status quo meets disruption was highly animated discussion led by Prof Phatak and with two participants from the startup/VC community – Haresh Chawla from IVFA & Sanjay Swamy from Prime Ventures – Dr Ajay Shah and Anand Bajaj, Head of Innovation at YesBank. Dr Phatak opened by stating the time is ripe for disruption and to move to a cashless and cardless world of mobile only payments. Mr Chawla was of the view that innovations will come once the cost of moving money between accounts is near zero – and the next wave of innovations will be around applications of low cost payments. Dr Shah was of the view that the regulator still needs to encourage disruptions and remains a risk to the innovation ecosystem if they stop innovations. Mr Bajaj, fresh from the signing of the MOU between YesBank and iSpirt to setup a framework for a banking app store reiterated the bank’s desire to partner with the startups as they innovate. Mr Swamy called for the need to remove some of the obstacles in on-boarding customers for electronic payment acceptance, and asked for a framework for piloting new concepts. Overall the panel raised several real issues that were actively debated – questions from the audience also echoed the fact that most of the points raised were relevant and real issues. Over the coming months we hope the banking industry will address these issues head-on and SRT the stage for India to maximize the opportunity of the new disruptive technologies from Aadhaar to biometric authentication to IMPS and the Unified Payment Interface.

2015-12-18 14.47.04This is was the first Fintech event for iSPIRT in Mumbai and it received record registrations. IGIDR FRG event organizers expressed desire to conduct a dedicated event based on the positive feedback received.

Guest Contributed by Surya Kasichainula, 3I Infotech & Volunteer for iSPIRT

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What it’ll take to make ‘Smart Cities’ ‘smart’ in the truest spirit

What the BJP is touting proudly as its Smart City development of hundred shortlisted cities across the country, the Congress had initiated during its rule by the name Urban Clusters. The ultimate objective was to judiciously use technology for intelligent planning and efficient running of urban centers in India.

This subject has been discussed by various eminent people in the field ranging from town planners to architects to civic authorities. Most are of the view that injecting technology in a contrived manner was not desirable and the need was for sustainable cities rather than ‘smart’ one’s, where the approach is more outcome based. Infrastructure by itself is of little value unless it is complemented by systems, which are efficient. The approach has to be holistic and should be in tandem with other related programs such as AMRUT and Swacch Bharat.

All such mega ventures with huge capital outlays come with their own set of impediments. To begin with, there are three bureaucratic layers to contend with, the Central Government, that holds the purse strings, the State Government where the Chief Minister could be the gateway to fund distribution and the Civic body where the implementation will be finally done. As things stand today, the CM of the state will be the overriding authority in decision making, but then political equations and differences could at times influence decisions. Also, politicians have short tenures, whereas planning and execution could be a slow laborious process.

For most major cities in the world, the city mayor is a powerful and influential authority as far as the planning and systems are concerned. Some of them have managed their cities so well that they have gone on to become national leaders. In India, mayors are but figure heads with minimal powers, at least as far spending is concerned. Should we then think of a separate body or authority to decide on city matters, especially for the metro cities of India? For instance, like the NCR region around Delhi, can we have a State Capital Authority for all the capital cities of our states?

Then, there is the tricky issue of procurement and purchase. With the proposed top down approach where the Centre releases the funds, this issue could hit road blocks. Who would decide on what and from where to procure the material? For instance, if a city needs 100 CCTV cameras for security, does one go for wired ones to stay within budget or go for wireless ones? Should purchases be made from local sources?

It will become desirable to make it a more democratized process with active citizen participation, where smart cities are run BY the citizens rather than FOR them. More involvement of citizens in varying degrees at the various stages of decision making would become a norm for the future. For this to happen, data which is under layers of bureaucratic stops is freed for the general public. The use of active API’s as envisaged by iSpirt could be put to good use. For specific problems of certain spots within a large city, accessing such data could enable residents to come up with solutions. The India Stack is a good example to follow for smart cities.

All major towns have authorities assigned with the task of systematic planning and infrastructure layout with the of 1917 serving almost as a bible; a 100 year old but meticulous document. Cities today are in disarray because vested interests, together with the collusion of authorities at times, have got away with violations in spite of a firm legislation. Smart cities could help curb such acts to a great extent since all planning has to be based on metrics and accountability and as we move to a ‘presence-less approach’ with the use of technology, the roles of these vested interests could diminish greatly.

So yes, a lot is possible with the use of technology towards the making and running of our cities, but for that a lot needs to be done other than earmarking funds and selecting cities to me made ‘smart’. From the dissolving of ward boundaries to accessing of geospatial data to free use of active API’s smart city development needs a concerted effort from more than one source.

Guest Post by Ranga Raj, Thinxtream Technologies

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Bill Gates meets with iSPIRT

Bill Gates met with members of iSPIRT in Bangalore in December to learn about the organization and its volunteers’ efforts to solve India’s hardest problems through the use of technology.  Nandan Nilekani played host to the event and also present in the room were Sharad Sharma (iSPIRT co-founder), Nachiket More (former Board member of RBI, now senior advisor to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF)), and various senior members of BMGF.

Bill-Gates1There were three broad themes that were covered — finance, healthcare and education — each of which forms an important part of the Gates Foundation’s work in philanthropy. Product demos included the IndiaStack, a suite of technology services currently being developed around identity, payments and personal data management for all Indian citizens; three of the leading startups in the healthcare space — Practo, Logistimo, and Swasthya Slate; and EkStep, an education-focused nonprofit that focuses on facilitated learning.

Shashank presenting to BillBill Gates observed that India is producing cutting-edge work and there are few countries which can boast of a digital infrastructure as sophisticated as we are producing here. With such positive encouragement from one of the most accomplished individuals in the world, the vision of transforming India at large through application of technology has received a new impetus.

the panel with BillGuest Post by Saurabh Panjwani, iSPIRT

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Rediscovering America – The SaaS way !

iSPIRT Roundtable Delhi – 12th December2015

ColumbusCenturies ago Columbus took an adventurous sea journey to discover India in search of gold and in the process stumbled upon America. It is ironical that after ages we Indian product entrepreneurs are re-embarking upon the journey to rediscover America in search of gold, just that we no longer trust the sea and prefer to go via the cloud.

So on Saturday, 12th Dec’15, in the Delhi winter fog, a group of iSPIRT SaaS entrepreneurs met for a Round table titled “” where selling to US was a key focus. I drove in my odd numbered car on even numbered date( the Delhi car rule has not yet triggered in) to get my share of gold. The captain of our ship was Samir Palnitkar from Shop Socially. Samir is a known face in the Indian entrepreneur circle, a serial entrepreneur who has done it all. Still when you meet him you’ll see that glitter in his eyes yearning to achieve more. What I like about the iSPIRT round tables is that they are not about endless powerpoint presentations but active discussions about real issues – real solutions. Every time I attend one I’m amazed by the positive energy in discussions there. You meet real achievers who are hungry for more yet humble enough to help those who have started their journeys. The true bond between us entrepreneurs is that of respect. Respect for hardwork , commitment and perseverance because only we know that that there is no easy way to get up there.

While the queen of spain sponsored Columbus’ sea adventure, ours was hosted by Investopad and I must thank them for that. Located centrally in heart of South Delhi , Investopad has a carefree yet professional environment for any startup to bloom. An ideal setup for our round table. Add to it the Vada Pao and Masala tea from Chaayos, and you are rearing to go. As Peter Drucker said “The best way to predict the future is to create it.” So here we were getting a sneak peak into our future.

The Round table started with a brief round of introductions from each of the participants. Interestingly, there was no debate on why we were there. Each of us knew that if we have to succeed, we have to go global with a special focus on the US market.

Outbound Vs Inbound Marketing

As the discussion evolved, it centered around one key aspect- Outbound Vs Inbound marketing.

InboundThere is a school of thought which believes inbound marketing using content and blogs gives you good quality low cost leads over time. I personally belong to that group having built SalesPanda, an inbound marketing product. But there is another set of people who feel its better to go target the exact customers you want to bring in via outbound. I must say this round table was dominated more by the latter than the former. Like Sachin from Insidesalesbox.com shared the perfect analogy of fishing with a spear and not the net, its yours to choose. In the same room we had two successful startups using both the methodologies successfully. On one side we had Samir our speaker from shop socially who has 70% of leads from outbound email and telecalling and other side we had Sidharth from Wingify(VWO) who have 70% leads from inbound content. Ideally you need to master both and leverage one with the other.

Samir, I must say has mastered the art of selling to global audience via outbound. And it’s not cold calling or randomly hitting on the entire market. It’s a well designed, cured and planned way to segment and target the market. He calls it warm calling to people who show interest to a drip email campaign.

Yes outbound it was, the group agreed and Samir would share his secret recipe to conquer customers globally.

We started the discussion with the fundamental questions

  • How do we find global customers?
  • How do we reach them?
  • Should I build a team abroad?

Marketing-driven Sales

Samir shared the concept of marketing driven sales where the you build a pipeline driven by marketing campaigns both outbound and inbound. Inbound leads are standard SEO and website based leads whereas outbound leads are a mix of email drip marketing and outbound telecalling.

The outbound process starts with a drip email campaign on a carefully built database.

Samir shared his inside sales process as in image below. You have an inside sales team(Qualifiers) to reach out to prospects who either open or respond back to the emails. They pass the leads on to Sales Managers(closers) who demo the product to the clients. There is a customer success team who’s job is to move free trial customers to premium and also upsell and cross sell. For specific hot opportunities a special Pod is created which nurtures these leads to keep hem engaged to close.

Inside Sales Process at Shop Socially

The key question which would come to your mind is that where would the data come from. The team discussed various options and tools to buy data. Here is what Samir shared about their process at shop socially.

  1. Set your target criteria- Industry verticals, Titles, Company Revenue, location etc
  2. Build a list of companies you want to target using tools like Builtwith, Datanyze, Hoovers, Data.com
  3. Work with third parties to scrub list – use elance, upwork etc.

InsidesalesOnce the database is ready, import it to a marketing automation tool, in case of sell socially they use Pardot. Create a drip marketing campaign across different offering. Segregate the prospects as R,C,O – People who respond,click or open your mailers. The inside sales team calls out to people who atleast clicked on the email so its never a cold call as atleast the customer has heard about you before. The chart below details the emailing process. The prospects move to a CRM solution where the lead is progressed. Shop socially use Salesforce and Sugarcm but any other good CRM would do. Ajay from Salezshark also shared how their CRM software provided an integrated mobile ready solution. It have built in contact database seamlessly integrated into the solution. Do check out !

Some of the other salient points mentioned by Samir and agreed by the group were

  • The product needs to have the stickiness for people to come back. You can get people to try but there has to genuine stickiness for them to buy.
  • The email content should be concise. Fancy EDMs are a big no as text mails are more acceptable.
  • Calling script is critical. It should be detailed enough for callers to navigate through all possible scenarios.
  • While reaching the prospects on a call, its always better to get them to block the calendars and follow it up with a reminder on the day of the meeting.

Go Prepared !

“By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.” ― 

We spend so much effort to create databases, send multiple emails and calling the prospects to fix demos. But the important question is how prepared are we to get into the battlefield. Are our sales guys equipped enough to answer customer queries ? Some of the Sales Collaterals you need to build before starting the process are as below

  • Standard Video and company presentation
  • Whitepapers and Case Studies
  • Video Testimonials
  • Webinars
  • Pricing and Value Calculator

Also remember conferences are for sales. When you participate in events and conferences, go prepared. Fix meetings with prospects there well in advance to utilise your time.

Finally, in the last leg of the round table we discussed on people ratios, targets and other infrastucture details. We also debated on hiring tips for key resources including inside sales and career plan for them.

One crucial point the group debated was the need and value of outsourcing some of the processes. As we debated, a concensus evolved on outsourcing top of the funnel activities. We need to focus on closures because as funnels goes down it gets more critical. So you can outsource top of funnel activities like data profiling, appointment setting etc but keep the bottom activites like demo and closure calls with you as every slip can cost you heavily.

Overall it was a great experience for all of us as we came out more clear and confident on reaching global customers. In fact, last few days I myself tested some of the ideas like drip marketing campaigns and reaching out to data profiling team via upwork and I must say it works ! I believe that as years go by, we Indian entrepreneurs would master the art of selling globally via the cloud. Here is the team who attended the round table. Carefully, note down these names coz when decades later your great grand children ask you who rediscovered America via the cloud, you should know J

A big thank you to all who participated in the round table and to iSPIRT for organising. A day well spent. Look forward to the next one !

by Samit Arora, Co-founder, SalesPanda.com

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India Stack takes the Digital India campaign to a whole new level

India is the third largest smartphone and mobile internet user market in the world with over 200 million internet users in 2013. The figures are expected to touch a staggering 500 million users by 2017, including 314 million mobile internet users according to a report by IAMAI and KPMG. Clearly, mobile phones are the ‘computing device of choice’ for the country. To keep up the momentum, the Government of India is keen on developing the digital infrastructure of the country under the Digital India program.

Digital India is a revolutionary program that will empower the masses and leapfrog India into the next generation of government services. Fortunately, the lower level of investment in earlier generation technology means India has skipped the legacy era and waited for the right technology to arrive at its doorstep. To kick-start and empower the Digital India program in a very democratized form and involve the great innovation talent of the nation, the Government of India has launched an open API policy. An open API, often referred to as a public API, is a publicly available Application Programming Interface (API) that provides programmers with programmatic access to a propriety software application. This set of open API is known as the India Stack and these would enable the ease in integration of mobile applications with the data securely stored and provided by the government to authenticated Apps.

India Stack is a complete set of API for developers and includes the Aadhaar for Authentication (Aadhaar already covers over 940 million people and will quickly cover the population of the entire nation), e-KYC documents (safe deposit locker for issue, storage and use of documents), e-Sign (digital signature acceptable under the laws), unified payment interface (for financial transactions) and privacy-protected data sharing within the stack of API. Together, the India Stack enables Apps that could open up many opportunities in financial services, healthcare and education sectors of the Indian economy. What this essentially means is that developers and tech startups can now build software and create businesses around the readily available infrastructure offered through India Stack, thus opening a huge potential to tap into the booming smartphone market in the country. Since the consumer market in India is very large, such startups could also hope for institutional funding and gain from the early mover advantage.

Through the digitized elements like e-KYC, e-Sign, digitized Aadhaar information and digital locker, the entire ecosystem has now become a presence less, paperless and cashless based system. A Digital Locker enables users to have all their legal documents in a digitized format that is stored online and can be accessed from any part of the country. The e-Sign makes it simple for people to sign deals, contracts and legal documents through their phones and the Unified Payment Interface lets people make payments with ease through their smartphones from anywhere.

India Stack makes a user base of over a billion people readily available through its API. This means that startups and tech companies can build over this to be able to integrate various functions for their businesses or for larger enterprises. Every bank or telecom operator scans through tons of paperwork every day to be able to verify customers and generate KYC documents. Now imagine the impact if this entire process could be digitized by building an application which would integrate India Stack and the user base of over a billion Indians!

With the technology, documentation and sample code available, entrepreneurs and startups can get started with innovating, prototyping as well as building India Stack enabled applications. The commercial applications are endless with multiple opportunities, as the large user base opened up by India Stack is nascent, solution-hungry and largely untouched by technology. Now even a local vegetable trader can take an intra-day loan almost instantly through his mobile phone and pay it back the very same or next day without even physically visiting the bank or wasting any time (time is money when earnings are proportional to time spent)! With their e-KYC documents and digital signatures, a loan can be processed almost instantly and the money transferred through the Unified Payment Interface. Long queues at banks, telecom offices and all other government and non-governmental processes should be the thing of the past, through proper integration of India Stack.

The nation is looking for “a transition from technology-poor to innovation-rich society” and entrepreneurs have a good role to play. The problems (read opportunities) in financial services, healthcare and education are all so large that only the right technology can cost-effectively solve them. Solving these scale problems would mean great business sense too.

iSPIRT, the non-profit software product industry think tank powered by industry veterans, has been actively involved in the development of India Stack and is helping entrepreneurs make the best use of business opportunities provided by India Stack, while building their startups. iSPIRT believes that India Stack creates a whole new generation of business opportunities around the mobile phone and early movers would have tremendous market advantages.

On a recent visit to India, Bill Gates commented on India Stack saying, “India is on the cusp of leapfrogging!” And it truly is; considering it is the only country in the world offering such an open and secure API, India is certainly looking at taking the Digital India campaign to a whole new level.

The future is here and now is the time to act.

 

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The last list – the final 25 #PNgrowth companies.

This is it, then. The last announcement of #PNgrowth 2016 is here. We have now the entire 200 companies who will get together in January for the inauguration of what is the most ambitious mentorship programs for startups ever put together in India. We now have about half a month to go, and it would be great if the companies talked to each other, think about what they want out of this, and discuss stuff. We have set up a Facebook group just for this, and we will be taking pointers for program design from on there, so be sure to get on it.
 
For further announcements, you can follow us here or on the Facebook group itself. 
 
25-founders-collage-8th batchSo here we go, the last 25. #Pngrowth 2016 is well and truly on!
 
Sivaram Subramaniam of CavinHR
Puneet Sharma of Bugclipper
Satish Kamat of Jambuster
Jay Thaker of sumHR
Salar Bijili of Cuecontent
Hari PK of Bigfoxx
Dr. Shikha Suman of Medimojo
Sanjay Shah of Zapty
Nikhil MS of Clusterzap
Sumesh K Menon of Winds Business solutions
Vinay Simha of Amiya
Kavita Khandadia of Mytripkarma
Vivek Beria of Whizzwifi
Dharam Mehta of Wedwise
Saurabh Saha of Talentpegs
Ish Jindal of Hellotars
Arvind Batra of EventsHigh
Satish Kashyap of AlgoEngines
Subrat Kar of Vidooly
Vishal Singhal of Artzolo
Nitin Chadha of Sride
Suraj Goyal of Printbindaas
Sarang Lakare of Intouchapp
Rittvij Parekh of Pykih
 
See you all over there!
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Design thinking Playbook Roundtable by Deepa Bachu

desk-931928_1280

The core idea of a startup is to tap into the previously unexplored markets, identifying unsolved problems and bringing to the market innovation that disrupt the existing eco-system. It’s about understanding complex problems and coming up with innovative, disruptive solutions…a process that requires understanding the consumers’ requirements and behavior patterns to create a well-thought out solution for the customers’ benefit.

While most entrepreneurs spend weeks brainstorming about the idea, they often ignore the key ingredient to innovation : design.

Design /dɪˈzʌɪn/ (noun) – do or plan (something) with a specific purpose in mind.

The Design thinking Playbook Roundtable organized by iSpirit and conducted by Deepa Bachu from Pensaar helped startup founders understand the importance of design thinking and integrate design into their workflow. Here are some key takeaways from the Playbook Roundtable held at the head office of Instamojo in Bangalore:

Design thinking is not just about the graphic elements, UI or tools. It is a creative approach to a problem. It is a problem solving methodology – whether it is blueprints for a building, a beautiful graphic design for a brochure, a sleek UI for a website or a comfortable piece of furniture, design helps to solve any problem, visual or physical.

While it is important to engage a professional, it is crucial that everybody on the team thinks DESIGN. Entrepreneurs should be able to step away from their immediate environment to look around and view their idea from the perception of the consumers, a process that requires creative thinking.

As a good product manager, a startup founder should be able to connect the dots in non-obvious ways to come up with a unique and innovate solution for the consumers. It is crucial for entrepreneurs develop a deep insight of the problem they are seeking to solve and be passionate about it before coming up with a solution. More startups focus more on the solution and forget the initial problem statement. You must never lose sight of your problem, constantly revisiting it while fine-tuning and tweaking the solution.

A product is valuable only as long as the consumer users it. It is thus important for entrepreneurs to understand customer behavior in order to make their product user friendly. Usability studies though interesting, aren’t always reliable. Startup founders thus have to seek out customers and work with them closely to understand what they need, what they think, how they use the product and how they feel about it.

Customer behavior v/s customer intent – it is important to understand the difference between the two. While a user may want to do something in the ideal world (intent), she may not be able to do it in the real world (behavior). As entrepreneurs it is important to differentiate intent from actual behavior. If this is geographically impossible, startup founders should not hesitate to use data analytics to tap into the users’ behavior patterns and modify the product.

Design thinking allows entrepreneurs to look at their idea holistically and come up with the best possible solution for their users. Design after all enables people to create and come up with the unimaginable and unexpected designs.

 

 

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Open Source and SAAS

While open source software is a fairly well understood in concept, I am always surprised how little it is understood in practice. At a round table of young product companies last month, there were a lot of raised eyebrows and questions when I explained our open source way of working.

Jordan Hubbard, co-creator of FreeBSD and open source veteran, spoke on this topic at this year’s ERPNext Conference, and he basically said this, open source business is all about people. Since the product is free, you sell services around the product, which is your people. This is mostly true for the very large majority of businesses that have mushroomed around open source projects, providing installation, hosting, customization, maintenance and other services around the product.

But there is now a new variable in the equation, SAAS (or Software-as-a-Service). It has been already accepted that SAAS is the way software is sold today. Listed companies like SalesForce, Xero, Zendesk, Workday, NetSuite, Hubspot, Shopify are testimony to the success of SAAS products and the billions of dollars that get spent on SAAS products each year. What does the future hold?

As on-premise is slowly moving into SAAS, I believe that SAAS itself will move into open source. Since the unevenly spread future is already here, there are companies already successfully doing open source + SAAS like WordPress, Ghost CMS, Magento, ERPNext (disclaimer: that’s us).

Open source + SAAS makes a great combination.

Benefits to the user:

  1. Open source products allow virtually unlimited possibilities to deeply integrate the product.
  2. There is a lot more risk in a closed platform, like price increase and slow pace of development.
  3. There is no vendor lock-in
  4. Free!

Benefits to the publisher:

  1. Not everyone wants to host their own infrastructure, this opens up opportunity to build a SAAS platform
  2. Provides word-of-mouth marketing
  3. Vibrant community attracts more users
  4. Community contributes by providing feedback, support, features, fixes, integration, testing, documentation
  5. A lot more incentive to write good code and documentation
  6. Much easier to find and on-board new developers to your team

Going open source is not easy. Business are built on the premise of transactions, and in open source, you have to be very open to giving and communicating without expecting immediate results. But once you cross a certain threshold, community participation can be extremely rewarding.

I am not advocating you open source your product today, but as Wikipedia has shown us, its only a matter of time before someone builds a mature open source product that might replace you.

Then there is no going back.

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Traction Trumps Everything – How to get traction for your SaaS product

A wise and successful entrepreneur once said, “Traction trumps everything”.

Indeed, traction is the only thing that brings you customers, VCs, and energy to keep going.

iSPIRT in partnership with PuneConnect & SEAP organized a playbook roundtable on “Getting traction for your product startup”. It was focused on peer to peer learning and taking away real feedback, rather than just typical “general gyaan”. The playbook roundtable was moderated by two very successful SaaS product entrepreneurs Niraj Rout of Hiver (earlier known as GrexIt), and Rushabh Mehta of ERPNext. Both are building highly successful SaaS products bringing very different approaches/strategies yet finding great synergy in their thought processes. Hiver is a simple-to-use product for business workflows, fast growing, young, funded and profitable startup whereas ERPNext is a highly complex, very stable, bootstrapped, profitable, world’s second opensource Saas ERP product.

The RT discussion was attended by founders building SaaS products in Innovation, eCommerce, business communication, personal customer loyalty, education, personal finance, recruitment, fashion and technology domain.

SaaS Valley of Death: Rushabh got our attention right away by asking “Do you know SaaS Valley of Death?” Its like your product is complex to use and cheap at price. Its very very difficult to sale. You can be either very simple to use and cheap or you can be highly complicated and pricey. You can’t be cheap and complicated. But ERPNext falls in that category. Rushabh briefly shared his long haul journey of 8 years of building a product out of his own need and making it open source for people to use/modify it. ERPNext gives it at fairly low price to host it and charges additional for product consultancy.

Open-Source strategy: Rushabh realised that if such a complex product has to have innovation, then hiring talent is quite difficult. Instead making it open-source brings immediate advantages such as your users brings innovation, it is easy to hire from the developers community which already knows your product code, less efforts needed to support the product as your community is your biggest support structure. Recently, this trend has started by major tech companies like facebook, google and others by making their api’s open-source for community to play around and bring true innovation. Also interesting to say here that open source is more than a marketing strategy, you have to believe in it to work. Also companies are open sourcing not just APIs but also entire projects (Apple just joined with Swift)

User Onboarding:  It is very easy to get signups, but what happens after signup is the crucial one. The real game begins from sign up onwards. Rushabh at ERPNext created a great user onboarding workflow for various categories of users. At signup, ERPNext asks its user several questions to understand user and his/her needs. Accordingly, it customises the rest of the onboarding flow. This “personalized” flow helps user to connect and understand ERPNext quite easily. There are several videos created for user to educate about product features and uncover true benefits. “Founding/Core team has to take product to a initial revenue level, until then one should not make a mistake of hiring a sales person”, insisted Rushabh. This helps you build and quickly tweak/change onboarding flow as your know your users better. This also helps in positioning and marketing the product better.

Product Market fit:  Niraj of Hiver (GrexIt) shared his journey of conceptualising the product as knowledge management place (for enterprises) to pivoting to tap a SME segment where quick workflow matters. Its all about finding a product-market fit. On a lean methodology which suggests to work with your customers and tune the product, Niraj shared a good observation. If you talk to your customers, they will always suggest small incremental improvements/suggestions, customers can never give you extraordinary (or 10X) innovation. Its your vision that defines what your product could actually do. However it’s essential to understand how users are using the product and what key activities they are doing repeatedly.

Buyer’s mindset:  For a product, you have to understand whether it helps user generate money or save money. Does your product falls into cost center or revenue center, accordingly you have to create your marketing campaigns and positioning.

Simple Growth hacks:  Startups don’t have big pockets to spend on marketing/sales. Simple techniques like Your domain specific keywords, Search Engine Optimization, Influential bloggers write about your product, your customers talking and referring your product are a few simple growth hacks every startup can try. Always get real customer’s/brand’s testimonials and showcase them on key pages.

Critical choices:  In the initial days when you don’t have traction, its an important call whether you want to give it to a few people and learn and tweak the product or you just throw it in the space for thousands to use and let them figure out. Both have their own pros-cons.

Post Lunch session, Niraj and Rushabh encouraged every startup to showcase their product’s landing page and quick onboarding workflow. Duo and other founders provided critical feedback to individual founders with immediate actionable takeaway. It was a great peer-to-peer learning exercise. Below is a summary of what came out of the discussion that generically applies to most SaaS product startups.

Landing page:  Product’s landing page is the most critical real estate. Be innovative and build it wisely with new/current trends. A few examples of well designed landing pages were discussed. Products from 37Signals (Basecamp and KnowYourCompany) were highlighted for their innovative approaches. Like Steve Jobs once said, “Good artists copy, great artists steal”, you need not to always reinvent the wheel, just see the best products in your category and steal (find inspiration)!

A few tips for a well designed landing page –

1) The main image and punchline should be appropriate for user to understand your product quickly. Thats where user decides whether I should scroll down (to know more).

2) Always talk about benefits user will get, nobody cares about features.

3) More than 3-4 scroll is overdone. Have only essential information upfront so that user is not overwhelmed with information overdose.

4) Testimonials from real user/brands works great, people feel more comfortable.

5) Less verbose, more visual is always better.

After Signup (User onboarding):  Engaging with user for first few days and making personalized communication helps build rapport as well as improve stickiness.

1) Build a user friendly Quick tour with an option to quit and restart

2) Let user experience your product as quickly as possible

3) Videos or user guides “How to” are essential and helpful

4) Website and user behavior analytics tools like Google analytics, KissMetrics, Mixpanel provide good data know your users better and make appropriate changes in your product

5) Intercom like products helps you build user behavioral based engagement

6) Provide triggers/incentives to appeal user to perform certain actions. Nir Eyal’s HOOK framework  (Trigger, Action, Reward, Investment) was briefly mentioned to emphasise the point.

7) Your product is a leaky bucket, user may fall off anytime. Identify such holes and fill them up with creative solutions

7) You don’t have to be too generous with free plan. Start asking for money (plan upgrade) for valuable/exclusive features

8) Track analytics daily to know traffic to trial to paid customers journey

9) Always do A/B testing of every change/tweak you make to understand how its working.

10) Understand, there is always a churn. Account for that

11) Always promote long term (annual payment) plans, it gives you better visibility on your revenue. 

As traction book says, “Almost every failed startup has a product, what failed products don’t have are enough customers (traction)” and “Traction is growth. The pursuit of traction is what defines the startup”.

This playbook RT was first of its kind where only real stuff was discussed and critical feedback was provided to every startup on their product traction leaky bucket. All startup founders walked out with several actionable takeaways.

There are great SaaS product startups coming from India. The successful entrepreneurs like Niraj and Rushabh have vigor to share their learnings and help budding entrepreneurs to avoid mistakes and leapfrog their journey. This is a movement to build a product nation, one roundtable at a time.

Guest post by Abhijit Mhetre founder at Canvazify – a structured innovation platform for teams to collect, brainstorm, and act on ideas. Abhijit is passionate about startups and collaborative innovation. Follow Abhijit @abmhetre