Category: Playbook RoundTable

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Learnings from “Running Inside Sales for US, from India” – iSPIRT Playbook Roundtable

It is an exciting phase for the Indian SaaS eco-system. There are a lot of companies from India trying to build products for the global market. Some of them have been able to scale to tens of thousands of customers and millions of dollars in revenue. Many others are just getting started or want to step up their game. In both cases, there are trying to figure things out, sort of solving a jigsaw puzzle. Sales is a big part of the puzzle. There are many questions to be answered – how to generate leads, how to sell, whom to sell, how to hire for sales etc.

To get answers to some of these questions and more, iSPIRT organized a playbook roundtable – “Running Inside Sales for US, from India”. It was moderated by Suresh Sambandam, CEO, KiSSFLOW and I was fortunate to be part of it.

Running Inside Sales for US, from India

This blog aims to highlight some of the key learnings from the discussion.

Product-Market fit

This may sound cliched but getting Product-Market fit right is critical before you begin your sales process. Without getting this right you are just shooting in the dark.

Branding and positioning needs to be aligned to what the customer thinks/needs. Customers won’t be thinking the way we are – brand needs to solve that. One way to achieve this is to start by having your product / company name synonymous with what your potential customer is looking for. There are plenty of examples out there – Recruiterbox – Recruitment software, Freshdesk & Zendesk – Help desk software, SalesForce & InsideSalesBox – Sales/CRM software, KiSSFLOW – Workflow management software.

Marketing / Demand generation

Most early stages startups work on an inbound lead generation model. This means, getting SEO right and having a website that looks great & conveys the right message to your prospect is a no-brainer.

One point that came up during the discussion about SEO was content marketing. Invest in building great content for your users and they can prove to be a good source of inbound leads. Also important to remember is the role of distribution of content. No point in having great content if it doesn’t reach the right audience.

Interestingly, Quora was mentioned a good source of leads if answers point to content you have generated.

Other lead generation strategies that were discussed

  • Adwords : important to make a list of primary and secondary keywords and bid for them so that you end up in the first page of search
  • Listing on business app marketplaces – Google Apps, Capterra
  • Outbound lead generation : Some tools to get a database of companies – Discovery.org, DataGuru, Datanyze, Rainking. Use tools like Sendee or Amazon SES for outbound email campaigns to get better open, response rates.
  • Doing Paid webinars at domain specific sites : need significant effort and money.
  • Analyst relations : KiSSFLOW has used Capterra, G2CrowdSource, Gartner and Forrester, TrustRadius. Getting listed is not difficult. Improving ratings needs time and effort

Inside Sales Team Roles

Sales team structure

Before setting up the sales team, it is essential for the founders to map the entire sales process. This sets the tone for the sales team to follow.

Suresh raised an important question – Is your product complex enough to necessitate two roles – SDR & AE.

Sales Development Rep (SDR)

  • Should be good with talking and selling and need to do the bulk of talking and writing to customers
  • Generally have about 300-400 leads to work on and set demos for AEs .
  • Incentives – At KiSSFLOW, it is composite – based on email opens (they have some metrics), completed demos and a small portion of booked revenue.
  • Qualify leads based on multiple factors including no of active sessions, user-base, profile of signed up user etc.

Account Executive (AE)

  • Typical AEs are prior pre-sales guys with ~4 years of experience
  • Have very good product knowledge
  • Important metric for AEs is “Time to first WOW / Magic moment”
  • They typically floor the customer during the demo by spontaneously configuring everything needed during the session itself.
  • Should be able to figure out whether a discount would help close the deal.
  • Generate leads on their own other than leads from SDRs

Hiring

An interesting suggestion that came up was hiring AIESEC students for sales roles. These students would be foreign nationals visiting India on an exchange programme and are generally available to work for about 6-12 months and would be a good fit.

Some of the companies mentioned, they have a intensive training program to train SDR’s.

Pricing

Important learning – many make the mistake of making quick decisions when it comes to pricing, and not giving it enough thought. Needs to be very simple, but also needs to be constantly worked and improved.

Tools & Resources

Some of the marketing & sales – tools & resources used by the participant companies

  • LeadSquared : Generate landing pages easily for campaigns
  • Sendee / Amazon SES : For email campaigns
  • Discovery.org, DataGuru, Datanyze, Rainking : Lead database
  • FullStory : Recorded video of user actions/activities. Alternative tool, MouseFlow.
  • Moz : to check SEO ranking
  • Pipedrive, SalesForce : CRM
  • Wappalyzer, BuiltWith – technologies used on website – useful for competitor analysis
  • Guide to marketing & selling in SaaS – A Jump Start Guide To Desk Marketing and Selling For SaaS – thanks iSPIRT for this.

Closing thoughts

It was really a insightful and informative session and a great starting point in Sales for many of us.

Thanks to

  • Amarpreet Kalkat, Frrole & Avinash Raghava, iSPIRT for organizing this round table
  • Suresh Sambandam, CEO, KiSSFLOW for moderating the session
  • Other startup founders for sharing your insights
  • And finally, Sumanth, CEO, Deck App for hosting us and for the sumptuous pizzas, tea and biscuits.
Guest Post by Gautham Sheshadhari, RecruiterBox
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The iSPIRT Roundtable @Pune – 11 Startups share Metric Driven Growth Secrets

As a startup founder or growth marketer, you obsess over metrics: what is my lead-generation rate, how many customers did I win or lose, how is my monthly revenue growing, or how many customer referrals did I get? Analytics is critical for your business, without which you’re flying blind. However, data overload is real and you might not derive the right actionable insights.

To simplify metric-driven growth for product startups, iSPIRIT, on 18th June 2016, organised a half day roundtable of 11 product startups in Pune. The roundtable was moderated by Paras Chopra, Founder, Wingify and Sanket Nadhani, Growth Marketer, Wingify.

The discussion was structured in a way where attendees spoke about the 3 metrics that are most important to them, an “uncommon” metric that they track, and their expectations from the roundtable. The format was kept fluid with attendees pitching in with thoughts and interesting ideas. At the end of this, all of us saw an exciting video about using Lean Analytics for growing your business.

As a growth marketer, I found interesting growth tactics that these startups use and some insightful metrics that they track. I have structured these in Dave McClure’s famous AARRR pirate-metric framework for SaaS businesses.

 

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Acquisition

Where do I get customers from?

Acquiring new customers is hard. Especially for newly born startups. The best way probably is to just throw mud everywhere and see where it sticks. Once you’ve identified a performing channel, or hopefully multiple channels, you build strategies around them to ramp up acquisition.

Invariably all the startups agree tracking the number of enquiries (opportunities) and their conversion rates across channels is crucial. Paras was of the opinion that keeping an eye on weekly trends on the performance of acquisition channels will help uncover tipping points of when the channel is about to take off or when it’s time to forget about a channel if it has not been performing for a while. To identify optimal acquisition channels, Sandeep Khode, WordsMaya, tells us to ask your customers where they came to know about you. Though it’s a manual process, it helps them to identify users’ exact search terms, which is very useful for keyword optimization. WordsMaya leverages Quora to acquire customers by answering questions or starting a topic.

Jayesh Kariya, VP Finance, TouchMagix, contributed an interesting idea that maintaining a trend of number of prospects lost every week is an eye opener. This lends the idea that your startup should improve its own performance week-on-week.

Landing pages and pricing pages plays an important part in customer acquisition. However, due to information overload, 55% percent of visitors spend fewer than 15 seconds on a new website. Optimizing landing page was a top priority for everyone. Paras told us that a landing page should tell a complete story; it should give all the information that the visitor wants in as few words as possible. Amit Mishra, CEO, InterviewMocha shared an excellent framework, HABITS, to design landing pages. He also says that inserting call to action buttons on your own blog posts gives a click-through rate of around 2%, effectively using your own website as an acquisition channel.

Habits_for_Conversion_Optimized_Landing_Pages

 

Activation

Oh! I got 1000 signups in a day but nobody used the product.

This sucks, right? To improve activation rates, answer this question: once someone signs up, how quickly can she actually use your product? In other words, how soon does she realise the product’s value proposition? If it’s not soon enough, the user goes away never to return.

The onboarding experience of a user should be smooth and, importantly, short. You should NOT ask a user to fill out a form with more than four fields. Some of the tactics and metrics that were discussed –

  • Keep the on-boarding experience short. Examining onboarding experiences of other companies will help you design your own.
  • Measure the ratio of number of users who sign-up to number of user who complete onboarding. Make sure that you measure every step if you have a multi-step onboarding process.

Retention

I signed up a 1000 users a month back. Today, only 10 of them are using my product.

Customer Retention is the real growth accelerator. The math is quite simple: 1 – 1 + 1 = 1. If you don’t retain customers, there’s no use acquiring them. Here’s a great infographic with helpful tips to boost customer retention and reduce churn.

Vrushali Babar, Founder, Meatroot, a B2C business, says that it’s crucial for her to retain her customers. She says that sentiment analysis of what her customers are saying online is indispensable. She currently does it manually on Twitter or Facebook but using a tool like Sentiment140 or BuzzLogix could be useful.

A useful exercise could be developing a dashboard that plots the engagement of users with your product on a daily basis. The philosophy is that a customer who is not engaged will leave. Such a dashboard will give you a snapshot of when engagement of a customer is on the decline so that you can take proactive action before the customer cancels. Another useful metric, for SaaS businesses, is to measure the number of sessions for a user during the trial phase. This will let you know which users are more likely to convert to a paid subscription.

To demonstrate how important is customer retention, Sagar Bedmutha, CEO, Optinno Mobitech takes this issue to an obsessive level. When a user submits a rating of less than 4 on their app on the Play Store, he tracks the user, fixes the bug, and sends a test app to the customer! He says, this personal touch often makes the user change her rating and helps Optinno maintain good ratings, the primary driver of app installs.

Paras contributed a great insight on how to properly measure churn rates. He says, that measuring the average churn rate doesn’t help uncover the reason for the churn. Instead, you should do a churn cohort analysis, that is, measure the churn rate segmented by customer cohorts. Examples of cohorts could be the number of months a customer used the product before leaving, the specific features churned customers use, etc.

Screen Shot 2016-06-24 at 11.12.51 AM

 

Let’s say you have 100 customers and 5 of them leave in a given month. Your churn rate turns out to be 5%. However, the graph above makes it clear that the churn is much higher for customers who are less than 6 months old after which the churn is much lower. This points to a problem with activation: customers drop off when they are not fully activated.

Revenue

I have over a 1000 customers, but I am not making any money.

A bad problem to have! Businesses should make money from the customers they serve. This, seemingly obvious, fact sometimes slips away when you are working on many things. Measuring how much revenue you’re generating month-on-month (monthly recurring revenue) is indispensable.

Not only should you track revenue growth, you should work towards increasing it in ways other than signing up new customers. A great way to do that for SaaS businesses is upselling. Upselling lets you get more revenue from one customer and help you define and build the whole product. Kaushal Sanghavi, co-founder, BreathingRoom takes this a step further by saying that maintaining a predictable revenue stream is important. He is trying various techniques and says that incentivizing customers to pre-purchase, or buying in bulk for future use, is showing a lot of promise.

Amit seems to have perfected the art of upselling. He says not to wait to build out a feature before upselling to your customers. Sell as soon as you have an idea. Doing so will give you insights on which are the features customers really want and help you prioritize your product roadmap.

Referral

How I wish my customers referred more customers to me!

A working referral system is what differentiates SaaS companies. An amazing referral system, like that of Dropbox’s Refer-a-Friend, is probably the easiest thing that can bring exponential growth.

Building a working, and non-creepy, referral program for your startup is hard. From my experience, most experiments fail. But you can look at some successful referral implementations and learn from them.

Amit tells that monetarily incentivizing salespeople to follow up with their customers and ask them to write reviews on various web directories has worked well for him to acquire more customers. InterviewMocha, an online assessment software, stores email addresses of people that their system collects, follows them on LinkedIn, and when someone changes a job, reaches out to them to install InterviewMocha in their new companies. Though manual and time-taking, this method, I believe, justifies the ROI.

Final Words

There are a lot of metrics that you can track and you probably are. It’s easy to get lost. The video from Google Ventures that we saw makes a great statement: for a company of a type at any stage of the company, there is one metric that is the most important, which you can’t afford to not track.

As a founder, keep an eye on that one metric and just focus on growing that metric. Here’s a PDF of what that metric is.

At the end of the event, I caught hold of Sanket to pick his brain. One of the main questions I had was what does a founder do when he is just starting out and does not have too much data to derive insights from. Customer Interviews. When you’re small, you can afford to pay attention to each customer. In turn, those customers, often happy with the personal touch, will tell you what they want exactly and give you insights that no market research can.

Customer Interviews are tricky: if you don’t conduct them well, you won’t get the insights that you want. Or more dangerously, you will listen to what you want to listen and fail at validating your assumptions. Spend effort in creating good user interviews and refine over time.

I hope that this post gives you an overview of why metrics are important to grow your business, how to define appropriate business metrics, and learn how startups are already doing so.
About the author – Siddharth Saha – a Product Marketer with an interest in full stack marketing. Questions? Criticisms? Insights? Shoot him an email on [email protected]

 

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Meeting Product Startups #Ahmedabad

Over the last few months, I have interacted with a couple dozen awesome product startups in India as a part of product roundtables organized by iSPIRT, a non-profit industry group for software product companies in India. The roundtables that were in Pune, Delhi and Ahmedabad included around 8–10 product founders getting direct feedback about their products from their peers and experienced product founders.

The goal of this roundtable is to help software product companies gain more traction without doing sales. Sales is a great tool, no doubt. But if the product is designed in a way that it can be used without anyone’s hand-holding, then it can be used by a large number of people very quickly. The feedback from these users creates a virtuous cycle of improvements and more users. This has been the central theme of these roundtables.

Most of the products we saw were well executed. A cottage industry of SAAS applications and marketplaces is blooming all over India. Many of them have the potential to become sustainable and profitable businesses. The obsession is ofcourse about building the next unicorn, the billion dollar startup, but we will keep that on hold for now. If we are able to create an ecosystem with hundreds of successful apps, the unicorns will automatically emerge.

As a bootstrapped and sustainable startup, with a product that is more than 8 years old, we are probably only a few steps ahead of these young startups. Sometimes, you can learn a lot more from people who are a few steps ahead of you than those who are way ahead, so I am happy to share my journey with them. In the process, I have learnt a lot from these startups too and having interacted with so many of them. There are some themes that I have seen again and again that seem interesting.

Making good looking CRUD apps is a commodity

The state of web tools in 2016 is such that building a basic app that has CRUD (create, read, update, delete) functionality is very easy. The frameworks and design resources available can make your apps look professional and neat. A couple of devs can churn out such apps with reasonable polish, within a few weeks. Using contractors and themes, you can churn out good looking websites pretty fast too.

What startups need to think about is distribution. How will people know about the app? Why will they sign-up? Why will they tell their friends about it?

Sales is still the default option

Most startups still rely on high touch sales to get users. The good thing about doing sales is that you get first-hand feedback from your users. If you are a good sales person, and if you are persistent, you can convince the user to sign-up for your application too.

The bad thing about this is that you have no idea what a user who has no context about your product thinks about it. You have no idea of easy or hard it is to start using your app instantly. You cannot reach out to users who are not in your network or timezone. And doing sales is expensive and not scalable.

To build applications that get customers without sales, products need:

  1. Great copy on the website that makes it extremely easy for someone to understand what the product is about.
  2. Automated, instant, no-hassle sign-up.
  3. On-boarding workflows.
  4. Online help with videos and documentation.
  5. Excellent product usability and quality.

Often, these projects are as daunting as building the original app, if not more. Often this is what takes time and is largely under-estimated.

Standing out, communicating clearly

Very few of the products we saw were memorable in terms of their marketing and communication. Since we live in the internet era where we are exposed to the best quality of content, it becomes even more important to be memorable and interesting. As the branding and design great Stefan Sagemeister puts it, “Everyone who is honest is interesting”, companies need to be a lot more honest about who they are and why they do what they do.

The best example I can think of is Basecamp. They have set the standard of how companies should communicate about themselves. Companies can use a lot more authenticity and their personal stories a lot more. Using stock images with caucasian models just does not cut it.

Closing

It has been fantastic communicating with these startups and the credit of making this happen goes to Avinash Raghava and iSpirt. Doing grassroots work is always hard and unsexy and not very visible, but is very necessary if you want to create a lasting change. It has been awesome to interact with Niraj and Pravin, two awesome product thinkers with whom I have conducted these sessions.

I wish I had access to such mentoring when I was starting off few years ago, and I am excited about the future sofware products that are coming out of India.

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“Getting traction for Product Startups” — iSPIRT Playbook Round Table | Notes

It was a warm Saturday morning in Ahmedabad and about 15 to 20 people had gathered at CIIE, IIM-A for this closed-door-day-long session where people who’d been-there-done-that were coming in, at their cost, to share (Read ‘Discuss’) their journey and more importantly, engage into a meaningful conversation about problems faced by Product Startups and their solutions; mainly centred around Traction.

The first iSPIRT Playbook Round table of Ahmedabad, this was that happened on 11th June ’16 and was facilitated by That Being Practical Guy (Pravin Jadhav, Head of Growth at Freecharge) and Rushabh Mehta (Founder atERPnext).

Look up the agenda that we set out with here!

And, here’s the list of Startups that attended:

  • CollegeBol: College Reviews; For Students, By Students
  • MeraCRM: CRM for India
  • Jolly Food Fellow: Making the food experience complete!
  • Plexus MD: A network for Health-care Professionals
  • MyTripKarma: Collective happiness of Stress-free Travel
  • SalesHandy: DataAnalytics & Communication tools for Sales folks
  • SalesMate.io: Intelligent CRM for smart sales team
  • Hubilo: Transforming events into happening hubs
  • Gridle: Productivity suite for teams & enterprises

Kicking off the day!

Pravin kicked the day off at 11 AM sharing some amazing insights into what it takes in building a product! Here are some highlights.

Atomic Unit

An Atomic unit of your product is that single functionality that is central to your product. For Twitter, it’s a ‘tweet’, ‘Post’ for Facebook and ‘a Transaction’ for Freecharge.

The benefit of identifying Atomic unit of your product is that it constraints you into thinking about 90% of your functionality (/perceived value) around that Atomic Unit of the product.

As an example, since a Tweet is atomic unit of Twitter, almost 90% of it’s functionality is built around:

  1. Creating a Tweet
  2. Distributing (/Curating) that tweet on Twitter (Retweet) and outside (Emedding)
  3. Favouriting & Replying to that tweet

So on and so forth. You get the point!

Clarity on what you are building..

Companies that have multiple founders, at an early stage, more often than not, have a different vision for the product. This makes it fairly important to have a short, crisp and simple vision at the start of the company itself.

We did a small exercise where we were asked to come up with our 10 word pitch within 1 minute and guess what!

  • Some companies couldn’t come up with something that short & crisp
  • Some founders had different ideas about their product

More importantly, it was a bit awkward, struggling to come up with 10 words to define what we did in 1 minute even though we had been working on it for atleast a year of more.

MVP = More Value Product!

There are few companies around that are creating a different market altogether for themselves. Minimum Viable Products work there.

Most startups are trying to make existing processes and products incrementally innovative. One thing to make sure here, Pravin said, was that our MVP should provide more value than the existing solutions in the market. It could be lean, agile, bad UI in the early stages, but the product should indefinitely provide more value. That’s the only sure-fire way to find meaning in our existence.

In order to keep it minimal, if the value is reduced, you cannot test the assumptions that you’ve set out to prove.

There were a lot more things that were discussed in this session on Product Management by Pravin. You can find the presentation here>>>>>

ERPNext’s thoughts!

Rushabh Mehta then took over to share his demo and metrics at ERPNext. How they built the company out of their own need, why they chose to go open source and compelling ways to sell softwares to Businesses.

Every Software is B2C

Said Rushabh emphasising on the importance of design, User Interface and User Experience of any Software. We also spoke about acceptable metrics in SaaS cloud-based B2B industry and why everybody should talk about churn.

Startup Presentations

All the 9 startups then did a 10 min demo of their sign up and on boarding processes where one-on-one detailed feedback, constructive criticism and important flaws were pointed out.

Here’s a brief presentation of what we learnt from the demo-session.

It’s more indicative of the depth that the session facilitators went into each and every product & entrepreneur that was present.

Towards the evening..

Pravin took to the stage again and spoke about the Growth Framework at Freecharge. Presentation here.

He shared some of the important lessons that he learn doing Growth Hacking at Freecharge. Apart from the 6 mentioned here, he also spoke about how there’s no one formula that fits all and how Growth hacking is more about quickly iterating to figure out what works best for the product. More importantly, the fact that with time, every Growth hack will lose it’s lustre and ability to bring in results.

Vanity Metrics

He shared an amazing slide as you can see below on the Vanity Metrics Vs. Real Metrics that every entrepreneur, startup and investor should understand and imbibe.

One of the very important things that he pointed out was that it was the founders job to make sure that Real metrics are measured in the company and that ROI on any marketing campaign is measured on the Real Metrics.

Do not Bullsh*t the guy in the mirror!

In Conclusion..

It was an amazingly well invested Saturday. Everyone present went home with a conclusive action point for their products.

Thanks

Hoping to have you guys back soon!

Guest Post by Yash Shah, Gridle.in 

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Why did I love this Saturday?

I usually start my weekends with an intense workout regimen. This one was also quite intense but in a very different way. I attended the 71st edition of ‘Playbook Roundtable’ on Saturday the 28th of May, 2016. Incidentally, this was my first time at any Playbook event. From the time I received the invite, I just had one question: how should I prepare to give it my very best? Little did I know that rather I would get the very best from this infectiously energetic tribe of people we call entrepreneurs on earth.

The event began at 11 A.M. with the first sip of cappuccinos and a brief introduction by everyone. We had 12 entrepreneurs (plus their co-founders), who had come to spend this Saturday to learn from one another. Besides passion, everyone was running high on desire to solve meaningful problems by using technology and change our world forever. While few of them had already (successfully) launched a product and were now facing next level growth challenges, many were still somewhere in MVP stage, figuring out product-market fit.

I was amazed to see an eclectic mix of problems these start-ups wanted to solve – beyond many industries and businesses. We had a renowned Fintech company making peer-to-peer banking easier with its latest product, a B2B engagement platform that helps convert one’s clients to promoters, a knowledge management product that makes life easier for customer support staff, a marketplace for those who want custom-tailored clothing minus hassles, an employee engagement platform that makes it easier to share ideas and innovate bottom-up, a mobile push notifications platform which has a unique ‘do it from your notification itself’ feature, an AI-based data cleaning & organizing tool, a personalized curated video platform which helps discover ‘still hard to find videos’ at YouTube, a collaboration platform which seamlessly works over Gmail, an education portal that aims to make multiple forms & cumbersome application process around admissions redundant, an open source ERP for small businesses with an enviable community across the globe, and a managed marketplace for getting super-affordable flash presentations. Phew, that was a lot… But that’s how best Saturdays are made!

The format of the event – with a handful of participants and an intimate setting over a roundtable, literally – allowed for an easy interaction for everyone. After hearing elevator pitches by everyone, we all were kicked to get into the next phase of our day – the demo!

Every entrepreneur had a total of 30 minutes to give a brief demo and then get into question-answer session, which was a unique opportunity for everyone. While a lot of questions satisfied curiosity of the audience, many entrepreneurs actually took on the audience by asking difficult questions that were giving them sleepless nights. “Almost everyone giggled when this young gentleman innocently asked – how do I reduce my cost of sales? And one response came – don’t ever sell to this segment!”

While everyone learned a thing or two, I noticed recurring themes in advice and insights that most of us agreed with. I call those timeless pieces and they are:

  1. Articulate the problem you’re solving really well (for whom, how, and why)
  2. Keep it super simple during MVP stage
  3. Speak to users, don’t assume
  4. Your product is super cool, but maybe for some other segment!
  5. Solve one problem really well for just a handful of users before conquering the world.

We concluded the session with everyone summarising their one or two key takeaways from these awesome 6 hours spent together (damn, nobody mentioned expanded LinkedIn network!) For me, more than anything, it was a humbling experience to be with these ultra-human beings for I’d like to be like them, some Saturday!

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Creating vibrant knowledge networks in emerging entrepreneurial ecosystems

Vibrant entrepreneurial ecosystems such as Silicon Valley, Route 128 are characterized by a free flow of experiential knowledge between expert and novice entrepreneurs. Experiential knowledge can provide much needed advice, mentoring and moral support to novice entrepreneurs, putting them on an accelerated path and fueling the ecosystem. In mature ecosystems like Silicon Valley, this is possible due to the prevalence of dense formal and informal networks. However, does this exchange of experiential knowledge occur spontaneously in emerging entrepreneurial ecosystems such as the software product industry ecosystem in Bangalore? If not, (how) can it be purposefully created?

The study aspires to answer these questions through an in-depth study of iSPIRT’s Playbook Roundtable initiative, which facilitates a conversation between expert entrepreneurs (EE) and novice entrepreneurs (NE) in a structured setting. Analysis reveals three distinct, self-reinforcing processes – Curation, Interaction and Expansion – that come together to create a vibrant and sustainable experiential knowledge network. Each of the ecosystem actors (novice entrepreneurs, expert entrepreneurs and the entrepreneurial connector i.e., iSPIRT) play a unique role in these three processes.

  1. Curation: Curation is a process through which a carefully selected group of novice entrepreneurs are introduced to an expert entrepreneur who has the deep experiential knowledge in a topic that is immediately relevant to the novice entrepreneurs’ business. In this process, the NE is an access-seeker, the EE is a volunteer and the connector (iSPIRT) acts as tertius iungens broker who brings together network members. Tertius iungens literally means the ‘third who joins’ and is a type of brokerage where the broker introduces two disconnected parties and facilitates direct interaction and knowledge transfer between them. The curation process creates a knowledge exchange platform between NE and EE.
  2. Interaction: The next process – Interaction – builds on the platform created by the curation process. Interaction is the process through which experiential knowledge transfer occurs between the EE and NE in the entrepreneurial ecosystem. In this process, the EE shares his/her own insights and creates an atmosphere for peer learning. In other words, the EE acts as a trust catalyst. The NEs on their part actively participate by bringing their business challenges into the discussion. The entrepreneurial connector plays the passive role of an observer. The outcome of this process is peer learning.
  3. Expansion: The peer learning resulting from the interaction between the entrepreneurs sets off the process of expansion. Expansion is a process through which more NE and EE in the ecosystem are brought into the experiential knowledge network. The NE who benefit from the peer learning become evangelists, bringing more entrepreneurs into the network. The EE also bring in new experts into the network but more importantly, they act as consolidators refining the content/format of the roundtable sessions based on feedback. The connector manages the new entrants in the network, actively mediating between them i.e., the connector exhibits a tertius gaudens brokerage orientation where it keeps the new entrants apart until a suitable platform is worked out to bring them together. This results in network growth which feeds back into the curation process by providing a larger pool of NE and EE to curate from.

The three processes are pictorially depicted in the Figure below. Together, they set up a virtuous cycle that strengthens the experiential knowledge network in the ecosystem.

Experiential Network Creation processThe insights from this study provide clear guidance on how to systematically create experiential knowledge networks in emerging ecosystems. It also highlights the important role played by entrepreneurial connectors such as iSPIRT in nurturing these networks.

 

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Key Takeaways from The Design Thinking Roundtable

When it comes to building a product, I had absolutely no experience before Pricebaba. While building Pricebaba.com I did learn many nuances and tricks for growth. I am grateful to the friends and mentors who have always helped us understand users better and how to build a great product. It was a pleasant coincidence last week when I got two opportunities to understand design better — first, I attended the Design Quicky Mumbai event hosted by 500 Startups and later in the week, iSpirt organised a roundtable session on Design Thinking. Deepa Bachu who is currently running a design consultancy firm Pensaar shared her 15+ years of experience working in the industry with brands like Intuit. Here are some key takeaways from that session.

Tracking Customer/Consumer Benefit Metric

According to Deepa, the key metric to chase / track is customer benefit metric (CBM). It’s simply how do you make your customer’s life easy. For Google, customer benefit metric would how be quickly it’s able serve the result and how relevant they are with user’s search query. This makes so much sense. If you look closely, all the updates Google has made are around that — be it with the Panda or Penguin update, to give the best result in minimal time.

Once you start thinking of serving your current users better, if they are truly benefitted with your product, they are going to use your product again. This leads to increase in MAU, decrease in bounce rate. All of your other metrics will fall in place automatically. Take marketplaces for example, they are serving two kind of customers — Merchants and Shoppers. Their key to success would be to make sure Merchants sell goods regularly and efficiently. They can enable this by reducing returns, empowering logistics and customer support. Whereas on the other hand making sure users get what they want at the right price and their journey to checkout is as smooth as it can be. For us, at Pricebaba it’s quite similar to marketplaces. Our customer benefit metric would be to make sure the returns on the partner’s platform are under control (thereby making sure conversions are higher). On other hand for users it would be how effectively we help them choose the best product for their needs. On Pricebaba a user can be overwhelmed by 175 products from the same manufacturer (eg: see Samsung Phones), our advanced filters is a way to help our users narrow their purchase decision faster. However for us bigger boost comes from helping the user get the top 4 or 8 products accurately in the first fold.

Design is not art, it’s not what you see

Deepa started her talk with how India is still not there when it comes to design thinking or product innovation. We do not think Design while building our Products, she suggested. On that remark, I jumped off my seat and said “this is not true”. People are talking about design. I sincerely believed this is now a key role in the product making, which was not the case 4 years ago. But, by the end of the session I realised she was right. Amongst many missing ingredients in our startup ecosystem, “design thinking” is one of them. We admire good looking design. We love clean, plain and simple. We look at design only by its visual perspective (is it appealing to the eye?). But, we forget to see the functionality or usability. That is arguably more important aspect of design.

IMG_20160409_165323Throughout the session we had one white board on which we wrote what design means to us. We wrote apps we love and products which we consider as good examples and inspiration of good design. The participants initially thought design had a lot to do with ‘Art’, ‘Painting’ or ‘Creativity’. As we went further, our understanding evolved and ‘Emotion’, ‘Customer Journey’, ‘Elegance’ were the new keywords on the whiteboard.

Going further it was ‘Customer understanding’, ‘Outcome’ and ‘Need’. Eventually, it all boiled down to one thing — ‘Metric’. If your numbers (in our case, Consumer Benefit Metric) are not increasing, all your Dev, BD or Marketing efforts don’t matter.

IMG_20160428_105735There is this simple pyramid which is quite self-explanatory for product making. Bottom to Top it reads,

  1. Benefit I care about: What is your service about? What is that one benefit you are serving your users with. The value proposition of your product. Nail that first. Achieve excellence. For my product Pricebaba, it is how a user get the best deal of a gadget suitable to their needs.
  2. Ease: How easily your users are able to get the benefit we talked about. How are you making things simpler for them. UX has a major part to play in phase. For us, it would be how easy are the choices we offer our users to narrow down on the right gadget.
  3. Positive Emotion: This is the part where actual UI comes into play. Users Delight will be the positive outcome of great UX and UI.

To sum it up, focus on what your business has to offer. What is that one benefit you are giving your users for which they will keep coming back to you. Create a good UX to make their journey to avail that benefit easier with great UI. There, you’ve got your “Ahaa!” moment from your users.

Users don’t know what they want

While building a product we often tend to build it the way we perceive things. We build a feature / flow in a certain way we think is the best. So many times we assume we know what users want. Taking some decisions from the gut is good. But building an entire product without interacting with actual users is not. You need to validate that gut-feel by talking to users. Observe them as use your product. We did a exercise where entire company went out on streets and interacted with users. We called it ‘Project Dragon Scroll’. We gave our potential users a simple task to search best price of a mobile phone. We were surprised to see so many of our myths and biases were getting resolved. Deepa shared tons of examples with us, making us realise that it is too difficult for a product to evolve if you don’t include your users in the process. For that you need to go and talk to them. Even understand what they are not saying. Ask questions. There are tons of tools for that. Just asking them question via surveys, making sure your Net Promoter Score is high might not help. Those online activities are needed, along with offline activities too. Also, you need to see the data on interaction, deep dive into metrics, logs, analytics to get a 360 degree view of things. Taking decisions based on only one of the above factors mentioned won’t help. You need to get out there on the streets, deep dive into analytics (GA, Clevertap, Mixpanel) and use online tools to see how users interact (A/B testing, Heatmaps and Surveys).

I am thankful to iSpirit for organising such wonderful event. I learnt a lot of things from this event. Thanks to Deepa who shared her experience and tools with us. It gave a new perspective to look at Design. If you want know anything more about this, feel free to catch me on Twitter @GanatraT

Tirthesh is co-founder of Pricebaba, one of the biggest product research and price comparison platform in India. A developer at heart, Tirthesh had the pleasure of being part of a journey since 2011, where a two-person team grew into a strong workforce in a matter of three years.

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Design is about Love and Empathy towards the customer

The Design RoundTable last week lead by Deepa Bachu and Rajan, was not what I expected. By and large, design to me was either a part of an application (UI / UX) or a concept which i did’nt know much about. But, when we went in depth with Deepa, I realized that design is an integral part of who we are and what we see around us.

Through detailed discussions, we were made to think about what design is and what design meant to individuals, communities, startups as well as our customers.  The first task started with a a simple question, what is design? One can come up with several ways to describe it and the audience described it as – Design is something that solves a need, brings convenience, humanizes products (i.e. bringing human touch to products), explores empathy, understands customers and is about continuous learning.  What stood out for me was that design is all about Love and passion in order to bring out the best products/services to address a customer need, in a manner that creates value with ease and convenience. This would enable the users to be at ease and fall in love with what it represents. If a design is thought through with love, compassion and empathy, the user’s journey and experience improves.

The first task in the workshop was to work in a group and explore design features (good vs. bad designs) both within and outside a room. This enabled us to look at things from a design lens. The group came up with very interesting insights of how people dry their clothes in modern buildings differently from those who dry clothes on their balconies or how badly the electric poles in India are designed or how cobbled streets are an interesting design element than traditional tar roads.

IMG_20160409_145508This experience made us understand and be aware of the small and subtle difference between good and bad design. I was able to realize and conclude how crucial it is to be empathetic to customer needs and when, where and how they experience a product / service. Hence, it is essential to understand things from the customer’s perspective which eventually helps us improve the utility of the product and services that one offers.

This applies to all our products and services. We are all trying to build a product around enhancing the customer experience and thinking through each aspect from the users point of view is crucial. How does a user discover your product or hears about you? How do you ease the process of sign ups? How important is the design of your website or application? What does the product do for the customers and what are the benefits of it? These are just few examples of how we can think from the customer’s point of view. By allowing ourselves to think from the customer’s perspective, we are enabling us to re-imagine the product and user’s journey through various channels to engage and enrich with the user.

Another interesting insight was around humanizing products as consumers are humans. Adding a human touch to design can make an experience great. For example, addressing consumers in emails by their names or to have a real person to sign off at the end of an email.

There were many other aspects we covered in our conversations. We discussed the importance of elegance in design and a belief that “UI without UX is Superficial”. We also discussed the importance of creating that WOW factor or customer delight in making customers your brand ambassadors. For creating customer delight, one has to first answer what benefits a customer will get and how one can create customer experience through positive emotion. The combination of these simple three stage processes will help us to think through the various customer delight experiences that we can design.

Another tool that Deepa spoke about and is quite helpful is an Empathy Map. It is a 2×2 matrix to understand the journey of a customer. Four questions need to be asked.

1) What do customers say about your product,

2) What do they do while experiencing your product,

3) What are they thinking while they use the service and

4) How do they feel over all.

This is an experiment which should be done periodically with various sets of customers which can make each member of the team sensitive to the customer journey. An interesting point learnt is that every time we have an insight on one of the four touch points — Say, do, think and feel , we could use this as a starting point. For example, while booking a flight online, how is the customer journey when they first login, are they looking for the cheapest price if so what do they say about that experience, what do they think while looking for the cheapest price (will they get the cheapest price on this website and will the price change later) and what do they feel (lets pay it by it before it changes).

By following some basic templates we can rethink our products and imagine the customer journey in a manner that we could live it on a daily basis. The love / empathy towards our customers, which results in benefits for the customer and eventually helps in designing the WOW (delight) moments are what makes a lasting impact and creates a bond between the brand and the customers.

Hence, design is one of the main pillars of building a successful product and I hope we all can make design an integral part of the organization. Our thinking should bring compassion and love to customers through Design.

Thank you Deepa and Rajan for wonderful session on Design thinking

Deepa is a design and product leader who most recently worked at Intuit as the Director of Design and Product Management. Deepa’s passion is to transform customers’ lives by creating products that solve their biggest unmet needs.

Deepa has 20 years of experience in the Tech industry where she has played a variety of roles across Product Development, Experience Design, Product Management and General Manager. Deepa’s experience has given her expertise in creating and taking global products for both emerging markets as well as developed markets across multiple domains.
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What is Design (Iteration 1)

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What is Design (Iteration 2)

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What is Design (Iteration 3)

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What is design iteration4 ?

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Team-Designthinking

Guest post by Gaurang Sanghvi

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How to scale your startup successfully and make it Virat !

An iSPIRT Playbook round table

Virat-KohliSo India won against Pakistan in the world cup match….again. I’m sure none of you would have missed it for the world. As you watched every ball with your heart in the mouth, you would have noticed some players performed while others faltered. But in the midst of it, one man stood tall. Virat Kohli, once again proved that he can perform in the toughest of conditions against the best of teams. So what makes Virat Kohli click where other great batsmen stumble ?

Similarly, you see some startups stagnate while others scale consistently. Is there any method to this madness ?

Successful startups who scale are ones who continuously try to improvise, holding on to their strenghts while improving their weaknesses. They build a process driven organisation fixing bottlenecks as they grow. Virat Kohli also worked hard to improve as a batsman, mastering his weakness against the short ball, and learning new strokes even though he was successful without them. Every player starts his international journey with a few apparent flaws. While some work diligently to remove them, others work around them. Then there are those who become victims of their own flaws before they can eliminate them. Similarly, startups who take early success for granted, fall and ultimately perish.

So how do I successfully scale my startup ? When do I know that I’m ready to scale ? Which countries and verticals do I expand?

Should I grow organically or inorganically ? Is enterprise selling important ? How do I build a successful sales team with predictable pipeline ? How does channel sales work? All this many such pertinent questions must be bothering you when think of scaling your startup !

This is why a bunch of successful startup founders met to discuss and understand the process to scale. The 63rd iSPIRT round table on “Scaling Revenues” was led by Aneesh Reddy, CEO Capillary technologies on 13th March, 2106 at Knowlarity, Cybercity office. Ambarish Gupta CEO Knowlarity was the host and also a participant. I was fortunate to participate as an iSPIRT volunteer and met some of the great startup founders there.

RT-Atendees

The list of attendees are as mentioned below:

  1. Ajay Chauhan @salezshark.com
  2. Anand Krushnan @exclusife.com
  3. Aniruddh Jain @salespatron.com,
  4. Bishal Lachhiramka @drishti-soft.com,
  5. Dinesh Gupta @busy.in,
  6. Sachin Bhatia @drishti-soft.com,
  7. Sakshi @posist.com,
  8. Vishal Bansal  @zenatix.com,
  9. Tushar Bhatia @empxtrack.com,
  10. Kushal @fareye.in,
  11. Subrat Kar @vidooly.com,
  12. Samit Arora @salespanda.com,
  13. Rajat Harlalka @iSPIRT volunteer
  14. Ketan @Mettl

RT leader Aneesh Reddy@capillerytech.com

Host &  Ambarish Gupta @knowlarity.com

Lets look at some of the key points discussed in the round table on “Scaling Revenues”

One of the first fundamentals you want to know is that when do you know you are ready to scale ?

Every startup goes through establishing its niche or the product market fit, wherein you get your first 100 paying customers who are not your family and friends. These are customers who know that you are addressing their painpoint and yours is not just a good to have solution. It is very important to ensure you get it right else all your scaling efforts will be futile. Like ‘Steven Covey ‘ in his book 7 habits of highly effective people says “ If the ladder is not leaning against the right wall, every step we take just gets us to the wrong place – faster.”

Now that you are ready to run, faster than the fastest, which market do you expand. India being an easy access, most SaaS founders start with India unless they have a cofounder in US or some associates. So is India the right market to start with ? There are multiple schools of thoughts here. Like Ambarish from knowlarity mentined that they built the company with clients from India and scaled it to a level where their core sales team and processes were established. The initial days of scaling are tough so if you have good acess to clients it can be really useful. Knowlarity then expanded to similar geo’s like Phillipines, Singapore and Malaysia which are english speaking and have similar business culture like India and other ASEAN countries.

Others like Aneesh from Capillary, Tushar Bhatia from Empxtrack and Sachin Bhatia from InsideSalesBox, prefered pitching to US clients first as they see a higher demand and buying maturity in clients there. One of the common observation the group had was that in US you will see only genuine prospects engaging with you so while the pipeline might take time to build, the conversions are better if the value proposition is right. Indian and ASEAN clients are more open to discussion with longer cycle times and lower conversions. Beyond the ASEAN and US, Sachin Bhatia also shared his experience of selling to African clients. He having travelled to 34 countries is quite qualified to write a book on this subject…May be “Selling SaaS to Nomads” or something around it J

Another interesting aspect of selling to US clients came up from Abhinav from Innovacer (watch out, innovacer might be the next mu-sigma in the making ! ) who have mastered the art of leveraging US based events to build a pipeline. Abhinav shared how they build an US events calendar and take up nominal booths there to meet larger base of prospects there. Its well planned and meetings are lined up with delegates much in advance. Event particpation helps in spending time with prospects away from office workload wherein the clients are also in a frame of mind to evaluate options. But you need to ensure, enough homework is done and meetings are planned in advance. Sachin Bhatia also shared similar experiences and vouched for importance of event participation to reach US clients.

The next question was the importance of enterprise sales and larger deals. How do you increase your average deal size and sell higher to enterprise clients?

Lets admit it. Everyone likes enterprise clients. They have the apetite to invest big and also act as a testimony for your product to scale. Aneesh shared his experience around selling to enterprise customers. The deal ticket size can be increased in multiple ways . First – you scale horizontally ie you can upsell and cross-sell. Which means you need to build multiple product modules which can be sold to same clients over the years increasing the account revenue. Next you can scale vertically by intially selling to a pilot base and then expanding into the account. For eg you can sell it to 10 retail outlets and then expand to 200 later or sell to one office and then expand to other locations. Enterprise selling needs you to have the scale or options built into your value proposition. Build new complimentary offerings every year.

RT-attendees2Channel Management was the another crucial aspect discussed. Dinesh Gupta of Busy software(www.busy.in) led the discussion. Busy competes with Tally as a market leader. They built and scaled a product in a market where tally is a houseold name amongst Chartered accountants their key evangelists. Couple of important points amonst many pointed by Dinesh are here. Firstly, Identify partners for whom your product and revenue are substantial part of their business. In other workds they need to have their skin in the game. Otherwise you’ll end up having a lot of channel partners but no sales. The other important aspect of channel sales is to educate the partners. Education helps twofold. It creates a buy-in amonst the partners who can then sell better. Plus it helps them put the value proposition better in front of their customers. The group also discussed channel margins and how much to pay. While it was a long discussion, the crux of it was that you should pay partners well , may be more in initial days to get a foothold in new markets. It has to be enough of a motivation for them to sell. Subrat Krar from Vidooly also shared his experience on how they are leveraging marketing agencies as channel partners to expand their video analytics software.

The team also spent some time discussion the sales team structure, hiring VP of Sales and how to build a scalable predicable pipeline. From what I gathered, it seemed that setting up an inside sales team is no brainer. It’s a must have. How to ensure it delivers is a larger discussion for which you might want to talk to an expert amounst people above who have scaled or to Sachin bhatia who has a product in the same space. But to build a sustainable pipelines, you need to also put the right metrics in place for the sales team. Eg the inside sales team should be measured on fixed demos, the sales team on closures. Few participants discussed sales quotas for sellers ranging from 1:4 to 1:10 of the CTC. Tushar from Empxtrax and Ketan from Mettl also shared their insights and metrics on hiring costs and metrics.

Depending on the product and brand pull it may vary. Ultimately it should not be so much of stretch for the seller that he does not even feel like trying nor it should be so easy for him that he does not get the aldrelin rush while closing a deal. You need to find your sweet balance.

RT-atendees3Premium/Free Trial vs no pricing mentioned on website was another aspect discussed. Different people have different models but largely the group agreed that most are moving away from freemium and those targeting enterprise do not prefer to display the price on the site at all as it varies by scale and need of clients.

Aneesh also shared his views and experience on attaining inorganic growth. Capillery having recently acquired MartJack, an esablished online ecommerce software company was best placed to answer it. Aneesh mentioned that any new startup takes 1.5 to 2 years to establish their product market fit and then to scale to a level where they are ready for enterprise sales. If you want to continuously increase your client revenue share and grow the market, inorganic acquisitions help you in cutting the time to the market. This then helps you focus on other aspects of scale.

Overall another wonderful round table by iSPIRT. Need to thank our man Avinash for arranging the round table. He is like Tendulkar, silently but strongly delivers what his fans wantJ. Special thanks to Ambarish for hosting us at Knowlarity and for his insights into scaling startups. Finally, many thanks to Aneesh and Anant from Capillery for leading such an interative round table and sharing deep insights from their business.

Okay, enough of insights and tips. Lets get down to basics. What do you think is India’s chance to win this T20 world cup ? Fine, we lost to New Zealand in Nagpur but the same thing happened in 2011 (when India lost to South Africa in Nagpur) and we went on to the win the World Cup. We are now on a high after beating Pakistan. As Pakistani team would say “Goli se daar nahi lagta sahab, Kohli se lagta hain (Pakistan don’t fear bullets, they fear Kohli)” (courtesy Sehwag commentary)

But you guys have nothing to fear. Take the leap of faith as you step forward to take your startups to new heights.

Take your wings and set on to fly

You might stumble but that’s only when you try

Don’t just give up if you face a few bump

Coz harder the conflict the more glorious is the triump

Happy Scaling guys ! And India will surely Win the T20 World Cup !

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

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

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

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

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

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

Few quick take aways:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Guest post by Satish Kamat, Jambuster Technologies

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How culture is the fevicol of a startup

I recently attended a Playbook Roundtable organised by iSPIRT on “Culture Design” discussing how to preserve culture of a company that it started with? Reading so much strife because of culture conflict globally or in India or how MNCs should imbibe the “Transparency Culture” & “Accountability Culture” has made me wonder Isn’t “Culture” a confusing word?

Each time we use the word culture we incline toward one or another of its aspects: toward the “culture” that’s imbibed through osmosis or the “culture” that’s learned at museums, toward the “culture” that makes you a better a person or the “culture” that just inducts you into a group.

As per Wikipedia, Culture is, in the words of E.B. Tylor, “that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.”

Tirthankar Dash articulated culture that can be depicted in a pyramid. At the base is the Philosophy – what are the belief systems underlying the culture.

On that base is built the Mythology or folklore. This would mean Stories – what are the stories that make your philosophy real and personal. And at the top would be Rituals – what can you do that will bring it all alive.

One truth we have seen over the centuries – whether it’s a team of 3 or a country or a civilization, culture exists in every community. So the choice is between letting an unconscious culture crop up like weeds or consciously creating a culture we truly love.

A lot has been said about “Corporate Culture” of late especially about “Startup Culture”. One can have big vision and goals, smart people, super pay, great products and more, but the undercurrents of culture many a times determine whether the company crosses the chasm from good to great.

So, the key question is what kind of culture we want to propagate, as a company, community and the country? How do we provide an environment where one can respond (said and unsaid) to people and situations to bring out the best in each of us?

How does one ensure that we preserve and pass the culture of company from the 10th employee to the 100th to the 1000th?

While each startup or a big company should identify its own values, rituals, celebration and mythologies, there are three critical aspects that each culture should have for it to sustain, have its employees be “in the zone”, an experience when your concentration and focus peak and you are able to scale uncharted territory.

Trust: Every culture should command and demand trust among its community. If there is trust deficit, it leads to fear which creates processes and policies. Leaders of many organizations are afraid of the 2 per cent employees who may break their trust. The reality is, whether you create restrictive processes or not only 2 per cent of the people break your trust.

You end up penalizing the 98 per cent of the employees with restrictive policies (attendance tracking, detailed travel policies, time-tracking etc.) Any driven employee cannot ever be in the zone if they feel restricted, monitored and trapped.

Progress: Growth, movement , opportunities whatever you call it progress is like oxygen for any company or culture. Driven people constantly look for avenues where they can satiate their hunger for learning. Hence the culture should foster open communication and collaboration coupled with professional & personal growth.

The Indian culture, often labelled as an amalgamation of several sub-cultures is a prime example of this progress over several millennia.

Purpose: As a leader, if you had to choose to do only one thing to get your team to be in the zone, it should be to continuously, shamelessly and loudly remind them of the larger purpose of the team and the organisation they are a part of.

Remember, there are a bunch of operational tasks and distractions vying for your team’s time and attention. It is your job to take out time and remind them of the larger purpose of the organisation. It is your job to get them back on track when they are distracted and to give them the feedback and support they require.

At InMobi we believe in nurturing a culture that enables people to become more of who they truly are. YaWiO which is the foundation of our culture is like the wind – it’s the presence that can’t be directly seen, but it can be felt very strongly. It is our glue that holds the organization together and can guide how to behave & act!

Guest Post by Ankit Rawal, Proud Veteran InMobian

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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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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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Design thinking Playbook Roundtable by Deepa Bachu

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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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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