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#PNgrowth – The first of the next 100 companies are here!

So here we are with the next batch of 25 companies who have made it to the #PNgrowth program. We had actually said that we would be announcing the last 100 in one go, but we’ve decided not to, so to give each of these amazing companies their place in the sun.

We will be announcing the rest of the companies in this week, keeping only the last 25 up our sleeves, which will arrive in the next week.

So here we go, and congratulations to those who’ve made it!

25-founders-collage-5th batch

Amarnath Shankar of TastySpots
Amit Mishra of InterviewMocha
Raghavendra Singh of Intellileap Solutions
Sanjoe Jose of TalView
Saurabh Arora of Airwoot
Sesadri Krishnan of Trip 38
Ishwar Sundararaman of Furdo
Srivatsan Laxman of Scribler
Manoj Agarwal of Giftxoxo
Krishnan RV of Waybeo
Johny Jose of Playlyfe
Bhaskar Krishnamoorthy of Cavintek
Utkarsh Apoorva of Clusto
Amit Mahensaria of Impartus
Sumit Goswami of Xploree
Chandrasekhar O of ProductDossier
Salil Agarwal of Queryhome
Sachin Bhatia of InsideSalesBox
Kartik Mohla of Masteroapp
Remesh Kurupath of Netvarth
Rajiv Mukherjee of IncubateHub
Arvind Krishnan of Swymit
Rangarajan S of Immilife
Gopal Kulkarni of Resumefox
Anand Prabhu of Infilect

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The next 25 is here making it 100 successful entrepreneurs – #PNgrowth. Application closes by Nov 15th 2015

The next 25 #PNgrowth people are here, and this time, even we are excited by the sheer breadth of the domains that are coming in. The three-day residential launch camp at the Infosys camp in Mysore is what we are looking forward to, most, though. There’s still a slim chance that you might get in, though; you can apply here.

The last 100 will be announced as one list, and will complete the 200 for the program. So we implore you to apply now, and not come back to us later. 🙂
So here you go, the next 25 participants of #PNgrowth
25-founders-collage-4th-batch (1)

Arvind Pani from Reverie Inc

Ashish Belagali from Kommbox

Harshal Katre from Profitbooks

Prakash Vishwanathan from Gradatim

Praveen Singh from 99tests

Sreepriya Koppula from PixterPro

Aseem Marwaha from eLitmus 

Kaushik Panchal from Travelcarma

Vaibhav Kakkar from Rankwatch

Ashish Tulsian from Posist

Manu Madhusudanan from Cooey

Naman Sarawagi from FindYogi

Rajesh Bernard from SmarterBiz

Shankar Krishnamoorthy from Synergita

Shashi Bhushan from HealthMacro

Mohammaed Ali from Primaseller

Vinod Muthukrishnan from Cloudcherry

Ajay Chauhan from SalezShark

Sanmaya Kumar Dhal from Slickaccount

Dixit Chopra from Truggo

Mahavir Chand from XLapp

Vinod Jeyachandran from AnuntaTech

Navneet Sharma from Snapshoppr

Hemant Sahal from CollPoll

Rohit Shroff from Holidify

Congratulations, and wait for the last list!

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Month on Month, Quarter after Quarter, there is only 1 thing a startup needs to do.

“Grow at a rapid pace!”

Meet Shashank ND, Founder and CEO of Practo.

Practo is a hyper-growth healthcare startup which has managed to raise $125M in three round so far, from the likes of Tencent, Sequoia, Google Capital, Altimeter Capital, Matrix Partners etc.

Below is short video where Shashank shares his 7 year experience of running Practo in a nutshell.

Shashank speaks about the challenges he faced while building a company for the local ecosystem and why rapid growth is essential for every startup.

Shashank also speaks about why an initiative like #PNgrowth is import for an eco-system like India and how it can play a pivotal role in facilitating growth for startups within India.

Watch the 3m43s video below.

#PNgrowth is an iSPIRT initiative in collaboration with Stanford’s Graduate School of Business and Duke’s Fuqua School of Business for growth stage entrepreneurs.

To know more about the program

To know more about the agenda

For people who still haven’t applied, we have ONE last batch to select. Apply here.

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The final agenda for #Pngrowth is here

In the fourth #PNGrowth hangout last week, the usual suspects got together but this time with something a lot more concrete to hand out. With #PNgrowth generating the buzz that it has, we have been inundated with questions about what exactly the three days of the residential workshop will entail. As we have been vocal about, the residential workshop will kickstart the yearlong program that is #PNGrowth. To give everyone deeper insights into the agenda, we brought Sharique Hasan, Rem Koning, Sharad Sharma and Pallav Nadhani together to speak about the program we have put together for the three days.

You can watch the whole hangout here, which will give you a deeper insight into what we are thinking about and hoping to achieve, but this blog will give you a rather simple breakdown of the agenda itself.

With the major objective for #PNgrowth being category leadership, we have calibrated the three days to be workshops; there will be no gyaan sessions and every entrepreneur will be thinking and working through problems they face.

Day 1 – Rethink

The first day will be spent on entrepreneurs getting their bearings right and reflecting on where they stand with respect to where they want to be. The day will focus on getting the best tools and frameworks they need in place, to think about where their company is heading, and to understand their company represents versus what the category leader in their segment will look like.

Day 2 – Redesign

The second day will focus only on one thing – getting a gameplan in place with the aim of getting to category leadership in their spaces. This day will contain what the entrepreneurs will need to carry back most. The day will cover all the important things entrepreneurs need to concentrate on – culture, team, product/business, authentic leadership and so on. With sessions designed for entrepreneurs to work this out, this is going to be an absolute cracker of a day.

Day 3 – Implementation

On day three, the gameplan will be put to the test. The question of how to implement the plan, what challenges will rise, and in what sequence to implement the learnings will be discussed. The important metrics to focus on will be finalised and most importantly, where to start, how to start and how much time and energy to focus on and where will all be cleared up.

After the workshop, when all the entrepreneurs have gone back to work on what they learnt, comes the most important part. Now when they start, they’ll come up against the real world, and will need help adjusting their plans with things that will come up. This is when the real value of  will come in. With a direct line to mentors who have done this before, they will know who to call and when to call for help. This kind of opportunity is unprecedented in the Indian ecosystem and was formulated with the goal of an Indian product nation in mind – a community of product people who have a network to help each other and grow together.

For people who still haven’t applied, we have ONE last batch to select. You should apply.

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Five reasons to attend #PNgrowth

Ever since we opened registrations for #PNgrowth, we wanted to do a list of this sort, to make it easier for those who wish to  attend to have a look and decide whether this program is helpful for them. But somehow we never got around to it until now.

#PNgrowth is now red hot, and we have three applicants for every place on the program. We still want to tell everyone about it because only a small fraction of the applicants will qualify for this program.

So here you go, five reasons you should be at #PNgrowth –

1. Handcrafted for the Indian Startup eco-system by iSPIRT and B-school professors from Stanford and Duke.

For the first time in the Indian ecosystem, evangelists and academia come together to design a program that will give maximum returns to the participants. With iSPIRT’s experience conducting Bootcamps and Roundtables across the country, and the experience of faculty from the Stanford and Duke school of businesses, the program has basically been handcrafted for Indian startups. You’ll know when you’re there.

2. Three day residential kick off event

Infosys Mysore has been kind enough to volunteer the space and infrastructure necessary for a program of this scale. The three day residential kickoff camp will take place at one of Indian tech hubs. This is followed by a year-long engagement with each Startup to help them achieve their goals.

3. Focus on category leadership

#PNgrowth is designed for the company which has already done the hard yards and  has potential to ascend from profitability to category leadership. The program will help organisations get past this transition without losing sight of the goal, which is to become category leaders in their space.

4. The best mentors in the country

#PNgrowth has the advantage of being able to bring into the program some of the best mentors in the country. With iSPIRT’s(Mavens) network of India’s most successful entrepreneurs who have been there, done that, some of these mentors at #PNgrowth is like a who’s who of the Indian startup scene. 

5. Months of follow-up through remote hangouts and peer-based learning

And lastly, the program is a long term investment. The aim, which is category leadership, will be achieved through several months of follow-on remote coaching, mentorship and peer-based learning. You will have direct contact with mentors and will be able to ask them questions as and when they arise for you. This isn’t just rare for the ecosystem. It’s unprecedented.

Now that we’ve said our bit, do come over, look at our entire program, and decide. We would love to see you in Mysore! apply now, before you miss the Mysore bus.

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Announcing the first 25 successful companies attending #PNgrowth

Right. So the first batch of #PNgrowth companies is here. It has been a slog for us going through all the applications we received, and we have made sure that we are extremely fair in the way we are allocating places for our already over-subscribed program.

If you don’t know what this is about, you go here, and if you want to apply, here, better late than never.
                                25-founders-collage-1
We are going to announce the companies finalised as we go along, so they can start preparing for what will possible be a non-stop knowledge ride.
So here we go, the first 25 companies for the inaugural #PNgrowth program
    1. Ahimanikya Satapathy of Docengage,  Healthcare CRM
    2. Akshat Choudary of Blogvault, WordPress backup service
    3. Anand Krushnan of Exclusife, offers app
    4. Ankit Oberoi of Adpushup, online ad optimizer
    5. Arastu Zakia of Collegebol, education/students forum
    6. Ashwin Ramaswamy of ContractIQ,B2B Outsourcing Marketplace
    7. Dhruv Gupta of Valuehire.com, recruitment software
    8. Elvis D’Souza of Sensara, TV search app
    9. Jaineel Agarwal of Planet Superheroes, Superhero merchandise store
    10. Jofin Joseph of Hello Vibe, contact management app
    11. Koushik Shee of Effia Soft , cloud ERP
    12. Krish Subramanian of Chargebee , billing software
    13. Kumar Abhishek of ToneTag, payment app
    14. Laxman Papineni of AppVirality, growth toolkit
    15. Mrigank Tripathi of Qustn, training and assessment company
    16. Nityananda Rao of Actouch Technologies Pvt Ltd, accounting software
    17. Pritesh Vora of Uninstall.io, app analytics provider
    18. Priyanka Agarwal of Wishberry, crowdfunding platform
    19. Rahul Bhalla of Zenatix, energy hardware company
    20. Rohit Bagaria of Budli.in, used gadgets marketplace
    21. Sanjay Sahani of Optimizory, management tool
    22. Shameel Abdulla of Jiffstore, grocery supermarket
    23. Sonal Goyal of NubeTechnologies,data analytics company
    24. Srikanth Adiga of Open Specimen, biobanking informatics
    25. Vijay Mane of Albumizer , album designer
Congratulations to the startups who made it. They will receive further information in their mailboxes.
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The #PNgrowth #OneThing Series – Mohit Gundecha, CEO of Jombay

When we as a ecosystem try to help our entrepreneurs, we make the mistake of always focussing on the mistakes others have made, and trying to steer away from those. This is evident even from the stuff we write on blogs and platforms with the specific purpose of helping others.

Maybe it’s time we step away from that.

In this new blog Series from #PNgrowth, we are going the other way. We are going to publish a series of posts on what we call the #OneThing. Our best product people will be asked a simple question – what is the one thing that worked best for you when you were trying to scale your company? These answers will be insightful partly as success stories and partly as guides for other startups looking to scale. In the second blog of the series, we talk to Mohit Gundecha, CEO of Pune based Jombay, the hiring portal that uses psychometry science and analytics to find the perfect fit for a job profile.

Mohit Gundecha, CEO of Jombay

Jombay is one of the cooler startups in recent years. With psychometry and associated analytics growing more powerful and insightful in the last few years, there is tremendous interest in these areas. Jombay has ridden high on this with a super-cool tool that is already working for organisations like Citibank, Nestle and Reliance Capital.

When I talked to Mohit, he was in the middle of several other calls, but graciously talked to me, taking his time to explain what he thought was the one thing that worked for them. This turned out to be quite similar to Subrat’s answer in Part 1 of this series. 

The difference, though, was in the phrasing, and in effect, critical.

Mohit’s answer wasn’t content marketing or something as specific as a particular blog. It was ‘thought leadership’.

If we go to Mohit’s LinkedIn profile, we have a series of posts that span an arc around his company and his interests – mainly around HR and employee culture and hiring and retaining employees and so on. Sharing his thoughts about relevant topics and what he is most passionate about has assured him a devoted following, some of them pretty important influencers themselves. People from his now 30-people strong team write too, and this deliberate attempt has paid off handsomely. Mohit’s articles have been picked up by newspapers and magazines, assuring constant media attention and several interviews, all of which has helped the company gain customers by way of recognition and of course, to attract major talent.

“It is LinkedIn which has been the most important channel for us,” says Mohit. This is understandable in hindsight, as Jombay is first and foremost a hiring portal, but for Mohit and his team to get this insight and execute on it is truly admirable.

There are several kinds of content/inbound marketing, and identifying which kind and what channel works best for your organisation is as important as creating great content.

About #PNgrowth

PNgrowth is a year long mentorship program with some of India’s top product people and founders, with learning sessions and curriculum prepared in collaboration with the universities of Stanford, Harvard and Duke. Content marketing will be one of the major areas being covered, as will all the other points our #PNgrowth series will highlight. 

Nominate your Startup here (Apply before 15th November)

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The importance of having a defined mission for your start-up

If you are a small team, starting out to solve a problem, having a mission is hardly a concern. What must concern you at that stage is getting to the product market fit and customer validation.

But even after building a successful product and scaling the business to a sizeable extent, many startups hardly articulate a compelling mission for themselves. With early signs of success, founders directly jump onto growing the team, building feature-sets and scale the organisation. Not very far in the journey, many startups end up facing employee attrition, lack of passion in teams and alignment issues in their organisation.

Founders of growth stage startups often mention retaining talent and alignment as a big area of concern; and end up applying many tactics to resolve talent-related problems. However, the cause of these issues is much more fundamental and intrinsic to the organisation.

Before your push the scale button and look outside to attract other people to your startup, the impact of your mission can’t be overstated. It is very important for the founding team to sit together and extract and articulate the mission for their business. A meaningful mission that matters to the world would instantly change how you look at yourselves and the business. The same regular job would inspire a lot more passion and a sense of pride in doing it. A well-articulated mission makes it easier for prospective team members, customers and investors to relate to your business, decisions and get similarly inspired.

Every problem worth solving is hiding within it a deeper challenge and glorious mission, which needs to be extracted with patience. For instance, the mission for a food delivery startup could be “Savings humans worldwide from the discontent out of hunger”.

Beyond inspiration, a mission opens up the avenues of long-term thinking and frames the canvas of opportunities, ideas and themes of innovations for the business to pursue.

Guest Post by Lalit Mangal, Co-Founder & CPO, CommonFloor

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The difference between iSPIRT’s Playbook RTs and what we have planned for the #PNgrowth Camp

We are now only about 90 days away from what will be a first of many sorts in the Indian ecosystem. The #PNgrowth camp at the Infosys campus in Mysore will be the first long-term program ever initiated for product startups in India. That much has been established. But at the Google hangout we were in yesterday, where we talked about what to expect at #PNgrowth and the process by which we were screening applicants, there arose a question that needed to be answered.

Some of our applicants are asking themselves about the need for a program like this when they have already been getting a lot of insights from our hugely successful Playbook RTs and other events.

I just wanted to make clear the difference between them, as they are both completely different beasts.

First, on content

The Playbook RTs are solutions for the problems that startups face in the here and now. Startups have an extraordinary amount of daily challenges and decisions to be made. Playbook RTs are designed to help founders and employees navigate them. On the other hand, the #Pngrowth camp is a long term mentorship/peer learning program that is focussed and has only one one aim – category leadership. The Playbook RTs are pointed, razor-sharp workshops, the #PNgrowth camp is a university course. The former will award you a diploma and send you off, the latter will give you an education for life.

Second, on numbers

Around 860+ people have, until now, been part of the Playbook RTs. The #PNgrowth camp will have only 200, and that’s it for the whole year. The #PNgrowth camp is selective, and open to product startups at a particular stage of their life cycle – when they need to scale. This selectiveness also means that we have to disappoint several startups who will want to join the program but aren’t in the perfect stage to. We intend to be very choosy here; this is a premier program whose graduates will come out with skills that can never be learnt elsewhere, and therefore it has to be this way.

Third, on the question of overlap

The Playbooks are tactical meetings almost, with different approaches aimed at something immediately tangible. #PNgrowth will design the architecture for the path ahead for startups looking to scale. Playbook RTs are peer-fuelled. #PNgrowth has a important component of academia involvement that will make sure that it succeeds as a long term program for improvement and action. Though the two can be complementary, they are definitely not substitutes. They are very different from each other, and aim to do two completely different things for the ecosystem.

I hope that makes clear the distinction between both of them.


Lastly, I’d like to stress once again the fact that #PNgrowth is going to be incredibly selective and there will be no last minute places. Each applicant goes through a screening process, and there will be no exceptions to that rule. Which means that if you are even slightly interested, please do apply immediately.

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The #PNgrowth Series 1 – The @Vidooly Secret to Scale

When we as a ecosystem try to help our entrepreneurs, we make the mistake of always focussing on the mistakes others have made, and trying to steer away from those. This is evident even from the stuff we write on blogs and platforms with the purpose of helping others. The things ‘not to do’ always take a upper hand over things ‘to do’.

Maybe it’s time we step away from that.

In this new blog Series from #PNgrowth, we are going the other way. Starting today, we are going to publish a series of posts on what we call the #OneThing. Our best product people will be asked a simple question – what is the one thing that worked best for you when you were trying to scale your company? These answers will be insightful partly as success stories and partly as guides for other startups who find themselves in a similar situation. In the first blog of the series, we talk to Subrat Kar, the CEO of Noida based Vidooly, the video analytics tool that has just secured its first round of funding, and is on its way to becoming an Indian startup success story.

Subrat Kar, CEO of Vidooly

Vidooly has been one of this year’s poster boys for the Indian startup community. The product is awesome, the market is growing, and the opportunities are endless. The team is completely homegrown, and for a company that’s growing and making waves, has a founding team that lets their work do the talking. There’s no gimmickry and absolutely no noise, except about the product they are making.

When I talked to Subrat, he was travelling back to his home state of West Bengal, and I asked him the question point blank, because I wanted to know the first thing that popped into his head.

#TheOneThing

His answer was quick too – “That blog we wrote.”

On further investigation, this turned out to be a post on the Vidooly blog, published in October last year called ‘How to maximise your YouTube views organically’. Subrat said that though at that time, this wasn’t a marketing move at all on their part, the reader interest and viral lift they got out of that post made them believe in the power of content marketing. “We don’t spend any money at all,” he says, “Our marketing is purely content.” This is incredible for a new entrant like Vidooly, and Subrat acknowledges it.

Vidooly“This is the one thing that helped us grow”, he says, “The confidence that initial number of readers and commenters told us that we were on to something. And we built on it. We didn’t do anything to actually make it go viral, so maybe there was an element of luck involved. But it convinced us that if we gave out good information, there were people hungry enough for it who would become our customers.”

About #PNgrowth

PNgrowth is ayear long mentorship program with some of India’s top product people and founders, with learning sessions and curriculum prepared in collaboration with the universities of Stanford, Harvard and Duke. Content marketing will be one of the major areas being covered, as will all the other points our #PNgrowth series will highlight. Nominate your Startup here (Apply before 15th November)

 

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Why WebEngage’s CEO @avlesh wishes #PNgrowth existed a few years ago?

WebEngage is probably the most important product startup from India’s business capital Mumbai – it builds customer engagement tools for SaaS businesses, is very popular and successful, and is used by thousands of businesses worldwide. Avlesh is one of the original hustlers of the Indian ecosystem, and he has built a world class product company in a matter of just four years.

When we talked to Avlesh about #PNgrowth, he was very excited, and stressed the importance of peer to peer learning in an ecosystem like ours which still hasn’t got as much attention as it should have. As he stresses, it would be very helpful for people if they don’t make mistakes in the first place, rather than learn after making a few. #PNgrowth would have helped him and WebEngage if such an initiative exited when they were starting out, he said.

Avlesh says that #PNgrowth can help entrepreneurs share different ideas of growth among them, and in doing so, share stories of how they scaled, the challenges they faced, and how they got to where they are.

#PNgrowth, in collaboration with Stanford’s Graduate School of Business and Duke’s Fuqua School of Business, iSPIRT’s #PNgrowth initiative aims to get the people who want to learn, and the people they need to ask in a room, and give them the perfect space to learn and grow.

You can learn more and apply for the program here.

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Why the CEO of OrangeScape thinks you should go to #PNgrowth

Orangescape is one of India’s first true product companies. KissFlow, their workflow automation software for small and medium sized businesses was one of the first successful products made out of India. This makes Suresh Sambandam, the CEO of OrangeScape, a visionary who saw what was coming long before any of us even had an idea about it. As Suresh himself says, it was a slog for him and the core team for the first year or so, working more than 18 hour days and trying to get things right and providing as quick customer service as possible. He was constantly learning because his team had to do everything themselves.

When asked what would have helped him most when he and his team were trying to get to crtitical mass, he is prompt in his reply – peer advice. If he had known that someone had already tried what he was doing, maybe he would have discarded the plans that were not working quickly, in order to focus on the things that actually were.

In this short video from #PNgrowth, Suresh talks about his product, its awesome launch, and its struggle to go from recognised, profitable product to something more, something special, something customers want to use.

This is where #PNgrowth comes in, he says, a platform to bring together India’s early stage software product companies. In collaboration with Stanford’s Graduate School of Business and Duke’s Fuqua School of Business, iSPIRT’s #PNgrowth initiative aims to get the people who want to learn, and the people they need to ask in a room, and give them the perfect space to learn and grow.

You can learn more and apply for the program here.

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Growth is a bitch!

Capillary Technologies is an information technology company headquartered in Bangalore, India. Established in 2008, Capillary is present in about 30 countries with over 200 enterprise customers.

In this short candid chat with Aneesh Reddy, the co-founder and CEO of Capillary Technologies, he bluntly mentions that growth is a bitch! Aneesh shares how his company spent 1.5M to reach 1/6th the current company size versus spending 24M to grow the next 5/6th.

Watch the video below and see why Aneesh thinks growth is tough.

PNgrowth is an iSPIRT initiative in collaboration with Stanford’s Graduate School of Business and Duke’s Fuqua School of Business to facilitate entrepreneurs to scale their business.

Please click here, to join a hangout session where members of iSPIRT, Stanford and Duke university share how the issue of scale can be addressed and how PNgrowth can facilitate the same.

Contributed by Rohith Veerajappa, Wow Labs

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Announcing the biggest software entrepreneur school in India – #PNgrowth

India’s product startup ecosystem is at an exciting stage right now. There are several startups who are being talked about as unicorns, several others which are bring touted as the next big things, and a whole host of others who are in their infancy. Though India’s metres are the ones driving this revolution-in-a-bottle, smaller cities are also catching up.

One reason for the emergence of these companies has been the inspiration that India’s first product startups have been. These were the trailblazers, the ones who went where no one had gone before, and learnt things by making mistakes, and in some cases a lot of them.

And these are the companies that are now going one step ahead. They are coming together, of their own accord, to help India’s growing product companies who are at a particular stage of their lifecycle – the growth curve.

iSPIRT is happy to present to you, in association with Stanford’s Graduate School of Business and Duke’s Fuqua Business School, a new initiative for India’s growth-stage product startups. We call it PNgrowth, under the now-familiar Product Nation banner.

pngrowthWhat are we doing?

PNgrowth is a year long mentorship program with some of India’s top product people and founders, with learning sessions and curriculum prepared in collaboration with the universities of Stanford, Harvard and Duke.

The program, prepared with some of the best minds in business and academia, is aimed at equipping the new age internet entrepreneur with an understanding of every skill he/she needs to build and scale a world class organisation.

Who is eligible?

Applications are now open. The program is open only for growth stage companies and is limited only for 200 entrepreneurs. The companies can be either B2B or B2C, but they will need to have already achieved product-market fit and must be aiming to become category leaders in their space.

We’ve started receiving applications here, and you can also follow us on Twitter or Facebook to keep abreast of everything that’s happening.

What’s the program schedule?

The program will start in January 2016 with a 3 day residential event in Mysore, where everyone will get together to learn how and what they are going to learn and implement in their companies in the course of the next year.

Applications are due by November 15th, and we’ll also be having Selene Delecourt and her team over in Bangalore in August in order to understand the challenges starts are facing and what kind of help they might need. You can reach out to us to participate in that as well.

You can see the entire program schedule here.

We are super-excited about this, and so are the mentors we have brought together for the program. We have here a sneak peek from Pallav Nadhani, CEO of FusionCharts who is telling you why you should be applying to #PNgrowth.