“Bootstrapping is tough. Most of the time things take three times longer than what we think. The only way to enjoy this journey is to absolutely love what you do. That is what sustains you.” – Rushabh, ERPNext

Continuing our journey to bring to limelight bootstrapped entrepreneurs from India, we got a chance to speak with Rushabh Mehta, Founder of Web Notes Technologies, a software product company that publishes a free and open source web based ERP called ERPNext for small and medium businesses. Built by a small team of 8 people, ERPNext has more than 250 paying customers and has also been included in Winners List of BOSSIE (World’s best Open Source Applications of 2013) Awards. Here is the transcript from the interview:

Tell us more about the journey of starting ERPNext.

I have been a software hobbyist, coding and developing software for fun since my school days. I graduated with a Masters in Industrial Engineering from Penn State University, US in 2004 and soon joined our family business. At that time the business was undergoing a transformation and we were trying to set up a custom ERP system to integrate Sales, Purchasing, Inventory and Accounting. I took ownership of the implementation and that experience gave me the first taste of ERP platforms.

Soon after that experience, I started a services company with a friend and delivered multiple software projects for clients but that journey didn’t continue for long as my heart was in building products. I shut down the venture and moved on to start Web Notes Technologies in 2008 to build a free and open source web based ERP product.

How did you fund the business while bootstrapping? Did you ever consider raising capital from investors?

During the time when I was starting Web Notes, my family exited our family business and had some funds in hand. I borrowed some of those funds and that gave us the initial breathing space. We also delivered services for few initial years to keep us going.

Once we decided to focus only on building products, we took many measures to sustain ourselves financially. We brought our team size down from 18 to 5. It was a difficult move but was essential to ensure we don’t burn out quickly. We also removed sales and marketing and instead focused all our efforts on product development. We hired fresher graduates to keep the salary expenses under control.

I did try raising funds but due to the nature of business, was not very successful. ERPNext is a specific mission critical product and it was not that easy to find a good market fit in the start. Also there weren’t many companies in the same space to compare us with. All this made the business not seem that attractive to investors.

How did you build your team at a stage when revenues had not started flowing in yet? What motivated those people to join you?

Most of our initial team joined us because of the work we were doing. We were building an open source product and that attracted people to join us as there weren’t many such opportunities available elsewhere. On a funny note, one person we interviewed also said that he checked our website and got an impression that we are a large firm! Probably having a good face online helped. Ha ha .

The initial years were quite difficult. We didn’t have any mentors and were not sure what to do next. We got all our feedback from customers and learnt how to build quality software. As Malcolm Gladwell says, success in any field comes when one invests 10,000 hours on it. As a team, we are walking through that journey of 10,000 hours and falling down and learning in the process. This journey is what keeps us together. Our initial 5 hires are still with us and that says a lot.

Marketing is another area that requires a lot of investment. You have reached 250+ paid customers with zero marketing and no sales team. Tell us more about how you managed marketing.

Information asymmetry is reducing fast. Now, there is no need to take the help of traditional media. If the product is good, word does go out. “Viral” is the new buzz word.

As a bootstrapping company, the marketing options are very less. In the initial days, we set up stalls and booths in different exhibitions and events to reach out to customers. We received our initial feedback from there and reworked on the product. It has been a slow and organic growth for us. But we were clear that we never wanted to push our products to customers. Once we gained some initial customers and delivered quality products, we got referred to new customers and the chain continued.

The open source aspect of our product also attracted many customers as there were not many open source ERP products in the market. Our competitive pricing was another attractive factor. ERPNext is available at 30,000 INR/ year and most customers usually have a budget 10 times that amount. Since we are focused on quantity i.e acquiring large number of customers, this low price strategy really helps us get the foot in the door.

Another advantage VCs bring in is the guidance on building the business. As a bootstrapped company, how did you make up for these?

As a bootstrapped company, we are left on our own. Not having mentors was an issue. I do feel we lost a few years. However, I have been trying to learn from each and every source I get my hands on. I read blogs, hacker news and also learn from other companies. For example, we are highly inspired by the design, philosophy and writing of 37signals, not to mention their products which are just amazing. We think that they, and not SalesForce, are the true pioneers of web applications. We love the quality, reliability and technology of GitHub, which has re-invented the way Open Source software is written and shared on the Internet. We try to learn from the design, quality and vision of Apple. They have set the benchmark of engineering and we hope we can understand and use some of their focus and attention to detail. And last but not the least, WordPress (and Automattic, the company behind wordpress) has provided us with a template of how an Open Source business should be built. Whenever we are in doubt in terms of taking business decisions, we find asking ourselves, what WordPress would do. There is no dearth of inspiration. One just needs to look around. These and many such companies have been our mentors indirectly.

Looking back do you think you should have raised angel or VC capital instead of bootstrapping? In what way has bootstrapping worked in your favor and what opportunities do you think you missed out on because of not raising external capital?

There is no right way to answer this. Both bootstrapping and raising external funds have their own advantages.

Because we followed a bootstrapped journey, our confidence is very high. We have gone through the whole process of transforming into a matured business. We are able to judge things better as we have seen the extremes. And we still have our independence.

On the other side, we do fell that as a bootstrapped business, we often miss out on the glitz and glamour that surrounds the well funded businesses. We also miss the whole package that comes with investors – the funds, contacts and advisory.

But at the end of it I feel that in the current world there is so much a single person can do without any external help. Take the example of Salman Khan of Khan Academy. It is so inspiring to see the way he has built his business single handedly. He did not employ an army of people to make his videos. He created close to 3000 videos, using his own personal skills and technology. Nowadays there are so many tools available that eventually capital driven growth might become irrelevant.

We are proud to say that over the last 3 years, we have been growing 100% every year in terms of revenue and we have reached this stage purely bootstrapping our way up.

From your own experience, what advice do you have for start-ups who are currently bootstrapping?

The key question one needs to ask themselves is how they are going to sustain themselves as they are clocking their 10,000 hours towards building their product. It could take 3 years or could also take 7-8 years. Most of the time things take three times longer than what we think. There is no magic bullet and one is not going to get discovered on their own. They need to take one step at a time.

The only way to enjoy this journey is to absolutely love what you do. That is what sustains you.

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As I spoke to Rushabh, I could sense his enthusiasm and passion towards his product. Their team sure is deriving their inspiration and learning from other companies but it is not very far when they are going to inspire others on how to bootstrap and build a successful business from scratch. ProductNation wishes Rushabh and his team a successful journey ahead.

16/09/201415/09/2014

Need 9 months to get baby out

One of the pressures and challenges of working on products is to get it out soon – the release. But I often recollect one of the leaders that I have worked with saying “need 9 months to get baby out”.

What’s the right time for a product release – Some Considerations?

Build for market, not a customer

Remember products are not built for one customer, its built for several of them, for a market. I highlight this as especially in India, we have abundant services companies and people with great experience driving innovations and solutions for one customer, and often the release time for such delivery can be done in a shorter duration as we are working towards a specific requirement set. Its different to build it for a market or many customers in mind.

Enough research time to iterate

The other key aspect of building a product is to spend good time on researching the market, understanding user problems and figuring out what to build, before start building it. In certain cases it could also be some initial prototypes to get the thinking process going. Often this time is ignored when building products.

9 moms cannot make 9 babies in 1 month

By getting more people assigned is not the solution to get the products out faster, actually it could be counter productive as there may not be enough components that can be built parallel and also could result in confusion on co-ordination.

It’s not just about development

Many software products fail primarily because they put all the time and effort only in engineering and developing the product and do not plan for an effective early adoption and go to market (including pricing) launch time planning. They consider this as lesser important task and often consider this as a post product release activity. But the market readiness and go to market should be planned well ahead, and enough time to be allocated to early adoption and launch cycle. The other aspect that gets ignored many a times is user empathy and design for user interaction and interface.

Focus on quality, differentiators

Bugs are fine in software, can be fixed is the typical attitude in software industry. But depending on the mission critical nature of the products, quality is going to be key criteria. Thorough testing and quality is an important part and while dates can be compromised, quality should not be compromised as the word spreads if its buggy. Get it out with good quality.

Many products compromise on features and differentiators, to deliver a product in time. This again can be dangerous in the current extremely competitive world.

So usually the right time of the release should have key focus on quality and differentiators.

Alpha, Beta….

We come across examples of products that get released to market without alpha, beta cycles – without being taken to first few customers or users to try out. This can be dangerous, inspite of the time pressures or the brutal confidence that you may have about your products and self testing, there should be time allocated for alpha and beta trials.

Rapid release cycles

The other side consideration here is that while products have to be planned, it can’t take too long as well. Many of the established players get into this syndrome where they spend too much time planning and laying it out but by the time the product comes out, the market is lost or captured by some one else. This is where agile methodology comes in handy. Products should be planned in such a way that there is minimum viable scope covered coming in from the research and there is agility built into cover a rapid release cycle post the first launch, where more enhancements can be planned, based on customer adoption.

So if you started reading the blog hoping to get the answer on the right time for a product release, sorry for disappointing you. But from my experience where I have been involved with enterprise software products that were built in 3 months, 6 months, 1.5 years, 3 years etc. , some of the above points were the learnings for the success or failure of the product. Plan time for the ideation/research, design, development, thorough testing, beta and GTM launch planning before getting your baby out…

Share your experience or other considerations that I may have missed here…

09/09/201410/09/2014

Bootstrapping is certainly possible until and unless the business model requires exponential growth in a short span of time, Nikhil Nath – CEO, Knowcross #BootUpINDIA

Last week I got a chance to speak with Nikhil Nath, Founder and CEO of Knowcross that provides technology solutions to leading hotels of the world in over 30 countries. Started in 2002, Knowcross has built a range of smart and intelligent products that address specific problems of running Hotel operations. From systems that allow Hotel staff to quickly respond to complaints raised by guests through careful assignment and tracking to systems that turn the manual Housekeeping nightmare into a smooth process by mathematically calculating which room needs to be cleaned when based on real time data such as check-out time, expected check-in time, room moves etc. This product called Know Housekeeping was listed as one of the top seven mobility products in India after an exhaustive assessment by Frost & Sullivan. They also have a product that allows staff to make-up for services failures and missing guest expectations by alerting them in real time and giving them a chance to make a goodwill gesture and increase loyalty.

Each of the products Knowcross offers seems to be extremely well thought out and is solving real problems hotels face in their day to day operations. No wonder they boast of customers such as Kempinski, Hyatt, Oberoi, IHG, Hilton, Sofitel, Taj, Swissôtel, Shangri-La, Radisson, Rosewood, Dusit Thani, to name a few of their chain customers, and marquee independents like the Ritz Paris, Le Bristol Paris, and The Halkin London.

After the hour long interview, I was left completely inspired listening to the journey of starting and growing Knowcross. Here is the compilation of the interview for you learn more about Nikhil’s journey of building Knowcross.

Tell us about Knowcross.

At Knowcross, we offer a suite of products for the Hotel Industry. We started in 2002 with our first product, a rapid response system to resolve guest complaints in time, every time. This was our main product until 3 years ago. As we thought of expanding our offerings, we had two choices – either to grow horizontally by offering the same solution to other industries or to go vertical by providing more solutions to the Hotel industry. We decided to go vertical as we had developed a deep expertise and understanding of the Hotel Industry and it made more sense to leverage that learning.

We looked for other problem areas in the Hotel industry and came up with three other products – that are now known as Know Housekeeping, Know Glitch, and Know Mobile. These products eliminate much of the manual communication and chaos that currently exists in hotel operations and have a direct impact on staff productivity and guest satisfaction.

Take us through your journey of starting Knowcross.

We started by accident. In my early teens I was an avid self-taught programmer – and honed by skills on Sinclair Spectrums, Commodores, and BBC Micros computers. However, I left this passion to pursue a more traditional Economics-MBA-Banking-Consulting career path…until life came full circle! In 2002, a friend and I were doodling around and we put some developers together to work on different software projects. Because of the dotcom bust the market soon dried up. One of the projects we worked on was for a hotel. That experience got us interested in the space and we ended up developing a product. We created a few prototypes, went out to the market and got some positive early reactions. That gave us the encouragement we needed to continue in the space. In hindsight, I think we selectively saw the data we wanted to support our belief and desire to continue developing the product!

With a team of four, we built a product and started approaching potential customers. We implemented the product for a Radisson, an Intercontinental and Oberoi’s new property in Udaipur, Udaivilas. Those first few installs were crucial. We learnt a lot from those experiences and almost rebuilt the product from scratch.

From this point onwards it was a hotel by hotel pitching and negotiating game. Once we signed up 15 customers, we stopped bleeding month on month. Soon we hired someone from the Hospitality industry to bring in the knowledge and knowhow. We stretched our boundaries and pitched to international hotels as well. We won a customer in Dubai. The deal was $40K, equivalent of 4 Indian customers. That experience made us realize that the market outside India is much more interesting. We got to pitch to the Hyatt top brass in Chicago and signed up Grand Hyatt in Mumbai as the test property.

We continued to make a lot of mistakes and learned from the experiences. The worst time was between 2008 and 2010. By 2008, we had built quite a bit of momentum and the financial market collapse hurt us terribly because a lot of upcoming hotels lost their funding and stopped mid-way through construction. With all the developers we had hired, our burn rate was very high and we didn’t have anyone to sell our products to. In 2009-2010 we were almost about to go belly up. But I didn’t want to give up. I got the team size down and had to let go of many talented people. From there on we restarted the journey slowly and steadily and were able to recover from the near death experience.

I am happy to say that over the last three years, we have seen very good success and have been growing at about 75% year on year.

You have been mostly bootstrapping your venture except for the small angel round. Tell us more about your experience managing the venture without much external financing.

Though Knowcross has been mostly a bootstrapped venture, we did raise a small angel round of $500K in early 2006 from “Band of Angels” (now called Indian Angel Network) and a few other individual investors. We did think of raising a VC round in 2007 but eventually didn’t go ahead. As a result, we have grown the company through internal accruals.

In our most strained period, 2008 to 2010, one thing that became our lifeline was a credit line we managed to negotiate from an Indian public sector bank. This was against our receivables and gave us the cash flow to manage the business… Raising money from Angels and VCs is the not the only way..if you talk to bankers, they often come up with many ways of borrowing money…ultimately, equity is always more expensive than debt and an entrepreneur shouldn’t forget this.

Having said that, both bootstrapping and raising external capital have their own sets of pros and cons.

With a bootstrapped company, I am the majority shareholder and have a much tighter control over the company. The growth is organic and takes time but in the process we have built a strong foundation. We won’t get knocked out that easily even if finances dry up.

On the other side, having money in the bank allows one to think long term and build a business without cash flow concerns. For e.g, in our case, the angel investment allowed us to hire the right people even if we had to pay more. Underfunded companies can’t hire the right people. Having capital also provides some mental stability. There was a time when our revenues were way below our expenses and I had exhausted all my life savings. I was not taking any salary and was using just the minimal amount of money to sustain myself. This kind of situation is a real blow to one’s motivation.

One needs to decide for themselves what the right way to manage finances is. We were not in highly scalable dotcom type of business and just wanted to build a profitable company. We could bootstrap our way up. But this might not work for every type of business.

How did you build your team at a stage when revenues had not started flowing in yet? What motivated those people to join you?

We started with four people initially. The biggest motivation for people to join us has been the kind of work we are doing. The time when we started, there were hardly any product companies in India. Still the product industry is small but 10 years ago it was miniscule. The people who joined us were specifically looking for such opportunities and that aligned our needs.

Two of the key people who joined us in our early days are still working with us. One is an IIT graduate and other from Hyatt, Mumbai. We did have to shell out a lot in compensation to hire these talented individuals but that was money well spent. They are still part of our key team.

I must say that hiring was much easier 10 years ago. The market was smaller and quality of talent was better. We got more value for the money paid. Now hiring is much more difficult. There is a lot of competition especially from VC backed start-ups that have driven salaries up – in some cases, to levels that simply don’t make sense. At these levels, it is better for us to set up a development center in a first world country!

Marketing is another area that requires a lot of investment. Tell us more about how you managed marketing.

Historically, we didn’t spend much on marketing. In fact we didn’t even have a sales team until 3 years ago. Sales for us were a door to door exercise. We were quite limited in our resources. So we had to cut costs at every step. We would fly cheap and stay cheap. We would stay only for few days and setup a maximum number of meetings in those few days to get the most out of our visits. I remember the time when I travelled to London to pitch to some potential customers. I slept on a friend’s couch and would step out everyday like a travelling salesman.

It was a slow, tiring and arduous journey. But the hard work did pay off. We built the customer base organically with the biggest growth seen in last three years. We spent many years building our financial strength and now we are investing heavily in building a sales organization and in marketing to support the salespeople. We set up our US presence about a year ago and now have three people based there. We are also about to open an office in London to cover Europe.

Another advantage VCs bring in is the guidance on building the business, contacts, references etc. Your clients include some of the big names such as Kempinski, Hyatt, Oberoi, IHG, Hilton, Sofitel, Taj and many more. As a bootstrapped company, how did you build this clientele? Where did you get guidance on how to run the business?

Almost everyone has some initial resources to work with. People do want to help others. If you look out for help and people know you are trying hard, they would come forward to help. In our case too, we got a few lucky breaks. Some of my good friends shared some references and made some connections. As we signed few initial customers and delivered good work, others came by.

In hindsight, I would say that it is important to have mentors to guide a first time entrepreneur on things such as which clients to take, how to approach them, when to raise money etc. These decisions are often tricky and it helps if someone who has been there and done that can provide advice. Best would be to bring someone who has started a business before. Incentivize them with stock options. Irrespective of whether one has VCs or not, mentorship is required. Such mentorship can’t be provided by a board. One needs an individual like a friendly uncle. Chances of success would be much higher if quality mentoring is available to teams early on.

From your own experience, what advice do you have for start-ups who are currently bootstrapping?

Bootstrapping is certainly possible until and unless the business model requires exponential growth in a short span of time.

If bootstrapping, one needs to prepare well and think through it. How much can you starve yourself? How long can you manage the business without revenue? How long will your savings last? You should draw your limits and know when to stop as there is an opportunity cost and the same money can be put to some other use.

If you go on for many years without showing positive cash flow, then it is concerning as your business is not sustainable. Make a realistic assessment of your situation and add a buffer around it. Many people don’t think through all this and then hit a wall.

23/07/201415/08/2014

Wooqer – Successful customer adoptions validate product tagline

Wooqer is a platform primarily designed to drive communication & engagement across cross-functional, geo-distributed enterprise groups. Wooqer tagline reads “One platform. Unlimited possibilities” and true to this statement, its customers have leveraged it in many use cases where people communicate & engage, specifically in:

– Training & assessments: Induction, product, soft skills or other customer training – replace/supplement face-to-face efforts.
– HO & Branch Operations: Operational activities like SOP into checklists with tasks & workflows that are track-able, real-time.
– Mobile Reporting: Supporting field teams operating out of office (e.g., sales) to report/order in real-time, from mobile devices.
– Knowledge Management: Enterprise knowledge store with right information, accessible by right stakeholders as needed.
– Audits, visits & compliance: Run business on hard data gathered exactly what needed, on-time & without 3rd parties

As you’ll see in this review, all this seems possible and the secret behind Wooqer’s “#1 adoption platform” marketing chest-thumping, comes from adhering to basic tenets of product management – Create products customers’ need, build it well and above all set & meet their expectations. Wooqer team has gone about systematically uncovering enterprise customers’ engagement and communication needs and then built a platform from well-thought-out building blocks. Their promise is to get IT department out of businesses’ way with a Do-It-Yourself (DIY) solution. Going by customer testimonials such as

DIY method allows you to do business understand/enabling processes without taking recourse on IT personnel […] works very well if you want to add value to business.” from Rakesh Pandey Ex-President, Raymond Shop, a Wooqer Customer, they have delivered on it.

This is not to say their journey so far was easy, or slam-dunk. In this fast-paced business world, even SMB owners are moving away from Do-it-for-me model to keep up, and that is definitely the case in large companies. CIOs just provide infrastructure and get out of the businesses’ way. Such trends bode well for platforms like Wooqer, as they provide flexibility for “continuous” business process deployments. Wooqer like solutions are very much a need of the day as organizations nowadays bank on resulting employee productivity improvements.

Wooqer Customers & Why adoption matters?

Paid customers in Retail sector & Banking/BFSI using Wooqer are:

Wooqer Customers

It is definitely important for any company to have paying customers for various reasons beyond financial. It is equally important for early-stage product companies, to stay focused on adoption (by customers and users if they are different). This is because monetization/revenue does not equate to adoption by satisfied customer who continues to use the product long after purchase and it is function of the business model and pricing strategy (eg freemium). Adoption, on the other hand, is always an opportunity to monetize and is purely a function of product value. Thus using appropriate (read as non-vanity) metric – such as Wooqer’s “#1 adoption platform”– is important internally and for marketing communication, as it calls out how a business keeps its scores. Interestingly in Wooqer’s case, this focus on successful customer adoption has not only helped them to pivot better but also improve the value they are bringing to customers from what I gather. Any venture – be it an India-first company going after newer high-growth sectors in India (e.g. ecommerce, retail) or Global company coming out of India – after all has to have a metric that is nothing but a measure of the impact it creates in the market place.

The Need – What is the pain being addressed?

Take Brand or Marketing Managers for instance. It is not uncommon they are asked to measure the effectiveness of post-launch product GTM activities and spend along each milestone of this journey below.

Track Leads - Wooqer

When Wooqer started in 2009, initial focus was to help Brand Managers to be more efficient in creating right content. Once they set out to address their pain point, market gave them the insight into other areas of this post-launch GTM activities journey that are far more fundamental and timely. By staying focused on adoption, I’d opine, founders pivoted their attention there.

In early part of this decade in India’s high-growth sectors (e.g. ecommerce, retail), one of the major problems was the lack of consistency that came from rapid growth. Take retailer Aditya Birla group Madura F&L. With the rapid evolution and expansion of the Indian retail environment they were rolling outlets at a fast pace, as their ability to morph in response to market demands and consumer needs is nonnegotiable. Wooqer focused on these consistency issues.

Engaging and managing their workforce is highly important as success within the retail industry is directly correlated to supporting a consistent brand image and providing superior customer experience. Retail Stores staff count is between 2-4 in small stores to 13-15 in bigger ones, and they have high-school level education. With broadly distributed locations and employee base, it is crucial that consistent standard operating procedures be established and implemented to facilitate their ambitious expansion plans. Marketing and managing many hundreds or thousands of retail products is difficult as is, but once inconsistencies start creeping in around employee knowledge about business workflow and processes, it causes productivity loss.

The Product

My Wooqer - 4 steps Wooqer’s solution to such class of problems that demand improved employee productivity, is synthesized into this platform comprised of tools that enables integrated, two-way, real-time and measurable content exchange channel between the employee producers and consumers of content in a large corporate setting. It is deployed as a multi-tenant, tenant-isolated, elastic cloud-based SaaS offering (a delivery model but not SaaS as a sales model i.e., direct sales, not self-service). It enables each of the Wooqer’s clients to exchange & track the content between any of their business producer and content consumers using a simple 4-step methodology as shown in the adjacent picture.

So what are the key insights that Wooqer had? Ones that told them that they can solve an enterprise pain point such as employee productivity with a software application? I would contend the following ones they had uncovered during their systematic search may have something to do with it as these ideas underpin the Wooqer platform.

1. Building block approach

Organizations and teams can explore productivity improvement opportunities through automation where none existed before by equipping their employees with tools, scripted processes & workflows. Wooqer achieves operational effectiveness while enabling flexibility and real time collaboration by reorienting Information, Communication and Collaboration. Modeling how organization groups communicate across distance say between Head Office or Corporate and field offices to support consistency and innovation is a key insight.

Wooqer-Home

Wooqer supports various type of content (files, processes) and gets feedback in a fastest manner thru modular building blocks, which is packaged as checklist, audit, appraisal, data collection, assessments (see picture for sample list). Product collateral like Wooqer compass is also used to mentor, message, monitor and measure the process scripting that users do in the platform.

2. Flexibility to change (sans IT) and track business processes

Information technologies enable key divisions of an organization such as HR, Training, Operations, and Legal, to achieve operational efficiency. In addition, “socially” engaging ecosystem of stakeholders like employees, suppliers, and customers are some of the ways IT partners with business to enhance company’s strategic positioning. For this, the company’s back-end IT infrastructure (“Systems of Record”) must be linked up with the front-line (“Systems of Engagement”), so that information can flow smoothly, and important decisions can be taken in real-time. Wooqer being such platform of engagement, it facilitates user communities to function independently. Supporting business groups that tackle a variety of problems, without requiring them to see scarce IT personnel assistance is a big plus.

3. Look at technology requirements – UX is key to user adoption

One of the pitfalls many application development projects fall into is the failure to take into account the technology changes and the value of the user experience. Needless to say mobile app is very different from a traditional or web app design for the desktop or laptop. Consequently, one needs to take a very different approach for UX and interaction design across these platforms.

To participate in today’s digital economy trends having a platform API is must. Ability to build modular capabilities with lightweight interfaces that don’t require heavy integration are key to connect with business services. Having recently completed Wooqer mobile launch (see above), these important aspects of technology and UX is evidently established well with the team.

Wooqer-on-mobile

Thoughtfully engineering and UX for its target user base has unearthed some contra thinking which comes from deep customer empathy. For instance, staff attrition in retail sector is high (130%) so a single-click handover of work to another employee demonstrates this empathy. Retails users are also not highly educated so Wooqer UX in some areas “deviated” intentionally from standards initially, to enable these users overcome brittleness fear that was felt with slick interfaces shown in prototypes. Even in mobile, they have leveraged both the ergonomics and capabilities of the device and married it well to the existing back-end services to offer a full feature rollout.

It is worth calling out that Wooqer is built as a Private Internet that enables any user ‘to be more’ by creating solutions to their work challenges on their own without sms, email, or phone calls in the shortest possible time by structuring work and measuring results. Prashant A Bhonsle, President at Wooqer adds their adoption drive goes well beyond enterprise users into SME as “Wooqer can not only give cost efficiencies to startups but also help build a culture of collaboration & quick response to market changes because of seamless data & information flow across organization“.

Platform Bells and Whistles – ‘Have More’

Platform has 5 core features and many add on but all comes as a part of the base subscription fee. Content consumers get access to all assigned content either via native apps in mobile devices (iOS and Android) or web-based interface in desktop that content producers have published typically from their desktop. The content can be in (m)any format(s) like video, documents, audio, flash, etc and all sizes are supported. Assigning is a simple process that “publishes” the content to a list of selected group business consumers. Fine-grain publisher control for publishing like collating them into chapters & modules, ability to verify detailed content understanding, get feedback & start private or social discussion are all built-in.

3 steps - Wooqer

Business users are tracked by the roles they play in the organization – though the platform personalizes to individuals who fill the role. The separation between role and individual is maintained at the platform level which help retain role context & knowledge thru people change.

4 simple workfows Business processes are launched with a workflow that is custom-built around the content at the time of publishing. Creating a process to gather data can be as simple as a survey or more involved to collect any kind of business data. Processes to map workflows in real-time exists including canned workflows like Approvals, Reviews, Complaint Management, Audits, Reports. Adding due dates, escalations, milestones, notifications, and conditions like parallel or sequential branching are supported along with maintaining records for posterity. Workflows can be created in a few minutes and kept current, by updating them in a few seconds.

Support to create alerts, reminders & milestones to summarize business reports and download then into tools like Excel or archive them as per business/IT practices require, are built-out. All this enables Wooqer users (producers) to run their business on data. Getting reports as well as submitting or seeing them or asking any question getting response either periodically or one-time from users (consumers) are possible even when they are away from office.

5 surveys Other personalization and socialization features include spotlighting a personal document, real time talk and feedback (using SMS, with urgency indicator) in the context of a document or business social context. The product is evolving with the users and sector adoption without customer-specific customization and retaining the platform nature. For instance when the banking sector customers came onboard to use Wooqer, issues such as security, uptime and regulation related features were added that also benefitted the retail segment without additional cost or upgrade burden. As they foray into addition sectors (emerging, industrial) and geographies(US, UK), the team seems confident in their ability to sustain a vibrant roadmap with “dip-in, dip-out” product management focus to zoom in and out to see the big picture without loosing the details of a requirement or feature.

The Market

Wooqer platform is primarily designed to drive communication & engagement and hence belongs in the business application market. It shares this space the likes of Microsoft with its Sharepoint product that was recently strengthened by the $1.2B Yammer acquisition. With social HR tech, IT and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software as adjacent spaces, it is part of the broader circle. IDC analysis pegs this market worth for business social networking at $4.5B by 2016, a clear indication that there’s still a lot of open space in the social technology realm — especially in the employee productivity application market where Wooqer squarely sits.

Testimonials & Publications

Customer and industry testimonials for Wooqer are very positive especially from the likes of Retail Association of India, in academic publications (IIMB case study that is currently a Harvard Business Case, SHRM paper on “Solving emerging HR challenges – The Wooqer Way”) as well as in commercial press. Impact they have created in their areas of focus is also worth noting.

• Communication & Engagement: Create a culture of inclusion; work towards a common goal with reduced attrition & higher motivation

• Training & assessments: 100% coverage, more knowledgeable staff and lower cost of training

• HO & Branch Operations: A more consistent experience for your customers and objective data on operational parameters

To quote a Wooqer customer from a press article : Wooqer is becoming a single point of contact with the entire network and for all operational activities. Training emerged as a large-use case as we found ourselves being able to achieve a lot more with the same set of resources. Wooqer has assisted in the democratization of ideas by making sharing of ideas and thoughts more free and open. It has also helped in seeking a majority opinion before implementing the key operational decisions. Hence Wooqer as a platform has been able to address many loopholes. It did take us some time to get started with the platform and discover our own ways of working. The discovery continues till date, as the organization continues to find new uses of the platform.

The Company & Competition

Wooqer is a 5+ year old, bootstrapped product startup company with significant market traction. They pivoted early on with their India-first market learnings. They have established a strong foothold in Retail sector in India and foraying into other sectors like Banking/BFSI and industrial houses in India and abroad (US & UK). They see email and spreadsheet use and ad-hoc way of doing as the primary competition (Sharepoint & Salesforce to a lesser degree) to displace or be compared with. Annual Licensing on per-user/per-store basis with professional consulting for initial deployment is their monetization model. The Company took first two years to build the platform and it is in commercial operation for the past three years.

The Founders & the team

Vishal Purohit, with his co-founder Pavitra Saxena, started Wooqer in 2008. Vishal was founder for GarageAgain Ventures and co-founder of CoreObjects (later acquired by Symphony Services) as well as everse/Velocient prior to bootstrapping Wooqer. His technology, sales, operations, chief-executive and advisory roles paved his path to Wooqer. Co-founder Pavitra Saxena started as an engineer in Cognizant and soon become senior architect there and later at CoreObjects. Pavitra is Wooqer #1 and together, they have over 40 years of technology & enterprise software experience. Currently, Wooqer team’s strength is about 40+ with a few outside Bangalore/ abroad. The team includes IIT/NIT and IIM grads, and is roughly 60% engineering/quality and the rest in sales and operations like customer advocacy. They have a unique video-based hiring process and are investing in skill-building.

Road ahead

Though Wooqer currently caters to the banking or retail sectors, predominantly, the use cases described above can certainly be applicable to many verticals. Mobility is also changing everything.

All business will have customers or employees undoubtedly facing business challenges that can and need to be addressed through a front-line “System of Engagement”, so that information can flow smoothly, and important decisions can be taken in real-time. Every industry all over the globe is looking to benefit from this increased employee productivity and efficiency, so their prospects look bright.

19/02/201415/08/2014

‘In order to succeed in the Indian B2B marketplace, be mentally prepared for the long haul’ – Vishnu Tambi, CEO of Excellon Software

Product Nation interviewed Vishnu Tambi, CEO of Excellon Software to understand the key aspects that helped him to create a successful product company working out of a tier-2 city. In this discussion, Vishnu shares his experiences dealing with Indian customers and tips for succeeding in the Indian market. Read on…

Could you describe the genesis of Excellon Software in India?

Excellon Software, in its previous incarnation as e-Caliber software was in to software services during initial years. This was set up in Nagpur during 1999-2000 as a part of the US based e-Caliber Inc. However, post the Y2K services boom, around 2001, we wanted to shift our focus to serve the local customer needs. This led us to foraying into developing packaged software solutions, catering to different industries.

We experimented in the local market a bit, by providing solutions to the healthcare and retail industries, but over time, realized that there was a big gap in the market for a software product that would effectively manage the selling, distribution, and servicing of the goods. This led us to develop and deliver an innovative software product that manages post manufacturing activity for industries. By 2006, we got our validation by means of signing up big names in the automobile sector. From then on, we have had repeatable successes till date. This is how we emerged as a credible player in the Indian software product industry.

Getting your first customer in an enterprise market is always a challenge. How did you achieve this? What was the learning from the experience?

When selling to large enterprises, inevitably, one has to fight the small company label. The customer, Ashok Leyland was initially skeptical about our company, our ability to provide continuous support and about us operating from Nagpur – which then was not known as an IT destination. However, we were able to address each of their concerns – by demonstrating our deep business knowledge, technology expertise and our willingness to go the extra mile to support them. We also did a very tactical thing in partnering with a large MNC SI as we worked with Ashok Leyland. Due to this partnership, Ashok Leyland also got more comfortable in choosing us against some of the very well established names in the industry.

So, I would say that if you are gunning for a very large customer during the early days of your company, it may be worthwhile to go with an established partner to enhance the prospects of you netting the deal. You should of course keep it interesting for the partner to collaborate with you.

Can you describe the journey of Excellon evolving to its current stage as a leader in the Dealer Management Space? What are your plans going forward?

Sure. After we got our first big enterprise customer in 2006, for the next two-three years, we focused on acquiring more customers. We worked with multiple partners during this period. By 2010, we realized that we had the best domain knowledge, as well as solid set of initial customers who would vouch for our expertise. We ensured that we executed well with an aim to make every client a success story – an achievement that we are proud to communicate to our prospective customers.

In 2011, we reinvented our company and our product offering to stay ahead of the curve by incorporating the latest technologies and platform which had become available in India, such as cloud and mobility. This helped to us aim for Clients with need for high scalability and Mobility solutions who looked for a business turnaround and impact by leveraging latest technology. This refresh helped us scale at a much faster pace – we signed a large deal in the Middle East, and were able acquire marquee customers in India such as Eicher, Mahindra and Bajaj, in a span of 18 months. This enabled us to serve and service customers with thousands of locations and users in more than 50 countries.

Looking ahead, I believe that as a company, we are at the best times. There is significant demand for our product in the Middle East and South East Asian economies as well. Our existing Indian enterprise customers are intending to use our products in subsidiaries that are based in other geographies. So, overall, we are well positioned to cater to the opportunities better than ever before.

On a slightly different aspect, could you share your experiences dealing with Indian enterprise customers?

Given that I worked in the US for almost two decades in different functional roles including experience with packaged software and technology, prior to focusing on Excellon full time, I guess I can provide you a comparative analysis of US and Indian customers. I would say that customers in US and in India are diagonally opposite. While the US customers are straightforward in discussing, accepting, and communicating, Indian customers usually do not like to talk upfront. Probably due to the cultural factors, some Indian customers tend to be polite and so you would not hear a ‘no’ from them directly until a few iterations.

I found negotiations, while dealing with Indian customers to be the difficult part. Some people usually tend to negotiate endlessly and at all levels. You think that the deal is signed, done and everything settled, even then there are such small things which get negotiated, some of which do not stop even during the implementation phases of your project. So, one needs to be careful on these aspects. Most importantly, at least in the initial stages of your company, you cannot remain completely profit focused in India, due to the above aspects. As an entrepreneur, you do need to protect your margins, and carefully give in to customer demands on a case to case basis. One must learn quickly when to pull the trigger and end a discussion or negotiation, if you think you cannot make ends meet.

Great insights! What advice would you provide to fellow product entrepreneurs focusing on Indian enterprise market?

I would like the product entrepreneurs focusing on Indian market to stay focused on creating and enhancing customer relationships. Do not get unnecessarily bogged down by negative factors such as heavy compliance burden, primitive ecosystem or banking support for software companies etc. Focus on creating a solid team with expertise / deep skills and one that stays with you for the long term. This way, you can lean on others in bad times to work out of the situations. You need to be mentally ready for the long haul, and surely, perseverance pays!

22/11/201323/11/2013

Indix: Building the world’s product information repository

Indix is a SaaS + Big Data product intelligence platform that allows businesses to organize, analyze, visualize and act on the world’s product information in real-time. Indix uses big data analytics and visualization to deliver actionable insights. Indix also offers APIs for developers to build product rich applications. It was founded by former Microsoft VP, Sanjay Parthasarathy, who previously led billion dollar divisions at Microsoft. Other co-founders include Sridhar Venkatesh, Rajesh Muppalla, Satya Kaliki and Jonah Stephen Jeremiah. Indix is backed by prominent angel investors as well as Avalon Ventures and Nexus Ventures.

Introduction

Indix is a platform that intends to be the single complete repository of information about the world’s products that are currently spread all over the Internet.

Consider this scenario: if you are responsible for analyzing price trends of a brand that you manage (say a fast-selling mobile phone) to ensure the market is healthy, you will do one of these two things:

Search for the product, filter the results that indicate price, and go through the pages, doing this every few days (or hours)
Identify a few top sites that sell the item and monitor prices on these site, every few days (or hours)

As you can imagine, this can be a very time consuming and inaccurate exercise, and may not leave you with enough time to act on the information you gain, (e.g. Why is Flipkart dropping its price every few days while Tradus does not?).

Using the Indix App for retailers and brands, that is built on top of the Indix product intelligence platform, you can get all these numbers from across the Internet at your fingertips, and get access to insights like price drops, new sellers, etc. This allows you to consume this real-time data and get on to your real job: analyzing price trends across various slices and dices of data.

It is very important to be clear on one point, a point which Sanjay (founder and CEO) emphasized in our interview: Indix is building a platform that provides access to the world’s product information, with all product attributes, in a structured form; the possible ways of using this data are limitless. This Indix App for retailers and brands is just one of the possible uses. A developer ecosystem around the Indix platform will create extremely innovative applications on this platform soon.

The Company

The company was founded to address three problems:

Offer a good view of the products out there to product managers by providing a comprehensive and structured product repository. Today, searching for products using existing search engines yields unstructured and error-prone results, whereas Indix intends to offer structured information about products of the world to everyone.
Today, product managers spend most of their time collecting data. Indix aims to reduce this time to next to nothing. This will allow product managers to do the work that is valued most – analyze data and generate insights for their business.
Enable product awareness of applications, to the point of letting users complete the purchase cycle everywhere a product is mentioned. For example, on whichever page a product is mentioned (say a blog that refers to the recent ad of a deodorant), there can be automatic workflow created by an app (which uses the Indix platform to access details of the product) so that the reader can interact with the product information, get more details and insights, and buy the product from a merchant he likes.

Indix is headquartered in Seattle and has a total team size of 42, with six people based in the Seattle office focused on business development and marketing, and 36 people based in the Chennai office focused on the product development.

It is a startup with a deep engineering focus and great culture. Here are a few things they do to foster a good workspace environment:

They have an internal app that assigns every engineer a Super Hero status and tracks their attendance at their daily standup.
They have treasure hunts / bounty hunts that involve the engineering teams taking on coding challenges.
They have a monitor that screams when a build breaks and in the future, it will have a missile launcher, which will send a missile in the direction of the engineer who broke the build!

The Indix Platform

Indix is a SaaS + Big Data product intelligence platform that gathers product data from Internet, processes it, and makes it available in a structured form. Comparing two products listed on two different websites and figuring out whether these are the same products or not is a very hard problem, and Indix does a great job in product comparison by doing deeper searches and using multiple attributes to compare. They have a few hundred million products (along with rich attributes) collected so far and their target is to have a billion products on their platform.

The platform offers access to developers for its data who are then able to build various applications on top of this valuable stream of data. While price is the most important attribute of a product, there are many other attributes which can be interesting to app developers and their users.

Currently, Indix offers two products:

Indix App for brands and retailers for better and faster market and product analysis.
Developer API set to access their platform data and build rich applications.

Indix app is priced per user per month, and Developer API access is per company per month.

Indix App

Indix app allows brand managers to explore unlimited product, competitors, and categories; monitor various channels through which the product is being sold; and gain insights on pricing, assortment, and Minimum Advertised Price (MAP), etc.

The way it works is as follows:

The brand manager logs into the app and selects a few products and categories that (s)he is interested in tracking.
The brand manager can also select one or more competitors to track.
Once these are set up, the brand manager can view the dashboard to analyze trends on assortment, prices, promotions, availability, competition, and social news, etc. within selected categories of the products.
Insights can be obtained through the analysis center. These could be analyses done by the brand manager as well as pre-defined insights thrown in by the app (see screenshots below)

Developer API

Since Indix is primarily a platform, its value will be best leveraged when outside developers use the data to build rich applications for users and businesses. Developers get access to the large repository of product information, which is easily accessible via RESTFul API that the Indix platform exposes.

Differentiators

Here are a few USPs of Indix that are worth noting:

Intuitive and visual interface – The Indix app is very user-friendly and designed to be intuitive, with customer use-cases in mind. It provides insights on pricing, assortment, markdown, availability, categories, and competition in real-time in a highly visual fashion; making it easier and faster for product managers to make data-driven decisions.
Scale – They have tens of millions products and billions of price points and other product related information. There is no limit on the number of categories, prices, or competitor’s products you can track.
Data quality – Their data is highly robust and accurate, thanks to their deep expertise in big data and analytics. They continue to improve their matching algorithm to do deeper comparisons (compare multiple attributes before declaring products the same).
Customer Service – They have integrated help and feedback systems within their product and are very focused on providing an outstanding customer support service. If their testimonials are anything to go by, they have many happy customers.

Market and Roadmap

This is a big market that Indix is operating in. Currently, their product is targeted at pricing analysts, brand managers, category/merchandising managers, and others involved with product information at brands and retailers, broadly referred to as product managers. There are millions of product managers in the US alone.

This is a hard problem to solve, and there aren’t many companies building product intelligence platform at this scale. Some companies have worked in category-specific or attribute-specific (like price) product data space, but not in a category-agnostic way Indix is doing it – Black Locus (acquired by Home Depot), decide.com (acquired by eBay), and Kosmix (acquired by Wal-Mart). So this is an interesting space for them to be in.

Over the next 6-12 months, their priority is to sign-up additional customers, incorporate their feedback, invest in marketing, and achieve an even bigger scale for product data in their platform. There are more than 1 billion products and services on the Internet. Today, the Indix platform has tens of millions of products, billions of price points, and other product related information, and they continue to add new products. They mentioned that the next 6-12 months are crucial towards realizing their vision of organizing, analyzing, and visualizing the world’s product information and making it accessible and actionable in real time.

They also continue to work on refining and improving their API set based on feedback.

The Road Ahead

As Sanjay writes in their launch post,

“In the future, all applications will be product-aware, just as applications today are people and location aware. The same way Facebook connects you with people and Foursquare connects you with places, Indix can help connect you with products.”

It is a very powerful vision that Indix is running with. They are enabling this by

“..[doing] the hard work of finding, understanding, categorizing, normalizing, matching and, in general, structuring the vast amount of product-related information on the Internet. Our ultimate goal is to provide a view of the Internet through the product lens”.

This is a tough and inspiring challenge for the company, to organize the world’s product information. However, the impact this can have is equally inspiring and this is what is driving the company forward.

Sanjay ran billion dollar businesses at Microsoft, and this one surely is headed in that direction.

Sanjay’s Advice to Startups

To get a billion dollar idea, you need to work on very hard, almost impossible problems. What we are working on at Indix is very hard, and it is inspiring.

Build a strong culture and pour your soul into it. Everyone has a personality, whether writing code, doing design, managing HR – their work should reflect their personality.
Hire great people whom you can trust.
Create a healthy balance between what you think is right (vision and mission) and what customers want; don’t go overboard on one side or the other. We talked to 100 people (not only customers) before we built a line of code, to learn from them. Started coding in Jan 2012, did 7 versions, threw away the first 6. We built for about 6 months (3-4 prototypes), and only then started talking to customers, as guidelines and not as requirements. Only when the product was fleshed out in some detail (alpha release) did we start looking at what customers wanted, and after beta, started taking feature requests.
I don’t believe in Minimum Viable Product (MVP) – critical mass of product is more important, at least in the enterprise space. I had the luxury to do so since I had funding, but it is an important point to think about.
If you build for the US, one of the cofounders must have had significant experience living in the US, or one of the co-founders should move.

04/10/201315/08/2014

Reduce Data – Programmatic Advertising Platform

Reduce Data is a programmatic advertising platform. Reduce Data helps advertisers buy media efficiently using programmatic means – machine learning, real-time data driven optimization and real-time bidding. Asif Ali is the founder of Reduce Data.Asif has over 15 years of technology experience. He previously ran ZestADZ, a mobile ad network (acquired by Komli in 2011). ZestADZ was a global mobile ad network with presence and advertisers in over 25 countries. Before that, Asif was the CTO / Co-founder of a wireless and enterprise startup – Threesixty Technologies Sdn Bhd, in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. ThreeSixty maintained app stores on Carriers, built and rolled out mobile commerce solutions such as prepaid SMS topup solutions and had the top 2 telcos – Maxis, Celcom, Top banks – Public bank and Ministry of Education, Malaysia as its customers. The current team strength I s about 15 with 4 people in US, rest of the team is in India. The team is roughly 40% sales, 40% engineering and 20% operations.

The Company

Reduce Data is an early-stage company offering a programmatic advertising platform. They pivoted recently from being an analytics-focused company to a company that offers an integrated platform for media buying and analytics.

Asif says the idea came about in his last ad network, where he found advertisers unable to effectively measure and optimize ad campaigns across various networks. The scale and size of data that was being generated in advertising was huge and there were very few platforms addressing this scale to drive efficiencies. It is also estimated that nearly 30% of media spends are wasted. Reduce Data was started as an attempt to solve this problem.

Reduce Data is what is called as a Display Advertising Platform. Display Advertising Platforms typically focus on Banner Advertising as opposed to delivering text ads within search results (like the way Google does) – see understanding display advertising for a simple view of the display advertising platform and marketplace.

Any company that needs to buy advertising typically buys media from various platforms (this varies, depending upon their goals). Display advertising is one such kind of platform where media can be bought.

Let’s say if Flipkart wants to buy media to promote its new tablets-only store.

They will sign up with Reduce Data
Either through self-service or with the help of Reduce Data’s team, they will identify and select the right target audience and segment of traffic (for example – Male / Females, aged 25 and above in urban centers only and those who are available within a list of top 10 cities)
Assuming that such audience information is available, Reduce Data’s team will make that available and kick start the campaign.

When a user visits a web page

The publisher (like Times of India) auto requests the ad exchange for an ad
Ad exchange will in turn send this request to Reduce Data and various other buyers to ask them whether they want to buy the user.
Reduce Data, will check whether it has relevant information about the user.
Reduce Data’s machine learning algorithms predict whether the user can be bought and if so at what price.
Assuming that Reduce Data wants to buy the user on Flipkart’s behalf and assuming that this user belongs to the right target audience that Flipkart wants, it will bid and either win or lose the auction.
On a win in the auction, the Flipkart ad is shown to the user.

This automated auction called Real-time Bidding (RTB). This entire process 1,2 and 3 happens in 1/10th of a second.

The Product

Reduce Data provides the best of programmatic and a measurement platform in a single platform to its customers (advertisers and ad agencies). The programmatic ad platform allows them to display ads for their clients on a large number of publishers’ sites, and for the most targeted set of audiences. The measurement platform allows their clients to analyze the impact of their campaigns and make the most efficient utilization of their ad budget. Such an integrated platform allows them to offer a low-cost, integrated solution to its customers.

Some of the features of the platform are:

Programmatic Buying capabilities: Reduce Data is focussed on delivering ROI by leveraging superior programmatic approaches.
Measurement and Programmatic in a single Platform: Advertisers using Reduce Data can leverage Reduce Data’s analytics to measure advertising spends through the same platform they use to purchase ad space.
Rich Media and Video Campaigns: Reduce Data allows video campaigns to be run in addition to other media-rich ad campaigns such as MRAID-compatible (a mobile rich media standard) HTML5 mobile campaigns.
Web and Mobile Advertising: Allows brand advertisers to reach both web and mobile users using a single platform.
Retargeting: Re-targeting enables advertisers to follow the user after a visit to a website. This approach generally enables better conversions and improves ROI for the advertisers.
Audience Segmentation: Reduce Data has partnership with three data providers to enable delivery of highly segmented audiences (available currently for US and UK, more international data providers are being added).
Self Service Console: Reduce Data enables self-service advertising through an easy-to-use, self-service user interface to manage the campaigns and check its effectiveness.

Technology

Core of Reduce Data is a technology platform that participates in Real-Time Bidding as a Demand Side Platform(DSP). Given the fact that the real-time bidding protocol is run across these players for every visit to a site, the turnaround time from a DSP has very stringent requirements. Typically, an Ad exchange expects the response from a DSP within 100 milliseconds; including network latency (turnaround time includes time taken to process the bid request, and time taken for the message to travel from exchange to DSP and back). Hence there are 2 technology challenges they need to solve:

Low response time: The time taken to process the bid request by Reduce Data software has to be very small. Reduce Data currently can process a request in 4-6 milliseconds.
Low network latency: The time taken for roundtrip between Ad Exchange server and Reduce Data server. Hence the location of the servers matter. They have tried to use Amazon Cloud, but aren’t happy with the costs and latencies, and are deploying datacenter infrastructure close to the supply side partners and exchanges.

Differentiators

This is a highly competitive market and many of the features they offer are standard features offered by lots of players. A few features that differentiate them from rest of their competition are:

Measurement Tools: Reduce Data provides an integrated platform which very few players offer. However, integrated doesn’t mean reduced set of features –Reduce Data offers full blown real-time reporting that enables advertisers to effectively measure and optimize their ad spends without having to use a third party platform.
Superior programmatic technology + big data driven optimization
1. Real-time machine learning systems with various algorithms for various needs
2. Big data technology driven real-time data processing / analysis capability which is extensively used in the feedback loop to drive highly optimized ad spends

Market

According to EMarketer’s latest forecast, RTB (Real-time bidding, the programmatic advertising) portion of digital display ad spending is steadily increasing, from 8% in 2011 to 19% in 2013, and projected to be around 29% in 2017 – $8.49 billion – a huge opportunity.

Reduce Data has a dedicated Sales team, and even though they have launched very recently, they see 15-16 leads a week, and all their current clients are paying ones. They expect to reach $2-3M revenue within next 12 months.

Building Credibility

They need to build credibility in the market that is filled with competition. To ensure that brand gets built quickly, Asif has moved to US, and is focused on marketing Reduce Data. Through tech meetups, publishing whitepapers, speaking engagements, getting published in print media, and of course by delivering good value to his clients, he hopes to build Reduce Data into a credible player in this space.

India offering

They recently launched an India offering too. This is a smart move from them because this helps them to position themselves as a big player in this space which has presence in multiple countries. India being an important market, some exchanges like Facebook Ad Exchange, tend to give preference to companies that have India presence when they let DSPs connect.

Future releases of their platform are likely to focus extensively on improving algorithmic and data processing capabilities.

Competitive Landscape

This is a highly competitive market. There are a large number of very well-known DSP in the market: Adroll, Dataxu, Mediamath, Turn, Google (InviteMedia), AppNexus, Komli Media, etc. Since all of them connect to same Ad exchanges (and hence have the same access to ad inventory) and offer similar functionality, it is hard to distinguish between them. Competition is based on pricing and ease-of-use. Such a crowded space with little differentiation will mean that prices will be squeezed and this will impact new players like Reduce Data.

If we do try, we can see 2 areas of competitive differentiation (other than pricing, of course!):

Inventory access: Though all DSPs aim to connect to all Ad Exchanges, some have better access than others. For example, Facebook hasn’t allowed all DSPs to come on their Exchange, and so it might disadvantage a few DSPs. Similarly, some publishers (too specialized, localized, etc.) may be available only some specialized exchange, and not all DSPs may be connected to them.
Effectiveness of data-based decisions: DSPs use data to make the decision about which impression to bid on. Decisions depend on proprietary algorithms, data available about the user and processing power, and this distinguishes different DSPs.

As the space evolves, vertical integration is a possibility – DSPs getting acquired by (or acquire) upstream or downstream players. Such a consolidation is more imminent as RTB grows at a rapid pace and become critical to display advertising.

The Road Ahead

Display Advertising is undergoing significant changes over last few years, with technology creating never-before opportunities for innovation as well as disruption. Demand-Side Platforms have the potential to make media buying and campaign management extremely effective and provide significant ROI to the advertisers. Reduce Data is in a very competitive space with large and well-known competitors. This industry will evolve along 3 dimensions:

Data-driven decisions: One of the promises of DSP is to offer compelling value using deep data analysis. Reduce Data needs to continue to focus on its machine learning and big-data capabilities.
Tools: Brand safety, Measurement, ROI calculators, more variety of algorithms etc. are keys to interest brand marketers to switch to new platforms and Reduce Data will continue to innovate and rollout various tools as per the needs of the marketplace.
Media focus – DSPs tend to focus either on Video, Online or Mobile and that is going to continue for a while. Reduce Data will eventually need to choose a sweet spot for itself in one media.

One of the things going for Reduce Data is the credentials of its founder: Asif has deep experience in the advertising space from his prior company (which he sold to Komli). Another is the fact that they are an engineering driven organization and are focussed evolving the platform faster than the incumbents in the marketplace.

If they execute well on these dimensions and leverage their technology focus and industry connect, they have a real good chance of becoming a force in this fast-evolving space and carve out a name for themselves.

03/10/201315/08/2014

‘From zero to 9 million customers in a decade’ – The Xgen story!

Product Nation interviewed Dr. Ajay Data, Founder and CEO of Data Infosys. In this freewheeling chat, Dr. Ajay discusses his journey of creating a world class product for the masses, and his key focus areas as he built and scaled his organization from scratch. Read on…

Your company, Data Infosys, in a fairly short span of 15 years has managed to emerge as India’s leading ISP as well as the #1 communications product provider. Can you describe how all of this started?

I hail from a business family whose interests were primarily in ceramics and edible oil. Like many other business persons in India, I too involved myself in family business and was well on path to take it to the next level. During 1998, I began to notice the initial signs of Indian government’s intent in allowing Internet usage for its people. Having read about the disruptive nature of internet and its advantages in the west, I always had kept tab on the developments on that front. So, when Satyam, the key ISP at that time issued an advertisement for partnership, I immediately jumped on this and initiated discussions with them.

During the course of discussions with them, it became clear to me that those folks were being very unreasonable in their terms. I did some more background work to examine the feasibility of becoming an Internet Service Provider – and initial evaluation suggested that while the path to do it alone was very difficult, the returns would be lucrative if one did it. Hence, I chose not to partner with them, but instead compete with them. This led to creation of Data Infosys, primarily with the aim to be the Internet Service Provider of choice targeting audience from North India to begin with.

Deciding to foray into a new business, of which you had little knowledge, is extremely risky and outcomes are uncertain. How did you navigate around these challenges in the initial years?

Starting any new business will bring with it its own risks and uncertainties. In my case, I had no knowledge of dealing with servers, hardware, no proper mentor or guide to work on the domain specific aspects. I think I overcame these challenges due to two aspects. The first one – is to get your hands dirty and learn the nuts and bolts of the business yourself. This meant that I learnt how to install a modem at a customer’s place, how to plan, set up and run a call center, how to order, procure and deploy a server, configure a router etc all by myself. Once you got a grasp of the basics of the business activities, it is easier to plan and track the activities.

Secondly, my approach was to plan and execute short set of activities as quickly as possible. I failed many times trying different approaches to meet an end goal. However, since I failed early, every next attempt – I knew what not to do. Both of these helped me develop the required expertise and knowledge of the business very quickly.

While the learning may have been quick and useful, how and when did the actual validation come that your business was in the right direction?

In 1999 I planned to invest about Rs. 40 lakh as the first iteration on the infrastructure to provide ISP services. To test the receptivity of customers, I placed an advertisement in a local news paper about offering our service. The next day, I saw 200 people queued up in front of my office, even when I had not started to execute on my plan. This was good enough indication that I was doing the right thing at the right time. All that was necessary was for us to execute on our plan – and we did it well.

How did the company’s transformation to products happen? What were the key drivers?

The focus on building products got amplified due to market conditions that developed in 2001. Due to increased attention on the ISP business, there was lot more competition in the market – and prices for a new internet connection drastically fell from about Rs. 2700 to Rs. 800 almost overnight. This sharp fall triggered the need to look for ways in which we could retain our customer base and provide them more value. We decided to shift gears and develop an IP based portfolio that would help us sustain and monetize our existing customer base.

It was at this time, we discovered that among our 1 lakh user base, a lot of them were dissatisfied with the email service provided by the ISP. This led us to design and develop Xgen, initially using the LAMP stack. We offered this service to our customer base. The customers provided valuable feedback on various aspects of our product – which we quickly addressed. This ensured that we built this product, ground up based on customer requirements.

The email / communication / collaboration product is not very new to market. Also, there are existing MNC giants in this space who dominate the market. Despite this, how were you able to sustain your product offering and emerge successful?

It is obviously not easy to enter into a mature market. However, to our advantage, we had an initial customer base from our ISP services that we could start with. Their feedback helped in developing the product specific to the unique and unmet needs of the customers that were hitherto ignored by the existing vendors. While there were MNC products already in the market, we were able to execute faster than them to capture the growing base of new customers who got added to the ecosystem. Several differentiating features such as superior processing of data, optimal transmission of data over the wire helped us differentiate from competition.

For example, among our recent wins at India’s leading PSU, the customer wanted to test the ability of all the short-listed vendors to send and receive an email with a 100 MB attachment. We came up trumps and bet the competition hands down all aspects of their evaluation such as speed of handling the traffic and delivery, transmission of data from two separate physical points in least amount of time, bandwidth consumed while transmission etc. So, in summary, our ability to understand the latent communication requirements of our prospective customers, the robustness and scalability of the technical architecture we have built in our product, coupled with superior round the clock support has enabled us to become the leader in this space in our country. I feel proud to state that we have gone from zero to 9 million customers in a span of 10 years for this product!

A quick look at your customers reveals that you have a lot of government departments as your customers. A lot of people find it difficult to work with this sector. Can you share with us how you have succeeded in building such good relations with them?

At the highest level, I do not differentiate between any customers based on the sector. It is my belief that as long as you can deliver value and solve their issues, you can acquire customers in any sector. Talking specifically of the government sector, you need to understand not just the end goal that they are trying to achieve, but the mechanics of getting there – within the framework of the government rules. As with any other sector, the decision makers and the workforce using the product will have their specific challenges. One needs to understand the limitations and propose a solution that alleviates their pain points in a way that is win-win to both the parties. Constant engagement, superior support is two aspects that one needs to focus on while dealing with this sector.

Once you have succeeded in demonstrating your product capabilities and the value to the department, word spreads by itself about our product and service, and a lot more doors will open up. This is how we have managed to build and develop long lasting relationships with the government customers.

On a parting note, what are the key tips that you wish to share with fellow entrepreneurs?

I believe that we have a very big opportunity in India to develop innovative products. Looking back at my initial years, I recollect that I have spent sleepless nights attending to the needs of the business – purely because I was driven by the passion to deliver value to our customers. There have also been times where I had to engage with customers for years before they decided to choose our product. So, I urge all product entrepreneurs to follow their passion, persevere and never give up; do not hesitate to dream big. If you have the conviction and the ground intelligence about the market fitment of your offering, do not look back.

Secondly, do not let recognitions and accolades distract you from achieving better. These recognitions are good in that they are a validation of your success thus far. It helps to motivate you to do better. However, do not rest on these laurels, since a slight digression from your goals might mean you are out of the race.

02/10/201315/08/2014

Q&A with Manufacturing ERP Provider Syscon Solutions

Syscon Solutions was launched in Hyderabad, India in 1996. Its ERP product, Syscon Cronus, is targeted for small and medium manufacturing enterprises. In 2006 it became one of the first ERP solutions to be offered in the SaaS/cloud model. We talked with co-founder and managing director S. Vijay Venkatesh about Syscon’s startup experiences and lessons learned. This article is brought to SandHill readers in partnership with ProductNation.

How did your company originate — what was the original vision?

Vijay Venkatesh: Having worked for 13 years with various midsize manufacturing companies, I thought of starting my own business and started a chemical trading company dealing with pharma and rubber chemicals and representing manufacturers from Tamil Nadu, Mumbai and Gujarat.

When the opportunity came to start Syscon with one of my old colleagues with two developers, I thought it would be something which was of my type. Added to this was the fact that IT was only afforded by big corporates; SMEs could not dream of it.

Our initial idea in 1996 was to develop a customized solution for manufacturing industries. As we started, I observed that we might end up doing the same thing differently for different people. This would leave us with several versions of codes, which might make the maintenance and upgrade impossible. With all the facts, we decided to go in for a product development and tell the customers to use what we have rather than asking them what they want. We shut our marketing department for a while and went for a small loan and working capital. There was no looking back.

Is there a story behind your company name?

Vijay Venkatesh: Syscon stands for “System Consulting” or “System Configuration.”

What are some of the challenges you’ve had that you didn’t anticipate? How did you resolve them?

Vijay Venkatesh: I always used to think, though there is a huge number of SMEs in the market, that the rate of customer acquisition is very slow. But now, instead of blaming the SMEs, I think that it is due to the fact that there are more failures than successes of ERP among SMEs in India.

It is the responsibility of the ERP vendor to bring in all the missing links to address this challenge. I learned that we needed to make our ERP product simple and also train our customers because SMEs are not computer savvy. I also recognized that SME CEOs have so many things to do that they cannot devote time to software product reviews. To address this challenge, we implement only the essential modules to start with and then scale them up step by step.

Please describe one of your company’s lessons learned and where it occurred in the time line of your product development.

Vijay Venkatesh: We have learned several important lessons of being a product company as opposed to an IT services company. First, instead of asking the customer what they want, we learned to tell them to use what we have. Next, we needed to make sure any new requirements made sense for larger target clients and make sure that we take time to bring those features carefully in to the product.

Also we learned that a software product company needs a complete ecosystem including sales, implementation, support and training, coupled with training partners, technology partners, hosting partners and industry associations.

How did you find your first customer? Did it take longer than you anticipated?

Vijay Venkatesh: Everest Organics Limited (EOL) became our first customer in 1999. I met the managing director and told him about our product and vision of being a long-term committed vendor for the SMEs. We gave several rounds of demos for EOL’s core team. After four months they released a purchase order for us.

At that time our product was not fully mature in several functionalities. We have done numerous amounts of customization (almost 60 percent) and made more than 250 visits over nine months for training and implementation. Since there was no Internet in those early days, the data transfer was happening through floppy discs on a daily basis.

The EOL office and factory works online now. We are proud to continue serving EOL today after 14 years!

With our experience of EOL and the product maturity of our ERP solution we are in a position to serve much bigger clients in the pharma segment. Some of the new pharma clients have seven manufacturing units. Our implementation now takes eight to 10 visits over three to four weeks compared to nine months with EOL. We also have started remote implementation for SMEs, which is very cost-effective and easy to manage.

Read the complete interview at Sandhill.com

25/09/201315/08/2014

Keeping Data Theft Prevention Simple & Green!

Zarir M. Karbhari is the Chief Architect of CopyNotify! & Founder of CygNET Systems Pvt. Ltd shares his journey of diversifying a outsourced programming services company into a software product company. The company was founded in 1995 with a focus of offering hi-tech outsourced programming services for companies based all over the world. The company maintained this hi-tech niche by ensuring that most of its projects involved network programming, communication protocols and device driver development for various operating systems.

Decision to diversify to product development — What factors contributed to this?

Based on inherent in house expertise and experience of over 100,000 programming hours in the field of application development, networking, security and communications, a strategic decision was made by CygNET Systems Pvt. Ltd. in 2007 to move up the ‘value’ ecosystem and develop a network security software product which catered to the needs of the small business user which was at that point a perceived need of the hour.

Explain the journey of evolving your core product. What aspects and feedback were important in this process?

Security against data theft of source code was becoming paramount in the outsourced programming industry in India and many nightmarish stories of how data was being copied in an unauthorized manner and without detection via USB flash drives were beginning to surface. So theft via USB became the initial ‘problem to solve ‘. Instead of searching the web for similar
anti data theft products and cloning them, the engineers at CygNET Systems Pvt. Ltd took the route of talking to system administrators & small business owners and created a vision specification for CopyNotify based on their feedback.

The company had identified a problem, spoken in detail to those who were facing the problem and then went on to design a software product to solve the problem. From a simple beginning of just detecting the insertion of USB Flash Drives, the product soon evolved into a full fledged Data Security Software for small office networks.

Can you share details about your products.

CygNET Systems currently has released 3 products.

1. CopyNotify! (Data Protection that went GREEN)

CopyNotify! is an entry level data protection software designed specially for the small business / SOHO networks. The software deploys anti data theft measures for computers on the office network by disabling the copying of data to external USB drives and Smart Phones, blocking internet connectivity via portable modems / data cards as well as restricting browser based uploads of data.

The software monitors user logon activities such as privilege levels, remote logons and invalid logons. Software installs and un-installs on the network are logged as well as rogue devices attempting to access network resources can also be detected.

CopyNotify! goes GREEN in data protection by also offering electricity saving features such as switching off IDLE machines and the auto shutdown of computers after office hours.

2. Insta-LockDown ( Data Protection at a Key Stroke )

The personal edition of CopyNotify! is called Insta-LockDown. It has been designed for single computers / laptops and locks down the copying of data with a simple keystroke combination.

Insta-LockDown restricts the copying of data through various routinely used data channels such as the internet, file attachments, removable USB devices and Bluetooth transfer to smart phones and comes in handy when single PCs are used by multiple users and protection of confidential data is a concern. It also plays a protective role against data theft when administrative privileges are granted to multiple users of the same PC or the admin password has been inadvertently compromised.

3. GreenNotify! (Energy Saver Software)

GreenNotify is an energy conservation software that reduces electricity bills of small businesses by automatically switching off computers that are not being used and shutting down computers automatically after office hours.

Your views on how your offering is differentiated in the market / Competitive advantage you have over others in the same space. Your plan of achieving success in a crowded and mature marketplace.

During this endeavor of developing a security software, CygNET Systems Pvt. Ltd in its strategy never tried to compare or clone its software with those released by its perceived competitors. A data security need had been perceived and the requirement of simplicity of acquisition, cost and expertise for Indian conditions had to be addressed.

In today’s digital world, protection from data theft is crucial and soon will become a ‘must’. However for small business users, the prohibitive acquisition costs of sophisticated Data Loss Prevention software and the level of IT expertise required at times results in data security being ignored all together. Also more often than not, the DLP software is an overkill in terms of ‘cost versus capability’ for small organizations due to non suitability of all available software features.

With CopyNotify! and its affiliated products, data protection software is made as easily available and affordable as a ‘wada pav’. A ‘wada pav’ is a popular spicy fast food native to Maharashtra. It is filling, inexpensive and caters to the masses.

Keeping the analogy of the ‘wada pav’ in mind, CopyNotify! offers data security solutions that brings enterprise level data protection to the average computer user. The software does basic data protection, is inexpensive in acquisition, feasible in implementation and simple enough to accepted by the average business user. CygNET Systems firmly believes that in India unless the use of data security software percolates down to the average user, an acceptable deterrence against data breaches will never be achieved whatever the size of any organization.

Very low cost of acquisition, suitability for Indian conditions and ease of use of the software products developed by CygNET Systems Pvt. Ltd are already paying rich dividends by the way of increase of sales.

Key learning from selling to customers

Feedback is crucial for a good product. Right from its inception, the team behind CopyNotify! have taken the feedback of users in the field, tried to understand the problems they face in a routine day and then design the software to alleviate these problems. This principle of user feedback based feature additions has made CopyNotify! very popular with its existing customers.

Your views on relevance or importance of leveraging channels and partnerships to sell.

It is far too expensive and time consuming for a startup to set up its own channel of resellers / distributors or having its own sales force. Partnering with existing VARs/Distributors/Resellers is best way to proceed as these organizations already have existing sales networks which can used to push the product out to the market.

The biggest difficulty is getting a partner / distributor to sign up with a start up is the ‘curse’ of being an unknown brand as the effort to push non branded product becomes more time consuming and expensive for the partner hence the reluctance to partner with a start up.

Your views on alliances and its benefits/pitfalls.

For any software product, alliances should not be shirked away from, be it technical, financial or by the way of sales and marketing however care should be taken that all is in ‘black and white’ and immense care should be taken that in the hype tornado of ‘promises and assured success’ the best interests of the start up is kept in mind at all times.

Your views on networking with industry colleagues and participation in conferences. The benefits or pitfalls of the same.

Networking is great provided one can get themselves in a group that is one step ahead of one’s current stage of business and can actually help with getting more sales. Networking is about getting the right connections to make more sales and not just about collecting visiting cards.

Your message for product development entrepreneurs for India.

You might have a great software product but unless you know how to tell the world about it, it will never sell. If it does not sell, your idea was of no use in the first place.

23/09/201315/08/2014

India has the potential to create great product companies. The ecosystem is evolving and we are glad to be part of it

Anup Tapadia, CEO, TouchMagix, has revolutionized interactive systems with his innovation. Driven by an aspiration to innovate and deliver great experiences in gesture based interactive display systems, his products have reached numerous brands and consumers since the company’s inception a few years back.

His work has earned him recognition from the likes of Bill Gates, Dr. Abdul Kalam, Dr. Raghunath Mashelkar, R. Balki and Azim Premji who have acknowledged his sheer intelligence and tech driven entrepreneurial spirit. The British Government awarded him the “Global Young Creative Entrepreneur” honor in 2010. In an interview with ProductNation, Tapadia talks about his aspirations in making India an innovation hub and to develop world-class products.

You offer a variety of interactive display solutions. What is the market potential for these products?

At TouchMagix, we are focused on creating next generation interactivity and engagement technology and have created products that use motion, gesture and touch for various applications. We manufacture and supply both technology and equipment that have been creating global standards for giving audiences a lasting impact and brand impressions. TouchMagix has a variety of interactive display products like Interactive Floor, Interactive Wall, Multi-Touch MagixKiosk & Table, MagixFone and rich capabilities to build customized solutions and content.

Customization of content is an aspect which increases the market potential of these products manifold. These applications range from creating engagement and experiences for brands, creating an interactive ambience in hotels and lounges, to marketing initiatives at on-ground activities. This technology is also being used for children entertainment, education and health. Being unique in nature, it enables brands to create conversations with their consumers, thus enabling them to become one with the brand. Over the years, we have penetrated globally across a variety of sectors including real estate, banking and financial sector, education, information technology, pharmaceuticals, healthcare, and hospitality sectors.

Is the market willing to bet on new products?

Today, Indian and global brands are looking at innovative avenues and channels to communicate with their target audience be it customers or internal audience. With brand fatigue becoming a cause of concern for brand managers, interactive products like TouchMagix is an ideal solution. The real USP of our product is in the usability, open SDK interfaces and core tracking technology IP which allows us to track gesture/touch at a higher accuracy level and speed.

How soon was /will be your company feasible in terms of generating revenue? What are your sales projections?

We have been profitable since the first year we started business. More than a million people have engaged/experienced TouchMagix products world wide and the number is growing continually.

Indian IT industry has largely been IT services focused. What has been your experience in building products? What were the challenges faced?

We firmly believe that India has the potential to create great product companies. Our experience in building products based out of India has been quite interesting. Building electronic products is not an easy task in India as it is capital intensive and expensive. A major challenge was to find the right people and retain them for R&D based jobs. The ecosystem is evolving and we are glad to be part of it.

Do you feel the Indian ecosystem is software-product friendly? What is needed to create world-class products?

The eco-system is still evolving and education needs to promote research driven product innovations. Most of us prefer the safer route and hence many end up in starting service based companies.

For a young 24-year old guy to have been honored with the ‘International Young Interactive Entrepreneur Award 2010’ by British Council, and ‘Best Young Entrepreneur Award’ by a business magazine, says a lot about your achievements.

I was drawn to computers when I was just seven. In the subsequent five years I mastered over 15 different computer programming languages. Art and Technology have always intrigued me. When I saw Tom Cruise playing around with large displays in Minority Report, it triggered a series of thoughts in my mind on the possibilities of this kind of technology if brought to reality. This led to launching of TechnoKarma Labs. At TechnoKarma, we undertook many projects in the IT networking space such as creating low-cost firewalls and a low cost wireless mesh router, which enabled Wi-Fi connectivity in IIT Pune’s campus. One of the projects from TechnoKarma Labs was later spun off as TouchMagix.

My passion and perseverance to create a truly Indian product for global markets was the reason for my success.

You have also received appreciation from the likes of Dr. APJ Kalam, Bill Gates, Azim Premji and others. How does it feel to be acknowledged by these eminent people?

It is overwhelming when stalwarts from the industry appreciate your efforts. These endearing comments reinforced my confidence and also encouraged me to keep moving on the path of innovation.

What is the road ahead like for TouchMagix? Where do you see the company going?

While multi-touch technology revolutionized the way we currently perceive and engage with technology, gestures and motion will make user-interface even more immersive and instinctive. The potential of this technology is great today, and we are seeing that with the response for our products globally.

From keyboard and mouse to touch and gesture, the human interaction with devices have evolved in a big way to help people interact in a manner that is appropriate for their lives. In future, we aim to create products and content that would make human interaction with devices more intuitive and enable us to create memorable experiences.

What learning would you like to share with others from what you have learnt?

For emerging entrepreneurs I would suggest it’s essential for one to work at one large corporation and one small start-up to experience and understand the functioning of both setups. I feel India is a land of great opportunities and there is never a better time than now to kick-start new business in a growing economy.

TouchMagix Products

MotionMagix™) converts any floor/wall into an interactive space for educating and engaging users with fun, action and excitement.
MagixTable™ is world’s thinnest 40 point multi-touch plug-n-play surface computer table loaded with rich application suite and easy customization for corporate and entertainment application.
MagixKiosk™ 32″ 1080p HD can be used in 4 different form factors like table, tilted kiosk/workstation, high bar table, or as a standing flat display.
MagixFone™ is Any Display Any Phone interactive technology which gives your audience the ability to control the screen for playing games, answering quizzes, sending social messages and much more using their mobile phone.
MagixFone™ hardware picks-up the call or interprets an SMS which allows the user to use his/her mobiles keypad or voice to interact with the display.

19/09/201315/08/2014

ParaBlu: Store, Sync, Share, Stream, Search

ProductNation interviewed Kameswaran Subramanian, Founder of ParaBlu Systems, which focuses on helping its customers take their business to the cloud. ParaBlu offers cloud storage solution with emphasis on privacy and control.

Learn more about how Kamesh and his team built a world-class product from India.

What was the motivation to start ParaBlu?

I love bringing new products to market. I have been doing that for over a decade now with other MNC’s and startups. ParaBlu is my second startup. I was technical partner of another Switzerland based startup where we developed products for Swiss Banks. The fundamental premise of starting ParaBlu is to start a global company from India.

Digital Privacy and Security is of paramount importance. I have tons of data and tried using many major offerings. But if you dig deep enough, we can realize that all of them have poor-to-none full user privacy. The recent revelation about NSA/Prism is only the tip of the iceberg. We wanted to provide a solution that can be used by enterprises in a manner they deem fit.

How did you zero in on offering Storage as a service to your customers?

The original idea was to provide a simple mechanism for people to seamlessly synchronize data (photos, videos, digital files, folders etc.) across all devices for an individual or family. We were developing the product for consumer market and lot of emphasis has been given on user design and simplicity of usage. We wanted to bring the cloud-storage into individual’s home. Towards end of last year, we saw an opportunity in the enterprise market. After piloting the product with businesses, we quickly realized that there is a market-fit and moved into SaaS model. We are now offering multiple variants of our products.

What is so unique and differentiated in your offering compared to others in the same space?

People think about Google Drive, Microsoft Sky Drive, Apple iCloud or Dropbox when we talk about Cloud Storage. They are public cloud storage and we are fundamentally different from them. For example, if you put a document in Google Drive, Google can read, create derivative works, publicly display and distribute the content. These are not entirely apt for businesses.

We offer private cloud storage to our customers with clear understanding that they own the data. ParaBlu offerings bring you the all familiar cloud storage, sync, share, stream and collaboration facilities with privacy and control that ensures that none of your files, media and assets are lost.

From technology perspective, we have had tons of breakthroughs and some key differentiators are mini-clouds (Cloud within a cloud), content search, end-to-end encryption, etc. We are also coming out with a plug-and-play hardware offering.

Key differentiators, which our customers love, are not from technology 🙂 They love our extremely dedicated-customer support, simple and intuitive design, installation within 60 seconds, lowest total-cost-of-ownership in our space and ability to use a technology product without having to even have an IT admin. The most liked feature for an SME about our offerings is the ability for the management to see the entire company information (Engineering, Planning, Production, Sales, Marketing, etc.) with detailed auditing in a single place from anywhere in the globe.

Can you throw light on the interactions with your initial customers? What have you learnt from them?

A Lot! We spent a lot of time with our customers understanding how their business works. We spoke to 100+ SME’s during our pilot stage. Many of our features were driven by market. We use LEAF – Listen to our customers, Evaluate the idea with other customers, Analyze the results and then convert them into a product Feature.

For Indian businesses, technology is a means of achieving their business productivity. Their major questions are about how the product increases productivity, impact on bottom line and ROI. If a product genuinely solves their pain point, then they are ready to accept an IT solution. There is a dearth of high-quality cost-effective solutions for the SME sector in India. That is both a market opportunity and a saddening fact that mainly “service” and “outsourced” companies crowd Indian technology space.

Some examples of our learning:

Many SME’s operate on low bandwidth Internet connection and we had to go-back and optimize data-transfer and network usage for them.
Businesses don’t care if we use 128-bit or 256-bit encryption. They trust us to take care of their digital security. There is a huge onus on us!
Customer support is extremely important. It doesn’t matter what your contract or SLA says – they need to speak to someone who can answer their questions, anytime of the day.
What is obvious to engineers need not be obvious to users. Understanding customers’ psyche and working pattern is important. We ran usability sessions to make our product features easier to use.
Customers found use cases for our product. We would have never thought about it!

Indian SME customers are known to be averse to embracing cloud-based solutions. They also harbor doubts about security of any offering, which is outside their organization. How have you dealt with these perceptions?

It is true that a large section of this segment is currently skeptical about working with something that is outside their physical organizational boundaries. However, I see that there is a rapid reversal of this tendency. This has primarily been due to the adoption of cloud by some early movers in the same clusters. As the fence sitting potential customer listens and understands the value and the precautions taken to safeguard the privacy and security of their data through another colleague who has embraced our solution – the acceptance levels increase.

Our offering actually provides more security to business – since its architecture was built keeping the retail consumers in mind. When you think of devising a solution that any end user could use, naturally you would place more emphasis on the access privileges, backup options, and data storage and synchronization aspects. Most of our customers are via referrals from other customers and it has become easier. For extremely paranoid customers or where there are specific requirements, we also offer on-premise installation of our server.

How helpful has the channels route been to work with your customers?

Working with channel partners is a new experience. If you can ensure that entry barriers to use your offering are minimal – such that value can be shown in minutes, and if the post deployment maintenance is negligible – both these factors form a very compelling value proposition for any channel partner to sell your offering.

We are also looking for new channel partners for expanding our product reach.

I notice that you have leading industry veterans as your mentors. Can you describe how having them on board has benefited you?

They have been of invaluable source of strength, inspiration and support. Nagendra Satyan has tremendous experience in growing enterprises and has done it successfully across many companies including EMC²India. Anand Prahlad is currently MD of McAfee India and has experience of taking a startup to an IPO in US. Startup is like a maze and it is very helpful to have people who have done it before. It is necessary to bounce ideas off somebody. They have played a crucial part in multiple aspects – from refining the product, helping in acquiring pilot customers, industry connect, and so on.

I would recommend that all budding entrepreneurs, specially the first time entrepreneurs to have experienced mentors on board.

What are the three takeaways that you would provide for your fellow product entrepreneurs operating out of India?

First, get your family’s buy-in prior to venturing into product development space, especially when you operate out of India. Running a startup is like having a kid. There are no off-days or even off-hours. Everything else will take a back seat. Startups are not easy and are NOT for everyone.

Be very passionate about the idea. Startups do not succeed over-night. There will be too many distractions that will come your way and there will be times where it will be easier to give up and get back to work with an MNC. It takes passion to keep going.

Finally, like I stated earlier, get advisors and mentors early on. They will act as a rudder to your ship and will help you navigate the ship in case you land in chopping waters.

06/09/201315/08/2014

PromptCloud is a powerful cloud-computing DaaS (Data as a Service) engine involved in ‘Big’ data acquisition

PromptCloud is a powerful cloud-computing DaaS (Data as a Service) engine involved in ‘Big’ data acquisition. PromptCloud crawls data that’s spread all across the web and converts it into meaningful insights. It was founded by Prashant Kumar. Before starting PromptCloud in late 2009, Prashant was at Yahoo! with their data team working on Yahoo! Frontpage which was one of its hottest products back then. He was mostly involved in data crunching using big data technologies that were still evolving. Prashant graduated with a B.Tech-M.Tech dual degree in CS from IIT Kanpur in 2007. He was later joined by Arpan Jha in 2012, who is a Carnegie Mellon alumnus and took over the Products & Market Strategy function. Prior to joining PromptCloud, Arpan has worked as a Consultant with KPMG & Deloitte.

Introduction

Let’s consider a scenario: say pn.ispirt.in decides to launch a section on the website where they rank all “Made in India” products based on popularity, usage, quality, and some other criteria. One approach is for them to go out and subscribe to the news feed of all important news sites all over the world and try to track all the news and events about all ‘Made in India’ products. This data can then be used to rank them. Given that data about popularity, usage and quality can be generated all over the web (a product review here, a customer complaint there, a Facebook mention, a tweet, a youtube video gone viral, a buyer praising the product on his blog, you get the idea), such a list of websites will be incomplete at best, and the volume of data will be too much to handle for the ProductNation editors.

Enter PromptCloud. PromptCloud offers its Data-as-a-Service for clients like ProductNation who need large volume of data from all over the web for further analysis (this is just one of the use cases, PromptCloud offer many more services). Continuing with the same example, ProductNation and PromptCloud work through following steps:

ProductNation provides 2 pieces of information to PromptCloud: a list of websites they are interested in, and a list of keywords they are interested in
They will also mention how frequent they want the data to be crawled which is dependent on ProductNation’s estimate of how fast their data is likely to change. If they need fresh data (say every few minutes), they purchase PromptCloud’s ‘Low-latency Crawl’ service
PromptCloud will crawl all the data, matching keywords to find relevant content, and then convert it into structured data (XML, CSV, XLS, etc.) for ProductNation’s consumption
ProductNation can do 2 things with the data
1. It can fetch all the data through API calls and download them into its own servers for further processing. This will be done at a regular schedule, agreed with PromptCloud
2. ProductNation may not want (or may not have capability) to host all this data. So they buy PromptCloud’s Hosted Indexing Service and they can now let their editors search this index and only fetch relevant content.
3. When ProductNation gets the data, they are also provided a relevance score for each data item (as judged by PromptCloud’s algorithm) so that they can optimize their analysis efforts and keep their results very relevant.

If Internet was small, say 1000 sites, this would be a trivial problem to solve – just get all the data and be done with it. Scale of Internet (and the rate at which data is growing) makes this a complex problem to solve. This is a technology problem which needs to solve 4 critical issues:

Velocity: How fast and how quickly can data be fetched?
Structure: How can the data be structured meaningfully when data on the web is largely unstructured?
Volume: How much data can be stored and processed efficiently?
Relevancy: How relevant the data is to the keywords supplied, and to the overall intent of this data crawl?

PromptCloud is a technology company which aims to address all these issues and offer services to businesses who need to analyze web data at scale.

The PromptCloud Service

Offerings

PromptCloud offers services built on top of their cloud-computing DaaS (Data as a Service) engine. They offer custom crawl services to their clients. Specifically, following offerings are available:

Their three primary offerings are:

Site-specific crawl and extraction: Given a set of sites and fields to be extracted, their crawlers will fetch relevant data from the web, which then gets converted into structured data and delivered to the clients via API
Low-latency Crawls: These are highly optimized crawls which can fetch data in intervals as low as 5-10 minutes
Hosted Indexing: Structured data created from custom crawls is hosted and indexed and exposed to clients via query APIs.

PromptCloud Service Offerings

Features

They offer following features as part of their services:

Deep data crawls- all past data on the site
Structured data feeds are available to the clients daily/weekly/n times a day
Ability to supply only incremental data
Crawling data from AJAX/non-AJAX based sites
Indexing of data as per requirements
Custom Analytics

Their technology stack uses a lot of open source solutions right from Linux, Hadoop and NoSQL to various cloud and cluster management tools. These are augmented with custom components they have written to solve their unique challenges and serve their customer needs better. They serve data to their clients via API which can later be synced to their FTP, AWS S3, Google Drive or DropBox accounts.

Differentiators

Offering web-scale crawling services is a hot space and there are many competitors with similar services. When looking at their differentiators, 3 things stand out:

Vertical-Agnostic: Their offerings are based on URLs and the keywords they use to filter the results of their crawl, so they are independent of verticals, and can cater to a large number of verticals. This also helps them quick turnaround on new features which then become available to all their clients.
End-to-end Monitoring – Web sites regularly have dynamic content on their pages, and things can change pretty quickly. While most other providers offer a do-it-yourself solution (essentially making you solve this problem), PromptCloud monitors structure changes on the web and supports clients until data gets imported into their systems.
Large-scale complex crawls – Managing large-scale crawls is one of PromptCloud’s USPs. AJAX elements on the web sites make the pages unique and dynamic. PromptCloud’s platform can crawl pages that use AJAX and interactions very well.

Market

Being a technology-centric company, CTO or Product guys on client side are the decision-makers and buyers for their product. Their adoption has been good so far, catering to clients in US, UK, Canada, Western Europe, Singapore, Hong Kong etc. Being a vertical agnostic solution, they have clients from all domains be it e-commerce, travel, market research or classifieds and across the globe. They are an early growth stage company and are growing at the rate of 4X in revenues each quarter, with healthy pipeline of clients.

Since they offer custom services, their pricing varies a lot – it could be anywhere from $200 to $10K a month for a given customer. Pricing depends on what types of services are being consumed, as well as on crawl frequency, data volume, value added services, etc. Users can control the price by setting limits to data that they fetch in a month. They also can do some sampling of data to get a sense of pricing run rate, before committing to the crawl.

Currently, most of their marketing and sales happen through referrals. As they go forward, brand-building is going to be key marketing strategy and they are investing in that right now.

They are looking to address a larger market and to expand their offerings across more and more geographies. Scale is the #1 imperative for them right now. The aim is to build a brand around their solution and increase the loyal customer base.

Future releases will focus on following themes:

Make data richer by applying AI and Machine Learning
Offer standardized data sets in some verticals

Competitive Landscape

Web Crawling services is a space that is hot and has many players. There is 80Legs (any guesses why they are called so?) which offers a programmable platform for custom data crawling, and there is Grepsr that offers its services to individuals, and there are a lot of them in between – Fetch, Mozenda, Spinn3r (blog, news and social media crawling), and of course an open source web crawler (Apache Nutch).

These products vary along 2 dimensions (and hence they should be visualized in a 2×2 box)

Horizontal (Platform) or Vertical (Business Solutions)
Level of programming required to achieve business value

#1 is obvious, let’s talk about #2. Level of programming required to get value depends on the interface that is exposed by these services and who does it appeal to the most. Most of the consumers of data are business people; however, most of these offerings are technical enough that business teams need to work through their technical teams to get value (one reason why PromptCloud sells to Product guys rather than business guys). It is hard (though possible) to have a platform offering and still provide an interface consumable by business teams (because business value will be generated only when platform outcome is processed using vertical business rules which is hard to do without some amount of programming).

PromptCloud is a horizontal (platform) offering that requires a little programming to get it integrated with business flows of the client. For them, this positioning makes sense for 2 reasons:

Revenue Spread: Horizontal increases addressable market because all verticals can be targeted. However, this also means that value provided per client is less and hence revenue per client is going to be less while number of clients might be large. At this stage of their company, this is a better revenue mix (since it exposes them to a large number of clients).
Cost of Innovation: Vertical requires more business focus and hence innovations that are specific to a vertical may not be applicable to another vertical, while horizontal means every innovation benefits every customer. This makes innovating for every client a costly affair when focusing on a vertical.

However, it is important for them to make sure they are moving continuously along the spectrum of offering vertical solutions (without compromising on their innovation abilities) and offering business-consumable interfaces.

The Road Ahead

The road ahead for PromptCloud is tough but inspiring. They are in a space that will require much more services in future as data continues to proliferate, data-driven insights become the order of the day, and web data continues to become more unstructured. They have a good set of offering and a good list of clients to work with. However, they do face some challenges:

They need to gain more visibility in existing and newer geographies; building their brand is going to be key.
They need to add more products to their bouquet of offerings
To maintain their technology edge, they need to continue to build the team even through the shortage of trained professionals in this area.

They also need to figure out where they want to put themselves on Horizontal-Vertical axis, we feel that they need to move towards offering vertical-focused solutions, in addition to maintaining a horizontal data platform. PromptCloud (and most of its competitors) offers a technology product to business teams to do their data analysis well (and hence business teams need to involve their technology teams to consume PromptCloud services). We feel that a way forward for PromptCloud will be to become a business product that the business people can consume directly and come to build critical business on. They platform approach (vertical-agnosticity) is a good foundation on which such a business product can be built.

They have the right trajectory of growth, and good momentum and team to continue to push and become a name to reckon with in this space.

03/09/201303/09/2013

Interviewstreet’s Role in Recruiting Software Developers

Launched in 2009, Interviewstreet’s recruiting tool helps companies hire software programmers. It was the first Indian company to be chosen for an incubation program at Y Combinator, a Silicon Valley seed fund. Co-founder Vivek Ravisankar discusses the company’s journey to a differentiating recruitment product. This article is brought to SandHill readers in partnership with ProductNation.

Please give me the elevator speech about what your company does.

Vivek Ravisankar: We are on a mission to connect great talent with great opportunities in the fastest, efficient and the most fun way. We use coding challenges and contests to help companies hire programmers. Our product is used by startups (Drchrono, Matterport, etc.), fast-growing companies (Palantir, Evernote, Box, Quora, etc.) and large companies like Amazon, Facebook, Walmart, etc.

Is the contest aspect what differentiates your product in the recruiting marketplace?

Vivek Ravisankar: There are a lot of testing platforms on the Web, but most of them focus on testing through multiple-choice questions, poor programming questions or good programming questions with no customization to the hiring company.

We worked around these parameters to build the best platform to screen programmers. It includes theoretical and real-world coding challenges that are customizable as much as possible by every customer to match their bar. Performance is measured on both speed and accuracy.

Has the tool made a difference in your own company’s recruiting? What challenges have you encountered as a startup that you didn’t anticipate?

Vivek Ravisankar: I didn’t anticipate that hiring people would be so tough. A good guy has at least three companies competing for him. It takes a lot of convincing and a lot of people talking to get the person on board.

If you could go back and start your company all over again, what would you do differently the second time around?

Vivek Ravisankar: I would fail fast. We took a long time to figure out that our first product (mock interviews) wasn’t working well.

Please describe one of your company’s lessons learned and how it affected your product development.

Vivek Ravisankar: We learned to test the app thoroughly before we make a major production push. It’s very easy to get hooked into the “move fast, break things” model, but it may not work if you are in the enterprise business. Your product is being used by large enterprises and any change breaks their process and flow, which is hugely unproductive for them.

This was a big learning when we almost screwed up a good relationship with a customer because of a component that broke. Since then, we have constant tests that run in the background testing every part of the application to ensure nothing breaks.

Read the complete story at Sandhill.com

28/08/201306/09/2013

Protect your Enterprise Network from infected BYODs – A disruptive product from i7 Networks

Manjunath Gowda (Manju), CEO if i7 Networks, shares his experiences of starting up a products based company, ground up from India. In this freewheeling chat, he discusses on various topics ranging from branding the products, managing investor relationships to seeking IP protection for products offered in a niche, evolving marketplace. Read on…

What was the motivation for you to start i7, a product based company?

The decision to start i7 actually was spurred due to a comment from a CEO of a multinational company. While in discussion with him in the valley, he seemed to indicate we folks from India would never be able to run a product company successfully out of India specifically in networking. While his comment pricked me instantly, I took time to objectively reflect on his observations. After analysis, it occurred to me that I could prove him wrong – since I figured out that we had all ingredients to build one and sustain it too. Besides this, I had just then successfully sold off my previous venture. I was looking at doing something more exciting. All of these converged, and so i7 Networks came to be.

You have chosen to build products in the Internet security space, and specifically addressing the BYOD challenges. Can you explain the reasons behind choosing this segment?

First, the Internet security space is the most volatile and evolving area that businesses need to deal with. Hence there is lot of opportunity to offer disruptive products and services, to meet diverse security needs of enterprise customers. The emerging challenge these days is due to change in the nature of threats. Earlier, most products and solutions were geared towards dealing with threats emanating from sources external to the enterprise. Now, enterprises are grappling with the damage that could be potentially caused due to the internal threats – ones that emerge from within the organization. BYOD is an easy entry point that could cause this. So, we chose to focus on providing products and solutions addressing this area.

How do you differentiate your offering with other players in your field? What are your strategies to achieve competitive advantage?

Our product is disruptive in the segment. Traditional vendors and competition is focused on deploying an agent on to every device that needs to connect to the network in order to discover and manage security threats. We have completely inverted this proposition – and are offering a purely agent-less and zero latency based solution. This means that users won’t in any way be disturbed as they connect their devices to the network and work. The IT policies in enterprises are increasingly being influenced by end users in the company these days. We plan to effectively leverage this shift in the decision making patterns of the IT companies and use it to our advantage.

Since you are offering an unconventional product, what steps are you taking to market your product, so that it is viewed favorably by prospective customers?

The folks in the line of business readily can see the benefits and advantages that our product brings to the table. However, to ensure that we have buy-in from all stakeholders in the enterprise, it is important to make them aware of our product and our strengths. Hence, brand building has become an important activity for us. We do it by positioning ourselves as the thought leaders in the BYOD security space. We are active on all the related forums on BYOD security; we publish and provide insights on BYOD security regularly in leading worldwide magazines, blogs. We are present in all leading conferences on this topic. These have helped us to gain visibility to a large extent. We are seeing some early successes. You should note also that we have not spent much by taking this course to market our product.

Second, recent developments in the world, especially the programs like PRISM from the US government have actually helped us open up new markets and opportunities. A lot of developing countries are now seriously considering evaluating indigenous security solutions rather than depending on MNC based vendors. This is one development which we plan to leverage effectively. In this regard, we are coming up with an alliance of likeminded security solution providers from the developing economies. We intend to form a common forum and through it, we want to engage with governments of emerging countries.

I would imagine that channels are an important aspect of you reaching out to the market. What has been your key learning, working with them?

Dealing with channel partners who operate in services space is entirely different on how one would work with channel partners in the products space. Having come out fresh from selling my services venture, I had a lot to unlearn in this aspect, and learn new ways of dealing with products selling channel partners. In the products space, the channel partners will listen to you only if you can help them solve today’s problems, or if you can solve a real need in the market that has not yet yielded satisfactory outcomes. As always, relationship and transparency builds in trust – and so, we have been able to rope in credible channel partners in East Asia, Europe and US.

I notice that you have repeat investors, even when the nature of your current company is vastly different from your earlier one. In this context, I would like to know what it takes for one to build sustainable relationships with your investors.

I guess being honest and being punctual with my investors helped me a lot. I respect human relationship without expecting anything from them.So, when I need anything it becomes easy to ask something. This is what I think has led to sustained faith being imposed by my investors on my ventures and plans.

You have taken steps to protect your IP by filing patents. Tell us your experiences as you filed your first patent?

I was completely naïve on the aspect of IP for my product. However, when I visited my friends in the Bay Area and discussed my product and its features with them, all of them educated me on the value of protecting my IP, especially given the disruptive nature of the offering. They forced me to file for a patent ASAP. Having done that, and after spending more time with them understanding the nuances and benefits of filing patents, I realize the merits of doing so. I would urge all product entrepreneurs to consider this seriously, especially when your product idea is in a niche, underdeveloped marketplace.

You have used media/PR effectively in both of your ventures. What tips do you have for product entrepreneurs in India regarding these activities?

In India, we tend to focus a lot on engineering/product development aspects, at the expense of other key and important aspects such as positioning and selling your products. One should realize that marketing your product is of paramount importance. Media and other online mechanisms such as blogs, online magazines etc are a great way to reach a wider set of audience. The key thing is to not do these activities in spurts, but as a regular habit. Results from these activities cannot be achieved overnight – it takes time, and a lot of hard work, patience and perseverance. You need to establish yourself as the go to person in the area of the product / offering. You also have to be honest and genuine in your views and opinions. This is how you can build credibility. In summary, never take your foot off the marketing pedal is what I would say.