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Earning a rupee in India is more difficult than earning a dollar in US! – Kumar Vembu, Founder and CEO, GoFrugal Technologies

ProductNation interviewed Kumar Vembu, Founder and CEO of GoFrugal Technologies. In a candid conversation, Kumar shares his experiences of dealing with Indian retail market and shares key mantras for succeeding in the Indian market. Read on…

Could you explain the rationale behind venturing into the Indian retail space through GoFrugal?

I started GoFrugal during the late 2004, inspired by the thought of solving problems local to India. At that time, my brothers and I were doing well with our other entrepreneurial venture – Zoho. We were primarily focusing on selling to US and European markets. However, an interview that I watched on NDTV with Bill Gates and Narayana Murthy, seeded my initial thoughts to focus on solving India-centric problems, specifically in the area of retail sector.

I distinctly remember Bill Gates lamenting about entrepreneurs not focusing on solving locally relevant problems. Having studied and worked at IIT Madras under Prof. Ashok Jhunjunwala and Prof. Bhaskar Ramamurthy, I thought that I had the right skills and expertise to delve into one of the most promising areas in the Indian market. This was my inspiration behind starting GoFrugal Technologies.

Interesting! What were the initial challenges you faced as you were setting up GoFrugal? What did you learn from them?

In the initial days of GoFrugal, I was quick to realize that I had not done adequate research in understanding the market dynamics. I probably got carried away by the size of the oppurtunity at initial iterations. I was of the opinion that if there was a good product that I could provide to retail customers, they would buy it. However, I soon discovered that many retailers had very little time or interest to evaluate my offerings, and even for those who had the time, they were unable to judge the value of the offering. I realized that most retailers made their buying decisions based on prior relationships or through references. Hence, I had to make drastic changes in plans to take into account these market realities.

I learnt that retail practices in India are different for every 100 kilometers, primarily because there are different clusters/communities that conduct businesses in very different ways, especially in terms of procuring and running their retail outlets. I also discovered that retailers were not open to adapt industry-wide best practices. They were more comfortable to consider automating their existing processes, even when we told them about better ways to manage those activities. All these early experiences led me to quickly reconfigure the entire process and goals at GoFrugal.

These are very vital insights. What factors do you think gave rise to this kind of buying/evaluating behavior in the Indian retailer? What are your ideas to improve the environment?

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I can think of few key reasons that, in my view, caused such changes in thought process in the Indian ecosystem. Firstly, most of the retail entrepreneurs were self made, were forced into this business due to external factors and possibly did not have any formal training. Hence, they had their own view of how to run their operations. Most retailers did not see, that focusing on best practices could be a competitive advantage. Usually, you would find them thinking for short term.

Secondly, for those people who understood the relevance of differentiation, I found that they did not trust the software solution vendors. This is because many vendors could not profitably serve the demands of the customer due to lack of ecosystem and encouragement from the Indian market. Also, vendor refusal to address customization requests from customers, left the latter in a fix.

To tackle these two key issues, I think that market awareness and education is required. The high entry-barrier for software vendors approaching customers should effectively be lowered by creating bridges of trust and relationship. Apart from this, we also need to make the retailers understand the need to upgrade, in order to effectively tackle the onslaught of globalization.

Could you explain what specific interventions you did to enable GoFrugal to emerge as one of the leaders in this space, overcoming the challenges that you outlined earlier?

At GoFrugal, when we started, I was planning for a hyper growth strategy – driven by large-scale customer acquisition plans. However, when we understood the intricacies of market, we pivoted and expanded at a much slower pace than what was initially planned, but with more and more happier and repeat customers. Our current focus is to provide continuous improvements to our offerings on an iterative basis to ensure customer delight and retention. We also have standardized all of our internal processes across product licensing, support, development practices etc. This has helped us move forward and absorb such marketplace changes as in technology and customer expectations.

There was also a particular focus to make all functional teams agile, to be able to take inputs and change processes very swiftly to meet the external changes. This also meant that most of the existing team had to be trained in these new processes. I hired a lot of new talent who helped in leading this transformation internally.

Apart from these internal alignments, I also saw that the external environment was in favor of companies such as ours. I now see signs that the market is looking for more credible vendors, and that customers are warming up to the concept that the best products would win and are worthy of use. With more clarity on regulations from the Government, many opportunities will open up for vendors such as ours. Overall, due to the actions we have taken over the past decade, and the emerging external environment, we seem to be in a very good position to leverage the upside and do well.

Thank you for these insights. As a parting question, what message would you like to provide to tech entrepreneurs who focus on India as a market?

I can recollect a few aspects that every entrepreneur should not forget as s/he builds their enterprise. The most pivotal input is never to be complacent on any aspect of your business. Complacency is your worst enemy. What you have now will never be good enough for tomorrow – and hence always think of ways in which improvements could be made to your business. Next one is to focus on hiring quality people, especially if you are in the retailers’ growth/scaling out stage. This is absolutely crucial for the success of your company.

Lastly, on the market side, realize that adoption of IT based solution is very slow in the Indian market. Be prepared for a long haul. Do not have excess fat in any functional area of your enterprise. Always remember that earning a rupee is more difficult than earning a dollar!

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Sanket – A disruptive health/wellness product to monitor health ailments

Sanket – a revolutionary product in the healthcare/wellness space is the brainchild of Agatsa, a Noida based product and Solutions Company. ProductNation interviewed Rahul, co-founder of Agatsa to understand the product and their plans to make it available to the masses. Read on…2_listentoyour heart_jpg

What was the motivation to start Agatsa?

My wife Neha (Co-Founder) and I started Agatsa back in 2010. When we started, our aim was to exploit the opportunity of providing innovative solutions to worldwide customers on the mobile/web/internet platform. We leveraged our expertise in working with mobile devices and built custom solutions and applications to clients in different sectors such as healthcare, education and social networking.

However, from the past year, we have pivoted, and reoriented ourselves as a product company in the healthcare space. All our current efforts are focused towards these aspects now.

How did this shift in direction of the company come about? What idea propelled you to think about this product?

The idea for the product came about as a result of personal experience of having to deal with heart related ailments in my extended family, and a lot of deep thinking about how these could be prevented. These days, we have compact and easy to use devices to monitor and keep a tab on few diseases such as diabetes, blood pressure etc. However, when it comes to detecting symptoms of heart related ailments, it usually involves a detailed diagnostic procedure at one of the labs. If one digs deeper, it comes out that most of the heart attacks could have been prevented, had there been proper and early diagnosis of the symptoms.

This led us to conceptualize and prototype a device that is smaller-then-a-credit-card sized pocket card device which can be carried along as a card in the pocket. This device would enable monitoring the vital stats of the functioning of the heart. We have named it ‘Sanket’, to reflect the signalling capability any potential ailments in the functioning of the heart.

Agatsa

 

Can you provide a few more specific details about the device – Sanket? How would one use it and what benefits would one get?

Sanket is the name of our product range that includes health monitoring, wellness devices. The very first product in Sanket portfolio is possibly the world’s smallest Pocket ECG card that can read and interpret ECG. It’s even smaller than a credit card !

There are at least three ways in which one would benefit by using this product. Firstly, Sanket simplifies the process of getting an ECG done. In the current practice, one needs to travel to a diagnostic centre, wait for his/her turn and get the ECG conducted at the lab, place gel and electrodes at numerous places on body. Using Sanket, one can do the same at the location of their choice, and without any external dependency or help. This greatly reduces the time and effort spent by the individual without the use of any gel or electrode. Moreover, Sanket records all the ECG data measurements of the individual, couples itself with mobile through Bluetooth and smartphone app and transmits this data to a central cloud server. A cohort analysis is performed on the cloud server, and data is benchmarked against reference standard readings and physician recommendations for that individual. The individual gets regular ECG reports/statements based on a predefined schedule.

Secondly, Sanket can provide early warning of abnormalities discovered as and when an ECG is measured by this device. As soon as the ECG measurements are taken from the individual, if there are any deviations observed in the ECG, immediately, the device will raise an alarm and has possibility of connecting live with doctors in case of emergencies, for quick consultation and advice.

Thirdly, due to the built in danger level indicator, if the ECG recording of the individual indicates an emergency situation, such as initial few moments of a heart attack, it starts an audible beep to alert the user to quickly get to a doctor. It can be improvised sends an SOS alert to the registered health provider and nominated family members about the situation of the user.

So, in summary, Sanket provides a revolutionary, easy to use alternative to traditional ways of getting ECG done. One can use smart mobile apps to display, record and interpret ECG waveforms. Due to its sophisticated circuitry and patent pending technology, Sanket can capture the electric heart signals of a user, with the same amount of accuracy as a traditional ECG recording setup. A user can monitor the trends of his/her heart condition due to the analytics and cloud based data storage. Most importantly, Sanket can reduce the fatalities by alarming or sending SOS alerts to concerned people in case of irregular or emergency situations.

This seems to be a very disruptive sort of an offering. How are you ensuring that you protect your IP, and ensure you have competitive edge over others who may copy you once this device is out in the market?

We realize that this sort of offering is very disruptive in the marketplace. Hence, we have proactively worked on protecting our IP. We already have filed for over 6 patents on the different unique aspects of the device, which are in various stages of processing. With this, we are confident that our IP would be protected. In terms of dealing with competition once this product is out, we think that there is not much one can do to curtail or stop imitation – especially when a solution is this effective. Hence our approach is to stay ahead in the thought leadership and sustain our early mover advantage by introducing similar new products/variants to the market. Of course, one needs to execute well on their plan as well to maintain this edge.

Have there been guides/mentors for you on this endeavour? Who have helped you in this path thus far?

We have been fortunate to get a few people who have greatly helped us to be where we are as on day. Rohan Sehgal and Arvind Jha from Gurgaon Angels not only seed funded our initiative but have also been a great source of strength, motivation and mentoring.

How much has your background helped you in this endeavour?

I have a background of over a decade of professional working experience, working in companies such as LG, Samsung and ST Microelectronics. This experience has helped me in drawing out the technical specs of the device – both in terms of hardware, firmware and software.

Neha, the second Co-Founder has been working earlier with Hewitt, CSC and has expertise in QA and  Software development. She has experience in handling large scale projects which are product oriented. This helped us in managing various stages of product development and troubleshooting  day to day issues/problems in developing a world-class electronic device in India.She is also a key part in designing the core strategy of product development and planning the much needed rigorous clinical trials.

What sort of initial traction and interest have you received from the market?

Even though we are in an early beta cycle, and trials with a select set of users, we have received huge interest from various players in the ecosystem. Firstly, we are very excited because we have received positive feedback from the initial set of users. Then, there are a few device manufacturers interested to collaborate with us to enable us scale. We are also in advanced stage of discussions with a global semiconductor giant to explore a joint go-to-market strategy which would allow us to scale and make the device available across the globe. So, in all, we have been overwhelmed by the initial traction that our device has received from the interested communities.

We are on track to make the product available in India by early next year, and are looking forward to make a disruptive change in this space!

ProductNation joins them in wishing more successes as ‘Team Agatsa’ moves ahead with the formal launch of Sanket.

 

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The Emergence of a Product Nation

In the last ten years, IBM, perhaps the world’s most iconic maker of the personal computer did two things that made people sit up and take notice. First, in 2004, it sold its PC division to China-based Lenovo Group in a deal valued at $1.75 billion. Then, around nine years later, it sold Daksh, its voice-based BPO to Synnex Corp. Both sales had one glaring similarity: They both involved flogging commoditized businesses with increasingly low margins and a questionable future.

growth_rateToday, both the computer hardware business as well as the voice-based BPO business is in peril. Computer sales have flattened while smartphones and tablets are experiencing scorching growth rates in excess of 150% in Asia. Meanwhile, the BPO business continues to face the twin challenge of rising costs in India and new, competitive destinations like the Philippines who continue to place more downward pressure on prices for voice services.

IBM’s experience is a crucial one to internalize, as the kind of upheaval that has taken place in the PC industry and the BPO one is going to inevitably rock the foundations of yet another which leverages cheaper labour as its core competitive advantage—namely, software services. The one harbinger of this change: The rise of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), also known as ‘the cloud’ that has revolutionized how we use software today.

Much like India churned out world-class software services firms in the 1990s and 2000s, it is already proving to be a major generator of globally competitive SaaS companies across all spheres—in the enterprise space, the B2C arena as well as those targeting SMBs. These are companies with small teams and unique products sold under their own brand—strikingly dissimilar from their IT services predecessors that have dominated the technology space so far.

In other words, these are companies that have climbed up the value chain where their core offerings are not so easily disrupted by a cheaper wage rate. Here, the elegance of the product, the stability and novelty of its solution and, most importantly, the unvarnished benefit that allows the customer to become infinitely more efficient for as little a cost as possible through enterprise software is what is making this revolution a reality. And India, with its legions of technology graduates, a vibrant app developer community and a coterie of battle-hardened entrepreneurs is pushing the envelope even further. Suddenly, a 40-member team can churn out a platform or a service that can compete on the global stage with the likes of an Oracle or an IBM.

This is a brave new world for buying and selling things. For one thing, the internet has become a dominant channel used to either sell products or attract and engage new customers. This means that marketers need to widen their net through plug-and-play IT solutions that are at their fingertips rather than waiting for their IT department to weigh in. They now have to deal with new ways of managing customer relationships, orchestrating cross channel marketing, and implementing digital advertising

Then, there is the aspect of nimbleness. Winners and losers today are determined by solutions that have as quick a time to market as possible, with unlimited scalability and access to reports on the mobile. Enabling this imperative are sophisticated tools to mine and analyze volumes of data arising from these activities to improve decision-making. Therefore, embedding technology in every business process is more than just an effort to stay competitive—it’s a basic survival ploy that allows for faster turnaround, better customer service and improved monitoring of the health of the organization.

pay_asTill now, though, being able to do all of this meant heavy in-house customization and up-front capex spends. The ‘pay as you’ go and ‘rent versus buy’ approach of SaaS has upended that reliance on customization, making even the most complex operations available on the net and easily integrated with other tools and apps for a fraction of the price. A company can now also try as many tools as possible rather than be handcuffed to a single one.

In a product revolution sweeping the country unlike no other, the makers of many of the world’s most innovative products are right here in India. Whether it is the collaboration space, enterprise applications or business intelligence in the cloud, for the first time in India’s history, software products are being made for the global audience and widely appreciated and used by global consumers.

Here’s a snapshot at some of the players who are leading this charge:

 

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Deepinder Goyal of Zomato on “ethics, respect, attitude and skill”

Deepinder Goyal is the founder and CEO of Zomato, India’s first online food guide to go global. Founded in 2008, Zomato recently raised Rs. 227 crore from Sequoia Capital and InfoEdge in one of the largest funding rounds for a consumer internet company in India. This deal values the company at over Rs 900 crore ($150 million) and has “best positioned” Goyal “to build a formidable global internet company out of India.” Prior to founding Zomato, Goyal was a management consultant at Bain and Company. He holds an integrated masters in Mathematics and Computing from IIT Delhi.

This post was conducted by Innovate Delhi, a three-week long academy that works with aspiring entrepreneurs to hone their skills in innovation, team-building, and strategy. Applications are due on 1st February at innovatedelhi.com/apply

[Innovate Delhi] What prompted you to start Zomato? What made a graduate from one of the most prestigious colleges in the country working at one of the prestigious companies in the world start a restaurant discovery website and mobile app?

[Deepinder Goyal] Back in 2008, I was working at Bain and Company, one of the largest management consulting firms in the world. At Bain, I noticed that my colleagues used to line up to view the stack of restaurant menu cards in the cafeteria during lunch hour. There was a rule that you cannot take the menus to your desk since people generally ended up losing these menus causing inconvenience for everyone. Looking at the queue, and to save the trouble for everyone, I just scanned these menus cards and put them online for everyone to use. This small intranet website started getting a substantial number of hits from people within Bain. That is when we realized that we can build a business out of scanned menus. That is how Zomato was born.

Deepinder-zomato-Pankaj

You told your parents about your decision to quit Bain only after quitting. What was their initial reaction? As an entrepreneur, how important is having family on your side?
My parents don’t really think about things once they have happened. So when I told them that I had quit my job, their reaction was “Ok, whatever”. They asked me to tell them if things get difficult for me financially. My wife Kanchan has supported me right through – she is a big believer in Zomato. It is important having family’s support in your entrepreneurial pursuits. If one is focused on their goals, everything eventually falls into plan.

To preview out next interview with P Rajasekharan of v-shesh, we found out that he frequently brings his daughter to his office. Do you see yourself bringing your daughter to Zomato and blending your personal and professional lives?
I don’t know. I don’t plan such things. If it does happen, it will not be because I planned it to be that way. It will be because it has to be that way.

One thing that sets apart an Indian company from US-based companies is that Indians are willing to work harder. People here can and would work 24×7 to accomplish something. That’s the sort of advantage we have here in India in terms of people.

You believe in hiring “good people.” What has been the best and worst hiring decision you have made?
We look for qualities like ethics, respect, attitude and skill – in that order. Looking back, all the people that we have asked to leave have either failed at Level 1 (Ethics) or Level 3 (Attitude). Mostly at Level 3. Similarly, the best hiring decisions we have made have been in being able to identify people with energy, focus and persistence.

Deep Kalra, our first interview for the Innovate Delhi blog, told us that an entrepreneur should be ready to do anything and everything in the initial years. What have been some memorably crazy challenges that you have met and not met?
The major challenge we have faced so far has been making sure that we have covered each and every street in the cities where we launch and have information for each restaurant in the city. Ideas can sometimes matter less than the execution. Hiring the right people has also been a major challenge. When we hire, we try our best to ensure that people are cultural fits – skill alone does not cut it for us.

For global internet corporations too, India is now the preferred choice for new investments.

In your corporate and entrepreneurial journey, how do you think the Indian entrepreneurial space has evolved and what are the most promising trends today?
A lot has changed in India over the past few years. Let’s look at three things first: Start ups, venture capitalists (VCs) and the market. There are a lot of good start ups that we see nowadays. We have many role model firms and entrepreneurs today and people are looking up to these role models to build up their companies. The ecosystem has evolved quite a lot, though it still needs to do much more. In terms of VCs, there are many entry-stage and growth funds coming in and they are more willing now to take risks with their money than they were earlier. Thirdly, the local market has changed a lot. Earlier, consumers were very rare to find. But now, it’s relatively easy to hit scale.

One thing that sets apart an Indian company from US-based companies is that Indians are willing to work harder. People here can and would work 24×7 to accomplish something. That’s the sort of advantage we have here in India in terms of people.

Now with the growth of internet penetration with over 200 million Indians logging onto the internet, there is a huge opportunity for web-based start-ups in the consumer space. VC money flows to markets which have large problems to be solved with start ups solving them, India is one such market. For global internet corporations too, India is now the preferred choice for new investments.

One of our key goals for Innovate Delhi is to build a community of like-minded entrepreneurial individuals. To that end, how have you fostered and maintained your professional relationships throughout your career? How has the changed or evolved since you started Zomato?
Networking and building strong professional relationships is important for any entrepreneur. I have built a strong network over the years that has been very helpful. It always starts with alumni networks and grows from there.

If you were a judge at our program, what would be the top three qualities you will look for in an aspiring entrepreneur?
Focus and clarity on what needs to be achieved. It has been the one principle we have followed in everything at Zomato right from product to sales to hiring. Well, ‘Rome wasn’t built in a day’. Persistence and consistent effort are required in order to translate an idea into a business. Also, to follow through is important – to deliver on what you set out to do.

Well, ‘Rome wasn’t built in a day’. Persistence and consistent effort are required in order to translate an idea into a business.

This blog post was written by Sonal J Goyal for Innovate Delhi Entrepreneurship Academy. Innovate Delhi is a three-week long academy that works with aspiring entrepreneurs to hone their skills in innovation, team-building, and strategy. Applications are due on 1st February at innovatedelhi.com/apply

 

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A Cloud telephony startup, VoiceTree- “Bootstrapped”, “Profitable”, “Still growing”

Indian economy is a cluster of more than 30 million small and medium businesses along with large enterprises which are lesser in number. Majorly, these SME’s powers the growth of Indian business industry.

This large SME pool presents a lucrative opportunity for Indian product and service companies only if one is able to tap it.

One such company which is creating a presence among Indian SME domain is “VoiceTree”. The cloud telephony startup, offers business call management solution with an Integrated IVR under its flagship product MyOperator and an automated order confirmation system on the cloud facility through its initial product, CODAC.

Team VoiceTree

Breakthrough

The startup was founded in 2010, though it was only in this March that things took a major turn for the company, in a positive way.It was the launch of  MyOperator, which subsequently became its most selling product.The product helped the cloud telephony startup, to scale up to more than 300 customers from 10 in a period of less than 8 months.

With MyOperator, VoiceTree targeted the large SME sector, mostly businesses which have an offline presence, though it also found a niche segment in the ecommerce industry.

In fact, the customers of MyOperator hails from various industry verticals, be it offline businesses like Berger Paints, political party like Aam Aadmi Party, religious groups such as Art of Living or ecommerce stores like Flaberry.

Other product by the startup, CODAC, targets enterprise sector and bags Snapdeal.com, Lenskart.com and many other as its clients.

Where MyOperator is  a call management and tracking system on the top of an IVR, CODAC is more of an order confirmation system on the cloud.

Bootstrapped and Profitable

Though various other cloud telephony players existed in the market before VoiceTree, still the Delhi based startup was able to strengthen its position, now turning profitable with a team of more than 40.

“Effective marketing and customer acquisition strategy has a played a big role for us”, says Ankit Jain, Founder, VoiceTree.

Though our price is on a higher side in comparison to our competitors, but enhanced product features and the product design which suited the Indian SME’s has been the key factor for our whatsoever success so far. Small and medium  businesses in India are not so much comfortable with Internet and concepts of cloud or SaaS, they just know about their business. We designed the product for them, with features they can easily grasp, while they focused on their business and daily routines, adds Jain.

The future of the startup looks bright as now it plans to go global and launch more features in its existing product, MyOperator. Also there are more products which are in the development stage which once launched, will help the company to expand its offerings for more business verticals.

Though journey so far has been very exciting and we did it while bootstrapping but now its time when we are looking to raise some capital for executing our more ambitious and larger goals, signs off Ankit.

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MakeMyTrip’s Deep Kalra on bowling, resilience and going against common sense

Deep Kalra is the founder and CEO of India’s leading online travel company MakeMyTrip.com. Founded in 2000, the company is now the largest e-commerce business in the country and listed its shares on NASDAQ in August 2010. Prior to founding MakeMyTrip.com, Mr. Kalra has had corporate stints with GE Capital, AMF Bowling Inc. and ABN AMRO Bank. He holds an MBA (PGDM) degree from IIM, Ahmedabad and a Bachelor’s degree in Economics from St. Stephen’s College, Delhi.

Read on to find out about the true test of an entrepreneur, the importance of knowing dhanda at a startup and going against common sense.

[Innovate Delhi] You believe in turning what one loves doing into a business model. How did you figure out what you love and turned that into India’s leading online travel company? 

Deep Kalra[Deep Kalra] For all entrepreneurs you have to focus on something that you love. But it definitely took me three jobs to figure out what I loved – I worked in banking, I worked in a very entrepreneurial role at AMF Bowling and I worked for GE Capital. Between these three roles, I figured out that I enjoyed the untrodden path. I was excited by stuff that had not been done before or at least not been done before in this part of the world. My second role was very entrepreneurial and I enjoyed that the most despite the fact that it was not financially a success. But I really had the time of my life which made me realize that I rather be doing my own thing.

What did the failure at AMF bowling teach you? How important do you think failure is in an entrepreneur’s journey?

AMF Bowling was a game changer in my own mind in terms of approaching different problems. Here was a problem that had not been thought about – How do you sell a family entertainment center around bowling which had not existed before? Addressing this problem was a learning curve in doing dhandha which is different from corporate business. Overall, it was a good learning experience in terms of a start up and solving problems that had not been solved before. It was also very personally fulfilling to me and I didn’t want to give it up. In hindsight, common sense would have dictated that I called quits within a couple of years but I worked with AMF Bowling for four years. So it also taught me that I can keep my head and chin up during a period when things are not working.

How is doing dhanda a unique challenge in itself? I read that you have bribed repairmen with bottles of rum to fix rat chewed cables. What challenges does the Indian entrepreneurial space pose and how do you deal with them while ensuring that you don’t lose sight of your larger goals?

I didn’t make a habit of bribing repairmen with alcohol but did so some unconventional stuff! The important lesson is that in the first many many years an entrepreneur should be ready to do anything and everything. And a lot of people are not. It’s better to start your entrepreneurial journey earlier than later because you have lesser hangups. At the same time, there is something to be said about good work experience. I don’t know what is a good amount. For me it was 8 years. But some entrepreneurs have never worked for someone else. I would recommend, especially in the Indian context, to work for a couple of years in a good company. It will help you later in life- you want to hire good people, you want to keep them motivated, you want to do the right things. I don’t think any amount of education prepares you for those kind of decisions.

In the initial years, an entrepreneur spends most of the time doing non-core business because you don’t have a team. And in India, things take longer. But hopefully with more interest and infrastructure in this space, the processes will get shorter. For instance, its getting easier to hire good talent. A startup is no longer a very unusual career. As an entrepreneur you have to be an excellent seller because you are selling all the time. Even if you are not doing the traditional selling of your product, in the early stage you are selling to get good talent. You are selling your story, your company all the time. You have to convince people to give up their great job at GE Capital or a think tank or Unilever etc to join one’s company. And then you need to sell to raise money. Each time you go out to meet current investors and potential investors, you are selling without realizing. And you have to work harder to sell your story in India because there are fewer startup success stories here.

You have clearly done a great job of selling to potential hires, MakeMyTrip has consistently been ranked amongst the the Top 10 “Great Places to Work for in India” by The Economic Times in the last four years. What is the culture at MakeMyTrip that make it such a great place to work?

The culture at an organization is related to the founding team or founder. One of the titles that the founder carries through life is Head of Culture. The founder has to walk the talk. I think it really comes down to passion and personal values of the founding team. Because then you end up hiring people for values. Then you start percolating down those values among similar minded people into a “culture” or whatever you want to call it. Over time it becomes established and you can talk about it.

In your corporate and entrepreneurial journey, how do you think the Indian entrepreneurial space has evolved and what are the most promising trends today?

There has been tremendous change in the last 3-4 years. The quality of entrepreneurs is improving. People have a much better overall view of what they want to do and what they need. There are lesser and lesser people who want to do something that’s cool. So folks are coming in for the right reasons. I love that there has been a great increase in the amount of angel funding that is available but there is big gap between angel and early and Series A and Series D deals. You can get your first round of capital fairly easily if you are an individual with a good plan but you have to be ready to perform in the next 12 months to get your Series A.

Do you think entrepreneurship can be taught or are entrepreneurs born?

I think its largely inherent. When things are going well, anyone would rather work for themselves everything else be equal. But that is typically not the case. Everything else is not equal. Let’s say you are going to make 50% of the money. Then what is it that you really want to do. And I think that is the test for if you want to be an entrepreneur or not. And yes, entrepreneurship can be taught but I think entrepreneurship has to be learnt more than it can be taught. And you learn it on the job. Ultimately, if you are happy being on the job, everything will work out.

If you were a judge at Innovate Delhi, what would be the top three qualities you will look for in an entrepreneur?

Agility and flexibility is one. There is a fine line between stubbornness and resilience. You have to believe in your idea but also be practical enough to make changes as you go along. You have to be wired analytically. I don’t know of any other way to run business. Creativity is important but if you are not fundamentally analytical then you will end up making decisions that are sub-optimal. And the third one is being a very good people’s person. It goes back to culture and teambuilding and it is something that comes to entrepreneurs naturally.

This blog post was written by Sonal J Goyal for Innovate Delhi Entrepreneurship Academy. Innovate Delhi is a three-week long academy that works with aspiring entrepreneurs to hone their skills in innovation, team-building, and strategy. Applications are due on 1st February. Apply at http://www.innovatedelhi.com/apply/

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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.

Indix-Apparels

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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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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:

  1. They have an internal app that assigns every engineer a Super Hero status and tracks their attendance at their daily standup.
  2. They have treasure hunts / bounty hunts that involve the engineering teams taking on coding challenges.
  3. 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:

  1. Indix App for brands and retailers for better and faster market and product analysis.
  2. 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:

  1. The brand manager logs into the app and selects a few products and categories that (s)he is interested in tracking.
  2. The brand manager can also select one or more competitors to track.
  3. 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.
  4. 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)

indix-app

 

indix-app2

 

Developer API

indix-developerSince 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.

 

indix-searchstoresDifferentiators

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

  1. 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.
  1. 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.
  2. Hire great people whom you can trust.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
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Complementary skills in your founding team is critical for a startup’s success – CSN Murthy, Founder and CEO, Ozonetel

ProductNation interviewed CSN Murthy, Founder and CEO of Ozonetel, a leader in cloud telephony based solutions. In this freewheeling chat, Murthy, a serial entrepreneur, shares his mantras on building a successful technology based venture. Read on…

What was the motivation to start Ozonetel? 

OzoneAround 2007, after the successful exit from Intoto, we examined various opportunities in the marketplace to start a new venture. Having worked in the telecommunications space over two decades, we recognized a huge unmet need in the Indian marketplace in the area of usage of telephony by businesses. Businesses were losing out on vital customer leads and important information due to their reliance on traditional telephony based system.  We therefore setup Ozonetel during 2007-08 to solve the customers communication based challenges through cloud based telephony solutions.

Can you explain the rationale behind using cloud as a delivery mechanism of communication products/services to Indian customers?

Cloud based telephony solutions is a natural progression from the previous physical PBX solutions. On the technology front, cloud based solutions help overcome the existing limitations of telephony solutions such as missing an inbound enquiry from a prospective customer. It provides tools to track your efficiency in responding to customers. Businesses can scale quickly based on the volume of customers they deal with on a pay-as-you go basis. Thirdly, since the workforce of businesses has increasingly become mobile, a cloud based telephony solution enables a business to respond to customers without being bogged down by physical location based constraints. These and many more aspects provide unprecedented value to businesses to solve their communication challenges. So, we started offering these cloud based telephony solutions to the Indian market.

How did you get your initial set of customers? What learning did you obtain from dealing with them?

We targeted the segment of customers who were willing to experiment with our offering. The first version of our offering required significant technical expertise at the customer end to use and benefit from it. Luckily for us, our first sets of customers were mostly technology based startups who understood the value of our solution. Companies like ZipDial and Asklaila used the APIs that we provided and integrated them in the manner they preferred. Grameen Foundation, another early customer of ours took help from ThoughtWorks to integrate our solution with their other systems. We also learnt from our initial prospecting that cost was an important parameter for businesses in India.

How did the company evolve from the first offering to its current state, where it has diversified cloud product offerings? 

home_kookooAfter finding initial customer acceptance, we quickly realized that in order to scale our business and make it usable across different sectors, it was important to make our solution more consumable and usable by end customers. Towards this end, our first solution was to announce KooKoo – a telephony platform that allowed end customers to build their own applications either on voice, SMS or fax. We then further enhanced our portfolio with Bizphone – a virtual PBX solution on cloud which customers could use out of the box, with no set up costs and hardware investments. The Bizphone offering helped us cater to needs of diverse set of customers across different sectors. Based on our insight and customer feedback, we enhanced our product portfolio by introducing CloudAgent – our cloud based contact center solution for businesses that are slightly more sophisticated business communication requirements. The growth of business in India augured well for us and we now offer these solutions to businesses of all sizes and sectors.

How have you ensured that you have competitive advantage in the marketplace? 

We had the first mover advantage when we started – which helped us to garner the initial set of customers. However, as the marketplace started seeing benefits of cloud based telecommunication solutions, new competitors emerged. Having been in this domain for a fairly long time, we had envisioned this scenario – and have developed key differentiating strategies right from our inception.

Back in 2007, when we started, we could easily have integrated a solution from different vendors and provide the same to businesses to satisfy their immediate needs. We instead chose to develop the entire solution stack – right from the hardware, telecom cards and software on our own. Though this took us about 18 months, this approach helps us in minimizing our dependency on external software/hardware/technology vendors. We also are in a very good position to incorporate customer feedback on to our solution stack – since we have total control on all layers of the solution. This approach has helped us to innovate constantly and maintain an edge over the competition.

Another complementary strategy we have executed in the recent years is to ensure customer stickiness. We have constantly delighted customers with superior service and helped them scale effortlessly as their businesses have grown. Thus, many of our initial customers have now migrated from using the low-value virtual PBX solution to leveraging our high value cloud contact centre solution. This approach has helped us both retain our existing customers, as well as ensured that we earn more working with them.

What internal measures have you taken to ensure that Ozonetel retains its edge in the marketplace? 

From an operational perspective, we have ensured that the Organization has the best leaders in every functional area. Our founding team is a great mix of complementary capabilities that are required to drive excellence across all aspects of the company. Getting to specifics, on the Sales front, we have presence now in many cities. This helps in building and sustaining relationships with customers. We realized very early that physical presence is important to close a sale. Hence we took steps to ensure we were physically accessible to customer.

On the development and R&D front, given that we are a technology based company, we have a maniacal focus on developing the best solution using the latest technological developments in our domain. We have effectively used our prior working experience to provide superior post-sales support to our customers. We take customer care very seriously – and it also is one of our key differentiators from competition, due to our superior execution and empathy for customers. All these have ensured that Ozonetel as an Organization responds nimbly to external environmental changes.

On a related note, how important it is to have a good founding team? What characteristics of the top management team in your experience will enable success of the firm, especially in its formative years? 

It is absolutely critical to have leaders with complementary skills in the top management team. It is also equally important that there is good chemistry between the founding team members. Once you have the above combination in place, you will automatically be geared to deal with the uncertainties and ambiguities that confront a nascent organization. In our case, I have been very careful in signing on our founding team and the top management team. I recommend that one closely work and observe the working style of any prospective founding partner that they want to bring on board. This helps in validating the nature of contributions that the person will bring in, as well as help understand if the person gels well with the rest of team members.

Another thing that I have realized from working across multiple ventures – is to recruit your sales leader up front – right from a very initial stage. This helps in enabling the Organization to grow rapidly at later stages. The Sales leader understands the other functional units of the company better due to the fact that they worked together in the initial stages. This bonding helps immensely as the company grows.

Thank you for your insights. As a parting question, what would be the top three things that you would advice to your fellow product entrepreneurs operating out of India? 

As I reiterated, starting off with the right set of founding team members – in terms of complementary skills and good teaming is very critical to any enterprise, more specifically for a technology product based company. Secondly, as the founder, ensure that you hire right for the Organization. Do not compromise on skills or on any other aspects that affects the culture of the company. Thirdly, as many others would tell you, keep your ears close to the customer. Constantly delight them and seek to improve continuously. Success will surely follow!

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Creating a platform needs a broad vision and a long leash from investors– Ranjit Nair, CEO of Germin8. #PNHangout

Ranjit has a PhD in Computer Science from University of Southern California and is the CEO of Germin8. In this #PNHangout we had a chance to catch up with Ranjit on the challenges of building a platform and finding the initial market fit.

Ranjit-PRCIMSMarket research companies world over found conducting surveys about brands and products difficult. People were reluctant to take surveys and those who did take these surveys were not representative of the target audience, eg: housewives and retired folks instead of working professionals. We saw a trend where people would often go onto social media sites and/or company owned channels of communication such as emails to express themselves. Hence, as a solution to this market research problem we developed NLP algorithms which were capable of understanding opinions expressed in textual conversations. These algorithms were designed to perform functions such as topic segmentation, topic identification and sentiment analysis. Although these theoretical problems were interesting to solve, it was far from being a product that had much broad commercial appeal.

The push to create a market fit for Explic8

By March 2009, I had assembled a team to develop a commercial product that harnesses these NLP algorithms in order to draw actionable insights and leads from public and private communications channels such as social media and emails. To fill the missing features that could make this product commercially viable, I had challenged my team to build a working prototype in 23 calendar days — just in time for the General Elections in India. Our goal was simple, to analyse what people globally were talking about politicians and parties during the election and make this data available to the public.

This sprint drew us closer to creating the foundations of a minimum viable product which solved a market research pain point (i.e. reliability of surveys). But we knew that the technology we had developed could also solve pain points felt by customer service, sales and corporate communications. For example, this tool could be used for lead generation by a sales team by finding conversations where customers had expressed a stated or latent need for certain products.

An expanded vision could mean a larger product development cycle, but it was worth it

We knew that if we expanded the product vision to solve problems beyond just market research and in multiple verticals, we were setting ourselves up to be a little unfocused; instead of narrowing the focus on one specific problem, we chose to develop a platform that could be used in different applications. We chose this approach because there was no market player who had taken the platform route and attacking the larger market would make this product more feasible. We were lucky to have the support of our investors to back us up on this decision.

We, as a product company, were a little bit ahead of the curve where we sometimes ended up with features that the Indian market wasn’t even ready for. When we launched our product, we realized a lot of the features we built weren’t actually being used by our customers.  For example, we have a feature that allows our users to analyse sentiments not just at the brand level but also for each of the brand’s touch points. We realized that apart from a few brands, most were satisfied with just using the overall brand sentiment without concerning themselves about the sentiment for each of their touch points. We preserved this feature and as users evolved, this feature became one of the differentiators that is now used by most of our customers.

Hindsight is always 20/20 and as we went about from concept to production there were many ups and downs that I think are common with every start-up. We would battle between adding features that add functionality and features which made the product more useful, usable and scalable. I think if I had to do things a little differently today, I would have focussed a little more on marketing initially and a little lesser on building many features. However, we have reached a point where our product speaks for itself and customers from a variety of industries are interested in using Explic8.

Platform and Goals

We are now more than a product but a platform. Explic8 is one of the apps which reside on our platform and we’ve built it in such a way that it could be used in multiple use case scenarios such as analysing emails, chat conversations, etc. We also allow third party applications to use our API to develop their own tools. Analytics that comes from our app is very industry focused. For example, if you’re an automobile brand, then the insights you receive will be benchmarked against competitors using metrics and sources relevant to the automobile industry. Hence, the insights you get are highly actionable. The sentiment algorithm is tuned for each industry, for instance “unpredictable” in the context of a steering mechanism would be treated differently from “unpredictable” in the context of a movie plot. We are also in the midst of expanding our platform to encompass predictive analytics.

If you have any feedback or questions that you would like answered in this series feel free to tweet to me: @akashj

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MyParichay – Find jobs by leveraging your network

MyParichay is India’s Largest job search and career network on Facebook. The company consists of a dedicated group of successful entrepreneurs, HR professionals, and computer scientists that want to capture the spirit behind a Parichay (an introduction) from a known person to transform how people achieve their career potential and companies find the best quality talent. The company’s technology prowess and deep understanding of the industry have encouraged several corporates including Genpact, 24X7, IBM, PWC, Grollier, Airbus, EXL Services, Cognizant, Yahoo India and Convergys to adopt MyParichay solutions. MyParichay has two product lines; one a social job board for job seekers, which is an internet consumer product and the other a set of social recruiting management products viz. Employee Parichay and Company Parichay for employers and recruiters. Here we focus on the social job board for job seekers, their B2C product.

The Company

Every job seeker knows that it is much easier to get an interview call when your resume has been referred (or at least forwarded) by an employee of the company, than if you post it through regular job boards or company’s website. However, it is not always easy to find out who amongst your friends and acquaintances can help refer you within the company. Most people still rely on regular channels of job search, which continue to yield poor results.

MyParichay (like other companies in this space) intends to solve this problem of discovery by allowing job seekers to discover their connections (Facebook and LinkedIn for now) within the companies where they see a relevant job opening, and allows them to request them to refer their resume.

It is a social recruitment platform that believes in the power of a ‘Parichay’ – the Sanskrit term for introduction. It was established in 2012 and is co-founded by Ranjan Sinha and Vivek Sinha.

Considering that 6 out of 10 job seekers are only on Facebook and that according to a study by ERE.net, chances of finding a friend increases by 54X when applied through a friend, MyParichay brings the power of social network to Job seekers. Their target segment is 21-30 yrs. which spends a lot of time on Facebook and uses Facebook as both a personal and professional network. They offer a job board for job seekers larger than Naukri and Monster combined! Their job seekers app is in Facebook’s Top 10 business app.

The Product

MyParichay allows their users to sign-in using Facebook (the only sign-in option) and look for jobs in companies, hence acting like a regular job board with a large number of job openings posted. You can add your Linkedin network to your MyParichay account to leverage your connections on LinkedIn. Every job search result is tagged with a list of people from your network who are connected with this company and can potentially refer you. The site then allows the user to apply to these companies by requesting their friends to refer them, thereby increasing the chances of an interview call significantly.

(All pictures and names have been blacked out in screenshots below for privacy reasons)

myparichay1myparichay2myparichay3myparichay4Technology

Their proprietary ConnectedJobs technology is built on a combination of Java, Python, and various Open Source projects. They use a combination of NoSQL and SQL data stores and use AWS. Their website is Android and iPhone friendly today and they will continue to invest in improving the website experience on handheld devices. They are also planning to bring to market a native android app that leverage key capabilities of mobile devices, such as OTT messaging and geo location, to deliver a unique social experience within the career enhancement context.

Differentiators

Their biggest differentiator is the size of the job pool that they have, and which continues to grow. They have tie-ups with various other job boards and thereby act as an aggregator of various jobs out there. They also have tie-ups with various large companies, which allow them early access to the jobs.  They continue to sign job board partnerships around the world and will announce three significant partnerships this quarter; they are also building their own job crawler.

Another advantage of social recruitment solutions like MyParichay is that by using social networks, they provide transparency whereby both job seeker and employer can learn more about each other, much before serious discussions have started. With its B2B solution, MyParichay closes the loop on referrals by both making it easy to refer (for employees) as well as making it easy for companies to track these referrals using MyParichay’s system.

Market

While job portals proliferate in India, hiring good talent remains a tough problem for organizations. Referral continues to remain best channel for good hires, but referrals account for a very small % of total available profiles. Hence it is not surprise that recruiting through social media (and hence job search through this channel) is a hot area, and MyParichay is positioned well. They have signed up some marquee clients and continue to do well in that area. They have 24M+ profiles in their database and continue to sign-up 12000 profiles a day (more than Naukri’s 11,000 a day). This demonstrates the traction they have in the market.

Among their competitors in Social Recruitment space, Career Sonar is best known, with very comparable offering. In addition, traditional job boards are their competitors, as well as their potential partners. Ranjan Sinha, Co-Founder, says, “Apply Button is our competitor, not the job portals.” They recently signed up a deal with Shine.com (HT Media has a stake in myParichay) to allow social bar on Shine.com site, essentially replacing ‘Apply’ with “MyParichay Apply”.

The Road Ahead

Recruitment has always been a social process. Good companies and roles are found by word-of-mouth, good hires are found through referrals and from passive pool of candidates (who are not looking for jobs). Interview process is more about knowing each other and liking each other than comprehensive evaluation of capabilities (which is anyway impossible to do in the short interview window). Job boards traditionally have made it a transactional activity where recruitment has primarily become a resume collection program. Social recruitment tools offer a much needed push towards making hiring social again.

MyParichay is uniquely placed in this space with a product that has excellent traction in the market and which offers some very good capabilities. Here are a few areas that they will do well to focus on as they go forward in this space:

  1. User Experience: Experience of their web site is decent but need to be at par with other consumer products their target segment is used to – it looks more web-like and less app-like.
  2. Relevancy of connections: Currently, I need to choose who do I go through if I have more than one connection who can refer me to a job. Clearly, with more data at their disposal, myParichay is (or should be) in a better position to recommend the person I should go with to have the best results. This will make the process more effective and seamless for the job seekers.
  3. Job Search vs. Recommendation: Job Search is going to be obsolete concept, given that many roles names and job definitions continue to evolve rapidly to fit a globalized world’s new requirements. Given that myParichay knows my profile details, it should be able to recommend jobs for me based on elements of my profile and my online behavior.

MyParichay is in a growing segment and has carved out a good position for itself, and they seem to be on track for a fast growth. Future seems very bright for them.

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Susant Pattnaik: Real Life ‘Doremon’ or an Innovation Champ?

TV addict Kids in India simply love Japanese cartoon character ‘Doremon’ who always come up with very cool gadgets to help his very average and foolish brother Nobita. Doremon’s gadgets are unreal but still fantastic and innovative and kids always dream of having them. But I wish to take this opportunity to talk about Susant Pattnaik, a real life Indian Doremon.

Susant, son of a veterinarian from Bhubaneswar, is a serial innovator and an entrepreneur, having invented several cool devices since his high school days.  From a wheelchair that operates through breathing to an anti-theft mechanism for cars, the list of his innovations is big and enviable. Moreover, more than ten of his innovations have already made the critical transition from idea to a working prototype. Recently, Susant was also among the top winners of the seventh National Grassroots Innovation Awards, given by the National Innovation Foundation.

One of the most interesting and award winning innovation of Susant is his wheelchair specially designed for paralyzed and which operate just through breathing. This wheelchair prototype uses an innovative battery operated breathing sensor invented by Susant, which is worn as a headphone by the users to navigate the chair by giving commands just with their breath. The sensor acts both on air and heat in the breath. This breathing sensor is attached to a transmitter while the receiver device receives wireless signals in the form of breath. As the user breathes, the transmitter transmits the signal and the receiver receives it for controlling the movement of the wheelchair and performing other tasks. Now, Susant has also designed a novel anti-accident circuit for the wheelchair to avoid any mishaps.

This breathing sensor technology has been recognized and awarded by various organizations like National Innovation Foundation, MIT Technology Review, NASA, Intel, etc. He was also selected as youngest inventor by MIT Technology Review.

Another interesting innovation by Susant is the anti-theft mechanism for cars which is operated through a mobile phone. The anti-theft device uses a mobile SIM card which can be paired with your phone.  The moment anyone breaks into the car and tries to fiddle with ignition, you get a beep on your phone with a call back number. The moment you call back, the mechanism get activated to immediately shutdown the car. This device also enables you to even trace the car via GPS.

Susant claims to have successfully installed this mechanism in over 50 cars in Bhopal. Moreover, variation of the same technology can have wide applications especially in security systems for home, office and shops.

Another innovation by Susant which can have wide application is the Low Cost Voice Operated Electrical and Electronics Appliance system. It works on voice by saying the name of the electrical appliance, for example light bulb or fan by mentioning its proper time of activation or deactivation, through any cell phone.

Presently, Susant is working on a very interesting concept, ‘Super Sense Technology’, a circuit-based device that will remove the need for a keyboard or mouse for a computer.  One can attach it on the wrist and operate any computer by a slight hand movement.  He is also working on an advanced model that has a jacket with an in-built computer.  The jacket and the wrist band together works like a computer.  According to Susant, you can type, draw or even access the internet – without needing a separate computer.

Apart from being a serial innovator and entrepreneur, Susant is also a motivational speaker and regularly addresses large gathering of students, which includes students from premier institutions like IITs. He even has a NGO for supporting innovators like him. Needless to add, he lists Dhirubhai Ambani among his role models.

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“We think more like Product Designers, and less like Product Managers” – Bharath Mohan, Pugmarks.me #PNHangout

(This passage is a summary of the conversation with Bharath Mohan. The audio transcript can be found here.)

Adopters of any new innovation or idea can be categorized as innovators (2.5%), early adopters (13.5%), early majority (34%), late majority (34%) and laggards (16%), based on a mathematical Bell curve put forth by Everett Rogers in his book titled “Diffusions of Innovations”. The book broadly suggests that if you have a product that is of value, you often times have to pave the path for the consumers to be the beneficiaries of this idea. It’s the product designer’s role to design how a product is used across the dispersion of users. This ultimately determines the principles of design and the features that your product consists of.

bharath-photoWhile I was doing my PhD in IISc, I worked on designing a myriad of algorithms for information retrieval. A typical internet user reads content that could range from currents events, such as the war in Syria, to topics as specific as Product Management. I’ve always dreamt of a system that can bring the most relevant information to a user – without the user searching for it. Pugmarks.me connects the context in which you are browsing through these articles by following the digital trails you leave behind. It then uses its context engine to recommend the next article it considers you should read packaged in a seamless experience.

Designing Pugmarks.me has been an exciting experience, which included research in algorithms, building a real time crawling and retrieval system, and constantly learning from users. We’ve followed some Mantras in our product development – especially because the product requires inputs from multi-disciplinary areas. Everything has to tie in, to each other. Nothing is known prior and has to be learnt along the way. A “product management” approach would not work. A “waterfall” model to design would not work. “Powerpoint presentations” would not work either. Our product management is less of “management”, and more of design and evolution.

The Pugmarks Mantra

Unlike Facebook or Twitter where the problem’s technology core is simple and scaling is complex, our problem’s technology core is complex akin to the likes of Google’s search engine and NEST. Hence, over the past 1.5 years our product has been opened to a smaller set of users which gives us data to refine the product further ultimately paving the path for a larger cross section of consumers to enjoy the benefits of the product.

pugmarks-character-evolutionSome of our Mantra’s are:

  • Be metrics driven: Once we analyse our features metrics we identify ones that are successful and bolster them to make these our ‘super class’ features. While we do this, we bin our users into “Fans”, “Tried but dropped off”, “First day drop-offs”. The ‘tried but dropped off’ is where we focus our energy on. We do data analysis, interviews and direct emails – to understand why they drop off. What we learnt is that they mostly drop off because of the “inconvenience” of a new product; either added latency, extra memory consumption, instability of the browser, etc. These reasons give us new things to work on and improve.
  • Usage versus Users: We are building our product with the goal that even if few users come to try out our product, they all stay back. Between usage and users, we prefer high usage between a small number of users over low usage in a high number of users. If our product cannot engage users for a long time, any amount of marketing will still not help.
  • Focus on real Virality: Virality is often confused with just having a Facebook share or a Tweet button, or slyly making a user talk (spam) about your product in his social channels. Virality for us is the inherent quality in our product which makes the user want to talk about it. We consciously ask ourselves, “What will our users want to talk about Pugmarks to someone else?” These viral loops must be strengthened and not social share buttons.
  • Constantly question your assumptions: In our initial iterations, we felt our users will be concerned over privacy. Soon, we realized that the paranoid would never use us anyway – even if we gave them a lot of control. The ones, who used us, felt we were not building good enough models for them. So, we moved away from user supervised learning to a completely automated learning system. We imagine our current user telling us, “I’ll tell you everything about me. Now help me in ways I’ve never seen before”.
  • Continuous Integration: We never take up features or tasks that take more than two weeks to launch especially one’s which require a lot of people and require extensive build times and planning. If you finish the code and if it’s lying unused, there’s an opportunity cost lost because that code could very well engage a user or maybe incite him to talk about the product to someone else. This is a loss for us, hence, we continuously integrate.
  • Own the full user experience, end to end – From messaging to user touch points to the backend algorithms: A user doesn’t appreciate information until it is delivered in a way that is useful to you and is needed by you. We obviously needed a team that was capable of building this experience end to end. Our team considers every aspect of the product, from the touch points to the user, how the product interfaces with the user and also how the product communicates with the user using the technology algorithm we created.

pugmarks-airplanes#PNHANGOUT is an on-going series where we talk to Product Managers from various companies to understand what drives them, the products they work on and the role they play in defining the products success.

If you have any feedback or questions that you would like answered in this series feel free to tweet to me: @akashj

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Billbooks is helping ease the invoicing for the freelance economy

It has never come as a surprise that the best startup solutions and most passionate entrepreneurs are the one who end up solving their own pain points. For Sagar Kogekar founder of Billbooks the journey began with the advent of his startup Webwingz which he started at the age of 18 years, engaged in client servicing. He would be able to provide and do the client work but the part about billing was always a hassle. Invoicing and billing like most people was done in Word by him.

Soon Sagar realised the potential in the market. Rather than jumping head first into developing the solution Sagar took his time and did his research to find the niche he was targeting. By 2012 he had gone full time into developing Billbooks as a product with his team. Billbooks was his take on creating an online invoicing solution for small and mid-sized businesses.

On signing up for the first time the user is gifted three invoices to try and experiment with the product. Irrespective of the package a user takes, all the features are uniformly accessible on the platform. Which is a big plus. The pricing model begins from as low as $10 per 20 invoices upto 60$ for 200 invoices. With no monthly rental and expiration of the recharge, the user is free to use the invoice credit as and when he wishes.

The product is aimed at North American and the European markets with language customization in five languages to tap the local clientele. Sagar claims the user base to be in the early hundreds with nearly 10% of them being paid customers of the product. To say what an ideal Billbooks customer looks like would be an exercise in futility with diverse occupational users ranging from a video jockey based in Spain to a wood artist in Australia to a piano teacher in the US being proponents of the product. The unifying factor being the freelancer or the small enterprise economy.

Billbooks is not without competition and claiming otherwise would be unjust. The space for online accounting softwares even those with a focus towards SME is a crowded one. Solutions from big names like Zoho and Intuit, and products like Freshbooks already exist in the market. With many of them offering more utility in the form of mobile products at a slightly higher price point. But the USP of Billbooks would lie in offering a simple approach to a more professional looking billing solution for the freelancers and helping keeping track of partial payments, scheduled reminders and giving free estimates. The service should be an ideal product for people with extremely limited invoice requests a month and their model actually encourages that with no expiry on the invoice credits. 

In the coming months of the product timeline we can look forward to having native mobile products for the Android and iOS ecosystems in place for Billbooks. Features like the Freshbooks import option are already in place making it a breeze to get new users onboard and be up and running on Billbooks quickly.

You can show Billbooks some startup love and sign up to let us know what you think about the product! But the fact remains there is a niche that Billbooks fulfills and Sagar is happy building a product for that.

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‘Ensure that your product delivers more value than what customers expect out of it’ – Shaudhan Desai, Founder and CEO, D’Soft Infotech

In a reflection of his journey spanning 25 years, Shaudhan Desai, Founder and CEO of D’Soft Infotech Pvt Ltd., makers of India’s leading Jewelery software shares his experiences in building the company during the license-raj era, and the changes he has seen in the business of recent times. Read on… 

You are celebrating 25 years of operations at D’Soft.  It is indeed a great milestone for an Indian products based company. Can you share with us how you started on this path? 

I was working with GE Medical Systems in their marketing division around that time. The use of computers by western countries during that decade made me realize that computers could help automation of routine tasks, even in India. This was the trigger to set up a company in India. The plan was to leverage computers and help data processing forms and share forms be processed quicker than the manual process. This is how we began our company during 1988.

Starting a software company during that time should have been a very daunting task. Can you share your experiences as you worked on establishing the company?

You are right. There were many issues that had to be taken care of. To begin with, there was no computer dealer in our region. Cost of procurement of one computer itself was very high – and that too for one with a 4.77 MHz processor. Secondly, there was no skilled labor available who understood how to operate computers, the punched cards etc that was the key to execute our plan. Thirdly, you had to deal with skeptic customers who resisted any change to their existing way of doing things. Overcoming all these were quite a challenge during our initial years.

How did you overcome these challenges? What was the first success you tasted as a company?

The first real success, in my view came to us during the years 1993-95, when we designed, developed and sold an accounting software package in Gujarati language. This was triggered by an advertisement from CDAC about a multilingual card which could be inserted in the computer. Based on this idea, we developed the basic tenets of accounting which would work in Gujarati language. We targeted professional accountants who would go to every shop and write accounts. These accountants realized that they could scale their business (as in, they could attend to more customers) by using our package – since it standardized all entries and made it easy for them to provide the final computations. A few others realized that they could save themselves from doing mundane and repetitive work, and hence bought on to this new offering. In all, this offering got good traction with the segment we targeted. Even today, while we don’t sell this offering too actively, we still have about 5000 to 6000 active users of this software.

Very interesting… How did you engage with customers back then, and what changes do you see now, after 25 years? 

During our initial years, to gain access to prospective customers, we relied initially on our personal networks – reaching out to accountants who maintained books at shops of our acquaintances. When we saw initial successful adoption, we resorted to making ourselves present in the seminars, specifically held for accountants. This helped us reach to all parts of the state. Now of course, with internet and other technological advances, we use all the modern methods of gaining access to potential customers.

Back then, the awareness of our customers in using the package was very low, and the expectations out of the software package also were limited. During the initial years, we had to even provide a guarantee to buy back hardware, if the customer decided to stop using our software. We had to print bound manuals and ship it for every customer – as a means of support, since no other reliable method of communication existed. Even if a customer had some feedback or a requirement, we would implement the same in the next version of our package; release it after 6 to 8 months since his request.

Fast forwarding these to now, the expectations of customers from a software product have grown tremendously. While our initial versions were on Foxbase and DOS based, we now ship products that are accessible on any device (computer, cell phone, tablet etc). Our product updates now come in 2 to 3 week cycles. Internet has helped us to support our customers better, and in real time. However, what has not changed is the reason customers buy a product. No customer will be willing to buy the product unless it delivers value to his/her business.

How did your flagship product – Ornate Jewelery Software come to be? Can you share us the making of the product and its current state?

A few factors led us to discover and develop on this opportunity to serve jewelers with our offering. A lot of our existing customers of our accounting package used to maintain books with jewelers. So, in discussion with accountants, and further probing, we discovered that jewelers’ operational lifecycle was very different than the ones followed in a typical industry. We also noted that there was no specific software available worldwide that would help jewelers benefit from automation. Hence, we designed and developed the first version of Ornate Jewelery Software during 1998 to 2002, and then subsequently have revised it many times thus far.

Our initial clients were retail jewelers, and even now, a large chunk of our 3000 odd customers are small and mid size jewelers. Since this was a segment that was largely underserved, we are able to attain leadership position in this segment within a decade. Right now, our focus has been to enhance our leadership in this domain. We now have introduced a disruptive offering – ‘Jewelery Kiosk’, through which one can virtually Try / digitally wear different ornaments or combinations and make a purchase decision. This patent pending offering has helped large jewelery houses to reduce customer churn and increase sales on account of our offering. Through our offering, customers of any large chain of showrooms can go to one retail outlet of theirs and virtually Try out all the jewelery available across any of their chain of establishments across the world.

As you look back, are there any opportunities that you felt you could not capitalize on effectively? 

The only aspect that I feel we should have addressed earlier is to focus on international customers. We now have customers from UAE and US. However, I feel that we neglected a bigger opportunity, given the needs of jewelers worldwide are similar. Having said that, with so much of traction and customers behind us, I believe we now are in the best position to make our presence in the worldwide markets. This shall be one of our key priorities going forward.

As a parting thought, what advice would you like to provide to fellow product entrepreneurs operating out of India?

First and foremost, I would say that you should continuously ensure that your customers are happy and satisfied. Irrespective of whether a customer’s business with you is small or big, ensure that you serve their needs. This is a key prerequisite for growth. Every customer is very important and we must satisfy them.

Secondly, ensure that your product really delivers more value that what customers expect out of it. This will help you to sustain your competitive advantage. Good luck!

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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.

  1. They will sign up with Reduce Data
  2. 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)
  3. 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

  1. The publisher (like Times of India) auto requests the ad exchange for an ad
  2. 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.
  3. Reduce Data, will check whether it has relevant information about the user.
  4. Reduce Data’s machine learning algorithms predict whether the user can be bought and if so at what price.
  5. 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.
  6. 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:

  1. Programmatic Buying capabilities: Reduce Data is focussed on delivering ROI by leveraging superior programmatic approaches.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. Web and Mobile Advertising: Allows brand advertisers to reach both web and mobile users using a single platform.
  5. 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.
  6. 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).
  7. 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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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!):

  1. 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.
  2. 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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.