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In the next 3 to 5 years, Jamcracker seeks to leverage and contribute to India’s product ecosystem, and bring the latest R&D and innovations in cloud brokerage solutions to Indian enterprises and SMBs.

Set up in 1999, Jamcracker develops and markets software, services and an ecosystem of cloud services that enable customers to become Cloud Services Brokerages (CSBs). K.B. Chandrasekhar, CEO & Chairman, was also co-founder and Chairman of e4e Inc., a business process outsourcing company. In the mid-1990s, Chandrashekar founded Exodus Communications, which he led to become the leading provider of enterprise hosting services. In 1999, Chandra was honored as the Ernst & Young Northern California Entrepreneur of the Year.

In an interview with ProductNation, Chandrashekar says he is bullish about designing and selling to the Indian market, but there are some specific challenges hindering SMBs, including low broadband penetration, and ubiquitous and cost-effective access to bandwidth.

1.    What is cloud service brokerage and is this phenomenon really desired?

Gartner defines a Cloud Service Brokerage (CSB) as an entity that will “play an intermediary role in cloud computing… [to] make it easier for organizations to consume and maintain cloud services, particularly when they span multiple providers.” CSBs broker relationships between cloud services consumers and multiple cloud providers, aggregating many services into one place with a single point of catalog management, user administration, access control and security, billing, auditing and reporting, and many other aspects. CSB operators are either Internal CSBs or External CSBs, and some will serve double duty. Internal CSBs are operated by centralized IT organizations that provide internal Cloud AppStores for employees and affiliated members. External CSBs monetize cloud services delivery by aggregating and selling from their own private-branded Cloud Marketplaces. An analogy is how the power grid interconnects energy producers with energy consumers. 

If we are considering a collection of interdependent cloud services taken from separate providers, what sort of help or value would cloud brokerage offer?

Cloud brokerages provide an abstraction layer that enables cloud consumers to have unified control – across disparate cloud services – of catalog management, user provisioning, security (including single sign-on), administration, reporting/auditing, support and billing.

This greatly reduces the overhead costs associated with procuring and life-cycle management for organizations that are incorporating cloud services into their businesses. It also improves their ability to secure and manage how their users interact with disparate cloud providers, to provide a unified support experience, and other benefits.

2.    Could you tell us about Jamcracker’s home-grown cloud services brokerage (CSB), and how do you differentiate yourself? What are your offerings as part of this solution?

Jamcracker develops and markets software, services and an ecosystem of cloud services that enable our customers to become Cloud Services Brokerages (CSBs).  Jamcracker’s CSB enablement solution – the Jamcracker Services Delivery Network (JSDN) includes a cloud services aggregation, delivery, and management platform; a pre-integrated catalog of cloud services; and  best practice enablement services that allow our customers to unify the delivery and life-cycle management of public and private cloud services.

The Jamcracker Services Delivery Network (JSDN) includes a white-labeled cloud aggregation and delivery platform, a global ecosystem of pre-integrated cloud services, and business operations that enable our customers to operate their own Cloud Services Brokerages. The JSDN is a complete services delivery solution that includes hosting, provisioning, licensing management, billing, identity management, compliance management, single sign-on, services administration, business operations and customer support—enabling organizations to get to market quickly and cost-effectively as a Cloud Services Brokerage (CSB).

3.    How will this solution help enterprises streamline their cloud IT services delivery to speed up organizational innovation, and provide a unified usage experience?

Cloud services provide significant benefits to IT operations. From an IT perspective, however, adopting cloud services presents significant challenges. Implementing cloud services from multiple vendors creates cumbersome management and complicated billing, and CIOs have compelling concerns around security, compliance, auditability, accountability and supportability.

A highly effective way for organizations to unify cloud services management and delivery is through internal cloud services brokerages (CSBs). CSBs can help IT provide unified security, compliance, license management, and support.

4.    What have been the pain points in designing a cloud brokerage solution given India’s existing eco system?  What were the challenges faced?

There are two aspects here: designing cloud solutions from India, and designing for the Indian market. In designing cloud brokerage solutions from India, we have benefited from the excellent developer pool in India. Regarding designing and selling to the Indian market, we are bullish but there are some specific challenges hindering SMBs including low broadband penetration, and ubiquitous and cost-effective access to bandwidth. In the next three to five years, we at Jamcracker seek to leverage and contribute to India’s product ecosystem, and bring the latest R&D and innovations in cloud brokerage solutions to innovative Indian enterprises and SMBs.

As an early market mover in this offering what gains have you realized?

Jamcracker is well positioned as a thought-leader and technology-leader with respect to cloud brokerage enablement solutions.  Now that the market is poised to see explosive growth, this puts us in a fantastic position to succeed.

5.    How do you envision the current cloud computing paradigms to evolve? In that context what innovation do you see forthcoming from Jamcracker in the cloud space?

Unifying cloud services delivery and life-cycle management is becoming a well understood need, and to a great extent cloud services brokerage platforms will become the virtual “platform” that combines the innovation advantages of distributed computing with the traditional IT management advantages of standardized platforms.  We’ve seen this need for centralized management controls with every new wave of computing innovation – starting with mainframes, desktops, client-server and the web.

What is your business revenue strategy from this cloud-brokerage solution?

We support a few different models based on our customers’ needs.  In some cases, our revenue is a purely license-based model of our platform, whereas in other cases it’s more of a revenue-share partnership.

6.    Gartner predicts that IT organizations will increasingly be assuming internal “cloud services brokerage” roles. What are the prospects for cloud brokerage in India? How mature is the market for such solutions?

After the U.S., India is the #2 source of cloud-based services development, so the CSB model will be an important one from a supply-side distribution perspective.

From the demand side of the cloud services market, India is an emerging market that is competing on a global stage. In this cloud services will play a critical role in enabling small to mid-sized Indian businesses to leverage IT and application services that would previously have been prohibitively expense for them to purchase and operate on-premise.

Larger Indian businesses that already operate on a global basis will increasingly look to the cloud delivery model as a means for them to compete more cost-effectively and in a more agile manner.

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Indian companies have a poor conversion rate of ideas into innovation because of a lack of structured processes’

Sridhar D. P. Founder & CEO and Dr. Shankar Venugopal, Chief Mentor, Thatva, say their company’s vision is to be a true enabler of innovation. Their strategy is to provide a software framework that could facilitate and enable innovation. Thatva came to be established when Sridhar was pursuing a program on innovation and IP at Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, in September 2007. He discussed the idea of enabling innovation with Dr. Shankar Venugopal, who was one of the expert instructors for the program. He encouraged Sridhar to pursue the idea and has been mentoring him since then.  Although the venture formally started in 2011, the Thatva team had already developed a concept framework, Thatva Innovator to address the challenges in the innovation lifecycle. 

In an interview with ProductNation, Sridhar D. P. and Dr. Shankar Venugopal explain why innovation is affected due to absence of scalability in ideas and how success of a product depends in customer empowerment, which makes it a game changer in the marketplace.  

How would you describe the current innovation practice followed by Indian enterprises? How mature are their processes?   

Every company wants to innovate – be it for business growth, survival in the market or for building brand image. Indian companies do manage to create a few impactful innovations and manage to take them successfully to the market such as Tata Nano, Godrej Chotukool etc. But for every idea that hits the market, there are several others that get killed. This poor conversion of ideas into innovation is primarily because they lack a structured process for facilitating innovation. Most companies lack a culture of innovation that encourages their employees to pursue new ideas.

How does a structured flow in innovation help in terms of time and effort? What are the pitfalls of an unstructured approach? 

Innovation has three components – the idea has to be insightful, the idea should create unique value to customer and it should overcome all barriers on its way to market. Most innovations start with an insight – a structured approach provides customer insights and helps in creating value to customer. Structured approach also helps to plan and take proactive steps to overcome barriers and create a path to market. 

You refer to statistics that state 100 ideas achieve less than five impactful innovations. Why is this number so low? How do products like Innovator help improve that ratio? 

Every great idea needs to be aligned and scalable from business growth perspective. Although business alignment is more easily achieved, scalability is not easily found in most ideas. Additionally, IP and defensive patenting by the company, is a must-have in order to guarantee long-term returns and to create an entry-barrier for competition. The final test for a product lies in customer empowerment, which is a game-changer. An aligned, scalable, IP-protected idea may still fail if it does not meet the final criterion of empowering customer. Thus the conversion rate is low because of these four barriers, each of which plays a pivotal role in the success of an idea as an innovation – alignment, scaling, IP and customer empowerment. Thatva Innovator helps in facilitating enterprises to cross these four barriers upfront.

When Thatva decided to innovate with a new product, what was the vision and development strategy? What has been the response to Thatva’s efforts so far?     

Thatva’s vision is to be a true enabler of Innovation. Our strategy is to provide software framework that can facilitate and enable Innovation, and complement it with Mentoring & Consulting Services.

Thatva believes that Innovation needs to be all pervasive, and in order to facilitate this, every individual in the enterprise should be empowered with tools and techniques to take their ideas further. Most enterprises have mere idea management systems where employees post their ideas and people vote on it, but what we have conceived is a true innovation enabler system which empowers individuals to generate ideas and cover the entire innovation lifecycle using tools and techniques. 

In short, Thatva’s Innovator serves as an Innovation Partner for enterprises by effectively enabling ‘Pain-to-Idea-to-ROI’, be it in their current or new initiative that may be new product development, cost optimization or revenue maximization.

We have received positive responses, and many enthusiastic early adopters have returned to us with their feedback that has helped us to improve our offering. We have had more than 350 users who have used the ‘Lite’ version of Innovator at our workshops. There have even been instances of some users who were able to develop patented ideas and others who were able to develop complete marketable products.

Referring to statistics that say 44 percent business projects fail to achieve their profit targets, what are your revenue targets and how optimistic are you about Innovator’s business success? 

Once we got the idea of enabling Innovation, we started meeting many people who were part of R&D in both large MNCs and Indian enterprises to validate our thoughts. Also, there was a need to look at Innovation holistically, and not just reduce it to Idea management. 

So, we validated our findings early on with lead users, market research, meeting experts and with our own experience in the Innovation domain. 

In terms of Growth – we are looking to create tangible outcomes with at least five enterprises in India this year, and we are getting traction from international markets. We have executed couple of Innovation FLOW workshops in the US, UK and Australia.  

What are the Innovator’s product modules and approach strategy? Do you have any metrics for measuring progress / results?

Thatva Innovator modules include Problem Analyzer, Idea Generator, Opportunity Mapper & IFR Manager that can be used by R&D scientists, engineers, operations team, and finance and product strategists. Thatva Innovator also has Innovation Management modules like Innovation Portfolio & Project Management Suite & Opportunity monetizer. 

Innovator has modules to launch Idea campaigns and seek solutions for challenges. Innovator has developed algorithms for tracking and stacking relevant information. It is integrated with patent systems and can provide information about trends & competitors. Innovator has automated workflow, intelligent search systems, and evaluation systems in place. 

Innovator has built in best practices that are both qualitative and quantitative. It helps Innovators in validating the concept that the user has generated and facilitates project managers / reviewers to measure the concept with quantitative data.

Are there any other products similar to Innovator? What are your differentiators? What are your future plans for Innovator? 

There are many idea management systems that are meant to simply capture ideas, rate ideas, and serves as collaboration platforms. There are some tools that are meant only for R&D, and limits innovation as a function of R&D.  However, there is no tool that helps in enabling ideas and taking them all the way to the point of monetization, and this is one of Thatva Innovator’s capabilities. 

We are planning to address other emerging markets that have similar challenges like the ones we have in India. Innovator will have vertical specialized versions that will be domain intensive; like Innovator for pharma, Innovator for chemicals, Innovator for hi-tech industry etc. 

What has been your experience in selling an IT product in the Indian market? How do you sell your story to an enterprise who wants to create new, innovative product or improve their existing process? 

Enterprises have been receptive but challenges are more in terms of marketing a new concept to customers that has a long gestation period.  Sometimes, organizations may not have a clear direction and are not sure about their approach to Innovation, and at times they do it because their competition is doing so.  We have to work with them in aligning their Innovation vision, which means tackling the challenge of getting the top management’s time and get their involvement. 

In India – we are going as a Co-Creation Partner, where we start by understanding the needs of an organization and then plotting an Innovation roadmap. We conduct Innovation FLOW workshops and identify the organization’s challenges, following which we customize and implement Innovator product. We will continue to work as Co-Creation consultants for at least one complete iteration of our client’s Innovation project to help give their innovation project team, a full understanding of how Thatva Innovator and its component modules should be used to optimize their work and reap the benefits.

In enterprises where the Innovation process is more streamlined, we directly start with the implementation of the Innovator Product.

What learning would you like to share with other product developers?

Product development is an iterative process. There were almost two releases that we had to write off because we wanted our mental map of the product to translate into real good user experience and had to validate our concept. This is true for any product development company that is working on new concept.  Another important finding is to involve and continuously engage with lead users. This became a source for our own learning. Workshops are another option wherein new concepts can be introduced to test people’s responses.

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Q&A with Cloud-Based Telephony Company Exotel

Exotel  Techcom “Cloud telephony product for SME’s which is like many others but we have a different approach in our problem solving.” says Shivakumar(Shivku) Ganesan, its Founder. Currently Exotel focuses on offering an easiest and fastest way to setup a phone number for your business, with smart applications tailored to business needs. He shares insights for other entrepreneurs about lessons learned in finding a market and growing a startup.

What is your Story? What inspired you to be an entrepreneur?

I am a Computer Science graduate from BITS Pilani and after spending some great learning years at Yahoo! I felt I needed a challenge beyond what Yahoo! could offer. I met the Bansals “over a few smokes” and their office was really close to my house, so it sounded exciting and I decided to join Flipkart. That experience awoke my inner entrepreneurial spirit and I decided I needed a venture of my own.  

If I could point to one thing, it’s “Impact”. I get up every morning asking how I can impact more people around me and improve their lives. That’s why Roopit was solving my own problem when I was not able to buy a 2nd hand fridge, and Exotel when I could not solve the voice and SMS problems for Roopit. All of this inter connects to wanting to solve existing problems for others, using technology, and hence creating impact.  

Why and how did you start your company? Why this Area? 

I was running Roopit at that point of time, a C2C marketplace where buyers and sellers could meet and sell over voice and SMS. I was a techie all my life since BITS Pilani, Yahoo! and Flipkart and I wanted to automate the entire voice & SMS platform into a scalable solution for my business. I did not want to hire LOTS of people and build a call center; that was just not me. Also, dealing with telecom operators and trying other products in the market to solve this problem led to many frustrations.  

Then, I decided to use a bit of open source and build a platform/product for myself. In the process, I bumped into many of my friends running businesses asking for a similar solution for themselves, and with money hitting the bank from these businesses, the pivot was natural. 

What is your product’s differentiator from competitors?

Exotel is a cloud telephony product for SME’s which is like many others but we have a different approach in our problem solving. We believe that a product has to be very very simple and easy to use for firms, especially in a new space involving telephony and that’s the core of our product.

Exotel is the easiest and fastest way to setup a phone number for your business, with smart applications tailored to business needs. Anyone in India can start using the product in 15 minutes after purchasing a phone number and the application they wish to use. The application maybe IVR, voicemail, call recording, data and analytics, API, SMS or a missed call campaign, and all this without much hassle, just a simple setup. 

We have also grown and learnt that telephony infrastructure and down times in this space have been common for years, but after an initial harrowing experience with one of our early customers, we have quickly learnt and much of our product focus has been on stability, redundancy and reliability. We even openly talk about the evolution and tactics we have put in place to make up time much quicker. 

In a nutshell, quickest, easiest and most reliable phone system setup for your business. 

What is the biggest challenge Exotel has faced so far? How did you address the challenge?

As we perceive business phone systems very differently, there is no precedent to draw inspiration from. Each one of us has our own vision of Exotel and they are all just as good as mine. Arriving at clarity on what we are building, why we are building it, how to sell it, what to do, what not do to etc have been time consuming and tough. My role of fusing everybody’s ideas into mine and then creating a consistent story that all of us understand and agree upon has been challenging. 

Who is your customer?

A small or really small company up to 20 people, typically in the B2C space that depends on phone calls or SMS for a major portion of their business is our customer.

The belief is that Indian SME’s need to be “sold to” – the job that’s conventionally handled by IT resellers who are critical to Exotel’s business model. What are your thoughts on the changes that Cloud technology might bring to this scenario, with the whole “self-service” angle coming into play? 

Cloud (and SaaS) is a service delivery model, so, that does not change the sales and fulfillment models (resellers). Increasingly Indians are buying things online and they will purchase services for their companies too. But that is not going to take away the role of resellers in the short to medium term. Having said that, Who these resellers are, what they are reselling and so on changes quite a bit in the SaaS model. It is likely that the partners in the SaaS ecosystem might be IT services and other consultancy service providers rather than hardware and black-box providers.  

What are your future plans?

To create as much impact as possible in society. There are millions of SMEs, and technology hasn’t reached them. If Exotel could save their time and money so that they can go home early and spend it on their family, that is a plan worth working for.  

What have been your BIG lessons – personal, professional and otherwise? 

  • Solve someone’s problem.
  • Most Indians have a “services” bent of mind. “Product” and “SaaS” bent of minds have to be acquired/taught (learned).
  • Hire for attitude rather than/along with talent
  • It is possible to learn and excel in nearly everything.
  • Many “middle management” people from MNCs (who were very successful) are not readily suitable for a start-up.  

We see a lot of product start-ups coming up in both the enterprise and consumer space. What would be your advice to start-ups — where do you think they are lacking, and how should they go about correcting these issues? 

I don’t think I am qualified to give advice to other people yet. My entrepreneurial life is guided by two concepts: 

Curiosity: A genuine desire to learn new things and correct one’s mistakes.

Self-motivation: The need to get somewhere in life (being driven).  

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How Visual Website Optimizer got to 2,500+ paid customers through great content and rigorous A/B tests

Last month, I promised to bring you stories of how Indian startups took their products to the world and got the inside scoop on how WebEngage used educational content and live demos to get to 7,000 users in less than 15 months. While I have been slow in bringing more stories to you, this one should more than make up for it.

In this post, I bring you the story of Visual Website Optimizer in conversation with its founder and CEO Paras Chopra. Visual Website Optimizer is an easy-to-use A/B testing tool that allows marketing professionals to create different A/B tests using a point-and-click editor (without needing any HTML knowledge). It is one of India’s fastest growing startups and has got to 2,500+ paid customers including the likes of Microsoft, AMD, Groupon & Airbnb using great content and rigorous A/B tests.

Let’s get started.

How did you get the initial buzz going for your product? 

Paras: Initial buzz was entirely product driven. The concept of visual A/B testing was non-existent then so the product was radical in that sense. A/B testing existed, but it wasn’t this easy.

Did you have marketing built into your product, and were you marketing your product as you were developing it? Or did it all start only after you had a finished product?

Yes, we detected successful A/B tests and requested for a case study from the customer automatically. The case studies gave a lot of buzz. First MVP was done in a month and after that product evolution and marketing started simultaneously.

Did you have a marketing plan in place when you started?

No, I did not have any plan. It was very organic without any plan whatsoever.

Who do you pitch your product to in a company?

Marketing analysts. Our target customer is a person who actually does the A/B tests.

I remember you mentioned on your Mixergy interview that you didn’t want the world to know that you were a one-man show to begin with. Was it difficult to look like a credible company that way? And was that an even bigger issues being an Indian product company?

No, it wasn’t difficult. As long as they were getting a good product and quick service, the customers didn’t care to verify whether it was a one-man show or a 100-people company. Interestingly, many people still don’t know we’re an Indian company.

As Visual Website Optimizer grew, how have you scaled up your marketing? Increased frequency in terms of content? Bigger campaigns? Targeting higher-value customers for your enterprise plan? Also, how have you scaled up your team to take care of these activities?

A bunch of things. Increased frequency from one post per week to two on our blog. Parallel guest posting. Making guides and dedicated landing pages for SEO. Comprehensive retargeting. Started PPC and display to measure ROI. I don’t think marketing should aim to target higher-value customers. They probably need a lot more offline interaction, so marketing works on nurturing them currently.

On the people side, we scaled it by bringing in additional super-smart people. Including me, right now we have a team of three. We’re looking to expand it by adding three more people. Yes, now we have a plan and going forward clearly defined roles in content marketing, generalist tasks, paid marketing and design.

What marketing channels have you used? What has been the most effective for you? Why have they been so effective?

Most effective has been our own case studies and comprehensive guest posts in prominent publications such as Smashing Magazine, SEOMoz, CopyBlogger, MarketingProfs, etc. We also nurture our user base by regularly sending them case studies and use cases.

What about paid channels? How do you go about choosing the right ones? 

We’re still learning on this, but the key is to explore new paid marketing channels that haven’t been exploited yet. All good paid marketing channels dry up ultimately and ROI dwindles. So you have to be on the edge of exploration. That’s how markets work.

How do you measure the success of your marketing campaigns? Do you compare them to your other campaigns? Industry benchmarks? Or just get an overall feel whether they are successful or not?

The only metric our marketing cares about is number of free trials. I believe that once free trial is generated, product should speak for itself so revenue should be a function of product if free trials are from the intended audience. Shares, visits, etc. are all fluff. We don’t obsess about them. We do compare all our activities to see which one gives most bang for the buck and most volume.

How do you use VWO to improve your own conversion rates? What are the top 2-3 biggest successes you have had from A/B testing?

We conduct many tests. Some examples:

http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/split-testing-blog/headline-test-increases-clickthroughs/

Behavioral targeting: http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/split-testing-blog/behavioral-targeting-case-study/

Heatmaps: http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/split-testing-blog/increase-conversions-using-heatmaps/

http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/split-testing-blog/left-vs-right-sidebar-which-layout-works-best/

Right now, five different tests are running on our website :)

Apart from the A/B tests, what other numbers do you look up on the website? Funnel drop-offs, bounce rate, what else do you look at?

Navigation paths and traffic sources with highest conversion rate.

I love the blog you have. How did that get started? And how do you measure its impact?

I love writing. Have written a book on Nihilism, so I can write whole day long :) Impact, was measured in terms of traffic to blog and then conversion of that traffic to trials.

What kind of community do you have around your products? How do you keep them engaged?

We have a very lively community on Twitter, GPlus, Facebook and our blog. We have 3000+ followers, 2000+ blog readers and remember that A/B testing is a niche. In terms of content, again case studies with actual learning work best. Just numbers without flesh doesn’t work.

What about partnerships and integrations? ClickTale, Drupal, how have they helped you increase your reach? How did you go about getting them?

Yes, partnerships increase reach if done properly. For commercial companies like ClickTale, they approached us. For open-source like Drupal, we simply developed modules.

What about your personal brand? Have you built that and used it to take the word out about your products in turn?

Yes, I think so. My blog and interviews such as on Mixergy help a lot. Our bootstrapped story helps a ton too.

What about the marketing team? How big is it and what roles do each of them play? What do you think is an ideal marketing team for a tech startup?

Ideal marketing team is: content, paid, generalist and designer.

We have a lot of good products being built in India but very few go on to become blockbusters. Where do you think these startups are faltering with their marketing? What advice do you have for them?

I think they do a very poor job on using the content effectively. My advice would be to product great content consistently, share it with influencers, build a brand of the company around content and eductation and just keep scaling that up.

That’s some great advice Paras. Thanks a lot for sharing them and being an inspiration to the Indian startup community at large.

Dear readers, what did you think of the interview? What else would you like to know when I talk to more successful startups about their marketing? Let me know in the comments.

Reblogged from PokeandBite.com

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Showcase of 8 Innovative companies for #IndiaInternetDay – A TiE event

It’s here! The India Internet Day(a TiE event) celebration is beginning, and you’re all a part of it. You may be an outelier, an insider, a veteran, an investor, a trend spotter, an experimentor or an industry driver, but this is your go-to event this year.

Why? We’re looking at the long-term horizon and paradigm shifts in the internet industry globally and translating that in the Indian context. We will debate and discuss strategic drivers of the industry and will attract the top players.

Eight Indian startups get their “4 minutes of fame” at the event – an unprecedented happening. No wonder that when we opened the call for applications, we received more than 55 of them.

The competition was tight, and the job of the jury was not easy. The jury – Rajiv Prakash(Next in Advisory Partners , Saumya Meattle (ModuleOne), Srikant Sastri (Vivaki), Vivek Agarwal (Liqvid eLearning) and Vimalendu Verma (Magic Software) – rated the startups on the following parameters: originality, impact, practicability and applicability of the Innovation. After a lot many conversations and debates, 8 companies were shortlisted.

The big question: Will you be there to see the innovations being put forward by these companies? Next year could well be your turn.

Bluegape helps brands in setting up fan merchandising stores. Fan merchandising is ignored by most brands in India and is also a unique way of promotion for brands.

Cite Communities is an open online community for management professionals and serves more than 28 lakh people worldwide. The community offers a free-to-use knowledgebase with a discussion forum. This is where professionals can share career-related queries, which are answered by experts and mentors. The trump card? Anonymity.

Dineout is a table reservation website that enables customers to book a table, online and on the phone, at their favourite restaurants in town. It provides fantastic discounts – something not on offer if customers go to a restaurant directly.

Huntshire helps solve the problem of finding the right talent in a given time frame. Right now, companies must post vacancies on job websites and wait for 30 days to get maximum applications. Post this, the candidates are screened. The entire process takes 30-45 days. Huntshire does all this in 3 days, eliminating the need for a two-step process.

PerfectMyEnglish is a Web and Mobile App enabling tangible improvements in English communication skills for students and professionals. They offer personalised mentorship, detailed analytics, spoken English skill remediation through VoIP services and end-to-end solutions, helping businesses and recruiters achieve key English training and assessment objectives.

NowFloats: With 850M mobile phones (over 90 per cent feature phones) and SMS being a pervasive technology, NowFloats enables creation and updating of websites through SMS for small and medium businesses in India. Smartphone owners can use mobile Apps.

MindHelix: Sentinel is the first app designed with women’s security in mind. The app can send instant alerts in case of any problems. A forced power-off of the phone or an improper exit of the application will trigger an alert to be sent. Prolonged signal loss will also cause a ‘fail safe’ alert SMS and email to be sent from the company’s server.

Mobile Harvest is a two-way oral and intuitive literacy neutral community and networking platform, much like an oral Wikipedia for our emerging billion. It attempts to bring the benefits of social media to people who are not comfortable with reading or writing. 

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Andy is a mobile robot platform that uses a Smartphone at its core.

Andy is a personal robot enabled by the intelligence of an Android Smartphone or any Android device. Personal or hobby robots till date have been unaffordable due to the high costs of the hardware involved. Abheek Bose, Andy’s creator shares the journey of building Andy and the factors that influenced its development.

What happened earlier in your career that led to your founding Andy?
Abheek Bose: We were always keen upon entering the educational and personal robotics sector but the challenge was keeping the price points low, especially for the Indian market.

After attending a mobile conference on advancement of smart phones, we identified an opportunity to utilize them and build cost effective robot systems for education and personal use 

What is Andy and how does it add value to consumers?
Abheek Bose: Andy is a mobile robot platform that uses a Smartphone at its core.

On strapping the phone onto the Andy base, the entire phone becomes a part of the robot:

  1. Andy is therefore now equipped with sensors like Camera, GPS, Wifi, Bluetooth Compass, Microphone, Touch Screen just to name a few.
  2. Andy is also highly programmable where the user can either program Andy or simply download apps on the phone which make Andy execute various functions
  3. In short, Andy is a robot with very sophisticated features yet highly affordable on an individual basis (Typically such robots costs between $2000 – 5000 while Andy is below $120)

With Andy, students and hobbyists can now afford to own their personal robot, hack and develop various applications as well as share them with one another. Users of lower age groups can actually learn the concepts of computing and engineering using Andy in a more interactive and entertaining way.

What is your target market?
Abheek Bose: Anyone in the age group of 14 to 25 years is our target user group. Andy falls in the personal robotics market currently estimated to be around USD 1.3 billion.

What is your product’s differentiator from competitors?
Abheek Bose: If you really look at the differentiators, they fall into two categories, Technology and Strategic. As far as technology differentiators are concerned they are:

  1. Andy uses the Android Platform which is open source, well supported and maintains a strong developer community around it.
  2. The hardware schematics and software developed are open source and we are providing an SDK to enable the target user group further.
  3. Andy already has an initial developer community involving top educational institutes like IIIT-Bangalore, VJTI Mumbai and IIT-Bombay. This community is also growing rapidly with more engineering colleges and schools enrolling into our developer program

Operational and Strategy Differentiators
Andy supply chain is well established and streamlined with the necessary arrangements to go for mass production.

We have finalized with the suppliers for all the components including chassis, electronics, batteries and other peripherals and the process is also set where we can order in lots and receive the same in our office within 2 – 3 weeks time. Andy distribution involves various channels partners including Robot training companies (education) as well as large retail formats (consumer / personal) to maximize reach.

We have currently the following partners in the educational / community development space

  1. Gade Autonomous Systems, Mumbai
  2. Open Robotics Club, Indore
  3. VJTI, SRA, Mumbai
  4. Andy design has also been registered with the Registrar of designs to prevent copycat products.

What is the biggest challenge Andy has faced so far? How did you address the challenge?
Abheek Bose: Out of the many close contenders, the biggest challenge was to streamline operations.

It was critical that the suppliers of Andy parts were reliable, assured  high quality and also within the target budgets.

The challenge was addressed (and we are still improving this) by trying out various suppliers during an early prototyping phase and creating procurement processes as well as conducting quality tests for the same.

Online portals like AliExpress and EBay were very useful to select the correct suppliers.

How has the recent Mentor program from Mindsphere helped your company? What mistakes/pitfalls has it helped you avoid?
Abheek Bose:Mindsphere has been absolutely crucial in Andy’s development. It is because of MindSphere’s involvement that we could complete the product launch from concept to the beta prototype in just 88 days!

Mindsphere has been involved in all aspects of the product development cycle since the conceptual stages taking on a crucial role in

  1. Prototype development and design ergonomics
  2. Market research, exploration & preparation (Go to market strategizing)
  3. Operations Management and Processes
  4. Project Financials and Budgeting
  5. Pricing Strategies
  6. Distribution Planning

What do the next 12-24 months hold for Andy?
The next steps with Andy would be to concentrate on Sales, Distribution and Community Development. In parallel we will also be working on next generation design and product improvements.

Abheek is Andy’s creator and oversees the development as well as the business of Andy. Abheek’s mechanical engineering and software development roots are responsible for the Andy body design as well as the base software. Abheek also manages the overall business growth of Andy and looks into new partnerships, markets and users. Abheek when not hacking on Andy, loves to play around with gadgets, listen to music and recently taken a liking to reading Dilbert! Abheek is also a big foodie and loves trying out new places to experiment.

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Hike Messaging App – 5M users since 12/12/12, and counting!

BSB is a start-up funded by Bharti & SoftBank building mobile products for the Indian market. Hike is a messaging app which allows instant messaging and group chat on your phone with friends who have Hike, as well as those who don’t have Hike. We caught up with BSB’s head of products and strategy, Kavin Bharti Mittal (KBM), to talk about Hike, right before he was getting ready to launch Hike 2.0, a major update to the messaging app.

Introduction

Hike is a pure Made-in-India product. BSB is based out of Gurgaon, and the product was built from scratch by this team. Under the guidance of KBM, who is also the resident UX guru, the team brought out a beautiful and highly functional product in Dec, 2012 when the team size was 15. They are 30+ now, and furiously working on next set of features, supporting users and handling the success!

Product Highlights

  • The product has been designed from grounds-up by Hike team.
  • The design is beautiful and minimalist.
  • They chose a more efficient protocol for communication (MQTT, which is less chatty than the better-known and more-often used XMPP).
  • In India, Hike allows its users to message to non-Hike users by converting Hike message into an SMS (each user is given 100 free SMS every month). This is a key differentiator for Hike, in addition to a cool and modern design.

Product Development

  • Following an agile development model, they schedule a release every 4 weeks with a stop gap release for performance and related fixes in the middle if need be. Such a schedule ensures that they are not hitting the users with too many changes too often, and still stay responsive to market feedback.
  • KBM controls the product UX and works with his designers to create detailed wireframes and mockups before engineering starts working.
  • They have a very product-focused culture and so engineering-design conflicts are minimal as everyone understands the need for a great design and works hard for it.
  • They work on multiple platforms in parallel, so lessons learned on one platform are quickly incorporated into other platforms in the same release cycle.

Product Strategy

  • Beautifully designed product – Made-in-India products are not known for good designs. Hike is a notable exception and this will help it gain ground quickly.
  • Messaging Hub – In the world of Facebook and Twitter, there is a huge amount of information generated and consumed by people, causing information overload. Hike aims to cut this clutter and allow you to create a closed network of friends with whom you share right amount of information. This is a good differentiation strategy.
  • Close partnership with carriers – With smartphone penetration going up all over the world and cheap smartphones being available, messaging applications are well-positioned to kill SMS (and jeopardize a large portion of carrier revenue). Hike can offer opportunities to carriers to offer value-added services and retain (and enhance) that revenue.

Adoption

  • The messaging app space is very crowded (WhatsApp, Facebook Chat, WeChat, Nimbuzz , etc.) and Hike is a late entrant to the party. Still it has created considerable buzz in the market and have some impressive numbers to show.
    • In 4 months since the launch (they launched on 12/12/12), they have crossed 5M users (adoption is measured by # of active users – sending at least 1 message a day) and growing fast!
    • Over 50% of their users use hike2SMS feature, which is a key differentiator for them
  • They have used rewards (Talk-time rewards, ended now) and incentives (50 free SMS for each successful invite) to good effect to create good buzz. However, as KBM says, buzz and going viral work only when you provide a good value to the users. Hike 2.0 is expected to bring in lots of features.
  • Using digital channels for marketing and support very well: Blog, support site, Facebook page and twitter handles (@hikeapp and @hikesupport) are all well used by users and well-responded by Hike team.

Hike 2.0 and beyond

On Apr 17, BSB announced Hike 2.0, a significant release which introduces ‘circle of friends’ notion and many other features. With Hike 2.0, you can now create a circle of friends (consisting of your close friends), post status and mood updates to them, and review their recent updates. This is similar to Facebook’s Improved Friend Lists and Google + . Read the announcement for full list of Hike 2.0 new features and enhancements.

‘Status updates’ are asynchronous models of communication (you don’t expect your friends to read and respond immediately, though this Facebook generation usually does!) while messaging is supposed to be synchronous – you engage in conversation in real-time and expect a response. With 2.0 release, Hike is positioning itself as the ‘messaging hub’ for mobile-first crowd, and taking a ‘closed group, more engagement’ approach (as opposed to ‘everyone reads everything about me’ philosophy). While this might pit it against Facebook and G+ in terms of functionality, I think this is good strategy going forward to capture mindshare of an audience who is a public enough to chat with anyone, but private enough to need the solace of ‘circle of friends’. This also attracts users like me who prefer private and deep conversations and shun messaging apps because of its openness.

As Hike grows beyond the feature-functionality debate, it needs to give more focus on back-end: messaging is critical for its audience and disruptions caused by planned maintenance or rush to get new release must be avoided at all costs. 

The Road Ahead

My address book contains my US, China and India friends which add up to about 400 contacts. When I installed Hike on my phone (Nokia 710), I found hardly 5 friends who were on Hike (Hike looks for those who are on Hike and adds to your friend list). I did the same for WhatsApp, and I saw 80% of my contacts show up as using WhatsApp, including some of the people I didn’t think were in the target segment of messaging apps!

Hike has a long way to go, but I think they have started with the right product and are travelling in the right direction. May the force be with them! 

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CollateBox: Cloud-Based Software Simplifies Small Biz Collaboration

Small businesses with growing lists of data are the ideal customer for U.S.-incorporated CollateBox, a software product of India-based WOLF Frameworks. Sunny Ghosh, co-founder and CEO, describes CollateBox’s value proposition and the factors that influenced its development. This article is brought to SandHill readers in partnership with ProductNation. 

SandHill.com: Please describe your product and how it provides business value for your customers.

Sunny Ghosh: Companies collaborate on lists of data with a lot of people, internally and externally, for different projects. But organizing and keeping track of these growing lists is a nightmare — from scouting mailboxes to finding the latest spreadsheet version to collect validated data.

CollateBox is a simpler way to collaborate on a list without creating and emailing multiple copies of spreadsheets. It lets users collect data from multiple sources, organize and securely share parts of a growing list with team members. And there’s no software to install; everything works online in a secure cloud environment and can be used for any business process.

CollateBox also helps companies set up processes to maintain a workflow and keep data organized, saving precious time and money. Users can also view instant notifications and summaries on every record of their data with the added ability to comment and add attachments. 

SandHill.com: Please describe your market and typical users of CollateBox.

Sunny Ghosh: CollateBox is best suitable for companies and teams with 100 people or less. It is suitable to any business scenario that involves growing lists of data. HR managers use it to work together with HR executives to qualify a list of new recruits. Companies can use it for sales leads, automatically assigning prospects to the sales team as a new lead is qualified. A marketing coordinator can use CollateBox to maintain a single list to coordinate email campaign dates with the marketing team.

Other examples of how small companies use our product include: tracking production updates and sharing it with top management, allocating service requests to support agents and visualize a summary of service statuses, and an operations manager can use it to recruit new partners using online forms and automatically collate all data in their CollateBox account.

SandHill.com: How did your company and CollateBox originate?

Sunny Ghosh: We founded WOLF Frameworks in 2006 with an aim to democratize computing by introducing savings of more than 60 percent in time and cost and with zero technical coding skill for developing and delivering new business software.

Our first WOLF product was an Online Database Application Platform. Launched in 2008, it helps database architects and application developers to rapidly configure and run all sorts of online applications without writing a single line of technical code — even for firing complex business logic. We netted over 40,000 end users during out first 30 months of business.

A year later, our Platform as a Service product was being used in more than 20 business applications. In 2010 WOLF bagged the Information Week Silver Edge Awards at INTEROP and was named GARTNER Cool Vendor Award for Platform as a Service worldwide.

In 2011, we ideated on DBMonk, which was incubated by VertExperts LLP for early validation.

DBMonk renamed to CollateBox Inc. and was incorporated in October 2011, in the state of Delaware, USA. We released the minimum viable product for selected users in 2012 and subsequently had more than 10,000 user registrations. In 2013 we signed up our first set of paid customers for CollateBox and released version 2.2 for more than 1,000 users.

Read the complete post at Sandhill.com

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The day Zest.Md picked on smartest brain for inputs at #PNMeetup

I met Avinash a few weeks back to share details about zest.md, and to discuss some of the challenges which we are facing. Avinash, helped me to understand a lot of issues better, and invited me to be a part of the #PNMeetup to discuss it with a larger group. To be honest, I was apprehensive initially, but seeing the conviction with which Avinash said that it would help us, I agreed and I am so glad that we did go and share our challenges at the #PNMeetup! 

Zest.Md is a SaaS platform which provides with medical practitioners with a solution to get started with online consultation process, using their own website. One of the key challenges which we shared with the group was on how to drive initial engagement with the medical practitioners who sign up. Another aspect which we discussed was around pricing. Currently we have a single price solution, and we were in the process of considering Freemium model – what should we keep in mind while designing Freemium so that we don’t end up losing paying clients. 

#PNMeetup was a great experience it was very refreshing to be amongst people who have been involved with various stages of product development, themselves. It was a very different space than the other entrepreneurship events that I have been in, almost everybody here was currently running an online product company, and they understood dilemma and the criticality of the decision around such questions. 

I had attended along with two other members of my team, and the one of the greatest reaffirmation was that, there is no single answer or a single point of view when it comes to even simple questions pertaining to a product. Many a times we, as young start-ups, tend to get bogged down or keep changing paths based on feedback from a single person. Being at #PNMeetup gave a reassurance that it is justified that we were so concerned about our decisions on these questions as they are not so straightforward, and at the same time the forum was a great place for us to take feedback from a group as a whole, and it helped us to identify the range of possible solutions from which we could chart out our own solution. 🙂

Thanks Amit, Devendra & Avinash for helping me in the presentation and briefing you provided and for the opportunity.  I really liked the venue and seating arrangement, and I feel that the ambience was instrumental in creating an informal atmosphere where people could exchange frank and honest opinions.  

P.S.: The highlight of the day was meeting up with Amit Ranjan, co-founder Slideshare and to see him share his thoughts candidly! 🙂

My name is Vinayak and I’m the Founder & CEO at Zest.md. 

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Sapience Analytics is driving over INR 10 million in annual value per 100 employees

CEO and Co-Founder, Sapience Analytics, Shirish Deodhar, is pleased with the market response to their first software product, Sapience, and says their objective is to become the default standard for Automated Enterprise Effort Visibility and Gain

Sapience Analytics was set up in 2008, as a software products company. It was formed by four serial entrepreneurs, who had come to realize that the future of Indian IT belonged to product ventures and that software services was a commodity business. The team faced the compelling need of stepping into the market of software products. The core product in this case is an award-winning, patent-pending, Sapience, an employee productivity analytics solution that claims to deliver over 20 per cent increase in work output from your existing team. In an interview with ProductNation, Shirish Deodhar talks about the Sapience product journey, its unrivalled position in the market and the company’s future plans.

Why and how did you start Sapience? Why this area of work efficiency?
Sapience Analytics has been co-founded by four serial entrepreneurs. By 2008, we had spent 25 years in outsourced product development, including successful exits of previously founded companies. After mentoring a few product companies, one of us, Swati Deodhar, decided to build a solution to address the challenge of measuring and improving productivity.

In mid-2009, we had a prototype with an integrated dashboard displaying software engineering metrics aggregated and analyzed from different tools. This had to do with visibility into the underlying effort of employees and teams as they went about their assigned work.

Absence of work visibility makes it difficult to increase work output, and affects productivity. Contemporary practices of 24×7 work using laptops, flexible office hours, work-from-home (WFH) policies, globally distributed teams, and outsourcing intensify the problem of measurement. Many companies even stop these progressive HR practices in order to improve productivity, just like the recent controversial ban on WFH at Yahoo. We saw an opportunity to benefit the business through greater productivity while encouraging employee friendly policies. The solution also helps employees work smart and improve their work-life balance.

What are your product’s key differentiators?
Sapience helps deliver over 20 percent increase in work output from the existing team without requiring any change in process or additional management overhead. Sapience achieves this through Automated Work Visibility. This is a game-changer for any business, driving over INR 10 million in annual value per 100 employees.

Sapience captures employee work patterns in a highly automated manner with virtually no manual intervention. Agents installed on the individual machines collect user data, and forward it to the central server. Each user gets an individual dashboard, while long term analysis / reporting at business level are available to managers on the central server. Sapience integrates with the customer’s ERP and other systems to enable effort analytics and capacity optimization across all aspects of the business. Customers can opt for Sapience hosted cloud server (SaaS) or an on-premise server.

Besides the revenue/profit gain for the business, here are a few benefits for various stakeholders:

  • For employees – they can ensure better focus on key activities
  • Managers – they can guide their teams to work smarter
  • Senior management get the ‘macro view’ – pointing out which teams are under-utilized

 

What was the funding strategy to create this product? Time and effort taken to develop it
Once the product concept was validated with some initial installations, we received US $350,000 from the Indian Angel Network in May 2010. Then in November 2011, we received around US $1 million funding from Seed Enterprises.

Who are your competitors? What is the biggest challenge Sapience has faced so far? How did you address that challenge?
Sapience remains the only product available globally that delivers enterprise class automated time/effort analytics. At first glance, some prospects confuse Sapience with employee monitoring tools that have been around for a long time. User time is classified into productive and non-productive work, and aggregated for a pool of employees on weekly and monthly basis.

One of our challenges is to highlight that Sapience does not change corporate culture, but adapts to it. We are addressing this with focused messaging, listening to employee and management feedback from our installations, and building the required capabilities.

What’s been your success mantra in expanding to emerging markets / its reach?
We have been fortunate to have India as a large potential market for Sapience, since it keeps the cost of sales and support low. The product timing has also been good, since productivity at work is becoming a key concern at IT Services companies and for subsidiaries of global MNCs. Since the economic downturn in 2008, revenue growth has declined and billing rates have remained flat or even dropped. Costs have continued to escalate, and profit at IT companies is now taxed.

We were warned that India is considered a very challenging market in which to sell enterprise products, especially for a start-up, and even more so for a ‘Made in India’ product. We encountered the classic innovation curve when selling the products. While everyone liked Sapience, most managers were reluctant to change the status quo in their companies. However, a few bold and innovative leaders recognized the value and signed up as our initial customers. In late 2010, the first release was picked up by companies such as IdeaS (a SAS subsidiary), Excelize, and EnVenture. These were all 75 to 150 user license deals. The next step was to persuade larger 2,500+ employee companies. In mid-2011, senior management at Zensar and KPIT gave Sapience its initial break into the medium sized segment. By early 2012, we got a breakthrough at Tech Mahindra, a leading IT company.

What have been your BIG lessons – personal, professional and otherwise? What lessons would you like to share with someone who is struggling or planning to get into product development?
I wrote a book called ‘From Entrepeneurs to Leaders – Building Billion Dollar Product Companies from India’ that was published by McGraw-Hill in 2010. But the BIG lesson is a very fundamental advice from an ancient Indian text (the Bhagvad Gita): ‘Do your work well for its own sake, without aiming for rewards.’

What inspired you to be an entrepreneur? What lessons would you like to share with someone who is struggling or planning to get into product development?
I did my B-Tech (EE) in 1980, from IIT Bombay. Following a Master’s in the USA, I worked at Burroughs Corporation in Southern California for several years. Got a US patent for the work that I did in my first year of work. I became an entrepreneur by accident when I met someone from the US, who wanted to outsource work to India, and helped co-found my first company, Frontier Software, in 1989. Frontier was a pioneer in outsourced product development, and with product offshoring to India being uncommon then, it took us 10 years to scale to 150 employees. One of our first customers, VERITAS Software (now Symantec Corp.) acquired Frontier in 1999. By 2003, we had scaled VERITAS India to over 600 employees in 16 product teams, and over 30 percent patents filed (though the India operation was 22 percent of worldwide engineering).

In late 2003, I and two others came together at In-Reality Software and grew it rapidly, before another successful exit to Symphony Services Inc. We scaled the Symphony Pune business to US $25 million and 700+ employees by 2007.

After mentoring a few product start-ups between 2007 and 2009, we decided to try and build a successful product company from India. We are now focused exclusively on Sapience Analytics.

Time on Work matters not Time in Office
Sapience automatically determines on-PC and away-from-PC time, and differentiates between actual work and personal time.Your 9-6 pm staff (typically women) may be more efficient than those staying late

The 9-6 pm employees are most efficient at work – since they contribute high work hours in proportion to time in office. They often tend to be women employees who have commitments at home.

Programmers don’t spend even 50% of their work day in programming!
It is about whether you are focused on activities that matter and which result in most work being done, rather than less important but seemingly urgent tasks.

Sapience is discovering that a large amount of employee time is being spent on emails.
This is often a case of poor email habits: opening each email as it arrives, copying too many people, etc. Similarly managers spend a lot of time on planned and informal meetings. The two most important training programs required in companies are on email discipline and how to conduct meetings.

What are your future plans –in terms of this (work efficiency) product / and any other?
We have a multi-dimensional ‘expanding web’ growth strategy that covers product functionality, platforms, enterprise scale, and geography. The goal is to become the default standard for Automated Enterprise Effort Visibility and Gain.

For example, in the current year, we will cover all platforms including Linux, iOS, smartphones, calendaring tools and third-party presence servers. We have just released mSapience beta for Android smartphones, which help you track time spent on phone calls, travel and meetings away from office. You can distinguish between business and personal work.

What has it taken so long for Indian software market to focus on software product development?  What changes have you see in people’s perception toward domestic software products?
India has dominated in the IT Services space for the past twenty years, which has benefited the country and generated self-confidence and reputation for India on the global stage.  However, IT Services growth has slowed, and profitability is down. Cloud technologies and widespread adoption of mobiles and increasingly smartphones has caused a technology disruption that new companies can exploit. Indian market for IT products is reasonably large and growing. Moreover, the presence of MNC subsidiaries and large number of experienced software professionals returning back to India means that the right kind of product talent is available. Finally, some degree of angel and VC funding is now possible in this product ecosystem.

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How Adoor Gopalakrishnan’s Kathapurushan became a Software Product Entrepreneur ?

From being the protagonist of an Adoor Gopalakrishnan national award  winning movie to a graphics trainer, from a book publisher to a printer, from services to products, our guest today has been there, done that. Meet Vish, the MD of Logical Steps.

ProductNation: Hi Vish. Welcome to Product Nation. Let us begin with your story.

Vish: I was born in an entrepreneurial family. My family ran a printing press in Kerala. So I grew up living entrepreneurship and also picking up skills to run a printing press. Childhood was exciting, as we were always creating something. As far as my education is concerned, I enrolled for an undergraduate Physics program at the Moscow State University. University had some of the finest minds in Physics teaching the subject. But, the 1991 coup cut short all this excitement. This brief stint while I was in Moscow, made me realize that college education does not prepare you for life. Though, I was not keen to go back to college, it was family pressure that saw me write three years physics papers in one shot. All this for a degree from the University of Kerala, Trivandrum. Isn’t degree everything?

It was around the same time that I got introduced to computers. My father had made investments into offset printing and desktop publishing. I soon found an entire computer science department to myself, right from laser printers to 486 machines. I learnt everything from scratch. It was time for my first fling with entrepreneurship. It was an MS-DOS pocket reference manual. Using a microsoft reference manual as the guide, I printed out some MS-DOS reference manual copies and handed it over to a local bookshop for sale. Surprisingly, the book shop came back for more. Simultaneously, I also ventured into Desktop publishing training, as the printing industry was moving in that direction. These experiments gave me the confidence that I could do something on my own

ProductNation: When did you get the time to do the Adoor Gopalakrishnan movie? And why do you consider it your first product experience?

Vish: Adoor Gopalakrishnan is a family friend and I had done a small role in one of his earlier films. He talked me into playing the lead role in a film called Kathapurushan. It went on to win the National Award in 1996. He knew about my background in printing. So, during the film, I got involved into many aspects of the movie production – recording audio, printing of collateral and special books. And working with Adoor Gopalakrishnan, who cared about every little detail and to experience his passion and leadership. I consider that experience extremely precious and a sort of first in making a product.

ProductNation: Which were the other movies you did?

Vish: No, I went back into computer training with a company called Tandem. Tandem, which was based in Trivandrum, sent me to CDAC Pune for a course called DACA – Diploma in Advanced Computer Arts. As a trainer, I was to learn this course and come back to Trivandrum to teach. At this course, I was the only one from a non-arts background, as the others were all from JJ and similar schools. But, I topped the class and got a break into advertising with a Kirloskar group company – Pratibha Advertising. One of the noteworthy projects that I did while at Pratibha was a digital kiosk that was showcased at the first Auto Expo in New Delhi. I quickly realised that digital advertising in India at that time was still very early. So I packed up my bags and went to Singapore for a teaching assignment with a University. But, I ended up joining a digital marketing company there. It was here that I spent close to five years till the dot com bust in 2000 consumed it. During my stint here, I got in depth experience into e-learning.

ProductNation: Is that when you started your current company, logical steps ?

Vish: Yes. I came back to India, after the dotcom bust. And that is when we started Logical Steps. We began by supplying learning content for television. We were paid 10% of the contracted amount. That is when I understood the trouble of doing business in India. So, I went back to Singapore to source business and keep the business running. It was challenging. I was using my salary to finance the business. I was not keen to close down and let go of my staff who had picked up extremely useful skills. So, we kept going. It was during this that we got a chance to service AIG for one of their projects. So that is how our services business started.

ProductNation: What happened to e-learning, then? And the platform? How did you start silver bullet?

Vish: An opportunity came up to create an e-learning engine for the US Market in the area of Medical Entrance exam called MCAT. A doctor who was considered the guru of MCAT had already created a large amount of content plus created analytics metrics to appraise students. We were given the project to create a platform that could provide all of this. This project gave us tremendous exposure to learning frameworks and gave us the idea to create a product on our own. That is how the idea of SilverBullet came up.By that time, I had also realised the limitations of a services business. So, we were all set for a product pitch in late 2010. While we built the platform quickly, content became a challenge. So we had to invest resources in training teachers to address this issue of content. This consumed our resources and it was our services business that was feeding silverbullet. It took us some time to adjust to this new reality, as we were dealing with an individual customer, unlike a corporate entity as in our services business.

ProductNation: Let us talk about silver bullet? Any learnings that you would like to share.

Vish: Silver Bullet is an online learning system for engineering and medical entrance examinations in India. There have been tremendous learnings. Unlike servicing a business, in this case, it was a B2C online product. It took us some time to figure out our Go-To-Market approach. We felt schools were the touch point, but it wasn’t so. Then we tried facebook, and it wasn’t the touch point. The most profound insight came from my 10 year old daughter, who frankly said that students are not interested in adding more studies to their daily work. She went ahead and said that no one would like to put themselves into trouble by opting for a Free Trial. How true? Students are already overworked. In all this, we figured out that it is the parent who is the touch point. And the parent was in a totally different world and a world that wasn’t online. The only way to reach them was through traditional media. It was then, that we checked out the media budgets of other online learning companies and found that they spend 19% to 20% of their revenue on ad budgets that run into crores, it is a totally different league. And that is how these companies are reaching out to parents. Parents are more than happy to add to the kid’s collection of material to consume.

ProductNation: Interesting, allow us to end this interview, with a difficult question. Looking back on your career, it is easy to see that you have been all over the place. How has it helped you in approaching your product business?

Vish: [Laughs] The product business is much like the movie business. If you see, my experience in diverse areas has given me ideas and the aptitude to create a wonderful product. Whether it is design or delivery, content or its packaging, all my earlier experience have served me well in developing Silver Bullet.

ProductNation: Wearing two hats at the same time i.e. services and products. What would you prefer? And what challenges do you face, while doing so?

Vish: Product without a doubt. It is something that you can own. But, when working on a product, especially when you are just starting off, managing the internal aspirations of the team becomes difficult.

ProductNation: Thank you, Vish for talking to ProductNation. We wish you all the very best in living up to these challenges.

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Q&A with ERP Ecommerce Company, InSync Solutions

InSync Solutions Ltd. provides ecommerce solutions for online retail businesses. Many software services companies in India are evolving to products companies. Atul Gupta, founder and managing director of InSync Solutions Ltd., describes how InSync made this transition. 

SandHill.com: When did you launch InSync as a services company, and what led to the switch to a products focus? 

Atul Gupta: We launched in October 2005 in Kolkata, India. At the time it was the only prudent career choice for me, as I was unwilling to work as an employee.

InSync was made to be a service company targeting small and midsize businesses (SMBs). But after four years we realized we couldn’t build a sustainable business with services. There were too many challenges. So we changed direction in the winter of 2009, switching our focus to products and incorporating the learnings we had gained up to that point.

SandHill.com: Did you also encounter unanticipated challenges when you started out as a product company? 

Atul Gupta: Once we changed gears and became a product company things started to fall in place. The challenges we have encountered since then are not related to building great products and delivering them to customers; our challenges since then are related to non-core activities of running the company. 

SandHill.com: What steps have you taken to overcome the challenges of an entrepreneur dealing with running a company? 

Atul Gupta: Having a strong management team / leadership team is very important, and it is equally important that they bring in unique skills on to the table. 

SandHill.com: Please describe your products and their differentiation in the market. 

Atul Gupta: Our Flagship Product is SBOeConnect, which integrates SAP Business One ERP and Magento eCommerce. SBOeConnect has gained good traction in the market so far. We have acquired the business of more than 100 Magento merchants globally with 95 percent customer retention, which means the customers benefit from our product.

SBOeConnect is the number-one choice for an ecommerce platform among SAP Business One users. Our market focus is on SAP Business One ERP users in the retail industry.

As to differentiation, no other ecommerce solutions have the capability of back-office ERP, and none of the ERP systems so far have been able to come up with a compelling ecommerce solution.

Businesses need to use multiple systems to be functional. We help businesses keep their investments in multiple systems intact and yet be efficient by integrating these systems.

Read the complete interview at Sandhill.com

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Presentations to CIOSE and the KUDOS!!!

In our latest blog we had written about CIOSE(CIO Strategy Exchange) and  about the 5 companies that were shortlisted to provide a presentation to Ernest M Von Simson and these five companies were 

  • ArrayShield – “Two-Factor Authentication”
  • C2il – “Asset Life Cycle Management”
  • i7 networks – “Agentless BYOD Discovery & Control”
  • Fieldez – “On Demand mobile workforce management”
  • Kreeo – “Knowledge management”

Everyone who presented to Ernie walked out with a smile, with abundant knowledge on how to pitch for the CIO and also what makes sense in the local market and what might not. Ernie was very happy to be the audience for these presentations and he was all praise for the Indian companies and this is what he had to say:

Though the presentations and dialogues were fairly brief, I was impressed by the sophistication shown by the Indian developers of mobility apps and mobility cyber security. They had learned much from analyses of their American counterparts and developed products that produced similar results with much, much lower TCO. “Less is more” in the words of the famous architect Mies van de Rohe.

Manjunath M Gowda, CEO of i7 Networks who was one of the presenters was very happy with the outcome and was amazed how much he knew of  the space and how laser focus were his feedback and this is what he had to say “He knew the subject very well and he asked me the right questions and his help in how to position was amazing. Looking forward for the next step”.

Pavan who is the CEO of ArrayShield was amazed to know how well it can fit into US enterprises too and he was thrilled and he profusely thanked Product nation for providing this opportunity and he said “The feedback and suggestions shared by Ernie was quite valuable, especially good to know that the market demand for our kind of products in US is high and we are addressing an opportunity which is currently under-served”

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Q&A with Seclore CEO on Information Rights Management Software

Often, enterprise goals of security and collaboration are mutually exclusive. Seclore, with customers in Asia, Europe and North America, resolves that dilemma. Seclore’s CEO, Vishal Gupta, discusses Information Rights Management trends as well as development of the company’s IRM product. This article is brought to SandHill readers in partnership with ProductNation.

SandHill.com: Please describe your company’s software product and your market.

Vishal Gupta: Seclore is an information security software product company. Our core technology enables information to be “remote controlled.” So you can send me a document, image or email and then, after 10 days, if the relationship changes, you can press a button on your computer and the information will effectively vanish from my computer! Sounds Mission Impossible? It is definitely doable.

During the 10 days you also can control whether I can edit, print, forward or copy-paste from the document, image or email. You can also monitor who is doing what (tried to print the document) with the information, when (on Sunday morning) and from where (from his home computer).

The mission of the company is to help enterprises achieve the mutually conflicting goals of security and collaboration together. We currently have customers in the financial services, engineering services, manufacturing and defense sectors across three continents.

SandHill.com: How does your product differ from other security products?

Vishal Gupta: Seclore’s technology is different because it allows information usage to be controlled without the prerequisite of everyone installing a local agent. It is the most integration-friendly Information Rights Management (IRM) system in the world. Any person or system within the enterprise that is creating documents or emails can use Seclore’s technology for securing the information.

SandHill.com: How did your company originate?

Vishal Gupta: Seclore came out of the IIT Bombay incubator. The company was initially a campus project, which became a company. The company was launched with the specific mandate of providing a secure outsourcing solution to enterprises looking to outsource business processes. Over a period of time we realized that what we had created as a solution to a specific problem was in fact applicable in a much wider context.

The formal operations of the company were started in June 2006. The name Seclore comes from “Sec” (for “secure”) and “Lore” (for “knowledge,” as in folklore). So Seclore stands for Secure Knowledge.

Read the complete interview at Sandhill.com

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LurnQ: Indian startup that’s building a personalised MOOC

Update: Some readers have asked for information about MOOCs. A (MOOC) massive open online course is an online educational resource that is available for open access via the web. MOOCs originated around 2008 within the open educational resources (or OER) movement. For more, refer to the Wikipedia link.

Online learning is undergoing a paradigm shift and this Forbes article is a pointer of the shape of things to come. Coursera, Khan Academy, Udacity, Udemy etc are growing into large public platforms and likely to give competition to universities and colleges in the years to come.  

LurnQ is an Indian startup that is building a personalised learning management solution which can aggregate and curate content from the web. The key part of LurnQ replicates an experience that everyone is familiar with – using a user’s preferences to aggregate content from the web and display it like a Facebook newsfeed (see screenshot). This is a smart strategy and takes advantage of the the benefits of recognition (rather than recall).

The LurnQ platform consists of different applications that are bundled together into a SaaS platform. The core of the platform is a repository of web content from established MOOC sources like Coursera, Udacity, Khan Academy etc. There is a learning app that displays content in multiple formats – video, slides, multimedia. And a teaching app that gives teacher the capability to put together a course.

The site has over 5000 registered users and is growing socially over 100% every month via Facebook (without ads). They also run a student ambassador program. And here’s a list of LurnQ lessons if you want to check them out.

For monetization, LurnQ is aiming Freemium. The core consumer product will remain free at all times  for learners and teachers. A premium version will be available for private or closed community deployment by individuals and organizations. Pricing details are still in the works.

For targeting growth, LurnQ plans to extend the Student Ambassador Program and drive teacher side adoption through special initiatives aimed at teachers. On the application front, they want to focus on viral features (follow lessons, users, Invite friends etc). Also possible is the route of content partnership with conferences. Mobile apps are planned at a later stage to drive on the go consumption across devices.

LurnQ looks like a refreshing idea and a spin on what others are doing in the MOOC space. The first challenge they face is getting to a threshold for their user base. The adoption of the newsfeed as a core experience is likely to help in viral growth. Though the homepage is a logged in experience and departs from the design pattern that characterises Web 2.0 user generated content platforms… this might prove an impediment to quick user acquisition.

Here’s wishing them the best in their efforts.