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Flipkart – Lessons for “Make in India”

Disclaimer : This article is entirely based on my reflection on what I read in the media

It was exciting and encouraging to experience the marketing campaigns of Flipkart’s billion dollar day and painful and demoralizing to witness pitfalls. I completely empathize with Sachin and Binny who had to write an unconditional apology letter to angry consumers while “celebrating” the victory in round #1 over Amazon, to keep their troops motivated.

Lessons for “Make in India"

The biggest question for me about the big billion day was : Is it a flop-show for Flipkart or is it a success ? Is complete acceptance of failure a sign off greatnes ? I felt apologizing and celebrating success at the same time is a concrete evidence of mediocrity

In any case, there are significant lessons to be learnt from this which is a classic case of gaps between intent and experience, plan and delivery.

We all know the investment and effort that goes into building such a market / consumer momentum for a day like this. We also know the lost image, lost investment, lost opportunity and above all the lost pride due to a result like flopkart. Why did this happen ? Here are my takeaways on the top reasons behind the gap between intent and experience, plan and delivery

  • Inadequate / incomplete anticipation / visualization of what is going to happen on the Big Billion Day. From the load on server to the demand for different products were mis-judged including the peak load at the time of start.
  • Poor coordination in the cross functional team in executing the project: Basically, the left hand was not aligned to what the right hand was doing. The eyes and feet were not coordinated with the brain etc.
  •  Poor workmanship / quality of delivery: from merchandiser to product manager, from project manager to developer, every person fell short in delivering what was expected. Every single gap in delivery contributed their share to the poor experience result.

Basically, every single person who worked on the project would have felt they did their job perfectly well but the end result was a not a success.

The lessons we should learn are very simple : Each one of us must visualize, simulate and experience the customer engagement in our mind while we create a product or service. Each one in the team including suppliers and vendors must collaborate deeply and engage passionately to ensure  the customer engagement visualized can be delivered 100%. When so much is at stake, the load and stress test must be done to ensure systems can withstand the load. Finally, when it comes to each of our own deliverable, we must ensure we deliver 110% and leave nothing to chance

Few other questions I was asking myself repeatedly but could not get an answer. Some of them are, If such thing has happened in a well funded US company, would heads roll ? Are heads not rolling in India because we do not have depth in leadership in the ecosystem ? Is stringent accountability a necessity for Make in India to succeed ?

Only if each person in the team is 100% committed to deliver customer delight, experience vision for customer engagement, execute and deliver on the plans – greatness is guaranteed. Every slip between the cup and the lip gets exposed. I strongly feel, these all are essential for Make in India to become a reality.

Cheers
CEO & Founder
GoFrugal Technologies

 

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CultureAlley: Simplifying Language Learning

CultureAlley combines the 2 most addictive online habits – Social Media and Gamification, to help people learn foreign languages. It attacks boring, generic, and old school pedagogy in education and turns it on its head. It turns the ridiculous number of hours spent on social media, and the web, into a language lesson. CultureAlley was founded by Nishant Patni and Pranshu Bhandari in 2012. 

Introduction

When I joined Microsoft in Shanghai, the company helpfully offered me 60 hours of 1-1 tutoring so I could learn Mandarin. I was excited to be able to learn the language. My tutor was decent, her English was better than average, and she had good structured lessons she followed through. However, it didn’t prove very useful for me – even after spending 2 years in Shanghai, I couldn’t manage anything more than being able to give driving directions to the taxi driver, and of course the usual greetings.

One of the biggest challenges was that even though the words and phrases that I was being taught were commonplace and important, I didn’t have to use most of them at my workplace or during other interactions with Chinese people. So I kept forgetting those words, and since I didn’t have a way to learn the words my program managers and developers used at workplace, my language skills never went beyond the survival level. And finally, I gave up even trying.

This has been the experience of many language learners, language teaching is not personalized, and it doesn’t take your context and interest into consideration. This means high dropout rate and diminished utility of such teaching.

Nishant Patni, founder of CultureAlley, narrates a similar experience when he had to spend time in China, which prompted him to look for better ways of language learning. He started CultureAlley, along with his co-founder, Pranshu Bhandari, in 2012 to offer a better way of language learning.

CultureAlley makes language learning simple, by personalizing and contextualizing the learning.
The way it does it is by taking the learners’ social media feeds (Facebook, Twitter etc.) and replacing parts of it into the language that the user is trying to learn. E.g. If your friends are saying “Hi” on Facebook it gets replaced with “ni hao” and you get to listen, learn, and collect these new words by tapping on them. Everything is progressive to the learner’s level. Every new word you learn, you get rewarded (think Candy Crush) and you keep competing with your Facebook friends on how many words you learn! The same experience is extended across the web using their Chrome browser plugins.
Learning is supplemented with bite-sized interactive lessons and fun games.

So you may be learning Chinese while browsing Facebook, Wikipedia, and TechCrunch, following your regular lifestyle, and learning words that are relevant for you.

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The Product

In addition to having regular features of any language learning (audio-visual language lessons, interactive practice games, dictionaries, Q&A forums, online tutoring), CultureAlley is the only major player to utilize web browsing, Social media and gamification techniques to teach languages. This way, they are much more immersive and personalized.

They have Facebook based web offerings for Spanish, Mandarin Chinese, Portuguese, and English for Latin American Speakers. And they have recently launched an Android App that teaches English to Japanese speakers. Another Android App to teach English to Indians (Hindi speakers) is slated to be out very soon. .

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They make the learning process:

  1. Personalized to the learner’s interests – users learn the words and phrases that they are interested in talking about
  2. Highly contextual – You discover new words in a conversation – knowing exactly when to use them
  3. Absolutely real-time – Every time you go to the app you have fresh content to learn with!
  4. Gamified and fun – Everything you do you are rewarded for and you keep competing with your Facebook friends on your learning goals!

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CultureAlley uses a combination of Social media APIs and an intersection of Machine Translation algorithms and human curated data-sets to personalize the learning experience of all the learners. These are used in the Facebook apps, the web-apps, the Browser Plugins and the mobile apps.

They use their own text-to-speech engine to provide speech recognition features to provide feedback on accents and user pronunciation on their mobile apps. There are several games that users play in a candy-crush sort of a journey including a cool Karaoke-like tool that allows learners to learn a language while watching movies, and YouTube videos. The mobile app also has a cool live chat functionality – which allows CultureAlley to push interesting content (including interactive video quizzes) to learners everyday and allows learners to in-turn ask questions to English tutors on a live chat.

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Product Development

The product team consists of young engineers from NITs and IIT-B, focusing on technology stack and features.

Maintaining a high level of quality on the content that they create as they scale, is a key challenge for them. They rely on quality control processes in house and work with a bunch of language professionals who do both the content creation and testing – they have a community of ~500 vetted language professionals who teach at CultureAlley as well.

CultureAlley has a very interesting talent strategy for their software development which helps them execute well, even while based out of a tier-2 city like Jaipur:

  • They are located next door to NIT Jaipur so they get good talent access
  • Founder is a hands-on technologist, so technology leadership has not been a challenge for them
  • Finding UX/Design talent is hard, but the founding team has a designer/artist in it
  • Founders spend part of the year in San Francisco where they have created their eco-system to access local design talent, get quick prototyping, and user testing

Being distributed for part of the year doesn’t create problem for them, Skype and Google Docs are used for collaboration all the time, with DropBox for document sharing.

Market

The global market for digital English language learning products reached $1.8 billion in 2013, which is less than 3% of total English language learning market. Global learning (all languages) is around $115B. 1 in 5 in the world are learning English right now. So we are talking of some extremely large market sizes here.

CultureAlley has about 340K users, using its web, facebook, and mobile products, growing at a rapid pace of 25% month on month. They target 3 segments (#1 being their primary target):

  1. Working professionals learning new language (job prospects) – 60% of the market
  2. Students to get better grades
  3. Biz travelers, travel enthusiasts

Their web offering is free, while the mobile app is freemium where the users have to pay to unlock advanced levels (pricing varies based on different language pairs) . They also offer Skype based tuitions and doubt-clearing sessions through a large selection of online tutors.

There are some worthy competitors in this arena – DuoLingo (good mobile interface and gamified learning approach), Rosetta Stone (focused on the US market, old school approach to language learning), OpenEnglish (Latin America based English teaching player, focused on Video Conferencing based group lessons). However, CultureAlley feels its contextual and social media based approach to language learning is highly complementary to most of the content focused players in the industry, providing ample partnership opportunities.

Roadmap

They are focused on the following for the next 12-18 months:

  • 10 different language pairs (language you want to learn, and the language that you know)
  • 4 different channels – Facebook, Browser-plugin, devices (iOS, android, wearable), Twitter based product
  • 1.5M users
  • Continued focus on design and usability of product

Their vision is to provide highly contextual learning, using video content (YouTube) as learning tool (similar to what they do to Facebook feeds), and create compelling content for wearable apps.

The Road Ahead

The language learning space is huge, and is ripe for disruption because of the old school teaching methodology of current products, and CultureAlley has a compelling solution. This seems to be a great opportunity for them to grow very big very fast and capture a large market segment. However, they need to be careful about the moves large publishers (entrenched, largely offline players in English language learning space like Pearson) are making to co-opt the space – busuu (an online language learning company with 40M users) recently tied up with Pearson English to offer a standardized English assessment to its users, for example. This is also a space buzzing with startup activities and ample funding ($3.3M average valuation of 232 language learning startups according to AngelList).

CultureAlley products are compelling to use and their roadmap is rich and headed in the right direction. As they scale to more languages pairs, channels, and engagement techniques, future is very bright for them.

 

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

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

Tell us more about the journey of starting ERPNext. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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Need 9 months to get baby out

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

9monthBaby1

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

Build for market, not a customer

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

Enough research time to iterate

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

9 moms cannot make 9 babies in 1 month

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

It’s not just about development

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

Focus on quality, differentiators

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

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

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

Alpha, Beta….

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

Rapid release cycles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tell us about Knowcross.

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

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

Take us through your journey of starting Knowcross.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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HackerEarth: an online technical sourcing and assessment solution – Sachin Gupta, Co-founder. #PNHangout.

HackerEarth is a Bangalore based start-up which helps companies hire programmers. It was started in 2012 by Sachin Gupta and Vivek Prakash, both of whom are alumni of IIT Roorkee. HackerEarth provides solutions for the technical recruitment space – one is an online assessment tool which is used by organizations to assess both internal and external candidates. Another solution acts as an engagement platform for companies when sourcing employees. With respect to internal candidates, companies typically use HackerEarth to conduct online challenges to assess their employees’ abilities. On the other hand, when we consider recruitment, there are primarily three stages during recruitment – sourcing where you source candidates, assessment which involves psychometric assessment, technical assessments, etc. and selection which is obviously where the candidate is selected. Our focus is primarily on stage one and two and our approach to these two stages differs from that of a typical recruitment agency. Our approach is to conduct an online hiring challenge. It is like an open test that we conduct on our community of developers. People come and participate in these challenges and based on their performance, we shortlist candidates. Since we began we have conducted numerous challenges, so we now have a large user base whose skill sets we’re aware of.

The test, or the challenge, as we call it, gives us a good understanding of a candidate’s programming proficiency. If they have performed well in the challenge, we know the candidate is good. We then aggregate their coding activities from online sources like StackOverflow, GitHub, etc, combine all this data to understand their core skills/strengths and we match it to a company’s requirements.

When we began HackerEarth, we were keen on working with early stage start-ups but we quickly realized that even if we give them good candidates, the number of hires wouldn’t be very high. So we decided instead to focus only on series A, series B funded companies. At that time InMobi, was a marquee client for us. Later on, Practo, FreshDesk, came onboard and we were able to fulfill their hiring needs too. We found great success in working with growth stage startups. Once we’d established some presence in the market we realized that the SaaS assessment tool could be sold to larger corporations too. Companies like Symantec and Citrix became our customers because our tool because of the time it saved them in assessments. Also, the product was much more stable and much more mature by then.

On the non-hiring front, we conduct exciting programming challenges which engages the developer community. We have a big following now. In addition, all the users on our platform are high on quality, high on skill sets and this in turn made sourcing from HackerEarth very effective.

Obstacles overcome:

The three main challenges that we have faced since we started-up are:

  1. Selection/Identification: As our company has expanded over the last 20 months, the most recurrent challenge that we have encountered is identifying our focus and priorities at different stages. If you can do this, you can actually build a very good company. When it was just the two of us, our challenge was to identify a MVP. We had interacted with a lot of people but there has to be a point where you need to sit down and start working on a product and in spite of this you will always feel that you don’t have enough information. You need to rely on your gut instinct and know why you entered that market or why you are building your product. Combine this with the initial user survey that you did to come up with an MVP and then proceed.
  2. Sales: Another big challenge for us was sales as both of us co-founders have a technical background and we had very little connection to the industry and even lesser knowledge of how to sell. In addition to the MVP we also needed to identify who are our target customers were because in many instances, potential customers expressed interest when we discussed our idea with them but their responses when we spoke to them after having built our product was very different. In our case especially, since we are a B2B solution in some sense, it was very important for us to identify our customer set as we were going after the entire technical hiring gamut. So we had to be extremely choosy. Now that HackerEarth has grown, we have a strong client base, revenue has been coming in and people are becoming more aware of HackerEarth. Building a good sales team was very important for us.
  3. Scaling: After a few successes, we realized that we needed to expand our customer base and accelerate in that direction. User acquisition is one of the most pressing things for us because we are essentially a marketplace as we have developers on one front and recruiters on the other side. It is similar to a chicken and egg problem. If you don’t have developers, you don’t have recruiters and if you don’t have recruiters you don’t have developers, so we have decided to focus more on getting developers to our platform and this is currently a challenge that my team and I are tackling.

Metrics is a must

Being a tech intensive company, the first thing that I would absolutely look for in a Product Manager is how driven the person is with metrics – you should be able to define what numbers you should be tracking, what are the time lines, you should be able to understand the sales figures, etc. By using tools like google analytics, he or she should be able to use a CRM to track sales, they should be able to use analytics to see how users are performing, they should be able to work with mix-panel and other tools to understand how users are interacting with the product and then be on top of these numbers because personally I believe product management is about tracking these numbers and making actionable decisions based on them.

HackerearthSecond is someone with actual previous hands-on experience with technology. If they still work with technology that is even better because sometimes, say you want to build a hack for marketing or you want to implement a small feature that your customer requested which typically would take say half an hour of work and you don’t want to disturb your team, you can go ahead and implement it yourself. So this is hands on technical skills, if not current, then at least experience with working with technology in the past.

Third is having domain knowledge. So somebody who has worked with programmers, somebody who can understand what programmers want and also understands recruiting because at the end of the day, the problem that we are solving is recruiting. We are helping companies hire programmers better. So if I can’t understand the pain point of a recruiter then I would not be able to build a product for them.

In addition, I believe that some sensitivity towards design is required. HackerEarth is a very design sensitive company. So the product manager also should understand what good design is. I don’t really expect them to create good designs but they should be able to understand what is good, what is bad and then work with the designer. One of the challenges of being a PM is actually working with the designer because designers tend to form a certain view point about certain things, so they are very passionate about what they see and sometimes what they see or what they feel or what they think or believe in may not actually translate to what the users want or what the business wants.

At the end of the day, being a product manager doesn’t mean you know everything. You could be wrong but to be a good product manager you need to be someone who is really passionate about solving a particular problem.

#PNHANGOUT is an ongoing 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 email me at appy(dot)sg@gmail(dot)com. 

 

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SaaS Based CRM & Lead Management Software from India

Main reason behind choosing a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) & lead management software is to cut down the sales time and add to the quality of client service. With a well equipped CRM & lead management system, customer relations would improve and the process of customer tracking is going to get efficient. Due to this, one would notice that the number of delays would be less and sales visibility would improve manifold. With all the sectors in India such as health care, financial, retail and pharmaceutical considering CRM and lead management systems, it gets imperative to know about the various available options.

  1. CRMNEXT: CRMNEXT is a responsive software designed to satisfy numerous goals like enhancing customer contentment and loyalty, affording your sales, management, marketing and service providing teams with thorough easily accessible information, manage, track and focus performance indicators like profitability, customer share, market-share, revenues and cross-market reports. This software is used in finance, banking, insurance, mutual fund, telecom, pharma, retail and multimedia sectors.
  2. Dquip: This lead management software would be of great help in lead acquisition, routing, prospecting and closure. The features that make it a wonderful pick are ability to add leads online, lead delegation, lead tracking, reminders via SMS and email and detailed reporting. Dquip lead management software consists of cloud as well as clients online servers.
  3. ImpelCRM: This software not only covers lead management but goes beyond touch marketing too. This is a Cloud + Mobile CRM that promise to help in many areas such as lead generation, order processing, collections, inventory management, and customer support. Striking features of this software include field reporting, e-coupon management, inventory management, email integration and advanced reporting. This is available in both mobile and web versions.
  4. Kreato CRM– Kreato CRM is a comprehensive cloud software solution that manages multiple aspects like managing numerous leads and inquiries, marketing campaigns like SMS and Emails, SFA(Sales Force Automation) – account conversion, generating analytical reports, arranging, planning and tracking customer support tasks and communicating with customers via inbound and outbound calls. The other notable features are business apps and integration apps.
  5. Lead Prime: This simple to configure and highly integrated software comes in a ready to use mode. It is going to make it possible to track down the leads, would provide timely alerts and help bring improvement in the lead conversion ratio.  Some interesting features that set it apart from others are, ease of use, fully automated processing, customizable, and easy to integrate. Lead Prime is available in both web and mobile versions.
  6. Leadsquared: This comprehensive lead management software would help one in areas such as lead acquisition, verification, routing and sales closure. Some of the features that add to the worth of this software are website visit tracking, lead scoring, email tracking, activity history, advanced search, dynamic and static lists, reminders, task updates, and social profile support. Available via SAAS model, this software surely promises to bring in efficacy in the order tracking and routing processes.
  7. Sales babu– Sales babu is integrated CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software that is hosted on cloud. Being on cloud offers the advantage that it can be operated from anywhere in the world. The data can be accessed, stored and analyzed irrespective of your location. The perks of using this software is that you can monitor the employee’s sales leads, check whether they are achieving the targets and likewise analyze and predict sales, implementation of strategies and carry out the successive planning. You can also sort qualifying leads, acquire a large amount of customer related information, collect the inquiries and manage various contact details of customers.
  8. SalesWah – Saleswah is specially designed for small and medium scale businesses and comes at affordable rates. The main highlights of this software are that it is user-friendly, innate app that has excellent functionality. Striking features of Saleswah include: easily operable by all and doesn’t need technical help, digs into customer interaction history and tells you where to focus, lets you customize your logo, email, time an currency settings and integrates data across Google apps and Microsoft Outlook.
  9. Winds CRM – Cloud based Winds CRM is mainly designed to grow organizations and is useful to both the sales and management teams. It performs a plethora of activities like managing multiple solutions like lead, clients, contacts, tsk management, team organization and product analysis, information and reporting. In the sales department it performs these functions: it helps tract leads that are created, qualified and promoted via numerous pipelines, sales staff can enter relevant information, update and track relevant opportunities thus making the entire process transparent, generating invoices against sales order and automation of the invoice generation proposal within seconds. In the marketing sector, Winds CRM is used for search based marketing for cross selling among customers and manage and orchestrate different campaigns to increase the output efficiency.
  10. Zoho CRM– A complete eagle-eye view about your entire sales cycle is provided by Zoho CRM. The key areas in which it makes your managing simpler is by automating the data so that you can lay emphases on selling, tracks your sales activity by displaying the sales cycle thereby helping you align your goals and strategies and it is mobile responsive. Add-ons include: connecting with your customers from within your CRM account, synchronizing your CRM account with other applications to increase the scalability of your business solution and you can integrate Gmail with CRM.

Any of these CRM and lead management systems can be considered after evaluating order processing, customer relation and order tracking needs. Depending on the business process, any of these variants can be put to work.

For any more queries or confusion about the SAAS based software, feel free to contact us.

 

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BrowserStack: Redefining Web Testing, Globally

BrowserStack helps you test your website (internal or public) on 300+ desktop and mobile browsers on different Windows, Mac & mobile OS flavors. It solves the problem of not having to setup and maintain multiple Virtual machines and devices to test your website. Ritesh Arora and Nakul Aggarwal are the founding team members. The strength of BrowserStack currently is 50+ employees.

Introduction

You are a web developer, you develop a piece of functionality and you want to test to make sure it works for everyone, irrespective of operating system, device, or browser they use. In an ideal, standards-driven world, this would be a trivial problem: you code using the standard, you run it by a compiler/validator which makes sure your code indeed follows the standard, and you are all set to go.

Unfortunately, the world of web development is much more complex:

  • All web code (HTML, Javascript) are really instructions to Browser (‘interpreted’ by Browser, rather than being ‘compiled’ into machine code that OS understands), so standards-compliance of the particular browser determines the accuracy of your code.
  • HTML and Javascript standards have evolved over the years and so different versions and types of browsers may have different level of standards-compliance. All these different versions of browsers are in use on different systems out there.
  • Given this dependency on Browser (which in turn depends on OS which in turn depends on device), we have a large number of combinations possible, each of which may produce a variance from standard and the code will not work as intended.

Given this complexity, there are 1000s of combinations that may need to be tested to give the confidence your piece of functionality will work for everyone.

Developers (and companies) address this problem by doing one or more of the following:

  1. Identifying a few (10-15) common combinations of OS-Browser-Version and focus all testing there – This is risk-based approach and may be too risky for some companies.
  2. Create Virtual Machines for OS-Browser-Version combination (100-200) and use them as needed – Cost of managing so many virtual machine images can be prohibitive for many companies
  3. ‘Rent’ pre-created virtual machines from 3rd party to make #2 more cost effective.

BrowserStack offers live, web-based browser testing to developers, by ‘renting’ virtual machines with desired configuration. Developer uses a familiar web interface and gets an instance of virtual machine with desired OS-Browser-Version combination to test against.

The founders started BrowserStack to solve their own problems – while consulting (after 3 startups), they found it was very hard to ensure web applications have been tested on all possible configurations.

BrowserStack-Time-line

By May ’14, they had 400K registrations and 20K paying customers.

BrowserStack-CustomerGrowth

The Product

Features

BrowserStack has all the features that a developer needs to effectively test their application.

BrowserStack-Features

Screenshot Service

They also offer screenshot service (how does a page look in different browsers), primarily for web designers who want to ensure their page looks good and consistent across devices.

BrowserStack-Screenshot

BrowserStack-PN

Automation Testing

Browserstack’s Automate Product enables automated testing of your web applications over 300+ browser combinations in 2 ways:

  • Selenium Cloud Testing – You can set it up as a Selenium WebDriver and code your tests in your favorite language. You can use their dashboard or their REST APIs to access information about your test runs.
  • Javascript Testing API – You can use it to run Javascript unit and functional tests, standalone, or with testing tools like Yeti, TestSwarm, etc.

They will soon support real mobile devices for Automate. You could run your tests on real mobile devices, get 100% accurate results and avoid erroneous simulators. This is a big deal.

Differentiators

While they have a full bouquet of feature, there are 3 areas they differentiate themselves from their competitors.

Usability

BrowserStack is easier to use than some of their competitors that I tried. Even configuring the local testing (which is a tricky concept) was straightforward and I could complete it in a few minutes.

BrowserStack-Home

Technology

They pride themselves on the technology they have built to enable these features, and the continued effort they put into it. 80% of their 50+ strong team is developers. This is not visible but can be a key differentiator in such a developer-centric product.

Local Testing

They enable you to test local setup. Given the fact that most of the time you want to test before you make your application public, this is a powerful feature. This has been done well even though many of their competitors also offer it.

BS-Configureyoursite

BrowserStack-Mobile

Product Development

The entire team is 50+ employees with 80% being developers. Technology consists of but not limited to plethora of languages including Ruby and RoR, Python, C/C++, Java, platforms such as AWS and co-located servers as well as iOS and Android development.

Most of the development effort goes into making the existing features awesome and robust. Some of the areas the team continues to innovate are:

  • Infrastructure of real mobile devices
  • Using better streaming technology to make the screen more responsive
  • Improve Local testing
  • Supporting newer browsers/OS mix

Market

Potentially this is a very big market, given the large number of web developers in the world, and this number is going up. However, this also seems to be a crowded space – there are many players offering similar services that are largely undifferentiated (or have hard-to-perceive differences). Their major competitors are Saucelabs, crossbrowsertesting, Browsershots, etc. SauceLabs primarily focuses on automation testing (its founders include founder of Selenium), Crossbrowsertesting doesn’t have good interface, and Browsershots is very limited in functionality. They are much better placed than their competitors. They aim to reach 1M developers.

BrowserStackFacts & Figures

They have some marquee names in their customer list. Also, their partnership with Microsoft through modern.ie (Microsoft’s attempt to help developers test their app on older versions of IE) has been very beneficial to them in bringing customers in.

BrowserStack-Customers

Product Vision and Strategy

They are totally focused on making BrowserStack a technically and usably superior product in the market by far. Their roadmap for the next 12 months includes ability to testing on real mobile devices (sort of a ‘device farm’ available on demand), improving the product speed and doing more aggressive marketing of the product.

From a vision perspective, Ritesh would like to give a browser-on-demand feel to every developer in the world – it should be so easy to load (just like I open a Chrome browser on my machine), so easy to use, that it feels like a native/local instance of the browser that you are testing on. They intend to be the de-facto standard for web testing world-wide.

BrowserStack-Marketshare

The Road Ahead

There is no reason to believe that in future, web technologies will become so standardized that cross-browser testing will not be required. In fact the trend is in opposite direction, with the proliferation of devices, OS and Browsers, we are getting more and more fragmented. Given that future, BrowserStack is well poised to be the first choice for development teams and companies to do cross-browser testing.

Couple of things they need to watch out for:

  1. Enterprise Software Development Process is where lots of engineering dollars get spent – and that usually goes to large organizations (Microsoft, Oracle, HP, and many other process/QA/IDE companies). How BrowserStack fits into that eco-system may very well determine how big BrowserStack can become – developer driving the adoption may be the start but it is unlikely to be the stable state.
  2. Being a technology focused company and located in India has its challenges. Exposure is limited, and also it is hard to get talent in specialized areas like design and product management. They need to address this, and their focus on marketing over next 12 months (as articulated by Ritesh) will help address this.

They have a bright future ahead, good luck to them!

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7 #SaaS Based Software for Managing Apartment & Housing Societies

The urban population is increasing by many folds every decade. Higher standards of living, greater exposure, fatter salary packages and attractive lifestyle is making youth migrate from villages to cities. In metro cities the ration of population to the land available can never be balanced. Leave aside sprawling mansions, in metro’s even owning a small flat is grim and a luxury that not all can afford. However, with the space crisis increasing by leaps and bounds, more and more sky scrapers and high rise buildings are coming up to accommodate the ever increasing population. In every housing society, there are volunteers who manage various sections like accounting, expense payment, calculating interest, etc. However, with the daily travel pangs and work pressure, it becomes increasingly tedious to manage the above said functions. This is where we come to your rescue with a list of seven SAAS (Software-as-a-service)  based apartment management and housing society softwares to make your life easier.

ApnaComplex

ApnaComplex, a SAAS software us built by Hyderabad based Gokul Singh. This ERP software is targeted for gated communities and housing societies.

This software manages four aspects:

  1. Accounting – It has two flavors, one for layman user and the other for auditors and accountants. The data can be entered by any person who knows basic computing and the back-end converts it into double entry accounting.
  2. Expense and income management – A record of all the members who have paid dues, not paid and how much money they owe all these details are stored in the software.
  3. Communication – Any changes in the current management system are sent to the members immediately by Email and SMS.
  4. Billing – This software performs three major tasks book-keeping, balance sheets and income-expense statement.

ApnaComplex offers the following striking features:

  1. All complex data of the residential society can be managed from one place
  2. Make all operations transparent and therefore prevent arguments among owners and residents
  3. All process are managed professionally by software and no dependence on any person
  4. Reduces the overall personal efforts

Many residential complexes have embraced ApnaComplex which comes at nominal monthly rates. It is advantageous for tenants, owners and the complex management team.

CommonFloor

CommonFloor App was built with an intention to bring all residents of a society together with the help of technology. The best highlight of this SAAS software is that you can be solely in charge of all the accounting and financing part and the entire system is transparent. Volunteers who take up housing responsibilities are very busy and CommonFloor is built keeping this in mind.

This software satisfies three goals:

  1. Brings the residents close in this age of technology where people are always on the go – Discussion forums to ensure that all residents are satisfied or have any issues with the management, notices that would land in your inbox every time a change is made, events and meet ups and directories to remain connected to fellow residents.
  2. Transparent accounting – Payment gateways, expense vs income tracker, seamless account management and audit ready account reports.
  3. Save time by great efficient management – Vendor management, complaints and issue management, SMS and Email broadcast and management of verification of new members.

India’s first real estate portal has more than 10 lakh residents using this software. Moreover, apart from the monthly or yearly payments, they do not charge any extra bucks as transaction fees.

ApartmentAdda

A great software can be available to the public at very reasonable cost of a few hundred rupees. ApartmentAdda has proved this statement right and is also able to generate profits. This online housing society accounting and management software has 1.8 lakh active users. The Target audience for this app are Co-operative Housing Societies, Resident Welfare associations and Apartment Owners Association. Its main aim is to boost communications among residents, facility management and accounting personals.

Why people find this app very user-friendly?

  1. They offer complete end-to-end accounting solutions and have a vigorous online ERP system for handling residential complexes.
  2. Important details like dues and actionable buttons are displayed at the top part of the page.
  3. News feed layout – Visit the news feed page and you’ll come to know about the latest developments in your society. All members can contribute and a like button is added so that you can shower him/her with your likes.
  4. Conversations section – Community conversations can be carried out in this section. Subgroups where you can have conversations with neighbors and share photos is a noteworthy widget.

ApartmentAdda offers the following advantages:

  1. Automatic maintenance billing
  2. User gets due reminder SMS’s
  3. In case of any problems you can always contact the Helpline
  4. It is possible to view and publish various reports

Go ahead and try ApartmentAdda, its cheap and has surplus advantages which would make your housing management easier. This Single Page Responsive UI is very simple to use, extremely user-centric and offered at the most reasonable rates.

SocietyRun

A one-stop destination for managing financial and accounting matters for housing societies, resident associations and gated communities. SocietyRun is a hassle-free and easy software for management and accounting of housing societies and apartments. This software facilitates enhanced communication between the members, sharing of pictures and documents, raising their voice on various issues, keeping a record of bills, dues and payment, decreasing paperwork and having transparency in all transactions.

Services offered by SocietyRun include:

  1. The society members can share their opinions, pictures and thoughts by polls.
  2. It allows members to buy and sell things.
  3. Check for dealers and service providers.
  4. Enhanced communication – Online communication via emails and offline by SMS and the sharing of announcements, documents and photographs is possible.
  5. There is a special activity point section wherein the members can recommend fellow members for their accomplishments.

The perks of using SoceityRun are:

  1. Social networking tools are available
  2. There is a special notice board where admin, committee member or office bearer can add notices
  3. All relevant information about members like their address, emergency contact, blood group and parking information are stored in the database
  4. Affordable
  5. Needs no external hardware or software

Apartment Sathi

Apartment Sathi is a multitasking software. Advancement of technology has given rise to software’s that perform a wide range of tasks for which previously manpower was needed. It is a SAAS catering to the overall needs of housing societies. This software manages the accounting and auditing essentials of landlords, industrial estates, builders and developers. It works on computers and mobile phones with an internet connection. Customers can opt for any package from Basic Product, Premium Product and Gold Type Product.

Advantages of using this software:

  1. Communication application: In order to boost communication between community members, there are activities like forums, residents address book, noticeboards, events calendar, website for your apartment, instant polls, vendor information, admin support and document storage.
  2. Management applications: Apartment Sathi makes managing your society easy as the software manages key tasks like admin users, creating a landing page for your apartment’s website, managing users, storing maintenance contracts, notices, staff records and admin files, event manager and issues, assets and complaint tracker.
  3. Accounting applications: In order to give you peace of mind, Apartment Sathi takes care of financial matters like payment gateway, income and expense tracker and managing cash flow.

A plethora of services offered by the SAAS Apartment Sathi makes it one of the most widely used in apartment management and housing society software.

Societyhive

This is the age of speed where everyone is always on-the-go. People living in flats do not even know who their neighbors are. Societyhive was built with the aim of bringing people closer and bridging communication gaps between them.

Societyhive makes a difference to your community by:

  1. Service providers: The main advantage of connected societies is that the local service providers know that all the members are connected and well informed. In case of any fraud, their reputation will go down and they would be kicked out of the society. So service providers offer their best services at the most reasonable prices.
  2. Always stay in touch with your roots: By bridging the gap between people, you can always increase communication, sit and solve problems and help the fellow members.
  3. Collaborate and celebrate: Societyhive draws your attention to the children of lesser God and gives you an opportunity to help them. It’s said, the best use of wealth is when it is used to help the needy ones.

Services offered by Societyhive:

  1. A private website is provided where information about all members is stored. In this way, no person with a fake profile can enter your society.
  2. Manage your society by making it safer, happier and a fun place to live. Accounting and billing information is stored here. You can meet like-minded people and raise support for social causes.
  3. There is an advice section where you can ask fellow members for advice regarding all issues. Looking up for recommended service providers was never so easy.
  4. Societyhive provides multilingual support.

Society123

It is a SAAS catering the financial needs of housing societies. This software manages the accounting and auditing essentials of landlords, industrial estates, builders and developers. It works on computers and mobile phones with an internet connection.

Advantages of using Society123:

  1. Simple operation: Log on into your account, assign the tasks to the software and it’ll do everything.
  2. Different user accounts like Administrators, Managing committee and Vendor staff can be created that allow them to access the accounts at different levels. By this method, no unaccounted person can log on and make changes.
  3. Completely accurate information is made available at all times to the members.
  4. The entire process is automated, hence there is reduced administrative work.

Society123 performs the following tasks:

  1. Bill generation
  2. Automatic bill delivery via e-mails
  3. Bank reconciliation
  4. Alerting the recipients of pending bills by SMS
  5. Calculating accurate interest rates as per the society norms
  6. R&D section
  7. Parking allotments
  8. Managing tasks, meetings, registers, tasks, complaints, compliances, circulars and events

Society123 aims to reduce your tensions and make sure that you never miss any payments.

The main aim of all these software’s is to bring in a transparent management and account handling system that is solely handled by technology and all users can have access to all system related information.

Does your housing society have a SAAS apartment management software? If the answer is negative, we advise you to check the following seven SAAS software’s and buy and install one today itself. You can also talk to our Software Analyst to find which software fits your requirement best .

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Appointy: Building a Marketplace of Services

Appointy_logoAppointy is an online scheduling software for small and medium sized businesses to help them grow exponentially.  Today, you can buy a movie ticket, flight or train ticket online. But what about your Salon, Spa, Doctor, Dentist, Hot Air balloon ride or even your pet groomer? Appointy is helping these businesses start scheduling online and fill their open times by reaching their customers faster. The company is founded by Nemesh Singh (CEO) along with home grown 4 key team members.

Introduction

In the good old days, if you needed a haircut, you would walk down to the nearest salon, wait for a while if you happen to go on the weekend, and get the service you desired. Need to see a doctor? No problem – there is one near the market, you go there and wait for your turn, and get treated. Needed a tuition? You talk to a few friends to find a good teacher, go there to register yourself for a year, and you are all set.

Things have changed over the years:

  • Service consumers like us have much less time and patience to wait for the service to be delivered
  • ‘Talk to a few friends’ has gone away as a reference mechanism because living close-by doesn’t mean knowing each other
  • Services (at least in developed economies like US) have become very expensive, service providers have proliferated, and perhaps most importantly, Internet has penetrated most lives.

So today, if you need a haircut, you search online for businesses in your neighborhood, you look for the one with best references/recommendations, you call up to make sure you will have 0 waiting time when you arrive, and you use your smartphone to entertain you if you do have to wait.

Need a doctor? You go to one or more sites that specialize in doctor search and use their recommendations and appointment engine to book a slot online.

Need a tuition? You will look for one that offers trial classes, you will compare prices in addition to credibility of the teachers, research their past results (which are all available online thanks to user generated content), and only then purchase the services – and you do all this without leaving the comfort of your home.

As you can see, in good old days, you bought the service at the time of consuming the service; you walked in, waited in line, got a haircut, and made the payment. Or you walked in, waited in line, got a prescription written by the doctor, you made the payment. Today, you buy the service (you may or may not make the payment at that point), and arrive to receive the service only when it is your time, thus cutting all the waiting time. Buying the service and consuming the service now happen at different points in time.

If you are a business that sells services to consumers – doctor, dentist, career coach, salon, spa – this behavioral change is very impactful. It means that people want to complete the first part of transaction (buy the service, or at least buy the right to get a service by booking an appointment) without arriving at your business – they will transact through phone, mail, and other technological means rather than being physically present at your business. Technology is disrupting the service purchase, and it increasingly resembles a product purchase.

The act of purchasing a service is usually called ‘book an appointment’. I think this is a very misleading description – it hides the commerce part of the act. Given the fact that the business sets aside a slot of time to serve you when you ‘book an appointment’, this in fact should be no different than ordering a printer on Flipkart or Amazon, or ordering in your nearby BestBuy (if you are in US) and driving down to pick it up from the store.

Appointy offers online scheduling for small and medium sized businesses. Here is a better way of saying this: Appointy is the platform through which small and medium sized businesses sell their services. They have helped their clients sell services worth $350M so far and do about $2M sale a day.

Today, Appointy handles 15K appointments and signs up 70 new businesses every single day and this number keeps growing rapidly. They have about 60K businesses using their platform for their scheduling needs, and they are on almost every major street of US.

Appointy works seamlessly on devices and web – experience on mobile has been specifically designed to fit that form factor – to support their clients who increasingly want to do things on the go.

The Product

The story

It is interesting how the appointment product, that Appointy sells, came about. They have been building an appointment tool since 2006, as plug-in to popular CMS platforms (WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, etc.). This was in response to the need for a scheduling page for many businesses who used these CMS to create their website. Idea was to give it for free, and generate revenue from consulting and development projects from these clients.

It didn’t have much traction initially. When Appointy created another product – a free plug-in to add Facebook ‘Like’ support on a site – they used this plug-in to advertise their scheduling plug-in. The Facebook plugin saw 10K downloads in no time, and the word spread about their appointment tool too.

During 2010-2011, the company went into a financial crunch as the development projects dried up. While looking for other sources of revenue, they realized they had about 20K businesses using Appointy, for free!. They had continued to enhance the software based on customer feedback, and it now had a healthy adoption in the market. They also started noticing the mails from some customers enquiring about paid plans – businesses wanted to get better service and support and they were willing to pay for it!

Company pivoted and made Appointy their core product. They created paid plans and started actively developing the product for multiple verticals, while keeping it a generic product.  And rest, as they say, is history!

Features

Appointy boasts of a rich feature-set, including features like easy scheduling without keyboard, drag and drop rescheduling, real-time notification of information like Facebook or Linked-In, online payments at the time of booking,  staff management, weekly customer satisfaction report to  build online reputation and intelligent CRM with powerful marketing tools to reach customers faster, etc.

Appointy is way ahead of its competitors in terms of feature richness, serving around 100 verticals. Here is a look at some of them.

Customized Appointment Site for business

For a business, it is very important that any add-on software like Appointy’s blends into their offering and not create a disruptive experience for the customers. Appointy allows their clients to either have a standalone page for their appointments (via a subdomain under appointy.com) or embed it in their existing site. It also allows them extensive customization of look and feel to ensure exact match in terms of colors, fonts, layout, etc.

Since people can come directly to the subdomain to subdomain directly, Appointy provides options for creating it like a mini product page with lots of business information.

Appointy embedded in a website

Flexibility in configuring availability by business

A business requires a flexible booking system so that it can optimize the slots available with each of its resources (people or machines). Appointy allows the business to configure different available time slots with different resources, and allows various granularity of slot sizes. It also allows a rich integration with personal calendar for the staff so that they can see all their appointments in 1 place.

Setting flexible hours for staff

Google Calendar Integration

Rich Business Management features

Appointy collects lots of data about business performance. It provides the clients with this data via a rich dashboard for quick review of business performance, and a number of reports. Whether it is analyzing the footfalls in the business compared to last month/year, analyzing this month’s revenue, categorizing customers to analyze trends, you can perform all these analyses through Appointy.

Dashboard with monthly appointment data

Customer Management

Given that Appointy manages all the appointments, it has huge amount of data about customer behavior before, during and after service delivery. Appointy offers a rich CRM layer to help their clients leverage this data. The intent is to help the client grow their business. Creating a last minute deal for the slots going empty, driving a loyalty program by giving special discounts to highly active customers, or collecting feedback from the customers when they are visiting the business or through emails, Appointy allows the business to drive customer engagement and create an extremely positive experience for their (clients’) customers.

Creating Deals Through Appointy

Differentiators

There are many appointment scheduling software in the market. However, there are 3 areas in which Appointy differentiates itself from the competition:

Focus on helping clients grow their business

This is part of their strategy and this shows up in the way features are designed and conceptualized and the way data is used to create business opportunities.

Complete CRM system

They are very focused on helping the business manage their customers right from within Appointy and they are successful in doing so.

Data Analytics Platform

Appointy collects lots of data around business performance and customer interactions and provide a platform for their clients to make data-driven decisions.

Development Process

Team

They are a small team of 10 people, most of whom have been working on it since the product was conceptualized. The product is built on Microsoft technologies – .NET & SQL Server. Each person has an expertise in one technology but can multitask at the same time, and as Nemesh says, “jack of all trades and master of one!” Since it is hard to get good people in the small city they are located in, they have outsourced their support and onboarding.

Product management

To identify new feature needs, they rely on customer data analysis, trial users’ behavior, and feature requests from existing customers. Since their support team engages deeply with the customer, they play a major role in surfacing the customer needs. They rank all these new requests and rank them to come up with most requested features every 3 months, and design it in a generic way so that it works for everyone. Idea is to keep the out-of-box experience simple, but allow rich features to those who need it, without cluttering the experience of those who don’t.

They focus on usability of their features a lot. They measure end customer behavior (using MixPanel and Totango) and analyze the data to come up with improvements, which they test with their customers and roll them out. They also borrow ideas from well-known products out there in calendaring space so that they can provide familiar and high-quality experience to their clients and their customers.

Release management

Their pace of adding features has changed over the years. Five years ago, they would add about 200 small and big features a year. Now they add about 20 features in a year. This is not only because there are no more glaring feature gaps, but also because customers get confused when large number of features are getting added at a rapid pace. This is also the reason why they have moved to a quarterly release rhythm from a monthly release one. To aid the customer in wading through multiple features, they added “settings search” page, similar to what Chrome offers for its settings.

A typical feature will be conceptualized, built and staged in their test area, go through some beta testing by select customers, and rolled into the next quarterly release.

Market

Reach

It is a large market that Appointy operates in. There are 26M SMB in USA alone. Appointy supports 100 verticals (lifestyle and health primarily) which is about 10M businesses. 9M of these still use pen and paper for their scheduling needs.  Appointy’s strategy is to focus on the remaining 1M (and growing rapidly) business since they understand online scheduling. Today Appointy is on almost every major street of USA.

They have about 60,000+ registered businesses globally and are growing at the rate of 5-6% month-on-month. Appointy believes that their product is their strength. They haven’t spent a dollar till date on Sales & Marketing!

Their biggest competitor is pen & paper scheduling. A few others are Bookfresh.com (Acquired by Square now), Mindbodyonline.com ($23 million funded company), Appointment-plus.com and Genbook.com. All of them offer similar services. MindBody is interesting because their strategy is to convert businesses that use pen and paper to come online and start using online tools like those for appointment. So they work with a different customer segment than Appointy’s.

Product Vision and Strategy

Currently, Appointy have about 60K businesses signed up. The goal is to get this number to 250K by 2 years and 1M businesses by 5 years, primarily by totally focusing on helping their clients grow their business and becoming their partner in business creation and development. Today, they create service revenue worth $500K for their clients in a year. They want to help the businesses grow 20-25% in a year by bringing new customers to them.

Couple of ways they want to achieve this:

  1. Local directory service (City Pages) with appointment facility – If someone needs a haircut, they can go to Appointy directory and look up the best one that meets their needs and book it there and then. This creates an alternative source of customers for their clients.
  2. Help businesses sell open times – Every service slot going vacant is a revenue opportunity lost. Appointy intends to create solutions that can allow open slots to be sold and revenue generated. Creating last-minute deals is one service that is offered already, they continue to work on more.

They keep exploring alternative revenue sources too. For example, aggregating all the commerce transactions through a single payment gateway can help get lower transaction costs for their customers as well as get an alternative revenue source for Appointy in terms of per-transaction fees.

The Road Ahead

Appointy has come a long way from where they developed Appointy as a free plug-in. They still have a long way to go. There are a few things they need to focus on:

  1. Position the product better – The product has lots of potential to be used in a wide variety of ways – calling it a scheduling software severely restricts these possibilities. Appointy needs to reimagine the product positioning.
  2. Change the playing field –This is related to previous point: they need to get out of the ‘appointment booking’ vocabulary and get into ‘services marketplace’ vocabulary. They need to talk about and think of themselves as an e-commerce company, à la Flipkart of Services.
  3. Get access to talent pool – They also need to make sure they have access to a large talent pool. They have a huge opportunity in their hands, and they need to leverage it quickly. Sitting in a small city, this may be hard to accomplish.

Local services marketplace is heating up, Amazon, eBay, startups are buzzing with activity. Even though these are different kinds of services (hire a painter for your house for 3 days), it is the same space that Appointy operates in. If Appointy (and other online scheduling software companies) don’t play in this market, they can be disrupted by these services marketplace. Time is right for Appointy to change its game, and a huge opportunity awaits them.  Good luck for a bright future ahead!

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Wooqer – Successful customer adoptions validate product tagline

logo-2Wooqer is a platform primarily designed to drive communication & engagement across cross-functional, geo-distributed enterprise groups. Wooqer tagline reads “One platform. Unlimited possibilities” and true to this statement, its customers have leveraged it in many use cases where people communicate & engage, specifically in:

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

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

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

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

Wooqer Customers  & Why adoption matters?

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

Wooqer Customers

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

The Need – What is the pain being addressed?

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

Track Leads - Wooqer

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

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

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

The Product

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

 

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

1. Building block approach

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

Wooqer-Home

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wooqer-on-mobile

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

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

Platform Bells and Whistles  – ‘Have More’

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

3 steps - Wooqer

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

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

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

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

The Market

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

Testimonials & Publications

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

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

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

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

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

The Company & Competition

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

The Founders & the team

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

Road ahead

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

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

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User experience and User acquisition are key strategies that a startup should pursue relentlessly – Nitin, CEO of Zepo.in

ProductNation interviewed Nitin, CEO of Zepo.in to understand his successes in enabling Indian businesses sell online. Zepo.in boasts of enabling more than 1200 businesses to sell online within a short span of 30 months. Read further to understand the key aspects that facilitated this success… 

What was the motivation to start Zepo.in? 

Zepo logoThe idea of Zepo.in came as a result of some challenges I faced during my previous stints of managing a T-shirt business and a startup. In particular, while I was running the T-shirt business, I realized how difficult it was for small businesses like us to get online and sell to the Indian market. We got fooled by a web developer who charged us a bomb and came up with a crappy website, we had to shell out huge percentage of our sales to payment gateways, and we did not have the right logistics support to help us deliver our products to our customers on time, to name a few.

These challenges made me realize that there is a huge opportunity in India, if I could make it easier for businesses to sell online, relieving them of all the pains of operational details such as website management, payment and delivery headaches. Zepo.in was born to address these pain points, and I am happy to tell you that we now have successfully enabled more than 1200 small businesses to conduct business online in a hassle-free manner!

Very Interesting! Could you share with us your initial experiences – both good and bad, as you started Zepo.in?

Nitin Purswani Sure. I think there have been lots of good things that have happened since we decided to start Zepo.in. The first thing that comes to my mind is that, before even we formally started off our operations, we had 6 customers who had already given us post dated cheques – just by listening to what we were building. This gave us validation from the customer end – also helped us to tweak our offering better based on the initial set of feedback.

Secondly, we got into the Morpheus accelerator and on account of that, we learnt a lot from Sameer and others out there. The Morpheus team helped us with lots of things, most importantly in bringing in very good and talented people to our company early on. All our key people – the CTO, our designer, key Sales and Marketing folks were all on board, thanks to guidance from Sameer. We also were able to get the angel round of funding at the right time, from Vijay Shekar Sharma, founder of the One97 Fund. Both of these helped us immensely to start on a strong foot.

On the things that we did not do correctly, perhaps pricing was something that we did not do correctly at the beginning. We started off with our pricing being nearly half of what we charge now. However, based on initial customer feedback, we arrived at the price which is a win-win.

Could you describe the current portfolio of businesses that are using Zepo.in to sell online? Also, how are you ensuring that they benefit from working with you?

While Zepo.in can be used by any business willing to sell online, we right now have retailers and manufactures using our site predominantly. Most businesses in the retailer segment are from fashion accessories and clothing, while home based product manufacturers, women enterprises, proprietary and partnership firms and even a few private limited companies have been using Zepo to sell their products online from the manufacturing segment.

Over the years, we have made significant enhancements to our platform that has benefited our customers, and has helped in deepening their engagement with us. By leveraging technology, we started off by providing a very simple and easy way to put and sell products online. We then entered into strategic alliances with logistics firms and payment gateway companies that made it easier for our customers to avail all these services from one place, through a single click of a button.

Prior to this, all small businesses had to go searching for courier firms that would accept to ship their packages. Very few courier companies would accept to ship in small quantities. Similarly, due to high payment gateway charges, one had to price their products artificially high to breakeven. Now, we launched a products as a value-add to Zepo, calling it ZePOST, we offer free pick up and delivery service that makes it so convenient to our customers to focus only on their core activity and leave mechanics of order receiving and delivery, payment collection and other things for us to manage.

On a different note, how have you organized your internal operations to support these activities? Could you provide us some insight on these aspects? 

For us, an unwavering focus on user experience, refinement of our offering and user acquisition has helped us scale and grow so fast in the past couple of years. We invest a lot of time in understanding how the user experiences our site. By thorough research and analysis, we identify the places where the user is experiencing problems, or is spending more time to finish an intended transaction/activity. We prioritize these and fix them at the earliest. On the product offering refinements, we have introduced new things almost every quarter – which has further benefited our customers, including revision of pricing to suit particular needs. This has helped in customer acquisition as well.

Further, on the user acquisition front, we have tried very innovative ways to get new customers and have a fair share of successes. We do a lot of campaigns – one of them – chotuchaiwala.com was a big hit, we leveraged social media to reach out to prospective customers, also do some inbound marketing to targeted set of prospects. We also did some very different things such as putting our tagline and company information on big carry bags that retailers use for transporting goods. This automatically provided visibility of our offering to many distributors leading to more customers. The most recent attempt was to use twitter to promote our offering – and we became the third most trending handle for all of India for almost 11 hours straight!

Thank you for those valuable insights. In closing, what would be the three things that you would like to share as key priorities a product entrepreneur should have, when they focus on the India market?

In my opinion, a differentiated product which provides a satisfying user experience, a focus on user acquisition to sustain and scale your company and superior customer service are the three things that every entrepreneur should focus, irrespective of the target market that they focus on. I believe these aspects will provide you happy customers, satisfied employees and good business success!

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Collaborating Framebench way!

As cloud based platform for online collaboration, communication & feedback platform Pune based startup Framebench is driven to hold your central workplace where you can store & share your creative assets. The objective is to help all your remote team members and clients to review, mark changes required on the assets and even host discussions on them in real time. All of this is automatically documented for viewing later.

Online collaboration is a method that gives the ease of access to work together with your team online simultaneously. Over the last few years, online collaboration has got a few adjustments done and all we can say, yes, it is better than ever. The World Wide Web has exploded with information, there are new ideas created, implemented, and trashed every day. Restricting yourself to one idea at one location is not doing justice to the race of technology. This is where online collaboration tool comes into play. If you have the right tools, using the technology to your advantage becomes even easier. Co-founded by BITS Pilani alumni Rohit Agarwal and Vineet Markan, Framebench is a promising venture in an exciting space. Framebench is built as a HTML5 web application with some of the latest technologies in the backend. The team depends on web sockets and low latency media streaming in order to achieve near real time collaboration among browser clients. The server side is built with a clear objective to serve thousands of concurrent connections which in turn allows them to scale effortlessly using the amazon web services. It helps teams to quickly annotate and collaborate on images, documents and videos and review them online. Teams can suggest edits and approve files in a single place which substantially reduces their time to market. The best part being able to achieve this workflow completely in real-time and can also be executed in an online conference environment.

According to the Co-founder Rohit Agarwal they already have over 1000 companies using the platform. These include the likes of Unilever, Prime Focus, HBO etc. However as Rohit shares the challenge post product launch in Feb 2013 was to acquire users. They spoke to college users and about 800 designers within the first two months of the launch. This was to get feedback and user experience reports. This helps them to build a business around the product that users enjoyed using.

Frambench is currently focused on expanding their paid user base and making it popular amongst lawyers, architects, consultants and other professional groups with attractive pricing structure and options. This they believe can be achieved via strategic partnership with various large players across the globe. The team is also exploring series of fund raising with well-known venture capitalists in India and the United States.

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Joydeep shares his insights, learnings and challenges of building Qubole, a big data service used by Pinterest, Quora and Nextdoor.

Joydeep Sen Sarma and Ashish Thusoo started Qubole, a managed Hadoop-as-a-Service offering, in late 2011. Since then they have seen an impressive growth counting some of the well known names such as Pinterest, Quora and Nextdoor as their customers and raising a total of $7m of funding till date.  They were recently mentioned as the one of the top 10 Hadoop startups to watch by CIO.com and Qubole Data Service was selected as InTech’s Top 50 Most Innovative Products from India. Qubole is headquartered in Mountain View, California and has an engineering office in Bangalore, India.

ProductNation had a brief chat with Joydeep to learn about his experiences of building a product company from India. This article touches upon some of the insights gathered from the discussion.

Starting up

Ashish Thusoo and Joydeep Sen Sarma
Ashish Thusoo and Joydeep Sen Sarma

Joydeep Sen Sarma and Ashish Thusoo, batch mates from IIT-D moved to US soon after their graduation to pursue Masters. They worked with different companies in various technical roles and eventually came together again at Facebook where they worked with the Data Infrastructure team for close to 4 years. At Facebook, they created the social network’s big data infrastructure and Apache Hive. Those 4 years at Facebook not just exposed them to the big data market but also helped them form a strong network in Silicon Valley. When they found themselves questioning what they want to do next, it was clear that they are going to follow their passion for technology and build a product company. “We started brainstorming on what customers wanted to buy from us? What the market needs are? What to build? We got a small room and started writing code”, says Joydeep.  Joydeep & Ashish built on their knowledge of the big data market and came up with the idea behind Qubole. They leveraged their network to find the initial customers and also managed to raise a seed capital of $1m to fund their product development.

Their starting up story highlights that two key things that strengthened their position as they were starting up – firstly the credibility and depth of knowledge they gained through their experience at Facebook and secondly the strong network they formed in Silicon Valley.

Tapping the Indian market

We have seen that many of the successful start-ups such as Zoho Corp, Druva, and Fusion Charts are growing by acquiring international customers. This poses a curious question – Is the Indian market very small or unattractive?  Joydeep admits that it would have been difficult for them to achieve a similar growth if they had been just India focused. “We had Quora as one of our initial customers. Acquiring such a customer would have been very difficult in India. It is not impossible to build business from India but getting the initial customers is hard. For a business like ours having an international presence is required.” He also quickly pointed out that Indian market is quite big if you build a product for the masses. “To build a business completely focused on the Indian market, one needs to pick a problem that is big and not niche. Many people build something and then hunt for a big market. That is a wrong approach. One needs to build something that has high leverage. Leverage can be measured as Revenue per employee or Revenue per engineer. Given that equation, mass market products can grow exponentially focusing just on the Indian market”.

Coming back to enterprise product start-ups, targeting a broad international market remains the most attractive approach to fuel growth. Joydeep applauded the efforts of iSPIRT and NASSCOM for taking efforts to help start-ups with M&A and go-to market.

Acquiring Talent

Every year close to 1.5 million students graduate with an engineering degree in India. But still many start-ups quote finding talent as one of the top challenges. As per Joydeep finding an engineering talent at the start-up phase is not a big challenge anymore. He mentioned “During my time the cream of the engineering talent from India used to either move out of the country or pursue non-tech careers. Most of my peers from my 1996 Computer Science batch didn’t stay in technology sector.  But I see the situation changing now. The volume of engineers we produce nowadays is way higher. Even if we lose a few good developers to the developed economies, still we have a good supply of entry level engineers. Overall the quality of engineers has improved considerably. Even company’s incentive systems are changing to reward good engineers.” Qubole currently has 20 member engineering team in India working on backend, frontend & UX and a 10 member team in US.

Though this sounds promising, the situation is not the same once a company starts scaling up and is looking for highly experienced technical experts. “In India, we struggle to find talent with a strong depth of knowledge. If one were looking for hands-on systems engineers with 15 or more years of experience – it would be very hard, if not possible, to find such people in India. The US and Silicon Valley remains the go-to place to hire experts”.  On the brighter side, India is seeing an interesting trend of reverse brain drain with many returning back to India after a long career in US. A study conducted by human resource and recruiting firm Kelly Services India in 2011 estimated that 300,000 Indian professionals working overseas will return between 2011 and 2015. As per a study done by Harvard Law School, 50% of the NRI’s returning to India plan to start new ventures. Joydeep observes that currently the top management of many successful start-ups in India is headed by US returned people.

Challenges in building a business in India

Qubole has been actively growing and managing teams both in US & India. However operating in India comes with its own set of challenges.

  • Infrastructure has been a continuing pain point in India especially in Bangalore. “Because of complete lack of mass rapid transit and bad traffic conditions, many employees spend a significant amount of their commuting. Or they are forced to work from home. Aside from impacting us individually, the startup ecosystem suffers as a whole. It is hard to pull in professionals from across the city for networking events. Basic things like an easily accessible world class conference center are lacking. India needs to take some cues from countries like Singapore and build better infrastructure. It is ironical that Singapore which is small compared to Bangalore in the IT sector hosts significantly more and much larger events in this category” says Joydeep.
  • Unnecessary government regulations cripple the start-ups. “Indian government has too many random rules and a lot of gatekeepers. For e.g the labor regulations for hiring blue collar workers are extremely stringent and scary.” Joydeep admits that he avoids taking up any activity that ties him into the web of government rules and regulations. “We do not hire blue collar workers and do not do sales from India as taxation levels here are very high”.
  • Product start-ups also face a lack of financing. Joydeep observes “In India, the appetite to finance risky software is less. We would have struggled to raise seed finance in India”.  It is unfortunate that India has startup tax law which makes it further difficult to raise seed capital. Instead the Indian government should follow the Israel model and introduce “Angel’s law” under which a substantial tax benefit is given to individuals who invest in qualified Israeli R&D companies.

Most of the above challenges require government intervention and we can just hope that the new government takes steps to make Indian ecosystem more conducive to starting up.

The discussion with Joydeep reiterated on the potential that Indian product companies have in international markets. This requires careful planning, strong network in international markets and ability to manage international sales along with managing R&D in India. Though setting up and operating a product company in India is not as smooth as other start-up ecosystems, still India offers a strong technical talent pool and other cost advantages which can be used to our advantage to compete in the global market.

As Qubole plans its next phase of scaling up, ProductNation wishes the team a lot of success in the coming future.

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Thinkflow Software – Keeping up with changing markets

I recently met with Thinkflow founder Praveen Hari and heard first hand their growth story of building a platform capable of powering business applications and services on the cloud. I specifically focused on learning how they accelerated their growth and scale phase, wanting to hear a few stories that could inspire other budding ventures on this path.

Handful of stories below highlight some points as key to the growth strategy they adopted and experienced.

Threat from Big Companies

Early on they realized that several bigger companies in the value chain of BPM applications began to change the game and build a larger product offering by acquiring small product companies in the chain. They researched this trend and began to use their insights of this industry and the trends that big companies were focusing on to pivot into a PaaS company.

Price point

First, they evolved the product offering from BPM to PaaS with better price point and working with smaller vendors / partners to build solutions and package professional services in much shorter timelines than bigger companies could offer.

Customer understanding

Next, having great customer insights was key to working this model. Solving customer’s business problems were paramount. As an example they realized the importance of Single Sign-on as a value point for customers and identified a way to implement this on top of the Microsoft Azure platform, which already supported multiple authentication modes. Using existing technology and simply working the core customer pain point was valued highly and resulted in building customer loyalty.

Multi-tiered approach & Partner with experts

Additionally they realized a need to build solutions that encompassed several domains. As they did not have all the domain knowledge and the best way to address was to partner with experts who had domain knowledge and have them build solutions on top of their platform. They focused on building a platform that could serve direct customers as well as application developers and enterprise developers. One such story began with a partner who realized the power of the platform and inquired whether they could build a workflow in the GRC space (Governance, Risk & Compliance). The partner ended up using 40% of the Thinkflow system to build this application.

Partnering with core platform

Being a Microsoft Preferred Partner definitely helps in continuing to evolve the platform and systems. One day Microsoft partner contact mentioned that there was a need to have a Document Scan & Capture capability that could help several enterprises. They rapidly implemented this functionality on their existing solution. It’s a win-win situation as Microsoft partnership provides them with insight that allows Thinkflow to add capabilities into their platformised workflow and potentially draw new clients.

Follow competition and trends very closely

The triad has continually encouraged teams to explore and record competitive and industry trends. They also attend the open webinars to learn about other products and solutions to discover trend patterns.

In addition to this Thinkflow constantly promotes its solutions and workflows through regular webinars they setup and also other forums. They find great value in events like the PNCamp, CIO meets, Tech50… Their belief is that such forums will help growth and visibility for startup ventures.

Summary of key takeaways

  • Use data insights for staying on top of market trends. Business environments change faster than you think.
  • Partner with vendors who can provide solutions at better price points.
  • Match customer pain points with existing technologies to build lasting solutions. Customer development is critical to building world-class products.
  • Scale multiple domains with expert partners to offer a plethora of solutions. Open your platforms to other solution vendors.
  • Form preferred partnership with large base technology vendors. The partnerships can provide great insights and leads to convert.
  • Promote your technologies & solutions in open forums.  Attend other open webinars to research competition, trends and potential partnerships.