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Location is a context, not THE context

Being context aware is about knowing location, identity, activity and time.

Many context-aware technologies give a huge importance to location, but location is just one aspect of context, not the context. Location awareness can improve user experience, but knowing a user’s preferences and specific environment makes it all the more personal and all the more powerful. Mobile apps and devices can tap into this information, as can ad platforms, to create relevant experiences for consumers. Location is certainly important, but it’s just one piece of the puzzle.

There are plenty of applications that use location-awareness successfully from tracking deliveries to managing inventory or simply helping a user find their lost smartphone, or even a pet. But what if those same applications could know, not just where you are, but what you’re doing? Or better yet, what you’ll be doing or needing in the future. In that case, you’ll get a lot more targeted and helpful information rather than educated guesses.

The experts say…

According to Gartner Inc., “context-aware technologies will affect $96 billion of annual consumer spending worldwide by 2015.” In addition, the company’s research shows that by next year, 40 percent of smartphone users will opt-in to context service providers that track their activities. This would equal about 720 million people, by their count. The research company believes that transportation, utilities, energy and healthcare firms, in particular, stand to gain from these trends.

“Context-aware computing is the method by which new experiences are constructed that blend information from mobile, social, digital and physical world sources,” said William Clark, research vice president at Gartner. “The disruptions caused by context-aware computing will include major user, technology and business shifts, including the use of model-driven security in fraud detection and prevention, convergence in television, game, Web and mobile advertising, and new styles of application programming.”

He added that “organizations that do not prepare for thoughtful information sharing — balancing usage, privacy and business models of consumers, context providers, and the enterprises themselves, will be at a severe disadvantage.”

Currently, context-awareness is being leveraged by mobile applications and wearable technology such as fitness trackers from companies like Fitbit, Garmin and Nike as well as numerous smart watches like the upcoming Apple Watch, and finally, Google Glass. In the app realm, one example is Easilydo, a virtual assistant that manages your contacts, calendar and more, in much the same way that Google Now does, by learning from your actions and stored data.

These smart apps and devices are still limited in their intelligence; they only know what a user shares whether it be actively or passively. For example, location-awareness becomes a challenge when one is indoors and out of range of Wi-Fi. Beacons, standalone devices that beam Bluetooth signals, are one solution that can be seen in the retail sector, where stores can communicate with shoppers, for example. Apple has joined the game with iBeacon, which is built into its devices and OS and can communicate with compatible beacons at retailers. Additionally, apps like Placed can be used to launch apps based on which room of your house you’re in, which makes the beacon experience more personal. But there is so much more potential to be tapped in this arena.

How business benefits

On the business side, mobile ad platforms can use your location to serve ads, but they can become more targeted through user profiling. Here too, location is just one tool at their disposal. InMobi, a mobile ad network, uses context-aware technology to create “SmartAds” which exploit a user’s immediate environment to trigger relevant ads. For instance, a user checking the weather on a hot summer day might see an ad for a cold drink or an air conditioner; conversely, on a snowy day, that same user might see an for a hot drink or winter boots. Looking into the future, a platform that knows not only that a user is at a ski resort, but is actually skiing, could serve ads for nearby après ski locations, or other relevant businesses and services.

These apps and devices are only scratching the surface. Currently, all of them require at least some user intervention or prompting. Eventually, we’ll see smarter applications that can infer more about a user, digging deeper into their interests and preferences and learning from mistakes. For instance, apps could know without explicitly asking, where a user works and lives and what their regular schedule entails, and when they might need a break–almost reading one’s mind.

The possibilities are endless

Guest Post by Prima Dona, Keypoint Technologies

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How I built a 1100+ users SaaS business as a Single Founder with Zero Marketing Budget

We formally launched inBoundio last week, I kept it in beta for eight months and kept working on it. It was slow going since I was the only one working on it — sometimes there was no progress for days. There were times when I got stuck and had to wait for people to reply on stackoverflow and answer my questions so I could finish the coding. Lot of things went wrong or didn’t work out. But some did, and in this post I want to share what I have learned. InBoundio is just starting. It is in no way a finished product nor a mature product, but I feel I should share my knowledge and experience right now. If I wait until I’m done, I may forget many of the smaller things. So here is the complete story. If you want the TL;DR version, scroll to the bottom where I have put everything in points.

How I Began

I stopped thinking too much, stopped planning, and just started doing the things I wanted to do and which I loved. I love technology, internet and marketing, so the product I built aligned with all this and I never had to look at where I was going. Failure looked acceptable as I knew I was going to enjoy the process and the final product.

I also didn’t set any deadlines for myself, and didn’t care about making money or setting targets. This took time out of the picture, which made me more comfortable and reduced any anxiety about getting it done. I wanted to be sure I made as few mistakes as possible, and I wanted to fully understand the market and user requirement. I continued to work alone, and it was only last month that I opened an office and hired two awesome developers (who in just five weeks have become a big part of my life).

How I funded inBoundio

Since inBoundio started as a one-man company, the expenses were negligible. I got one year of free hosting from RackSpace , which saved some money. I got the logo done for $3 and the dashboard was a $12 template. That was all the initial expense. I did use freelancers later on, as I wasn’t able to code some features. I paid them primarily from money earned by selling software packages and offering services.

Offering services also helped me understand client needs and wants. Because InBoundio is still in the early stage, I will keep on doing this for at least this year.

The experience with freelancers was hot and cold. Overall, I felt I wasted a lot of time. Many features never got shipped and I probably overpaid on a few, but I have learned my lesson.

Where We are right Now

inBoundio is still in its very early stage, and I am still working on finding the correct business mode. Still, I felt I should write this post now, as I want to share my experience and journey so far (posts like “How we sold our business for 20 million dollars” suck, right?)

Right now I have a small team working from our office, both of which give more structure to the business and make things move fast. For example, we are shipping new features on a daily basis, something which was not possible earlier. We just launched our chrome plugin and waiting for our WordPress plugin to get approved.

My Learning while bootstrapping as a single founder

I am splitting my learning into 2 section. Startup and Business/Life.

Startup Learning

  1. Use freelancers wherever you can, but be careful. I had mixed experience with freelancers. I met some nice people but I felt I also sometimes overpaid. Sometimes the freelancer just wasted time and did nothing. There is a huge cost involved in finding the right freelancer, plus there is a cost involved if something goes wrong. You can use freelancers for small tasks like testing—for example, I hired a freelancer from Vietnam on oDesk for $5/hour who did a great deal of testing and found lots of bugs. I also got the initial logo for $3 and bought the user dashboard template for $12.
  2. Do not hire people unless you need them. Do as much as you can by yourself and understand the technology stack of your product as well as marketing. Find your first paid user by yourself. Find new marketing channels by yourself. Do sales and support by yourself. Take all the phone calls yourself. Do the site support chat by yourself. All these tasks are part of building your business.
  3. SaaS businesses don’t grow fast and there is nothing great about them.  InBoundio is growing 15% month to month, which I think is on “faster” side of growth, although most of the SaaS businesses grow very slow. In fact I don’t even think SaaS are the best business model on the web for making money; the unit economics don’t work and most B2B products don’t spread by word of mouth. This means higher cost of marketing and no viral effect.
  4. The best feedback you will get is from your product users. The best feedback I have ever gotten is from inBoundio users. I have asked questions on various web marketing forums like warriorforum, as well as on Reddit and Hackernews, and received helpful replies. But the best real feedback I got was from current users. Aimee, my first paid user, has replied to many of my emails telling me what was broken.
  5. Building is easy, marketing is not. Marketing will always take more resources and time than building. Most founders put all their energy into building and then run out of steam and ideas. Products fail because they hit the wall of “How to Market and Sell” and the founders have no answer.
  6. Win-Win partnership works on Internet. The best businesses on Internet are the ones where your user also wins. If you are just focusing on yourself and how you can grow and make money, you will find yourself alone. This is not what the Internet is about.
  7. Bootstrapping is not easy, and doing it is as a single founder is even more difficult. Bootstrapping sounds great when you are able to pull it off; when it don’t work out, it can do lot of damage to your personal finances. Being a single founder also means you are taking the risk and will burn out fast. So far, though, things are looking fine for me. I will keep on doing what is working. If I feel I am burning out or need funds for additional growth, I will look at alternatives– though personally, I will always chose Freedom over Money.

Business and Life Learning

  1. Success and Failure are meaningless terms. Don’t waste your time judging yourself from others parameters.
  2. Don’t look at other startups and how they are doing. There are people who started before you, and others have already finished the race before you even started, so it is stupid to compare your startup with others.
  3. Don’t waste too much time thinking about company vision, disruption and denting the universe. You will end up doing what you want to do anyway, no matter what your earlier vision was.
  4. Use your own software. This is the best way to understand the limitations of your software. I only use inBoundio to market inBoundio. Yesterday I sent 1,000 emails and today I made some social media postings. When you use your own software, you can take better action on your user feedback and learn what you want and what you don’t.
  5. There is nothing wrong with doing services to fund your company product. I personally feel a business is a business, so it doesn’t matter if you are doing services or product. The end goal is to build a business.
  6. If you are not enjoying what you are doing, don’t do it. It is just not worth it.
  7. Only do things which make you happy. I don’t think I need to explain this.
  8. Don’t chase money; it will always be the byproduct of your success. If you do well in life, you will make money, anyway. If you start chasing money, you will cut corners, compromise on quality, and become mediocre and unhappy.
  9. How big you get, how big your business becomes, and how much money you make is NOT in your control. It doesn’t matter if you have an amazing team, a great product, big funding and work 18 hours a day, you can – and possibly will — still fail. Don’t waste your time on thinking things which may or may not happen. Live in the present, build your company in the present.
  10. Don’t plan too much. Most of the plans are just wishful thinking.
  11. Money will solve only one problem, money. The rest of the problems of building business have to solved by you only.

Republished from inBoundio blog

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Why social networks that pay you may be a bad idea

One of the most common questions I get asked, while talking about platforms, relates to the issue of labor on platforms. Facebook and Twitter, among others, get a lot of value from their users and make billions of dollars, but the users don’t see much kickback.

The economics of free-labor platforms

Social networks like Facebook and Twitter leverage free labor from a global talent pool to deliver a business that has near-zero marginal costs of value creation. A mouthful of words but it essentially means the following.

In traditional Pipe models, every act of value creation has an associated marginal cost associated. There are fixed costs of running the pipe’s infrastructure (i.e. the factory, personnel, equipment etc.) and there are marginal costs associated with the production of every new unit of a good or service in that Pipe business. While most Pipe businesses have a good handle of fixed costs, a lot of optimization work focuses on reducing marginal costs, as that directly helps the company scale. If you can produce more units at less cost per unit, your margins improve and your business scales.

This is where free-labor platforms like Twitter and Facebook becomes interesting. They drive marginal costs of value creation to zero. Facebook incurs practically no marginal costs associated with the creation of a new status update. YouTube, likewise, has no marginal costs associated with creation of a new video. It may incentivize the creation of some videos for a variety of reasons but the video creation cost isn’t borne by YouTube.

This allows such platforms enormous leverage. Coupled with the network effect, that creates a natural pull for value producers (in case of YouTube, video uploaders) as the network scales, this model of free labor is guaranteed to create a form of scale, hitherto unprecedented.

These platforms then monetize the value created (in the form of attention, data etc.) but do not pass back any proceeds to these value creators. YouTube, unlike many other platforms, does share some money back with some producers, but most other platforms are run on free labor.

As a result, one of the common criticisms often leveled against such platforms is the argument that they live off free labor and should logically/ethically/morally ‘do the right thing’ and pass some of the kickback back to the users.

That’s a good idea, right? Think Network Effects

When it comes to platforms, the good ideas are typically the ones that strengthen the network effect and the bad ideas are the ones that weaken it.

Is paying value creators a good idea? Only if it leads to desirable interactions on the platform, that in turn, strengthen the network effect.

Every networked platform needs to structure the right incentives for its users. These incentives may be organic (fun, fame, fulfillment) or inorganic (fortune). But platforms need a balance of incentives that leads to the right types of interactions.

Paying someone to use Facebook or LinkedIn may, for instance, possibly encourage the most undesirable interactions. Teenagers in need of some quick money may fill up a professional network. Even when structured on a model that rewards quality, users would tend to game the system. If higher votes mean more money, entire alternate markets could get created to game the system, buy votes and make money. Such markets already exist for gathering fake fans and followers (and votes, actually).

Essentially, shifting the balance of incentives towards inorganic incentives may often lead to unforeseen governance issues.

The problem gets compounded when you realize that higher governance leads to inordinate friction for new users. What sets apart platforms like Wikipedia and Reddit is their reasonably high quality despite the fact that they are open. But this comes at a cost. New users find it very difficult to break through the hierarchy of the Wikipedia and Reddit communities. But conversely, that hierarchy and tight control over actions is exactly what ensure these communities create quality output.

Any platform that functions well on organic incentives may face issues with weakening network effect and frictional governance when moving to inorganic incentives.

The Poverty Line on Platforms

The other issue with paying your users is that it isn’t actually as good an idea as it sounds. Most platforms rely on social feedback as a measure of quality. Votes, likes, ratings, followers etc. typically indicate quality. If platforms were to reward their users, they would likely reward them on the basis of some such parameter that signifies social feedback.

A curious issue with social feedback is the fact that it makes the rich richer and the poor poorer. If I already have more followers on Twitter, I find it easier to add a few more. If my videos are already popular on YouTube, I am likely to have more subscribers making it easier for every subsequent video to also become popular. As a result, platforms develop a poverty line. Users below this line languish in oblivion hoping for their 15 minutes of fame.

The challenge with any form of monetary incentivization is that it would award the rich (in terms of social feedback) way more than it would avoid the poor. This, in turn, discourages the poor (again, in terms of social feedback) all the more from participating further. A feedback loop sets in and the poor start to abandon such a platform. We already see this in Twitter’s challenge in engaging new users who have just been on boarded.

Summary

This leads us back to the original debate. Is it a good idea to build a social network that rewards its users? If it can do that without harming the network effect, creating clunky governance, or disincentivizing certain types of users, it possibly is a good idea. But more often than not, we see things work out the other way.

Hence, the entire hue and cry about Facebook not sharing money with its users when it makes some $x per user, is too simplistic an argument to be judged purely on ethical grounds. And platforms that take the moral high ground on launching in competition with free-labor platforms often realize that they completely messed up the balance of incentives.

There is a reason why platforms which cater to organic incentives well, perform better than the more transactional ones.

Tweetable Takewaways

Social networks that pay users often fail when they end up weakening network effects. Tweet

Platforms with high friction discourage new users from coming on board. Tweet

Platforms reward some users disproportionately owing to the rich-becomes-richer feedback loop. Tweet

This article was originally published on Sangeet Paul Choudary’s personal blog Platform Thinking – A blog about building early stage ventures from an idea to a business, and mitigating execution risk.

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Innovate on the Product, Not on the Business Model

Entrepreneurs from Bangalore had no problem driving into Chennai amid a tense political situation in Tamil Nadu. There was an air of expectation and enthusiasm on the part of more than 15 entrepreneurs who had come in from Bangalore and Mumbai, apart from Chennai itself, to listen to Girish Mathrubootham, Freshdesk CEO and founder, for the Playbook Roundtable on Scaling a SaaS business. Colourful wall graffiti greeted visitors at the Freshdesk’s vibrant office, which itself exuded energy.

A condensed version of the discussion is given in form of a Q&A.

Girish from Freshdesk

What should I focus on in a SaaS business?

The No. 1 success for your business is your product and it is key to your sustenance in business. You should know what matters to your business. Innovate on the product but don’t change your business model. Look at businesses that are in the same domain as you are or businesses that sell to the same kind of customers like yours. Adopt their business model. Copying business models is not a sin. Tweaking the business model may not be good in the long run. 37Signals started charging credit card subscription only when the merchant bank refused them monthly subscriptions as the bank felt the business is new and could fold up in any time. Such business model changes happen by compulsion and not by design.

How should I go about marketing the SaaS business?

Forget affiliate marketing. It works only for impulse buys and in an e-commerce environment. Success, if any, is not scalable. Only Constant Contact has achieved success with affiliate marketing.

Guest blogs with linkbacks to your product site is a good idea.

Positioning and lead generation are key to marketing. Trigger e-mails is just a drip marketing tool and not scalable. Killing welcome e-mails increases response rates. Getting your e-mail to land in the target’s inbox is crucial and it shouldn’t get into Promotion box in Gmail.

Text-only e-mail with no images and links works best. Attention-grabbing subject line and shortening the length to four to five lines assure greater response rates. Remember, mails are read on mobiles. So keep it short.

Instead of a uniform pitch to customers, talk to them to understand their problems. Then your demo should provide a solution to their problems. Customers at times get confused if you run through your presentation and may not connect with how the product or the features will solve their problems. Be specific.

Make your demo educational for the customer. Say something new and which the customer doesn’t know. It will earn you respect and might convert to sales.

Freemium has two groups. In one, after a trial period, you charge for the product right from the beginning. In the other, there are a free version and a paid version of the product. Nail down which works best for your business. Any number of free trials is not going to hurt your business. Leaving money on the table is a good idea. Because the customer might buy after a long time. Patience is a good trait.

Track the customer from their first visit to your website and determine the pattern of how customers find you. This is called visitor fingerprinting. Then you know where to focus upon.

Trade shows. Do they help? For small companies, they may bring some branding and don’t expect too much ROI from events. What works best is a personalized presentation to your target customer. Do your homework and create customized presentations. This might convert to sales.

Attendees at FreshdeskGenerally, personalize across presales, sales, and marketing. The response rates are 25%.

[Read Marc Benioff’s Behind the Cloud.]

[Watch Gail Goodman of Customer Contact’s video “How to negotiate a long slow SaaS ramp of death”]

Webinars? Webinars are good. All the more good if there is an expert on the topic speaking and it offers something new. Make the webinar having some educational value for the audience.

PR – Be in the news constantly. Hire a good PR agency and avoid scamsters promising hell a lot of things (say, one-page content on you in a magazine that has access to thousands of targets in a domain). They wouldn’t be suitable for your business. Churn out good stories often. Reach the people who don’t need you now. Seed them for the future.

Segregate your marketing function into a campaign team and a content marketing/product marketing team.

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How to hire like a hacker

In my past several years of running Themeefy, I have gone through many hiring cycles. Over time I have learnt that there is a particular strategy or set of things, that work really well — especially if you are an early to secondary stage start-up, and want to attract good talent, without necessarily paying a lot.

  1. Be clear on who you want — Do you want a CSS / HTML guy ? Do you want a server-side developer ? Or do you want someone who can do pretty much everything little bit? It’s important to clearly outline this in your mind, because people come with different skill sets and everyone has a different bent of mind. Server-side programmers, even if they can write CSS very well, should ideally not be used for that role — they might miss out Ux aspects that are crucial. Similarly, front-end developers might be capable of writing server-side code, but might miss scalability or other issues. Of course there are exceptions to this.

    Also, if you know the exact skill set you want, or the exact role this person will play in your team, you will look at the right places to hire. For example, while hiring UI people, you should be browsing Dribble, but while hiring server-side, GitHub is a much better place.

  2. Write a cool job advert. Be creative — Often, highlighting the non-monetary benefits of joining your start-up, can attract top talent. For example, in a recent hiring cycle, I started my job advert by saying “work for 5 hours a day and do cool stuff for the rest”. I didn’t lie. I just figured that days of high pressure work, nearing a release date, are often balanced out by relatively low pressure days when we are in design phase or doing beta testing etc. It all averages out to 5 or 6 hours of work a day, which can be a great perk for talented people. You also stand a chance of hiring folks who like to spend time in developing their own skills, ultimately benefitting your startup.
  3. Give measurable tests — Hiring is a risky business with a high probability of a wrong decision. This is because it has so many aspects and in a start-up we are always pressed for time and resources. Often, multiple rounds of interviews or tests are not possible, candidates are remote or are too busy in their existing jobs. The best way to cut through this is to send a set of small projects — for example a single page UI to a client-side developer, or a small DB problem to a server-side person. A set of goal oriented tests often makes it easy to see whether the person has the ability to achieve a task without much guidance and in a small time frame — a crucial skill for a startup.
  4. Build a pipeline — The fastest way to get people on board, is to have a pipeline of resumes / people that you interviewed in earlier cycles and have had a conversation with. People acquire more skills over time. . They might have been a “near-fit” back then and you found a better person. But six months or a year later, they might be the right person.
  5. Be open — Don’t have strict notions of work. Be open to work from home, remote work, flexi hours. Be cognizant of the fact that you are hiring people, not coding machines. Talent can come in unexpected packages and as long as you feel a person might be able to do the job, it doesn’t matter how they do it.
  6. Look for attitude — Because when the ship hits rough seas, it’s the attitude that matters more than the skill. No matter how good resumes look, or how amazing a GitHub profile is, it’s the gut feel you get when you see the test results of a person, or interact with the person on email or phone to which you should pay attention.
  7. Be a “closer” — When you are taking time to hire, or decide not to hire someone, make sure you send out an email to the person — especially if you have had several rounds of interviews or discussions with them. It is the right thing to do, and it makes sure your pipeline is open for the future. And as an entrepreneur it’s important that you work towards building a healthy industry culture.
  8. Rules are meant to be broken — There is no one-size-fits-all in start-ups. And definitely not in hiring. If you have rules like salary structures, leave policies, timings — junk them. They are barriers to hiring. Employees get confused and the focus becomes more on what am I getting, rather than on what is the culture I am getting into. Emphasize just one thing during hiring — that it’s a goal-oriented, trust-based and merit-based place. That’s all that matters and that’s how your start-up should be. Customise your offers based on your candidate and your current ground-reality.

Well, that’s it — my algorithm for hiring. You are free to fork and tweak this to your needs. Happy hiring ☺

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Can you implement Growth hacking in your small business?

With new start-ups coming up on a daily basis, the competition in the market is intense. To be successful in this competitive world, you have to think beyond the ordinary. This is probably why growth hacking has become the go-to word when looking for people you may want to hire! If you can scale your growth beyond a linear curve and find multiple ways to expand your reach multi-dimensionally, you will survive. There is no other way to make our mark.

Growth hacking is not a new thing and unmindful of the same, you might have been using it in a different variant in the recent past.  Here are some powerful marketing tools in your hands as a business entrepreneur, to hack your growth.

  1. Encourage People to use your Products

    If you have started product manufacturing, its popularity among masses can be increased by incorporating a mechanism wherein the actual product can be shared. A business card company by the name of Moo has used this strategy effectively.

    In its pack of business cards, it adds some cards which encourage people to pass it on to other users, giving them discount as an incentive. Try this strategy in promoting your business and you will find that the customer affinity with your range of services will increase randomly.

  2. Identify potential Partners

    Small businesses often grow well if backed by someone who is already established in the market. Identify some of the successful leaders in your niche and try to establish a business linkage with them. Get someone to mentor you, or get them as a customer. If they are doing an event, try to get into some kind of partnership. This will help your business to gain effective visibility in relatively less time.

    PayPal and eBay are a perfect example of this synchronization. eBay was already a successful brand by the time PayPal came up. However, the concept of offering a safer transaction to its customers impressed eBay so much that it tied up with PayPal helping the company grow at a rapid pace.

    Use this strategy in your business promotion initiatives and help it prosper.

  3. Endorsement for your Endeavours

    Endorsement by someone successful in the niche area in which you are trying to get a foothold also has its imminent benefits. Your customers will take you seriously and will start believing in your promotional initiatives. You can hire the services of someone with a visionary outlook and help explain to your customers, the services or ideas you are trying to spread.

  4. Free products along with some Paid Services

    This is another viable method of implementing growth hacking successfully. You should offer some free services or products to the customer initially to build upon their trust levels. These free products or services can be offered in synchronization with paid services.

    A company by the name of Moz has been trying this successfully. One can sign up for free SEO tools on Moz but will have to pay up for premium services. People will eventually connect with you and go for paid services when they find that the quality of your product or service is trustworthy.

  5. Using Social Media Tools

    The advent of social media has drastically changed the way small businesses are perceived. Join the bandwagon and reap the benefits. Link up your promotional content on to the social media platform. The users on the social media channels will do the rest for you and the worth of your business will spread multifold.

    Pinterest has used this growth hacking strategy successfully for promoting its reach. Pinterest allows its users to find up content on the site and share the same on their Pinterest, Facebook and Twitter page.

    Make it easy for people to distribute your content on their social media pages easy and you will be able to connect with users in an effective manner.

Growth hacking has been in use since long. The techniques and tricks of using the same in business promotion have been evolving with time. By incorporating the above listed tips in business promotion you will be able to improve your prospects in the competitive business world and grow at a rapid pace.

This post is contributed by Kritika Prashant, together with team MyOperator, this IIT Delhi alumna is committed to make business calls as efficient and manageable as emails for small businesses in India.

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Piggybacking Mechanics: Whatsapp, Instagram And Network Effect Marketing

Welcome to the age of the zero-dollar marketing startup. WhatsApp, and earlier Instagram, have officially become a permanent part of startup lore for having built multi-billion dollar businesses without (reportedly) spending a dime on marketing.

Meanwhile, Airbnb has grown from a hipster community of mattress-renters to the world’s largest provider of accommodations without spending even a fraction of what traditional hotel chains spend in marketing.

Marketing is dead! Or that’s what many would have you believe. A great product sells itself, of course! Fire the marketing team!

Well… not quite!

The fastest growing networks on the internet – Airbnb, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Snapchat – may not have spent much on marketing, but they all have one thing in common: Each of these networks piggybacked on top of another pre-existing network.

Facebook and Bebo grew on top of the network embedded in our email. Many networks, including Instagram, grew on top of Facebook itself. For a while, Airbnb grew on top of Craigslist, while Snapchat and WhatsApp have leveraged the mobile phone’s organic network, the phone book, to create networks native to mobile,

If you’re building a social network, marketplace or platform and you haven’t considered piggybacking on a network, you need to think again.

Much so-called ‘growth hacking’ relies on testing of cause-and-effect and optimization of funnel conversions. But in the early days of a network or a marketplace, startups are faced with a radically different problem. Why will users come on board when there’s no one else there? Why will producers set up shop in a marketplace that is not yet frequented by consumers and vice versa?

The classic chicken and egg problem cannot be solved by pulling in users and optimizing conversions. Before network effects set in, users will neither get activated nor will they get engaged.

Set a network to catch a network

To grow a network, you need to think like a network. To get enough users on board to create network effects, you need to piggyback upon another network. Piggybacking on a thriving network works wonderfully as long as your platform is complementary to that network and delivers additional value to the users there.

As far as growth strategies go, there are few strategies that are more scalable and sustainable as engines of growth.

Paypal got almost all its traction by piggybacking on eBay and offering a much superior payment method than the painful check-over-mail. It solved the pain points around payment on eBay providing instant payments without the hassle of credit cards and assuming much of the risk of online fraud.

Soon enough, Paypal was the predominant mode of payments on eBay and rode its growth to become synonymous with online payments.

But not all piggybacking stories end happily ever after. Apps that have leveraged Facebook to grow aggressively, have found their business jeopardized with a change in Facebook’s news feed algorithm. Startups that tried to emulate Airbnb and siphon users away from Craigslist were sent cease and desist letters. Even Paypal was banned on eBay for a while before the marketplace had to accede to the wishes of the users.

So what does it take to successfully piggyback a network?

The Biology of Piggybacking

Successfully piggybacking a network is more complex than simply choosing a network and executing an API integration. A startup looking to piggyback on an underlying network needs to understand the nature of its relationship with that network.

Borrowing analogies from biological systems, there are three types of relationships between your startup (the Guest) and the underlying network (the Host).

The Happy Clownfish

In certain cases, a partnership model may be initiated by the Host i.e. the underlying network.

Much like how colorful clownfish (Guest) inhabit sea anemones (Hosts) whereby each party gains protection from their respective predators, both networks benefit from each other.

For example, Facebook’s partnership with Spotify, following its launch of frictionless sharing, is designed in a way that both Facebook and Spotify benefit.

Facebook needed greater engagement among users and Spotify needed listeners, even though the implementation of frictionless sharing has much that can be improved. Earlier, Zynga, Slide and RockYou benefited from a similar relationship with Facebook, piggybacking on Facebook for growth by providing value to Facebook users, while improving user engagement and retention on Facebook.

The Hitchhiking Remora

Not all networks may initiate partnerships the way Facebook did. In fact, most don’t.

In such cases, it is the prerogative of the guest (your startup) to be backward compatible with the host, much like a remora attaching itself onto a shark and feeding off it, you need to figure out a way to embed your functionality in the host network.

YouTube gained early traction by piggybacking on MySpace. Engagement on MySpace was built around musicians who needed a way to showcase their talent. At the time, online video was broken. YouTube fixed that with its flash-based one-click video experience and MySpace users finally had an answer to their problems.

Flickr solved the pain of sharing pictures in the blogosphere. Every blogger putting up a picture on his blog helped showcase the service to others. Flickr rapidly grew to become the fifth most visited website on the internet by the time Yahoo lapped it up.

As these examples demonstrate, these relationships start without an explicit partnership. The Guest makes a conscious decision to make its functionality and content embeddable in the Host network. If such embedding solves a key user pain point, the users start embedding Guest functionality into the Host network, driving adoption. The chicken and egg problem is solved as more users on the Host get exposed to this functionality and migrate to start using the Guest’s functionality.

The Bloodsucking Parasite

Finally, some networks may actively discourage any form of guest-host relationship. In these cases, the startup needs to reverse-engineer an integration with the host. Such piggybacking is generally non-consensual.

Airbnb reverse-engineered a de facto ‘integration’ with Craigslist and offered users on Craigslist, an alternate, more convenient and safer destination for their interactions. Airbnb stole the network interactions away from Craigslist and was promptly blocked by the Host as soon as it realized what was afoot.

Skype, Viber and WhatsApp have similar relationships with carriers where they piggyback the connections created by the carriers (via the user’s phone book) to provide an alternate communication channel.

Viber rode this success to a $900M acquisition recently,and WhatsApp was acquired by Facebook for $19 billion in cash and stock.

Sidenote: It is interesting to note Skype, Viber, and WhatsApp are able to arbitrage users because of a lack of effective carrier data discrimination. That is to say, carriers are well aware of WhatsApp allowing users an end-around onerous SMS fees, but feel powerless – at this point in time – to raise network data rates to make it unprofitable for WhatsApp, forcing users back to SMS.

How To Succeed With Piggybacking

While piggybacking may seem attractive, startups need to be aware of the relationship they have with the host network and pursue strategies accordingly.

More importantly, not all piggybacking is successful. The stories above suffer from survivorship bias and are useful only when understood in the context of the factors that dictated their success and spelt failure for other startups that tried similar strategies.

In general, everyone wins in The Happy Clownfish scenario.

But in most Hitchhiking Remora relationships, the Host controls the relationship with the piggybacking Guest. This is specifically the case whenever the Host launches an open-access API upon which startups build off that to access the Host’s network. While remora may add value by plucking parasites, fickle sharks have been known to bait-and-switch and devour orbiting remoras.

The Bloodsucking Parasite relationship is a lot easier to anticipate and is always antagonistic. In most cases, it triggers an instant immune system response, which, translating to business, amounts to legal action.

The only long-term sustainable network-piggybacking, then, is the Happy Clownfish. Both the clownfish and the sea anemone need each other. Their respective physiologies are a clue. A clownfish will never grow poisonous tentacles to sting potential predators and a sea anemone will never grow fins to swim.

To be a clownfish in a sea anemone, your network needs to provide high-contrast, high-value-add differentiation with significant barriers to entry, otherwise you risk coming across like one of thousands of commoditized remoras. Facebook doesn’t want to build its own music library and Spotify isn’t interested in connecting the world outside of music.

There are three factors that determine success with piggybacking:

1. If the host explicitly calls for piggybackers, be the first to the party

When Facebook opened its platform to external developers, Zynga jumped on board and gained rapid adoption. Many startups that followed failed to get such adoption because users had become more sophisticated to the viral invites by that time and Facebook, as well, started dampening the spread of these invites subsequently.

Being the first to the party helps to get users deeply engaged before they get sophisticated and start ignoring messages from other services that follow.

Be the first clownfish to get to your sea anemone.

2. If you can build for backward compatibility, ensure you add value to the underlying platform

YouTube solved a problem for MySpace bands. Flickr solved a problem for bloggers. Paypal solved multiple pain points for buyers and sellers on eBay. Be the useful remora that eats the little parasites on the shark.

3. Be the first to reverse-engineer before the host wises up

When stealing traction parasitically, it pays to be the first to discover the chink in the armor of host network. Airbnb gained traction before Craigslist wisened up. But every startup that has tried that strategy subsequently has failed to replicate the same success and has instead been caught in a legal quagmire.

Being first to piggyback a host network is the most important determiner of success. There is typically a time window while these strategies work. And almost always, first-to-the-party wins. When the host wants you to piggyback, there’s a window while it will be effective. When the host doesn’t want it, there’s a window before which the host wises up. In either case, being first helps.

The story of many of today’s large social networks and marketplaces follows similar trajectories. Bringing in users through linear funnel hacking tactics often prove counter-productive. Finding a new network and piggybacking it helps gain traction among enough users simultaneously and build network effects.

So the next time you hear about a startup boasting a zero dollar marketing budget and putting it all on building a great product, think again! Piggybacking is the new marketing for the age of the network effect.

Note: This article  first appeared on TheNextWeb. This article was co-authored with Patrick Vlaskovits, the NY Times BestSelling Author of The Lean Entrepreneur.

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14 Ways to Emotionally Engage users with your Product

Most conversations with entrepreneurs and product managers who want drive engagement and bring viral features to their products are answered as ‘We will gamify our product through features’. This post is about clearing some nuisance around the topic of gamification in products.

Gamification has nothing to do with building features. In fact, even Product Management has nothing to do with building features. It is not a rocket science, product managers usually figure out the ‘building features’ part of it with time and experience.

“People don’t buy products. They buy better versions of Themselves.”

So how do you ‘connect’ users with your product? Not through features, not through gamification, but by triggering certain emotions with your users.

Gamification = Getting People Emotionally Engaged with Product.

Below are some of the most powerful emotions people have along with few examples that will help you figure out how get users to emotionally engaged with your product / startup.
PS: The number of emotions could be more, I have referred to only 14 here.

1. Expression

Expression – People love to express themselves. Enable it.

Products that allow users to express themselves:

  1. Tumblr
  2. Twitter
  3. Facebook
  4. Medium

Products that allow users to express themselves anonymously:

  1. Secret
  2. Whisper
  3. FML

Tip: ‘Expression’ is used as a core use-case in product.

2. Acknowledgment

Acknowledgment: People love getting acknowledged. With interactions & endorsements.

Help people getting acknowledged. They love it!

  1. LinkedIn – Recommendations & Endorsements are social acknowledgments which users love.
  2. Twitter – Retweets and Replies on tweets are great way to be acknowledged.
  3. Facebook – Likes & Comments are acknowledgments to status messages users shares
  4. Quora – Upvotes & Comments is acknowledgment to your answers.
  5. Tumblr – Love & Reposts are acknowledgments to you posts.

Tip: ‘Acknowledgments’ lead to ‘User Notifications’ which further lead to Engagement. Always build features that enable acknowledgments in products that use ‘expression’ as use-case in product.

3. Exclusivity

Exclusivity or Privilege: People love being privileged. Make it exclusive.

Make it exclusive. No one likes the feeling of being left out.

  1. Gmail – Gmail invites were exclusive to few users. People were ready to buy invites off Ebay.
  2. Quora – Only existing users can invite new users.
  3. Pinterest – Users need to apply for access. After few days they were granted it.
  4. Mailbox – Users were in queue to get access to the app.

Tip: ‘Exclusivity’ works best for initial referral program for driving sign-ups.

4. Being Cool

Being Cool: People want to be Cool. People want others to know they are Cool.

Make your users look cool when they share your product.

  1. Frontback – Share a snap along with a selfie. Lets users be cool.
  2. Vine – Short cool creative videos.

Tip: ‘Being Cool’ will help you drive sharing on Social Networks.

5. Nostalgia

Nostalgia: People have memories. Sweet Memories. Remind them about it.

Remind users about some of the best times they have experienced.

  1. Timehop – Complete product is built around Nostalgia. Reminds users of special moments from the past.
  2. Facebook – 2014: Year in Review videos
  3. Twitter – 8th Anniversary: Which was your first tweet.

Tip: ‘Nostalgia’ helps get back old users and revives their interest. Can be only used once in a year on special occasions.

6. Curiosity

Curiosity: People want to know. They fear on losing out. Keep them curious.

Keep users curious. Keep them looking for more.

  1. LinkedIn – The feature ‘who viewed my profile’ tries to keep its users curious, and engaged.
  2. Twitter – Catching up with Timeline, mostly is the fear of losing out.
  3. BuzzFeed / UpWorthy / ViralNova – All try to trigger curiosity of readers through their post titles.

Tip: ‘Curiosity’ in products helps you increase repeat usage.

7. Competitiveness

Competitiveness: People love to compete with others. Creates a sense of achievement. Make it happen.

Drive users to compete with friends / others.

  1. Foursquare – The leaderboards between Friends was a great way 4SQ ensured people kept checking in.
  2. Quora – The feeling of ‘I have a better answer’ or ‘I can answer this question in a better way’ keeps driving engagement.
  3. Fitbit – Leaderboard that tracks your fitness with friends.
  4. Hackrank – Programming challenges.

Tip: ‘Competitiveness’ leads to greater engagement. Though its novelty in private group is lost after some time.

8. Stay Organized

Stay Organized: People love to organize things. Organize everything. Make it happen

Give users stuff that they want to sort / organize. Keep them busy.

  1. Pinterest – Lets you organize pins / interests/ stuff you love.
  2. Evernote – Organize all your notes.
  3. Wanelo – Organize fashion stuff. Ask girls how much they love doing this.
  4. Calendar / Contacts – They are always in a mess. Its a never-ending struggle to organize this. Google Contacts & Google Calendar help you keep them in place.

Tip: ‘Staying Organized’ helps your users spend more time in your product. It soon becomes a habit.

9. Importance

Importance: People love to feel important. Its about them. Their identity. They want to show off.

Make your users feel important about themselves.

  1. LinkedIn – My professional achievements., that is how a user sees it.
  2. Twitter – My views. My opinions., that is how a user tweets.
  3. FourSquare – Checkin is telling the world – I am here.
  4. About.me – This is me. This is my identity.

Tip: ‘Importance’, everyone wants to be important. The product usually ends up being shared, talked about – and results in others wanting to do the same.

10. Authority

Authority: People love to display their authority on a topic. Give them opportunity to do that.

Help create authority for users. Users want to be acknowledged as influencers by others.

  1. Quora – Authority by Topics. Asked to Answer is being authoritative.
  2. StackExchange – For programmers.
  3. HackerOne – For hackers.
  4. Hacker News – For Geeks.

Tip: ‘Authority’ is the importance others in a community or forum assigns to select users. Users want to be acknowledged as being authoritative, it helps increasing engagement and spending time on the product.

11. Visual

Visual: People love stunning visuals. Its a powerful emotion.

Visuals create impact in product. Don’t miss on it.

  1. Instagram – Personal Emotions.
  2. Flickr – Professional Emotions (yes unfortunately for Flickr).
  3. 500px – Photography community.

Tip: ‘Visual’ is a substitute to all unsaid emotions. Use well when your product is build around pictures and photographs.

12. Freebies

Freebies: People love Freebies. Badges. Credits. It all works.

Freebies work. Make use of them correctly.

  1. Quora – Credits users get when other upvote their answers.
  2. FourSquare – Badges for Check-in.
  3. Uber – Credits to Refer Friends.
  4. Facebook / Twitter / Google – Regularly use Advertising Credits to on-board new advertisers.

Tip: ‘Freebies’ – use it only for one purpose. Can be used for activations, sharing or driving engagement. Use it for one use-case that can measured.

13. Money

Money: People want to make Money. People want to receive Money.

Money is one of the strongest emotions. Portray it positively.

  1. Google Adsense – Opportunity for bloggers, individuals, publishers to earn money online.
  2. PayPal – Receive money from anyone.
  3. Elance – Get paid for free-time work.
  4. Kickstarter – Raise money for your projects.
  5. Gumroad – Make money by selling digital goods.

Tip: ‘Money’ – Receiving Money / Making Money is a positive emotion. Giving away is negative.

14. Sex

Sex: People want Companions. People want Dates. People want Sex.

Keep it simple, keep it safe.

  1. Tinder – Helps you find date.
  2. Match.com – Helps you find date.
  3. OkCupid – Helps you find date.

Tip: ‘Sex’ – It is more about selling the Hope. Keep the product simple. Don’t over engineer.

Concluding Notes:

When you build any feature, try to trigger a emotional engagement with user. If you are in early stage of your product development or in process of making your product roadmap, spent some time with this methodology – 15 Steps Towards Building a Great Product.

When it comes to including emotions in your product, ensure the following:

  1. Use max 2-3 emotions per product.
  2. Gamification is not about building features. It is about emotionally engaging a user.
  3. Don’t exploit users. Be subtle. Be good.
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Hiring Is Growth Hacking

Hiring is Growth Hacking applied to organizations.

What does that mean?
It is expensive to pay a staffing consulting $10k – $20k per hire, so creative, guerrilla tactics have to be adopted. Using your network to reach out to your audience, relying on word of mouth, the referral program that extends beyond employees, Quora/Twitter/LinkedIn for lead generation, fancy videos and blog posts with great content, etc.

It can be harder for large companies to do real growth hacking, whether to acquire users or employees, for many reasons, some legitimate: agility, red tape, risk averseness, etc. But there are always inspired employees in these companies making an exception.

So how should one go about hiring like a growth hacker?

1. Double down on metrics
Draw out funnels for every channel you are sourcing candidates from. Measure success rates (define success explicitly: an interview accept? the actual hire?) and work on drop off points. Be ruthless about cutting out the underperforming channels, regardless of how cool they are right now. It is an optimization problem.

2. Growth is a culture
You have to build acquisition and retention into your product DNA. Same for your organization. Every employee should be an evangelist. Every employee should be helping with the hiring process.

3. Initial user experience
If the first interaction requires a prospective candidate to commit to a job search or going through an interview process, it’s an anti-hack. It’s why you choose to ignore those InMails. Elicit a “wow” the first time, then take it from there.

4. Spread success stories
Get new employees to update LinkedIn profiles, Facebook/Twitter statuses immediately. Ask them to blog about their first day. Show off internal successes.

5. Multi multi channel
That’s two “multi”s. Everyone is already multi-channel: they’re on LinkedIn, Quora, Twitter, StackOverflow, etc. Find more channels. Treat everything as a channel. Exactly why this is like growth hacking: the answers are not already available.

6. Create content
Content is one of the best ways to engage your audience. The Kixeye hiring video. The Facebook Engineering blog. Meet The Team sections on so many company websites.

7. Bootstrap
When you’re starting from zero, you have to bootstrap. An online education startup bootstrapped by creating courses themselves from publicly available course material. A local services marketplace bootstrapped by letting you type in any service you wanted, and then going out to find and sign up a provider for that service. An e-commerce selling diapers online started by fulfilling orders by buying diapers from the local Target store.

Got any more growth hacks that can be applied to hiring? Leave a comment, and I’ll add it to this list.

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Platform Metrics: the core metric for platforms, networks and marketplaces

You become what you measure. From my experience working with clients across enterprises and startups, the most common reason for failure and inefficiency is the focus on convenient, but inappropriate, metrics. Your technology doesn’t determine the business you build. Neither does your organizational capability. The metric you optimize for is the single biggest factor that determines which business you end up building.

Metric Design

The importance of choosing the right metric is more far-reaching than we often believe. A metric is a bit like a commander’s intent in an army. At battle, there are a lot of variabilities and unexpected contingencies which cannot be pre-planned for. The Commander’s Intent is a simple rule of thumb that helps soldiers take local, individual decisions towards a cohesive, larger goal.

Metrics work in much the same manner. Once you set a metric, the entire team organizes its efforts around it, and works relentlessly to optimize the business for that metric. It’s often fancy to have a large dashboard with multiple graphs tracking hundreds of things. But to be truly effective, an organization/team/individual should be solely focused on optimizing for one metric.

As a result, identifying and designing the right metric is critical for business success. More often than not, I’ve seen the following general observation to hold true:

If you’re asking someone to optimize for more than one metric, you’re setting them up for failure. 

Often, ratios help capture multiple movements in one metric. Whether you think of the financial ratios that traditional business managers track or the DAU/MAU that app developers relentlessly track today, ratios tend to be important as they explain concentration rather than quantity.

Pipe Metrics

This discussion of metrics is especially important in the world of platforms and networked businesses. Platform businesses are a lot more complicated than traditional pipe businesses. Pipes optimize unidirectional flow of value. Hence, metaphorically, releasing bottlenecks at any point should help with the flow. The Core Metrics for pipes, naturally, then, measure smoothness of flow and/or removal of bottlenecks. Inventory turnover is one such metric to check how often the flow of goods/services moves through the pipe. All forms of Output/Input ratios for intermediary teams on the Pipe are, again, checks to understand rate of flow and identify creation of bottlenecks.

Platform Metrics

But this tends to be much more complex in the case of platforms where flows are multi-directional. Moreover, they are interdependent because of network effects. E.g. optimizing activity on the producer side may have unexpected implications on the consumer side. On a dating network, allowing over-access to men may be unattractive for women. Hence, even if you have two different teams optimizing for two different metrics on the producer and consumer side, the activities of one team may adversely impact the pursuits of the other team.

How then does one go about deciding on platform metrics?

The Business Of Enabling Interactions

This takes us back to a theme I repeatedly talk about. If I had to condense the essence of Platform Thinking in one line, here’s what it would be:

We are in the business of enabling interactions.

This is much like the Commander’s Intent I mentioned earlier and has important implications. Irrespective of how big your firm is, how complex the operations are, the goal should always be to optimize the core interaction.

1. Identify the Core Interaction that your platform enables

2. Remove all bottlenecks in the Core Interaction to ensure that it gets completed across Creation, Curation and Consumption

3. Ensure that the Core Interaction is repeatable and repeats often

From a metrics perspective, this essentially means that the Core Metric that rules everything should measure interactions.

If you’re running a platform business, you need to start measuring and optimizing your core interaction. 

Metrics Design Around The Core Interaction

So we get the fact that we need to measure interactions. However, we still need a measure, a number that shows the Core Interaction is working well. As with all metric design, it is still possible to choose the wrong metric despite understanding the importance of measuring the Core Interaction.

To design the right metric, let’s revisit what the Core Interaction on a platform actually entails.

From earlier essays in this series, we note the following:

1. A platform enables exchange of information, goods/services, money, attention etc. between the producer and consumer. For a visual guide to how this works, check the article here.

2. The exchange of information always occurs on the platform. The other exchanges may or may not occur on it.The exchange of information enables every other exchange to take place. To understand the mechanics of this, refer this article.

3. The exchange of information is the key source of value creation across all platforms and can be visualized as the Core Interaction of the platform. To understand the structure of the Core Interaction in detail, check the article here.

4. The Core Interaction has three parts: Creation, Curation and Consumption of the Core Value Unit

Let’s now look at the different types of platforms and tease out relevant key metrics.

Transaction Capture

Some platforms capture the transaction between producers and consumers. These platforms typically track actual transactions. Platforms like the Amazon marketplace may measure gross value of transactions. Those like Fiverr (which have fixed value per transaction) may simply measure number of transactions. Airbnb tracks number of nights booked. This is a better indicator of value creation than simply tracking number of transactions. At the same time, it doesn’t care about value of transactions (spare mattress being booked vs. castle) as the goal is simply more value created irrespective of type of customer.

Transaction Tracking

Some platforms can track the exchange of goods and services in addition to capturing the exchange of money. ODesk, for example, can track number of hours of work delivered by the freelancer (producer), a key measure of value creation. Clarity.fm can track duration of the consulting call between an expert and the information seeker.

Market Access

Some platforms are unable to capture the transaction, the exchange of money. They create value by allowing producers access to consumers. In these cases, one of the common metrics tracked is the platform’s ability to generate leads. OpenTable specifically tracks reservations. These are not the actual transactions at the dinner table, but serve as a proxy for the value created. Some platforms may track overall/relevant market access. Dating and matrimonial sites often talk about number of women registered as that determines the value that a user can expect to get.

Co-Creation

One of the key properties of platforms is the fact that external producers can add value. Whether it is new apps on an app store, new videos on YouTube or new pictures on Flickr. In these cases, one is tempted to solely track these co-created Value Units. However, Creation forms only one-third of the Core Interaction. The proof of the pudding, in such cases, lies in repeat Consumption. Some platforms may track the total consumption, some may track the percentage of Value Units that cross a minimum threshold of Consumption. I tend to favor the latter as measuring and increasing the percentage of units that get minimum consumption ensures that the platform focuses on getting more producers who create relevant units that will be consumed. It also ensures that, over time, the feedback loops (in the forms of notifications to producers) will encourage creation of the kinds of units that get greater consumption.

Quality as Value

Some platforms may create value largely by signaling quality. Reddit is one such example where Curation is more important than Creation or Consumption. Such platforms may track reputation of users and create feedback loops that encourage users to participate often, gain karma and use that to participate further in the curation process.

Market Attention

Platforms where the Core Value Units are content e.g. YouTube, Medium, Quora etc., the engagement of Consumer Attention serves as a key metric. Measuring number of videos or articles uploaded or number of videos viewed or articles read is often not enough. These give indications of Creation and Consumption but not of Curation. We need some indicator of quality as well. This is why many such platforms track the percentage of content which gets a minimum engagement. Medium tracks views and reads separately indicating that it requires a minimum commitment from the Consumer to determine quality of the content.

The Easy Metric Fallacy

While working with companies on this, I’ve often noted the following:

1. Creation is the most common metric tracked. Number of apps, number of videos, number of sellers etc. This is misleading.

2. In the case of Market Attention category platforms, Consumption is the most common metric tracked. This is an improvement but still not a measure of quality.

3. Curation is rarely tracked and is often the most important metric that determines the health of the platform.

4. The measure of transactions that should be tracked varies with type of platform. In some cases, number of transactions may suffice, in other cases, volume of transactions may matter.

5. The metric that best explains interactions will change over the life cycle of the platform and it’s critical to identify points at which these transitions occur. Companies often make the mistake of sticking on with an older metric when their business has scaled. Identifying and vetting the Core Metric at every point is very important.

Counter Metrics

While measuring the platform’s ability to create interactions is important, it is equally important to measure its failure to close interactions. I will explore this further in a subsequent post.

The Way Forward

The discussion on metrics is deep and cannot be done justice in one post. I’ll cover this more as we move further in the series. The key point, though, remains:

On a platform, the Core Metric that rules them all must measure and optimize the Core Interaction.

Tweetable Takeaways

For platforms, the Core Metric to be tracked must measure and optimize the Core Interaction.Tweet

The goal of a platform is to repeat and optimize the Core Interaction that creates value. Tweet

This article was originally published on Sangeet Paul Choudary’s personal blog Platform Thinking – A blog about building early stage ventures from an idea to a business, and mitigating execution risk.

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Before you start with Growth Hacking

Building a product startup is exciting. Most startups look to raise capital early and investors look no other measure but traction to take their bets. This need for traction puts immense pressure on the founding team to grow their startup. That leads to implementing multiple tips and tricks to improve the key product metrics – most importantly to show traction to investors. Founders get into the so called ‘growth hacking’ mode.

Growth hacking is the new buzzword in the startup town. There is nothing wrong with ‘hacking growth’ – most of the tricks attempted in this phase end up being short-term techniques. They might work for a while, bring traction for a while (which might lead you to raise investments) but these techniques don’t help in long term and the growth is not sustainable and quickly falls off.

Startups tend to neglect the simplest rules of product management before starting with growth hacking. According to me, here are the 5 Basic Rules of Product Management:

  1. User Engagement > Growth Hacking
  2. Retention > Acquisition
  3. Context > Activity
  4. Own growth channels > External channels
  5. Being Valuable > Being Social

A. User Engagement > Growth Hacking
Remember startups like BranchOut, Glassdoor, Viddy, Socialcam – that famously hacked growth through Facebook Dialog Feeds? Though they showed amazing growth curve initially, it soon fell off. Most users dropped off the product as quickly as they signed up never to return again. Reason – zero engagement on the product. Ensure that there are enough engagement loops on the product before you do any sort of ‘growth hacking’.

B. Retention > Acquisition
Acquiring users is the simplest thing to do, retaining them is the key. Any user acquisition technique should retain a good percentage of acquired users. Not just that., over a period of time the users who dropped off should be reactivated – there should be enough methods to pull them back – emailers / network effects / and so on. If the product has strong engagement features, retention is a easy task.

C. Context > Activity
Most products undermine the importance of context. In today’s world – anything that is not context is considered spam. The finest examples of a context driven product is Quora that lets you follow topics of your interest and helps you discover relevant content. Also important are products like Twitter (that lets you follow users) and Pinterest (that lets you follow boards) to build a information stream in context thats relevant to you. Think of context when you build features.

D. Own Channels > External Channels
Many startups focus on external channels for growth. Branchout was focussed on Facebook Dialog Feeds, Zynga was focused on Facebook Activity Wall, Viddy was focussed on Facebook Open Graph. Perfectly fine – if there are enough engagement loops and good retention strategy. However depending on external channels might not be sustainable – many startups hacked the Facebook Open Graph to get significant users – this led to users complaining about to the noise on Facebook wall, Facebook in return built many approvals / controls to prevent applications from spamming the users and giving users ease to block spam applications.

Large startups like Facebook, Dropbox, WhatsApp were completely focussed on driving growth through channels owned by self and had very little or no external dependence for growth. Don’t depend too much on external platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Google (SEO) for growth – build our own channels. Facebook’s journey of growth hacking is well documented. Also Dropbox as mentioned in next point.

E. Being Valuable > Being Social
There are also startups that focus on building ‘too-many’ social sharing features, expecting users to share almost everything and anything on to their social profiles (Facebook, Twitter, etc). Users are smart – they don’t fall in this trap and founders keep wondering why no social sharing happens. Instead of trying to be forceful on social, focus on being valuable.

Example –  Dropbox, it was a very valuable product that had super methods to hack growth – by connecting FB or Twitter account with Dropbox and providing users additional storage space by asking them to spread a message to their social circle or invite email contacts.

Concluding Notes:
Can you hack growth first and implement these rules later? No. There are startups that hacked user acquisition and raised initial investment on traction., and later things did not go according to the plan. Not just startups, that leaves even investors wondering what went wrong after the initial impressive growth metrics.

Startups are about growth, no doubt. Getting Techcrunche’d (PR release), top position on Hacker News or Video that goes viral might bring one-time traffic boost / user sign-ups. You can get good amount of traffic by integrating with Facebook Open Graph, optimizing site for Google (SEO) or even paid user acquisition – but make sure that the product has enough engagement, retention loops, value and context to sustain the users you are acquiring!

You may hack growth., but you can’t hack success. Building the next billion dollar company is a big deal!

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How Startups Compete with Friction in Product Design

Startups need Traction. A startup which doesn’t get discovered doesn’t go anywhere. This is all the more critical for platform businesses which rely on their users to create value and network effects. In the specific case of platform businesses, Traction dictates the value that is created. A social network without enough users or a marketplace without enough activity isn’t going anywhere. Traction essentially refers to the additional value that is created on these businesses by the users using it, value created through interactions between users.

Often, one of the core principles of building for Traction is removing Friction from the product experience. Friction comes in the way of users using the product and, hence, in the way of value creation. Friction may result from anything that acts as a barrier to a user for using the product. Friction may be created by design (e.g. users are curated before they get access) or by accident (e.g. poor product navigability).

Traction and Friction don’t go well together. We’re living in an age where frictionless is increasingly synonymous with desirable design.

But Friction continues to have an important place in the world of platform businesses. Getting Friction right is critical to the success of an internet startup. Through this essay, I’d like to explore some of the top design considerations while building for friction.

As with all design considerations, the ultimate goal of a platform startup (marketplace, community, social network, UGC platform etc.) is to facilitate interactions.

Hence, as a rule of thumb:

Friction is a good thing if it facilitates the interaction instead of coming in the way of it.

Let’s dig further!

The Traction-Friction Matrix

This is pretty much how the traction-friction trade-off works out:

Traction 1

High Friction-Low Traction: There are two reasons your startup may be in this quadrant: by design or by accident. You’re either curating who gets access or you’re suffering from really bad design.

Low Friction-High Traction: Again, a startup hits this quadrant for one of two reasons: frictionless experiences by design or lack of checks and balances.

High Friction-High Traction: This is a great place to be and ultimately successful startups migrate to this quadrant after starting off in one of the quadrants above.

Low Friction-Low Traction: This is clearly the worst quadrant to get stuck in for too long.

 

Movements in the Matrix

1. Pivoting around Friction:

 

2. Avoiding friction altogether: CraigsList pretty much allows anyone to do anything, except for a few categories that it polices and a few categories where listing are paid.

 

3. Embracing friction with scale: Quora has been increasing friction as it scales. Anyone could ask a question in the early days but asking a question now requires the user to pay forward in points.

4. Relaxation of norms:  App.net started off with high friction with a $50 subscription fee. However, it has gradually reduced friction to allow for traction.

5. Scaling the country club: Several invite-only platforms have successfully scaled with this model.

 

 

Design Considerations For Friction

As mentioned earlier, Friction, like every other design consideration, should lead to smoother and better interactions between users on the platform. With that as a guiding principle, let’s look at a few case studies where Friction works well.

Interestingly, two platforms in the same vertical and category often compete and co-exist by being in two different boxes in this matrix, as the examples below demonstrate.

Friction as a Source of Quality

Some platforms risk losing activity (interactions) when there is a lot of noise on the platform. Women tend to avoid dating websites which attract stalkers and men with poor online etiquette. Clearly, noise leads to lower probability of interactions.

Some dating websites invest in incentivizing women to join the network. An alternate model is to increase friction on the other side and curate the men that get access to the network. Sites like CupidCurated have taken this approach as a way to differentiate themselves from existing dating sites which relied on incentivizing women.

High Friction-Low Traction: CupidCurated

Low Friction-High Traction: Match.com

Friction to Create Trust

Some interactions may require a minimum guarantee and an environment of trust. Hiring a babysitter is different from asking a question online. False positives can cause much greater damage in the former case.

In such scenarios, Friction in the form of curation of babysitters provides a critical source of value. In contrast, the Friction-less Craigslist is hardly the destination for finding babysitters online.

High Friction-Low Traction: SitterCity

Low Friction-High Traction:  Craigslist

Friction as Signal

In both examples above, Friction not only controls who gets access to the platform, it also creates some form of signal about those getting access. Curation of babysitters yields exact parameters which would be used by parents for making a decision. Hence, Friction also helps with signaling.

Interestingly, financial markets work with signaling too. VCs, in private markets, are responsible for due diligence and determining whether a startup is worth investing in.

Crowdfunding tries to disrupt venture capital but most current models (like Kickstarter) merely unlock new sources of funds, they don’t necessarily provide the expertise curation and signaling that a VC fund would. Startups like RockThePost are working on the Country Club model and allowing only heavily curated startups to raise money through their platform. In this way, the platform is placing a bet on the fact that signaling and curation need to be part of the platform, to credibly provide an alternative to venture funds.

High Friction-Low Traction: RockThePost

Low Friction-High Traction: KickStarter

Friction on One or Both Roles

Most platforms support two distinct roles: consumers and producers. In all the examples above, Friction was being applied to only one side. This is the model used in most cases. However, where there is  high overlap between the two roles i.e. the same user produces as well as consumes, Friction can be applied to both roles. Quibb is an example of a network that applies Friction across the board. It works for Quibb because users want to be part of an exclusive community, to benefit from superior quality interactions. But more often than not, applying Friction on both sides comes in the way of creation of network effects, as demonstrated in the next example.

High Friction-Low Traction: Quibb

Low Friction-High Traction: Reddit

Friction as a Barrier

For all the hype and fanfare surrounding App.net’s launch, the platform has never quite lived up to its initial stand of providing an alternative to Twitter. There were two design considerations that were fundamentally flawed in this case:

1) Applying Friction to both producer and consumer roles. The core value of Twitter is the ability to build a following. By restricting who could access App.net, the platform limited its ability to deliver that value to producers.

2) More importantly, the source of Friction did not guarantee any form  of quality, trust or signal. Friction was created by charging an access fee. That didn’t help make interactions on the platform better in any way. If any thing, it just came in the way of these interactions. App.net realized it wasn’t getting anywhere and subsequently brought down the access fee, through a series of revisions, by 90%.

High Friction-Low Traction: App.net

Low Friction-High Traction: Twitter 

In summary, the following is a non-exhaustive list of design questions to consider while introducing Friction onto a platform.

A. Do you add Friction to one side or both sides?

B. What criteria are used to create Friction? Does it improve quality and add value?

C. Does Friction lead to higher likelihood of interactions?

D. Is the interaction high-value or high-risk? In other words, how important is trust, signal or quality as a source of value?

Tweetable Takeaways

Friction in design is helpful if it facilitates the interaction instead of coming in the way of it. Tweet

Two competing platforms can co-exist by varying the levels of friction in their design. Tweet

If you’re restricting access, it better provide additional value. Think SitterCity, not App.net. Tweet

Every element of platform design should be aimed at incentivizing interactions. Tweet

This article was originally published on Sangeet Paul Choudary’s personal blog Platform Thinking – A blog about building early stage ventures from an idea to a business, and mitigating execution risk.

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Owning the Transaction – Why Marketplaces Need to Think Like SaaS Businesses

Marketplaces are difficult businesses to get off the ground. A marketplace without buyers cannot attract sellers and vice versa. In fact, the infamy of this proverbial chicken and egg problem detracts entrepreneurs from the challenges that a marketplace presents after it has successfully gained adoption and is successfully matching buyers with sellers. After all, marketplaces for products, like Ebay and Etsy seem to have it all working for them once they gain adoption.

Why the EBay of Remote Services Behaves Differently

Services marketplaces, however, present a unique challenge. Most services marketplaces cannot facilitate a transaction before the buyer and seller agree on the terms of the service. Also, actual exchange of money often follows the delivery of the service and the delivery of the service requires the buyer and seller to directly interact with each other. Connecting buyers and sellers directly before facilitating the transaction cut weakens a marketplace’s ability to capture value. The party that is charged is naturally motivated to abandon the platform and conduct the transaction off-platform.

Marketplaces that fail to capture the transaction often resort to a lead generation, paid placement or subscription-based revenue model. The classifieds model has traditionally worked on paid placement. Dating websites and B2B marketplaces work on a subscription-based model while several financial comparison engines work on a lead generation model. However, lead generation models are attractive only at very high levels of activity and subscription-based revenue models make the chicken and egg problem worse than it already is. If your monetization model involves extracting a cut from the buyer-seller transaction, you need to figure out a way to own the transaction.

Solving the buyer Decision-Making Problem

Services marketplaces like Fiverr, Groupon and Airbnb try to solve this problem by preventing the users from directly connecting before the actual transaction. These marketplaces typically try to provide all the information that a buyer needs to make a transaction decision. Groupon features services from sellers that are largely standardized. While less standardized, Airbnb and Fiverr try to provide enough information for the buyers to make a decision without having to contact the seller.

Additionally, some marketplaces charge the buyer ahead of the transaction and remit money to the service provider after the provision of services, thus providing some insurance to the buyer, encouraging her to transact.

The Two-Pronged Challenge of Professional Services Marketplaces

Unfortunately, the above strategies fail with professional services marketplaces for two reasons.

First, it is much easier to take the transaction off-platform in the case of marketplaces connecting professionals. Freelancer marketplaces like Elance or expert marketplaces like Clarity are particularly prone to off-platform transactions for two reasons:

a) Clients need to know information about service providers before making a transaction decision

b) Once the end users know each other, they can potentially connect directly on LinkedIn or other networks, thus avoiding the platform cut

Second, professional services marketplaces require discussions, exchanges and workflow management during the provision of services before the actual charge can be levied. As a result, charging the buyer ahead of the transaction is all the more complicated.

So how do professional services marketplaces own and retain the transaction?

To own the transaction, professional services marketplaces need to think like SAAS businesses!

This may sound counter-intuitive. After all, a marketplace’s goal is to connect the two sides, complete the transaction and get out of the way, isn’t it?

Clarity’s early success illustrates that a marketplace’s role may be a lot more than just connecting buyers to sellers. Clarity connects advice seekers with experts. Traditionally, such marketplaces would connect the two sides, charge a lead generation fee and allow them to transact off-platform. Clarity provides additional call management and invoicing capabilities that serve to capture the transaction on the platform. Since the call management software manages per-minute billing, advice seekers have the option to opt out of a call that isn’t proving too useful. For the experts, the integrated payments and invoicing provides additional value. There is enough value for both sides to prevent them from leaving the platform to avoid the cut.

Clarity is one of many examples of platforms which are using workflow management solutions to capture the transaction. Services marketplaces like Elance focus on providing work-tracking and billing solutions that provide value to both sides and capture the transaction on-platform.

When marketplaces behave like SAAS businesses, the following design principles are commonly observed:

1. The SAAS workflow tools should create additional value for both sides, not just for one. This prevents either side from abandoning the platform for the transaction.

2. The SAAS tools should remove frictions in the interaction.

3. The interaction management tools should feedback into some form of on-platform reputation. Reputation is an added source of value that ensures stickiness to the platform. Clarity calls are followed by a request for rating the other side. Over time, the rating increases discoverability of an expert on the platform and acts as social proof for further callers.

The Added Benefit of Engagement and Stickiness

Workflow and interaction management tools also help make the platform more sticky. The traditional marketplace model has a very transactional use case. There is no need for a user to return often to such a marketplace. Users turn up only when they’re looking for something specific. With workflow management tools, the post-matching interactions are also captured on the platform, which encourages users to return often and to actively use the platform.

Secondly, a marketplace is only as good as the liquidity of available suppliers. As a result, there is no real need for a buyer to stick to a particular marketplace, transaction after transaction, especially if two or more competing marketplaces have similar liquidity and choice. Workflow management solutions help create stickiness because the requirement of on boarding on and learning new workflow management tools acts as a greater barrier to switch and can potentially keep users loyal to a particular marketplace.

The SaaS-First Marketplace

In recent times, we have been seeing the model flipped. Businesses are now building SAAS workflow solutions first to get entrenched among the demand side and then opening out the marketplace, to get suppliers in. An invoicing service spreads out to become a B2B order management platform. A payroll software provider expands to append a marketplace that can bring in freelancers which are then managed using the same payroll software. This also solves the chicken and egg problem by staging the launch of the marketplace.

Summary

In general, if you run a marketplace that requires services to be exchanged remotely, provisioning workflow management solutions to facilitate this exchange is a great way to own the transaction and create greater engagement and stickiness for users.

Tweetable Takeaways

Owning the transaction is the key success factor for a marketplace. Tweet

SAAS tools for workflow management help retain the transaction on a marketplace. Tweet

The new durable marketplace model: Start with a SAAS business, open up one side to create a marketplace. Tweet

This article was first featured on Sangeet’s blog, Platform Thinking (http://platformed.info). Platform Thinking has been ranked among the top blogs for startups, globally, by the Harvard Business School Centre for Entrepreneurship

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Announcing the first list of #PNCamp attendees

Last evening was a really exciting one for Team #PNCamp. We’ve been cracking some goals we set for ourselves while building this bootcamp from scratch, and lofty as they were, the team has been reaching milestone after milestone. The incentive of putting together an event to help the ecosystem we are part of, has pushed us all towards something special, and we hope you’ll see that passion come through on December 4 and 5.

Amidst a flurry of mails yesterday then, we have just been able to take some time off to publish the first list of confirmed attendees.

The most important thing we want to make clear is that being in the same track as your friend or someone you know doesn’t mean that you are going to be attending the camp together or that you can sit together and so on. The boot camp format is not going to work that way.

How will it work then? Well, it’ll work better.

Here’s the first set of attendees and more will get announced as soon as we’ve collated the registration details.

Cohort

Dec 4th – Customer Discovery Hacking track

 

Dec 5th  – Scale Hacking track

If your name is not in this list, there’s nothing to worry. We’re still collating all your info and will be announcing the next set of attendees soon.

We’ll be seeing you in Pune!

If you haven’t registered/applied yet (there’s still time — in fact if you register before 22nd November, we have something special for you 🙂

 

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Scale Hacking at #PNCamp: What To Expect on Day 2 (Dec 5)

It’s a conference….it’s a summit….it’s a camp! Being a startup ourselves, we constantly listen to  our customers (who are startups as well!) and try and come up with initiatives that solve their problems and address their pain points.

In that regard, the genesis and the program design of the ProductNation Camp has come from what we’ve been hearing from you – the Indian product startup community. Sandeep has very nicely elucidated the need for a Product Bootcamp for Product entrepreneurs and laid out the broad agenda of the #PNCamp.

#PNCamp is expected to be a very intense, highly curated and focused two-day event with two tracks – Discovery Hacking (on Dec 4) and Scale Hacking (on Dec 5). For a product entrepreneur, getting the first set of customers is mighty important from multiple perspectives – validating the need for the product in the market, generating the first rupees (or dollars!) in revenue  and grow the startup from a buzz in the head to a live organism. While 2013 is expected to end with a Dhoom for Bollywood fans, it’s the same for product entrepreneurs attending #PNCamp. Rather than an ending, we hope it’ll be a new beginning for them to grow their startups to greater heights in the coming year. One of the producers of the product startup community’s Dhoom, Sai unveiled the first look of #PNCamp and gave us a glimpse of what’s in store for attendees of the Discovery Hacking track on Day 1.

It is said that well begun is half done. Let’s stay the tough part, that of beginning well has been taken care of and you are now staring at the tougher part – of growing your startup across multiple dimensions. That is when the startup is in the happy-confused state and there are a lot of questions on your mind.  Sales cures most ills, but how do you sell? This will be the primary thrust of the morning sessions which is mandatory. Here, we will have separate tracks for those who are selling to a global audience and those who are selling domestically. The challenges, hiring, operations, etc are completely different. In the afternoon, we have various exciting sessions on how to understand and communicate with customers and how to pick the right product direction when you have scarce resources to spread amongst several promising ones. Choice in an uncertain world is not easy and while we promise no silver bullets for your problems, we do promise to ignite enough fire in the belly (and in the heads!) for you to go back and navigate your way into scaling your startup. We also have specific “Oh, Oh, How do I do that?” sessions on specific topisc you’ve always wanted to know..

So specifically, what do we have to offer to you on the Scale Hacking Day:

We will have around 75 chosen participants for the Scale Hacking Day divided into cohorts of 15-20 people each. There are mandatory sessions which all participants will attend and then the cohorts will attend the optional sessions depending on the stage of the company and their interest.

The Mandatory Sessions

“Great Indian Street Fight or Selling In India”

No wonder most of the selling in India happens through ‘feet on street’. And when you’re out there on the streets, it’s always a fight. Fight against time to sign-up customers, fight against a thousand other things to get the customers’ attention, fight for receiving payments on time and just fight for survival!

You have probably got your first set of customers, but you want to scale now. What are the different ways to do that? Does the Channel Partner route work and what are the pros and cons of taking that approach? How do you reach out to your next set of potential customers in an effective manner? Should you now start considering mainstream media for advertising or scale up your digital marketing efforts? More importantly, how do you plan for scale and put together the right team to execute your plans? How to hire the right people and fire the ones that don’t work out well?

Dhiraj Kacker, who has built Cavera into the leading destination for customized printed merchandize and an e-commerce solutions provider for photographers, will facilitate this session. Dhiraj along with Canvera’s Co-Founder Peeyush was recognized as amongst the top-10 Most Influential People in Photography in India by Asian Photography magazine. So he surely knows what clicks with his customers!

“Dancing with Elephant/Winging in the new flat world or Selling to Global Customers”

If IT services companies made the world flat, Saas product companies have made it even flatter!

While Zoho remains the pioneer, we have seen many SaaS companies FreshDesk, WebEngage, Wingify, Capillary Technologies, ChargeBee among others whose products are proudly Indian and that are selling to customers from across the globe. What does it take to build a global SaaS company out of India? More importantly, what does it take to sell to customers you haven’t met or even spoken to? How do you price your product so that customers from across geographies can buy it? How do you take care of the differences in the customers expectations, time zones, languages, even customs and culture across different regions? After all, every product has a personality. What about providing support to global customers?

Samir Palnitkar (ShopSocially, AirTight Networks) & Girish Mathrubootham (FreshDesk, Zoho) will facilitate this session. You wouldn’t want to miss this session unless you want to see your dollar dreams go sour!

The Optional Sessions

“Customers Buy Features, Not Benefits or How To Think Customer First?”

Here’s a quick question – which is the Indian brand that has grown the fastest in recent times and its identity (hint, hint!) transcends all barriers of language, region and religion? What’s more, it is very much an Indian tech startup! Yes, you guessed it right. It is Aadhar. Meet Shankar Maruwada, who gave the Aadhar its brand name and developed its identity and made it into the household brand it is today. Get to know how to place yourself inside the customers’ heads, try and understand what factors play in their decision-making and how you can approach your customers better by anticipating what’s possibly on their minds.

If you want to get a sense of what’s in store for you, watch this video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTNVTaPXfqI#t=58

Well, you wouldn’t want to be that fish which can’t understand how people live without water!

“How to get featured in TechCrunch, spending $0”

It’s true that media coverage alone isn’t the true barometer of success of a startup. But hey, when has positive media attention, especially from a top global publication like TechCrunch hurt any startup? That is of course, assuming that the product is a good one!

For a lot of product entrepreneurs, getting featured on TechCrunch is a dream and considered as a good means to be visible in front of a lot of people – customers, investors, partners among others. So what does it take to get featured in TechCrunch? Considering they’d be getting hundreds of requests each day, do the writers and editors there even read such emails? Do you need to hire a high-profile PR agency and spend a lot of money?  Or should you just build something meaningful and the coverage will happen by itself?

Valorie Wagoner, Founder of ZipDial, has done that and been there (on TechCrunch). ZipDial is one of the fastest growing global startups emerging from India and Valerie will share her experiences of getting covered in global tech blogs and tell you how your startup can also get featured with no money spent!

“Positioning for Getting Acquired”

So you think acquisition only when you have reached a certain level and scale of business? Well, that’s what a lot of entrepreneurs in Bangalore thought before they attended this round table. How do you know if the time is ripe for your company getting acquired? How do you choose between multiple suitors you may have? What are some of the key things one should keep in mind so that all the stakeholders have a favourable outcome? While an acquisition is a regular business transaction in the US, do we Indians get (needlessly?) emotional about it?

Jay Pullur, Founder and CEO of Pramati Technologies and Sanat Rao, Director, Corporate Business Development (Emerging Markets) at Intel will facilitate this session. iSPIRT has a very active M&A initiative with Jay and Sanat actively leading the M&A Connect. You’d surely not want to miss this opportunity to understand how you can set yourself up for a nice acquisition.

“The Forum or Where You Can Bring Out Your Worst Fears!”

Every CEO needs somewhere to turn for the insight and perspective only trusted peers can provide. When such peers meet together in a setting where there is an atmosphere of confidentiality, respect and trust, it can become a supreme sounding board. We will call such a setting a “Forum”. Such a forum can become most valued asset for the members, because the maxim holds true: it can be lonely at the top, but it doesn’t have to be.

At #PNCamp, we want to experiment, for the first time, with building such a Forum by forming a small group of peers who meet regularly to exchange ideas, thoughts and experiences on the issues that matter most to them. During the first meeting at the PNCamp, this group will be taught effective forum techniques, a set of protocols and a shared language that creates immediate and meaningful connections among members.

We expect that once created, the Forum group will periodically meet either in person or online with the following agenda:

1- Update each other by looking back since the last meeting and looking forward

2- Identify, discuss and park business issues that are typically Important but not Urgent

3- Make presentations around these issues and get non-judgmental feedback from the fellow members

I’ll end this post with a quote from the very inspirational movie, The Shawshank Redemption.

Dear Red, If you’re reading this, you’ve gotten out. And if you’ve come this far, maybe you’re willing to come a little further. You remember the name of the town, don’t you?

Of course, you remember the name of the town. It’s Pune and we look forward to see you in Pune on Dec 4 and Dec 5 for #PNCamp.

PS. After all this if you haven’t still applied for #PNCamp yet, we’re afraid you may be a little late. Apply Now here!