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#DesignThinking: Desirable. Feasible. Viable

We all know quite well the value of Design to business, and Design Thinking to problem solving. But what remains a bit fuzzy for many start-ups, organizations & individuals is the gap between thinking and doing or making it happen.

In this time of volatility and complexity, the role of design to drive meaningful innovation and change is growing and while there are multitude of factors that need to be taken into consideration for a product design that is desirable, feasible & viable the design thinking process can help overcome these product characteristics. 

Yes, great design starts with design thinking! Reminds me of David Kelly from IDEO who puts this together as empathy or being empathetic. In other words focusing on what users value the most and building on top of the ideas they share with every incremental value we deliver to make designs better.

In an effort to bring all designers, engineers, product managers & entrepreneurs together via an informal coalition of like minded design thinkers community to help promote the how-to’s of design thinking, MakeMyTrip in co-ordination with #PNMeetup hosted a day long #DesignThinking event in its premises inviting them to discover the stories, solutions and tools that design thinkers are putting to work, from start ups to multinationals helping them find inspiration and learn how real world solutions are provided using innovation & technology to work to solve complex global challenges. 

This event was a first step in NCR UX community with series in pipeline with start of an exciting thought-leadership plank in the UX ecosystem in the country towards creating a platform to nurture design thinking & promoting design thinker’s community fostering an ecosystem that promotes delivering great experiential online products. Industry experts from LinkedIn, Mettl & Anagram Research supported the event with inspirational talks on subject and sharing how they practice the same in their respective job functions, startup’s & organizations thereby embracing the process in their day-to-day routine while driving the product vision at their setup. The experts also covered upon bootstrap strategies for startups who cannot afford the UX agencies or a big design team and face design challenges day in day out during their product design journey. Some even illustrated the design thinking approach to problem solving of product features design and helped them uncover the latent needs, behaviors, and desires for their users. 

Altogether,  #Design thinking event saw noteworthy achievement with 40+ design thinkers joining us from NCR and could leverage the platform listening some inspirational talks from speakers and meeting few like minded folks around. Had participant mix from passionate startup entrepreneurs to designers & dev engineers. Audience was glued to program embracing the talks & interactive workshop from functional experts in domain. 

Check out what happened at the First #DesignThinking Workshop on http://t.co/g0DDFbP7kS  

Guest Post by Dushyanth Arora, Head, User Experience & Design MakeMyTrip

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Pixel Jobs – Product review of a job portal by designers for designers

Pixel Jobs Image

Pixel Jobs, designed by the talented folks at Sparklin, is a refreshing look at the boring world of job portals. The problem to solve was simply, “How to get a job post seen by the best creative talent?” An old fashion job-board served as a physical metaphor to yield a clean, simple and inviting job portal cheekily named – Pixel Jobs. It has nifty filters to make searching easy and a straightforward form that allows you post a job in a few minutes.

Pixeljobs Screenshot

 

 

On April 3rd, Avinash and I had freewheeling chat with the young founders of Team Sparklin – Gurpreet Bedi and Himanshu Khanna – on the hows and whys behind the product. 

How did it all began? Are you trying to become Cleartrip for the job space?

“Pixel Jobs really started based on internal need of hiring the best designers. Sparklin started a Facebook group last year to reach out to the designers through personal networks and within a short time close to 1200 people had signed up. That clearly indicated a need for a specialized job site for designers. There are already sites for coders, so why not for designers. This is purely a niche product,” on the why.

“There was a concern on excessive moderating to ensure the postings to be creatively-relevant and accurate. I had to overly moderate the Facebook group for the first couple of months. But then everything kind of fell in line. The relevancy and quality of postings sort of improved on their own. Very little moderation was required. That’s when an open job forum became a viable next step. We still moderate but only for completeness.”

So what is the initial marketing strategy?

“We have deliberately taken a slow approach towards marketing this portal. First, we want to ensure that the platform is robust enough to handle large volumes. Second, by only allowing a selected well-known companies in the creative domain to post (for now) will increase the quality and credibility enough to not warrant a serious marketing push,” elaborating on the initial word of mouth approach.

How is the product going to evolve over next few months? Semantic search, LinkedIn connect, company-based hosting, additional views, etc. are some gaps.

“This is only a version 0. We are improving the product on a daily basis. All these features and many more are in the pipeline and you will see a gradual improvement over next few months. For instance we are working on an Android app to launched soon and targeting companies to use Pixel Jobs to host jobs on their sites. They can just use our embed our code with their branding on their site. There is a big need for this. For example, some of our clients already have a job board on their site but prefer to here.”

Even though the initial version is impressive, there are some user experience improvements to consider. For instance, extending the card metaphor by not going to the next page for a more fluid interaction (too many new windows), introducing category tags as alternate searching mechanism (search only for graphic designers), making search more central to the experience, introduce shared vocabulary (minimal difference between UX Designer and UI Designer), personalizing content based on previous searches and making it easy to follow-up on interesting jobs.

“We agree with all these points. Most of these are being worked on currently. For example, in the Android app you can favourite your job and city. Only those jobs will then be shown by default. These will help personalize your experience. Easier to do this on Android for now and eventually we will introduce them on the web as well.”

How do you plan to distinguish the experience between job seekers and posters?

“This will be a very important strategy once we build some traction and gain volume. For now the obvious focus is job seekers which will help drive better companies to the portal.”

Why is there a disconnect between brand Pixel Jobs and the URL (jobs.pixelonomics.com)? This could split the brand between Pixel Jobs and Pixelonomics. Better to build a single brand for consistent messaging.

Without elaborating on this too much, “We will merge these very shortly under a new brand name in the next release. We could also launch series of boards across other verticals as well – mobile developers, etc. under the same brand.”

It will be hard for the creatives to search on cluttered and difficult to use popular job sites from now on. 

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Which feature to prioritize first ? – Wrong Question

When building a product it is very easy to make a list of features to build. One could brainstorm to create an initial list, copy features from a similar product or ask others (including potential users or customers ) via a feature wish list.

However which feature to prioritize and what to build first?  is one of the most burning question for  startup founders and early employees.

There will always be more features to build and add than there is the capacity or bandwidth to build.The additional challenge is even after building it is not clear if it was the right decision.

These decisions typically happen based on what one thinks is cool to build or someone has asked to build first.  For lack of a better framework to use to decide that is how things move forward but time runs out, product builder stand clueless what should have gone in the first place.

LeanStartup principles offer a framework for thinking about this. BUILD gets complemented by MEASURE & LEARN and which further loops.

At the beginning of an idea building an MVP is good step forward (which as we previously is tool for learning & may not be any feature of the product) to learn a little bit more.

With learning from MVP additional features can be decided upon. List each feature in terms in terms of the learning that they should yield along with a defined metric.

At various stage of a startup different metrics matter and come into play. For instance in the very beginning along with the MVP – validation of problem & solution is the important metric. Once that is established metrics relevant user acquisition, retention, referrals become important.

The first step to decide before periodization is to decide the metric for startup to focus on. Once the metric identified picking the feature become easy.

For instance for a product the problem/validation is established the next important stage is to acquire users really fast then to prioritize a feature ask the question “Does feature X allow to acquire users more by Y%”. Pick the feature first that will have the higher score for this. If development time comparison for the feature is steep then factor it in the trade-off.

In essence the question “Which features to prioritize to first” is to be really framed as “Which learning to prioritize first ?”

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A product’s success goes beyond its features

It is an irony of sorts: the more things get real, the more they need to go virtual; and the more virtual they get, the more there is a need to balance the two with Augmented Reality. That is the case with events. As events – trade fairs, conferences, seminars, exhibitions – become bigger and span multiple dates, multiple venues, have multiple tracks and hundreds of exhibitors and thousands of participants, there is no way to keep pace with the event. So, what do you do? You get your event on a platform like Event2Mobile that lets you distribute event details like agenda, attendees, exhibitors, location etc with ease and without the problems of cost, time and distribution associated with print. And, of course, putting it on a mobile ensures that the event goes wherever the stakeholder goes.

Event2Mobile, of course, is selling the service on the strength of interactivity, deeper engagement with attendees, experiential capabilities, ability to update the event on the fly (and let attendees know about it instantly), networking capability, integration with weather updates and Google maps, live chats and so on. Not that it takes much intelligence to guess what a mobile app for events should be doing – but the thing about Event2Mobile is that it does all of what you guessed plus some more (there is a free version of the service, but it works only on the iPhone).

The intriguing part is the thinking that the platform has put in place. For example, delegates have a QR code that can be scanned and this makes it easy and accurate to send mailers or additional information to the delegate without having to exchange cards and keeping track of what needs to be mailed. The service also provides event analytics – if it can do this in real time, it can help event organizers deal with upcoming problems to ensure a better experience (like incentivizing attendees to go to Restaurant B on the venue when Restaurant A appears to be filling up).

The challenge with such a service is that it can be mimicked overnight. What took the original development team months to think through and get right can be copied in a few hours by a competitor. There are no real barriers to the business. Over a period of time a service like Event2Mobile will survive on competitive pricing. This means two things: first, it must race to bring in customers to recover development cost before competition begins to eat into the market; second, it must bundle itself as a component of enterprise grade Trade Promotion Organization (TPO) and Trade Promotion Management (TPM) solutions.

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5 tips to making a killer product video

Your product has something worthy – its just that no one reads now. So how do you make your audience appreciate the worthiness of your product. They’re hearing you – but are they listening to you? 

Videos use 2 out of our 5 senses and if designed right – a video can help you can slip the pill. A pill that will start a conversation. And a conversation is the start to any sale.

For hygiene – videos are of many types. A video can entertain (Avatar the movie), It can teach (NGC the channel) and it can sell (explainer videos). I’m talking about the last on the list – quick explainer videos that showcase a USP of your product. 

Here are my top 5 tips to making your product video stand out:

1. Number of propositions

Sure your product has half a dozen value propositions. But your audience can only remember a few of them. In a minute – try to restrict the propositions to 1 or 2 at the most. 

Its better you say 1 thing two times than 2 things once.

This is a proposition heavy video. (you’ll notice how little propositions you’ll remember after you’ve seen it) 

2. Number of seconds 

Brevity plays a big role in any content. Not at the cost of the propositions though – but exceeding 90 seconds can cause slow death. 

See this 2:28 min video we did for a tech startup and then compare it to the 68 second one for another product – you’ll appreciate the difference. 

3. Speed/Velocity 

The pace of the video is perhaps the trickiest to set. If the speed is too fast – ideas will zip by. If its too slow – your audience will lose attention. Damn these fickle minded audience I tell you ! 

The trick is to build the speed based on the propositions. At govideotoday, we set the pace based on how many UIs are to be shown, or how many propositions need to be delivered. We also take into consideration the pace of the narrator (voice over) and the genre of the background score. 

This is a fast video. The pace limits the understanding of the product. 

4. Audio 

Most forget that Audio Visual – is 50% Audio ! As a musician and a self-taught audio engineer, I can tell you that if you get the audio wrong – all hell will break loose. 

The trick to judge any audio is to close your eyes. Silly I know – but by closing your eyes, you’ll prevent distraction and you’ll focus on the tonal quality of the voice over, the beat in the music, the gain levels, and how the music contours the voice. 

I know this may not be precise but audio engineering is not a science yet and most audio engineers get paid (or used to) because they just had good ears. Its pretty much like a painting on canvas. After a few years of doing it – your eyes can detect the goods and the bads. 

In my opinion, this video has a good audio master. (notice the beat on the score)

5. Reality – use case 

This is the BEST way to make your video rock. Real use case of where your software made a hit with the customer. Call it a case study or a client showcase – the use case is real, therefore its something your target audience can relate to, and therefore its got trust written all over it. 

When people trust you – they’ll talk to you. What did I say about conversations earlier – remember? 

This is a video that you’ll so easily relate to.

If you’re a pastry fan like me – you’ll know that the light and crispy pastry always wins over the oily and soggy. That’s not a personal choice – that’s how we ALL like it. Any marketing content is subject to the same prejudices. 

Keep it short. Simple. and Humorous. Humor is the best way to break any resistance. 

What have been your favorite product videos? 

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Designing Great Products: A Startup CEO’s perspective

I had the opportunity to attend iSpirit Foundation’s #PNMeetup: Design great products through experiments – Product Leadership Workshop on 20th April 2013 at TLabs in Noida. 

Avi from iSPIRT put together a delightful, half-day session that brought together a smattering of product people from Delhi-NCR region.  In addition to product managers, CEOs, and senior executives from a wide range of Delhi startups, the icing on the cake was the presence of a hard-hitting product team from Intuit that had travelled all the way from Bangalore to share their experiences with the assembled audience. The Intuit Team included Deepa Bachu (Director, Emerging Market Innovation at Intuit), Samarjit Ghosh, Lalitha Ramani, Vivek Vijayan & ThiyagaRajan ) 

The Intuit posse had experiences working on a variety of products from the uber-popular Turbo Tax to the socially relevant Fasal and an engaging discussion on their diverse experiences exposed the audience to a wide range of challenges that the Intuit teams faced and the teams’ approach to overcome these challenges.  Many an aspiring entrepreneur has been flummoxed with multiple questions vis-à-vis product development, not limited to prioritizing features, costs, and release cycles and the Intuit team cleared a lot of misconceptions around commonly accepted best-process with their highly structured product management approach.  Intuit’s product management model is largely based around the hypotheses driven approach that, in addition to software development, is the bedrock for business decision-making from optimizing scientific discoveries to underpinning most strategy consulting engagements.  We were walked through a detailed explanation of the Intuit way and were then led to put our newfound knowledge to task with an actual exercise on the streets.

The hour spent on the streets by 25 eager entrepreneurs, braving the Noida summer-heat led to the thread baring of multiple, seemingly unambiguous truths about how we thought about product research, design, and development.  The interesting aspect of the exercise was that that like many frameworks, the Intuit approach brought out its share of naysayers and skeptics among the assembled audience but the healthy discussion that followed enabled multiple perspectives to heard and discussed. 

 

As a startup-CEO at Studycopter, managing the product development process is an integral part of what I do, day in and day out.  Sharing of notes and perspectives with fellow CEOs and product managers was a unique opportunity for me to test my assumptions and build a new way of looking at problems and coming up with solutions. 

I can write with a reasonable degree of certainty that all participants would share my thoughts about the utility of the aforementioned session and moving forward, I look forward to the Studycopter team and I participating in multiple such meetups to build the intellectual rigor that would be critical in delivering breakthrough product experiences for our customers.

Guest Post by Adi Jain, Founder and Chief Awesomeness Officer at Studycopter, a mobile + online learning platform to enable students to get their best possible scores in competitive exams such as the GMAT and GRE.  

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Marketplace Metrics: The Three Success Factors

Marketplaces are difficult businesses to run. Like all multi-sided platform businesses, they suffer from the classic chicken and egg problem: the technology has no value unless buyers and sellers are present and you can’t get the buyers on board unless you have sellers and you can’t bring in sellers without having buyers. Hence, building a marketplace is a lot like building two separate companies simultaneously, each dependent on the other.

There are three factors that determine success for a marketplace business:

LIQUIDITY OR CRITICAL MASS

The lifeline of a marketplace (and any platform business for that matter) is liquidity. Liquidity is a state where there are a minimum number of producers and consumers on the marketplace and there is a high expectation of transactions taking place. This is similar to the critical mass of users that is needed on a social network for users to find value in the network. Critical mass is a state where there is enough volume of supply and demand, for transactions to start sparking.

The first and most important metric to watch out for is the percentage of listings that lead to transactions within a certain time period. This serves as a proxy for the efficiency of the marketplace. Merely increasing the number of buyer and seller sign-ups doesn’t serve a purpose unless this metric starts rising. The time period would depend on the category. AirBnB listings would find transactions sooner than listings on a buy-and-sell  real estate marketplace. This could also depend on ticket sizes within the same category. Fiverr and oDesk are both services marketplaces but the turnover on Fiverr is most likely higher, owing to the much smaller ticket sizes.

To get to liquidity, the marketplace also needs to solve the chicken and egg problem and get both buyers and sellers on board. Marketplaces leverage a variety of tactics for circumventing this problem including building single user utility, stealing traction and piggybacking other platforms.

MATCHING: CURATION OF PRODUCTS/SERVICE

Users visit a marketplace with a highly transactional intent and want to find what they’re looking for at the earliest. In this aspect, transaction businesses are remarkably different from engagement businesses. A user visiting AirBnB or Yelp has a specific intent in mind. Hence, the quality of the search algorithm and the intuitiveness of the navigation are critical to delivering value. In contrast, a user visiting Pinterest often wants to spend some time and consume content on the platform. Hence, the infinite scroll!

The efficiency of discovery and matching is critical to a marketplace’s success. Percentage of searches that lead to listing profile visits within the first page of results is one such metric. When listings are served instead, as a feed, the clickthrough per session can serve as a proxy as well. The best metric to track matching efficiency varies with the business model of the marketplace as well as the category.

TRUST: CURATION OF PARTICIPANTS

Building trust is central to marketplaces where transactions carry risk. AirBnB is an example of a player in a high-risk category, that succeeded because of its ability to curate its participants. AirBnB allows hosts and travelers to review each other and has one of the highest review rates among marketplaces. It also takes additional measures to build trust, including having photographers certify a host’s listing.

This was one of the factors that helped AirBnB challenge CraigsListbecause CraigsList never built a strong curation system for participants.

Focus on the trust metric is very important to move from appealing to an early adopter audience to appealing to a mainstream audience. While early adopters use new marketplaces because of the novelty, opening up to a larger market requires the trust and reputation management systems to be alive and kicking.

WHAT’S NOT AS IMPORTANT:

User interface and design are less important with transactional businesses as compared to engagement businesses.

On a marketplace, the ability to search and transact/interact should be as intuitive as possible. Beyond that, the look-and-feel and design are purely hygiene factors. Unlike social networks, marketplaces are transactional and users typically don’t have long visit lengths engaging with the product. Hence, UI is not as important a criterion as the other three mentioned above.

In summary, if you’re building a marketplace:

1. Focus on liquidity, not just user growth

2. At critical mass and beyond, closely track matching efficiency

3. When moving from an early adopter to a mainstream audience, ensure that the trust systems are in place and functioning well.

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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Where does India Stand on Innovation?

How does India stack up on innovation compared to other countries? Are we getting more innovative over time? These are questions I have been grappling with since I started studying innovation more than two decades ago.

In recent times, the growing importance of innovation to economic growth and prosperity has induced many efforts to measure innovation at the national level. In my book From Jugaad to Innovation: The Challenge for India (Utpreraka Foundation, 2010) [FJ2SI], I cited studies like the UNCTAD Innovation Capability Index, Georgia Tech’s High Tech Indicators and the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Innovation Study to show that India is a laggard as far as innovation performance is concerned.

As I noted in FJ2SI, each of these studies emphasized a different set of variables. The UNCTAD approach was based on human capabilities, and therefore focused on human development indicators. The Georgia Tech approach used high tech exports as a proxy for innovation sophistication. And the EIU used patents as its primary measure.

A few years ago, INSEAD and the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) launched a joint effort to develop a more comprehensive innovation index. In a short time, this index has gained credibility with policy-makers. The latest report of this Global Innovation Index (GII) came out last June.

India’s Position

India ranked in the middle of GII 2012 with a rank of 64 out of 141 countries. India’s rank remained virtually unchanged from 2011 to 2012. Apart from the GII itself, the GII methodology involves the computation of three other indices – an innovation output index, an innovation input index, and an innovation efficiency index. India was ranked 40, 96, and 2 respectively on these three measures in 2012.

The innovation input index rests on five pillars: institutions, human capital and research, infrastructure, market sophistication, and business sophistication. The innovation output index consists of knowledge and technology outputs and creative outputs. The innovation efficiency index is based on the ratio of innovation output to innovation input.

To get a clearer sense of where India stands, it is useful to compare India with China, as I did in FJ2SI. China does much better on the GII with a 2012 rank of 34. It was ranked 19, 55 and 1 respectively on innovation output, input, and efficiency.

China outclassed India on 3 of the 5 input pillars – human capital & research, infrastructure, and business sophistication – with a rank difference of 40-50 places. I am not surprised by the huge gap on the first two, but I am certainly intrigued by the huge difference in business sophistication (I’ll come back to this shortly). China was marginally ahead of India on the other two input parameters – institutions and market sophistication.

On the output side, China ranked 5 globally on knowledge and technology outputs while India came in at #47. The only measure on which India did better than China was on the output measure of creative outputs.

Digging Deeper

Looking at the raw scores that underlie the ranks, I found a few interesting contrasts:

• China does much better than India on institutional factors like ease of resolving insolvency and ease of paying taxes;
• The biggest differences between India and China are on the education-related indices of reading skills (a real shocker – India scores 4.41 against 100 for China; but the ASER reports have been showing this for years), and pupil-teacher ratio;
• China’s score on Gross expenditure on R&D is twice that of India;
• China’s score on ISO 14001 environmental certificates is about 7 times that of India (I need to dig into the significance of this number, but I guess the trend is clear enough);
• China’s higher score on business sophistication comes from the proportion of firms offering formal training to their employees (16% for India vs. 85% for China), R&D performed by businesses (34% for India vs. 72% for China), and high-tech imports (this is, I suppose, more reflective of China’s position in high technology manufacturing vis-à-vis India);

India’s bright spots (vis-à-vis China) are:

• Press freedom (not a surprise!);
• Efficiency of energy use;
• Ease of getting credit, and ease of protecting investors;
• Services exports (again, hardly a surprise)

What Needs to be done

The GII underlines something we already know – India’s biggest failure as an independent nation is in the arena of literacy and basic education. No other country with which we compare ourselves has such a poor record on this basic pre-requisite of a modern country. While government initiatives like the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan and the Right to Education Act have belatedly acknowledged this failure, I don’t see a sense of urgency in addressing this problem. This has serious implications not only for innovation but for the very existence and progress of India itself.

While we often rationalize Indian firms not embracing an R&D culture by arguing that perhaps it’s not a business imperative, the fact that Indian firms are laggards on environmental certification as well as training suggests that we are simply not investing enough in the long term future of our enterprises. This is a sobering thought as we contemplate the future of Indian business and the Indian economy, and should be an important subject for reflection by India’s leading industry associations.

Some Concluding Remarks on Innovation Indices

One problem with innovation indices such as the GII is apparent from the above observations: they are constructed on the base of very generic parameters. The variables that are used to measure the GII (like the ease of setting up a business or the ease of paying taxes) seem no different from those used to measure competitiveness or the business environment. At the same time, the GII omits relevant measures such as the level of protection for intellectual property in a particular country.

In an effort to use “objective measures,” these indices appear to be measuring phenomena that are somewhat removed from innovation per se. Instead, the simple OECD model that I adapted for use in FJ2SI seems much more relevant to measuring the environment for innovation, and the resultant innovation output.

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Experiencing the product, or productizing the experience?

About 6 months back, I saw a print advertisement from a well-known job portal (I will call it SiteZ): “Free webinar and live chat with well-known Mr. X”. When I visited their site, they helpfully informed me that I need to be a registered user of their site (which meant I had to be someone looking for a job, which I was not), but it would take only 30 seconds to register. I didn’t mind giving 30 sec and a few bits of personal information to attend this webinar so I proceeded with registration. It took me about 2-3 minutes before I realized that this is going to take quite some time – they wanted all kinds of details about my profile, what kind of job I was looking for, what I had been doing so far in my career, etc.; simply uploading my resume didn’t SiteZ. So I abandoned my effort and tried to find a way of deleting this account I had just created. I couldn’t find it, so I just navigated away from the site and made a mental note not to use SiteZ again since they misled me with their advertisement and were not helpful when I changed my mind about creating an account.

Little did I know that it was not the end of my experience with SiteZ. A few weeks later, I started receiving email ads/spams about properties and other stuff. Spams are nothing new, so I kept ignoring them, till a few months back when I cursorily went down the mail and saw that it (helpfully!) mentioned that I was getting this mail because I registered on SiteZ. It also offered an unsubscribe link, so I was happy. I clicked on it and was informed that I have been unsubscribed. However, that didn’t change anything; mails kept coming. I tried unsubscribing couple more times, with no result. I tried to write to the email address mentioned on their site, the mail bounced. I again searched their website for any link to delete the account, but couldn’t find any. Finally I found that even though the mail sender text says some developer’s name, it actually is sent from a @sitez.com account. So I could block this address, and have some peace of mind.

To be clear, this is not some no-name company, this is one of the top 4-5 job portals in the country. So you would expect them to think more holistically about their product offering and put more efforts in avoiding frustrations for their users, not to talk of delighting them.

In case of SiteZ, incremental tasks/thoughts like below might have gone behind the experience they finally offered to me:

  1. Product Management – We want to be like #1 job portal site, so we will build all the usual features.
  2. Engineering – Let’s not give a delete account button, it is too hard and can be depriortized since these users are anyway leaving the site.
  3. Marketing – Great idea about not giving delete button, this way our metric of # of accounts keeps going up and we can keep using their data (or get them to call us and we can upsell them)
  4. Sales/Marketing – Let’s make sure we enroll all our users into our promotions email list, and also make sure they don’t notice it when they are registering.
  5. Sales/Marketing – We need more users, so let’s run some promotions like free webinars. We will use it to get the user into registering for the site.
  6. Engineering – It is too hard to build a 30-second registration page, so let’s drop the user into the regular registration flow which takes 10 minutes.
  7. Sales – Let’s make some money with all this personal data that we collect by selling email campaigns to 3rd-party.
  8. Engineering – It is too hard to implement unsubscribe, can be deprioritized since these users are anyway leaving the campaign.
  9. Sales – Great idea engineers. This way, our mailing lists will always have lots of subscribers.

Why am I writing this?

First, it left a very bitter experience in my mouth and now I am very skeptical of any site that asks me to register; I have started reading terms and conditions of the sites that ask me to register, which is a painful process!

Second, and more importantly, I want to make the point about considering end to end experience (including support) as the product, rather than just the core feature set you want to offer to the customer. In this case, my experience with SiteZ was what made me to abandon them, not necessarily the core feature I was looking for (webinar, which I could never reach!). To be clear, SiteZ is not an isolated case, there are a large number of products out there which suffer from this problem of focusing just on the product and not on the experience (see ‘experience is the product‘). Product Managers need to exert more control (and influence) over the overall experience and not just focus on core product, otherwise they will be leaving a lot on the table. Maybe the way is to start from experience when building/changing the product, and embrace ‘experience is the product’.

What is your take on product vs. experience question?

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Promoting Design Thinking in the NCR

design thinking

In the last 2-3 years there have been well designed products coming out of the NCR startup ecosystem. Mettl, Visual Website Optimizer, Paytm, and Oogwave, especially come to mind where Design Thinking has been an integral part of the product development process, and not an after thought by giving it just a cosmetic veneer.

There is a noticeable increase in design sensibility while attending various Meetups and pitching design services to startups. However, there is still a gap in how to make it happen. In other words, how do startups and product managers cover the distance between thinking of design and making it actually happen.

With support from ProductNation, a few design professionals from Design For Use, MakeMyTrip, WoodApple, DSYN, Zomato and U2opia Mobile have formed an informal coalition to help promote the how-tos of design thinking,

Please join us for our launch session this Saturday (May 18th) at the MakeMyTrip office. There will be a talk by Mettl founder, Tonmoy Shinghal, followed up a 3-hour workshop on how to practice Design Thinking in your company by Devika Ganapathy of Anagram Research. Not to mention plenty of networking opportunities during coffee breaks and lunch. Please check out the details and register soon (only 30 participants).

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Don’t Build Something Unless Someone Is Willing To Pay For It & Asks For It Twice!

Notes from the  Product Management Roundtable In Bangalore. Having attended the first ever iSPIRT Roundtable on Product Positioning in Bangalore and closely followed the second one held in Delhi, I was eagerly looking forward to the Round table in Bangalore on Product Management by Sridhar Ranganathan. Sridhar is a senior Product Management professional having spent considerable time in product management roles in companies like Zoho, Yahoo! and InMobi.

The 12 startups that participated in the round table consisted of a healthy mix of companies across various stages wrt their Product organization – some already had a PM function set up, some were scaling fast and were looking for ways to make their first PM hire and some where the CEOs or the founders were themselves donning the hat of a Product Manager.

The session started with a round of introductions and an open discussion around various aspects of Product Management – need for Product Management, hiring of Product Managers and setting up the team, prioritization, building an MVP etc. which set the right tone for the rest of Roundtable.


Sridhar shared his experiences of being a Product Manager and a Product Management leader in his previous roles. His experiences at Zoho were particularly of a lot of interest to the participants, as Sridhar was at Zoho during the period it transitioned from a company making Network Management Systems to the Saas giant it is today. He mentioned how the founders had a strong faith in setting up a Product Management function and empowering the Product Managers to lead the product efforts. He said it was like changing gears from moving in 4 big ships to 11 speedboats – with a Product Manager navigating each speedboat (a product). One insight Sridhar shared stood out, that the founding team needs to strongly believe that there’s a need for Product Manager(s) in the company and remain fully invested in the idea. Otherwise, there are very few chances of a Product Manager making a meaningful contribution and succeeding in their role.

Here  are some key insights from the discussions at the Round Table:

Product Management is a highly cerebral activity

The importance of setting a conducive environment for the Product Management setup was stressed upon heavily by Sridhar.  It is imperative that between the Product Manager and the immediate Product team (engineers, designers, QA), there be a very high amount of trust. The decisions of the Product Manager will directly impact the work, and subsequently the performance of the engineering team. Similarly, the Product Managers needs to believe that his engineers are capable and are able to solve the challenges he poses to them.  Laying the right foundation and building trust among the team is absolutely essential for the Product Management team to contribute significantly towards the company’s goals.

Framework to Solve Customers’ Pain Points

The discussion then moved towards prioritization of tasks, catering to customer requests for feature additions and customizations. Sridhar presented a very interesting framework which is quite handy to place customers’ pain points in the right context and solve them appropriately.

 

Depending on the target group size is and the complexity of the pain point, one can address the pain points in different ways

  • Education: Can you provide simple walkthroughs of the product through screencasts or tooltips, put down a set of FAQs that customers can refer to and get the help they’re looking for?

  • Process: Can you tell customers on how to do something? As an example, creating a 1-page document on how to apply for a passport and redirecting customers to that section would be a way of setting up the process.

  • Procedure: Taking the above example itself, if you actually build a feature to help customers apply for a passport, it would be creating a procedure to solve a pain point.

  • Solution: Any customizations/hacks over an existing feature/flow would fall under this.

  • Product: Enabling the customers to do something completely through the product itself. E.g. Employee payroll processing.

Building an MVP

How much time should one spend in building the MVP? One of the keenly debated questions was on the amount of time to spend to build an MVP. While there were multiple inputs based on the nature of the product and the market each of the companies was targeting.  However, Sridhar mentioned that one should invest enough time so as to avoid having to pivot at a later stage.

Is your product a ‘painkiller’ or a ‘vitamin’? It is important to understand this very well beforehand and pitch the product in the right manner to your first set of customers. You may be overselling if you’re trying to pitch a vitamin disguised as a painkiller and grossly underselling if it is the other way round!

What features get built into the MVP? Don’t build the product or a feature just because someone says it’s a good idea or if your prototypes ‘look good’. You need to validate that the customer is indeed willing to pay for the product. It’s even better if they ask for something repeatedly, which indicates that they have a pain point and they are willing to use the product/feature.

Taking the MVP to the market. Choose customers who can challenge you and make you think harder. The first 5% of the customers give 85% of the important feedback and the interest tapers off as you get the next set of customers. It is important to keep validating your view of the market and be ahead of the curve. You may have built something that was relevant at a previous time or maybe talking to a customer set that’s no longer representative of the larger market out there.

When to get a PM and what should the PM spend time one?

Sridhar suggested that whether or not there’s a formal designation assigned, there should be a Product Owner from Day 1, which is invariably one of the founders. Over time, it will be good if one can identify a good Product person from among the early engineers and have a Product person for a group of 7-8 engineers. The Product Manager should ideally be able to do 70% of everything! For the effective use of a Product Manager’s time, a helpful rule of thumb is that he spends 50% of his time planning for the future, 30% of the time on current initiatives and 20% of the time on firefighting.

Data, Intuition & Processes

How much does one trust data and how much does one rely on intuition to make decisions?

One of the participants remarked – “If you torture data long enough, you’ll get what you want”. It was general view shared among the participants and endorsed by Sridhar that data is good for discussions and not decisions. There’s a strong element of intuition and market understanding that go into making decisions and there should be ample scope for that.  Finally, it’s the Product Manager’s call on the direction of the product and he needs to be able to take views from multiple perspectives. Data alone being the decision criterion may not be the best way to go about it.

What about processes? Do they kill creativity or actually help in better productivity and accountability?

A quick poll on what the participants thought about process threw up some interesting responses. The hardcore engineers found process to be a bit of hindrance. However when they put on the founder/senior management hat, they found that there needs to be some way to maintain accountability and provide better visibility to a larger group as a company grows. As one of the participants rightly said, process is ‘doing what you say and saying what you do’.

Sridhar cautioned against having too many processes (don’t put policeman unless there’s a lot of traffic) ot of traffic), he also shared some interesting ways of bringing in process. Rather than enforcing process, can the employees themselves be stakeholders in implementing process and are ihe also shared some interesting ways of bringing in process. Rather than enforcing process, can the employees themselves be stakeholders in implementing process and are incentivized for taking an active part in the process and evangelizing it?

Each of the participants took away some key actionables which they’d go back and try out at their respective companies. They’d also stay in touch to share their learnings and experiences to help one another build a strong product management function. After all, we’re working towards transforming a nation with products!

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Q&A with Cloud-Based Telephony Company Exotel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is your product’s differentiator from competitors?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who is your customer?

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

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

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

What are your future plans?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Why Business Models Fail: Pipes Vs. Platforms

Why do most social networks never take off?

Why are marketplaces such difficult businesses?

Why do startups with the best technology fail so often?

There are two broad business models: pipes and platforms. You could be running your startup the wrong way if you’re building a platform, but using pipe strategies.

More on that soon, but first a few definitions.

PIPES
Pipes have been around us for the last 400 years. They’ve been the dominant model of business. Firms create stuff, push them out and sell them to customers. Value is produced upstream and consumed downstream. There is a linear flow, much like water flowing through a pipe.

We see pipes everywhere. Every consumer good that we use essentially comes to us via a pipe. All of manufacturing runs on a pipe model.  Television and Radio are pipes spewing out content at us. Our education system is a pipe where teachers push out their ‘knowledge’ to children. Prior to the internet, much of the services industry ran on the pipe model as well.

This model was brought over to the internet as well. Blogs run on a pipe model. An ecommerce store like Zappos works as a pipe as well. Single-user SAAS runs on pipe model where the software is created by the business and delivered on a pay-as-you-use model to the consumer.

PLATFORMS
Had the internet not come up, we would never have seen the emergence of platform business models. Unlike pipes, platforms do not just create and push stuff out. They allow users to create and consume value. At the technology layer, external developers can extend platform functionality using APIs. At the business layer, users (producers) can create value on the platform for other users (consumers) to consume. This is a massive shift from any form of business we have ever known in our industrial hangover.

TV Channels work on a Pipe model but YouTube works on a Platform model. Encyclopaedia Britannica worked on a Pipe model but Wikipedia has flipped it and built value on a Platform model. Our classrooms still work on a Pipe model but Udemy and Skillshare are turning on the Platform model for education.

BUSINESS MODEL FAILURE
So why is the distinction important?

Platforms are a fundamentally different business model. If you go about building a platform the way you would build a pipe, you are probably setting yourself up for failure.

We’ve been building pipes for the last few centuries and we often tend to bring over that execution model to building platforms. The media industry is struggling to come to terms with the fact that the model has shifted. Traditional retail, a pipe, is being disrupted by the rise of marketplaces and in-store technology, which work on the platform model. 

PIPE THINKING VS. PLATFORM THINKING
So how do you avoid this as an entrepreneur?

Here’s a quick summary of the ways that these two models of building businesses are different from each other.

USER ACQUISITION
User acquisition is fairly straightforward for pipes. You get users in and convert them to transact. Much like driving footfalls into a retail store and converting them, online stores also focus on getting users in and converting them.

Many platforms launch and follow pipe-tactics like the above. Getting users in, and trying to convert them to certain actions. However, platforms often have no value when the first few users come in. They suffer from a chicken and egg problem, which I talk extensively about on this blog. Users (as producers) typically produce value for other users (consumers). Producers upload photos on Flickr and product listings on eBay, which consumers consume. Hence, without producers there is no value for consumers and without consumers, there is no value for producers.

Platforms have two key challenges:

1. Solving the chicken and egg problem to get both producers and consumers on board

2. Ensuring that producers produce, and create value

Without solving for these two challenges, driving site traffic or app downloads will not help with user acquisition.

Startups often fail when they are actually building platforms but use Pipe Thinking for user acquisition.

Pipe Thinking: Optimize conversion funnels to grow.

Platform Thinking: Build network effects before you optimize conversions. 

PRODUCT DESIGN AND MANAGEMENT
Creating a pipe is very different from creating a platform.

Creating a pipe requires us to build with the consumer in mind. An online travel agent like Kayak.com is a pipe that allows users to consume air lie tickets. All features are built with a view to enable consumers to find and consume airline tickets.

In contrast, a platform requires us to build with both producers and consumers in mind. Building YouTube, Dribbble or AirBnB requires us to build tools for producers (e.g. video hosting on YouTube) as well as for consumers (e.g. video viewing, voting etc.). Keeping two separate lenses helps us build out the right features.

The use cases for pipes are usually well established. The use cases for platforms, sometimes, emerge through usage. E.g. Twitter developed many use cases over time. It started off as something which allowed you to express yourself within the constraints of 140 characters (hardly useful?), moved to a platform for sharing and consuming news and content and ultimately created an entirely new model for consuming trending topics. Users often take platforms in surprisingly new directions. There’s only so much that customer development helps your with. 

Pipe Thinking: Our users interact with software we create. Our product is valuable of itself.

Platform Thinking: Our users interact with each other, using software we create. Our product has no value unless users use it.

MONETIZATION
Monetization for a pipe, again, is straightforward. You calculate all the costs of running a unit through a pipe all the way to the end consumer and you ensure that Price = Cost + Desired Margin. This is an over-simplification of the intricate art of pricing, but it captures the fact that the customer is typically the one consuming value created by the business.

On a platform business, monetization isn’t quite as straightforward. When producers and consumers transact (e.g. AirBnB, SitterCity, Etsy), one or both sides pays the platform a transaction cut. When producers create content to engage consumers  (YouTube), the platform may monetize consumer attention (through advertising). In some cases, platforms may license API usage.

Platform economics isn’t quite as straightforward either. At least one side is usually subsidized to participate on the platform. Producers may even be incentivized to participate. For pipes, a simple formula helps understand monetization:

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) < Life TIme Value (LTV)

This formula works extremely well for ecommerce shops or subscription plays. On platforms, more of a systems view is needed to balance out subsidies and prices, and determine the traction needed on either side for the business model to work. 

Pipe Thinking: We charge consumers for value we create.

Platform Thinking: We’ve got to figure who creates value and who we charge for that. 

BUT… PLATFORM THINKING APPLIES TO ALL INTERNET BUSINESSES
If the internet hadn’t happened, we would still be in a world dominated by pipes. The internet, being a participatory network, is a platform itself and allows any business, building on top of it, to leverage these platform properties.

Every business on the internet has some Platform properties.

I did mention earlier that blogs, ecommerce stores and single-user SAAS work on pipe models. However, by virtue of the fact that they are internet-enabled, even they have elements that make them platform-like.  Blogs allow comments and discussions. The main interaction involves the blogger pushing content to the reader, but secondary interactions (like comments) lend a blog some of the characteristics of platforms. Readers co-create value.

Ecommerce sites have reviews created by users, again an ‘intelligent’ platform model.

THE END OF PIPES

In the future, every company will be a tech company. We already see this change around us as companies move to restructure their business models in a way that uses data to create value.

We are moving from linear to networked business models, from dumb pipes to intelligent platforms. All businesses will need to move to this new model at some point, or risk being disrupted by platforms that do.

Note: I intend to use some/all of the ideas here as part of an introductory chapter to the book I’m working on and would love to have your feedback and comments.

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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Building the Product Right

The foundation of a product company is in its IP. An idea is only as good as its implementation.

Start-ups face twin pressures of building the right product and doing it in time. The broad contours of the product may be quite clear, but specific features change shape regularly. Things happen simultaneously. While the product is being built, it’s being pitched to prospects, advisors and investors. Based on this learning, entrepreneurs keep tweaking or adding features. There is urgency to build an early prototype for demo purposes. At the same time, everyone’s end objective is a high quality product that is released quickly to generate revenue.

With time-to-market and funding issues, start-ups often take short cuts. Repeated changes in functionality are disruptive. This leads to a defective implementation, requiring substantial revisions or a complete change. Such modifications can ultimately prove too expensive. There is no easy prescription to manage this problem, and we will limit ourselves to a few basic suggestions.

Set up a product management team, consisting of the founders and key architects. The team must spend sufficient time upfront to defi ne key requirements, high level product features and design. A common problem is the tendency to over-design a product. Engineers fall into the trap of ‘feature creep’ in which they attempt to include too much functionality because it is technically exciting. Meetings with prospects and experts lead to demands for new features, and changes to existing ones. Set up a process to register and approve all change requests only through formal review meetings. Limit the scope of the initial release to those features that are critical to sales.

Start-ups should adopt the agile development model, consisting of a series of intermediate releases spaced by a few weeks. Each must have incrementally more features that are fully functional. This enables testing of completed features, in parallel with ongoing development of new ones. Being able to play with intermediate versions brings about confi dence that the fi nal release will be on time and to the desired quality. Other than for embedded products, the user interface (UI) is a critical element of the product. It is also the most neglected. Defining and implementing the UI upfront is the best way for everyone to understand exactly what the product can do and how it will look. A good UI speaks louder than the most detailed requirements document.

Your initial selling will rely on screen mock-ups. This can be followed by UI only demo version, which is invaluable in showcasing the solution to prospective clients and to the investors. User feedback helps refine the product, while it is being developed. This will help it meet the user expectations.

Relying so much on UI means that it should have the highest priority. Engineering teams are not good at UI, but still end up doing it themselves. At most,  they get visual designers who help with screen layout and style-sheets. However, what you really need is a Usability expert as consultant. His job is to understand how customers will interact with the product, and conceptualize screens and navigation, to ensure it’s user-friendly.

Reprinted from From Entrepreneurs to Leaders by permission of Tata McGraw-Hill Education Private Limited.

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

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

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

Let’s get started.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who do you pitch your product to in a company?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We conduct many tests. Some examples:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Navigation paths and traffic sources with highest conversion rate.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reblogged from PokeandBite.com