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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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Is your product vitamin, pain killer or vaccine?

2014 has been a year of great momentum for software products in India and its going north in 2015. As the momentum picks up, thought of sharing some thoughts on a thumb rule that we can apply for products that we plan to build

Picking the medical analogy, the one way of classifying where your product fits in would be when you answer if your product is a vitamin, pain killer or vaccine – and how you innovate around them.

vitaminvaacine

Pain killers

The must haves are the pain killers, you can’t survive without drugs that cures fever or other painful diseases. In software products area, an equivalent is the automation software that will help you bill your customers, keep your accounts, communicate through emails, build professional or personal network etc. These are very basic, been there for a while and there is always market for these products. But the challenge with these products is that you are not the first one building it and you have tons of competitive products. A funny example I came across when a team mentioned they are building a product for traffic problem that exists in Bangalore, but the how part was not convincing enough to believe it can solve the problem. While the problem is clearly understood, and is a pain, the pain killer solution is key.

Often referred as commodity market, the only success factor here is “how” you solve the problems in a different way, leveraging latest technologies such as mobile, cloud or internet of things. Value of such products, in order to be successful, needs significant go-to-market investment. Nevertheless, if you have found the right product – market fit, there is still scope for this as everyone needs these products, as there is no question “why you need these products”, as long as you can differentiate and sell.

Vitamin

The nice to haves are vitamins, we all know that. You will agree that to sell vitamins, you really need to first establish “why you need that product”.  We do see the benefits, but we can live without it. Analytics and big data products are good examples of vitamins analogy. It would certainly help for your data driven decision making, but you need to convince someone a lot as he or she is already getting the insights in different forms, maybe through a good team that he or she has. But like how we get addicted to some vitamins, you can tend to get addicted to software products that can help businesses or life better. Also over a period of time, vitamins become pain killers as we can’t live without them. A good example for me is Google or Mobile phones or ipads. We have lived without google or mobile phones few years back, but they are no more an option. Ipads is still a vitamin, but still sells very well.

Vitamins need a different kind of expertise in your sales and go to market organization. You need experts to sell these solutions. They really need to uncover the invisible need that the buyer would have and offcourse your product needs to fulfill their aspirations by educating them. Vitamins can be sold at a very premium price if we can convince the customers.

 

While painkillers take care of the visible need, vitamins have to discover the invisible needs

productInvisibleneed

As you build products that fall in the vitamin category, it would be great to see the end vision of these products, and if they can eventually create a new category that can get into a pain killer or vaccine.

Vaccine

They are preventive; they address solutions to problems that exist today or likely to arise in the future. They are must haves, but they get into territory of unsolved problems, so if you have a solution that solves an unsolved problem or even prevents the problem to occur, they would fall into this category. Vaccines type products are real innovations – as they are needed and they can help businesses or improve life.

Business networks are a great example of vaccines, as they remove the hurdles of problems such as intercompany reconciliation or payments by cheques. Knowing your customer is great problem that exists and you want to sell the right product/services, at the right time and at right price based on what customers are seeking. If you understand the customer better, it’s a no brainer that your revenue is going to increase. Next generation customer engagement solutions are a good bet, which personally can fall into the vaccine bucket.  I was super impressed by the Health care cloud mobile products developed by Lifeplot, and many of their products certainly fall into the vaccine category as they can prevent diseases at an affordable cost.

While vaccines are game changers, they also need certain degree of convincing to sell, as the problem is not obvious to many.  One example for me in software products is digital commerce such as web and mobile. There is a huge opportunity to tap into selling in these channels and having products to support them. But it still needs to convince the buyers, as certain level of education is required for this.

Criteria Pain Killer Vitamin Vaccine 
Need Must have – Visible Nice to have – invisible Must have – Visible
Problem statement Well defined Need to be explained In certain cases defined but needs education
Main value prop to sell How its solved Why its needed How its solved and sometimes why its needed 
Sales approach Non Experts but with clear differentiators for product – market fit and lot of investment Experts required to explain value with lot of investment More education required, and once convinced less investment
Revenue and Pricing Standard Premium Standard 
Examples ERP, Emails Analytics, Messenger Business Network, Digital Commerce

 

So where does your product fit in – is it a pain killer, vitamin or vaccine ? 

 

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UxNow ~ Nickel o Wonder : The Design Conference

 “It was a rainy day. Everyone in the family was relaxing and I, in my cuddling days, was sketching scenery with mountains, birds and rivers. I filled my clipart with all the colors I wished for and stroked in every direction with the freedom unrestricted.  Upon finishing my drawing, I jumped and jacked straight to my granny and she, with all the worldly affection, patted my shoulder and gifted me a cent as a token of appreciation. Back then, the twinkle in my eyes was shining bright and it was just the onset of the creativity in me.”

~Anonymous

Is that a walk past the memory lane?  Off course! The semblance of this sweet memory is locked safe in everyone’s account.  Isn’t it? So, what if we invite you to unlock and unhide the very childlike streak in you?  Are the twinkles in the eyes coming back with a smile?

And now that we know you are smiling, here we go!

mailchimpMark your calendar for 28th November 2014 as MakeMyTrip, celebrating the sprit of World Usability Day, brings you UxNow, a conference focused on this year theme of “User Engagement”. World Usability Day is conducted each year in November with an aim to bring professionals, researchers and academicians to work towards simplifying products and services

UxNow aims to provide a multidisciplinary platform for designers, academicians, entrepreneurs & developers to discuss the challenges and potential solutions for effective interaction with and through web and mobile devices, applications, and services.

A one-day conference with exciting talks, chatter, networking lunch and a roundtable panel discussion provides participants plenty of real-world examples along with actionable takeaways.

Checkout the event site & agenda at: http://uxnow.org

To set the ball rolling, we have also started a design challenge where both students and professionals are invited to create products and services that can revolutionize the travel industry. To know more about the challenge please visit the website

UXNOWAs it was once said, “A creative adult is a child who has survived”. So what are you waiting for? See you on 28th Nov ’14 under the umbrella of UXnow. Let us together revisit the creative child in us in our very own NCR and we promise that you would ‘Rediscover’ the shining Nickel for the wonder inside.

Come ready, devices charged. We’ve got a packed day!

Yes!! Your very, Nickel o Wonder!

Guest Post by Dushyant Arora, Head – User Experience & Design at MakeMytrip

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Some People Hate Self-Checkout

There’s a myth out there that helpdesk companies like to perpetuate about customer service automation — that it will save you time, that all your competitors are doing it, and you need to have it too so you can go work on more important things.

Except this it isn’t true.

As our friends at Buffer like to say about social media automation, “It’s not a rotisserie oven. Please don’t set it and forget it.” The same goes for customer service automation.

All awesome technology requires equally awesome people and processes to build it into a meaningful competitive advantage.

Automation is the technology component of the wonderfully productive golden triangle of people, process and technology. Each requires the other two to make a tangible impact on business.

people process technology

Take people and process out of the equation, and it looks a lot like the modern-day self-checkout.

48% of people don’t love self-checkout

The Mindy Project, a FOX sitcom, captures at least half of humanity’s sentiments about the self-checkout.

Mindy’s childhood love has just come back from a long stint in the army, miles away from any supermarket innovation.

Things have changed. There is now self-checkout.

mindy1

Yea, if the future is a fiery dystopia. She puts it in the bag like the machine says.

mindy

The machine totally melts down.

mindy

It’s like automation gone rogue: the machine is going nuts, there’s no store associate around to help. They don’t even end up getting what they came for – they bail without that shampoo.

mindy6

 

 

 

 

 

 

Useless, right? You might as well bark over the intercom:

“Good afternoon customer, we are replacing the privilege of human contact at the checkout counter with robots. You will now interact with a robot that you’ve never been trained to use. We will task a single associate to supervise the whole self checkout section, so if you run into a problem while checking out during rush hour, you’re on your own. Good luck thumbing through our massive directory of fruit and vegetable codes to find ‘heirloom tomatoes’. You would think it’s under H, but it’s actually under T. Thanks for shopping with us today.”

Some people don’t like self-checkout.

Check out the line at Whole Foods

Only 52% of consumers prefer self checkout. This automation innovation is by no means a runaway success.

Another 48% are opting for the human checkout experience probably for the same reasons as tech writer Farhad Manjoo:

The human doesn’t expect me to remember or look up codes for produce, she bags my groceries, and unlike the machine, she isn’t on hair-trigger alert for any sign that I might be trying to steal toilet paper.

Best of all, the human does all the work while I’m allowed to stand there and stupidly stare at my phone, which is my natural state of being. (WSJ)

Look at how differently Whole Foods manages its checkout lines at some of its busy urban locations.

whole foods self checkout

Customers stand in one long line and walk to their color-coded counters when it’s their turn.

This is a great example of how automation can be used to assist — not replace — human employees. 

The benefits are worth it. Customers enjoy the personal attention of a store associate and more importantly, they don’t have to work the register to be able to walk out with your groceries. Oh, and how about those nice last- minute impulse buys?

whole foods self checkout

Stick to your (automation) principles

There’s a general principle that successful customer-centric businesses tend to follow. We call it The Automation Principle.

kayako automation principle

Here’s where that comes from: some businesses believe that automation exists to free up their time. But better businesses use automation to reinvest their new free time in better human-to-human service.

Automation should support your support. If you’re automating any personal interactions, you’re doing it wrong.

With that in mind, here are little “human hacks” that are total winners:

Automation is your little helper

Follow up on a ticket

The scene: You’ve provided a fix to your customer’s problem. Now it’s up to them to implement the fix.

What to automate: Schedule a follow up date.

The human hack: Write a unique and personal message to ask if they resolved the problem or need extra help.

If several members of the team were involved with solving an issue, the initial point of contact should schedule a follow up to check in: “Is there anything else I can help you with?”

Build your knowledge base engine

The scene: You’ve been answering or resolving the same issues over and over again.

What to automate: Run a report linking tags + priority level to see which inquiries are the most frequent and pressing.

The human part: Now that you know what’s tripping up our customers most often, prioritize those help articles first.

Celebrate customer milestones

The scene: Your customer has just been through a milestone with your product: it could be their first 10 followers, completing a level, referring you to a friend, or trying a new feature.

What to automate: Set up an email trigger to notify you of the customer’s milestone.

The human part: Sure, send a personal email, but could you work on something bigger? Invent a way to take the relationship offline.

creativemarket

Creative Market, a marketplace for designers, is seriously raising the bar. Every time a seller makes their first sale, it triggers an email. Then someone on the team sends across handwritten card along with a dollar bill. How’s that for inspiring?

The Takeaway

It takes time to find the right balance between automation and human-to-human engagement.

But you’ll find that if you’re doing it right, your customer service team will be busier than ever: upping their game, building new ways to engage your customers and the new face of your company. Like an unstoppable machine.

When in doubt, be human.

This post was originally published by Kayako at Medium.com

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6 Steps to prevent your Product from becoming multiple Applications! All in Cartoons!

Somewhere along my long software engineering career, I sat one more time rolling my eyes and clucking mentally that one more product is about to become a series of applications! We are about to create multiple code line monsters that will be demanding and expensive to maintain! Yet, this is what happens in reality in most “Product Companies” that start out with the greatest of intentions but devolve quickly into a morass of effort and expense! Do not mistake me! This is a great problem to have and solve! If you have that many clients wanting your product you are in terrific shape to begin with! You just need to manage it carefully. How do you prevent this from happening? Here are six steps to make sure that this does not happen! All in cartoons! After all, a picture is worth a 1000 words!

1. Nothing can substitute for a proper Product Management Function

All features needed for a client need to go through Product Management. Engineering should not be setting the priorities! Product management can always balance Sales’ priorities with Engineering capacity. Not impossible! Somewhere in the past we have used the rule “If one client requests it, it goes into the Wish List. If two clients request it, it goes into the next release. If three clients request it, it goes into the next build”. But nothing is worse than promises like these. And a proper product management function, run well, can prevent it.

pm1

2. Always separate the Product piece from the Consulting piece

If only one client requests something, it is always good to separate the product from the consulting piece. And make sure that the product has callable features that accommodate the consulting piece separately. Like through an Application Programming Interface (API) or through Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) to make it even more robust. Otherwise your whole product ends up like this

pm-3

3. Create new features out of useful Consulting Pieces

This is the challenge for Product Management. They should always be on the lookout for generalizing client consulting requirements and make them new but customizable features. Consulting requirements that work for client A hardly work for client B. However with some thought and ingenuity, you can generalize the requirements so that it is not only useful for A and B but also other future clients. It will be more code than you usually write as an application, but once done properly, can be reused for many, many clients in the future!

pm-5

4. Minimize Custom Code and Maximize Product features

Over a period of time, one of the worthwhile goals a software product company should have is to minimize custom code and maximize product features! No one really knows the exact requirements for a product unless you roll it out to at least 3 or 4 clients. You realize that you don’t need 50% of the features you thought were hot and you don’t have 50% of the features that clients truly need. This is the process of finding those out! Nothing wrong, but it is just part of the process! However, you need to formalize that process and work that in to your product release schedule. If you think this is crucial for On-premise software, you should try Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings! Even more of a challenge to get features generalized into a bunch of admin settings for a SaaS offering! One more reason to minimize custom code and maximize product features! Like here.

pm-4

5. Find and groom Consulting Partners to do the customization

Writing custom code for clients 1 through 5 may be fine but you need to get out of the custom code business. For startup companies it is always tempting to take on as much consulting revenues as possible, especially when it helps greatly with cash flow. It will smother and kill you, as I have seen it in too many companies myself! It’s a honey trap! Find and groom consulting partners that will do the custom code development as early as possible and get out from the applications business. Requires diligent testing, documentation and training. The sooner you do this, you will come up for air and get on with your future major version releases of your product. Also, from a fund raising perspective, if you look more and more like a consulting company, you have less of a story with investors, especially VCs. Consulting companies do not fit their investment profile too much!

pm-6

6. Re-Architect the Product every few years! It’s inevitable, especially if you are successful

Software products become like the cartoon in point #2 above. It is inevitable! You have a preliminary architecture, you keep adding features, pretty much with duct tape and baling wire. It is then and only then you realize how you should have designed the architecture in the first place. Plus, every five years or so, you have a whole new set of advances in software engineering methodologies, languages and tools. It pays to completely re-architect your product from the ground up! It also goes with the observation that your product has a whole lot of features you need additionally and a whole lot of features that go unused by your clients, anyway. Step #5 buys you this breathing time to go off, have a few off-site meetings and re-think how your product is structured. Plus never forget that you need to migrate all your old clients to this new one, too! Crucial!

pm-7

Successful products evolve! But not without a lot of thought into the process of getting there! Without careful, considered forethought and planning, they can come back as a whole set of applications that can smother and choke a product company!

Software is a great combination between artistry and engineering – Bill Gates

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Product Management Roundtable For Startups by iSPIRT In Pune. #PlaybookRT

After all the missed opportunities of being at a PlaybookRT by iSPIRT, I finally made it to Pune last weekend for the roundtable on Product Management. Amit Somani and Rahul Kulkarni conducted the session. While I can’t do justice to all that was discussed at the session, I am translating my notes from the Roundtable into this blog post. After sharing some of our product dev insights in my last post Learnings From Building A Consumer Facing Web Product, this was a good opportunity to become a sponge and soak in all that I could manage. 

As a startup founder who hasn’t previously worked in a product company, starting a product business is tough. And being a CEO with no technology background, doesn’t help the mix either. The challenges for building an internet product for me may be more than the average amongst the ones attending this Roundtable, but product management is still a tough beast. Understanding consumer needs, building a product around it, figuring the right metrics for your business, measuring it and iterating is puzzling for anyone, specially given the fact that we are always chasing a moving target.

2014-11-08 14.15.57To give you a taste of how things play out in the real world:

When we started PriceBaba back in 2012, mobile apps were a good to have, desktop traffic was bulk of Internet usage and little did i know that India is on the verge of such massive investments in online shopping. Over 2 years later, the story is very different. Mobile is huge (both web and apps), online shopping is real and consumer Internet in India and the investment landscape which was looking slow between 2012-2014 has picked up crazy momentum.

For a startup that is bootstrapped, at an accelerator or even seed funded stage, getting the product market fit, raising funds to survive, hiring good techies and dealing with an uncertain market which is changing fast is a daunting task. If you add to that the learning curve involved to make things successful, you would know why I appreciate this Product Management PlaybookRT by iSPIRT so much.

The Product Management #PlaybookRT

Amit and Rahul kicked off the session by helping us define our product vision (and separating it from the company vision and mission). We were asked to make a 30 sec pitch by each of us on our product vision along with two things that we would never do. Both Amit and Rahul played devils advocate and helped us think through what we are doing. Learning: A quick dipstick to check if your product vision is well defined, ask employee no 20! If they can define it well in your (founders) absence, then you have set your product culture right.

Stack rank your requirements. What is the single most important thing you? Rahul suggested us that things can’t move forward till we stack rank our priorities. We must know what is the most important thing that we do. A somewhat heated discussion was on how important the user interface of a product is for being successful. Should we fret about having the best UX out there or build a product that is very compelling, offers a better price than competition and delivers what is promises reliably? To cut short on what could be a day long debate, here are two independent bits I picked up from our facilitators. i) If you are offering something that no one else can, your consumer will also use a command prompt to get it. ii) Your Apps UX is much more important than what it was a few years back and it is getting more and more important by the day. But that may not be the lone factor in getting a winner out there. That said, don’t purposely try to build a bad UX 😉

The user experience is not just defined by what the user does on your mobile or web interface. It is every touchpoint that the consumer has with your brand / service. It is the whole packaging of what a user goes through. For a e-commerce site it would go down to the professionalism and courtesy of their delivery boys. Similarly, when taking a view of product, the challenge isn’t always about getting that killer UX designer to work on your mobile app. It is really defining what your product does and how.

Each of us got enough time to define our key metrics and find ways of measuring them. With my experience I can surely tell you that it is indeed true that which ever metric you track on a day to day basis, improves quite magically 🙂

Tips on collecting feedback & effective product management: 

  • Take feedback from your extreme users. Either the ones who are very naive and would ask very basic questions. Or from the extreme users who would want every pro feature out there
  • Group users by commonality. Set goals for users who perform well. So track a users life journey within your app, figure key milestones and set them as goals. Optimize for these goals. So if you know that a user who completes Level 1 of your game, is most likely to play till Level 4, try to optimize such that you acquire users who will complete Level 1

Apart from the evergreen Google Analytics which is great for averages, tools like Mixpanel, Kissmetrics and Wizrocket are great for digging into specifics. You may want to give them a spin. You may also want to check Dave McClures talk on Startup Metrics for Pirates. 

playbookRT

Hiring. The Big Deal. 

So the tired entrepreneur in you is thinking already, when can I hire someone to take some of my money and all my product problems? Well, well not so soon! Product Managers come in various flavours and to begin with, YOU are the PM. Hiring a lead product manager is tough and transition is not easy. You need folks who are curious, bring product insight, are analytics, can be strategic and can work with really smart engineers. This is an individual that blends great communication skill and simplicity. So where do you find such a mahapurush?

Amit suggested a good strategy of hiring young grads and train them to become good PMs in a year. They will love the opportunity at the start of their career and won’t burn a big hole in your pocket. That said, a dedicated product lead will take over the duties from the founder(s). This would ideally happen at a later stage for most of us attending the Roundtable. The three flavors of Product Managers are:

i) A Project Manager who will get your task list executed

ii) A product manager who will get the job done but won’t give a new direction to the part they are leading – the CEO holds the strings. Also example of Windows OS where changing one aspect as per will of a Product Manager won’t fly, it would need the to go hand in hand with the whole OS

iii) The Business Owner – Give this product manager your metrics and let him/her chase it down for you with full ownership

^cheat sheet: Google for questions asked to Product Managers at Google / Amazon / FB 🙂 

2014-11-08 14.22.30Best Practices For Product Development: 

i) The Amazon Approach – Write a press release before starting the product development. Also read this by Ian McAllister of Amazon:

ii) Before you launch the product, predict the no of users your new product / feature would have for the next week & month. Define the usage metrics

iii) Have extreme clarity in goals, let people make mistakes but own the job

iv) Questions to ask yourself – Is this world class? Can an engineer look this up and build it in 2 days? Why are you uniquely positioned to do that?

Also appreciate if someone else has users and learn as to why they have users for what they have built. You can learn a lot from that. Eg: Google & Apple learnt about good features that would eventually go into their OS by looking at some trivial but popular apps on their App Stores.

Books recommended by Amit and Rahul: 

  • The innovator’s dilemma by Clayton M. Christensen
  • Start with why by Simon Sinek (also the TED talk by Simon)
  • Profit from the Core: Growth Strategy in an Era of Turbulence by Chris Zook
  • Only the Paranoid Survive: How to Identify and Exploit the Crisis Points that Challenge Every Business by Andrew Grove

2014-11-08 16.26.16

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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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Exploring Mobile Moments and Building a Consumer Strategy for your App

It’s all about delivering the right message to the right audience at the right time. Today mobile offers us this capability to capture, analyse and execute in real-time on users immediate needs. Mobile is the disruptive force that is here to change long standing business models. When building a consumer strategy for your app, it is important to understand that the journey to business success begins with the consumers.

Influential factor of brand messages and services increases when the message caters to the consumer’s need, preferences, and context.

Engagement and incentives can make mobile moments more memorable.

mobile momentsBrand experience must be pleasant and relevant to your consumers’ experience. However, marketers need to look beyond demographic, location specific or personal preferences and execute more on better targeting options like hyper-context. Hyper-context applications delve deeper in contextual understanding, going a step ahead to combine context with users past behaviours and preferences and to even predict the users’ need in the next moment. A personalized mobile experience that enriches consumer experience can augment favourable attitude toward a brand message, increasing purchase intention and significantly add to a company’s bottom line.

Consumer strategies on mobile must focus on improving engagement with consumers in their mobile moment – defined by Forrester as:

A mobile moment is a point in time and space when someone pulls out a mobile device to get what he or she wants immediately, in context.

The faster companies and marketers adapt to giving contextual experiences to their users the faster they would be able to keep pace with their competitors who are already engaging with their mobile consumers.

Starbucks of US has emerged as a clear leader in catering to consumers in their mobile moments of need. Building a strong loyalty program (My Starbucks Rewards), when members pay via smartphone, they get to redeem their awards for free drinks and food. Talking revenue, the rewards for the company has been huge: “The Starbucks app is on track to process over $1.5 billion in payment volume in the U.S. in 2014.”(Via Business Insider)

Adding on to their brand experience, Starbucks recently announced that they are ‘working on an order-ahead mobile application this year in a bid to speed up service and boost sales.’ The app will allow users to place their order before they arrive, reducing their wait time thereby adding to a more positive experience at their stores. Starbucks, through its successful consumer strategy has established a strong message on how influential factor of brand messages and services increases when the service caters to the consumer’s need, preferences, and context.

With a truly mobile-first Indian market, there is an unprecedented opportunity for marketers and brands to reach out to mobile users and capitalize through new innovative platforms that leverage on the mobile moments of consumers. According to Gartner the Indian eCommerce market will reach $6 billion in 2015 a 70 percent increase over 2014 revenue of $3.5 billion. The report cites the biggest challenge is in ‘getting the business digital commerce strategy right and adequate investments in people, process and technology to engage with customers across channels, which has been ignored by Indian enterprises so far.’

Brands and marketers must focus on creating a strong consumer strategy to increase customer connection and customer delight to overcome this challenge. Engagement and incentives can make mobile moments more memorable and add to measurable revenue growth and improved customer loyalty.

Insights for creating a better mobile experience

The App Publishers need to understand their consumers’ intent and patterns.  Once the app publishers identify these patterns and intents and analyse the need and behaviour, it will further help to pre-target user with relevant services, information and content. For example in iOS 8, users can take quick actions in response to a push notification like – accepting an invitation to a party, one-click offers on sensor enabled shoes which indicate a wear outAnother big step in this direction is Google’s step towards indexing mobile app intents/pages. This aids fastest hop discoveries of apps and services from one app to another. With such innovations, it gives marketers a hyper-moment of opportunity to make itself relevant and visible to users when they are in a moment of need.

Another scenario is about enabling a user looking for second hand cars via search, online discussions with friends etc discover great deals catering to his needs and specific to his location while conversing. It is a hyper-moment where the users’ needs have been seamlessly met by just a click, and on the go. Mobile apps have opened up brilliant opportunities to connect consumers and brands in the mobile moment.

Conclusion

Creating such mobile moment, a user can be given the fastest service to solve his need at that instance and helping simplify the process of buy and sell. Apps which are able to weave this intelligence into their offerings will succeed in connecting to consumers in enriching and positive ways. This will not only delight the consumer but will also benefit brands.

Contributed to Ms. Prima Dona – VP Product Innovation, IP, Business Strategy at KeyPoint Technologies

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Competition – Research and Share

As we build (software) products, the competition is something that we need to stay ahead of, but how?

competition1

 

Especially building products for different markets, you always have others building similar products for probably same or different markets. There are already established products that you have to compete with, there are other products that are getting built as you build your product, there are new technologies that throw up new opportunities or challenges that will help new products to build that could surpass yours.

How it’s different from services ?

In services business, you just have a few competitors that you are competing for “a customer”.  You know what this one customer is looking for and its often not very difficult to create a competitive strategy. But in case of products, it’s a huge challenge to identify first of all who could be your competitor and if you are lucky to identify all of them, how your products stand out in the market, not just a customer.

So what you need to know to stay ahead of competition ?  I try to share couple of key elements that I have focused on in this area, as part of building software products : Research and Communication

Competitive Research:

competition2

 

As software product leaders or product managers, one of the key activities that we need to be focusing on is Competitive Research.  This cannot be optional and has to be mandatory task with clear deliverables. If you are lucky, especially working with larger enterprises, there are focused research colleagues who track and share insights about competition. If not there are external agencies that you can engage who can research a bit and share insights about competition. But personally I feel that as the product owners, its best for product leaders or product managers to be closely doing their own research as the expertise that you carry or the interest to get your products successful lies with you.

Tools, Tips and Techniques for Competitive Research:

  1. Don’t cross legal boundaries – while researching your competition, one of the most critical and important aspect of what you can find out should be based on publically available information and within the legal boundaries of access. This is super critical, while it’s a no brainer, its best to understand legal guidelines laid out by company and if you are startup, better to get some legal advise or attend a course to understand the Dos and Don’t
  2. Competitors website  – Thanks to internet, there is already enormous information available about the competition, especially if you are looking at existing established products.  Checking the websites of the competition helps a bit, taking at their value proposition and what customers are talking about the products are very important.
  3. Social media – This is an interesting channel in last few years where we get lot of information about the competition. From youtube, linkedin, twitter, we can follow and understand what the competitors are doing, what leadership in the competition are doing as well as some of the key stakeholders involved with the competition are saying. From whom they are hiring, which location they are talking from and tit bits are very valueable information you can know about the product
  4. Community and Blogs – Another great channel to understand competitors is through communities and blogs written by users, partners and employees about the competitive products. There are forums where products are discussed and there are blogs that are written that helps get an informal view of the products
  5. Analyst – IT industry analyst are a great source of information to understand competitors and their strengths and weakness. Its always better to understand different perspectives of the industry analyst. Your product may still not be in the overall review in the space, but you may want to analyze the market potential through whats being said about the analyst reports.
  6. Partners website – partners or implementors of software website is key source of information for research. This helps us to understand products better as partners are typically very close to the products and often share some details. Typically a demo of the product posted by partner is often more detailed and really very helpful
  7. Knowing and following competitor key people – one of the opportunity we have with internet is to know the people better. From a competitive research perspective, one of the important aspect would be to know and follow the key people who are involved in the competition. It could be the CEO of that company, few of the key technology folks there who are involved in the solution area. This gives a great perspective on what they are trying to do and help understand whats in store
  8. Involving in sales cycles – One of the best way, especially if your product is already out, is to involve in sales cycles. Talking to sales /presales as well as customers. You definitely get insights on how your competitor products is addressing the problems. This can also be done by listening to sales calls as well as just being part of some of the meetings or conference calls. Sometimes customers give you direct feedback on how your products fare and at other times you may get indirect inferences. Participating and contributing in some of the win loss analysis can help take back some of this information.

Having done the research, what do we do with this information to use this effectively as you build your products. While you can have a structure way to incorporate this information into your knowledge base, the important aspect of sharing and communicating this information. Often I have noticed that we share one set of information for different stakeholders, which may be not a good approach.

Prepare and Share

1. Sharing with Sales and Field : Sales organization in your company would like to know exactly how your products are better from your competitors products. What is the key value propositions and some differentiations. This could be addressed at different levels, at the overall product strategy level, on product feature /functionality and the fit with respect to solving key business problem in a better way, and based on customer usage.  How competitive fud can be resolved with a capability that exists or likely to addressed in the road map.

The communication here needs to be very broad based, especially if you are selling to different markets or user base. Some                   information of the regional competitors may also be very useful

2. Sharing with Development : Product Development including product managers are very emotional and close to their products and its often difficult for them to digest to hear that the competitive products are better than your products.  But here the communication and comparisons should focus on where the products are weaker then competition, don’t have to be highlighting the strengths but focus on where differentiations can be fulfilled, or how products can catch up with competition. Even an equally good product could be very successful due to other considerations such as price, market and geography focus, as well as mere ability of sales people. So its important to compare and highlight lagging product areas, and get to focus on competitive catch ups or differentiations. Some of the information collected from Analyst could be very useful as it could lead to good insights of competitive products.  All of this information also helps in prioritizing backlogs.

3. Sharing with Top Management: Assuming you are not the founder, its important that competitive insights are regularly shared with top management in order for them to get a feel of specifics that competitors are doing in this area. This will help getting the attention for investment into those areas, potential acquisitions as well as help them engage better in their customer/investor interactions.

Competitive Research and Sharing is a key activity that needs good time investment to stay ahead in the race as make Software Products.

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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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Product Evangelism for B2B Startups

Product EvangelismIf you are a B2B startup building an innovative enterprise product, it’s the dream of millions of users that keeps you going in the initial days. Sometimes however, as you acquire early customers and users for your product, it seems that the demands they make and attention they seek is almost distracting you from your dream! And they are not even using the coolest and most innovative features you designed. Sounds familiar?

Here’s how you can draw the best out of your early customers, help improve your product and revenue, while ensuring user delight. 

Customer Empathy to Customer Delight

Product evangelism is NOT about your product. It’s about your customers’ needs. Your product fortuitously happens to be the right medium to fulfill those needs. A customer-centric approach to building a product has been espoused by many. However, customer delight involves more than just validating your MVP and beta versions with early customers. Customer empathy is putting users at the center of your product development. Customer delight is beyond that – everything you build should be to enable your users to derive more, faster and better from your product.  If your product has the WOW factor that elegantly meets the customer requirements while making it a joy to use, the users will almost certainly come! 

Relationships, Relationships, Relationships

Next to a strong business case and measurable Return on Investment (RoI), your customer relationships are a critical aspect for your product’s adoption and success. Customer relationships do not imply idle socializing (who has time for that in a startup, anyway!). You need customer-side advocates who will not only vouch for your product in their company, but champion it internally as if it were their own. And that involves building and nurturing strong relationships with your early adopters.

  • Treat them as true partners, not just as your paycheck!
  • Share your product roadmap with them and listen to their feedback. It will give you early insight into how your next-gen features will be received
  • Pay attention to their product complaints and resolve them to closure – not just in the early days of the deployment, but throughout the lifetime of the engagement (which, if things go well, can be forever!)
  • Ask questions and understand their industry-specific trends. Everyone loves to talk about their domain and you will gain valuable insights for your product 

Involve your customers to grow your business

If you have spent time and effort delivering customer delight, it can pay off in ways much beyond steady revenue. You can leverage your happy-customer network to expand market-reach and get even more business.

  • Request for references to other prospects. A warm reference from an industry peer or colleague is likely to open doors that no amount of cold-calling can. Plus, they can talk about how your product is already benefiting them, helping you establish a stronger business case with the new prospect.
  • Ask for quotes and customer testimonials. Video testimonials work even better.
  • Publish joint case-studies. Let numbers and your product RoI be the central theme. Nothing sells like hard numbers, anyway!

B2B products are hard to build and enterprise customers are even harder to acquire. Nurture them and listen to their needs; they are the ones who will eventually fulfill to your million-user (and million-dollar) dreams.

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Making the world flat, one programmer at a time. Vivek Ravishankar, Co-founder at HackerRank. #PNHangout.

Vivek from HackerRankI am one of the founders of HackerRank, formally called InterviewStreet, where we are building a platform for programmers to hone their skills and companies to streamline their recruiting process. Currently we are a team of 66 split across Palo Alto and Bangalore and we have been signing up companies like FB, Amazon, VMWare, Bloomberg, etc. as our customers while simultaneously growing our developer community. We originally started off with a platform for mock interviews but we pivoted based on customer feedback and we kept iterating until we found a gap in technical recruiting which we discovered had a huge market but was struggling from a recruitment perspective which is why we chose to go ahead and tackle this domain.

CodepairTo aid in this recruitment process, we recently launched Codepair – a tool for real-time technical interviews. With this tool, you can view, edit and execute code in real-time in over 16 programming languages. When interviewing someone for a programming position there are a number of biases which both the recruiter and the candidate encounter. Factors such as the programming environment, spoken language, etc. can impact a recruiter’s decision when hiring someone. In fact, I remember my first interview where I wrote a syntax which the interviewer wasn’t familiar with. It was a new syntax and was correct but due to the lack of familiarity on the interviewer’s part we spent over 15 minutes debating over the validity of the program. Though I now understand why I didn’t get the job, that situation could have been avoided if I had a product that is so home to the environment of a programmer. Ultimately when you as an interviewer are taking a decision on whether to recruit a candidate or not, it is your bias right? You are processing a set of data internally to gauge if this person is going through to the next round or not and we want to make sure that we can eliminate as many of these biases as we can.

With Codepair, the primary bias that we are trying to eliminate is the environment that you put the candidate in. For example, you maybe interviewing candidates from outside your country and because of your accent they might miss out on a couple of words or they can miss out on certain catch phrases in your challenge or in your problem. So we built a problem statement based on this issue where you can actually view their code in real-time and you can walk through the different scenarios in the candidate’s code, i.e. for this particular scenario this maybe the output and for this particular input this maybe the output, etc. The idea of Codepair beyond the fact that it can be a pair programming, support on-video and video integrations and so on is the fact that we can eliminate all of those biases and give both the recruiter and candidate the best tool or product which is so close to what they would be use for programming in their normal day and objectively measure the ability of a programmer or candidate to come on board. We have a lot of features which might not be so obvious initially but when you start using it the experience just becomes so much better. For instance, a lot of people conduct phone interviews or attend phone interviews with their phone between their ear and shoulder and that’s not the most comfortable way. So we brought in the ability to call and have a video. So a lot of these features are implemented with great care which is why using Codepair for technical recruiting is an absolutely great experience.

Why you will lIn terms of customer acquisition, we at HackerRank are focused on building an amazing content team. We tried running ads in the past but through feedback from our customers, we realized that that wasn’t the way forward for us. I am really excited about the content team and I think that that will be a great way to increase our customer-base. With respect to enterprise customers we have a very strong sales team. We have a SDR team and so on and that has definitely increased the customers coming on to the platform but for the hacker side of things, things have been relatively organic

We have learnt through experience that data beats intuition and market averages because of which ours is a very data driven organization.  As a result, everyone in our team has a complete understanding, almost to the granular level, of how many new people we are able to attract to the site from different sources and what constitutes a success namely a user who keeps coming back to our site regularly and how do we make sure that everyone falls into this cohort. This is what I wake up to. This is what our product managers’ wake up to.  To process all our queries in a day while staying on top of our game, we rely on this very data. We care a lot about ensuring that the customers, whether it’s a programmer that’s hogging a challenge or an enterprise company which is trying to make and view reports, have access to features as quickly as possible as product is essentially a function of user experience and the speed at which you are able to help users get things done.

HackerRank has scaled rapidly, though not systematically and obviously there are a lot of things that are broken but we are constantly learning from our successes and failures.  Now is the time where we are scaling at such a rapid pace that things have to be in order for it to actually get the effect of the scaling. Moreover, technology is such a critical part of everyday life and it is only going to get more critical as the world moves on because every industry is being driven by technology. Consequently, it is critical that a company hires the right people by stream-lining their recruitment processes. This way we intend to act as the backbone of organizations by aiding them recruit better and smarter. We want to make the world flat completely based on meritocracy and this is the problem that we are tackling at HackerRank i.e. how do you make the world flat?

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

If you have any feedback or questions that you would like answered in this series feel free to email me at appy(dot)sg@gmail(dot)com. 

 

 

 

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Why B2B Startups Need an Enterprise Integration Strategy

B2B startups usually solve a unique problem that existing enterprise applications do not address. In some cases, they even create a new solution niche as they expand their customer base. As your B2B startup grows and acquires more customers and users, it is critical that the early adoption rate is not only sustained but multiplied. Integrating your new product with the enterprise ecosystem should be an important part of your adoption and growth strategy.

Effective enterprise integration stems from designing your B2B product to support an API framework. The framework itself can be built incrementally, but it’s important to have the API hooks in your product that allow external applications easy and secure access to data, product functionality and workflows. You can even have a few out-of-the box integrations that showcase this capability and provide your sales team with additional ammunition to convince that difficult prospect they have been chasing!

From a product adoption point of view, there are a number of advantages that B2B startups can derive from an enterprise integration strategy:

  • Product access and recall: Enterprise users already employ a number of applications in their day-to-day working. Integrating your new product with these applications makes your product easily accessible and increases the number of user touch-points.
  • Barrier to entry for competitors: It is harder for a competitor to replace your product at a customer where you already have multiple enterprise integrations in place. Your product is not just used by the customer, but well-entrenched in their ecosystem!
  • Process integration: Integrating with one or more processes and making your product a part of enterprise workflows will help formalize usage and prevent it from being just another startup pilot deployment that ended up in a narrow enterprise silo.

YourB2bProduct

What should you integrate with?

  • Corporate Directory (SSO): Probably the first integration you should implement at any customer. I’d recommend making it practically mandatory for all enterprise customers you sign-up, and a default offering in your basic sales package. In this day of multiple online accounts, no user wants to remember another username/password combo for a new product. Integrating with your customers’ corporate directory and enabling single sign-on (SSO) will significantly ease the access, increase usage and speed-up adoption in an enterprise.
  • Search Integration and Intranet Portals: Often the most frequented applications in an enterprise. Integrating with intranet portals are a great way to increase your visibility at a new customer, by leveraging these footfalls. If the customer has federated search implemented, search integration will allow users to discover your product when they are looking for something relevant.
  • Domain Specific Applications: If you have an L&D product, you must have integrations with the customers’ existing LMS, assessment applications and the like. If you have a nifty HR tool, integrating with their employee management systems and ERP apps is a must.
  • Critical Applications: Most enterprises have one or more critical applications that are essential for operations and are used by employees on a daily basis. Finding a way to integrate with these applications (even if they are outside your domain) can be a great way to make your product a part of the critical path of the organizations daily working.

Enterprise ecosystem integration is a key driver of B2B product adoption strategy. Executed well, it will pay rich dividends in terms of product usage, revenue and customer longevity.

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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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Need 9 months to get baby out

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

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

Build for market, not a customer

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

Enough research time to iterate

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

9 moms cannot make 9 babies in 1 month

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

It’s not just about development

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

Focus on quality, differentiators

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

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

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

Alpha, Beta….

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

Rapid release cycles

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

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

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