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Product Aesthetics, Community Development and the Step-wells of Gujarat

If you have had a chance to visit the state of Gujarat in Western India, you have almost certainly seen atleast one of the famed step-wells in the region. Known locally as “baori” or “vav”, there are hundreds of these architectural masterpieces dotting the state. The most famous ones are the Rani ki Vav (queen’s step-well) in the town of Patan and the Adalaj Vav (pictured below) at Adalaj, about 30 kms from Ahmedabad. The former makes it to the list of UNESCO World Heritage Sites and both see thousands of visitors and tourists every year.

Major parts of Gujarat have been dry and arid for centuries, with the Thar Desert and the Rann of Kutch having a strong influence on the climatic conditions. The southern parts of the state border the saline Arabian Sea. Water, as a result, has traditionally been a precious and scarce resource. The step-wells evolved between the 6th and 11th century AD to meet the water requirements of the communities that made Gujarat their home. Today they stand testimony to the vision and empathy of the local chieftains and kings who patronized and funded their construction as a public good. They also offer some excellent lessons in product aesthetics and community development, which can be useful even in the unrelated field of software development.

Product Aesthetics

User Experience: Blending Functionality with Aesthetics

The primary function of a step-well was to be a year-round source of water for the community. The deep, multistoried step-wells made the underground water table easily accessible even during the harsh summer months. It would have been economical to simply construct step-wells as a purely functional engineering structure, without the elaborate carvings, sculptures and rich ornamental decorations that we find adorning them. Aesthetics and engineering however went hand-in-hand in traditional Indian architecture, leading to a wonderful user experience. Art-forms and beauty were given equal importance along with scientific principles and construction. Software product designers and architects need to play a similar role for complex software products – features and functionality must be designed with a view of the user experience and aesthetics in mind. Users may start using your product for its features and functionality, but they will become strong champions and power-users of your product if it’s also aesthetically appealing and elegant to use.

Community Development

The step-wells served not just as a stable water source in an arid land, but also a meeting place for the community. The elaborate structures served as a place for the locals to mingle, interact and probably even spend time trading wares and services. Constructing engaging and beautiful structures served the purpose of people spending more time at the step-wells, strengthening the bonds in a migratory, nomadic and dispersed community. Software products can take a leaf out of this book to engage with their users and promote community development. Recent trends in digital transformation have shown that a strong emphasis on leveraging your user community can pay rich dividends for your products and services. Apart from functional aspects of product design and development, having features that enable users to interact with each other and a community support ecosystem that fosters such interactions is critical to product success, user adoption and longevity.

Legacy and Purpose

In the age of multi-billion dollar valuations for seemingly ephemeral apps, it’s easy to get carried away and look for short-cuts to success. As we all know however, these valuations are more black swans than de-rigueur. The patron financiers, architects and sculptors of the step-wells emphasized building something that would not only serve the people of their generation, but would have a lasting impact on the generations to come and leave a legacy. The sense of purpose was a central theme in the construction and perhaps it should be so for the software products we design as well. It may seem naïve to have this point of view given how “exit route” is one of the central discussions for any funding that is sought. But perhaps a shift in focus to the product vision and what it accomplishes for the users and society at large will help us build more enduring and endearing products.

Are there other interesting inspirations you can draw from these wonderful engineering marvels? Which is your favorite step-well and why? I’d love to hear from you!

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No. 10 : product manager is for successful products, let’s explore 10 success tips

Keeping with the world cup fever, where No.10 is center of everything for success, thought of writing this post on success of product managers, who are the No.10 for success of products.

Here in plan to share 10 tips for successful product management. This is based on my dozen years’ experiences in the function, working in Ramco, Hyperion and SAP, rolling out both successful and not so successful products, primarily enterprise software products.

1. Network to thrive: product managers most important tip is to be really networked, this needs to be in person in 1×1 and 1xN interactions, through social media and web and with internal team for key influencing, especially if you are in a bigger organization.

Network across

  • Build key customer circles
  • Stay close to Sales
  • Specialist groups
  • Coffee corners and peer to peer networking

2. Communicate to succeed: closely connected to the networking, the success to networking is communicate, communicate, communicate…product managers should constantly be communicating with all stakeholders. Whom

  • Internal – Influence without managing, especially with designers, developers and architects
  • Internal – Talk technical or functional
  • Internal – communicate to executives
  • External – Speaking in events, develop Executive presence
  • External – Speaking with customers/prospects

3. Specialize: Remember product managers are the Specialist…

  • Different levels of specialization – Level 1 across company portfolio and strategy, Level 2 across your product portfolio and functional, Level 3 in your product and best practices
  • Functional & Technical expertise (product managers need a balance and understanding of both)
  • Better customer exposure levels will only be more when you are a specialist

4. Know your competitors: product managers need deep understanding of competitors through publically available…Analyst Reports, websites, interacting with sales/presales, Win stories, loss analysis participation.

Important tip is to contribute to competitive differentiation.

  • Both feature/function as well as more strategic levels.
  • Have different comparison charts, ones for your field/sales that will help to highlight how products are better than competitor’s products to sell and for development that highlights weaknesses that will help better the product or build new ones.

5. Know your markets: product managers do not make products for specific customers, but for markets. So it’s important to understand which markets that you are focusing and understand the dynamics of those markets.

  • Understand Developed and Emerging market dynamics.
  • Understand Nuances of each market, cultural aspects e.g. US: Keep it simple and bit high level, Europe : Get to the details.
  • Style of business function e.g. whether in general the focus market is more result oriented or more believers in process oriented style.

6. Negotiate: Product managers spend most of their time negotiating, so acquiring some tips to better negotiate is very important.

  • Talk like a customer to developer, brining customer perspective and value for every key step
  • Be face of development to sales and customers, and bridging the business /technology gap
  • Build data points to back up every discussion
  • Build credibility across internal/external stakeholders, remember the expert tip which is interconnected to make this happen
  • Talk use cases/real life examples/personas…

7. Senior management buy in : connected to the negotiation, but more important is the ability of product managers to negotiate and influence their management.

Remember it’s not enough if you have great idea, you need to convince senior management

  • Be prepared for a 15mins, 30 mins…meetings with ideas & how it can be monetized
  • Leverage every opportunity :
  • Investment in new areas
  • Convincing to continue investment
  • Strategic acquisitions for fast time to market
  • Managing different point of view – as management may have a broader understanding so you need to think and be prepared to tackle those povs.

8. Spread your knowledge: product managers are the experts, but experts are known only if they share their expertise. Important you spread your knowledge

  • Find all avenues to share your knowledge on product, best practices and the “whys?” more than what? Or how?
  • Blog, tweet, build content, do trainings, challenge yourself against real life examples
  • Drive discussions towards the way you want to position your product
  • Pick on customer advisory board sessions
  • Tell your customer success stories

9. Balance your time: Product managers face customers/sales, development and strategic (with management). Time is precious. Important tip is to balance and spend equal time amongst different or else you can’t be successful

10.Mini CEOs: Finally product managers have to behave like mini CEO, within the scope of the products they work. Essentially product managers

  • Claim ownership – with which comes the responsibility of success or failure of the product
  • Have Business (for sales), technical (for development) and user (for designers) views
  • Compare it with market – and constantly strive to improve or reinvent
  • Know your numbers – important to know how is the business doing and what are financial or other goals
  • If you are product manager or one aspiring to be, the above tips should be very handy. While you may or we all have come across, consciously following this may help, as i have found it to be useful as i practice it in my past years of experience as product manager.

Let me know if you have other tips to share, questions on the above or other comments

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Can you implement Growth hacking in your small business?

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

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

  1. Encourage People to use your Products

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

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

  2. Identify potential Partners

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

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

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

  3. Endorsement for your Endeavours

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

  4. Free products along with some Paid Services

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

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

  5. Using Social Media Tools

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Obstacles overcome:

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

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

Metrics is a must

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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Bridging Code to Customer Gap

One of areas I have focused in many years that I have been involved in building and taking enterprise software products to market is, bridging the code to customer gap. This really is the main reason for success or failure of products.

Success of Failure

Inspiration

Inspiration for many of us building high tech products is offcourse Steve Jobs, and here is his take on bridging the code to customer gap

Steve Jobs

Enterprise Business Software vs Consumer Software – Gap is wider

Most enterprise software products have atleast 3-4 layers between the person who codes the software and the business user who uses the product.  Here is the illustration of the chain.

Product Management

Main challenge when we build products, especially business / enterprise software vs. consumer software, is often that we don’t have direct access to what the ultimate business user wants. Here are few more specific challenges that causes product success or failure

Customer side challenges

  • Most people in IT department of customer do not have knowledge of what is required for their business, its many times their interpretation of problem or their perspective of a solution
  • Business users who have the problem does not have time to invest in sharing the same
  • Business users can articulate the problem but do not know how technology can solve it
  • Business users cannot believe that problems can be solved in a different way – resistance to change
  • Business users resist to share information, as it may cause them becoming redundant
  • Business users and IT users have the knowledge of the problem but cannot influence their management to invest the time and money
  • Many business think they are unique and different, and standard products cannot solve their problems
  • Decision makers in Business and IT have different views on priorities and have conflict
  • Cultural differences and perception without objective assessment of problem and solution that the product can solve – startup vs established vendor, geographical boundaries, technology preferences

Product company side challenges

  • Focusing on what customer wants, usually solution provided by customer IT, rather than what’s the customers problem that needs to be solved by the product, which usually needs to come from customer’s business user
  • Carried away by new technology, instead of understanding business impact it can make
  • Lack of adequate specialized skills to build product – architecture, design, product management, developer, testing – assuming having just developers can lead to good products
  • Thinking with a services mindset, basically just focusing and building for few customer requirements rather than for market, especially due to the $ temptations there
  • Lack of understanding of how product gets sold
  • Lack of business /domain knowledge with development team
  • Complete lack of knowledge with sales /presales to show the value of the product
  • Huge reliance on consultants to get the products implemented , to configure and/or customize

Tips on how we can bridge this gap

Bridge this gap

  • Pilot with 2-3 key customers in the market you choose, where key Business person is involved – Get many user stories and business use cases defined from them
  • Identify key people in customer side who has business + IT knowledge or get a team
  • Culture of getting developers to focus on the problem that’s being solved, rather than just getting excited about technology and language
  • Key developers/architect to meet business users instead of just IT
  • Investing in acquiring the functional/industry/domain knowledge imparted to the development
  • Training extensively the product capabilities – Level 1 for Sales, Level 2 for Presales and Level 3 for consultants
  • Training development team how sales happens, who are the target users and what can help sell the product – listen into sales calls, customer sessions
  • Adopting Agile development methodology
  • Building a conscious product mindset into development team
  • Building products that can be managed by business user without IT dependency
  • Adopt design thinking methodology that helps understanding the business viability, technical feasibility and user desirability

Cloud helps in bridging this gap better

The biggest advantage for me with cloud is that it really helps in bridging this gap extensively, as the developer can see how the product is being used, they can quickly react and there is a far simpler code to customer connection.

cloud

Share your thoughts on this and experiences of any additional challenges you have come across or tips that you have in bridging this code to customer gap…..

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How Companies Use Big Data to Help Their Customers?

Big Data has gotten a lot of attention over the past 18 months as retail, manufacturing, and technology companies realize the gold mines they’re sitting on and rush to scour them for competitive advantage. Nearly all of this discussion, though, revolves around consumer trends, marketing guidance, new product planning, and other market-level insights.

Here are how companies are using big data to treat customers more like individuals — and build better long-term relationships so those customers happily buy more and more.

EBay turns big data into intelligent information

EBay conducts a wide variety of activities such as machine learning, data mining, economics, user behaviour analytics, information retrieval and visualization using big data. And the data they work with is of a wide variety: user, user behaviour, transaction, items, feedback, searches.

GE uses big data to power machine services business

GE, one of the UK’s largest manufacturers, is using big data analytics to predict maintenance needs. GE is a big fan of big data, investing more than $100 million in tech companies this year alone. GE manufactures jet engines, turbines and medical scanners. It is using operational data from sensors on its machinery and engines for pattern analysis.

Amazon predicts exactly what customers want before they ask for it

Amazon long ago mastered the recommendation of books, toys, or kitchen utensils that their customers might be interested in. Other companies have followed suit, such as recommending music on Spotify, movies on Netflix, or Pins on Pinterest. Amazon uses big data also to offer a superb service to its customers. This could be the effect of the purchase of Zapos in 2009, but it clearly helps that it ensures that customer representatives have all the information they need the moment a customer needs support. They can do this because they use all the data they have collected from their customers to build and constantly improve the relationship with its customers. This is something many e-tailers can learn from.

But Amazon is expanding its usage of Big Data since it notices that the competition is nearing closer. As such, Amazon added a remote computing service, via Amazon Web Services (AWS), to their already massive product and service offering.

Catching swine flu: how big data helped doctors to understand a pandemic

In the health care industry, big data is being put to work to improve the quality of patient treatment — and save lives. Health care providers in Singapore have gathered big data insights from analytics platforms to transform how they manage chronic diseases.

The swine flu pandemic was an early example of how mobile phone data can be used to analyse trends and patterns of movement. A specialist team from Telefónica used mobile network data to understand how people moved around during the swine flu pandemic. Their findings helped to validate a government’s response to the crisis.

Delta Airlines identified customer pain points and resolve them using Big Data

Most companies know what some of their customers’ pain points are (if they don’t, they aren’t paying attention to their customers.) Those who are digging deep into the data to solve those difficulties are improving their customers’ experience.

For example, take Delta Airlines. All airlines know a top concern for passengers is lost baggage, particularly when they are on a flight that’s delayed and missed connections involved. Delta Airlines looked further into their data and created a solution that would remove the uncertainty of where a passenger’s bag might be.

Customers can now snap a photo of their baggage tag using the “Track My Bag” feature on the Delta app and then keep tabs on their luggage as it makes its way to the final destination. Even if a bag doesn’t make it on the intended flight, passengers save time tracking it down. Finding a new way to put big data to use for the benefit of their passengers put Delta out front in a competitive market.

Why do Product leaders need to understand “Big Data” science?

One of the benefits of Big Data is the opportunity to explore and discover trends in our same ‘ol data. As Product Managers, we should understand the use case and provide some basic reports and views. But we can’t assume to know everything that the user will want to know or do. Instead, we should provide tools that enable the user to explore the data at will. Leveraging big data capabilities can help to form instant strategy decision, spur innovation, inspire new product and services so on and build competitive advantages

Understand how big data can help you make better product decisions, come join the industry connect event on September 13, 2014 at CMR University Campus, Bangalore.

With inputs from Shweta Bisarya

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Simple Dynamic Pricing for Mobile Games and Apps

There are many tactics mobile games and apps can borrow from retailers and e-commerce stores when it comes to selling In-App Purchases. Dynamic Pricing is one of the most powerful of them. This post is going to look at the low-hanging fruit with dynamic pricing that almost every mobile app or game can take advantage of, quickly and effectively.

WHAT is Dynamic Pricing?

Changing the effective price of an item based on the situation or context is dynamic pricing. Note that it is “effective” price. If the grocery store stocks half a gallon of milk for $2.00, and one gallon of milk at $3.00, the full gallon is actually cheaper even though the total dollars paid by the customer is more.

The simplest way to change the price is to offer a straight-up discount to the customer: a dollar off on a $2.99 item.

There are other ways to vary prices:

  • Quietly sticking a new price on the tag.
  • Creating a bundle of different items with a single price tag such that the individual prices cannot be determined.
  • Creating a premium class of the item via additional value (organic milk?) or a limited supply.
  • Etc.

For the low hanging fruit, we will just focus on discounts.

HOW can you give discounts on the In-App Purchase items?

Both Apple and Google require you to declare your In-App Products up front (in iTunes or the Play Store) and assign static prices. The workaround is to create multiple products for every item, but at different prices. The SKU or Product ID will be unique, but you can create a “disable ads for $0.99″, a “disable ads for $2.99″ and a “disable ads for $4.99″ item that all maps to the same item / functionality.

Here are instances of some of the popular apps doing this (showing examples from AppStore because PlayStore doesn’t show IAPs):

Go to the LinkedIn App in the App Store and scroll down to the In-App Purchases section. This is what you will see. Notice the same items at a different price?

Here are Hay Day, Candy Crush Saga and Spotify too:

Or, some games offer bonuses at existing price points like this:

WHEN should you give a discount?

This is the “dynamic” part of Dynamic Pricing. Big businesses, especially retailers, have teams of data scientists trying to determine the most optimum answer to this very question.

The low hanging fruit for mobile games and apps is in determining the basic rules or conditions under which a discount will get a user to make the purchase. Obviously, discounting the same item for everyone at the same time is a really bad idea – you should only do that when having a closing sale: “everything must go”.

Here are some instances of when you should offer a discount:

  • An Abandoned Cart: A user clicked on an IAP but cancelled out at the confirmation dialog from iTunes or PlayStore. Track these events and offer a discount to that user for that item the next time they are in the app. Will this teach users to hit cancel and wait for the discount? It could. One way around it is to offer the discount only when the abandoned cart is by an infrequent buyer.
  • Free Users: Users who have been using the free version of the app for a while and are not paying for the premium upgrade or game currency likely think the price is too high. Offer them a discount once they have used the app for enough time. Extra effectiveness if you offer the discount at a time when they will immediately be able to benefit from the upgrade (extra health just after running out of lives?).
  • Potential Power Users: If there are users who are buying the small packages: the weekly subscription instead of the quarterly, the $1.99 coin pack instead of the $4.99, consider giving them a discount on the larger items to give them a nudge into becoming power users.

These are three “dynamic” discounts your app should have as soon as it goes out of the door. There are lots more, and if you want to pick our brains about them, drop us a line!

HOW MUCH discount?

The next question is obvious: how much should you discount? 10%? 20%? 50%?

The answer is not as obvious: do not pick a number based on your gut. You will invariably be wrong. The human psyche has a tendency to qualitatively evaluate numbers based on the nearest comparison. You might decide 20% is a lot of discount, based on what you see in the grocery store down the street. But the grocery store has a different cost structure and RoI than your app or game.

The right answer would be to test a few different discounts levels: 20% and 40% are good numbers to start with. Apple makes the price choices a little easier by letting you change the price only in $1 discrete amounts.

Also see what other similar games or apps do. If you see the Hay Day example above, they drop the price of their “Bag of Diamonds” from $4.99 to $0.99 – that a huge 80%! The level of discount can also depend on when you are offering the discount: if it is to a first-time buyer for their first purchase only, getting the conversion is more optimal, so the largest discount is the right strategy at that point.

Don’t you incur a loss by dynamic pricing?

Not if your product is 0s and 1s getting duplicated in computer memory. The cost of duplicating is 0. Any price you sell the item at is a profit. In fact, you incur a loss if you DON’T do dynamic pricing. For every user who does not buy your product because the price was too high for them , you incur a loss of the price they would have bought at. This is true of all products that have a zero marginal cost.

All you should focus on is the total revenue, which needs to be greater than your total cost of building, marketing and running the app. Price per unit is not important.

The Lattice system is built to automatically do dynamic pricing in your app. If you want to find out what it can do for your app, drop us a line!

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Personalized UI: Shape Shifting

Whenever we think of Personalization the first thing that comes to mind is Amazon displaying products we are likely to be interested in. The next thing that come to mind is like advertising on the internet. A little more pondering, and Google’s search results and Facebook’s news feed would strike us as being personalized too.

Notice how personalization is invariably assumed to apply to information — whether products to buy or ads to click or statuses to like. The structure around which information is placed often goes ignored — and underestimated — when it comes to suiting the individual.

20140812-shapeshiftingui-man-bike-phone

On the mobile, the ubiquity results in apps rarely getting more than a few fleeting glances. Darwinian economics of App Stores thus have necessitated apps evolve into the leanest units of functionality possible. Any unnecessary clicks, pauses or confusion that could trigger distraction are an evolutionary disadvantage.

Darwinian economics of App Stores have necessitated apps evolve into the leanest units of functionality possible.

A fluid UI that shifts shape depending on the user and their context can streamline the user experience.

There are many simple ways for interfaces to adapt to the user’s context without the need for sophisticated personalization algorithms.

Mobile Games were probably the first to innovate in this area. Starting with a dedicated First-Time User Experience (FTUE or ‘fatooey’) that would run only for new users to introduce them to basic game elements and get them started. In freemium games, it is not uncommon to see different views when trying to buy game currency packs: for players who have never bought before, these packs will be sorted with the lowest priced option on top. But for regular buyers, they are sorted with the highest priced option on top.

(Image Source: kryshiggins.com)

Other apps have started to take a leaf out of this book: the image above is a walkthrough of the FTUE of Weave, a popular ToDo app. Secret and Slack have recently received accolades for their FTUE too. Smashing Magazine has a really interesting guide to FTUEs on mobile:

Adapting UI to context is prevalent in more ways than just the FTUE in mobile apps

1. Screens on GPS devices switch to a darker color scheme at night, for low glare.

2. Language localization is perhaps one of the oldest forms of adapting the interface for the user.

3. Responsive web pages are a great example of the UI adapting automatically, with the context being your screen size.

4. The Uber app changes its default view after you have requested a car, to directly show you where it is and when it will arrive, and put the relevant information immediately in front of you.

5. The new Foursquare app, that notifies you of interesting place around, only triggers the notification when it senses that your location has changed.

(original source: It’s A Read/Write Web by Luke Wroblewski)
(original source: It’s A Read/Write Web by Luke Wroblewski)

6. Knowing that most users use a single thumb of their dominant hand, it might be a good idea for apps to structure their navigation accordingly, AND laterally invert key elements for left-handed users. (If you know of any apps that already do this do let us know in the comments.)

In contrast, desktop user interfaces have static, making all options available at once, and expecting the user to “pull” what they want.

3 key ingredients to consider while designing personalized UI are Identity, Context and Behavior.

Identity

There are two parts to Identity: the first part is knowing every user, being able to recognize them when they come back to your app even if on different devices. Knowing every user more is part of this – various traits that let you tailor the app experience: whether the user is left-handed or right, their internet bandwidth, language preferences, social graph, etc.

The other part of identity is created by the user: their identity in your app. How they use your app, and the persona they create in your app is a large part of this. For example, users portray themselves very differently on Facebook vs. Instagram vs. LinkedIn. Sometimes users use Instagram to post pictures of what they sell to their audience, while other times users use Instagram to share personal photos with their friends.

Context

Context is about the here and now. Knowing if a user is at home or walking on the street can play a big role in shaping the UI of a restaurant recommendation app. Or a payment app — whether a history of transactions on the main screen is more important, or a pay here button. What screen the app is being used on – a TV or a car – will govern what actions are front and center. The user’s local time, whether the user is currently on a subway train or running down the jogging track, whether they came to the app from a specific notification are all piece of context that can be used to personalize the experience.

Behavior

Interpreting users’ collective previous actions to anticipate what they might do, and shaping the UI accordingly is where personalization gets complex but also magical. All content recommendations – products, music, search results, news – do this. With UI, it overlaps with the second part of Identity mentioned above: is the user using a calendaring for their business or for personal scheduling? Can the payment app know if it is being used to pay for purchases or to send money to friends? Can a news app learn about your sharing habits to decide the prominence of the sharing button?

BUT there is a slippery slope to ultimate confusion

The best UIs are the ones that are familiar – the user instinctively knows where to click and how to reach their goal. Too fluid a UI can create confusion. Getting the personalization wrong can be even worse. It is always the right thing to make changes in small steps, and A/B test to learn from how users react.

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YO YO Honey Singh Strategy for Product Startups!

We are a product startup from Delhi NCR and to be honest, not big fans of Yo Yo Honey Singh. He started his music career as a Music Director in 2005 and for 7 years, was virtually unknown. Then, something happened in the year 2012 that catapulted him to overnight success and by 2014, his songs were in close to 15 big Bollywood movies and he wrote lyrics with legendary Gulzar!

In past 2 years, he has been in news all the time, with a Yo Yo Honey Singh song cropping up every few days. He did this by partnering with many established singers and by being in songs of various movies. With his signature voice and style, many might not like him, but one cannot just ignore him.What he did struck us as a great strategy for early stage product startups.In India, customer validation for product startups takes 12-18 months easily and as an independent platform, things get off the track all the time and the period only increases. By using YO YO strategy of piggybacking upon existing, established distribution network, a startup can:

  • Reduce their time to market drastically
  • Amplify their reach substantially in quick time
  • Carry out quick product iterations to reach product/market fit

Ours is a B2B2C product – a white label plugin for payment splitting and aggregation for use-cases like group-gifting, group-travel, group-event booking and crowd funding. We have partnered with multiple e-commerce websites in gifting, travel and crowd funding domain in just a span of three months.

We have learnt that while taking this approach, it is important to take a Selective Distribution approach and tie up with partners that cater to the Target Segment you would have targeted if you had not taken a YO YO strategy and had been an independent B2C product.This stems from Geoffrey Moore’s “Crossing The Chasm” lesson where you must ensure that partners whose network you are leveraging, cater to end target segment your product is meant for, to facilitate organic word of mouth spread among customers.We have a lot to learn and we realise that on path to creating great software products out of India, we will have to embrace innovative and new approaches which sometimes, we might not learn from a Silicon Valley blogger but from Indian celebrities you might not generally like.

Guest Post by Ankit Singh, Aprogift

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Ship Version 1.0 soon!!!!

Finishing the design and development of a product or a service is often challenging for entrepreneurs. That’s because they are so passionate about the product or service that they want to perfect it! Every feature that they think of, appears really really important to them and they want to incorporate it in the on-going development phase. This is even more pronounced among entrepreneurs in India whose product and service design and development never seems to end.

However, product and service designers (founders) need to discipline themselves on working on a roadmap. I.e. A plan for features to be added to a product and launched in a planned and phased manner.

The way to do it is to list down all the features that may be possible in the product. Then categorize them under two heads

(a) Must-have and

(b) Nice-to-have features

(Be careful, don’t go by your own judgment else everything will appear to be a must-have feature… check with others, particularly users/customers).

Once this is done, identify what needs to go into version 1.0, then what will be added to version 1.1, and then what will be added to version 1.2 and so on… When there is a major change from the original version, call it version 2.0.

But, have a road map. And stick to it.

And defining a road map does not mean that you cannot adjust /alter it and add/delete some features. But once a plan is defined and communicated to the team, if anything new is to be added, you should have the discipline of debating and deliberating it and taking a very well thought decision to add something in, and only if it MUST be added.

It is good to have an external review committee (may be a few other entrepreneur friends, a few friends who are potential customers, etc.) to discuss these things with… and perhaps share and test the product periodically.

If you do not have the discipline of a roadmap, you will constantly lumber in development stage. It will appear to be progress, and it will be, there will be no sense of achievement, which comes from SHIPPING A PRODUCT OR LAUNCHING A SERVICE. (A wise senior from TiE describes this as ‘MAFA’ – Mistaking Activity For Achievement’).

Also, if you launch and test with a base set of features, you get a chance to test various things on a smaller scale. Apart from the product or service, you can test the value proposition; communication; brand personality and some other assumptions underlying your business plan (e.g. how many visits does it take to close a sale), etc.

Ask other entrepreneurs who have launched a product. The joy of shipping something is comparable perhaps only to (ok, may be a shade lower than) bringing a baby into the world. It changes the mood in the team. It automatically brings a different level of maturity to the startup. It brings in a sense of responsibility and pride. It multiplies the passion and commitment. Shipping a product or launching a service fundamentally changes the organization. It is a joy that you cannot imagine, until you experience it. And that is very valuable in building the foundation of a strong, scalable company.

(Well, some people have asked me “so, what if we ship and it bombs, it could kill the enthusiasm in the team”. Well, surely it will. But better to hear bad news earlier than later. Also, not for one moment am I suggesting you ship an inferior-quality or incomplete product or a product with fewer features than the consumer/user needs. But don’t over engineer the product, which most founders tend to do.)

So, go ahead. Define your product roadmap. And ship that version 1.0 as fast as you can.

If you have stories of your product or service launch experience, we would love to hear from you. Any learnings and insights you have from your experiences will be valuable for other budding entrepreneurs.

If you have stories of your product or service launch experience, we would love to hear from you. Any learnings and insights you have from your experiences will be valuable for other budding entrepreneurs.

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Pricing your SaaS Product and how we did it at Sosio

In case you aren’t updated on the current affairs, 2014 is shaping up to be a controversial year; and we’re not referring to Justin Bieber’s antics, Mr. Kejriwal’s dharnas or Mr. Modi’s development stories. Instead, a new contention is brewing in the annals for us which is every entrepreneur’s one of the worst nightmare: deciding how much to charge for your product 😉

Pricing is one of the most difficult things to get right. There are several questions that come to us, and its good if we can get an answer for each of them. Should my MVP be free? When should I start charging? How much should I charge? Will I lose my first customer, if I start charging higher? Will the freemium model work?

We get into these FUDs(fears, uncertainties, doubts) because whenever you ask for money, there is friction, which cannot be removed, it can only be minimized. The best way to overcome these objections is to prevent them from happening. Well, I tried to study, how other people, were addressing the same problem, and tried to come up with one for my own product. Its taken more than 6 months, and hours of brainstorming with few of the amazing folks for me to reach here. I will try and summarize few of them.

The trouble with software pricing

Pricing is a basic economics thing. Unlike traditional manufacturing products, where there is a fixed cost of raw material, labour, transportation etc. a cost price for each unit is pretty clear. On this objective value for each of the unit, the sales team, tries to create a perceived value of the product, based on reference points of competing products, and after a basic survey of the demand curve, a price point is generally arrived.

For softwares, the case is slightly different. After break even, the price of a new unit, tends to be negligible. So defining an objective value for each unit becomes tough. Chances may be, the product you are creating may not have a direct competitor, or if there is an alternative it might be free. In that case, extrapolating from a reference point becomes tough.

The price tag you put on your software, is one of the most challenging thing to get right. Not only, it keeps you in business, it also signals your branding and positioning. Iterating on the product, is far more easier than on the price. Lowering the price is generally easy and appreciated but it takes to be an Amazon to demonstrate it profitably. Increasing the price, is tough, because it adds to the churn. So doing the most you can, to get it right, generally accounts for a successful business in making.

Addressing few of the initial Questions

Should I charge for my MVP?

Despite validating the problem that I was solving, and clearly mentioning the price point during the customer interviews in my initial stages, I used to be afraid of asking money for the product, because I had a fear, the product is not ready, the Minimum Viable Product was minimal, I was not sure of the hidden bugs and I was not sure, how deeply have I solved the problem.

The two thought leaders Steve Blank and Sean Ellis had the following to offer –

Steve mentions pricing to be one of the important questions in your customer interview, this helps you validate that the product’s value proposition is compelling enough for them to pay, and the problem is worth solving. Once the MVP is built, Steve asks you to sell it to your early customers. There is no clearer customer validation than a sale.

Sean Ellis, removes pricing to the post-product/market fit stage:

“I think that it is easier to evolve toward product/market fit without a business model in place (users are free to try everything without worrying about price). As soon as you have enough users saying they would be very disappointed without your product, then it is critical to quickly implement a business model. And it will be much easier to map the business model to user perceived value.”

Well both of them have their own merits. So I did an A/B with my customers. I offered two of them, the software for free, and mentioned to the other that we will be charging. The folks who were given free product, did not use it and it got shelved, whereas the ones who were paying, had feature requests, reported few of the bugs they came across, solving these bugs, and responding pro-actively helped me develop better relations with them. The free users asked for additional features, whereas the paying users asked for improved features, which eventually meant a better product.

Personally, I align more towards Steve’s side, because, the best validation you can get for products value prop. is the customers’ bucks, and if it gets figured out initially, nothing like it.

Should I go for a freemium model?

Lincoln Murphy has a white paper on The Reality of Freemium in SaaS which covers many important aspects to weigh when considering Freemium, such as the concept of quid pro quo where even free users have to give something back. In services with high network effects, participation is enough. But most businesses don’t have high enough network effects and wrongly chase users versus customers. The notable point in the above paper is – “Freemium is a marketing tactic, not a business model.”

People have struggled with freemium, and dropped it, with few exceptions of Wufoo and FreshBooks. The conversion for free to paid accounts has been relatively low even for Pandora, Evernote, and MailChimp. 37signals has greatly deemphasized their free plans to almost being fine print on their pricing pages.

Its not impossible to launch successfully with a free plan but things can get easy, when we simplify freemium, not look at it as a business model, with the only objective for it being to get people using your product in a manner that makes them want to pay for more advanced features.

What should I consider while pricing my software?

There are a number of ways to approach this problem.

The amount of money a customer is willing to pay, primarily depends on the following two factors –

  1. Value extracted from use of the product
  2. Emotional Willingness to Pay, which is an after effect of perceived value of the product.

And hence, two of the most obvious pricing strategies are –

Pricing based on the value provided

This is customer-first strategy. The amount of value each customer gets out of using Sosio, corresponds with the amount they pay us. Tried doing it, but devising an excel sheet, where in we could go and show, that you used sosio for X, and it increased your value Y times, is something, we are yet to find.

Pricing based on cost

This strategy takes care of our engineering team, sales cost, server and other rentals. This is generally intuitive from an engineering perspective. Pricing based on the number of accounts, the amount of data that is processed and saved, give us a good number, as to how much we should charge.

But the above approach makes it a uni dimensional pricing strategy. Our product is not just the product, its the customer support, its the number of users, its the problem that we are attempting to solve. The Quality of Support we provide, the response time of the support, Email Support versus phone support versus in person support, number of support incidents, product features and depth of usage are other metrics are other dimensions to reflect upon while deciding the pricing.

There are several params, to consider, and you can go on complicating your pricing and creating complex tiers. Even, I was doing one, till I read this post by Dharmesh Shah, and how he randomly arrived at a price of USD 250. I could have gone for a ballpark of maybe 20k INR, but here is how I arrived at what I arrived – I had few features, which other softwares, were providing as well. I have tied down features, uniquely, but my software, as of now, lacks the depth that these enterprise softwares offer, primarily for 2 reasons –

  1. those features will add to the complexity of the product and cost.
  2. the customer segment, I am targeting, does not require such depth.

What I tried was, brutally trimmed the price 10 times, of each of the features, and talked to customers. They were not willing to pay that much, but because I wanted to get started, I reduced it 50% further, the ones who were, happy, continued, the rest were a good bye.

With subsequent improvisation of the product, the prices will increase, and we will keep iterating on it.

Another advice, I got, while I was discussing my pricing strategy with Prof. Prem was to charge for the service and strategy. Well I don’t want to go into the details of how, an analogy can be if you are selling Adobe Photoshop, reduce the price of software, and charge for educational offers. It is working for me, two of my customers are happy with it.

Deciding a pricing tier

The four things to be taken care of, while deciding on pricing are –

  1. The price tier should be simple(Mixergy just uses the names of the plans as calls to action)
  2. It should be easy to compare, with the competitors.
  3. You should help people choose a plan.
  4. Avoid giving, too many choices. (The paradox of Choice)

An easy way of arriving at the tier is, creating customer persona, and segregating them.Your pricing tiers are a visual representation of where your buyers fit in your business model, and each tier should align to one type of customer.

Tiers makes sense for a lot of startups. But as of now, we are doing without it. Because based on the 50 customers I talked to during the sales process, most of them, got stuck, while I was explaining them the pricing model. If you’re a startup (or any software company) consider if your customers really need the additional pricing levels.

To end it all –

“Although scientifically purer, it often doesn’t make sense to change a single variable at a time. Theoretically, you shouldn’t change the price of your product, your discounting strategy and the types of bundle that you sell, all at the same time. But practically, it can be the right thing to do. It’s more useful to fix the problem than to understand why it’s broken. When a scientist goes on a blind date that doesn’t work out then, in theory, he should fix one variable at a time, and re-run the date. first, he should change the partner but go to the same film and buy the same flowers. Next, he should keep the partner the same, vary the film and keep the flowers the same, and so forth. but the pragmatist in him will, or should, change the girl, the film, the flowers, and buy some new clothes and shave too. If it works, he might not understand why, but at least he’ll have girlfriend.” – Neil Davidson

And this awesome piece by Seth Godin –

Go ahead and act as if your decisions are temporary. Because they are. Be bold, make mistakes, learn a lesson and fix what doesn’t work. No sweat, no need to hyperventilate.”

Guest Post by Saket Bhushan, ADFL at Sosio Technologies

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Appointy: Building a Marketplace of Services

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

Introduction

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

Things have changed over the years:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Product

The story

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

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

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

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

Features

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

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

Customized Appointment Site for business

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

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

Appointy embedded in a website

Flexibility in configuring availability by business

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

Setting flexible hours for staff

Google Calendar Integration

Rich Business Management features

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

Dashboard with monthly appointment data

Customer Management

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

Creating Deals Through Appointy

Differentiators

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

Focus on helping clients grow their business

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

Complete CRM system

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

Data Analytics Platform

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

Development Process

Team

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

Product management

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

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

Release management

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

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

Market

Reach

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

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

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

Product Vision and Strategy

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

Couple of ways they want to achieve this:

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

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

The Road Ahead

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

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

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

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Wooqer – Successful customer adoptions validate product tagline

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

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

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

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

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

Wooqer Customers  & Why adoption matters?

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

Wooqer Customers

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

The Need – What is the pain being addressed?

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

Track Leads - Wooqer

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

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

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

The Product

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

 

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

1. Building block approach

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

Wooqer-Home

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wooqer-on-mobile

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

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

Platform Bells and Whistles  – ‘Have More’

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

3 steps - Wooqer

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

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

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

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

The Market

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

Testimonials & Publications

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

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

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

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

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

The Company & Competition

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

The Founders & the team

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

Road ahead

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

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

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Awesome happy people build awesome happy products.

Being an entrepreneur is always tough, but the first attempt is always the toughest. The social and economic weather in India right now is thrumming with unharnessed entrepreneurial energy and the reasons for not starting up are becoming fewer and fewer.

The odds however, still remain quite high, especially for people who start for the first time. This post is a note on things I learned first-hand on my entrepreneurial journey.

A first generation entrepreneur, I’ve always had a strong desire to build new things and have a global impact. I spent a few years at a large multinational and then started up. I had a fair grip on technology and I had done some intra-preneurial work at my company — that is, built and managed a small product in the field of User Centered Software.

In retrospect, I realise that I did not know a lot more than I thought I didn’t know. I had no idea of how to productise a concept under severely limited resources, how to design products or, what product-market fit is. I had hired and built teams for big companies, but not for a new start-up. I just had a clear vision of the product and a dream to build it.

If you are sailing in the same boat, then read on. There is a lot written about starting up by a lot many people who are much smarter than me. My intention is neither to assume I know better nor more than them. This post is just a set of notes I scribbled along the journey so far. I am hoping this will help folks, who like me are starting up for the first time in India.

Talk to people. The more you share your ideas, the more lucid they will become and the stronger your conviction will become. And chances are, you will get help from a lot of unexpected quarters. Don’t ever be afraid of people stealing ideas. Thieves rarely make entrepreneurs, and even if they do, they are just testing out a new market for you.

Build a company. Not a product — Start by getting the right people on board, whether these are co-founders or employees. If the people are right, they will make everything right. When a product fails the market test, the right people know how to pivot. So one idea morphs into another.

This might be hard in India, considering people often get nervous about changing courses midway. So apart from hiring the right people- which incidentally is a very subjective term — the next thing is to make sure there is a lot of sharing of ideas, frank communication and discussions about the product. Not just daily heads down, code from 9 to 5 stuff. That just makes people robots and kills ideas.

Hire young people with spark. Pay more, hire less — Several times in my 3 years, I have hired fresh college grads over experienced folks, paid them slightly more than they would normally get, and gotten a lot more dedication and valuable contribution. Experience matters, but if there is already enough of that in one of the founders, then spark and energy outweighs that factor.

Hiring fresh grads is tricky. There is very little to judge them with, and the best way to start is to throw a small project or challenge at them. For example, when hiring a UI developer, send him a simple mock, and ask him to code it in a day or two.

Employees are not founders. Don’t expect that. Let me rephrase. It’s ok to expect employees to contribute ideas. It’s ok to expect employees to care about the product and give it their 100%. But it’s not ok to expect them to slog 16 hours a day and over weekends. That is for founders — you and your friend who started up, or you alone. It’s neither fair nor healthy to make employees kill themselves beyond what is reasonable. As entrepreneurs we have a duty to set the right culture across the industry, and to ensure that creativity and energy is not killed by burning people out.

If you are making your employees work weekends, 12 hours consistently, all in the name of product deadlines — you are doing something wrong and it will hit you sooner or later, maybe as killed innovation, bugs, or just bad karma. All of that matters.

Awesome happy people build awesome happy products. Bootstrap but don’t cheap out. If you build a team, because you need a team, then you need to figure out how to keep the team happy within the set expectations. While nice white offices, with MacBook’s and vending machines, is the ultimate way (perhaps) of keeping folks happy — that is not the only way. You will be surprised to find out how, if you can set expectations right, then simple things like letting people work flexible hours, working out of a nice neighbourhood cafe and footing their coffee or beer bills, goes a long way in thinking they work at Google.

Try to be the least smart person on the team. This is a known mantra but I have seen this in action, first-hand. And I need to put this on record that if nothing else pays back in entrepreneurship then simply the ability to hire people smarter than you, and see them execute, is payback enough. The point is, every guy you bring on board should do at least one thing better than you do it.

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Interakt – an all-in-one customer engagement platform, Sudhanshu Aggarwal – Product Manager and Founder @ Fizzy Software, #PNHangout

Fizzy Software was founded in 2007 when I was doing my under-graduation in the US. Back then the Facebook platform had just come out and we saw that this could be an excellent opportunity to build some interesting apps on their platform and the first Facebook application that we built exploded well on the market resulting in us developing more Facebook and I-phone applications. We eventually sold most of those applications because those platforms were very new and we weren’t sure what this would end up resulting in. So we saw an opportunity and we cashed out our applications. I then decided to join Zynga as a Product Manager, where, for over a year, I worked on their internal gaming social network initiative which was developed to compete with Facebook. This turned out to be a great learning experience – lots of very smart people, lot of insights, focus on scale, speed and analytics, etc. However I chose to return to India in 2010 and resumed operations with Fizzy Software where I started a team in 2011 which focuses on design, analytics and feedback to build products and solutions for ideas that we came across.

Interakt.co

The idea for Interakt arose from a recurrent pain point that we observed while developing our products at Fizzy Software. Just to clarify, Interakt is an all-in-one customer engagement platform that brings lead capture, user data, email automation, live chat, web notifications and feedback under one dashboard. Over the previous years when we’ve built products, our goal was always to solve some problem. So we would find that one simple problem or pain point that we were facing and we would build solutions around that.

interaktAcross all these products that we built there was one underlying theme namely “customer engagement.” No matter what product we built, whether it was a B2B product or a B2C product there was always an angle of customer engagement involved i.e. how do you capture customer information, how do you understand what are they up to, how have they used the product, etc. Typically you would engage with your users by maybe sending a marketing email, automated email, informational email or transactional email. They might also have a query so you would want to respond to their support queries, get their feedback or engage in live chat. So there are currently a lot of different methods that websites and mobile apps use to engage their customers. Once we had built a number of products we saw this as one of the main underlying issues that we had to deal with every time we built a product. That is when we started diving deeper into what other solutions were out there and we learnt that we could build a solution which was probably better and more comprehensive and delivered the right value because of which we decided to build Interakt as a central customer engagement platform to allow you to capture, engage and entertain users.

Picking and Choosing

Currently, in terms of customer acquisition for Interakt, we are doing a number of things as I think it is too early to predict what is going to be the biggest customer acquisition driver in the future for us but content writing is a very big thing for us. We are also now trying to formulate a social media strategy where we use Twitter, Quora and other tools to generate more leads and reach out to more people and get their feedback from there. Other than that we are constantly parsing and collecting information about start-ups from blogs and other sources and putting that in our database and reaching out to them. Another big segment for us is our integration partners. We’ve integrated with Shopify, Prestashop, bigcommerce and we are going to be going after their customers and will hopefully win some partnerships and cross promotions with those platforms where we sell it to their customers. People are already used to SaaS based platforms and they understand the value of having everything in an integrated solution. So just like Shopify handles all the inventory management, sales, payment transactions for e-commerce stores, etc. hopefully Interakt could be the place where you manage your customer engagement, supporting your customers, sending them more personalised offers, etc.

At Fizzy software, we have a diverse portfolio of products. So when building a product, we first ask ourselves if we are building this as a viable business or are we building this just because we see a problem and we are really passionate about it. This is something that has helped us determine things going forward. Consequently, we have built products like EmailList.io, LaunchGator, etc. where the idea was we wanted a simple solution where it just did something for us where other solutions didn’t satisfy our need, irrespective of generating revenue from the product. In these cases we built these products almost as hackathons and just opened up these products other people. We sometimes even open source the code if we think it can be beneficial to others to see how we’ve done things. In the extreme cases where we do come up with ideas where we think these are really models or opportunities that could be big, then that is when the decision is to see if this a B2B product or a B2C product and based on that the revenue model decision or the business model decision comes in. We have clearly defined that any B2B product will be a SaaS based play and with respect to any B2C product we want to stay away from advertising. This is an internal decision that if we are doing a B2C product it should be something where there is an alternate source of revenue rather than just advertising dollars because in order to make a lot of money on advertising dollars you need millions and millions of hits on a daily basis.

While building our products, what has been important for us is being clear about the objective. What I have noticed through various discussions that I have had with regards to a MVP is that people have over thought the scaling aspect of things. For example, when I have 100,000 users or 500,000 users I should be able to do this which, in reality, is technically not part of your MVP. The whole idea of your MVP is just to put something out there and figure out your product market fit because getting to a 100,000 users is a very big challenge and it takes probably lakhs of rupees or a brilliant product or some other product features in there which will allow you to grow that rapidly. Dropbox had its own referral system. Evernote just had a great product to capitalise on. So a lot of people focus on scaling which is one thing that we’ve never thought of. Whenever we are building something we prefer to just plug-in basic features that work for that moment and if we have to re-do it once the product goes live, that’s fine. So scaling is definitely one thing we pushed back at.

Product Roadmaps are driven by customer feedback

The core philosophy has been about being able to build that basic MVP in addition to having transparency across the board. We want to make sure that whenever someone is building something they have a clear vision in mind and that everyone in the team is aware of what the other person is doing. Before we build anything however, we require thorough research into the competition and what tools are available in the market in order to enhance and build our product at least on par with what is out there today. I think doing enough market research and gathering enough feedback from people that is basically what should be your first step before you decide to build anything because unless you have Steve Job’s capability of just envisioning something and coming up with a break-through product on your own, most people rely on customer feedback and there is really nothing better than that. So just getting out there and talking to people and figuring out what their response is in order to shape your product’s future is important. A lot of times we’ve been guilty of not doing that. We just went with our gut instinct when we thought that the idea would make a cool product but then we’ve realised, from a big picture perspective, that customer input and feedback from all the stake holders is ultimately what should be driving your product roadmap.

#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.