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2016 iSPIRT Annual Letter

AnHRA0C0tF4mI0qO-9WAwf-AXl383SqEDMGC9He_wzNoSeven years ago a band of volunteers came together to move the Indian software product ecosystem into the next orbit. Three years ago this movement became a think tank, iSPIRT. We pioneered the idea of building public goods without public money in India. Today, India has many software product Unicorns and many more are in the making. We are doing one M&A a month. India Stack is reshaping many sectors especially the financial sector. And, the Government of India recognizes the power of startups and have started changing their systems to enable us. This has been a long and a fun journey for us all. This letter captures what we have been up to, our learnings and our dreams.

Bharat Goenka, Jay Pullur, Naveen Tewari, Sharad Sharma, Vishnu Dusad

Governing Council, iSPIRT Foundation, 4th Feb 2016

 

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Startup India: What Can You Do?

At the Startup India event, our honourable PM shared that government’s impact is highest when it decides, intentionally, to stay away, and I agree with him. But we, as the citizens of India, can play a huge role. And we must.

But as a co-founder of NowFloats, a startup, here are some of my asks to you, my fellow citizens, and you may fall under multiple categories:

To Consumers: Sincerely, kindly adjust.

Like most of you, I have cursed Ola/Uber as much when the driver cannot read the GPS. Many of NowFloats’ over 200,000 customers escalate to me directly. All this is a part of the startup journey. We learn from this and hopefully act fast enough on it. So, please crib to us (speaking for all startups here), act obnoxious, throw a fit, expect the best-in-the-world quality, but don’t give up on us! Because we will fix things, once we get that next round of capital or find more efficient ways to train the drivers or the sales people.

To Enterprises: Startups are a feature, not a bug.

When a startup comes calling, please keep aside your desire to be an entrepreneur. That is a parallel process and highly encouraged, because it will make you adopt the new technology or product. If you are unable to do this, you may be unable to do that startup either (#harsh), where you are required to be a new person every single day (#think). So when a startup approaches you, it’s an opportunity to understand the latest technology, perhaps even get feedback on your own business plan. It’s not the time to feel left-out or ask questions that make you go ‘I could have done this so much better’. BTW, almost all startups are happy to discount their product (or even make it free), if you just agree to adopt (#hint).

To Investors: Stay true to your investment thesis and stage.

An angel investor is (and should be) very different from an institutional seed, and this should be very different from a Series A and so on. Only the wearer knows where the shoe pinches, and therefore only the stage-walla investor knows what the entrepreneur needs. Angels will typically give money based on trust and that’s all they should be bothered about. Blume Ventures (for example) is a seed stage investor and they understand their thesis and stage well. They don’t ask for monthly, 10-page reports from all companies but watch out for the ones who are sending these pro-actively. Their support and help is different for each and they will spend significant resources to deliver ‘personalized’ mentoring to each startup. This will not be the case at Series B, when the startup has its resources (now) to find (read pay) for external support. Our Series A investors, Omidyar Network, puts the next stage of pressure on us, helping us with higher growth and velocity.

To Government: Stay hungry, stay away.

In my opinion, the government has already done something that even they don’t realize it, yet! While some of the policy changes expected by startups remain open (refer my pre-event opinion in Mint & iSPIRT’s 34 point asks), but many were awesome starts. And by doing what the government did, they have unleashed a (wonderful) monster. They made the world (to borrow from them), stand-up and take note. This aircraft has taken off and it’s not landing anytime soon, supported by mid-air refuelling of new and relevant policies in future. Things will just have to happen given the velocity on the numbers and stuff we see every single day (see Digital Desh) (#no #choice).

To Family: Stay.

The real entrepreneurs are the families of entrepreneurs’, even though this was forced on them. To them I have to say only two things: Thank you and please stay the course. Pass or fail, this experience is going to change your family for generations. Just take my word, send your partner that home-made food (to save money and health) and… Stay! (#rockstars)

About Me

I am Jasminder Singh Gulati (@GulatiSinghJ), worked at global corporates for over 18 years, including 12 years at Microsoft before co-founding NowFloats in 2012 with Ronak Kumar Samantray, Nitin Jain, and Neeraj Sabharwal. NowFloats helps local businesses get a meaningful digital presence that connects the business with local consumers, resulting in higher revenue & profits. Over the past 3 years, NowFloats has over acquired over 200,000 customers (90% of them in India) and drives over 6M consumers to them every month. NowFloats has 6 patents, all ‘Made in India’.

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The Dark Secret of India’s Start-up Boom

The Modi Government has made bold moves on the world stage. Its now time to make one at home!

By Mohandas Pai & Sharad Sharma

New-age startups are making waves. Flipkart has redefined retail. Ola is changing how we travel by taxis. PayTm is at the threshold of disrupting banks. Forus Health is attacking blindness with gusto. Eko is bringing financial inclusion to millions. Team Indus is on its way to land a rover on the moon. Nowfloats is bringing lakhs of businesses online. Pick any sector, even agriculture, and you’ll find a new-age startup gamely trying to bring about change.

These new-age startups are not like our traditional small businesses. They are peculiar in many respects. For one, they don’t play safe. They take on incumbents that are many times their size. They seek out David versus Goliath battles. They have a ‘panga’ mindset where our traditional small businessman was all about ‘dhanda’. This craziness in their DNA makes them wonderful change agents. No wonder, these new startups are transforming India from within.

We are blessed to have these new-age startups. It turns out that this new species of small businesses thrives only in a few places in the world. The most famous locale is, of course, Silicon Valley. Europe, unfortunately, is a veritable desert. South America has only Chile as a small oasis. Asia, however, looks really promising. Israel became a startup hub first, then China and now India. We are now the third largest startup ecosystem in the world.

But there is something dark about India’s startup boom. Six of the eight Unicorns have domiciled themselves outside India-in Singapore or US. In 2014, 54% of all new-age startups raising money chose to domicile outside India. Last year this number grew. It is estimated to have crossed 75%! This points to a big problem.

You might wonder why it matters where Flipkart is domiciled. For starters, when Flipkart has its IPO, Indian citizens won’t get a chance to participate in it. Worse, the intellectual property of these redomiciled companies moves to their new home. But the worst is that the money that the founders and investors make at the time of an IPO or an M&A goes to their foreign bank accounts and tends to stay there. It stymies the creation of Rupee risk-capital system in India. It makes are startups almost fully dependent on foreign capital leaving most of them starved and under-capitalized in their early years.

Startup India is an opportunity to stop the exodus. It turns out that only 34 issues, across Ministry of Finance, RBI, Ministry of Corporate Affairs and Ministry of Commerce, need to be tackled. Work has been underway on them since 23rd Oct and 60% of the issues seem to be on their way to a resolution. But this 60% fix is a recipe for failure. Unless all the 34 items are resolved, exodus will not abate. Just one friction point is enough to send the startup to Singapore, where, a welcome band awaits.

Anything that we do in Startup India without addressing the issues on the Stay-in-India Checklist is a gift to Singapore. The Modi Government has made bold moves on the world stage. Its now time to make one at home!

Mohandas Pai was the CFO and then the head of HR at Infosys. He is now Chairman, Aarin Capital Partners.

Sharad Sharma was the CEO of Yahoo India R&D. He is a co-founder of iSPIRT, a non-profit think tank that wants India to be a product nation.  

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Start-ups and think tanks are game-changers

It is time for us to embrace new-age start-ups and local think tanks for India to prosper.

Human development indicators improve rapidly when countries learn to provide health, education and financial inclusion more effectively. Incremental increases in expenditure on welfare schemes and subsidies do not bring about this change. Plugging the leakages in government distribution helps, but it is not a panacea. What we need are game-changing innovations that can tackle India-scale challenges.

In the past 30 years, it has become clear that game-changing solutions do not follow a prescribed path to discovery. Instead, they are born out of hundreds of experiments. These experiments can’t be limited to the labs of a few resource-rich incumbents.

We need to widen the funnel to include the new-age entrepreneurs and innovators. To do this, the government needs to adopt and evangelize pro-challenger tools and policies that reduce barriers to experimentation, create level playing fields and encourage innovating around national issues.

There is some good news on this front. In the past few years, a collaborative effort between several government agencies and the Indian Software Products Industry Round Table (iSPIRT), a non-profit think tank, have helped create key enablers for hundreds of experiments.

A digital infrastructure for cashless, paperless and presence-less (on smartphone) service delivery is now in place. It is colloquially called the India Stack. It offers all the building blocks that are needed as public goods. And the rapid adoption of Jan Dhan Yojana, Aadhaar and mobile numbers (JAM) has created a ready pool of citizens to try out these services.

This enables new-age start-ups to do more complex things than they could do before, making them transformation agents for real India.

These new-age start-ups will deliver 10x gains that we need in health, education and financial inclusion to make India successful.

But we must think beyond start-ups. The Indian state must evolve too. It must learn faster, change faster and implement faster.

A 2013 paper by Luke Jordan of the World Bank and Sebastien Turban and Laurence Wilse-Samson of Columbia University shows that the Indian state performs poorly on these dimensions compared to the Chinese state. They identify many factors for this.

For instance, China has undertaken reform once every five years since 1978, while India has only attempted it twice in 65 years. Therefore, China has been continuously tuning up its capacity to learn and deliver.

In India, substantial administrative reforms are overdue. (The reforms recommended by the Second Administrative Reforms Commission still remain unimplemented.)

It turns out that think tanks have an important role to play too. A dense network of think tanks is necessary to conduct and spread research.

Indian think tanks are mostly central or foreign, with only a few having strong links into the policy system. China has think tanks observing and explaining change. This is a structural gap.

Because of this, the Indian state is conspicuously lacking in its capacity to generate new knowledge, transmit it across the system and act on that.

It is time for us to embrace the two new players—new-age start-ups and local think tanks—for India to prosper. Only then will we able to break free from our current trajectory to meet the aspirations of our young citizens.

Jay Pullur is founder and CEO of Pramati Technologies. He is also a co-founder and governing council member of iSPIRT.

Shashank N.D. is founder and CEO of Practo Technologies. He is part of iSPIRT’s Founder Circle.

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Netneutrality & the fairness for innovation by OTTs

Here is a great rendition of what the evolution of #netneutrality” needs to be and fairness to OTTs with protections against monopoly. Applies equally to the Internet here in the US!
http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/opinion/theres-a-fog-over-net-neutrality/article8089254.ece
Courtesy: Drs. Rohit Prasad & V.Sridhar, IIIT Bangalore

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Scaling Revenue Roundtable

Enterprise Sales, Marketing & Inside Sales Team Build Out, First International Customers Acquisition, Enterprise Pricing etc. I understand, we have heard these topics in multiple events & conferences, so why this round table be different? The difference is gyan vs hearing from real person with real experience which sometimes exactly what you want to hear, even reading 10 books will not help compared to one line coming from a CEO who has done it over and over again and seen the success.

AiAfOYoopNK2-JpnERWxOZdUFD5vPYd5ajC8OOkJg_tPIn this Round table, Aneesh was leading and moderating the discussion. He leveraged the experience of other founders which made the most out of few hrs of interaction. The participants are founders of mid-stage startups, who have good-size customers and have decent ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue), growing and scaling.

This blog narrates the learning in the form of Q&A.

How to establish a meaningful and sustaining Partnership for your B2B enterprise business and grow your business?

  • Partner are those who have done similar product sales in medium/large scale before, so ask them for their sales targets (region wise) and their profile of B2B partnership in their existing set up. That is a good validation point for partnership. {It is like validating by their current and past experience in partnership}
  • Partners could be the companies who are into services (in your industry vertical like healthcare or retail etc) and likes to have monthly revenues.
  • If your product sit on top of other product and integrates then go for a partnership program to the base product. For instance, if your product complements or built on top of Salesforce, then you can enroll in Salesforce has AppExchange program wherein you can list your product and generate good visibility and leads. Partners, could be the product that your software compliments or built upon it.
  • Partners could be the implementation companies of the product that your product built on or compliment. Say your software built on Salesforce, then the service companies who are implementing Salesforce solution could be your partners.
  • You could also go for two-way partnership, like I push your product and you push mine, sometimes one partner performs a lot better than the other, in that case, be open and refine the terms as you go in the journey.
  • If you are enrolling in partnership programs from large companies like IBM, Salesforce etc and see if you can use their promotion events and brand your product, many gives a free offer for promotion. You might end up in getting leads worth a lot that might seems impossible to generate by the solo marketing you do on your own.  These large companies also have paid outreach which has high outreach and see if it is worth investing.
  • Incubator and Accelerator, if you are part of any incubation center or accelerator that helps a lot in getting the right partnership e.g  Microsoft accelerator
  • How to bring transparency in partnership? You might also want to try “Lead Protection Program” which creates 100% transparency in the leads generated, let your partners enter the leads in your CRM & both of you can track the status and you can also make sure that right analytics are coming out.
  • If the partners are asking for exclusivity, ask for minimum guarantee e.g 30 qualified leads per quarter per area
  • Partnership takes time to achieve, so keep experimenting, be conservative and go slow, do a some sort of pilot before you sign larger partnership contract. And ready to fail as it takes time to get into right partnership.

AtT1H_5g3UkqxqIvC6jRlOknnwXUZPnMjQ0GkhyzAymFHow to acquire customers in new international market?

  • You can go with the existing customers and if they have business overseas then you can approach them for the initial open door to international market.
  • Another suggestion is to participate in events and have a booth or something so your product gets exposure and you might end-up in getting partners or customers
  • LinkedIn is a great source to find first few pilot customers in that region.
  • Overseas partnership also you can explore using LinkedIn or Quora, but it is not that easy to find viable partnership
  • And also cold calling for opening doors also worked for few startups.
  • If your product is like B2C then publishing in appstore, Appstore marketing, google adwords would be a good start, but if you are in B2B and enterprise sales, then the steps mentioned in the beginning are the way to go.
  • Once you have handful of customers internationally, select a country where you could open a small sales team may be start with one or two guys and these guys need not be very senior like VP level, 2 yrs to 5 yrs exp and they have to work with India Sales team parallaly. You might need to travel and stay there for a while for initial years to establish a sales pattern oversees.

Ar3dOzl_O6w-FGfJzAg_J7VarpANJbdP-uJ4bFiora6FHow is to do pricing for your product?

  • See your competitor price and product features and how much it solves the customer problem, how your product makes them dependable, this combination will help you to arrive at pricing.
  • If your product a lot better than your competitor, do not lower your price to compete, you need to stay at a price tag for the right product.
  • If your product does not have India based competitor, see the US pricing and create some kind of benchmark value to arrive your pricing.
  • You can have different packaging but not too many, max 3 to 4.
  • You kind of have to experiment with pricing, for e.g one of the enterprise product was priced it 5k for the first few customer during pilot (initial years) and when they need to sell the product in the second year to a bigger organization, they tried quoting 1L and end up in selling at 60k.  So you need to try and see how market is reacting for your new pricing, first few year keep experimenting, you will be able to arrive at pricing between 1 to 3 yrs if not before.
  • When you sell enterprise product, make the price attractive in the pilot stage and after showing the desired results, you can go for high price and the customers would not mind paying it as they have seen the results which impacted their top line.
  • The pricing could be geography based and can be different. And again, find the right pricing by seeing your competitor and demand in that market.
  • If you want to give freemium version, give it free but let the customer give you some kind of asset that you can use for your business like marketing or brand building. For e.g refer 2 friends to get the free version or share in your facebook page to get the access. Some kind of exchange of benefits for freemium version.

What is the most painful growth in the entire journey of the startup?

  • 1M to 5M growth is the most painful where you are likely to make mistakes
  • While growing fast, you need to be careful when reaching to new markets, not all regions works great for your product. US need not be the best market for all products. If you have invested in one region and seems like it is not working, then shutdown and alternate your sales strategy in overseas.
  • Please refer “acquiring customers in new international market” for more details.

How to upsell and cross-sell to your existing customers?

  • There are two ways, first upsell more apps/ additional features to the same customer
  • Second is find out other departments or other sister organization and do a cross sell
  • An customer account is usually handled by an account manager, the upsell/cross sell need be done by different person say group account manager.
  • Every group account manager handles multiple accounts, like 5 to 10 accounts, is responsible for upselling. The account manager finds opportunities for upsell. Do not mix up the account manager dealing with customer on day-to-day basis to do upsell as the negotiation will become very tricky otherwise.

How to give discounts to the customers in SaaS product?

  • The discounts needs to be distributed, do not give them at one go.
  • For instance, do a yearly subscription with 2 months off. Those two months are going to be 11th and 12th month. So incase they leave in 6 months, these discounts does not qualify.
  • Another way you could spread across 3 years like 3rd month, 6th month off, 22th month off for discounts.

How much is the typical yearly renewal increase in ARR for the Enterprise Product?

  • 8 to 10%
  • We need to say 10% increase is very common and if the customer creeps, bring down to 8%

How to get testimonials and referrals?

  • Usually testimonials are done after building a strong relationship with a customer. Usually after 1 or 2 years. Make sure that the account managers and CXO’s of the company has a good relation built with customers to ask for testimonials. Once you establish those soft links, whenever the customer delightness go very high and initiate the process. e.g Release of product feature which solves one of their pain point which the customer demanded for a while.
  • Another idea is to mention this in the subscription or contract time itself. Suppose if the customer is asking for discounts then you can tell him that you can enroll in the “Loyalty Program”  in which you might have to give testimonial & also give 2 referrals and participate in the case study within the first 2 years and you are eligible for this much discounts. This way the customer is well aware of the expectation and also enjoys discounts. Do not give discounts for free, make him have some benefits offered to us.

Does awards and recognizing important for startup?

  • This comes directly into credibility building so it is good to get some recognition
  • The important point is apply for recognition that are credible and genuine with a selection process like boot up awards by ispirit
  • Have some sort of recognition award or have an article or mention in international news & media like Techcrunch, Harvard Business Review, Gartner, Marketing Magazine, Forbes, Wall Street Journal etc.This will help both India & international brand building.
  • You can use a PR agency to reach out these media and appear for the competition or for the product review

Name some books good for Inside Sales and for Complete Sales?

  • Predictable Revenue by Aaron Ross
  • Sales Acceleration formula by Mark Roberge

Is there any online tests used as a first-cut of sales roles?

AkKzIBAt4w99IJ_Uj2_8mQGs0EyU9dnA03l9hY6xQA1qHow to provide incentives for your IS(Inside sales) team?

  • Incentive are always a motivating factor for the Inside Sales team. We have laid out some numbers as a sample for you to see below.
    • 2% to 3% of Annual Recurring  Revenue(ARR) for new customer acquisition.
    • 2% to 2.5% of annual revenue for UpSell/Cross Sell or  have a fixed amount like 10k for all revenue of 3L to 5L per year, 5K for 2L to 3L etc.
    • You can also say, if you get a referral from a customer then the account manager gets 5% of revenue.
    • You can also include testimonial incentives for e.g Video testimonials 10k, Text testimonial 5k, Case Study like 10% of ARR
  • Even you can add some incentive for first go-live means successful deployment and this is applicable for enterprise products
  • Make sure these numbers are published and you make sure the check is given to him as soon as you receive them from the customer.

We would be writing another blog on a related & demanding topic “How to set up a Inside Sales Team from scratch & generates Leads?” in the upcoming week.Stay Tuned and Happy Reading!

Contributed by Asha Satapathy, DocEngage

 

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A new year, a new dawn: Startup INDIA, Standup INDIA

Sh. Amitabh Kant, Secretary of DIPP brainstorms with iSPIRT.

Greeting_Card_for_website_v2 (1)He is the author of the book Branding INDIA, a key driver behind many successful branding INDIA campaigns like Make-In India, Incredible India, and Athethi Devo Bhava (Guest is God) campaigns. He is a decision maker par excellence and above all the Secretary of DIPP (Department of Industrial Policy & Promotion). Mr. Amitabh Kant. who is now also in charge of Startup India, Standup India campaign, met up with iSPIRT, in Bangalore to understand the plethora of Technological Break-throughs and Policy Transformations that iSPIRT is facilitating for the benefit of the Startup Community. He provided some very useful advise by participating in interactive session for close to 2.5 hours.

Prime Minister Mr. Modi in his Mann-ki Baat radio address had announced that the Start-Up India, Stand-Up India initiative will unfold on January 16. The initiative will be anchored by the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion (DIPP). Mr. Amitabh Kant, and his team consulted and deliberated extensively, on opportunities that can be Game Changers for Indian Startups.

On Tuesday, at Shangri-La in Bangalore, iSPIRT with its team of Volunteers which included Sharad Sharma, Co-founder of iSPIRT, Sharique Hassan from the Stanford Graduate School of Business, Shashank from Practo, Sanjay Jain from Ekstep, Jas Gulati from Nowfloats and other volunteers, presented the INDIA STACK, PNGrowth and various other Leap-frogging breakthroughs which will help INDIA innovate for the next 6 Billion people.

Below are some of the key highlights of the Session.

AmitabhKant1iSPIRT Show-case of various Ongoing Initiatives

The session started with a presentation by Sanjay Jain on IndiaStack, a suite of technology-led services, currently being developed to solve identity, payments and personal data management for all Indian citizens. It was followed by Shashank from Practo, about Healthcare, which highlighted how Accessibility and Affordability is helping Health care reach the masses in INDIA. Mr. Amitabh’s participation on both these were highly involved, and he pointed out how States like Rajasthan have taken a pioneering approach, especially in Healthcare. He was quick to point out that if we can create a FEW champion states adopting the IndiaStack and its suite, the rest of the states will quickly follow.

This was followed by Jas Gulati presenting both the book and details around Digital Desh (Impact of Internet on Indian MSMEs).. It was clear that 2nd Tier and 3 Tier India is waiting to explode and join the Internet and Digital revolution in INDIA. iSPIRT also presented its SPiX Index and M&A initiatives helping Quantitatively track the progress and market growth of Indian Startups.

The most intense session was when Mr. Sharique Hassan presented the PNGrowth Initiative Details. China has had an exponential growth in Innovation in the past 15 years, and India now has the Opportunity to repeat the same. However to unleash India’s innovation potential, INDIA needs to capitalize on the Founders hunger and also harness the Institutional assets created by Educational Universities like Stanford, Harvard, Duke etc. Mr. Amitabh was very impressed by the PNGrowth agenda, and commented that it would make an Orbital shift in the Organizational Skills and Strategic Thinking levels of Entrepreneurs in INDIA. He wanted such programs to reach all academic incubation facilities in INDIA.

Ak2Insights and Advise from Mr. Amitabh Kant

If Indian Entrepreneurs focus on Fundamental Science and if they can create a competitive advantage, Mr. Amitabh felt that there was nothing stopping us from leap-frogging the WEST. He was immensely supportive to all programs and in-fact extended financial support for PILOT Projects in various spheres discussed. However, he had 5 important pieces of advice.

  • Pilot projects need to achieve success in at least some corners of INDIA.
  • Nothing Succeeds like Success, so it was imperative that we quickly implement ideas.
  • Institutional Mechanics will follow Innovation, there are several District level funds, MP Lad Funds and also Innovation Funds.
  • Startup challenges can be addressed quickly by Joint Inter-ministerial committees provided we can carve out clear definitions and scope for those challenges.
  • Policy Levers will respond to fast changing needs of Startups. Startup India, Standup India will make sure that ease of doing business is a top priority.
Conclusion
Mr. Amitabh Kant was highly impressed with the body of work presented to him. He said that everything from Challenge Grants supplementing the various RFP tendering processes, of the Govt, to the Inter-ministerial committees quickly acting to enable the Growth levers, were geared to make sure that the Startup Entrepreneur is successful. iSPIRT on its part is fostering and facilitating many such conversations to nudge Policy Makers help the Startup Ecosystem. For the Entrepreneurs, its now up to you to Stand-up and Start-up, to create a new dawn and a new beginning. Happy 2016 to all change makers!
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Internet.org & the debate around NetNeutrality

WISH YOU ALL A HAPPY NEW YEAR 2016 !

The debate around Internet.org and the #Netneutrality is very interesting and how startup founders and ordinary citizens are engaging is very fascinating. Proud of you young India for your activism!

As per an article published on NDTV titled “IIT Faculty, Startup India vs. Zukerburg’s Free Basics”,Facebook says that Free Basics (the main thrust of Internet.org) is aimed at bringing free Internet to millions of poor mobile phone users in rural areas. The package offers free news, health, and job articles from partners along with a text-only version of Facebook.

Even TRAI or the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India is actively looking into this from a regulatory point of view to see that the Internet has fair access for all and content/app. developers have equal opportunity/access to deploy their products & services.

Netneutrality activists say Zuckerberg’s plan violates the principle that the whole Internet should be available to all and unrestricted by any one company. They see it as a Trojan horse being used by Facebook to control access to the Internet.

Content provided by Free Basics is available free to mobile phone users, but they have to pay for other content – described by critics as “differential pricing” which results in a “tiered Internet” instead of providing a level playing field that allows innovation and startups to compete with established corporations.

So what is the truth?

The bottom line seems to be that some content access and apps seem to be bundled with Free basics on the Facebook branded phone which will be available free to folks in rural India.

In an editorial for the Times of India earlier this week, Zuckerberg wrote, “Instead of wanting to give people free access to basic Internet services, critics of the programme continues to spread false claims – even if that means leaving behind a billion people.”

As reported by The New York Times this week, on India, “the program offers free Web searches using Microsoft’s Bing service but Google searches incur a charge.”

So it appears that most of the content that is already freely accessible on the Internet will be  available free to the Free Basics service patrons including the text version of their app. So far it seems to be fair. The quarrel seems to be for the app developers (startups and established ones like PayTM, FlipKart and others) who may lose out to these patrons because the Facebook branded phones may not accept downloading their apps. Its a legitimate concern.

As this is being framed as a #Netneutrality debate, it should probably be understood in the
context of what Facebook and their carrier cohorts like Reliance and Airtel can do to create a monopoly.

Here are a couple things:

1. They (Facebook) could ban free downloads of outside apps. to their “branded” phones
2. The carriers could prioritize Facebook traffic from Free basics (Facebook) phones on their data networks through available & new QoS (Quality of Service) mechanisms.
3. Once they acquire critical market share among the rural areas, Facebook could charge app developers to deploy or release their apps like the equivalent of Google Play Store (Android) or Apple Store (iPhone).

So as long as Facebook promises this kind of openness for app developers and the carriers don’t make preferential treatment to Facebook traffic, #Netneutrality can be maintained. In the absence of this, which is very much possible depending on how Facebook plans to make revenue in this market, TRAI or any other Internet regulatory authority needs to be able to monitor this for any violations.

To help TRAI, there needs to be a way to monitor this traffic!

Maybe this could be good “startup” idea to develop technology similar to “network security monitoring” (deep packet inspection) of malicious traffic on the Internet. But this idea is dependent on knowledge of vendor networks (network equipment gear) that carry most of the traffic on the Internet today.

Any takers?

It will be unfair to ban Facebook or their Indian carrier partners to provide this service subject to they NOT violating their promise in letter and spirit!

Of course as we say here in America, TRUST but VERIFY!

 

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The last list – the final 25 #PNgrowth companies.

This is it, then. The last announcement of #PNgrowth 2016 is here. We have now the entire 200 companies who will get together in January for the inauguration of what is the most ambitious mentorship programs for startups ever put together in India. We now have about half a month to go, and it would be great if the companies talked to each other, think about what they want out of this, and discuss stuff. We have set up a Facebook group just for this, and we will be taking pointers for program design from on there, so be sure to get on it.
 
For further announcements, you can follow us here or on the Facebook group itself. 
 
25-founders-collage-8th batchSo here we go, the last 25. #Pngrowth 2016 is well and truly on!
 
Sivaram Subramaniam of CavinHR
Puneet Sharma of Bugclipper
Satish Kamat of Jambuster
Jay Thaker of sumHR
Salar Bijili of Cuecontent
Hari PK of Bigfoxx
Dr. Shikha Suman of Medimojo
Sanjay Shah of Zapty
Nikhil MS of Clusterzap
Sumesh K Menon of Winds Business solutions
Vinay Simha of Amiya
Kavita Khandadia of Mytripkarma
Vivek Beria of Whizzwifi
Dharam Mehta of Wedwise
Saurabh Saha of Talentpegs
Ish Jindal of Hellotars
Arvind Batra of EventsHigh
Satish Kashyap of AlgoEngines
Subrat Kar of Vidooly
Vishal Singhal of Artzolo
Nitin Chadha of Sride
Suraj Goyal of Printbindaas
Sarang Lakare of Intouchapp
Rittvij Parekh of Pykih
 
See you all over there!
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Open Source and SAAS

While open source software is a fairly well understood in concept, I am always surprised how little it is understood in practice. At a round table of young product companies last month, there were a lot of raised eyebrows and questions when I explained our open source way of working.

Jordan Hubbard, co-creator of FreeBSD and open source veteran, spoke on this topic at this year’s ERPNext Conference, and he basically said this, open source business is all about people. Since the product is free, you sell services around the product, which is your people. This is mostly true for the very large majority of businesses that have mushroomed around open source projects, providing installation, hosting, customization, maintenance and other services around the product.

But there is now a new variable in the equation, SAAS (or Software-as-a-Service). It has been already accepted that SAAS is the way software is sold today. Listed companies like SalesForce, Xero, Zendesk, Workday, NetSuite, Hubspot, Shopify are testimony to the success of SAAS products and the billions of dollars that get spent on SAAS products each year. What does the future hold?

As on-premise is slowly moving into SAAS, I believe that SAAS itself will move into open source. Since the unevenly spread future is already here, there are companies already successfully doing open source + SAAS like WordPress, Ghost CMS, Magento, ERPNext (disclaimer: that’s us).

Open source + SAAS makes a great combination.

Benefits to the user:

  1. Open source products allow virtually unlimited possibilities to deeply integrate the product.
  2. There is a lot more risk in a closed platform, like price increase and slow pace of development.
  3. There is no vendor lock-in
  4. Free!

Benefits to the publisher:

  1. Not everyone wants to host their own infrastructure, this opens up opportunity to build a SAAS platform
  2. Provides word-of-mouth marketing
  3. Vibrant community attracts more users
  4. Community contributes by providing feedback, support, features, fixes, integration, testing, documentation
  5. A lot more incentive to write good code and documentation
  6. Much easier to find and on-board new developers to your team

Going open source is not easy. Business are built on the premise of transactions, and in open source, you have to be very open to giving and communicating without expecting immediate results. But once you cross a certain threshold, community participation can be extremely rewarding.

I am not advocating you open source your product today, but as Wikipedia has shown us, its only a matter of time before someone builds a mature open source product that might replace you.

Then there is no going back.

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Traction Trumps Everything – How to get traction for your SaaS product

A wise and successful entrepreneur once said, “Traction trumps everything”.

Indeed, traction is the only thing that brings you customers, VCs, and energy to keep going.

iSPIRT in partnership with PuneConnect & SEAP organized a playbook roundtable on “Getting traction for your product startup”. It was focused on peer to peer learning and taking away real feedback, rather than just typical “general gyaan”. The playbook roundtable was moderated by two very successful SaaS product entrepreneurs Niraj Rout of Hiver (earlier known as GrexIt), and Rushabh Mehta of ERPNext. Both are building highly successful SaaS products bringing very different approaches/strategies yet finding great synergy in their thought processes. Hiver is a simple-to-use product for business workflows, fast growing, young, funded and profitable startup whereas ERPNext is a highly complex, very stable, bootstrapped, profitable, world’s second opensource Saas ERP product.

The RT discussion was attended by founders building SaaS products in Innovation, eCommerce, business communication, personal customer loyalty, education, personal finance, recruitment, fashion and technology domain.

SaaS Valley of Death: Rushabh got our attention right away by asking “Do you know SaaS Valley of Death?” Its like your product is complex to use and cheap at price. Its very very difficult to sale. You can be either very simple to use and cheap or you can be highly complicated and pricey. You can’t be cheap and complicated. But ERPNext falls in that category. Rushabh briefly shared his long haul journey of 8 years of building a product out of his own need and making it open source for people to use/modify it. ERPNext gives it at fairly low price to host it and charges additional for product consultancy.

Open-Source strategy: Rushabh realised that if such a complex product has to have innovation, then hiring talent is quite difficult. Instead making it open-source brings immediate advantages such as your users brings innovation, it is easy to hire from the developers community which already knows your product code, less efforts needed to support the product as your community is your biggest support structure. Recently, this trend has started by major tech companies like facebook, google and others by making their api’s open-source for community to play around and bring true innovation. Also interesting to say here that open source is more than a marketing strategy, you have to believe in it to work. Also companies are open sourcing not just APIs but also entire projects (Apple just joined with Swift)

User Onboarding:  It is very easy to get signups, but what happens after signup is the crucial one. The real game begins from sign up onwards. Rushabh at ERPNext created a great user onboarding workflow for various categories of users. At signup, ERPNext asks its user several questions to understand user and his/her needs. Accordingly, it customises the rest of the onboarding flow. This “personalized” flow helps user to connect and understand ERPNext quite easily. There are several videos created for user to educate about product features and uncover true benefits. “Founding/Core team has to take product to a initial revenue level, until then one should not make a mistake of hiring a sales person”, insisted Rushabh. This helps you build and quickly tweak/change onboarding flow as your know your users better. This also helps in positioning and marketing the product better.

Product Market fit:  Niraj of Hiver (GrexIt) shared his journey of conceptualising the product as knowledge management place (for enterprises) to pivoting to tap a SME segment where quick workflow matters. Its all about finding a product-market fit. On a lean methodology which suggests to work with your customers and tune the product, Niraj shared a good observation. If you talk to your customers, they will always suggest small incremental improvements/suggestions, customers can never give you extraordinary (or 10X) innovation. Its your vision that defines what your product could actually do. However it’s essential to understand how users are using the product and what key activities they are doing repeatedly.

Buyer’s mindset:  For a product, you have to understand whether it helps user generate money or save money. Does your product falls into cost center or revenue center, accordingly you have to create your marketing campaigns and positioning.

Simple Growth hacks:  Startups don’t have big pockets to spend on marketing/sales. Simple techniques like Your domain specific keywords, Search Engine Optimization, Influential bloggers write about your product, your customers talking and referring your product are a few simple growth hacks every startup can try. Always get real customer’s/brand’s testimonials and showcase them on key pages.

Critical choices:  In the initial days when you don’t have traction, its an important call whether you want to give it to a few people and learn and tweak the product or you just throw it in the space for thousands to use and let them figure out. Both have their own pros-cons.

Post Lunch session, Niraj and Rushabh encouraged every startup to showcase their product’s landing page and quick onboarding workflow. Duo and other founders provided critical feedback to individual founders with immediate actionable takeaway. It was a great peer-to-peer learning exercise. Below is a summary of what came out of the discussion that generically applies to most SaaS product startups.

Landing page:  Product’s landing page is the most critical real estate. Be innovative and build it wisely with new/current trends. A few examples of well designed landing pages were discussed. Products from 37Signals (Basecamp and KnowYourCompany) were highlighted for their innovative approaches. Like Steve Jobs once said, “Good artists copy, great artists steal”, you need not to always reinvent the wheel, just see the best products in your category and steal (find inspiration)!

A few tips for a well designed landing page –

1) The main image and punchline should be appropriate for user to understand your product quickly. Thats where user decides whether I should scroll down (to know more).

2) Always talk about benefits user will get, nobody cares about features.

3) More than 3-4 scroll is overdone. Have only essential information upfront so that user is not overwhelmed with information overdose.

4) Testimonials from real user/brands works great, people feel more comfortable.

5) Less verbose, more visual is always better.

After Signup (User onboarding):  Engaging with user for first few days and making personalized communication helps build rapport as well as improve stickiness.

1) Build a user friendly Quick tour with an option to quit and restart

2) Let user experience your product as quickly as possible

3) Videos or user guides “How to” are essential and helpful

4) Website and user behavior analytics tools like Google analytics, KissMetrics, Mixpanel provide good data know your users better and make appropriate changes in your product

5) Intercom like products helps you build user behavioral based engagement

6) Provide triggers/incentives to appeal user to perform certain actions. Nir Eyal’s HOOK framework  (Trigger, Action, Reward, Investment) was briefly mentioned to emphasise the point.

7) Your product is a leaky bucket, user may fall off anytime. Identify such holes and fill them up with creative solutions

7) You don’t have to be too generous with free plan. Start asking for money (plan upgrade) for valuable/exclusive features

8) Track analytics daily to know traffic to trial to paid customers journey

9) Always do A/B testing of every change/tweak you make to understand how its working.

10) Understand, there is always a churn. Account for that

11) Always promote long term (annual payment) plans, it gives you better visibility on your revenue. 

As traction book says, “Almost every failed startup has a product, what failed products don’t have are enough customers (traction)” and “Traction is growth. The pursuit of traction is what defines the startup”.

This playbook RT was first of its kind where only real stuff was discussed and critical feedback was provided to every startup on their product traction leaky bucket. All startup founders walked out with several actionable takeaways.

There are great SaaS product startups coming from India. The successful entrepreneurs like Niraj and Rushabh have vigor to share their learnings and help budding entrepreneurs to avoid mistakes and leapfrog their journey. This is a movement to build a product nation, one roundtable at a time.

Guest post by Abhijit Mhetre founder at Canvazify – a structured innovation platform for teams to collect, brainstorm, and act on ideas. Abhijit is passionate about startups and collaborative innovation. Follow Abhijit @abmhetre

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One more list to go. The last #PNgrowth companies are here!

We are at the end of the announcements of shortlisted companies for #PNgrowth 2015. There’s only more to go after this, and we want to thank all those who applied. We put this event together for you, and you have responded. We are working hard on the programs so you get maximum benefits from Mysore and the subsequent interactions.

So here you go, the second-last list of #PNgrowth companies. Congratulations to the finalists, and there’s only one more to go.

25-founders-collage-7th batch

Sharan Madawal of Inzaxis
Suneil Chawla of Influencer
Alan DSouza of Vavia
Paul Mathews of Nethram
Sidharth Wadehra of Terrabees
Rashmi Padhy of Koove
Rahul Reddy of Nutrifi
Nishant Pandey of Getgreaser
Ankit Dudhwewala of Softwaresuggest
Anil Gupta of Smart Buildings
Abinash Saikia of Enclouden
Vaibhav Lodha of FTcash
Abishek Ballabh of Extraaedge
Abishek Humbad of Nextgenpms
Abhijit Choudhury of AzureAiken
Ashutish Verma of Paymateexpress
LN Mishra of Adaptive processes
Navin Chandra of Mavsocial
Barbara Main of Minsh
Suvodhoy Sinha of Adnabu
Abhijit Mhetre of Canvazify
Krupesh Bhatt of Legaldesk
Rani Paruchuri of Dreamtekis
Akshay Gautam of Heymojo
Manik Mehta of Linkmysport

Congrats to the chosen ones!

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We are almost at the end of the lists. Here are the next 25! #PNgrowth

So here are the next 25. Only two lists remain, and the calibre of the people on here in itself should convince you what we have put together.

Mysore 2016 is going to be super awesome!

 

25-founders-collage-6th batch

Jayadev Mahalingam of Piqube
Sachin Sharma of Townscript
Shardul Mohite of YogurtLabs
Nitin Gupta of NavStik
Vinay Nathan of Altizon
Mandeep Makkar of Amigobulls
Prasad Nagalapura of Vitamap
Nitin Kapoor of meetuniversity.com
Dilip Ittyera of Aikonlabs
Osho Sidhant of Craftemporio
Niranjan Nokhate of Frapp
Srikanth Chellapa of ContactDoctor
Vasanth Sampathkumar of Honeytask
Pranav Tej of Vibrantworkapp
Ajay Chanam of Halfsteprock
Raghu Mittal of Handsrel
Vaibhav Jain of Teramatrix
Jyoti Sahai of Kavaii
Shivam Mishra of Ahataxis
Ravi Datanwala of Appice
Rajarshi Chakraborti of Grosum
Aatash Shah of Edvancer
Hari Venkata of Mybustickets
Sangeeth Velekett of Bixera
Parichay Das of Rootalpha

Congratulations to the chosen ones again!
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Entrepreneur..rise..fail..resolve..rise..fail..resolve..rise

The life of an entrepreneur is really interesting and very challenging. It is interesting because they are trying radical ideas and something which has possibly been never tried before. Challenging because they are walking along unchartered territories and there is joy, disappointment, surprise, shock, failure and success lurking around every corner. It really tests your persistence, patience and steadfastness as you keep discovering your path amidst this uncertainty.

3-ladder

The question is – what keeps him/her going? What is that single most important trait which gives strength to the individual to beat all odds and deliver something which is valued manifolds as time progresses?

I think that the single most important talent is to use every challenge he faces to his advantage, by resolving to fix it for the betterment of the product, team and overall venture.

Now contrast this to the corporate world. When majority of the employees in a corporate run into a problem which they couldn’t foresee or have no clue about, they usually resort to one of these standard options (i) find an excuse which can convince their manager (ii) present data or polish a ppt in a manner that the problem is under wraps (iii) find a scapegoat to take the blame. In the end, when faced with a challenge which has disrupted all their planning, the recourse is to save their skin one way or the other. Nothing wrong here; as this is the inane tendency of all living beings!

The entrepreneurs also do exactly that, i.e. save their skin in the startup game. It’s just that they know that the only way to do this is to get a handle on the problem and find a fix or a workaround so that the venture can still make progress. Actually, they have no other option. There is no boss to think of a convincing excuse, no scapegoats to take the blame and any data-dressing to swipe the problem under the carpet will tantamount to fooling no one else but themselves!

So, the entrepreneur does what they must – take the bull by his horns! Roll-up their sleeves and get down to fixing the problem. What could it be – is it because the customer does not understand the true value proposition of the offering? Is the UI confusing and not good enough? Are people gaming the system? Or is he targeting the wrong segment altogether. Could it be that their go-to-market is not really helping him to reach their target group? This analysis starts and one by one, every single proposition is ruled out with the data available at hand; and accordingly the solutions are deciphered. By the time they have fixed the problem, either the product has improved or the go-to-market strategy has become more laser-focused. Whatever the case may be, the venture has moved one step closer to success!!

But then the dawn of the very next day brings with it new challenges and the entrepreneur gets into this never ending problem-solving mode. With every fix you rise, create a new set of challenges and fail a little, solve them and then rise again. The cycle just keeps going…

Agree?

Image Courtesy.

 

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Welcome to DrupalCon Asia!

It was in 2011 that Srijan spearheaded the first ever Drupal Camp in Delhi. A few meetups had happened before this. There were barely 50­-60 of us at the Camp, but the interest in Drupal was high. Some of us even dared to think that one day we could have Drupal’s global conference, DrupalCon, right here in India.

Cut to today. We have the very first DrupalCon of the continent being hosted in Mumbai in Feb 2016. And when we look back, as a community we have grown and come a long way!

Drupal started off as blogging platform in 2001, today Drupal is recognized as a robust enterprise-ready web content management. The latest release, Drupal 8, has a modern development framework and technical improvements to help us build multilingual, mobile and highly personalized experiences of the future. But technical wizardry aside, the best feature of Drupal is the community. With over 1,000,000 passionate developers, designers, strategists and architects, Drupal has one of the largest open source communities in the world.

Increasing number of Drupalers: India has over 70,000 registered ‘Drupalers’ and is  the second highest source of traffic on Drupal.org, the global community portal

Huge contributions to Drupal code: Developers from various Drupal agencies and IT companies in India have committed their time and skill into resolving critical issues for Drupal. In fact, India had the second largest number of contributors working on the Drupal 8 core.

Camps to encourage Drupal talent: All this has been made possible because of the efforts of Drupal agencies, and their efforts to build the community by conducting Drupal Camps in various cities. Delhi, Chennai, Hyderabad, Bangalore, Pune and Mumbai and many other cities have been conducting Camps, and it is heartening to see the Camps getting bigger each year.

Global events, the DrupalCons: DrupalCons are mega events for the community, drawing Drupalers from across the globe. These are held across the US and Europe and give the community a chance to come together and participate in learning sessions, talks, code sprints and social events. Indian companies have been regular participants at DrupalCon events in Los Angeles, Austin, Barcelona, London, Munich and more.

IIT, Mumbai will be the venue for the first Drupal Con in Asia: That India is avenue for a DrupalCon speaks volumes about the strength and passion of the Drupal community in India. DrupalCon Asia has lined up top speakers from the Drupal community across the world to present valuable tech and business sessions. A key highlight of the event is the one­day Business Summit, where Drupal agencies will discuss trends and challenges for their businesses today.

Engage with DrupalCon: We would like to invite the Indian IT community to engage with DrupalCon. There are many ways one can do that. IT companies can send their Drupal and PHP developers to attend the event and keep abreast with the latest in code. Companies seeking Drupal development, and Drupal agencies will find the one­day Business Summit very insightful. Companies can also be sponsors for the event, details of which are here.

DrupalCon Asia 2016 is going to be an exciting event, and pathbreaking for the Indian Drupal community. Come, be a part of it!

Contributed by Rahul Dewan an entrepreneur, open source and agile evangelist, blogger, green activist and yoga & meditation practitioner. He is the founder of Srijan Technologies, a 13­ year­old consulting company with expertise in building high­traffic websites and building online business applications.