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MakeMyTrip’s Deep Kalra on bowling, resilience and going against common sense

Deep Kalra is the founder and CEO of India’s leading online travel company MakeMyTrip.com. Founded in 2000, the company is now the largest e-commerce business in the country and listed its shares on NASDAQ in August 2010. Prior to founding MakeMyTrip.com, Mr. Kalra has had corporate stints with GE Capital, AMF Bowling Inc. and ABN AMRO Bank. He holds an MBA (PGDM) degree from IIM, Ahmedabad and a Bachelor’s degree in Economics from St. Stephen’s College, Delhi.

Read on to find out about the true test of an entrepreneur, the importance of knowing dhanda at a startup and going against common sense.

[Innovate Delhi] You believe in turning what one loves doing into a business model. How did you figure out what you love and turned that into India’s leading online travel company? 

Deep Kalra[Deep Kalra] For all entrepreneurs you have to focus on something that you love. But it definitely took me three jobs to figure out what I loved – I worked in banking, I worked in a very entrepreneurial role at AMF Bowling and I worked for GE Capital. Between these three roles, I figured out that I enjoyed the untrodden path. I was excited by stuff that had not been done before or at least not been done before in this part of the world. My second role was very entrepreneurial and I enjoyed that the most despite the fact that it was not financially a success. But I really had the time of my life which made me realize that I rather be doing my own thing.

What did the failure at AMF bowling teach you? How important do you think failure is in an entrepreneur’s journey?

AMF Bowling was a game changer in my own mind in terms of approaching different problems. Here was a problem that had not been thought about – How do you sell a family entertainment center around bowling which had not existed before? Addressing this problem was a learning curve in doing dhandha which is different from corporate business. Overall, it was a good learning experience in terms of a start up and solving problems that had not been solved before. It was also very personally fulfilling to me and I didn’t want to give it up. In hindsight, common sense would have dictated that I called quits within a couple of years but I worked with AMF Bowling for four years. So it also taught me that I can keep my head and chin up during a period when things are not working.

How is doing dhanda a unique challenge in itself? I read that you have bribed repairmen with bottles of rum to fix rat chewed cables. What challenges does the Indian entrepreneurial space pose and how do you deal with them while ensuring that you don’t lose sight of your larger goals?

I didn’t make a habit of bribing repairmen with alcohol but did so some unconventional stuff! The important lesson is that in the first many many years an entrepreneur should be ready to do anything and everything. And a lot of people are not. It’s better to start your entrepreneurial journey earlier than later because you have lesser hangups. At the same time, there is something to be said about good work experience. I don’t know what is a good amount. For me it was 8 years. But some entrepreneurs have never worked for someone else. I would recommend, especially in the Indian context, to work for a couple of years in a good company. It will help you later in life- you want to hire good people, you want to keep them motivated, you want to do the right things. I don’t think any amount of education prepares you for those kind of decisions.

In the initial years, an entrepreneur spends most of the time doing non-core business because you don’t have a team. And in India, things take longer. But hopefully with more interest and infrastructure in this space, the processes will get shorter. For instance, its getting easier to hire good talent. A startup is no longer a very unusual career. As an entrepreneur you have to be an excellent seller because you are selling all the time. Even if you are not doing the traditional selling of your product, in the early stage you are selling to get good talent. You are selling your story, your company all the time. You have to convince people to give up their great job at GE Capital or a think tank or Unilever etc to join one’s company. And then you need to sell to raise money. Each time you go out to meet current investors and potential investors, you are selling without realizing. And you have to work harder to sell your story in India because there are fewer startup success stories here.

You have clearly done a great job of selling to potential hires, MakeMyTrip has consistently been ranked amongst the the Top 10 “Great Places to Work for in India” by The Economic Times in the last four years. What is the culture at MakeMyTrip that make it such a great place to work?

The culture at an organization is related to the founding team or founder. One of the titles that the founder carries through life is Head of Culture. The founder has to walk the talk. I think it really comes down to passion and personal values of the founding team. Because then you end up hiring people for values. Then you start percolating down those values among similar minded people into a “culture” or whatever you want to call it. Over time it becomes established and you can talk about it.

In your corporate and entrepreneurial journey, how do you think the Indian entrepreneurial space has evolved and what are the most promising trends today?

There has been tremendous change in the last 3-4 years. The quality of entrepreneurs is improving. People have a much better overall view of what they want to do and what they need. There are lesser and lesser people who want to do something that’s cool. So folks are coming in for the right reasons. I love that there has been a great increase in the amount of angel funding that is available but there is big gap between angel and early and Series A and Series D deals. You can get your first round of capital fairly easily if you are an individual with a good plan but you have to be ready to perform in the next 12 months to get your Series A.

Do you think entrepreneurship can be taught or are entrepreneurs born?

I think its largely inherent. When things are going well, anyone would rather work for themselves everything else be equal. But that is typically not the case. Everything else is not equal. Let’s say you are going to make 50% of the money. Then what is it that you really want to do. And I think that is the test for if you want to be an entrepreneur or not. And yes, entrepreneurship can be taught but I think entrepreneurship has to be learnt more than it can be taught. And you learn it on the job. Ultimately, if you are happy being on the job, everything will work out.

If you were a judge at Innovate Delhi, what would be the top three qualities you will look for in an entrepreneur?

Agility and flexibility is one. There is a fine line between stubbornness and resilience. You have to believe in your idea but also be practical enough to make changes as you go along. You have to be wired analytically. I don’t know of any other way to run business. Creativity is important but if you are not fundamentally analytical then you will end up making decisions that are sub-optimal. And the third one is being a very good people’s person. It goes back to culture and teambuilding and it is something that comes to entrepreneurs naturally.

This blog post was written by Sonal J Goyal for Innovate Delhi Entrepreneurship Academy. Innovate Delhi is a three-week long academy that works with aspiring entrepreneurs to hone their skills in innovation, team-building, and strategy. Applications are due on 1st February. Apply at http://www.innovatedelhi.com/apply/

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Design and its New Role in Innovation – A Round Table led by Eskild Hansen (Nov 26th, New Delhi)

DesignRoundTable with Eskild Hansen in New Delhi

Eskild Hansen will lead a discussion with prominent design thinker in the NCR on ‘Design and its New Role in Innovation.’

Eskild Hansen is one of the most talented Danish Designers on the Scandinavian landscape. Just turned 40, he has already been in leaderships positions at Cisco and Coloplast among others after having worked with other leading global design firms. At CISCO Eskild was responsible for establishing their first European Design Centre in Copenhagen and during this period helped bring a breathe of fresh air to the previously ‘boring and bulky’ Wireless Routers. He even won a Red dot in 2011 for one of his designs. You can read more about his work at www.eskildhasen.com.

Eskild is also a part of the Danish government strategic think tank that is developing and strategizing the ‘Danish Design Society.’ Invest in Denmark, a part of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is bringing him to India on their 2nd Design Tour between 25th and 30th of November, 2013 and are offering the members of iSpirit and opportunity to engage with Eskild on common areas of interest. A new development has been the opening of a Danish Innovation Centre in New Delhi and Bangalore (www.icdk.um.dk).

Eskild is also very excited and eager to work with Indian companies for his private design consulting company.

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Sachin Tendulkar has Retired. Can we now convert a Cricketing Nation to a Product Nation?

All Institutions seek to influence the behavior of people. Nasscom Product Council and iSPIRT today, are associations, which as Institutions are seeking to influence the consumption and production behavior of Software and Technology offerings in India. Our nation is in a dire need of grass-root level, production of value-added goods/services/experiences and its consumption. As articulated previously in Gandhigiri to the Software Entrepreneur, the industry and market developments further command that we dig deep and bring our Nation back on track to be known as Incredible India.

Can iSPIRT influence the mindset of an entire nation towards Products via Education and Information? What initiatives are responsive to the needs and aspirations of a budding young India? Are we in unchartered waters?

No, we are not in unchartered waters. For the past 24 years, one man showed how he can influence the behavior of a Nation. Every time he went out to perform his duty, the nation watched. But alas, all good things come to an end. If there is one silver-lining with Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar’s retirement, it is that now, we can all focus on doing our jobs.

However, can we work with the same level of passion, intensity and commitment as the master-blaster? There is a lot we have seen about the Internal motivations and abilities of this man who mesmerized the nation and we all just indulge in the religion of cricket, when he is playing. But how many of us realize, how BCCI the Institution behind Cricket in India, has had an equally important role to play.

What role has BCCI played in influencing the behavior of the Cricketing Nation? Are they not the ones that control the entire apparatus to influence? Are they not the Institution that responsibly influences cricket lovers, and have they not effectively done it in a sustainable way? The answer is an emphatic YES, and its anybody’s guess. What are the lessons we can learn from BCCI?

Lessons from BCCI – Creation of the GOD of Cricket

Let us look at some basic things which BCCI does brilliantly.

  • Crowd Sourcing and Talent Recognition: Players from all over the country are crowd sourced, and are carefully curated and recognized for talent.
  • Incubation and Mentoring: Provide Academies where the talent, can then get nurtured to a product-offering and help them attain international standards.
  • Organize Marketplaces:  Enable opportunities for the product-offering to be show-cased – Whether it is the One Day matches, IPL, Champions League or other matches. Each Match Venue is an Offline “marketplace”, and each match streamed is a Virtual Marketplace, either on Television or on the Internet.
  • Create Winning Products and Sustain them: Whether it is Sachin, Dravid, Ganguly, Dhoni, Kholi, make sure there is a steady supply of “heroes”
  • Maintain a Monopoly: Kill Competition (this strategy however is questionable and debatable).

So, what can we learn from BCCI? Do we focus on the Structures, the Processes and the methods that they have employed to institutionalize the religion of Cricket? No. Focus on people. The key takeaway is, Sachin was once a consumer of Cricket, just like all of us. He was later transformed into a Product by the exogenous support of an Institution, and of course with his endogenous hunger, hard-work and determination.

We now understand how both the internal motivations of Sachin, and the external support of BCCI captured the imagination of nation. We now know how a game meant for amusement, became a religion universally adopted by the length and breadth of the country. We now understand how Sachin became the GOD of Cricket.

Sachin-God-Of-Cricket

From a Cricket Pitch to a Startup Pitch

How do we go from a Cricket Pitch to a Startup Pitch? How do we become a Product Nation from a Cricketing nation? How do we find the GOD of Products? Do we not have enough Entrepreneurs who are as hungry, as dedicated and as hardworking as Sachin? In fact in our field, we have both Men and Women who can become the God of Products. Can an Institution like iSPIRT not influence the same level of commitment and passion towards building and selling products, like BCCI did for Cricket. Yes it can!

There is nothing new in the idea of influencing a Nation. But there is certainly something new in what we know about, how best to do it. Lots of research and studies, especially in behavioral economics and behavioral science show that approaches based on Education and Information do not actually work as well as intended. Education is a two-way street, only 50% of the work is done by the Provider. The other half, which is the art of Internalizing the Information and Education, and putting it into everyday practice, is still at the behest of the Consumer, which is where mostly the approach of Information and Education fails. How do we nudge people to complete their end of the bargain? How do you enable India’s transformation into a Product Nation. Has our own BCCI not shown a better way?

Undoubtedly it has. But first, as Entrepreneurs, each of us need to have a burning desire to become the God of Products. Each of us need to take our imperfect skills/ideas to the field everyday and test them out. Each of us need to play with our local teams, our local communities to build a grass-root movement towards becoming a product nation. Each of us need to learn the spirit of team-play and the benefits of camaraderie. Each of us need to get Involved. When we all do, we will recognize that the external support from Institutions are available to Influence us.

How do we go and get Involved?

  • Crowd Sourcing and Talent Recognition: Today we have enough startup pitch sessions, hackathon competitions. Take your skills and ideas there, participate and get recognized.
  • Incubators and Mentors: Just like cricket summer camps and bootcamps, there are camps conducted by many bodies. Product Nation itself is running a boot camp in December. Have you registered yet?

There are some systemic gaps, which I am sure Institutions will quickly enable. Infrastructural Interventions are much easier than Motivational Interventions.

  • Organization of Marketplaces: Whether we choose the IPL format, Champions League format or the One-day format, we need marketplaces.
  • Creating the GOD of Products: We need to build and sustain our heroes, who draw, inspire and influence ordinary people to become GOD of products.

 

Conclusion

The true products of a Product Nation are not the Routers, Switches, ERPs, Office Softwares or Productivity Softwares. The true products are the people who believe that we can create a Product Nation. True products are those you perform on a Startup Pitch, with the same intensity that Sachin played on a Cricket Pitch.

Inform me and I might forget, educate me and I might remember, Involve me and I will transform, is the mantra. The Cricketing Nation found its GOD of cricket in Sachin Tendulkar. Can a Product Nation find its GOD of products, like Steve Jobs? If you get Involved, its only a matter of time!

Steve-God-Of-Products

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Announcing the first list of #PNCamp attendees

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

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

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

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

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

Cohort

Dec 4th – Customer Discovery Hacking track

 

Dec 5th  – Scale Hacking track

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

We’ll be seeing you in Pune!

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

 

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Using small data in a BIG way

#PNSummit – Two Day Gathering of Practicing Product Professionals, 4th &5th December, Pune

These days there’s a huge buzz about BIG data. Everyone is now talking about investing huge in BIG data in a BIG way. But before we get all gung-ho about it and take the BIG data plunge, companies should try to figure out applicability of whatever existing data they have. This is especially true for Startups and SMBs who don’t have BIG budgets for BIG data.

With that thought, here’s how we at #PNCamp are using the small data we have to draw BIG and meaningful conclusion…

Participating Cities

Bangalore and Pune are leading the pack with Mumbai / Chennai trailing behind them. Do you see your city? Register today put your city on Startup map of India.

Business Model

B2B is leading the pack. Surprised?

Primary Customer Base

Startups and SMBs have now slowly started building products with primary focus on Indian marketplace. The local market focus enables these companies to be closer to their Customers and create products that address their business needs.

Number of EmployeesNumber of Employees

Companies with up to 20 employees are really interested in identifying ways to crystallize understanding of their customers and or rapidly grow scale their business. Hence, if you are a business with fewer than 20 employees, you will get to interact with bunch of your peers. And discuss way to find and grow your Customer base.

Learn more about #PNCamp at https://www.pn.ispirt.in/pncamp/

Register today to become part of the movement that’s making India a Product Nation!

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The awesome #PNCamp volunteer team

Putting up #PNCamp has not been easy. And the task is only half-done. Volunteering is like an open-source movement. You learn a lot, give back, and lean upon all your co-volunteers to make things happen. There is no institution behind it, no big brother, no event manager, no marketing agency. Just volunteer passion.

It’s the same energy that put up India’s defining product events in the past.

So who are these folks? Lets get behind the scenes…

The Chief Directors… we call them Program Curators

Bala Parthasarthy is program curator and is putting together awesome sessions for Scale Hacking. He is also allowed some free time to run his own venture ! We promise him a lot more free time after PNCamp is over.

Pallav Nadhani is a scale hacking legend and he is program curator for the Discovery Hacking track. His quick fire responses and ability to dissect any situation is only one of his amazing traits. He’s walked the Discovery Hacking trail and has a story or two for you.

Chief Cheerleaders

Our Volunteer efforts would not be complete without the active support of our Product ecosystem stalwarts. Folks like Vijay Anand, Rashmi Ranjan, Kesava, Dorai, Arpit and many of you who have readily helped to reach out.

The Chief Camper

Sharad Sharma, the person who started it all. He has the most amazing vision for Indian software products, and carries this mission with zeal. He unashamedly says he can’t do it alone, so he turbo charges unsuspecting folks like me and we end up being volunteers. Willing volunteers. We get so badly infected by the Sharad virus that we start encouraging others to become volunteers.

The Chief Choreographer

The one man army who’s known as M Thiyagarajan during the day and Chhota Rajan by night. Ok, that’s stretching it but Rajan is one person who’s easily our one man army. Rajan leads the design of the PNCamp. Rajan’s ability to design a program, think objectively and pull resources to make it happen, is unparalleled.

The Chief Distributor

That’s me, Sandeep Todi, reaching out to all you folks with the audience curation team comprising Aditya, Harrshada, Nakul, Sai, Seema and Vijay.  I’m a very responsible person. So for anything that’s going wrong, you can hold me responsible. I enjoy putting fresh ideas and trying the unknown stuff and thinking on my feet. Sometimes these fresh ideas are purely experimental. Sometimes they’re not even half baked. So things go wrong and I look for the villain in our movie so I can blame it on somebody. Trouble is, there’s no villain, only heroes 🙂

The Chief Everything

That’s Avinash Raghava, who is one of guys most well versed with the Indian product ecosystem. Always willing to help, create connects and push for doing things that have never been done before, like the hugely popular Product Nation Round Tables. You name any one part of doing PNCamp that he hasn’t helped with, and I’ll buy you a beer.

The Chief Controller

Dilip T Ittyera, now in his firth startup and previously with a large IT firm, brings you all the goodies. If your Registration didn’t go smoothly, go ahead and blame him. If the arrangements at the venue aren’t up to snuff, you know whom to catch. Be forewarned, he’s one tough guy. If the PNCamp is happening, it’s because he and Avinash went all out to seek support of our sponsors.

The Chief Curators… these are the folks who’ve primarily been responsible for all the chaos. After all, you can’t make a movie without Chaos…

Meet Aditya Bhelande, our Editor. He does more than work on products. He helps people build products. Just as he’s helping to build PNCamp. He’s one of the rare breed who will do anything if he’s convinced about it, and sees it through. Most of us would falter half-way. Many of you will hear from him, the “hand-curtation” is really his editing magic.

Harrshada Deshpande is the Music Director and one of our newest volunteers. If there’s anything beautiful about our movie, its the music she’s produced. Have you seen our awesome website yet? There’s more… the kind of stuff you’re going to see in the coming weeks is entirely her creation. She works on US time, but out of Bangalore, and NOT for US customers. No kidding. Have a call with her at 9pm IST and she’ll come back with a complete set of ideas and mock ups by 9am next day. Awesome!

Nakul Saxena is the Actor-Director-Producer at large. A dependable all rounder, he can act, he can direct and he can even produce. He’s the kind of person who wants to transform from one role to another and does it so fluidly that we find him everywhere all at once!

Sairam is our Scriptwriter. He’s someone all of us turn to. His ability to put together thoughts and communication in a way that is meaningful, impactful and passion-full, is his own undoing. Because if you do something really well, you are destined to do more and more of it 🙂

Sameer Agarwal, the Stuntman. He’s the visionary and the guy who can hypnotize you even on the phone. His vision, design sense and whacky ideas are unmatched in the whole team. It’s what makes us tick. Sameer can jump better than Jeetu, talk better than Big B and dance better than Mithun. So what if these are heroes from the 90s?

Seema Joshi is our Chief Psychiatrist. She can fix all of us mad folks in one stroke. After an hour of meandering discussions, trust her to distil that into objectives and action points. We would be nowhere on a number of things were it not for her extreme clarity and focus on what we need delivered.

Vijay Sharma is Chief Marketeer. the powerhouse that’s probably the combined Klout of all of us. Actually, I’ve never met him but I promise I’ll be able to recognize him within 5 seconds. He’s one of the fastest on the ball and can turn any idea into a plan within that 5 seconds. That’s how I would recognize him!

Each of us has bitten off more than we can chew. Seriously. We’ve got day jobs and companies to run. That should not deter you from talking to us. Click on any of our Linkedin profiles or Twitter handles to reach out.

 

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What India needs is a bootcamp for existing Product folks

PNSummit just pivoted. But only in name. And it was to reflect the true nature of what this first-ever bootcamp for product folks is all about.

Many ProductNation friends asked why it was called a Summit because…  hey, it is not a conference. Its more intense than a conference and much more meaningful for a product startup. This led to the pivot and thus was born #PNCamp – the bootcamp for product entrepreneurs by iSPIRT, cooked in the ProductNation kitchen.

With the new name we wanted to share with you new insights into #PNCamp…

There’s 4 Masala packed sessions on the Discovery Hacking day (Dec 4) for young startups. You’ll stay with the same group of 20-25 folks all day, across all sessions and get to know and help each other in depth. Now does that sound interesting?

Selling in India and selling to the world – baked oven fresh for you and served on the Scale Hacking Day (Dec 5). There are group sessions and in between several informal sessions or ‘quick bites’.  The groups sessions are the “a la carte” for a software startup – conceptualized and cooked with your taste in mind.

There’s food for B2C folks and B2B folks. For 1 year old Startups. And for 3 year olds. All slow cooked the way it should be. Hand curated sessions, every single one. This is what the volunteers are doing, and being product folks themselves they understand this intricately.

Does all this talk about food make you hungry for more?

  • See the Slideshare deck below for a more detailed overview of #PNCamp
  • Attend a PNCamp Q&A webinar and meet one of our volunteers online – click here
  • Directly apply for PNCamp here.

Wait, there’s more… the icing on the cake at #PNCamp awaits. That icing is the hand curated peer group we’re creating for you and one that you’d love to work with during the #PNCamp, and even after.

P.S. : you can choose which of the days (Discovery Hacking OR Scale Hacking) is suitable for you, depending the stage you are and the traction at your Startup. We kind of want to ensure that the folks in your room have similar stage of challenges as you do. So some filtering will happen. It’s for the common good so we’re sure you won’t mind. The volunteers are product folks like you, putting in a lot of effort to make this vision a reality.

 

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Speaking at PNCamp – Dhiraj Kacker(Canvera) and You

Get to hear speakers at conferences every day, don’t you?

Delivered over the mike, broadcast mode.

Speak speak, no listen.

It won’t happen. Not at PNCamp

Because when folks like Dhiraj Kacker are at PNCamp, it’s not to share their story but to listen to yours. And to help you make your story the stuff that conferences are made of. Dhiraj is going to be at PNCamp. Are you?

Dr.Dhiraj Kacker - 4 (square)

Apply here if you haven’t done so already. If you have already applied, you don’t need to do it again. We shall be in touch with every single person who wants to be at PNSummit. We’re just taking a little longer to get similar folks into the room so you can benefit from sharing with people who have similar problems. Stay tuned – here’s the latest on the PNCamp blog.

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ProductDossier – An integrated platform for project planning and execution

ProductNation interviewed Sandeep Kumar, Founder of ProductDossier, a company focused on providing integrated project management software solutions to customers worldwide. Read on to understand the genesis of the company and the learning from the experience gained in selling to different sectors of B2B customers…

What factors led to creating ProductDossier? 

0f89878During my professional career and extensive travel to the West, I noticed that a lot of project based industries were struggling to manage the execution of their projects and programs. While they had ERP systems and PDM software, these solutions were still not able to help them manage the project planning and execution. I reasoned out that the cause for this gap was due to ERP systems being transactional in nature, and PDM systems aiding only in data management. This led to the inception of ProductDossier, positioned primarily as a platform for project planning and execution.

Besides the above, two more factors aided me in starting up ProductDossier, out of India. My education was from IISc, which imbibed a strong desire in me to create something from scratch or something new. Secondly, I had noticed a strong bias on IT services in the Indian ecosystem, while in the West, they appreciated the product oriented work in equal terms. I wanted to work on things that would help put India in the world of products. So, these aspects also contributed in me starting up.

Going to customers who are so used to ERP and PLM concepts, and trying to explain your offering should have been tough. How did you manage to convince your initial customers about the need and value of your product? 

Since we setup our company in India, we targeted customers in our backyard, i.e, India for the first iteration. I found out that Indian customers were not able to verbalize their needs. Most of them were confused with the utility of ERP, PDM, PLM and CRM solutions and jargons – and were not sure of the value provided by these standardized solutions to their business. While in reality, some of these solutions could be a good fit, their lack of awareness of these solutions, and equally, the inability of these vendors to explain the value that these solutions can provide to the business – all led to the confusion.

Hence, we started approaching our prospective customers in a consultative fashion. Our first meetings with them would be to provide structure and meaning to the set of activities that they performed, mapped with the tools and practices that they currently used. Once the customer became aware of the landscape of their activities, we would then start discussing areas where there were big gaps and explain how our offering could help. This mode of complementing their existing solutions, showing them the bigger picture, aiding them to move to their desired goal, incrementally helped us win customers.

Product dossier - courtesy sme storyHow did your company evolve into offering diversified solutions to different industry sectors? What learning did you have as you straddled different sectors? 

We first positioned ourselves as an Integrated Project Management company, who would work to aid project based companies in the manufacturing sector in India. After a few engagements, we discovered that Manufacturing perhaps was not the best industry to go after, at the time we started. This was because in this sector, customers were not willing to pay, they expected any software to be delivered free, and they were not ready to look beyond what they already knew. Decision making was very slow – since the chief beneficiary of our solution was not the owner of the company or the key stakeholders but perhaps just the engineering manager.

We learnt a lot from the above experience. We realized that we were not solving a mission critical problem. Customers looked at our offerings as a nice to have capability – and not as a ‘must have’ capability. This way, we would stand a very less chance of converting a prospect into a sale. These experiences led us to focus on other similar project based industries, namely to Professional Services, Life Sciences & Pharmaceutical, & EPC.

We now focused on solving problems of the key stakeholders in these industries. We also made sure that we were solving the ‘must have’ problems – things such as project profitability, cashflow status, resources utilization, project material procurement, visibility of project status execution in real time, statutory compliances (ISO/CMMI,FDA, etc), NPD project portfolio, cross functional collaboration etc. This led us to more customers across different sectors.

Very interesting insights! What are your thoughts on selling and pricing your offerings in a market where every customer seems to have a unique need? 

There are different aspects one needs to master, when you begin selling to enterprise customers. Firstly, there is a huge opportunity in the B2B marketplace if you can do two things: one is to provide your product as a solution and not as a pure software and second is to position it right along side the existing IT landscape without displacing anything in the beginning. As I mentioned earlier, the lack of awareness of customers, along-with the rigidity of established solution vendors provide immense opportunities for other players to satisfy the needs of customers, not only in India but across the world. So for instance our product has several modules with each module a complete product in itself. So what we do is we pick a few features from each module, assemble and deploy it at a customer location as a customer specific solution

However, pricing such highly customizable product or solution is a challenge. One needs to remember that a customer is only looking at whether the package or offering suggested by you helps in his business or not. So, many a times, pricing becomes the perceived benefits that the customer expects to derive from your solution, as you pitch to him. We are still learning in this aspect but I believe we are on the right path.

Given these observations, your Sales team would have a big challenge, since you go-to-market as a solution. How do you address this challenge?

If you notice, scaling the sales team has been one of the most critical success factors of B2B companies that have now become large entities. The issue to be addressed here is about your sales team’s ability to articulate the pain points that their customer faces. Given the highly unique circumstances of the target customer segment, it becomes a challenge to bring in consistency and repeatability in the value proposition articulation process. To mitigate this, we have relied on visuals that tellingly explain different scenarios a customer would face, and how our offering can help us. We also have come up with many case studies, and based on the prospect, we provide the closest case study as an example, during the selling process. These have helped us in scaling our sales execution. We have also setup a back office team whose sole mission is to innovate around all aspects of product so that it becomes easy for our sales team to demonstrate the value proposition and also easy for our implementation team to implement.

Many other companies similar to yours rely heavily on partners to scale, while you seem to be focused on scaling your sales team organically. Why? 

In my view, partners are only one of the many different means to reach to your customers. It is very easy to sign up a partner, but it is difficult to enable them to sell our offering in a comfortable fashion. At best, then can be lead generators, introducing their captive customers to us. We initially engaged with a few partners, but it turned out that we had to do all the heavy lifting, in terms of engaging with the prospect, explaining the value of our solution and then even attending to their deployment despite partners being around.

This is not to say that the partners are not of value. The key problem is in enabling them to sell and manage the relationship with a customer even after deployment. So, we now are focused on creating an infrastructure where our sales team or partners can use the capabilities (visual, audio, content) to set up demos and articulate better. Once this is in place, I believe we will have a much fruitful relationship with partners.

When did you start selling globally? What has been your experience dealing with global customers? 

We did not explicitly start selling to global customers. However, due to the nature of industries in which our India based customers worked, we were able to get good foothold and visibility on to foreign markets. For example, QuEST Global and Tata Technologies – two of our most valued Professional Services customers used our products worldwide to manage projects and resources. So, in reality, our product, while was deployed in India was used by about 5000 users across 30 countries almost from a couple of years since our inception.

However, we made concerted efforts to sell in the international market only from last year – since we wanted to have a good set of domestic customers as references prior to us formally entering foreign markets. We are making good progress in this front, signing up customers across different geographies in a short span of time. Moving forward we will be focussing a lot more on the overseas markets as a part of our growth strategy.

Thank you for your insights. As a parting question, can you share a few of your personal learning that you believe other fellow product entrepreneurs will benefit from? 

I would say that as an entrepreneur, you should be out with your customers as much as you can. This is critical, because, when you interact in person with a prospective customer, you learn so much about their needs and requirements much closer at their workplace, as it happens, than by reviewing these trends from your office.

Secondly, try and solve a business critical problem that has significant impact on the target organization. This will maximize the chances of sale of your product and bring this stickiness. Thirdly, do not go by the herd mentality – stay focused on solving your customer problem. Everything else will follow!

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“We think more like Product Designers, and less like Product Managers” – Bharath Mohan, Pugmarks.me #PNHangout

(This passage is a summary of the conversation with Bharath Mohan. The audio transcript can be found here.)

Adopters of any new innovation or idea can be categorized as innovators (2.5%), early adopters (13.5%), early majority (34%), late majority (34%) and laggards (16%), based on a mathematical Bell curve put forth by Everett Rogers in his book titled “Diffusions of Innovations”. The book broadly suggests that if you have a product that is of value, you often times have to pave the path for the consumers to be the beneficiaries of this idea. It’s the product designer’s role to design how a product is used across the dispersion of users. This ultimately determines the principles of design and the features that your product consists of.

bharath-photoWhile I was doing my PhD in IISc, I worked on designing a myriad of algorithms for information retrieval. A typical internet user reads content that could range from currents events, such as the war in Syria, to topics as specific as Product Management. I’ve always dreamt of a system that can bring the most relevant information to a user – without the user searching for it. Pugmarks.me connects the context in which you are browsing through these articles by following the digital trails you leave behind. It then uses its context engine to recommend the next article it considers you should read packaged in a seamless experience.

Designing Pugmarks.me has been an exciting experience, which included research in algorithms, building a real time crawling and retrieval system, and constantly learning from users. We’ve followed some Mantras in our product development – especially because the product requires inputs from multi-disciplinary areas. Everything has to tie in, to each other. Nothing is known prior and has to be learnt along the way. A “product management” approach would not work. A “waterfall” model to design would not work. “Powerpoint presentations” would not work either. Our product management is less of “management”, and more of design and evolution.

The Pugmarks Mantra

Unlike Facebook or Twitter where the problem’s technology core is simple and scaling is complex, our problem’s technology core is complex akin to the likes of Google’s search engine and NEST. Hence, over the past 1.5 years our product has been opened to a smaller set of users which gives us data to refine the product further ultimately paving the path for a larger cross section of consumers to enjoy the benefits of the product.

pugmarks-character-evolutionSome of our Mantra’s are:

  • Be metrics driven: Once we analyse our features metrics we identify ones that are successful and bolster them to make these our ‘super class’ features. While we do this, we bin our users into “Fans”, “Tried but dropped off”, “First day drop-offs”. The ‘tried but dropped off’ is where we focus our energy on. We do data analysis, interviews and direct emails – to understand why they drop off. What we learnt is that they mostly drop off because of the “inconvenience” of a new product; either added latency, extra memory consumption, instability of the browser, etc. These reasons give us new things to work on and improve.
  • Usage versus Users: We are building our product with the goal that even if few users come to try out our product, they all stay back. Between usage and users, we prefer high usage between a small number of users over low usage in a high number of users. If our product cannot engage users for a long time, any amount of marketing will still not help.
  • Focus on real Virality: Virality is often confused with just having a Facebook share or a Tweet button, or slyly making a user talk (spam) about your product in his social channels. Virality for us is the inherent quality in our product which makes the user want to talk about it. We consciously ask ourselves, “What will our users want to talk about Pugmarks to someone else?” These viral loops must be strengthened and not social share buttons.
  • Constantly question your assumptions: In our initial iterations, we felt our users will be concerned over privacy. Soon, we realized that the paranoid would never use us anyway – even if we gave them a lot of control. The ones, who used us, felt we were not building good enough models for them. So, we moved away from user supervised learning to a completely automated learning system. We imagine our current user telling us, “I’ll tell you everything about me. Now help me in ways I’ve never seen before”.
  • Continuous Integration: We never take up features or tasks that take more than two weeks to launch especially one’s which require a lot of people and require extensive build times and planning. If you finish the code and if it’s lying unused, there’s an opportunity cost lost because that code could very well engage a user or maybe incite him to talk about the product to someone else. This is a loss for us, hence, we continuously integrate.
  • Own the full user experience, end to end – From messaging to user touch points to the backend algorithms: A user doesn’t appreciate information until it is delivered in a way that is useful to you and is needed by you. We obviously needed a team that was capable of building this experience end to end. Our team considers every aspect of the product, from the touch points to the user, how the product interfaces with the user and also how the product communicates with the user using the technology algorithm we created.

pugmarks-airplanes#PNHANGOUT is an on-going 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 tweet to me: @akashj

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Billbooks is helping ease the invoicing for the freelance economy

It has never come as a surprise that the best startup solutions and most passionate entrepreneurs are the one who end up solving their own pain points. For Sagar Kogekar founder of Billbooks the journey began with the advent of his startup Webwingz which he started at the age of 18 years, engaged in client servicing. He would be able to provide and do the client work but the part about billing was always a hassle. Invoicing and billing like most people was done in Word by him.

Soon Sagar realised the potential in the market. Rather than jumping head first into developing the solution Sagar took his time and did his research to find the niche he was targeting. By 2012 he had gone full time into developing Billbooks as a product with his team. Billbooks was his take on creating an online invoicing solution for small and mid-sized businesses.

On signing up for the first time the user is gifted three invoices to try and experiment with the product. Irrespective of the package a user takes, all the features are uniformly accessible on the platform. Which is a big plus. The pricing model begins from as low as $10 per 20 invoices upto 60$ for 200 invoices. With no monthly rental and expiration of the recharge, the user is free to use the invoice credit as and when he wishes.

The product is aimed at North American and the European markets with language customization in five languages to tap the local clientele. Sagar claims the user base to be in the early hundreds with nearly 10% of them being paid customers of the product. To say what an ideal Billbooks customer looks like would be an exercise in futility with diverse occupational users ranging from a video jockey based in Spain to a wood artist in Australia to a piano teacher in the US being proponents of the product. The unifying factor being the freelancer or the small enterprise economy.

Billbooks is not without competition and claiming otherwise would be unjust. The space for online accounting softwares even those with a focus towards SME is a crowded one. Solutions from big names like Zoho and Intuit, and products like Freshbooks already exist in the market. With many of them offering more utility in the form of mobile products at a slightly higher price point. But the USP of Billbooks would lie in offering a simple approach to a more professional looking billing solution for the freelancers and helping keeping track of partial payments, scheduled reminders and giving free estimates. The service should be an ideal product for people with extremely limited invoice requests a month and their model actually encourages that with no expiry on the invoice credits. 

In the coming months of the product timeline we can look forward to having native mobile products for the Android and iOS ecosystems in place for Billbooks. Features like the Freshbooks import option are already in place making it a breeze to get new users onboard and be up and running on Billbooks quickly.

You can show Billbooks some startup love and sign up to let us know what you think about the product! But the fact remains there is a niche that Billbooks fulfills and Sagar is happy building a product for that.

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Lets Not Lose the Reason and Season for Products

One of the long running debates in the Indian technology entrepreneurial world is whether India will ever engender global product companies or will it be destined to be a purveyor of services and a consumer of products and solutions that are imagined, created and marketed by others. As in most things, and especially true for India, there has to be a reason and there has to be a season for anything to occur. So what has occurred? What’s the reason? What’s the season?

What has occurred and is occurring with increasing velocity is:

  • Services companies are passé.  Almost all companies being created today are products or solutions (ie services around a core product offering)
  • These companies are largely to be found in the telecom/mobile domains utilising SaaS/cloud based delivery. This isn’t surprising since telecom/mobile are global scale, scope and market opportunities in India; SaaS/Cloud based companies can inexpensively cater to the world leveraging expensive and complex infrastructure built by others.
  • Talent from global tech companies or even from overseas is coming together to capitalise on these opportunities.

While these are heartening developments, what is more interesting is the opportunity ahead-  across each and every sector of the economy.

What’s the reason though for all this?

Increasing competition, awareness, technology adoption, and the like are beginning to convince more and more companies, across the board, of the importance of investing in technology to drive efficiency, productivity, quality and indeed competitiveness. Technology for all practical purposes today is all software: from vehicles to logistics to hotel, bus and airline reservations to rocket launches to banking to fraud detection to communication to education to anything-else-you-can-imagine! India is beginning to realise that it can be a market on a global scale for solutions as each of these sector s is plagued by colossal global sized problems.

Why is the season right?

Without the right season, no fruit would ever ripen. The season, in this case, is the environment:  enormous numbers of youngsters – aspirational, aware, impatient, confident, unafraid, educated, driven, the growing presence of avenues for these youngsters and their supporters, backers, service providers – investors, mentors, partners of all kinds– to experiment.

The collision of the reason with the season is accelerating this process at an increasing pace.

But before we all start hyperventilating, it is useful to remember that India, despite being the world’s largest producer of milk and in spite of being a milk surplus country, isn’t known around the world for its milk products! There’s a lesson in there somewhere right?  And as a country, we’re known to grab defeat from the jaws of victory with unfailing regularity and precision.  Some important points to keep in mind:

  • Most of the young product companies, especially those that have the connections, are either considering or already have set themselves up as overseas entities. Why? To escape from the mind-numbing red-tape, to enjoy operating freedom, for reasons of branding, protection of intellectual property, to get the benefit of taxation, investments and exits.  Is this desirable? If not, shouldn’t there be policy mechanisms to ensure that the reasons for seeking overseas domicile are minimised? When all countries are laying out red-carpets for companies to come to their shores, why are we intent on driving away those we have?
  • Local branding and awareness generation: Are there sufficient role models for Indian customers? Is it a matter of pride for the country if a world class “Made in India” product is used? What can and should be done to make this happen? Examples from what Taiwan and Korea did are relevant here. Remember, branding isn’t advertising. It is the delivery of a promise, consistently.
  • Industries that are global scale in India eg  defence or where India offers unique challenges eg retail and distribution? Co-option of stakeholders to build world class solutions in these areas is a possibility.
  • India, one would imagine, is ripe territory for the creation of unique voice based products and solutions, given the illiteracy, proliferation of languages and accents. Yet there’re no solutions here. Education – quality video over low bandwidth lines – can be a gamechanger. What about offering cloud based mobile apps for managing businesses for the large number of SMBs?

There are obviously opportunities and possibilities. But without the coming together of like-minded people driven by the desire to effect change across industry clusters via policy, awareness generation, branding, crafting solutions to solve Indian problems, the season to ripen fruits will pass.

This is a season where the coming together of young people, using technology, knowledge, research, engagement, drive and passion, are driving large changes in the way democracy and politics are practised for the better in the Indian nation. Surely, building a product nation is far simpler? Are we all up to it?

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Happy B’day ProductNation, We are One year Young

Yesterday is gone. Tomorrow has not yet come. We have only today. Let us begin. ― Mother Teresa.


ProductNation is today, one year young. Yes! One year. It didn’t seem too long ago when I was contemplating putting a blog together to showcase Indian Product companies. It all started as a passion project at the One97 office with the support of Vijay Shekhar Sharma; it was something I wanted to do for a long time. Having worked for almost eight years with the Product eco-system, I wanted to connect and contribute in a small way to the project building India as a ProductNation. I wanted to build something which allowed product people to share their experiences. I did bounce off the idea with a few of my friends, evangelists of the Product Industry and I had spontaneous commitment from many of them.


I always like to read and understand the successes of product entrepreneurs, which include some inspiring stories, the challenges faced by them and how they have been able to address global markets. These are the stories which will inspire a new generation of product companies from India, and indeed, it’s been a wonderful journey, for me personally, as well as for the people who have been involved. 

Here’s what ProductNation is today – 

  • We are home to 400-odd blog posts here in 50+ categories such as Product Management, Reviews of Products, Design, Eco-system, Funding, GotoMarketing and so on.
  • We have featured 110+ product companies on the site.
  • We do 5 blogs every week – Monday to Friday at 11am and once in a while do a blog on Saturdays.
  • There are 75+ contributors who actively contribute articles and share their own learning’s here. Many of them help me do the Product Reviews, interviews with Product Companies and the like.
  • We have started #PNHangouts where we have conversations with Product Managers.
  • We started out with sending newsletters twice a month, but now with so much of content coming up, we schedule the newsletters thrice a month (5th, 15th and 25th).  You can access the past issues here and subscribe to the newsletter here. We have sent out 53+ newsletters so far
  • We have 80+ Posts on Product Management
  • 18+ Playbook RoundTables which have been covered on the site
  • A vibrant community with 500+ members and 50+ conversations
  • More to come…stay tuned 🙂

 

ProductNation is the result of a collective effort, and I’m grateful to all the evangelists who have spent enormous efforts in contributing and in making what ProductNation is today! When I started, it was just me and my passion. Today, I have a large “virtual” team and many evangelists who truly believe in the movement. I do get many people who compliment me on the content and the regular updates that they get from the site. There are many who are silently observing the movement and I’m sure will jump in soon. 

ProductNation was one of the first steps in the formation of iSPIRT(Indian Software Product Industry RoundTable) – a think-tank with a difference to transform India into a hub for new generation software products. So here’s the deal. We need to put India on the global software product map. We need to do it soon. Come, join us.

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Design in Indian Startups

A brief look at the state of the Indian startup ecosystem from the lens of design and how well it is understood or misunderstood. How the next generation of the technology startups are battling the design challenge in a globally connected ecosystem for the right consumer audience.

According to Dave McClure the founding team of a startup should include the holy trinity of a hacker, hustler and a designer. In simple terms a dream team comprising of members responsible for the technology, business/marketing and the design. Dave is no stranger to entrepreneurship or India, and as the founding partner at 500Startups (internet startup seed fund and incubator program based in Mountain View, CA) each of their accelerator programs have seen interest and presence from a number of Indian startups.

“Holy trinity of hacker, hustler and a designer”

This then begets the question of what exactly is an “Indian startup”? Unlike Israel a nation known both for its military prowess and high-technology startups along with the fact that it has the highest per-capita VC investment in the world. Startups in India like the nation itself conform to no unifying sector or theme. On one hand we have Delhi based Langhar helping connect foodies with authentic home cooked local cuisines on the other we see SarkariExam a portal dedicated to helping people find government jobs. Even after applying the filter of technology and technology enabled startups with their constantly blurring boundaries in the internet & mobile space, the bandwidth of the spectrum is still large.

If one goes by the estimates of AngelList, a platform dedicated towards the startups and the investors; there are 1500+ startups in India. This by no mean implies that all of them would be independently successful or have a profitable exit. Many of them would eventually shut shop and might not even exist the next summer. Despite this uncertainty and the increasing belief of Indian founders in their idea have led to a rising entrepreneurial activity. Catering to everybody from the hyper local audiences to products specifically built for the customers abroad. Helping us establish the fact that there is no single way to explain or define as to what constitutes an Indian startup. If question of the Indian-ness wasn’t tough enough the attention to design has increased the complexity of the understanding manifold. Invariantly a handful of startups like Cleartrip (travel), Zomato (food), Paytm (payment) and Hike (messaging) have become the poster boys for the best designed products being built in and in certain cases for India. This then progresses us to our next challenge of “What is design in the context of the startups and what is the role of the designer?”

Depending upon who do you ask, one is bound to get various forms and interpretation of what constitutes design? Making it easy to complicate things for the humble hackers and the hustlers trying to fathom as to why their designer is unable to deliver in the face of the challenge for their startup. Going over from formal the definitions provided in academic institutions of design being ‘a noun and a verb’ to the one followed by design practitioners whereby they try to highlight the difference between “art and design”. One thing that emerges is that, design has been and will always remain at its core a form of problem solving.

“Design has been and will always remain at its core a form of problem solving”

Had things been as black and white as they seem we wouldn’t have startups explaining their design strategy in terms of the visual design. Or in the case they understand the value of design keep looking for that one mythical designer who could solve all their problems. With the ever changing relationship and interaction of humans with technology; and it’s constantly evolving nature the boundaries of what explicitly is the job of a designer or the hacker is quickly overlapping.

Take the case of Rasagy Sharma who after finishing his undergraduate degree in computer science & engineering joined a Bangalore based startup as their UX Designer. One of the first ‘design’ hires in the team comprising of hackers, leading him to explain his role to the people around him. If the challenge of understanding what exactly entails in these new design roles wasn’t tricky enough, Rasagy highlights the emerging debate of ‘Should designers code?’ “The answers vary from the extremes of ‘Designers can code and should code’ to ‘Designer cannot code and is not expected to code’ with a comfortable middle ground emerging in the form of ‘Designer can code but is not expected to code’ ” says Rasagy.

“Designer can code but is not expected to code”

But if there is no one designer who can solve all of the problems of the startups which range from visual design & interaction design to in certain cases industrial design; and finding the talent is tough. Then shouldn’t we see the limited resources of the startups being spent on the function (technology) than form (design and by extension user experience)? One of the most interesting theme to emerge while talking to a number startups as a part of the research was their unanimous agreement in pushing design forward for their product. Neeraj Sabharwal who heads the design at the Hyderabad based NowFloats quotes Tom Peters when he says “The dumbest mistake is viewing design as something you do at the end of the process to ‘tidy up’ the mess, as opposed to understanding it’s a ‘day one’ issue and part of everything.” Even in the case where the technical founders thought of design as nothing more than a marketing gimmick they did approve of increasing the resources dedicated to certain design activities by either hiring talent or outsourcing the process. And putting the bill under what they felt was the ‘cost of customer acquisition’.

The cost of starting an internet business is decreasing by the year and in no other period of history have we seen more entrepreneurial activity than the present. Faced with the simple market forces of consumer choice, a positive user experiences is a simple measure of how efficiently the technology works to help the user achieve his goals. In a somewhat surprising trend that in hindsight makes perfect sense, some of the best designed startups being built in the country include a designer as a part of the founding or the founders atleast have the design aesthetics in place to drive things forward.

Eventifier is being built in the southern city of Chennai at The Startup Center. Eventifier helps keep all the social media chatter around an event including the conversation, photos, videos, presentation decks in a single place. They are one of the few startups using the hacker, hustler and the designer approach since the day they began. Mohammed Saud holds the mantle of the Chief Design Officer and one would give weight to his belief when he says “Being equally proficient in all facets of design even when their underlying principle might be the same is difficult.” His solution is the one that is increasingly becoming common, become proficient in one form of design yet understands the other well enough to guide somebody with your vision. A similar ideology was put forth by Arun Jay, who amongst a number of other claims holds the post of the principle designer at SlideShare and the senior UX designer at LinkedIn. By academic training Arun began as a communication designer but his experience with film making, photography and web based technologies makes him the ideal choice for the unicorn designers so many startups look for.

But it wouldn’t be fun if there weren’t a few startups breaking the mould. HealthifyMe and NowFloats are two startups which were a part of the Microsoft Accelerator program in Bangalore. On one hand we have Neeraj Sabharwal from NowFloats with no formal training in the various disciplines of design yet relying on his industry experience and understanding of design thinking principles to lead the charge. On the other we have Tushar Vashisht co-founder of HealthifyMe attributing the fact that “Lack of a dedicated designer in the founding team even with the team valuing design, cost them precious resources in the decision making and product building exercise. With HealthifyMe treating the user experience as an integral part of the product building process getting Rohan Gupta as a designer onboard has positively affected our shipping time.”

But believing that a well-designed product is the end all in the product building exercise would be plain naïve. Design is one of the integral processes amongst the host of other responsibilities held by the hustlers and the hackers which make a product successful. Brij Vaghani is the founder of live traffic monitoring service, Traffline which currently operates in three metropolitan cities. His team is working in close association with a design studio for the soon to be launching next version of their product. “Even though we understood the value of design, the founding team relied upon our core strengths of technology in the early stages of the product. An approach which we feel might have had an impact on the metrics we use to track the product success but something that was within permissible levels”

Where are we headed? Great design and technology have always existed. The founders are still looking for that elusive designer who can handle all their design problems, but as unicorns go those beings are still rare to find. The consumer internet is nearly twenty years old, the smartphone nearly six and the tablet less than four. Yet the potential of the startups building upon and specifically for these platforms is seeing an exponential growth. We haven’t even begun scratching the surface of the potential and can’t predict the trajectory of the startup economy in India serving an internal audience of a billion plus people and catering to those abroad. But the fact remains that the designers seem to have finally found a voice and Indian startups are rearing for them to go.

Author’s Note: This article was written for a collaborative publication: Create Change for Kyoorius Designyatra 2013 produced by Kyoorius and British Council, India and is a part of British Council’s design writing programme.

The post has been slightly modified for the web by adding of the appropriate hyperlinks to the startups and the resources mentioned to aide the reader. You can download the PDF version of the print magazine in all its glory here. The article is on page sixty-nine.

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Gandhigiri to the Software and Technology Entrepreneur!

Many of us in the software industry, for more than 2 decades have not only been the direct beneficiaries of the opening up of the Indian economy in 1991, but we also pride ourselves for creating an industry that today supports the livelihood of millions of software engineers, bpo executives and call-center operators. But have we done enough, could we have done better?

India is today struggling with C.A.D (current account deficit). Simply put, we import more than we export. Some people argue that we have gone back to 1991, in effect, all the glorious 22 years which we think we have created have some how evaporated. If we had spent the past 22 years creating Indian software products, could we have not today exported more than just services, based on labor arbitrage? In fact, I would say its largely because we did not think ourselves as a ProductNation. We became pseudo-intellectuals, happy with the easy money flowing into our economy.

Good thing is we can still learn from our legacy. 300 years of British colonial rule, and all the well educated software industry professionals, fail to understand that we are no different than our fore-fathers. Its quite fascinating, and really important to see the parallels outlined below. As software professionals and business owners, its time for us to introspect and learn a little bit of Gandhigiri.

Economic Impact during British Raj

Any chapter from our history books will have paragraphs which read like this…..

Indian Economy was transformed into a colonial economy whose nature and structure was determined by the needs of the British economy.

India supplied all the raw material required for Britain’s Industrial needs, especially the cash crops like jute, cotton, iron ore, silk, wool. In-turn, became the ready market for Britain’s large-scale finished products which were also cheaper than Indian finished-goods, since they were mass-produced, for e.g. the ready made shirts, pants, sweaters, machines,etc. The economic policies of the colonial government was to reduce India to a feeder economy to Britain’s industrial base and hence with out any domestic policy support, the cottage industries within India were destroyed systematically.

Added to that, the zamindari system also meant all profit accruing out of the agricultural sector went to the zamindars instead of the cultivators. High revenue demands and rigid manners of collection forced peasants into the clutches of the moneylenders, who were controlled and financed by the colonial government’s banks. Expanding population put greater pressure on viability and sustenance, and as there was no corresponding domestic development of both urban and rural infrastructure, the economy collapsed and India became a poorer nation. Britain’s policy of trade ruined India’s urban and rural industries.

Economic Impact from 1991 to 2013…

Indian Economy was transformed into a “global” economy whose nature and structure was determined by the needs of the US/Western economy.

India supplied all the raw material required for America’s IT/software needs, especially the cash crops like software engineers, creative designers, app developers, analysts, bpo executives and call-center operators. In-turn, India became the ready market for America’s large-scale finished software and technology products, which were also cheaper than Indian-finished goods, since they were mass-produced with patent protections, for e.g. the Office software, ERP software, Accounting software, Routers, Switches,etc. The economic policies of the Indian government was to reduce India to a feeder economy to America’s Technology and Software base and hence with out any domestic policy support, the local software industries within India were destroyed systematically.

Added to that, the funding eco-system also meant all profit accruing out of the software/technology sector, went to the venture-capitalists instead of the entrepreneurs. High revenue-multiple demands and rigid manners of exit-funding forced software entrepreneurs into Mergers or Acquisitions by American companies, or to the clutches of the Angels and VCs, who were in turn controlled and financed by PEs or LPs from America. Expanding population put greater pressure on viability and sustenance, and as there was no corresponding domestic need for software/technology in both urban and rural industries, the economy collapsed, the FIIs fled, leaving India poorer. India’s own policy of trade for 22 years, ruined India’s technology and software industry.

Conclusion

Well, do I have to take a pessimistic approach and assume that this how its going to be? Should we wait for another Mahatma to lead the new movement to becoming a true Product Nation? An emphaticNO. Gandhigiri to the software and technology entrepreneur provides the vision and direction, so we don’t have to go down the same path our forefathers went. We need to be the change the world wants to see. Lets go and create the change, and let initiatives like iSPIRT and ProductNation be the inspiration through which we can channel our aspirations and ideas. Happy Gandhi Jayanthi to all!