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Users or Customers?

If you’ve been around the internet startup world for long enough, you’ve probably engaged in the user-customer debate at least once. Who’s the user? Who’s the customer? Who should we be focusing on?

I’m going to start off a series of posts talking about the basic elements of Platform Thinking and this being the first, I’d like to talk about the User-Customer debate since that lies at the very heart of how we think about the design of internet businesses.

If we put on the Platform Thinking lens, we essentially do away with the user-customer debate and replace it with a more fundamental view of how your business functions. Here’s how:

Most internet businesses can be viewed as a platform on which value is created and consumed. E.g. YouTube.com is a platform on which video up loaders create value and viewers consumer value. With that in mind, let’s move on…

Who’s the user? 

Quite simply, the user is anyone who uses the product. Now that doesn’t help us too much, so let’s break that down a little.

A user may perform one of two roles:

Producer: Someone who creates supply or responds to demand. If you think of YouTube, whenever a user adds a video, he’s acting in a Producer role, creating supply. A person answering a question on Quora is a producer, responding to demand. 

Consumer: Someone who creates demand or consumes supply. A video viewer is a consumer on Youtube. A question asked on Quora (as well as others viewing the question and answers) is playing a consumer role. 

Note that these are roles, not user segments. If you think of eBay, the sellers are the producers and the buyers are the consumers so we have two distinct segments. But on Twitter, every time you tweet, you are in a producer role, and if you start reading your tweet stream the next second, you’ve moved to consumer mode. 

Splitting the term ‘user’ into these two roles helps us understand the exact motivations and actions for the user while using the product.Understanding the motivations and actions helps us design tools that enable the users to perform these actions instead of loading the product with features. 

Most products have more than one producer or consumer role. E.g. On LinkedIn, professionals using LinkedIn are producers and consumers of interactions and status updates, thought leaders are privileged producers and recruiters are producers of job listings and consumers of relevant user profiles. 

This brings us to the third party in the debate… 

Who’s the customer? 

As in the offline world, the customer is someone who pays. The customer may not be part of the central demand-supply equation. The sole defining criterion for a customer is that the customer pays money to the business. 

The customer may be:

  1. The producer: e.g. Vimeo. Video up loaders can pay for premium features.
  2. The consumer: e.g. New York Times. Readers pay to access news
  3. Someone else: e.g. Facebook. The advertiser is the customer 

Again, multiple parties may be customers. On LinkedIn, we have users (who play both consumer and producer roles) as customers as well as advertisers and recruiters. 

To summarize:

  1. Every internet business has three distinct types of roles: Producer, Consumer and Customer
  2. There may be multiple roles of each type on every business
  3. Producers create supply or respond to demand
  4. Consumers create demand or consume supply
  5. Customers pay  

A few quick examples:  

Zappos.com

Producer: Zappos.com itself is the producer; sourcing shoes and creating supply.

Consumer: Users browsing and buying on the storefront.

Customer: The segment of consumers actually buying shoes.

AirBnB

Producer: Hosts, Review Writers

Consumer: Travelers, Review Readers

Customer: Technically, the hosts are the customers since they forgo a cut of the transaction and share it with AirBnB 

Yelp

Producer: Yelp (creates listings), Review Writers

Consumer: Consumers in the city, Review Readers

Customer: Merchants that advertise 

The New York Times

Producer: The New York Times

Consumer: Readers

Customer: Readers, Advertisers 

I’d love to hear your thoughts. This is the first in a series of posts where I intend to share the essential tenets of Platform Thinking and how to use it to design internet businesses. Feel free to leave your thoughts below.

Note: This article was first featured on Sangeet’s blog, Platform Thinking (http://platformed.info). Platform Thinking has been ranked among the top blogs for startups, globally, by the Harvard Business School Centre for Entrepreneurship.

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Cloud Services and Mobile Apps

In addition to vendors of traditional on-premise products that are shipped or downloaded via web, a different generation of providers is fast emerging. They are leveraging new technologies and business models, often interchangeably referred to as cloud services, Web 2.0 or SaaS (Software as a Service). (Not all SaaS products are truly cloud based but the differences are not relevant for this discussion.)

SaaS considerably simplifies application deployment and upgrade challenges. Software is hosted at one site (vendor’s own or through a provider). This reduces development cost since the deployment environment is controlled. There is no distribution expense, though deployment charges can become considerable to support a large base of users.

The SaaS model is important for India. Making geography irrelevant, it enables anywhere, anytime apps and services for a fl at world. Indian Web 2.0ventures can now reach out to the world market without the huge cost of sales that enterprise software companies have to bear. They can compete directly against global players.

Cloud services adoption will depend on resolution of a few major concerns. One is security of personal and corporate data in the cloud. Secondly, guaranteed near 100% uptime will be critical for mainstream enterprise apps to move to the cloud. Reliable access will be a big factor in India for a few years, despite the phenomenal growth in broadband connectivity. Uptime has been an issue even in US, with large players like Google and eBay facing major outages in their online services.

The most widely used cloud service is web-based e-mail such as Google’s  Gmail. The standard bearer for commercial SaaS apps is Salesforce.com, which crossed $1 billion in revenue in 2009 in just ten years. It provides web-based Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution for sales, service, marketing and call center operations.

With over 1.5 billion people going online, SaaS offerings will only proliferate. Amazon.com, which started with selling books over the web to consumers, is now a full-service online merchandise store. Examples in India include IndianRailways.com (train bookings), MakeMyTrip.com (travel services), naukri.com (job related portal) and shaadi.com (matrimonial related).

Similar to cloud services, software apps on mobile phones are becoming more common, driven by the explosive growth in usage. In 2009, cell phone ownership had reached 3.5 billion worldwide and over 400 million in India. Cell phone growth is highest in India, with 10+ million being added each month, cutting across income barriers. The Indian mobile market is unusual in its extensive usage of texting (SMS) and multiplicity of languages. With its ubiquity, mobility and low cost, it is the ideal delivery platform for simple apps (and supporting middleware).

Though SaaS and mobile app vendors often look like a services rather than software firm, they are included in the book because software is the foundation and key differentiator for their business.

There is another reason. With its late liberalization, India largely skipped making huge investments in an entire generation of technology (land lines, minicomputers and even standalone software apps). This proved to be a boon in disguise, and led to rapid adoption of latest advances like broadband and mobile by a booming market. In similar fashion, consumers and businesses may take to this new breed of software products. Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) especially benefi t from SaaS by not having to invest upfront in IT infrastructure (servers, software licenses) and buying subscriptions only as required. Similarly, the hand-held is rapidly morphing into a highly integrated device, and is poised to become the key accessory for humans to interface with their environment. The vast majority of Indians will skip the PC and directly use an integrated
device at work and home.

Since the Indian psyche is different, entrepreneurs can build unconventional solutions that refl ect local reality for domestic users. The intersection of new technologies and India’s growth economy has opened a window of opportunity for new firms to leapfrog past existing players with exciting new products.

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

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Why does India struggle to develop its own complex high technology products like fighter aircraft?

Dr Raghuram Rajan, Chief Economic Adviser to the MoF, GoI, was the chief guest at the IIMB convocation this year. I had the privilege of meeting him briefly before the convocation started. We talked about jugaad, Indian industry’s innovation capabilities, and which companies stand out on the innovation dimension.

One question that Dr. Rajan asked was something that I have thought about often: why do we struggle in our large projects that involve the development of complex products like tanks or fighter aircraft? And why are we able to do relatively better in areas like space and missiles?While I gave an immediate response to his questions, these are important enough questions to merit a more elaborate response.

1. Overly-exacting Specifications
The starting challenge for creating defence products from India is the product specifications. One common criticism of our armed forces is that their specs are usually a combination of the best performance on each parameter offered by different vendors. Often, a product with such a combination of characteristics is either unavailable anywhere, or if it exists, is exorbitantly expensive.

There seems to be some truth in this criticism. Consider this example: according to press reports, in the now “under the scanner” Westland deal, there was only one helicopter globally available that met the specs set by the Indian Air Force. Much of the current debate is about who “diluted” the specs to “allow” the Westland chopper to be considered!

2. Lack of Clarity regarding what Local Development means
Designing a product locally does not mean that all components and sub-assemblies have to be made locally. In fact, one of the key decisions to be made is what will be done locally and what will be sourced from elsewhere.

Take the example of Embraer, the Brazilian aircraft company. Embraer retains ownership of design and system integration, but collaborates with other companies as diverse as Hitachi and GE for important sub-systems. Yet, Embraer aircraft are still regarded as Brazilian planes! Their big supplier partners share some of the investment and development risk with Embraer.

Contrast this with the development of the LCA. Much is made of the fact that India has not been able to develop its own engine for the LCA. But most aircraft companies don’t design or make engines themselves!

Most defence products require higher grade components with “MIL” certification. For many components, it’s cheaper to import from existing suppliers than design and manufacture them in India to MIL standards.

A related issue is the definition of the objective of the development project itself. Whenever I have spoken to people involved with the LCA project, they have proudly drawn attention to the number of new technological capabilities ranging from composite materials to advanced avionics that were developed in India as a result of the project. So, even though the LCA itself may not have been inducted into the Air Force so far, India has undoubtedly gained from the LCA project. Of course, this is limited consolation as the country has not got the aircraft we needed for the defence of the country!

3. Lack of Technological competence in Advanced Technologies
Complex products require advanced competence in diverse areas. Often, India does not have companies or institutions that have the required level of competence in each of these areas. Even when available, such skills may be relatively shallow and limited in scope. When the skills exist in the academic or research institutions, they may not be application-oriented.

LCA project head Dr Kota Harinarayana gave some interesting insights into this challenge when I spoke to him some years ago. When the LCA project started in the mid-1980s, we faced serious handicaps in composite materials, avionics and a host of other technologies. Dr. Kota Harinarayana who headed the Aeronautical Development Agency (ADA) that was created for the LCA project realized that it would not be possible to create all the needed expertise within ADA or HAL. He therefore visited all the leading engineering schools in the country, made an assessment of the expertise available, and created a large collaborative platform to rope in this expertise. Very soon he realized that these individual faculty members lacked either the managerial expertise or the interest to manage complex research projects. So, ADA had to work with the professors to break down the problems into more manageable pieces, each of which could be tackled as a Ph.D. or M. Tech. project. ADA funded the creation of physical infrastructure wherever necessary and did the overall programme management and coordination. So, there is a great deal of managerial effort that has to go into working with academic research partners who might have the required technical expertise.

4. Inadequate Number & Frequency of Experimentation and Testing cycles
While complex products are today largely designed on the computer (the Boeing 777, for example, was designed predominantly based on simulation through CAD/CAE), some amount of physical prototyping and testing is always required. Rapid testing, using low cost mock-ups and prototypes, wherever possible, is critical to completing the project quickly. But, design of complex systems in India is undermined by inadequate resources for experimentation and testing. This results in overly long development cycles.

I don’t have hard evidence, but I am sure the CAG’s notion of wasted and infructuous expenditure also hampers adequate experimentation. In 8 Steps to Innovation, we wrote about “failure fallacy” – the purpose of experimentation is testing assumptions and learning, not success and failure! Given our administrative rules and audit procedures (the infamous “Infructuous expenditure” that is the subject of criticism of successive CAG reports!), it appears that our system can easily fall prey to this failure fallacy.

5. Design/Development & Production Gap
After independence, India adopted the Soviet model of separation of design and development from production. As a result, we have a huge network of government owned and operated research and development laboratories and facilities, and a separate network of production units/factories (like the ordnance factories in the case of defence).

The separation between R&D and manufacturing has worked to our disadvantage in multiple sectors. Take the case of telecom, where the Centre for Development of Telematics (CDOT) set up in the 1980s created contemporary digital exchanges that were well suited to the hot and dusty conditions of India and the then prevalent high number of “Busy Hour Calling Attempts.” But as I documented in From Jugaad to Systematic Innovation: The Challenge for India, the separation of the technology provider from the manufacturers (a set of licensees who themselves had limited technological capabilities) meant that CDOT was one step removed from the marketplace and that the licensees never invested in creating their own technological capabilities. As a result, over time, the CDOT technology failed to keep pace with the needs of the market and lost out to products imported from global telecom giants.

The separation of R&D from production is particularly detrimental to the commercialization of new technologically-intensive products. The designers tend to be relatively insensitive to concerns of manufacturability or support, and hence the product can prove difficult to manufacture in large volumes, or at a reasonable cost. The manufacturers have inadequate understanding of the know-how and know-why, and in the process of trying to make manufacturing easier or more streamlined make changes in the product or process that make it deviate from the required specifications.

Commercialization of complex technologies needs close working between R&D, engineering and production, and this becomes more difficult if this involves crossing organizational boundaries. There are major challenges even within the same organization – the success of Samsung in the memory chip industry, for example, is often attributed to the co-location of these three functions as this makes communication and problem-solving much easier.

6. Lack of Tacit Knowledge
Besides, successful productionization or commercialization of products involves the generation and retention of a large amount of tacit knowledge. I am reminded of an experience that was narrated to me by the Chairman of Samtel Color, Mr. Satish Kaura, many years ago. Samtel entered the Colour Picture Tube market in the early 1980s when colour TV was first introduced to India. Samtel sourced its technology from a leading Japanese company. However, they struggled to achieve the same level of productivity of CPTs as the company from whom they sourced the technology. However, a leading Korean company was able to master the technology from the same source. Ironically, Samtel had to hire consultants who were ex-employees of the same Korean company in order to get the tacit knowledge of how to improve the yield of the production line!

Successful product companies build huge internal repositories (both informal and formal) of such tacit knowledge. It is this knowledge that helps them avoid repeating the same mistakes or being able to move ahead rapidly when a project gets stuck. Building this knowledge requires going through multiple product development cycles and finding ways of capturing and building on such knowledge from one project to another. But, if one project takes 30 years, you have a problem! In complex product development like aircraft design, we have not gone through a complete project cycle even once. That is a major disadvantage we face.

Why have we done better in the Space Programme?
My hunch is that we have done better in the space programme because that is a vertically integrated programme, has much clearer strategic objectives, is managed more effectively, and because its not a volume-oriented programme – you don’t have to move to serial production, so many of the productionization and commercialization problems don’t exist.

What needs to be done to improve our ability to build complex engineered products?
This is a big question in itself and I will leave it to a future post!

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How Adoor Gopalakrishnan’s Kathapurushan became a Software Product Entrepreneur ?

From being the protagonist of an Adoor Gopalakrishnan national award  winning movie to a graphics trainer, from a book publisher to a printer, from services to products, our guest today has been there, done that. Meet Vish, the MD of Logical Steps.

ProductNation: Hi Vish. Welcome to Product Nation. Let us begin with your story.

Vish: I was born in an entrepreneurial family. My family ran a printing press in Kerala. So I grew up living entrepreneurship and also picking up skills to run a printing press. Childhood was exciting, as we were always creating something. As far as my education is concerned, I enrolled for an undergraduate Physics program at the Moscow State University. University had some of the finest minds in Physics teaching the subject. But, the 1991 coup cut short all this excitement. This brief stint while I was in Moscow, made me realize that college education does not prepare you for life. Though, I was not keen to go back to college, it was family pressure that saw me write three years physics papers in one shot. All this for a degree from the University of Kerala, Trivandrum. Isn’t degree everything?

It was around the same time that I got introduced to computers. My father had made investments into offset printing and desktop publishing. I soon found an entire computer science department to myself, right from laser printers to 486 machines. I learnt everything from scratch. It was time for my first fling with entrepreneurship. It was an MS-DOS pocket reference manual. Using a microsoft reference manual as the guide, I printed out some MS-DOS reference manual copies and handed it over to a local bookshop for sale. Surprisingly, the book shop came back for more. Simultaneously, I also ventured into Desktop publishing training, as the printing industry was moving in that direction. These experiments gave me the confidence that I could do something on my own

ProductNation: When did you get the time to do the Adoor Gopalakrishnan movie? And why do you consider it your first product experience?

Vish: Adoor Gopalakrishnan is a family friend and I had done a small role in one of his earlier films. He talked me into playing the lead role in a film called Kathapurushan. It went on to win the National Award in 1996. He knew about my background in printing. So, during the film, I got involved into many aspects of the movie production – recording audio, printing of collateral and special books. And working with Adoor Gopalakrishnan, who cared about every little detail and to experience his passion and leadership. I consider that experience extremely precious and a sort of first in making a product.

ProductNation: Which were the other movies you did?

Vish: No, I went back into computer training with a company called Tandem. Tandem, which was based in Trivandrum, sent me to CDAC Pune for a course called DACA – Diploma in Advanced Computer Arts. As a trainer, I was to learn this course and come back to Trivandrum to teach. At this course, I was the only one from a non-arts background, as the others were all from JJ and similar schools. But, I topped the class and got a break into advertising with a Kirloskar group company – Pratibha Advertising. One of the noteworthy projects that I did while at Pratibha was a digital kiosk that was showcased at the first Auto Expo in New Delhi. I quickly realised that digital advertising in India at that time was still very early. So I packed up my bags and went to Singapore for a teaching assignment with a University. But, I ended up joining a digital marketing company there. It was here that I spent close to five years till the dot com bust in 2000 consumed it. During my stint here, I got in depth experience into e-learning.

ProductNation: Is that when you started your current company, logical steps ?

Vish: Yes. I came back to India, after the dotcom bust. And that is when we started Logical Steps. We began by supplying learning content for television. We were paid 10% of the contracted amount. That is when I understood the trouble of doing business in India. So, I went back to Singapore to source business and keep the business running. It was challenging. I was using my salary to finance the business. I was not keen to close down and let go of my staff who had picked up extremely useful skills. So, we kept going. It was during this that we got a chance to service AIG for one of their projects. So that is how our services business started.

ProductNation: What happened to e-learning, then? And the platform? How did you start silver bullet?

Vish: An opportunity came up to create an e-learning engine for the US Market in the area of Medical Entrance exam called MCAT. A doctor who was considered the guru of MCAT had already created a large amount of content plus created analytics metrics to appraise students. We were given the project to create a platform that could provide all of this. This project gave us tremendous exposure to learning frameworks and gave us the idea to create a product on our own. That is how the idea of SilverBullet came up.By that time, I had also realised the limitations of a services business. So, we were all set for a product pitch in late 2010. While we built the platform quickly, content became a challenge. So we had to invest resources in training teachers to address this issue of content. This consumed our resources and it was our services business that was feeding silverbullet. It took us some time to adjust to this new reality, as we were dealing with an individual customer, unlike a corporate entity as in our services business.

ProductNation: Let us talk about silver bullet? Any learnings that you would like to share.

Vish: Silver Bullet is an online learning system for engineering and medical entrance examinations in India. There have been tremendous learnings. Unlike servicing a business, in this case, it was a B2C online product. It took us some time to figure out our Go-To-Market approach. We felt schools were the touch point, but it wasn’t so. Then we tried facebook, and it wasn’t the touch point. The most profound insight came from my 10 year old daughter, who frankly said that students are not interested in adding more studies to their daily work. She went ahead and said that no one would like to put themselves into trouble by opting for a Free Trial. How true? Students are already overworked. In all this, we figured out that it is the parent who is the touch point. And the parent was in a totally different world and a world that wasn’t online. The only way to reach them was through traditional media. It was then, that we checked out the media budgets of other online learning companies and found that they spend 19% to 20% of their revenue on ad budgets that run into crores, it is a totally different league. And that is how these companies are reaching out to parents. Parents are more than happy to add to the kid’s collection of material to consume.

ProductNation: Interesting, allow us to end this interview, with a difficult question. Looking back on your career, it is easy to see that you have been all over the place. How has it helped you in approaching your product business?

Vish: [Laughs] The product business is much like the movie business. If you see, my experience in diverse areas has given me ideas and the aptitude to create a wonderful product. Whether it is design or delivery, content or its packaging, all my earlier experience have served me well in developing Silver Bullet.

ProductNation: Wearing two hats at the same time i.e. services and products. What would you prefer? And what challenges do you face, while doing so?

Vish: Product without a doubt. It is something that you can own. But, when working on a product, especially when you are just starting off, managing the internal aspirations of the team becomes difficult.

ProductNation: Thank you, Vish for talking to ProductNation. We wish you all the very best in living up to these challenges.

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Entrepreneurship as an extra-curricular and hobby

Anatomy of an Idea

If today a survey in done in schools across India and students are asked some questions like,

  •         What are your favorite hobbies or pastime?
  •         What do you do after going back home from school?
  •         What do you do during holidays? 

You’ll get all sorts of answers but ‘Entrepreneurship’. Even worse, if the following question is also included,

Have you heard about the word “Entrepreneurship”?

I am guessing a depressingly low percentage would answer ‘yes’. That’s because the concept of ‘entrepreneurship being taught as a subject or an extra-curricular’ is non-existent in Indian schools. 

Schools play critical role in defining and determining a child’s way of thinking, perception about the world, mental and physical development and so forth. Schools shape children’s goals and aspirations. Children have an amazing ability to pick things up very quickly. The adoption of a concept is much easier in case of a child than an adult. We cannot expect India to produce a huge army of young home grown entrepreneurs when we don’t introduce this concept to them early on. It’s like expecting a country to have successful scientists or doctors without introducing science in schools. We benchmark Indian startup ecosystem against that of US based total annual VC funding, number of technology startups emanating, number of successful exits, etc., but forget that beneath all those facts and figures, there lays a very fundamental difference in the philosophy these two societies and, thus, their education systems have been built.  Success of America has a lot to do with their education system which promotes entrepreneurial and excogitative attitude. Indian education system, on the contrary, is more conservative and inclined towards rote learning. 

Trust me when I say that planting the idea of entrepreneurship in a child’s brain can do wonders!!

That’s because, it will ensure,

  •      Smarter kids (child’s development wont be restricted by bulky books)
  •      Better leadership qualities (entrepreneurship is all about leadership)
  •      Better problem solving and analytical thinking (child would explore innovative solutions as no   book would have written answers)
  •      Better sales/marketing skills (something which Indians are always criticized of!)
  •      Better programmers (I guess in many cases the next logical step after ideating something is learn programming)
  •      Increased employability of Indian engineers (Isn’t above mentioned skillset what every employer wants!)
  •      Better understanding and acceptance of entrepreneurship by parents and society at large, since schools would push the concept (again a major problem area, especially for young entrepreneurs)
  •      More experienced and more successful entrepreneurs (Serial entrepreneurs tend to succeed more than first timers)

In short, a win-win situation for entrepreneurs, employers and employees.            

Entrepreneurship may not be popular in Indian schools, but it is increasingly focused on by under graduate and graduate schools. Almost every good B-school has incubation cells and courses focused on entrepreneurship.  Also the companies hiring from B-Schools love to hire ex-entrepreneurs (not necessarily successful ones but also failed ones). That’s because in the fast changing times, it has become imperative for companies to innovate and evolve in order to stay relevant and flourish. In this context, entrepreneurs bring in a refreshing thinking and ‘challenging the status quo’ culture to the table. 

Today both schools and children are becoming more and more technology savvy. While Internet is within the reach of many, others are joining in. In that context, there is not much schools need to do, to ignite the spirit of entrepreneurship among students. All they need to do is realize its importance and try to build some very basic subject matter expertise of entrepreneurship in the form of a subject, extra-curricular, summer holiday project, workshops, etc.  Tying this to overall grade of the child would ensure parents’ buy in. The government and other stakeholders of startup ecosystem (investors, entrepreneurs, enablers, incubators, etc.) can also pitch in and organize competitions and events to promote the concept. Just as we have Science or Maths Olympiad, we can have similar Olympiad for business ideas as well. NEN is doing an amazing job in replicating this model in undergraduate schools across India. It is time that we move a step prior in the value chain and introduce entrepreneurship in secondary schools in some form. 

Think about this, the secondary education dropout ratio in schools in rural India is almost 50%. The major cause – as child reaches the employability age of 12-14 years, he is expected to add an extra shoulder to support household income. Mid-day meal, the driving factor behind sending child to school, becomes irrelevant. But if students are encouraged and supported (finance, mentorship, subject matter knowledge, etc.) to become entrepreneurs and thus, support his family by generating some monthly income, the school dropout rate can be brought down significantly. Needless to talk about the employment opportunities created! Here the definition of enterprise can be totally different – it may not be a technology focused one. A person procuring purified water from somewhere and selling it in villages is also an entrepreneur in one way.

P.S. : When thought about earnestly, this can be a billion $ idea !! J 

I sincerely hope in coming years we hear success stories like Yahoo acquiring Summly (a teen startup out of London) from India, in addition to a 12 years old cracking JEE or an Indian kid winning Spelling Bee.

This article first appeared on NextBigWhat

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The Great Facilitation ballgame of Multi-sided Business Platforms

Let me start with a simple question. What is common among these, as of 2006 (and, for that matter, even as of today)?

– Visa
– Sony Playstation
– Orbitz
– NASDAQ
– Microsoft Windows

All of these are known examples of facilitation based multi-sided business models. These are not just products or businesses; these are platforms, in the true sense of the word. These platforms have, some even in industrial and so called traditional businesses, created value by “facilitating interactions & transactions” among various groups involved. They depend on network effect to kick in, and then thrive big time.

The concept of the two-sided markets is not new. In fact, the newspapers might have been among the first to exploit it, through low-priced subscription subsidized by the sponsors paying for advertisements.

Networking Events and conferences have been a great example of a non-tech two-sided platform, and they are sold on the same direct benefit as well. The sponsors subsidize the participants’ fees, and hence get presumably higher visibility. Participants get to network; sometimes get direct information or sales leads; and pay for it unless in some cases, fully subsidized by the sponsors.

However, these business models, as represented by the examples above, were still very few & far in between until few years back.

The business world, since, has changed. And, drastically so!

Google and Apple have become the most valuable brands in the world. Amazon, that revolutionized the Books & Publishing market through the e-Commerce strategy, has since transformed itself into a Platform company. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and recently Pinterest have become the household names, beyond the tech world. Travel, Hospitality & Commute have become well-integrated platforms driven businesses – driven through online technologies and ground-level operational integration.

HOW SONY FALTERED, AND HOW APPLE & GOOGLE PROPELLED

Let’s take an example of two companies that seem to be very similar on products stack otherwise. Apple and Sony. Sony actually brought upon the concept of music that you could carry, with its revolutionary Walkman. Apple came in very late, with iPod. Sony has had a premium quality tag in computing machines (with Vaio) for a long time, while Apple’s Mac slugged it out in its own creative/designer/geek space. Sony even had the earliest starts with its Reader as long back as in 2006! They even had a great idea of Reader being the platform, and got the leading publications in Japan to take note that time. Sony, a very relevant company even today in tech world with the quality and huge brand image to boot, (interestingly, it has had at least one product in platforms category in Playstation) has fallen to 31-Year lows. They continued selling products in silos on their own standalone benefits. They are a product company, still a great one, but that doesn’t seem to be enough!

On the other hand, Apple had an iPod – as a standalone “take your music with you device”, around 2001-02. With iTunes, it took the first steps into a platform around 2003. However, it has since transformed into a true platform company, with its formidable all-integrated business strategy that brings together computing, entertainment, and business. iTunes is a comprehensive AppStore, and not just a music store. Apple is a multi-dimensional company at its best – it brings multiple beneficiaries together in this multi-facets products business. iOS developers and Applications users. Musicians, music companies and Music lovers. Local or global businesses and their customers and fans. We’ve even started seeing the serious Enterprises making Apple devices the central to their CoIT (Consumerization of IT) and collaboration strategy. iPod, iPhone, iPad, Mac, iCloud – they sell products but they’re a platform! And, in Feb 2012 Apple became the most valuable company in the world!

Google is an obvious name in the multi-sided platforms strategy. They took forward the newspaper ads model and applied it to search beautifully. And now, with the Enterprise businesses as well as their ever-growing list of vehicles – in GMail, Google Apps, Android, Chrome, Maps, Drive, and so on – have established themselves as an formidable Multi-sided platform. At this time, there doesn’t seem to be a limit on what vehicles Google can choose to drive their platform strategy. Microsoft is now fighting it out on its own turf while Google and Apple make inroads into its huge Enterprise foothold. (This also points to another trend that I’m planning to write about – the blurring of lines between Business & Personal Technologies).

SO WHAT?!

This era clearly belongs to the multi-sided Platforms based business. It’s important, however, to not confuse this with the traditional definition of platforms in technology space. The true business platform is the one that is driven by facilitation and network effect, and which actually has multi-sided business model in the sense of heterogeneous set of beneficiaries that are not directly connected to each other. It is also important to note that this disruption has been caused not only by technological evolution, but also the interlinked effect of the other disruptive patterns such as “Long Tail” and “Free”, both terms made popular by the very respectable Chris Anderson. I will touch upon these in the next couple of posts as noted in my cover post on Game-Changer trends.

If you’re in a business – whether technology or not, whether e-commerce or not, whether products or services – don’t ignore this trend. Think about how you can leverage on this model, or be part of this ever-growing multi-cog machine that benefits all its gears. But, if you really think details, it’s not just a marketing gimmick, and it’s not just a tweak in the product. It should become the foundation of how business of your product is conceived, strategized and operationalized.

PS: This post originally appeared on my blog, but I thought it’s worthwhile to post it here. Very relevant, hope you find it too!

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10 Rules for Effective Product Company Advisory Boards!

Advisory boards are rarely meant for fixing fundamental flaws with business plans. Having big names on the advisory boards, purely for their name value, rarely works. It might help a little in raising venture money, if at all. However, when composed and used wisely, advisory boards can help your product company choose the right corporate, product, market and sales strategies. Simply put, your advisors should be people whose expertise or experience you respect highly, and feel sincerely that their advice will benefit your business. And if giving advice is an art, asking for, receiving and using advice is also an art!

Here are 10 rules that can help you make effective use of advisory boards:

1. Friends and Family may not be good candidates:   A natural instinct with some entrepreneurs is to appoint some of their friends and family members to the advisory board. They usually may not turn out to be good advisors unless they are otherwise qualified to be there.

2. Get advisors with fully complementary skills: Have three or four advisors, maximum. Find people with strong engineering and product development skills,sales experience or marketing experience in products related to yours or subject matter expertise.

3. Find the right people for your advisory board:  With LinkedIn and search engines like Google and Bing available, you can always find the right people for your advisory board and reach out to them. Their experiences need to be related to your product company. You may need to do the research to make sure that your company and products may be of interest to them currently. With internet connectivity linking people all over the globe easily, a company need not limit itself to any particular city or even the same country. You can even reach out to people in the US or Europe if you think they may be interested.

4. Clearly outline the time commitments to advisors:  Typical time commitments for advisors are one face to face meeting for a few hours every quarter (if everybody is in the same city or online, if not) and one full-day meeting and discussion once a year.  This may work out to be about 40 to 50 hours per year including their time for reading your materials and preparing answers and discussing them in your meeting.

5. Prepare a list of questions or topics you want advice on and send it ahead of time as an agenda:  Prepare an agenda of topics or list of questions in different areas like technology or science involved, product strategy, product management, engineering, marketing or sales. Sending it ahead of time to advisors will help them prepare properly for the meeting, quarterly or the annual one.

6. Arrange for convenient ways to participate:  With web conferencing services and tools like Skype and Google Hangouts, it has never been easier to arrange online advisory board meetings when advisors are geographically dispersed.

7. Compensate them for their time, expertise and advice:   Product companies rarely can compensate advisors with cash but the customary way to compensate them is with stock options. Usually it is around 1% or less of the company vested over 4 years or so. You can vest the first year’s options  (1/4th) at the time an advisory board agreement is signed and 1/4th the total number of shares every year after that.

8. Hold the right to fire them:  Advisors may sign on with the best of intentions in the beginning and for many reasons, it may not work out well for you subsequently. They may not find the time or may not be interested any more. The agreement should have a clause that lets you remove them from the advisory board if it is not working out for any reason.

9. Don’t confuse the advisory board with your board of directors:  Keep a clear separation and distinction between your advisory board and your board of directors. Your board of directors can introduce you to potential clients or customers, and they can help you with thorny issues with your management team, stock options or compensation issues. Advisory board members are there for a different reason and may not be compensated enough on the same scale for such activities.

10. Don’t confuse your advisory board with an extended sales team: Some companies sign up advisors for the board and also provide them with a small commission percentage for prospect introductions and such. This rarely works out in practice and confuses issues and may cause problems down the road. It is better to keep advisory services separate from sales activities.

All of us, at certain moments of our lives, need to take advice and to receive help from other people graciously- Alexis Carrel.

 

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7 Ways to Avoid Your Product Company Becoming a Services Company!

Product companies (especially those focused on the Enterprise) always face pressures, primarily that of cash flow in the earlier years, forcing them to take on more services components. This is especially true in countries like India where angel and venture investments are not as plentiful as in Silicon Valley. This is a trap that product companies will find it difficult to emerge from once they get into it.

Just to be clear – there is nothing wrong in being a services company! In many ways, it has better cash flow profiles in the earlier years enabling companies to ramp up with additional people and “projects”. But, you may not be able to make progress on your product vision, unfortunately!

How do you avoid this situation? Here are 7 ways you can avoid this trap:

1. Stick to your Vision, Test and Pivot: As we learn more about Lean Startups, one of the best ways to avoid becoming a services company is to make sure that your product is needed, clients will pay for it and you can build a company on it! You talk to potential clients before you build the product. Even then, you build only a Minimum Viable Product (MVP), roll it out and test your hypotheses by getting to revenues. If revenues are minimal or non-existent, you pivot and build something that someone will pay money for, and soon!

2. Build Features Based on How many Users Ask For Them:  In one of our enterprise product companies, we had a simple rule – If one client asks for it, it goes into the backlog list. If two clients ask for it, it goes into the next major release. If three clients ask for it, it goes into the next sprint!

3. Turn Custom Components into Product Features if you can: Try not to build components for any one client. Parameterize the client’s requirement into a more general idea and make what they are asking for, a specific case of that! For example, if they require your product to work with a certain brand of a reporting tool, think of how you can generalize it so that it can work with most reporting tools. You may need to build additional components but it will be worth it when the next client needs your product to work with another brand of a reporting tool!

4. Line up Services Partners Early:  Large product companies deliberately price their professional services much higher than their service partner ecosystem does. For example, if you were to source Oracle product expertise from Oracle, it will be an order of magnitude more expensive than obtaining it from a service partner of theirs. That’s how they prevent themselves from being sucked into spending too much time on services and away from their products. For small product companies this may be difficult to do, but if you find service partners who are also service partners for related products, they may be interested. It will involve sharing your revenues but that’s the tradeoff!

5. Line up Product Partners Early:  Products have natural boundaries and it’s good to recognize them early on and bring in product partners that do those things better. For example, if your product addresses a specific vertical with a core solution, line up product partners for related needs like reporting, social media integration, telephony integration, etc. You cannot be everything to your clients and identifying related product partners early on will help you avoid the trap of reinventing all related wheels all over again! Of course, you need to architect your product in such a way that it can easily integrate with other solutions!

6. Refuse Non-Core Competency Opportunities:  This is easy to say but tough to follow in real-life if you are a product startup. If a client offers you money to do a related thing but not quite what you were hoping to sell, you may need to refuse it! But that’s exactly what a product startup needs to do to stay true to its vision. If three clients ask for this other thing, that’s a Pivot! Take it and go forward!

7. Plan ahead for Cash Flow Pressures: Product companies are not for the faint hearted! Do not embark on even writing one line of code before you talk to potential prospects about your ideas, show them sketches of what you were thinking about, and finding out what they are willing to spend for such a solution. If you are already well into having two or three clients and it is a case of scaling, you may need to pivot to products that could scale up better, faster.

It pays well to remember that with product companies the goal is to write code once, get paid many times. With services companies, you write code once, you get paid once! Very rarely do you get to write code and retain the Intellectual Property that is general, and can quickly be sold to other clients, unless you subsidize the initial development substantially!

Again, there is nothing wrong with being a services company. It has its plusses and minuses, but without paying attention to strategy, proper architecture and partners, you could end up becoming a services company when you want to go the other way!

I already am a product – Lady Gaga
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“E” is for empathy

The last three business books I read were seemingly all different. “Wired to Care” by Dev Patnaik, “Nanovation” by Kevin and Jackie Freiberg and “Customer Centric Selling” by Michael Bosworth. The first was how humans are genetically designed to care for others, the second was the story behind how the Tata Nano was launched and the third was a book on more effective selling. But there was a common underlying theme to it all.

The theme was empathy. The Merriam Webster dictionary defines empathy as

“the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another of either the past or present without having the feelings, thoughts, and experience fully communicated in an objectively explicit manner; also : the capacity for this”

All the books in various ways said this and I am paraphrasing here – in order to to create a compelling offering you need to understand your customer’s pain and create a solution for it.

This should be self-evident but unfortunately that is not what we find in reality. What we find too often is a situation where a company creates a product without fully understanding how it will solve a customer’s problem. Even if they have a legitimate product solving legitimate problems, they are so caught up in the gee-whizziness of their product that they stop listening to their customers.

This is a big problem. A company that has a valid solution for a defined problem can last for a while. It might even get some early adopters but it will have a hard time sustaining its momentum and will run out of steam unless it starts a dialog with its customers and is empathetic to their needs. This is because your mainstream customers, the ones that will sustain you, are not early adopters and need to develop trust before they do business with you. One of the surest ways of building trust is to make sure the customer feels that you feel their pain and understand their unique situation.

This is not rocket science. It can be easily instituted in an organization. Designing a consultative sales process around understanding a customer’s needs first is a great start. But the culture of making sure that every touch point with the customer listens more than talks starts at the top.

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Great Mentoring Session for Product startups with Piyush Singh & Greg Toebbe

Both, Piyush Singh(Sr. VP & CIO) & Greg Toebbe(Sr. VP) at Great American Insurance, are active participants in the Indian software ecosystem and are acknowledged speakers in the NASSCOM Product Conclave. This time they selected 4 companies to have one-on-one sessions with them on February 27, 2013 after reviewing several companies that had applied for this mentoring session.

Objective of these one-on-one meetings was mentoring/guidance on product strategy, Go-To-Market (GTM), scaling and sales among other things. The number of companies selected was consciously kept less so that each startup gets quality time of one hour with Piyush and Greg.  The time was split as follows: 15-20 minutes of introduction and product presentation followed by a few minutes of the product demonstration. More than half of the allotted time was suggested to be used for seeking advice and feedback. These sessions were voluntarily given by Piyush as part of helping the Indian Software Product ecosystem. Participants were at liberty to seek out the mentors for any advisory role or future involvement. I am sure that every company walked away feeling satisfied and renewed energy to pursue their dreams after these meetings. The companies selected were:

Here are some of the snippets of advice given to the companies (in random order):

  • Presentations should immediately connect with the audience. Great way to do this is to start with user stories/perspectives so that people immediately see the product’s value rather explaining the technology involved or the general problem that the product is solving. He also mentioned that CxOs like numbers. Numbers hit them more than anything else. One of the startups declared that their product reduces the testing effort, increases productivity and saves license costs too. They were advised to take a specific case study and put the actual savings in numbers. These would then make people see the value instantaneously.
  • One company had built a great enterprise technology platform over the last couple of years. However, it had difficulty in selling it to the big guys. Piyush advised them to build vertical-based solutions on their platform and target one or more marquee customers in that segment. He said they could keep the core common and build vertical-focused modules. This would help them differentiate from their competitors as well as have potential customers see the value immediately.
  • While everyone is clamoring for moving their applications into the cloud, he said cloud is not meant for everyone and everything. Companies should not make superficial efforts to move their product into the cloud if it doesn’t make sense to their customers. Alternatively, if they could offer the hybrid model (cloud and on-premise) then customers are free to choose what they want. Ultimately the development should be driven more your customer needs rather than general technology trends around you.
  • For selling in the US, he said there is no alternative to burning shoe leather. Companies will have to meet the leads face-to-face and sell. Specific targeted Tradeshows as well as exposure in right magazines are another avenue to generate good leads. He also advised the startups to tie up with bigger player in their domains and use their sales muscle, if it works out symbiotically for both parties.

Once again, ProductNation and the participating companies would like to thank Piyush and Greg for their valuable time and advise. And last but not the least, we would like to thank Pramati Techologies (Syed Khadar) for hosting these meetings and helping us with the arrangements at a very short notice.

Few testimonials from the companies:

Thank you very much ProductNation for the opportunity to Mr. Piyush Singh and Mr. Greg Toebbe.  The feedback and suggestions shared by them was quite valuable, especially good to know the buyers perspective, which will be helpful in presenting a business case to the prospects.  Once again thank you ProductNation for all support extended to start ups – Sudhir Patil, Qualitia Software

It was a great experience meeting Piyush & Greg, very high return on my time spent (RoT).  The quality & amount of, to the point, practical and meaningful advice I got in one hour of our interaction was invaluable and is impossible to get by even attending a dozen startup events.  Very productive, very helpful, expecting more of such interactions with people who know and understand the needs of your target customer segments besides knowing technology! – Sumeet Anand, Kreeo Software

Our main intention was to validate some of the assumptions we have made for building the Enterprise Software. Piyush, being the CIO of a huge enterprise, provided that validation as well as helped us prioritize a few things. His offer for using out free Lite version (when it is available) was also deeply appreciated. Overall, we felt it was time well spent. – Chandra, i7 Networks

The interaction provided some valuable feedback for our company growth and scale. Even though the session time was limited, ROI was there ! Today we need to interact with wide/diverse network of people due to the product DNA nature in the business model and the pace at which this model is growing as compared to the old mentoring model and nature of the companies/business model.
Also he was good enough to keep the interaction beyond the session as well ! I would like to quote Jim Rohn in this context – “You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.” Lot to learn from their expertise and hopefully the session provided the platform for the same/to get started with. Thanks to ProductNation for organising such a session and expect to do more sessions. Abdulla Hisham, Fordadian Technologies
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Q&A with MAIA Intelligence, India’s Largest Business Intelligence Software Company

MAIA Intelligence, launched in 2006, was the first business intelligence software product company in India. Its product, 1KEY Agile BI Suite, is designed with the vision of serving the analytics and reporting needs of an entire organization from the operational end users to the top executives. In this interview, CEO and founder Sanjay Mehta discusses the product benefits and the importance of customer feedback in developing a market-leading product. This article is brought to SandHill readers in partnership with ProductNation.   

SandHill.com: What is your company’s mission and what was your original vision? 

Sanjay Mehta: MAIA Intelligence is a young and innovative company committed to developing powerful BI reporting and analysis products. MAIA’s mission is to democratize BI and take it from a few expert users to the operational managers, and from frontline executives to the back-office team.

While at my former company (Udyog), we realized that for ERP software there are too many challenges in creating reports as and when required. The Udyog customers wanted a reporting tool to the business software as a plug-in. These customers then started asking for enhanced reporting capabilities and features in other business applications such as CRM, HR Management, etc.

Business intelligence is a domain which traditionally is aimed for the top decision maker. But what we have observed is that with adequate information at hand, operational-level decision making also improves drastically — improving productivity, increasing revenue and market share. We now have more than 45,000 users across India and are the largest BI software product company in India. 

SandHill.com: Is there a story behind your company name? 

Sanjay Mehta: MAIA is a female given name of Greek origin. MAIA also means the eldest of the Pleiades in Greek mythology, also identified with an Ancient Italic goddess of spring and the most beautiful. Similar to Laxmiji, goddess of prosperity. 

SandHill.com: Please describe your product suite and your market. 

Sanjay Mehta: Our flagship product is 1KEY Agile BI Suite, which is a comprehensive business intelligence software application catering to strategic, tactical and operational data analysis and reporting needs of multiple vertical industries. An integrated offering with a choice to pick and choose modules (business user interfaces), it enables organizations to deploy the BI framework with minimal investments and have a secure, enterprise-wide, dynamic reporting platform in six weeks, irrespective of existing applications.

We also have other products such as 1KEY Touch (an advanced interactive dashboard and reporting software), 1KEY FCM (a financial consolidation management solution) and postXBRL software (an XBRL reporting tool). Our upcoming product is 1KEY HPC (high-performance computing analytics software).

Our 1KEY BI application is suitable for small businesses as well as enterprises. We have been making good inroads in almost all the industry verticals, especially BFSI, Manufacturing, Pharmaceuticals, FMCG, Consumer Durables & Retail. As of now we have customers largely in India and the Middle East, but we are looking to expand soon in the other global markets through strategic alliances.

Read the complete story at Sandhill.com

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“Great Designers Steal”

Picasso Cubism

Picasso is purported to have remarked, “good artists borrow, but great artists steal.” He probably did not mean it in a literal sense. He wanted to inspire us from great works of arts and re-interpret or re-imagine them in a different way. Here are some references that have inspired us to become better designers.

 

Balsamiq Screenshot

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. Balsamiq: Its simple sketchy interface evokes a sense of nostalgia of our playing with crayons as children. The clients don’t get distracted by little details allowing us to focus on important things such as navigation, content prioritization, quantity of content, and what a screen does. You should definitely use this to visualize and share your vision before writing a single line of code. This is also a great tool to communicate user stories within the agile framework.

PatternTap Screenshot

 

 

 

 

 

 

2. Pattern Tap: Its a collection of crowd-sourced design inspirations for all page types and devices. The designs are categorized by facets, so search for “login” to be wowed by how a simple screen can be so beautiful. 

TheNounProject Screenshot

 

 

 

 

 

 

3. The Noun Project: “The mission of The Noun Project is to collect, organize and add to the highly recognizable symbols that form the world’s visual language so they can be shared in a fun and meaningful way.” The symbols are free and delightful. You have see them to believe.

Smashing Magazine Screenshot

 

 

 

 

 

 

4. Smashing Magazine: An online magazine for designers and front end developers, to stay current with the ever evolving tools and techniques. It also has a great compilation of books and ebooks that could be references on your next project.

365psd Screenshot

 

 

 

 

 

 

5. 365psd: 365 psd, needless to say, means one high quality psd file a day. A great resource for free UI kits, page templates, and icons to get you started or help get over the creative block. And do sign up for a freebie everyday.

Google Web Fonts Screenshot

 

 

 

 

 

 

6. Google Web Fonts: Are you still married to times, arial, and helvetica? Here are hundreds of open source free fonts to help design great looking yet highly readable sites.  Don’t forget to look at the “pairings” feature. It recommends best complementary font pairs to add that extra zing to the design.

So go forth and steal, and please keep adding to this list.

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SaaS #MadeinIndia Products – HR & Recruitment

This post and the one’s following this are attempts to improve the coverage and knowledge of Indian made Product companies who are solving issues with their SaaS type solutions. This is not a comprehensive list, and if there are some companies whom we have missed and should be in this list, please feel free to email us or drop in a comment and we will add it to the list, this hopefully will turn into a Crowd Sourced list of companies in the HR & Recruitment space.
Some of the HR & Recruitment based Products with a SaaS twist and the #madeinindia component in an alphabetical order:
1. Adrenalin – Adrenalin is a business-critical Human Resource Software. It provides critical tools such as HR software solution, payroll software solution, HRMS software solution, performance management system, attendance and training management software solutions.
2. Ascent Payroll – Employee Self service, Payroll Software.
3. Cynergis – HR Outsourcing, Payroll & HRMS software which has been around for over 10 years, and also has a major SaaS play involved.
4. Employwise – HR software for integrated employee life-cycle management delivered as SaaS.
5. Emportant – Emportant.com provides Internet based HR and Payroll Management software. Based on cloud technologies, it provides highly reliable and worry free software environment that you can just use without any other software management overheads.
6. EmpXtrack – EmpXtrack is a software product of Saigun Technologies Pvt. Ltd.. The company has been focused on HR solutions for the last 10 years and is a CMMI Level 3 company implementing best software development practices since inception.
7. Fluous – PowerApps – Adaptive HR Systems is the premier HRMS solution being by both large and growing organisations.
8. Greytip – Greytip Software is a leading HR & Payroll software solutions company. They offer a wide range of HR solutions (from on-boarding to exit) for customers big and small across industry verticals.
9. Hackerearth – Help you hire programmers for your companies.
10. HireCraft – Talent Management is a tool to help you manage all your employees and talent via this product suite by HireCraft.
11. Hire Rabbit – HireRabbit helps you design a beautiful career site on facebook, boost your referral recruitment, automate manual social recruiting activities, and provide metrics that matter!
12. HR Mantra – HR Mantra provides SaaS based Employee Self Service, HRIS, HR & Payroll Software on the Cloud.
13. Jombay – the smartest way to find jobs in India on the next generation job portal.
14. KServeHRMS is a flagship product with of Kallos. The HRMS product is known for its unique employee self service centric model for integrated HRMS software
15. MinervaHR Suite – A product from TenXLabs designed to house all information pertaining to every employee in an association from Recruitment to Retirals.
16. Mettl – Mettl is an online assessment and testing platform to measure, analyze and improve people skills. It is ideal for companies who want to run multi-competency assessments for their prospective hires or existing employees. We focus deeply on the science of assessments and combine it with advanced technology to deliver highly valid and reliable tests.
17. PeopleWorks –  A flexible, robust, customizable, and seamless cloud based solution for efficient management of the HR lifecycle of every employee in the organization.
18. Recruiterbox – Recruiterbox is the easiest way to receive and manage job applications to your company. It is more efficient than email and simpler than any other recruitment software. They are Bangalore based, but have been getting great traction outside and within India for their product.
19. Saral Paypack – Payroll Software for managing all your employees in one place, SaaS based web platform.
20. Shawman Software – From recruitment to retirement, the entire gamut of managing human capital is supported by HRMS.
21. SumHR – SumHR is a HRMS product, automating all HR requirements with a Free Employee & Leave Management system product integrated as well.
22. Synergita – Software for the people, performance management and continuous feedback.
23. Talentpool – Talentpool is a recruitment software for HR Departments of companies. It helps them streamline their recruitment processes, meet hiring targets and get instant reports to track performance.
24. Valuehire – A complete workflow automation solution for recruitment agencies and
companies of all sizes.
As mentioned, if (and we must have) we have missed out on some companies, either yours or another you know of, and would like it to be added to the list, please comment below here, or email us.
Our Goal is to create a great compilation of SaaS Product companies made out of India and hopefully get more businesses to try using these products as well compared to other counter-parts.
The next list of SaaS Product companies made from India, will have special focus on Social Media Tools. Watch out for that in a few days.
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Guerilla Marketing 2.0 for Product Startups!

Jay Conrad Levinson, father of Guerilla Marketing defines it very simply as going after conventional goals with unconventional means! When you are a product startup, trying to build a business on little to zero money, you need plenty of unconventional means. With the rise of social media, viral word-of-mouth options with web and mobile global connectivity, it has never been easier to do guerilla marketing! As you will see in  the rest of this article, social media can be a part of guerilla marketing and that makes it 2.0!

However, guerilla marketing requires lots of time, energy, imagination and information on your part rather than money (in Jay Conrad Levinson’s words again!)

First, it is worth watching him describe guerilla marketing in his own words! It is worthwhile to remember that he invented this way before we had social media but since then they have made what he was trying to do a lot easier!

Time, energy, imagination and information are not easy to muster or master easily when you are short of money, trying to get to the next level of getting angel funding or venture funding or just trying to keep your business afloat! But that’s when guerilla marketing could provide the big breaks you may be looking for in terms of customer adoption!

Here’s a video of the Unidesk CEO talking about how they performed guerilla marketing and the tools they used throughout the lifecycle of their product. Right from inception, when they did not have a product to when they had a product and trying to get repeat customers!  They used different tools, some of them social media, at various stages of the product development lifecycle and for different purposes. For example, their use of SurveyMonkey to survey potential users of their product BEFORE they had a product is remarkable. Unidesk is in the business of desktop virtualization. All they had to do was ask potential users what they needed using a survey and seems like they got MORE than what they needed by way of inputs on what was needed in their product. This ties in with the Lean Startup movement where you get out of the office and talk to potential prospects before implementing anything.

Very interesting to see the variety of tools used during different stages of the lifecycle of their product (inception to repeat customers). Most importantly, their use of measurement of everything is key in seeing what works and changing tools or approaches quickly! After all, time, energy, imagination and information is not easy to come by, and cannot be wasted even if you can do many things for free these days!

Here’s another YouTube video about understanding the Chain of Conversion. Software product founders may also know this as the Funnel. This video makes a very important point about understanding the way your own funnel works, pinpointing the weaknesses in your funnel, working backwards from any point in the funnel, and fixing these weaknesses systematically. This is where you may need to employ different guerilla marketing approaches depending upon what is suitable at the different stages of the funnel.

Finally, here’s a stunning YouTube video. I don’t want to say anything more since that anything would be a spoiler!  Watch it for yourself! All I want to say is that this one has 43 million views as of this writing! Rest assured that this Guerilla Marketing effort was highly successful!

Many users on twitter, facebook and instagram believe they are the star of their very own reality show when they are stalked by a mellow mushroom! – Entrepreneur Magazine talking about Mellow Mushroom’s (restaurant) guerilla marketing effort.

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Geeks with Dilli Wallas

Geeks on a Plane (#GOAP) is an invite-only tour for startups, investors, and executives to learn about burgeoning technology markets worldwide. #GOAP is headed to India and after visiting Bangalore & Mumbai the geeks will be visiting Delhi from 27th to 2nd March ’13. We (91Springboard, ProductNation & Moonlighting) are hosting #GOAP while they are in Delhi. Come join us to meet the #GOAP team, most awesome startups & entrepreneurs in Delhi-NCR and other cool folks accompanied with a light lunch on 28th Feb ’13 from 11am to 2pm.

Geeks on a Plane (#GOAP) is program initiated by 500 Startups, a startup accelerator from Silicon Valley. Through this initiative, founders Dave McClure and Christen O’Brien travel to technology markets with geeks and startup enthusiasts. The participants come from companies like GE, Wahooly, XG Ventures, SoftLayer, JESS3, Qualcomm Ventures, SendGrid, Google and more.

Tentative agenda:
1100 – 1115 hrs – Welcome & Introductions
1115 – 1130 hrs – Talk by Dave McClure – Go Local or Go Global (or both)
1130 – 1145 hrs – Talk by Sharad Sharma, Co-Founder, iSPIRT – Surfing the Innovation Wave
1145 – 1245 hrs – Lessons Learnt from Product Startups in Emerging Economies – Ambarish Gupta (Knowlarity), Aloke Bajpai (iXIGO), Kavin Bharti Mittal (Hike) Ketan Kapoor (Mettl), Paras Chopra (Visual Website Optimiser), Rajat Garg(SocialAppsHQ); Moderated by Kunal Bajaj – Advisor, iSPIRT Founder Circle
1245 – 1400 hrs – Networking Over Light Lunch with the Geeks

Venue: 91springboard

Entry free: Rs 500. Register Online. We have very limited seats, please do register online by filling up the form and we will confirm your participation. Here is an opportunity to meet and interact with the geeks. Register now to avoid disappointment. No on-site registrations will be allowed.