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Build product teams based on established capabilities and chemistry

Jay Pullur is the founder and CEO of Pramati Technologies, software and services company based out of Hyderabad. The company recently announced that it’s enterprise social collaboration software platform — Qontext — had been acquired by Autodesk, the maker of design, engineering and entertainment software.  Jay’s career in the software industry spans 25 years, and his primary interest lies in building products for new markets. This has led to Pramati Technologies incubating and spinning-off multiple startups. In an interview with pn.ispirt.in, Jay talks about the importance of a product development team, switching from a services mindset to a product mindset and importance of giving customers not just a product but also an experience.

When you’re conceptualizing a product do you ultimately have the end goal in place or does that fall into place somewhere long the journey? 

Well, the end goal is to make the product successful. Normal entrepreneurial expectations are to build the business big enough to pursue the acquisition path, or an IPO. However at Pramati, even before we think about that end goal we practice what we call ‘careful entrepreneurship’ — we don’t venture into something just because we’re passionate about doing something in a certain area or because we want to jump on the bandwagon. Working with an end goal in mind is like playing the game with the sight set on the scoreboard; we might loose track of the ball.

Instead, we start an idea in a small fashion, watch it gather momentum and then form a core team. The spectrum of opportunities is wide and how else would one choose? We build a core team around the project with people from within the company who have established capabilities and chemistry. We then have to craft the product pitch and try it out in the market before committing funds to sales and other activities. Based on the product-market fit, we formally make it an independent entity and float it out like a typical startup. This approach as worked better for us.

So on an average, how long does this preparatory phase take? And what’s the profile of this team – do they come from multidisciplinary backgrounds?

Idea development stage can take anywhere up to a year, most often 6 months.  During this period, we have a really small team — like for Qontext, we had a three-person team. And they are usually people who’ve been with the company for sometime, so we know they are right for exploring certain aspects. There are many aspects to explore because a product is a confluence of market opportunity and certain technology changes. The company has built strong capabilities to address this confluence in a few chosen areas, and we play around our strengths. The team might include people from technology, user experience, business development, consumer marketing or enterprise sales, and the composition entirely depends on what aspects have to be explored before we dive deep.

So given your background in Wipro, where you were employee #36,  getting into the product mindset would have required a different mentality. In Wipro it was about the client doing the spec and asking for something, and the services organization providing the people and delivering the project. How did you resolve yourself to a new business model where the waiting period itself to kick of a project was anywhere between 9-12 months?

When I started at Wipro, it was early days of the IT industry in the country. We did have to innovate on the services side of the business model in some fashion, however the services industry enjoyed many natural advantages. Understanding the services part of the business gave me good insights as to what is possible in India and the expectations of global clients. But, now we had to innovate on the business model further and we were ready for that.

I left Wipro with the intention of experimenting and bringing a new level of innovation in the country using the same IT professionals but creating higher value offerings. Those were the days when the Internet was just beginning to boom, so our first product was an infrastructure for web applications. The company vision has been to find the right model for building globally successful products or services and go beyond what the traditional IT industry in India has done.

Talking of teams, you have different very distinct product lines doing some very focused work. How do ensure that the best practices that come out of the product development exercise are replicable across the organization?

Product development no doubt needs very high-levels of skills, capabilities, teamwork and commitment to excellence. And when we are able to that well, we need to ensure that it spreads through the organization and remains as part of our DNA even as we grow.

This actually is a very critical element of our business model and you will notice that we are organized as multiple independent businesses with a core, underlying infrastructure, technical expertise, work culture and purpose. The independent business gives them the freedom of smallness (read startup) structurally and the core brings the power of the big.

In some ways Pramati is not only a software company but also as an incubator and an angel investor with a portfolio of businesses. The strength lies in bringing this synergy between them, and building the infrastructure that is common for all these companies — and this is beyond just providing facilities and finances. It is about building the core capabilities of creating teams, spotting talent and integrating them. The Pramati corporate base provides a common infrastructure such as access to a strong legal and M&A specialists needed for deals like our recent one with Autodesk. Such Corporate development capability is hard to build in a startup, although very essential. Also, our model gives us the opportunity to bring talent in to the company even earlier than we’d actually need. We are always looking to bring the right people in the system and be part of our culture; opportunities may get worked out subsequently.

So in the product development game, if you had to put your finger on three vital resources without which you wouldn’t even contemplate beginning, what would those be?

  1. Deep understanding of technology. The organizational knowledge in key technology areas plays a big role. It gives us the confidence to deal with changing market needs and customer preferences.
  2. The ability to think globally. Over the last 14 years we have built complementary operations in both India and the US. So this gives us access to both markets – customers and talent, enabling us to build products and market them.
  3. Our brand. Customers don’t want to deal with small brands and unknown products. Having been in business for a long time and served thousands of customers across different categories, we understand the kind of expectations customers have. We constantly strive to understand customers better and enhance the experience we deliver.

Typically, Indians have been accused of being great from a technology perspective but are sometimes very poor at packaging and brand building. How have you tackled this? 

I think being good at technology alone is not enough. Customers today are expecting more than just a product or a solution — they’re expecting an experience. We always design and build the whole product, not just the software part. Few important things here are – the experience of dealing with company, the first impression with the product, the usability, the interaction with our support team. Nothing less than world-class sells today and no customers are captive; there are hundreds of other players in every market who are ready to service them.

So obviously we had to build a team that’s global in nature finding the right resources in the right place. Fortunately, we found right talent in India who could design user interface and experience that works well for our global customers. However, as a company, we have placed heavy emphasis on packaging, user experience and brand development which has paid off well.

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You May Not Like Your Payslip, but We…Love It

SAP acquired Success Factors and Oracle acquired Taleo in billion dollar transactions. Workday recently listed at a billion dollar valuation. The boring enterprise HR software market is suddenly hot – red hot. This excitement is also rubbing off onto a decade old HR Software Product company from Bangalore that aspires to be the first choice provider of HR and Payroll Software to businesses in India.

Today, we hear their story in an interview with the Chief Executive of GreyTip Software – Girish Rowjee.
ProductNation: Welcome to ProductNation. We are really excited to speak to you. Please share your story and your journey towards founding GreyTip. Why did you get started and what prompted you? Please tell us all.
Girish: When we were studying in the 1990’s, the normal practice for most of the engineering pass outs was to do the GRE, get an MS and then get into a job.
Obviously, my co-founder and I did not belong to that dataset. So, during engineering, most of the times we were hanging around the Computer Lab, keen to do a few things around software. Primarily, we wanted to do something in India, not that we had any business plan, but that was the intent. We were driven by the sheer excitement of doing something real. Our first fling was with a Bulletin Board System in 1994, when we had just passed out of college in Mysore.

That is how the whole thing started.

Just to jog the readers’ memory, this was the time when the internet was nascent – dialup modem and text interfaces. But, we were thrilled at the prospect of writing software.

ProductNation: Girish, can you please share details on the equipment you had at that time?
Girish: We had ONE assembled 386 machine ably supported by a stabilizer. The big debate back then was whether we should take a 40 MB or a 120 MB hard disk, as the three thousand rupee difference was 30% of the capital that we had borrowed.

The Bulletin Board Service (BBS) had developed did not take off in Mysore, so we decided to move to Bangalore in November 1994 and start this company. It was called Delphi Software. We decided to stick to BBS in the endeavor to be an information portal for Indian consumers. We realized quickly that this may not work.

At the same time, we got an opportunity to work for a company called Brooke Bond Lipton. This was around developing reporting tools for their HR management information database. It was a new area and a new experience for us as we ourselves were getting introduced to data warehousing. But, we pulled off the project successfully.

Following that the HR team also asked us to build a HR database. It was a critical assignment as it was part of their KRA’s and the appraisal season was just a month away. We were able to do that job successfully as well.

That is how it all truly began. And when the HR staff from Brooke Bond moved to other companies, we followed and that is how we got more work.

ProductNation: That means in the initial period, you guys were helping out companies with IT services and special projects. Is that correct?
Girish: Yes. We even wrote ERP software for a garment manufacturer. At that time, it was the thrill of writing software that was driving us rather than money, business plan, topline and the works. We were making enough money from a self-employment perspective.

It was in 1999 when we started thinking on the need to move beyond a generic IT Services for Business approach. We started focusing on the HR software product. We already had 20 – 25 installations of the product. Payroll was an area we were comfortable with. At that time, many companies were doing payroll but the quality wasn’t enterprise class. That was the gap we were after and we had the competency to address it. With this the HR software product idea got crystallized. We stopped doing everything else and just focused on doing HR software product.

ProductNation: Those were the dotcom days. How did it all go? What did you name the product?
Girish: Yes. During the 90s, eight character names were needed as DOS supported only 8 character file names. And since our product stood for people, we had named it Folklore. We were one of the firsts to do e-pay slips in companies like Microland and Compaq. Customer referrals helped us acquire more business. Referrals have always been our critical channel and explain why we haven’t really invested big time into marketing initiatives.
Not everything was good. At the height of the dotcom boom, our development team left for better opportunities. So we had our share of ups and downs. But, we persisted and hung in there.

We drifted for some time and it was only in 2007 that we decided to go for the SaaS option in the pursuit of scale. It took us two years to commission the cloud based product. In the first year, we managed only 50 users in the Bangalore area. The cloud concept was still very new and market acceptance was very cold as compared to today. But, over the years companies started developing comfort with SaaS and cloud concepts. This helped our case.
2011 was a very good year and we currently have more than 1000+ accounts on our cloud platform. We expect more growth going forward and are feeling confident.

ProductNation: Girish, what have been you BIG lessons in your entrepreneurial journey – personal and professional? And what would you like to share with other young product entrepreneurs?
Girish: Any entrepreneur who is setting out for the first time would do well to develop an initial set of customers. These customers should see enough value in the offering. These customers should miss you when you are not around. This also gives the entrepreneur valuable validation of the idea – pricing, potential and scale. This I believe is a much durable milestone to target than VC funding or exciting financial models on spreadsheets.

ProductNation: Well put Girish. An initial set of paying customers sounds really logical, simple and powerful. What about lessons on the personal front?  How has it been for you? Any tips here.
Girish: Couple of things. One, an ability to dream and visualize your future realty now is extremely important. You should develop a fair idea how things are going to look two to three years down the line. And of course, an ability to follow that path in a planner manner.

Another is that you should have an ability to convince a few set of people into your vision. These people should be other than your customer – your employees. If you are able to develop this initial set of employees, it would help in your go-to-market.

Passion and desperation are absolutely critical to success. It is only when one is desperate that things start to happen. Money is just a corollary to the value one brings to customers. This is what I believe.

ProductNation: Nicely articulated, Girish. What is next for GreyTip? Could you share some of your future plans?
Girish: We want to the first choice provider of HR and Payroll Software to businesses in India. Across India, we cover about 51 cities and 1000+ accounts. We have gained traction online as well and we would like to focus on the online channel in the future. For this we would endeavor to reach out to Tier II cities helping out organizations with their payroll automation and statutory obligations. We are catering to both enterprise and SME organizations in this pursuit.

ProductNation: Thanks for sharing that. Any moments that you would always cherish as part of the GreyTip story. Would you like to share?
Girish: I would like to narrate an incident. There was a client of ours, a fairly senior person in the corporate World. He said that he wanted to come to our Bangalore office and talk to us. Generally, people don’t come over. So, we were a little unsure. He came over. And shared –“Look, We have used five softwares in the past. But after using your software, the only reason why I am making this visit is to say ‘Thank You’. You have done it for us and relieved us of our headache.” And coming from a fairly senior person, it just made our day. We were really happy that we could make a difference.

It is instances like this that drive us. It is moments like these that mean more than any award or bank balance. In the end, it is the joy of the customers that does the trick for us.

ProductNation: Thank you for speaking to Product Nation. We wish you and your team many more such unusual client visits. Good Luck, Team GreyTip.

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Q&A with Software Startup Druva

Editor’s note: Druva’s inSync is a cloud-based unified solution for managing endpoint data in a mobile world. In this interview, Jaspreet Singh, founder and CEO, explains how the product differentiates in its market and how it provides value for enterprises. He also discusses an important attribute for startup CEOs. This article is brought to SandHill readers in partnership with ProductNation.

SandHill.com: When and where was your company launched?

Jaspreet Singh: We founded Druva in July of 2008 at Pune, India. We eventually moved to the United States after a Sequoia investment in January 2010.

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

Jaspreet Singh: Druva provides a unified solution to protect and manage endpoint data for enterprises. The solution integrates three functionalities — award winning backup, secure file-sharing and data loss prevention and analytics — to create a single unified cloud for IT to protect, manage and empower end users.

The enterprise endpoint landscape is ever changing. From PCs and laptops to smartphones and tablet devices and now a rising BYOD trend, enterprise data is spread across users, platforms, devices and geographies.

Data protection has been a crowded market space filled with legacy solution providers that have upgraded traditional server backup solutions to fit the mobile enterprise user. This has resulted in a lot of unhappy enterprises and great resistance from the end users to using those products because the solutions are resource intensive or do not offer sufficient security over public networks.

We built inSync specifically for the mobile user to address all the issues that legacy solutions were failing to address. The non-intrusive nature of the solution ensures that end users don’t even know it’s there. Our product helps users make the best use of the data and at the same time enables IT to protect and control the same information. The users can use Druva inSync to share and collaborate with peers on the data from any device. IT gets a single console to back up corporate information, visibility into what and with whom users are sharing, and is able to control the data using data loss prevention and analytics. It’s the industry’s first solution to integrate these features into a single unified solution.

Read the complete interview at Sandhill.com

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5 speaker quotes @NPC12 & what they mean

5 phrases I heard and overheard at NPC12 and what they mean. I’m open to a thrash-out on this.

1. “Initially I was skeptical about coming to NPC. Now I want to come here every year.”

– First time at NPC + US based speaker with 100% audience feedback. 

Achievers in America are looking towards India. There’s a reason.

The PULSE that ignited so many industries in the 90s with the sudden wave of IT based services has had no follow up. Companies were able to generate value from the cost arbitrage. Labour was (is) cheap and American companies found (find) Indians to be extremely high ROI.

Until now.

The ITES model has not been able to add the same value as earlier. The pipes are drying out. Software demand has moved away from custom services to problem-solving-price-effective-free-support software.

Almost no one wants to pay for software that doesn’t save lives or makes money.

The ITES ecosystem is attracting the lowest ranks of talent. The good and smart ones that remain are breaking out and building products. Or at least in deep contemplation. Much expected – as a nation of the smartest chimps on earth – we’ve been solving the world’s software problems for over 2 decades now. It’s time we build products. And that’s what we are doing. And these speakers now want to come here every year because its helping them.

Watch this space as I share a video about MR asking Ram Shriram a few questions – one of which is a very interesting angle on why bandwidth is a problem solver.

2. “They (Indian s/w products) are looking inwards to solve the problem. India’s HUGE as a market”

– American born and based speaker.

The Indian SMB industry is upwards of $40Bn worth. But adoption is where the challenges are. If I get your payroll problem solved for INR 1.00 per employee per day – would you still worry about hooking yourself up to this system? At its least – you’ll give my system a shot won’t you?

The cost arbitrage that existed earlier through the service model is now visible through the product model. Companies are not just building the problem solution pairs. But they are creating disruption and then asking for very little money in exchange for it.

And they can do it cause they’re based in India. It costs virtually nothing to setup and build a product from India. Selling it globally may seem lucrative – but not everyone intends to go global immediately. Don’t need to.

Flipkart.

3. “Failing is no longer a social taboo” – everyone.

As a social fabric – we Indians have had this problem for a long time. The class topper is celebrated. She gets the biggest chocolate – both in school and at home. The second in class gets a smaller chocolate.

The one who was failing in Math all along but passed this year without any cheating – is considered a failure.

Not anymore. Finding your own battles and winning them is more important than winning battles others have set for you.

Its the pursuit to excellence that’s taken precedence now. Companies and founders are realizing their shortcomings. And are working to address them quickly. And that signifies a major shift in thinking.

Accepting the possibility of failure makes it easier to accept risk. And risk precedes rewards. So as the Indian smartie moves away from the cushy air conditioned cabins to the street side hustle – the ecosystem around him will prevent him from being ridiculed for his failures.

Every little success is being celebrated here.

4. “Indian products still don’t understand their TG perfectly” – Entrepreneur with thorough experience with software products in the valley.

This one is a serious flaw. Not understanding the target group (TG) is a recipe for disaster. And of all the entrepreneurs I met – finding the TG was in many ways the biggest challenge.

This is because what works and what doesn’t needs a qualitative feedback. This means you tell someone what you think they’re doing wrong. And then superimpose that opinion with what can be done right. Perspective is what the NPC community now offers through the Open source model.

See this video to wrap your head around this ‘open-source’ model. Sharad’s articulate mind encapsulates the theory. If you were at NPC – you would have seen it in action. You’re reading this on ProductNation ! 🙂

5. “Stop wasting time on the Blogosphere” – Ex Facebook, ex AOL, investor who speaks harsh truths.

Though in many ways this is important – it also signifies the importance of content and content marketing. I missed cornering Naren Gupta on why he feels marketing talent is low in India and how we can improve it. But to cut a long story short – the noise on the blogosphere is preventing the Indian product owner from creating, marketing, measuring the effectiveness of content and marketing. Independently and as a whole.

Investors, angels, and startups all seem to agree that products with initial traction need to increase the effectiveness of content and its marketing. Reading techcrunch is great to sound smart – but its got no relevance to the Indian ecosystem and how technology products can be built and grown here.

Conferences like the Nasscom Product Conclave are by design meant to share and exchange ideas. It takes a little time for a new comer to get acquainted. But my first time experience volunteering with this community taught me so much. The software product ecosystem is brimming with energy and confidence.

Yes on many fronts we Indians are at rock bottom. But from here,  the only place you can go is up.

If you’re on the boat – grab an oar and start paddling. We gotta take this ship to the other side. Wish you all a very happy good-wins-over-evil festival of lights – Diwali.

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And You thought Friday was just a Day of the Week…

What happens when six engineers with cushy corporate jobs decide to invest? And that too in a Whiteboard and an imported Smartphone. Yes, they grow up into mobile entrepreneurs creating android apps that millions the World over love. If you are reading this on an Android device, quickly search for “Friday” on the Play Store.

Today, we hear their story in an interview with the Chief Executive of Dexetra – Narayan Babu.

ProductNation: Welcome to Product Nation. We are really looking forward to hear your story. So please share all the excitement and emotion that you have gone through in your journey as a product entrepreneur.
Narayan: I was mentored by my Dad. My father used to be a CDAC Scientist (it was called ER&DCI then) and a member of the team that created Param – The First Supercomputer from India. So, Binary and Boolean Logic all came to me at an early age.

When I came into college after school, I realized that I could do technical stuff well. I could code and program, but I had no people skills for a startup. But I always wanted to do a startup like my father. So this startup was always playing at the back of my mind. While at college, I did create a portfolio of websites and apps (they were called applications then) but never made money as I hesitated to ask.

After college, I joined Bosch as an engineer. Bosch had an amazing culture and it gave me a nice view of the Corporate World. But it is a great place for the 9 to 6 crowd. The only problem – I did not find the work challenging enough. In three years at Bosch, I also found a good team. And it dawned on us that we better do something before growing old. So I pulled in two hackers from my college and two others from Bosch.

At that point in time, there was no idea. But we were all excited about doing a startup. So we began thinking, what to do?

Luckily, at that time Android was just announced. Incidentally, I was working on the WinCE and few other mobile platforms at Bosch. The platform was unwieldy and so I began experimenting with Android. The Android interface and features were just fascinating. At that time, Google conducted the android app developer contest and giving away US $ 100,000 as prize. We could not participate in the first edition, but it was a fascinating entry into the world of apps. We saw very simple apps being awarded US $ 50k and US $ 100k. We found it pretty cool and thought that we should do something around Smartphones.

Our first investment was in a Whiteboard, to brainstorm what all could be done on a smartphone. So, we listed down all the features of the smartphone and we realized that there were 7 – 8 data point sensors on a smartphone compared to almost no features in a desktop computer. And then in an “Aha” moment we thought we could do something using all those sensors – A diary of one’s life maybe. We really went crazy with the possibilities. Crazy because at that moment neither we had any smartphone nor there was any android phone available in the market.

Coming back to our senses, we decided to create a basic version and participate in the next Google App Developer contest. We only had a month and we were able to put together a crude version of it, and eventually we didn’t submit our app. When the winners were announced, we saw that most of the apps were very basic and not as grand as what we were thinking. This made us think if our idea was too grandiose. But, we worked on it and after two months of effort, we felt that we could pull it off.

ProductNation: What was the name you gave to this initial app?

Narayan: First, we called it Chrone (for chronology) and then owing to the confusion with the Google product, we called it “Instinct”.

ProductNation: Ok. Please continue
Narayan: So, it was end of 2009 and we got our first android phone. It was an HTC phone with a 3.5 inch screen – a rare feature then. We ordered it from the US and specially took leave from office to receive the courier. And when tried running our app on it, it crashed. That is when we realized that emulator and the phone were different. So we had to work on the app, again.

Meanwhile, the android app marketplace had reached thousand apps or so. We decided to try something simpler. An android game which was a cross between pacman and Mario. We called it tintumon. And we launched that game. The app became popular, got 10,000 download and qualified for the Google Nexus One phone prize. It went on to do about 60,000 downloads. This was a big morale booster. That was when we started thinking about leaving our jobs and doing this full time. I had support from home and my other team members though concerned were way too excited about starting up.

This is when things got serious and we got our 6th founder. I reached out to one of our college mate who had done his MS and asked him to help us raise some money so that we could move into a place and leave our jobs. Basically he was the business guy we wanted in our tech team. He spoke about the app to a number of people and then finally an Investor who used to do only investments in rubber estates got really excited about it and put twenty lakhs into the business. So we quit our jobs and started Dexetra in April, 2010.

For a couple of months, we played around with all the mobile platforms – iOS, Blackberry, Android. We used to make apps, sell them for Free and also some for paid. One of our iOS games apps became the top 50 paid app in the App store. It was exciting. But it was time to focus on the main idea – Friday.

In the end of 2010, we shut down everything else and just focused on Friday. In two months we released the Alpha version and the users loved it. It was like SIRI but almost a year before SIRI. We got covered by Techcrunch and it was good fun speaking to all who covered us.

In this version, all the data was being collected locally on the phone. So the next step was to move all this data to the cloud. And we started working on the Friday cloud part. Quickly we realized that we had to build for scale. Since, we had been in a startup mode for close to a year, we understood issues of scale. So we consumed lot of information on scalable architecture to put it all together.

This was the time we met Vijay (Founder – One97). He instantly liked the cloud first version and the next day he signed the term sheet and put in a crore of rupees. This way we could recruit a couple of more guys into the team. Around this moment, the product was a little more than fifty percent ready. But in cases like this it is the last 20% that really takes the time.

ProductNation: Was that time when the Apple SIRI came by? Tell us about it and the eight hour SIRI bet.
Narayan: Yes. It was October 2012 when Apple launched SIRI. The World was touting it as the next big thing. We were irritated as we had been trying to put something together since 2009. And SIRI was not even close to what we had planned for Friday. But yes, conceptually similar.
Internally, we took up a bet to create an app exactly like SIRI in 8 hours flat. We managed a version and called it IRIS. It wasn’t for the public marketplace, but a tweet was picked up and it went viral. So we released it into the public marketplace. It got a million downloads in the first month, two million the next. Then, Micromax Aisha also leveraged IRIS.

IRIS becoming a sort of distraction and it was becoming hard to manage two entities. After spending a couple of man months, the team gathered itself and decided to focus most of its efforts into Friday. And it made good sense since we were just ten people then.

ProductNation: What prompted your team not to pursue IRIS?
Narayan:  One, we were occupied with Friday. Second, for IRIS to scale, it needed a strong content pipeline. This would have entailed partnering with a number of content providers. All this meant a different set of skill sets. That doesn’t mean we gave up on iris, just that we put most of our tech energy behind Friday.

ProductNation: So, you guys got back to Friday.
Narayan: Yes. February 2012 end, we launched Friday beta on a closed basis. After four months of improvisation based on user feedback, we released it into the Android marketplace in July, 2012. Friday sees about 100 million documents in the cloud with a 30% daily user engagement.

ProductNation: What should we expect from Friday, going forward?
Narayan: We are focusing on making smartphones intelligent. We are making efforts to put context into smartphones with powerful software. e.g. your smartphone instead of showing “recently dialed numbers” should prompt you with the names of people depending on the context of location or time.

Those are the things we are working on. Plus we are working on building the UX as well. You would soon see a major new release on Friday.

ProductNation: Are you doing the UX internally?
Narayan: I am doing it myself, internally. It is challenging to get external UX guys working on a consistent basis. And UX needs sharp focus. And it has been painful to source UX guys. I have tried freelancers and outsourcing it to experts overseas. The problem of getting UX done outside the team, is to really get the job done. The creative guys are a different set altogether and they have a challenge adhering to timelines. Also, the external guys are not able to experience first-hand what is happening with the product. So, you need a UX person internally who can feel what’s happening.

ProductNation: Narayan, why the name Friday? Do you guys take off that day, is it?
Narayan: We wanted a simple one word name. We started with Chrone that came too close to Google Chrome. We tried Instinct. Then we hit upon Friday. It sounded crazy, it sounded bizarre, so it sounded good. ‘Friday’ sounded happy and it went well with the established meaning of “Man Friday”. And above all, it was easy to remember unlike the names of other apps, which you struggle to recollect at the right time.

ProductNation: What has been your learning’s during this journey? What would you like to share with an entrepreneur?
Narayan: We went all in. There was no plan B. We went all in with one plan. Many people ask us quizzically that you spent two years just building an app. But we did that and survived well too. It just makes sense to sell out to one meaningful idea.

I like the quote by Drew Houston, the founder of Dropbox – “It is better to fail than building a mediocre product”.

ProductNation: Before we let you go, would you like to share the complexity of your six-member founding team?
Narayan: Yeah. Investors used to express shock on the size of our founding team. Fortunately, inspite of having different backgrounds and personalities, all of us were excited about the startup. We do have differences but is mostly around the product. And most powerful bonding force is that all differences apart, we all want to build something really praiseworthy. This single thought ties all our efforts together.

ProductNation: Narayan, thank you for talking to Product Nation.
We wish the entire Dexetra team many more million downloads soon.

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Pallav Nadhani’s list of Top 10 mistakes entrepreneurs make…(Part 2 of 2)

Pallav Nadhani, CEO and Co-founder of FusionCharts, was just 17 when he started the data visualization product company in 2002. The company today is one of India’s most successful product stories and happens to be one of the first Indian start-ups to have caught the eye of the Obama administration. FusionCharts has a user base of 450,000 across 118 countries, and the company celebrates its 10th year of existence on October 22, 2012. In the second half of a two-part interview with pn.ispirt.in, Pallav Nadhani tells us about keeping a product relevant in the constantly evolving market, how he communicates with team members and what it’s like to work with teams from two very different cities in the country! 

This is part 2 of the interview titled – Find out what inspired Pallav Nadhani to start FusionCharts on their 10th anniversary.

How do you manage to keep your product relevant in the market? How do you keep yourself in the game even after going through the process of scaling and maturing? Usually after this it’s a case of either re-birth or death, right?

For us a couple of things work well : there are nearly half a million developers out there who use our product, so we get more feedback than we can sometimes handle and implement. This is huge repository for us to understand where the market is going. There are some developers out there saying in a few months or few years we see ourselves using the product this way so we require this functionality. So there’s a lot of consolidated information that we get from both our existing clients and prospects, and we add some amount of research and gut-feel to this so that we can improve the different versions.

If you had to pick three functions in the company which are critical for a product company like yours, which ones would you choose?

I’d choose engineering and marketing together first. In our case, marketing and engineering go together because the value proposition and positioning done by the marketing team is done in consultation with the engineering division. Similarly, right from day one of product development, marketing defines the product features such as labels so there is a lot of interaction. I would choose the support function next, because ours is a B2B product so implementation does require some amount of support.

What are some of the tools and techniques that you use internally to keep communication alive? What are some the things that you do keep communication going right from the top to the most junior most employee?

The advantage we have is that we are a really small company — we have a team size of about 60 people. So anything that’s happening gets communicated within the team quite easily. The next advantage that we have is that most of the team is based in Kolkata, and I like to say that the Kolkata team is more like family because of the inherent nature of the city! In terms of messaging, We’ve divided teams into functions so if a team needs to know something, we tell the team head and the trickle down effect just ensures the right communication. All the heads are supposed to involve their team members, and this is relatively easy because there are only four to five members per team. Then we have layers of communication protocols built over this, so engineering has its own system which is visible to everybody within the team. For cross-company communication its either face-to-face or I send out an e-mail — since this is quite rare (like once in three months), people do read them. I also ensure that I ask a question or engage the reader somehow so that I know who is involved. We also use Yammer, the enterprise social network. Another thing we do is celebrate birthdays, so this becomes a one or two hour event which does involve some discussion.

How do you manage the culture difference between Bangalore and Kolkata? Both the cities and their people are very different — Bangalore is more fast paced and Kolkata is not like that.

Like I mentioned, I tend to say Bangalore is the team, Kolkata is family! There are some inherent challenges : when we brought in some senior management in Kolkata there were some issues as most people were used reporting to me and suddenly it wasn’t the case anymore. Now the senior management is trying to put in more systems and processes so that that Kolkata team can work more professionally! There was some resistance, of course, but once they were able to see the value of the changes then things changed. Now there is data to react to, and today they are able to pin-point where things went wrong and fix it. Overall, I’ve not had any major problems. Initially, for the first six months I had to go to Kolkata once every week to act as a mediator. Now I go once in six months so I guess that really shows how far we’ve come!

So FusionCharts has now matured and you’ve been in the business ten years — what are the nuggets of information you’d give product company entrepreneurs out there?

There is nothing thats right or wrong. It depends on the context of the product your are building. A few things that you need to get right are even if you are a developer, you need to focus on packaging your product. Packaging and marketing has an important role to play as no product can really be sold on it’s own — there are only exceptional cases like popular apps which get downloaded millions of times. Team building is another important thing — once your product starts getting traction, your company will get split across so many different functions that you will require help with this. You’d like to believe that you can solve every problem, but it’s not very scalable. Specifically in India, an entrepreneur requires a lot of focus. If there’s a new product idea every week and there’s no focus on one thing, it can disastrous. For the last ten years, we’ve just focussed on data visualization — despite the audience we have and despite our capabilities, we’ve not ventured into other areas  because we know that this particular category has a lot of scope and if we branch out into too many other things we won’t be very good at any one thing.

What is the leadership style that you employ? What do people typically have to say about your leadership style?

I would say mine is more of a laissez-faire style of leadership. It’s very different from the concept that people are not trustworthy. I prefer not micro-manage — I believe in giving people work and a broad outline and let them go about it. At the end of it I’ll tell them how I feel about what they’ve done.

Pallav Nadhani’s list of  Top 10 mistakes entrepreneurs make

  1. Not delegating early and enough for the fear of things not getting done correctly
  2. Hiring senior people who don’t fit and have different expectations and lesser hunger
  3. Not setting culture right – focus is more oriented towards result, than behavior. Also setting unreasonable deadlines which set the wrong culture.
  4. Using the same team to deliver multiple products – bandwidth bottleneck
  5. Not establishing clear communication channels and ownership between teams when moving from generic team members to specialists.
  6. Not getting enough exposure locally for hiring — like the first 4-5 years I lived a cocooned life in Kolkata.
  7. Not bringing in a sales team early — they bring in more deals to close and also free up your time
  8. Losing focus in between — too many products and extensions
  9. Not saying ‘no’ enough to many employee and customer requests
  10. Building custom additions for a few customer along with the main product — upgrade issues.
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Your neighborhood mom-and-pop Shop is an SBI Branch, thanks to EKO

It is not a usual day if Bill Gates pays a surprise visit to your office. And if the Microsoft Founder spends two hours understanding your business and your product, you might be onto something with a potential to change the world. Hence, the ProductNation team caught up with the Co-Founder and CEO of EKO – Abhishek Sinha – to find out if the World had indeed changed since the Gates visit.

ProductNation: Abhishek, thank you for speaking to Product Nation. Please share the story of your entrepreneurial journey.
Abhishek Sinha: After completing my engineering, I joined Satyam in 2000 and was posted in Hyderabad. Following the usual onboarding and training; I was deputed to Jaipur to work on assignments at couple of mobile network operators. I was never great with coding, however, it was on these projects, that I met Abhilash with whom I co-founded my first company – 6d Technologies.

There was no detailed business plan, we just wanted to do something on our own and since we were in the mobile space, we decided to hit it out by offering communication solutions to Mobile Network Operators through 6d Technologies. At that time, we were pretty much newbies, no family or home pressures. So it was manageable to do all this crazy stuff.

As we went about building 6d, we were on the ropes most of the times. It was a deal that we got from Oman that swung our fortunes. I still remember the generous credit line that our travel agent offered us. For some reason, he believed in us more than we did on ourselves. So this is how, it all started happening for me.

ProductNation: Wow. Thanks for sharing, Abhishek. Who inspires you?
Abhishek Sinha: (In a Snap) – Mahatma Gandhi. I am also encouraged by Dhirubhai, Google founders, Mark Zuckerberg and Flipkart founders. Gandhiji certainly has been a huge inspiration.

ProductNation: Tell us about EKO. How did you start? Why the name?
Abhishek Sinha: Abhinav (Co-Founder & COO – EKO), my brother and I were in Bangalore. We saw a number of people approaching a nearby shop to recharge their mobile phones. Perhaps, oblivious to the shop owner, there was a sophisticated m-commerce transaction happening, right there. It was this exchange that prompted us to think about EKO with the objective of providing financial access to the unbanked. So I left 6d to build EKO.  As far as the name is concerned, it stands for “Echo” and luckily we managed a shorter form.

ProductNation: Please tell us about your customers and your future plans with EKO.
Abhishek Sinha: Our initial market was focused towards Delhi-NCR, Bihar and Jharkhand. We have expanded to 11 states in the country. Importantly, this financial year we are expanding to Mumbai, Hyderabad, Kolkata and industrial areas in North India – Baddi, Ludhiana, Amritsar, Panipat, Sonipat, Murthal, Jaipur, Kanpur, Lucknow among others.

Over the last one year, the model has matured and stabilized. Since June this year, we are adding in excess of 200 outlets per month and should close this year with more than 5000 EKO outlets. The idea is to increase our presence and be a dominant player in the domestic money transfer space. Money transfer segment is attracting tremendous interest from the unbanked population. Moreover, fungibility provided by EKO is fueling it further.

ProductNation: Abhishek, what have been you BIG lessons in your entrepreneurial journey? And what would you like to share with other young entrepreneurs?
Abhishek Sinha:  People say that you should not repeat mistakes, but I must confess that I have repeated mistakes. It takes a lot of time to understand and comprehend that you are committing and repeating mistakes. It takes a while.

The advantage of starting young is absolutely unmatched. Start Young. The naivety and foolishness helps. It is important to persevere and consciously exhaust ones options to loose. At 6d, there were situations when survival itself was at stake and such episodes would worsen the family pressure to get back to a job. However, doing my own thing was and remains my identity, very thought of going back to a job would make me shudder. I thought I would lose my self-respect. I was very conscious that I must exhaust all my options to lose. One has to increase their stakes substantially. One has to be continually hungry.

I never thought in college that I would be an entrepreneur and start a company. Even five years ago, if somebody had told me that I would have to raise tons of money to get this company started and bring it stability, I would have never started. I had no experience of a consumer-facing or payments business. Sometimes following your heart and taking the plunge without analyzing, helps. With EKO, we lost money and we could have gone down-under but I had to take my chances. There is no harm in facing failure. The loss due to failure is measurable, but the gains of success are gratifying and limitless. This is what I have experienced in my last ten years as an entrepreneur.

Product Nation: Abhishek, very profound insights indeed. We wish you and EKO super success.

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Find out what inspired Pallav Nadhani to start FusionCharts on their 10th anniversary.(Part 1 of 2)

Pallav Nadhani, CEO and Co-founder of FusionCharts, was just 17 when he started the data visualization product company in 2002. The company today is one of India’s most successful product stories and happens to be one of the first Indian start-ups to have caught the eye of the Obama administration. FusionCharts has a user base of 450,000 across 118 countries, and the company celebrates its 10th year of existence on October 22, 2012. In the first part of a two-part interview with pn.ispirt.in, Pallav Nadhani talks to us about what inspired him to start FusionCharts, the importance of marketing in a commoditized industry and how the company believes in training and retaining its talent.  (Don’t forget to download the Free copy which has the complete story of FusionCharts)

Pallav, congratulations to your team and you on FusionCharts’ 10th anniversary. We’re curious to know — when did you decide that you wanted to get into the product space and start a company? What was your inspiration?

I call myself an accidental entrepreneur for a reason. When I started thinking about FusionCharts, I had no idea I was going to develop a product or even run a company. It was something I wanted to do for pocket money! In 1999, I was in Class 11 when I came across this site that accepted innovative articles on technology. By then I had already done a bit of coding (there’d been a computer in my house since I was eight years old) and I was using Microsoft Excel in school, and I hated the boring charts that the program created. I thought — why not convert those boring Excel charts into a lively format for the web? So I wrote some code, and then wrote an article based on that code which got picked up by a website called ASPToday.com. I got paid $1500 for the article which is a lot of money when you’re 16! I got a lot of feedback from developers on the article, and it got me thinking: if so many people were interested in the concept and were giving me inputs, why not consolidate all the modifications and start selling the concept as a product? So there was no market research as such. However, I did make a clear-cut decision when it came to choosing between developing a product and a service: despite the fact that I had some experience working in a service model (I worked in my dad’s web design firm), I knew that there were problems like working with only one client at a time, and the fact that people didn’t trust you as a 17 year old! So for a while my dad fronted me: he would bring in the clients and I would do the work.

 

In a product company there are guys who develop and then the guys who package, market and sell the product. Traditionally, in the services model it’s the developers who tend to take center stage but in the product space people usually say it’s the marketing which makes the difference. What’s your take on this?

I absolutely agree. When we set up FusionCharts we were very aware of the fact that we were going to be operating in a commoditized world. Our top five competitors are amongst the biggest companies today: Microsoft, Yahoo, IBM, Google and Adobe give competing products for free and there are others who also offer charting libraries like ours. On an average, our product is 10 to 100 times more expensive than our nearest competitors. Still, we’ve grown in this fiercely competitive market, and this is not just because of our product: it’s because of our positing, our story telling and the whole packaging. Other products out there directly appeal to developers who often have limited budgets when it comes to purchasing components — but our approach involves appealing to the level just above the developers who are often the decision makers and this has worked well for us.

Much of a product’s success relies not only on quality of the development but also on the kind of people who are part of the team. You have guys who are hesitant about joining a smaller setup because they are worried about stability and are unsure about joining a place which gives no guarantee whether it will exist the next year or not.  What’s your strategy when it comes to hiring good people?

The only time when we found trained talent is when we shifted to Bangalore, but this was for the middle management level. We’ve found it quite rare to find ready-made talent at the development level. At this level, almost everybody who is on our team has come to us fresh out of college, and have been trained by us for anywhere between 12 and 36 months. We’ve trained them with the approach of building the product. This is important because one of the issues we had with people who came from bigger companies was the difficulty they had in adjusting to the fast and agile environment of a product company like ours. So we decided it would be better to concentrate on hiring high intensity guys, giving them some light projects to work on and training them so that they’d be good to go in a couple of years. This also helps create a sense of loyalty because we’re taking them on board at a very early level in their career and this means we have a lower attrition rate.

You make a very valuable point. So what do you feel about the fear in the market about spending time training freshers and then watching them jump ship after spending about two years with you?

I look at it as an engineering challenge: if a guy is willing to move to the competition, what are the incentives that he’s getting? Nobody moves from a product company to a services company purely because of the type of work. Sure, some companies sell to employees just like they sell to customers and the employee may want to opt for a bigger brand name but this is often at the cost of his or her engineering lifestyle. What you do at a product company like ours is something that you can talk about to your friends, you know where your code is going, you have a complete idea about the product and you can proudly point out what your contribution is. In a large organization this is not really the case, and often you don’t have a clear idea of why you are writing a certain piece of code, and you may not be able to talk to your friends about what you do because of confidentiality clauses. Whereas here, you’re given a problem statement and given the freedom to figure out how you want to approach it. Then there are things like the US President Obama selling FusionCharts in 2010 to design digital dashboards for the federal administration. These things inspire confidence in employees, and give them a level of satisfaction. So the employee has to make a decision if this is something he or she wants to give up, as well as give up working with a team he or she has grown comfortable with.

Read the second part of the interview where Pallav shares the list of Top 10 mistakes entrepreneurs make…(Part 2 of 2) 

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A great product ends up creating its own market by typically disrupting an industry or creating a new one – Archit Gupta, ClearTax

Here’s an interesting story about a young entrepreneur who put his personal life ahead of cool, calculated business decisions and went on to create a very successful IT Products Business.

Going back in time – background

Archit graduated in Computer Science, from IIT Guwahati and a doctoral level programme in the same subject thereafter, from Wisconsin University. The inherent brilliance and appreciation of things technical, was always there. This story is about taking all this, harnessing it and shaping a model which has all the trappings of a sound product.

A chanced paper publication and presentation thereafter – on network storage and efficiency – earned him many laurels, the least among them being offered a job in a start up, the brainchild of an equally brilliant professor from Princeton. Archit became part of a Core Engineering Team, which positioned the company in its own niche space. A solid reputation built on strong execution capabilities, was what this team epitomised. He put in a two-and-a-half year stint, and later on the company was later taken over by another Fortune 500 Company, EMC. By this time, the spirit of entrepreneurship had germinated inside and was beginning to take shape.

It was in late 2010 that he was faced with a peculiar dilemma – whether to stay back in the Valley or return to India and start off on his own. Personal reasons outweighed business instincts, which necessitated a move back to India. By then, the decision of going the entrepreneur-way was already taken. It was now only about that – what, and when. Having a father, who was a partner in a large CA Firm, helped in sharpening Archit’s laser-like focus and identify addressable gaps in a market dominated by the Chartered Accountants.

The Idea

The existing products (filing of returns) in the Compliance Space (Taxation) weren’t very good and there was a huge potential to design a better product by introducing an Americanised approach to solving bandwidth issues – offer a cloud-based solution. The CA profession has often been cited to be traditional in its approach, and this product which was conceptualised, was doing just the opposite. Break the traditional way of thinking. It offered a platform based product, leveraging future technologies, like SaaS based models on cloud or even build mobile applications in the times to come by. These were the early days of Clear Tax – simple to use and largely influenced by a product called Turbo Tax, from US. A major game-changer was about to enter the market.

The Product – ClearTax

It is not just a rudimentary e-return filing software, but designed to also educate the user and help him / her make informed decisions. Today, the bulk of users are in the Consumer segment but a drive is on to gain larger share of the pie, in Enterprise space too. The company has tied up with Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI) and leveraging this to build strong networks in the user community. Initially there were teething problems of migrating from desktop based applications to a cloud-based one but surprisingly the adoption has been very quick. Presently, the penetration has been in the top 8 -10 cities in India, which means there is a huge potential for growth, in untapped markets.

An Excel sheet based tool provided by Income Tax Department has captured about 40% of the market share and the balance is fragmented, which is where ClearTax operates. In terms of usability and many other critical functionalities, ClearTax is way ahead of even the market leader. On-line filing has been made free for women, which in a way is giving back to the community.

The enterprise segment is what will bring in margins and needs to be penetrated with precision. Reaching out to SMBs is a daunting task. Considering their size and nature of operation, the focus of entrepreneurs is really running their day-to-day show. They are too busy in doing what is their core activity – trading or manufacturing. Not being tech-savvy either, puts an additional pressure on marketing such products which are Internet-driven. The earlier adopters of ClearTax were Chartered Accountants, who in turn promoted it aggressively within their own community. It was also recommended by CAs to the SMB business. Otherwise through traditional advertising route, it is a very costly proposition.

The Product Eco-System and what it takes to succeed

A good product is something which users want. Of course, not all user desires are desirable (say recreational drugs for instance), so when we talk about a good product, it has to be consistent with the founders’ value system.

For success in the market, there are other factors at play :

  • The size of the market has to be sufficiently large for the startup to be able to deploy sufficient engineering, sales and marketing resources, for its success. Software Products interestingly can attack large adjacent markets, so this is something a startup doesn’t necessarily have to worry about when they start creating a product.
  • A great product ends up creating its own market by typically disrupting an industry or creating a new one.
  • Marketing: There is a lot of noise in the market place. Users have to be convinced to invest time/money/effort into this new thing. This requires very good marketing.
  • A good product comes with incentives for its own growth in the marketplace.
  • Good Engineering: Less important in the beginning, but becomes very crucial as the product gains traction.

Incumbents and competitors have to be out-executed.

We signed off with Archit Gupta, Founder of ClearTax, a very successful IT Product in its domain. The spirit of entrepreneurship is oh-so-intoxicating. Entrepreneurs are essentially dreamers who have the ability to make others believe in their dreams.

Here’s wishing the team at ClearTax a great year ahead.

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NPC is the most successful volunteer driven conference in India…Sharad is yet another volunteer.

In recent years the Indian Software Product industry has seen exponential growth in terms of revenue and people. The industry has matured to a state where numerous entrepreneurs have built successful companies that are becoming household names! Our mission this year is not only to inspire and motivate entrepreneurs but to also impart knowledge and grow their skills to become global players.

We’re bringing together actual practitioners from the global and Indian product industry, serial entrepreneurs, CIOs, investors, customers, VCs and angel investors who will formally and informally network with the delegates and provide them useful insights. The Conclave is the biggest platform for entrepreneurship in India as evidenced by the 1,400 people who attended last year.  Listen to Sharad’s 3 point theory..