Startups Archives - Page 10 of 30

10/12/201309/12/2013

Premium vs Freemium vs Subscription

For mobile apps, there are three dominant pricing strategies: Premium, Subscription and Freemium.

According to a report by app-store analytics company, Distimo, freemium now accounts for 71% of Apple AppStore revenues in the US, up from somewhere around 50% last year, and rising. In Asia, freemium is 90% of App Store revenues.

Is freemium always the most optimal? What factors should you consider when choosing a pricing strategy?

Firstly, here is what these different pricing models mean, as applied to mobile apps:

Premium apps (or Paid apps) have an upfront price before they can even be downloaded. Similar to licensed software, except that the App Store makes all future upgrades to the premium app free once purchased.

Contrast this with freemium (a portmanteau of “free” and “premium”), where the app is free to download and use. However, some features inside the app are unavailable until you pay for them. App stores make it dead simple for developers to charge small amounts of money inside the app.

Subscriptions are a regular fixed fee the user is charged automatically via the App Store for using the app. Magazines in the iOS Newsstand are usually subscription-based. Subscriptions can actually overlap with either premium or freemium models. For example, Spotify requires you to have a subscription to even use the app (premium), while Pandora is closer to freemium where you can pay a subscription to get ad-free and unlimited hours of music.

How do you decide which to choose?

Premium has very limited use today

Perception is a large factor in how high a price is acceptable, and going premium helps create that perception. With premium, every user pays upfront, but the amount each user pays is fixed, regardless of how much utility each gets. Also, users have come to expect apps in the $2 – $5 range (a few niche apps can charge $10-$20) and there is no way to get higher ARPU.

In general, premium works in the following situations:

1. There is a strong demand for your app – niche areas are good candidates here.

2. You have a strong brand already and can establish trust with users where they are willing to pay before they download the app.

3. There is not a lot of competition that will almost certainly drive the price down.

4. You don’t care much about reach – which will be much smaller because of the “pay gate” into your app.

5. There are no ongoing feature or content costs that can drive up the average cost of of supporting a user to levels higher than what the user paid for the app.

Freemium helped create those million-dollars-per-day games

Freemium was popularized by casual games in Japan and Korea and has quickly become the winning model in mobile apps. It works really well in the following situations:

1. There is enough competition that users invariably have other cheaper or free options (low barrier to entry). This has been partly the reason for most mobile apps today moving to freemium.

2. When reach is important. You need large amount of users quickly to create network effects. For example, to drive virality or gather significant data.

3. When there are a small % of power users willing to pay significantly more than the other light users. The pay-as-you-go model facilitates this. Hard core users can drive as much as 100 – 1000 times more revenue than the other users. This is why some free-to-play games are reaching a $1MM per day revenue runrate.

More users in freemium, but a small percentage of them drive astronomical amounts of revenue.

The mobile app economy has progressed to a point today where all of the above usually hold true. Freemium does require some operational effort in managing your free and paying users, converting the former to the latter, and driving repeat purchases. However, this helps create a sustainable business rather than a one-time hit.

Subscriptions: the Holy Grail?

A subscription provides a guarantee of repeat transactions and hence, businesses with subscription revenues tend to be valued far higher. The subscription price is usually smaller than the one-time price to incentivize the user into a longer term commitment. As the seller, you make up for the discount by being guaranteed future transactions.

A single issue of The New Yorker costs $6, but a year’s subscription of 52 issues is $70. That is a 77% discount and is still better, revenue-wise, than selling individual copies. Of course, they make a lot of money through advertising, so a guaranteed customer in the future is far more important to them. This may not be the case in all businesses. Amazon gives you a ~15% discount to “subscribe” to certain household items.

But the subscription model does have a few drawbacks:

1. Like premium, there is a single price for all users, regardless of how much they use. There is a lot of money left on the table because hardcore users willing to pay a lot more cap out at the fixed price. There is some more money left on the table where the subscription price and commitment is too high for a large number of light users who will not sign up.

2. Tiered subscriptions does let you set different prices, but still creates ceilings on both price and consumption. Netflix has a 1 DVD plan for $8, 2 for $12, all the way up to 8 for $44. The lost opportunity? (a) A user can only do 8 DVDs. There may be a few subscribers who want much more. (b) A $44 price tag for DVD rental has a sticker shock. It is easier to charge $5.50 eight times than to charge $44 one time.

So when should you use subscriptions? Whenever you can – subscriptions are considered the holy grail of revenue models, BUT it is important to make sure you are not leaving money on the table just to get a subscription commitment from a customer.

The ideal pricing strategy

Escalators are faster than stairs, even faster if you run up them.

At the risk of over-generalizing, a combination of freemium + subscription would be ideal for most apps.

Not everything being sold lends itself to subscriptions. Impulse purchases typically don’t. For example, a power-up that will help you cross this level in a game, or an Instagram filter that makes this photo of yours look exceptional. In such cases, it is best to start with a freemium model and then offer subscriptions to your regular customers to drive purchases further. Content (magazines, music streaming, movie streaming) has more commonly been a subscription business. For these, it is a good idea to start with the accepted subscription, but remove any ceiling on purchases and consumption by offering more content that can be purchased in-app in addition to the subscription.

The mobile app economy is already large and growing even bigger. Get all the value you can out of it.

Drop in a comment, or shoot us an email if you want to chat about this for your app. We’re happy to help!

Update:

Marco Arment wrote his thoughts about our post:http://www.marco.org/2013/10/02/lattice-labs-freemium. Do read that too – it is an interesting debate and certainly not over yet!

03/12/201303/12/2013

Owning the Transaction – Why Marketplaces Need to Think Like SaaS Businesses

Marketplaces are difficult businesses to get off the ground. A marketplace without buyers cannot attract sellers and vice versa. In fact, the infamy of this proverbial chicken and egg problem detracts entrepreneurs from the challenges that a marketplace presents after it has successfully gained adoption and is successfully matching buyers with sellers. After all, marketplaces for products, like Ebay and Etsy seem to have it all working for them once they gain adoption.

Why the EBay of Remote Services Behaves Differently

Services marketplaces, however, present a unique challenge. Most services marketplaces cannot facilitate a transaction before the buyer and seller agree on the terms of the service. Also, actual exchange of money often follows the delivery of the service and the delivery of the service requires the buyer and seller to directly interact with each other. Connecting buyers and sellers directly before facilitating the transaction cut weakens a marketplace’s ability to capture value. The party that is charged is naturally motivated to abandon the platform and conduct the transaction off-platform.

Marketplaces that fail to capture the transaction often resort to a lead generation, paid placement or subscription-based revenue model. The classifieds model has traditionally worked on paid placement. Dating websites and B2B marketplaces work on a subscription-based model while several financial comparison engines work on a lead generation model. However, lead generation models are attractive only at very high levels of activity and subscription-based revenue models make the chicken and egg problem worse than it already is. If your monetization model involves extracting a cut from the buyer-seller transaction, you need to figure out a way to own the transaction.

Solving the buyer Decision-Making Problem

Services marketplaces like Fiverr, Groupon and Airbnb try to solve this problem by preventing the users from directly connecting before the actual transaction. These marketplaces typically try to provide all the information that a buyer needs to make a transaction decision. Groupon features services from sellers that are largely standardized. While less standardized, Airbnb and Fiverr try to provide enough information for the buyers to make a decision without having to contact the seller.

Additionally, some marketplaces charge the buyer ahead of the transaction and remit money to the service provider after the provision of services, thus providing some insurance to the buyer, encouraging her to transact.

The Two-Pronged Challenge of Professional Services Marketplaces

Unfortunately, the above strategies fail with professional services marketplaces for two reasons.

First, it is much easier to take the transaction off-platform in the case of marketplaces connecting professionals. Freelancer marketplaces like Elance or expert marketplaces like Clarity are particularly prone to off-platform transactions for two reasons:

a) Clients need to know information about service providers before making a transaction decision

b) Once the end users know each other, they can potentially connect directly on LinkedIn or other networks, thus avoiding the platform cut

Second, professional services marketplaces require discussions, exchanges and workflow management during the provision of services before the actual charge can be levied. As a result, charging the buyer ahead of the transaction is all the more complicated.

So how do professional services marketplaces own and retain the transaction?

To own the transaction, professional services marketplaces need to think like SAAS businesses!

This may sound counter-intuitive. After all, a marketplace’s goal is to connect the two sides, complete the transaction and get out of the way, isn’t it?

Clarity’s early success illustrates that a marketplace’s role may be a lot more than just connecting buyers to sellers. Clarity connects advice seekers with experts. Traditionally, such marketplaces would connect the two sides, charge a lead generation fee and allow them to transact off-platform. Clarity provides additional call management and invoicing capabilities that serve to capture the transaction on the platform. Since the call management software manages per-minute billing, advice seekers have the option to opt out of a call that isn’t proving too useful. For the experts, the integrated payments and invoicing provides additional value. There is enough value for both sides to prevent them from leaving the platform to avoid the cut.

Clarity is one of many examples of platforms which are using workflow management solutions to capture the transaction. Services marketplaces like Elance focus on providing work-tracking and billing solutions that provide value to both sides and capture the transaction on-platform.

When marketplaces behave like SAAS businesses, the following design principles are commonly observed:

1. The SAAS workflow tools should create additional value for both sides, not just for one. This prevents either side from abandoning the platform for the transaction.

2. The SAAS tools should remove frictions in the interaction.

3. The interaction management tools should feedback into some form of on-platform reputation. Reputation is an added source of value that ensures stickiness to the platform. Clarity calls are followed by a request for rating the other side. Over time, the rating increases discoverability of an expert on the platform and acts as social proof for further callers.

The Added Benefit of Engagement and Stickiness

Workflow and interaction management tools also help make the platform more sticky. The traditional marketplace model has a very transactional use case. There is no need for a user to return often to such a marketplace. Users turn up only when they’re looking for something specific. With workflow management tools, the post-matching interactions are also captured on the platform, which encourages users to return often and to actively use the platform.

Secondly, a marketplace is only as good as the liquidity of available suppliers. As a result, there is no real need for a buyer to stick to a particular marketplace, transaction after transaction, especially if two or more competing marketplaces have similar liquidity and choice. Workflow management solutions help create stickiness because the requirement of on boarding on and learning new workflow management tools acts as a greater barrier to switch and can potentially keep users loyal to a particular marketplace.

The SaaS-First Marketplace

In recent times, we have been seeing the model flipped. Businesses are now building SAAS workflow solutions first to get entrenched among the demand side and then opening out the marketplace, to get suppliers in. An invoicing service spreads out to become a B2B order management platform. A payroll software provider expands to append a marketplace that can bring in freelancers which are then managed using the same payroll software. This also solves the chicken and egg problem by staging the launch of the marketplace.

Summary

In general, if you run a marketplace that requires services to be exchanged remotely, provisioning workflow management solutions to facilitate this exchange is a great way to own the transaction and create greater engagement and stickiness for users.

Tweetable Takeaways

Owning the transaction is the key success factor for a marketplace. Tweet

SAAS tools for workflow management help retain the transaction on a marketplace. Tweet

The new durable marketplace model: Start with a SAAS business, open up one side to create a marketplace. Tweet

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

28/11/201315/08/2014

A Cloud telephony startup, VoiceTree- “Bootstrapped”, “Profitable”, “Still growing”

Indian economy is a cluster of more than 30 million small and medium businesses along with large enterprises which are lesser in number. Majorly, these SME’s powers the growth of Indian business industry.

This large SME pool presents a lucrative opportunity for Indian product and service companies only if one is able to tap it.

One such company which is creating a presence among Indian SME domain is “VoiceTree”. The cloud telephony startup, offers business call management solution with an Integrated IVR under its flagship product MyOperator and an automated order confirmation system on the cloud facility through its initial product, CODAC.

Breakthrough

The startup was founded in 2010, though it was only in this March that things took a major turn for the company, in a positive way.It was the launch of MyOperator, which subsequently became its most selling product.The product helped the cloud telephony startup, to scale up to more than 300 customers from 10 in a period of less than 8 months.

With MyOperator, VoiceTree targeted the large SME sector, mostly businesses which have an offline presence, though it also found a niche segment in the ecommerce industry.

In fact, the customers of MyOperator hails from various industry verticals, be it offline businesses like Berger Paints, political party like Aam Aadmi Party, religious groups such as Art of Living or ecommerce stores like Flaberry.

Other product by the startup, CODAC, targets enterprise sector and bags Snapdeal.com, Lenskart.com and many other as its clients.

Where MyOperator is a call management and tracking system on the top of an IVR, CODAC is more of an order confirmation system on the cloud.

Bootstrapped and Profitable

Though various other cloud telephony players existed in the market before VoiceTree, still the Delhi based startup was able to strengthen its position, now turning profitable with a team of more than 40.

“Effective marketing and customer acquisition strategy has a played a big role for us”, says Ankit Jain, Founder, VoiceTree.

Though our price is on a higher side in comparison to our competitors, but enhanced product features and the product design which suited the Indian SME’s has been the key factor for our whatsoever success so far. Small and medium businesses in India are not so much comfortable with Internet and concepts of cloud or SaaS, they just know about their business. We designed the product for them, with features they can easily grasp, while they focused on their business and daily routines, adds Jain.

The future of the startup looks bright as now it plans to go global and launch more features in its existing product, MyOperator. Also there are more products which are in the development stage which once launched, will help the company to expand its offerings for more business verticals.

Though journey so far has been very exciting and we did it while bootstrapping but now its time when we are looking to raise some capital for executing our more ambitious and larger goals, signs off Ankit.

26/11/201326/11/2013

In Product Management, It’s All About Location, Location, Location!

Over the last few months, while talking to a range of Indian and Global tech companies, I noticed an interesting trend in the determination of location for key functions, specifically product management.

Global MNCs: During conversations over the last few months with some North America based technology MNCs, I observed that a lot of them plan to create product management functions for local markets and ensure better insights by placing the product managers in the local markets. By this, they plan product functionality and global roadmaps accordingly.

Most people who have worked with global MNCs will, time and again, have observed that products are not created for Indian (or emerging) markets. Most product managers continue to design products for their home markets (typically the more mature markets), with limited focus on local market insights.

India Based Product Companies: In a majority of these companies, more so the startups, senior management executives are either based out of, or are relocating to their largest markets (read North America, maybe South East Asia). The logical reason is to be close to the key markets and customers.

The rest of the functions (operations, product management and engineering, service delivery, shared services), continue to be based in India.

And this is where I started thinking about the ideal location for product management.

Typically, Indian product startups focus on building a customer base (and credibility) in India, and once established, extend to more mature and higher revenue markets e.g. North America. As they expand, they locate their sales teams there, but continue to have their product management teams based in India.

Extending the logic of creating products suited for the key markets, shouldn’t product management at Indian product companies be based in the potentially largest markets? The refrain often is that they cannot afford to have product managers based out of the higher cost markets.I recognize that there is no easy solution, and companies choose different approaches to manage this.

Location Options	Typical Company	Advantage	Challenge
Located with Development	About 50-60% of companies, Indian and Global	Ensure that the product development matches product definition	Not enough market exposure for the product managers
Split between Development and Market locations	Taken by SI firms, where the product manager travels specifically for large opportunities	Balance between development and market needs, being an effective bridge	Customer meetings are for closures, not for discovery – thus, not able to really get deep proactive insights into the market
Extended Product Management teams in the market	Taken by about 15% of companies, having an advanced roadmap	Get market feedback and also be able to effectively engage with the development teams	Presales / solution responsibilities are pushed onto local product managers, limiting market feedback and insights
Located in the Market	About 5-10% of companies (mainly Global)	Capture direct and deep market feedback to ensure product truly meets market needs	Limited engagement with the development teams

My belief is that while there may be no one answer, it is fundamentally linked to the stage the company is in, and the ability to effectively capture market feedback into the company’s product management teams.

The Location Matters

For product startups, however, it becomes extremely critical to get the right market insights (on an ongoing basis) so that they can actively differentiate and continue to retain their market edge as compared to some of their better entrenched competitors. Having local market feedback could well be the key differentiator that could help them build and deliver significant value to their customers. And could result in the long term growth and survival. When one evaluates the employee costs of keeping the product management function in the key markets against the opportunity costs, it becomes apparent that the benefits derived can easily justify the investments. However, the choice of the right product manager is also critical, otherwise you may end up getting pre-sales and reactive insights, which is not what the goal is.

Of course, an extreme option could be to follow Dogbert’s advice:

Look forward to your insights on approaches that have worked for product companies across multiple markets.

21/11/201315/08/2014

Complementary skills in your founding team is critical for a startup’s success – CSN Murthy, Founder and CEO, Ozonetel

ProductNation interviewed CSN Murthy, Founder and CEO of Ozonetel, a leader in cloud telephony based solutions. In this freewheeling chat, Murthy, a serial entrepreneur, shares his mantras on building a successful technology based venture. Read on…

What was the motivation to start Ozonetel?

Around 2007, after the successful exit from Intoto, we examined various opportunities in the marketplace to start a new venture. Having worked in the telecommunications space over two decades, we recognized a huge unmet need in the Indian marketplace in the area of usage of telephony by businesses. Businesses were losing out on vital customer leads and important information due to their reliance on traditional telephony based system. We therefore setup Ozonetel during 2007-08 to solve the customers communication based challenges through cloud based telephony solutions.

Can you explain the rationale behind using cloud as a delivery mechanism of communication products/services to Indian customers?

Cloud based telephony solutions is a natural progression from the previous physical PBX solutions. On the technology front, cloud based solutions help overcome the existing limitations of telephony solutions such as missing an inbound enquiry from a prospective customer. It provides tools to track your efficiency in responding to customers. Businesses can scale quickly based on the volume of customers they deal with on a pay-as-you go basis. Thirdly, since the workforce of businesses has increasingly become mobile, a cloud based telephony solution enables a business to respond to customers without being bogged down by physical location based constraints. These and many more aspects provide unprecedented value to businesses to solve their communication challenges. So, we started offering these cloud based telephony solutions to the Indian market.

How did you get your initial set of customers? What learning did you obtain from dealing with them?

We targeted the segment of customers who were willing to experiment with our offering. The first version of our offering required significant technical expertise at the customer end to use and benefit from it. Luckily for us, our first sets of customers were mostly technology based startups who understood the value of our solution. Companies like ZipDial and Asklaila used the APIs that we provided and integrated them in the manner they preferred. Grameen Foundation, another early customer of ours took help from ThoughtWorks to integrate our solution with their other systems. We also learnt from our initial prospecting that cost was an important parameter for businesses in India.

How did the company evolve from the first offering to its current state, where it has diversified cloud product offerings?

After finding initial customer acceptance, we quickly realized that in order to scale our business and make it usable across different sectors, it was important to make our solution more consumable and usable by end customers. Towards this end, our first solution was to announce KooKoo – a telephony platform that allowed end customers to build their own applications either on voice, SMS or fax. We then further enhanced our portfolio with Bizphone – a virtual PBX solution on cloud which customers could use out of the box, with no set up costs and hardware investments. The Bizphone offering helped us cater to needs of diverse set of customers across different sectors. Based on our insight and customer feedback, we enhanced our product portfolio by introducing CloudAgent – our cloud based contact center solution for businesses that are slightly more sophisticated business communication requirements. The growth of business in India augured well for us and we now offer these solutions to businesses of all sizes and sectors.

How have you ensured that you have competitive advantage in the marketplace?

We had the first mover advantage when we started – which helped us to garner the initial set of customers. However, as the marketplace started seeing benefits of cloud based telecommunication solutions, new competitors emerged. Having been in this domain for a fairly long time, we had envisioned this scenario – and have developed key differentiating strategies right from our inception.

Back in 2007, when we started, we could easily have integrated a solution from different vendors and provide the same to businesses to satisfy their immediate needs. We instead chose to develop the entire solution stack – right from the hardware, telecom cards and software on our own. Though this took us about 18 months, this approach helps us in minimizing our dependency on external software/hardware/technology vendors. We also are in a very good position to incorporate customer feedback on to our solution stack – since we have total control on all layers of the solution. This approach has helped us to innovate constantly and maintain an edge over the competition.

Another complementary strategy we have executed in the recent years is to ensure customer stickiness. We have constantly delighted customers with superior service and helped them scale effortlessly as their businesses have grown. Thus, many of our initial customers have now migrated from using the low-value virtual PBX solution to leveraging our high value cloud contact centre solution. This approach has helped us both retain our existing customers, as well as ensured that we earn more working with them.

What internal measures have you taken to ensure that Ozonetel retains its edge in the marketplace?

From an operational perspective, we have ensured that the Organization has the best leaders in every functional area. Our founding team is a great mix of complementary capabilities that are required to drive excellence across all aspects of the company. Getting to specifics, on the Sales front, we have presence now in many cities. This helps in building and sustaining relationships with customers. We realized very early that physical presence is important to close a sale. Hence we took steps to ensure we were physically accessible to customer.

On the development and R&D front, given that we are a technology based company, we have a maniacal focus on developing the best solution using the latest technological developments in our domain. We have effectively used our prior working experience to provide superior post-sales support to our customers. We take customer care very seriously – and it also is one of our key differentiators from competition, due to our superior execution and empathy for customers. All these have ensured that Ozonetel as an Organization responds nimbly to external environmental changes.

On a related note, how important it is to have a good founding team? What characteristics of the top management team in your experience will enable success of the firm, especially in its formative years?

It is absolutely critical to have leaders with complementary skills in the top management team. It is also equally important that there is good chemistry between the founding team members. Once you have the above combination in place, you will automatically be geared to deal with the uncertainties and ambiguities that confront a nascent organization. In our case, I have been very careful in signing on our founding team and the top management team. I recommend that one closely work and observe the working style of any prospective founding partner that they want to bring on board. This helps in validating the nature of contributions that the person will bring in, as well as help understand if the person gels well with the rest of team members.

Another thing that I have realized from working across multiple ventures – is to recruit your sales leader up front – right from a very initial stage. This helps in enabling the Organization to grow rapidly at later stages. The Sales leader understands the other functional units of the company better due to the fact that they worked together in the initial stages. This bonding helps immensely as the company grows.

Thank you for your insights. As a parting question, what would be the top three things that you would advice to your fellow product entrepreneurs operating out of India?

As I reiterated, starting off with the right set of founding team members – in terms of complementary skills and good teaming is very critical to any enterprise, more specifically for a technology product based company. Secondly, as the founder, ensure that you hire right for the Organization. Do not compromise on skills or on any other aspects that affects the culture of the company. Thirdly, as many others would tell you, keep your ears close to the customer. Constantly delight them and seek to improve continuously. Success will surely follow!

19/11/201321/11/2013

What Makes a Good Product Manager: Lessons from Doers

For solo product entrepreneurs and product teams that are caught in a vicious cycle of build, release, build release, we bring some insights from “doers” that will help them differentiate through the demanding skills of product development. Deep Nishar, who leads product management at LinkedIn, had said sometime ago that a product manager needs brain of an engineer, heart of a designer and speech of a diplomat. Is product management an art or science is an extraneous question. It is both and more. If a product manager can understand where code sucks and how to place a nice button to entice the user, his job is well done. It’s a deft left brain right brain play.

Indian product ecosystem is evolving and many product managers are learning on the way to make their successes and don’t ask heartwrenching slips, which anyway is part of the game. These first-generation product managers are just sowing their seeds of a developing ecosystem. When we asked some accomplished product managers who are part of successful product ventures in India—Amit Somani of MakeMyTrip, Ravi Padaki of Pravi Solutions, Shivakumar Ganesan (Shivku) of Exotel, Krishna Mehra of Capillary Technologies, and Shrirang Bapat of Pubmatic—as to what makes a successful product manager, the answers were varied and thought-provoking.

Key aspects of becoming a product manager

Krishna Mehra and Shirang Bapat are unanimous in their view that a product manager should understand the pulse of the customer. Mehra adds another element to the product manager’s repertoire – execution. Ravi Padaki takes a holistic view in stating the a product manager should understand the how business works, be creative in solving problems for customers that may not translate as features in the product, and be a great communicator, not just in listening to customers but to the market as well. Amit Somani demands insane curiosity, building capability, and knowledge of how to work through influence. Shivakumar Ganesan (Shivku) of Exotel feels the product manager expects the product to sell itself and works backwards from market needs to build a suitable product. He feels product manager is a misnomer and the correct term is “market manager.” Shivku brings out the creative plus execution aspect of a product manager when he says, “he is willing to write a hack to keep the elegance.” Aesthetics are important for a product manager whereas the coder just concentrates on architecture and design.

Attributes demanded: ability to understand customer pulse, creativity, curiosity, influence without authority, capability to build what market needs

Top three priorities of a product manager

Ravi Padaki is emphatic that shipping is the first priority. Iterating and scheduling releases based on feedback and market response follows. Krishna Mehra cautions against building without validation and product discovery. In enterprise market, building for wrong requirements means loss of cost and time, while customer feedback should be gauged quickly for consumer products. Focusing on customer experience is the first priority of Shirang. Amit bets on a big vision to begin with. According to Shivku, customer support comes first.

The second priority for all the five revolves around execution. While for Amit, understanding customer requirement and translating it into a product is important, Mehra focuses on the ability to work with the engineering, design and QA team to deliver high-quality product. Shirang takes it a step ahead to focus on communication between customer, product manager, and engineering, which again emphasizes on aligning customer needs to building the product. Shivku emphasizes on product-market fit, while Ravi bets on validating the product through feedback through all stages of development.

The third priority for product managers is taking several parts of the organization together to build a successful product. For Shirang, the third priority is fitting the non-functional requirements into the product. Mehra wants the product manager to drive customer success by working with other parts of the organization. Ravi terms it triangulating and prioritizing, which means synthesizing inputs from various parts, which the product manager likes some part of it or not. Shivku calls for inventiveness in creating a product out of ideas from the junk. Amit takes shipping, iteration and metrics to the end.

Three priorities: 1. Enlisting customer requirements/support, 2. execution and continuous iteration based on feedback, and 3. taking the organization along during product development

18/11/201318/11/2013

Piracy and freemium killed the Indian software buyer

Nobody in India buys software.

If the above sentence draws your attention, read on! If you are based out of India, think of the last time you bought software (yes packaged products). Now think of all your friends and guess when they bought software. Now, here’s the clincher, “When was the last time you bought software made in India?”. 99% of the people, irrespective of their socio-economic status will respond in the negative.

Product evangelists will now talk about the cloud/SaaS and the subscription economy, and how it is the great leveler when it comes to software products. As an entrepreneur selling a SaaS software in India, let me be the first to tell you that it is really hard work. Most entrepreneurs have told me that the Indian customer is price sensitive, I say, a majority of them are insensitive. Now don’t get me wrong. I don’t wish to rant. I am trying to catalog and present reasons why selling SaaS software is hard. Here’s what I think it is:

Let’s talk a little bit about the Indian software market

In the last two decades, India has seen two revolutions which helped create a large software market. Firstly, the economic deregulation in the 90s which enabled a steady growth of the economy, disposable income and import of technology. Secondly, the telecom, and subsequently the PC and mobile revolution that has created a (supposedly) large software consumption market. PCs, Laptops and tablets are now commonplace in Urban and Semi-urban India and the latest numbers indicate 15 Million broadband and about 100 Million mobile internet users. A look at these gargantuan numbers and you might begin to assume a large consumption market, but to give you a sense of reality, let me ask you the same question one of my mentors asked me – “Name 5 large Indian software product brands selling in the Indian market”

Enterprise software is probably your best bet

If you are selling software, the enterprise market is probably your best bet. Bharat Goenka, co-founder of Tally solutions, said that “In developed economies, SMBs act like enterprises and in emerging economies, SMBs act like consumers“[2]. Many of our customers are SMBs who are looking to use technology to grow some component of their business. And most of the times, we don’t deal with the company, but with empowered employees. The ones who have a budget at their disposal and are forward looking in their outlook. What we found was that the same stigma that existed in the 70s and 80s in the US software markets exists in the Indian SME customers of today. A lot of them look at software as something that will displace them in the organization and are extremely defensive in the matters of adoption. But we all know how that worked out in the US and UK markets and I am hoping India follows a similar trend.

Oh wow! I never knew you could do this

A lot of people we have met have been genuinely surprised at what our product does. It’s tough to manage these customers because we spend a lot of our acquisition time on sensitizing them about the problem before we present the solution. Even if you are doing something radically new, it is easier to bucket yourself into a genre that is popular and accepted. For example, we are a customer conversations player, but it helps if we refer to ourselves as a Social CRM or a marketing insights product. Ignorance about a genre of products has a big pitfall – customers don’t know how much to pay for the solution. This is really tricky because it usually leads to a customer deliberating on paying for the solution.

“But we can do this for free on Google”

Freemium is both a good and bad thing. Almost every customer of ours expects a free trial for a few days. In the products eco-system it’s become a norm, but a lot of productized service companies I know have been asked for a free trial on bespoke software. Most users don’t understand the price they are paying when using services like Google or Facebook and usually expect the same when we tell them about our “use on the browser” service. Usually this means we have to get into a lengthy explanation about why our product costs so much. The best experience I have had was when a customer, who understood the online advertising economy, asked us if he could use an ad supported model of our service for free!

Freemium might be a viable option early on but when looking at growth and scale, I don’t believe freemium is a sustainable economic model. It is a marketing tactic at best!

“muHive crack codes”

One morning, while peering through our website analytics, we were surprised to find a search keyword “muHive crack codes” in the list. This was a good and a bad thing: good because some customer actually found our service good enough to look for a cracked edition, and bad because we knew this customer wouldn’t pay. And yes, if it’s crack worthy, then it is probably good software – that’s the Indian psyche. Industry estimates put the total value of pirated software used in India to be upwards of $50 Billion[3]. Why won’t we pay for software? That’s a long post in itself, but to be brief: piracy was not controlled in the early days of the PC revolution and hence the assumption that software is free. Also, cost of software has always been calculated based on the affordability and costs in developed markets. To illustrate my point, I will end this section with a question – If Microsoft Windows were to cost Rs 1000 instead of $149 (Rs 9000) would the piracy numbers be different?

The pricing slope

Researchers put the Indian middle class at earning $10/day or roughly $300/month. To give you an estimate of why this matters, the urban poverty line stands at $14/month – yes, a month. The Indian middle class is about 100 million people and $300 per month usually supports 2 to 3 people on an average. Now when you think in these terms, you can imagine what the cost of ownership of a $149 software sounds like. Add the fact that software is a non-tangible artifact and you understand why Indian customers are extremely cautious when it comes to software purchases.

Even with enterprise customers, your pricing strategy has to be “just right”. And you have to account for discounts. A majority of the Indian customers we meet ask for some form of special pricing. Now, this might not be a trait which is unique to the Indian market, but understanding the cultural and economic context of the demographic becomes very essential when it comes to pricing. Marketers talk about using tricks like prepaid accounts (India has a large prepaid mobile subscriber base), daily subscription and data based pricing but all of them have the underlying assumption that the customer is willing to pay and understands the cost of the solution.

In conclusion

All these are what we have found to be the issues with selling software in India. Even though we have good answers to some of the questions our customers pose, in my opinion, it will still take a long time for the Indian software buyer to evolve and for good product companies to make a mark. Rather than end on a dismal note, I will now list down what actually seems to be working for us, and also some insights from other producteers.

– Customer don’t mind paying for bundled software. Hardware, especially mobiles and tablets might actually help in software sales.

– Customers will pay for immediate utility. What someone referred to as “First order business” solutions; meaning something that can make them more money instantly. Example: Email and SMS marketing solutions. Customers don’t mind paying for advertising and reach.

– Customers usually pay when they feel they are missing out on revenue or an opportunity. A loss averse technique to selling is what we have seen work best.

References:

13/11/201312/11/2013

Cross-Border Alliances: Strengthening India’s Cyber-Entrepreneurs

India’s product-thinkers in the cyber-domain are a unique breed of cyber-warriors that could significantly benefit through cross-border partnerships. Credited with being one of the first nations to possess an IT road map, India has devoted additional focus to create a secure IT road map. Cybersecurity remains a critical concern for not only governments or businesses, but also for individuals.

Our increased connectivity has produced increased vulnerabilities, and has subsequently amplified cyber-attacks. Grey and Black-hat hackers choose targets indiscriminately, and are not necessarily loyal to specific foreign governments, competing corporations, or other organizations. On the contrary, India’s cyber-entrepreneurs are capable of demonstrating undying commitment to a vision – a vision to secure India’s cybersecurity ecosystem.

The Indian government has repeatedly underscored the significance of public-private partnerships (PPP), and conception of international governmental partnerships. However, our cybersecurity ecosystem seems unable to intensify active cyber-partnerships within the private sector itself. Undoubtedly, the government has proven to be instrumental in recognizing cybersecurity as a challenge, but, the private sector must spearhead change through global partnerships.

India’s modern cyber-entrepreneurs are our nation’s cyber-warriors; individuals who exceedingly need innovation and an exchange of ideas from foreign counterparts to secure our cyberspace. Indian cyber-thinkers must focus on formulating cross-border partnerships to engage in revolutionary activities such as joint-product development, formulation of joint ventures, and other forms of high-impact cooperation.

India’s cyber-entrepreneurs have undoubtedly developed a handful of world-class cybersecurity solutions, but clearly, the emphasis seems to be more on delivering services rather than creating innovative products. Living up to India’s reputation of being a leader of IT services; Indian cybersecurity companies continue to successfully service needs of various governmental, corporate, and academic entities. Nevertheless, this trend must not be viewed as a problem, but as an opportunity to reflect on the massive scope to conduct more meaningful activity!

Most product-based Indian cybersecurity companies primarily contribute to defense of our cyberspace by providing indigenous products/solutions for hardware and software entities. However, our cyberspace is an arena where deploying offensive cyber-tools is easier than conduct of cyber-defense. Increased collaboration with foreign counterparts could be a rewarding venture to enhance existing products, or develop new products to address multiple cyber-threats.

Such cross-border collaborative activity by India’s product-thinkers in the cyber-domain can stimulate productivity for respective cybersecurity organizations. More importantly, creating cross-border ties with capable cybersecurity firms will serve as a catalyst in enhancing India’s existing cybersecurity ecosystem.

Vishal Dharmadhikari is the Founder and CEO of India Cyber Connect, an organization that envisions filling gaps in India’s cyberspace through formulation of cross-border ties for the conduct of meaningful collaboration. Vishal is also the concept initiator of a business-event – India-Israel Cybersecurity Connect (IICC), an event featuring governmental and corporate leaders along with start-ups to promote Indo-Israeli cybersecurity cooperation

12/11/201312/11/2013

Using small data in a BIG way

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

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

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

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

B2B is leading the pack. Surprised?

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

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

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

11/11/201311/11/2013

Scale Hacking at #PNCamp: What To Expect on Day 2 (Dec 5)

It’s a conference….it’s a summit….it’s a camp! Being a startup ourselves, we constantly listen to our customers (who are startups as well!) and try and come up with initiatives that solve their problems and address their pain points.

In that regard, the genesis and the program design of the ProductNation Camp has come from what we’ve been hearing from you – the Indian product startup community. Sandeep has very nicely elucidated the need for a Product Bootcamp for Product entrepreneurs and laid out the broad agenda of the #PNCamp.

#PNCamp is expected to be a very intense, highly curated and focused two-day event with two tracks – Discovery Hacking (on Dec 4) and Scale Hacking (on Dec 5). For a product entrepreneur, getting the first set of customers is mighty important from multiple perspectives – validating the need for the product in the market, generating the first rupees (or dollars!) in revenue and grow the startup from a buzz in the head to a live organism. While 2013 is expected to end with a Dhoom for Bollywood fans, it’s the same for product entrepreneurs attending #PNCamp. Rather than an ending, we hope it’ll be a new beginning for them to grow their startups to greater heights in the coming year. One of the producers of the product startup community’s Dhoom, Sai unveiled the first look of #PNCamp and gave us a glimpse of what’s in store for attendees of the Discovery Hacking track on Day 1.

It is said that well begun is half done. Let’s stay the tough part, that of beginning well has been taken care of and you are now staring at the tougher part – of growing your startup across multiple dimensions. That is when the startup is in the happy-confused state and there are a lot of questions on your mind. Sales cures most ills, but how do you sell? This will be the primary thrust of the morning sessions which is mandatory. Here, we will have separate tracks for those who are selling to a global audience and those who are selling domestically. The challenges, hiring, operations, etc are completely different. In the afternoon, we have various exciting sessions on how to understand and communicate with customers and how to pick the right product direction when you have scarce resources to spread amongst several promising ones. Choice in an uncertain world is not easy and while we promise no silver bullets for your problems, we do promise to ignite enough fire in the belly (and in the heads!) for you to go back and navigate your way into scaling your startup. We also have specific “Oh, Oh, How do I do that?” sessions on specific topisc you’ve always wanted to know..

So specifically, what do we have to offer to you on the Scale Hacking Day:

We will have around 75 chosen participants for the Scale Hacking Day divided into cohorts of 15-20 people each. There are mandatory sessions which all participants will attend and then the cohorts will attend the optional sessions depending on the stage of the company and their interest.

The Mandatory Sessions

“Great Indian Street Fight or Selling In India”

No wonder most of the selling in India happens through ‘feet on street’. And when you’re out there on the streets, it’s always a fight. Fight against time to sign-up customers, fight against a thousand other things to get the customers’ attention, fight for receiving payments on time and just fight for survival!

You have probably got your first set of customers, but you want to scale now. What are the different ways to do that? Does the Channel Partner route work and what are the pros and cons of taking that approach? How do you reach out to your next set of potential customers in an effective manner? Should you now start considering mainstream media for advertising or scale up your digital marketing efforts? More importantly, how do you plan for scale and put together the right team to execute your plans? How to hire the right people and fire the ones that don’t work out well?

Dhiraj Kacker, who has built Cavera into the leading destination for customized printed merchandize and an e-commerce solutions provider for photographers, will facilitate this session. Dhiraj along with Canvera’s Co-Founder Peeyush was recognized as amongst the top-10 Most Influential People in Photography in India by Asian Photography magazine. So he surely knows what clicks with his customers!

“Dancing with Elephant/Winging in the new flat world or Selling to Global Customers”

If IT services companies made the world flat, Saas product companies have made it even flatter!

While Zoho remains the pioneer, we have seen many SaaS companies FreshDesk, WebEngage, Wingify, Capillary Technologies, ChargeBee among others whose products are proudly Indian and that are selling to customers from across the globe. What does it take to build a global SaaS company out of India? More importantly, what does it take to sell to customers you haven’t met or even spoken to? How do you price your product so that customers from across geographies can buy it? How do you take care of the differences in the customers expectations, time zones, languages, even customs and culture across different regions? After all, every product has a personality. What about providing support to global customers?

Samir Palnitkar (ShopSocially, AirTight Networks) & Girish Mathrubootham (FreshDesk, Zoho) will facilitate this session. You wouldn’t want to miss this session unless you want to see your dollar dreams go sour!

The Optional Sessions

“Customers Buy Features, Not Benefits or How To Think Customer First?”

Here’s a quick question – which is the Indian brand that has grown the fastest in recent times and its identity (hint, hint!) transcends all barriers of language, region and religion? What’s more, it is very much an Indian tech startup! Yes, you guessed it right. It is Aadhar. Meet Shankar Maruwada, who gave the Aadhar its brand name and developed its identity and made it into the household brand it is today. Get to know how to place yourself inside the customers’ heads, try and understand what factors play in their decision-making and how you can approach your customers better by anticipating what’s possibly on their minds.

If you want to get a sense of what’s in store for you, watch this video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTNVTaPXfqI#t=58

Well, you wouldn’t want to be that fish which can’t understand how people live without water!

“How to get featured in TechCrunch, spending $0”

It’s true that media coverage alone isn’t the true barometer of success of a startup. But hey, when has positive media attention, especially from a top global publication like TechCrunch hurt any startup? That is of course, assuming that the product is a good one!

For a lot of product entrepreneurs, getting featured on TechCrunch is a dream and considered as a good means to be visible in front of a lot of people – customers, investors, partners among others. So what does it take to get featured in TechCrunch? Considering they’d be getting hundreds of requests each day, do the writers and editors there even read such emails? Do you need to hire a high-profile PR agency and spend a lot of money? Or should you just build something meaningful and the coverage will happen by itself?

Valorie Wagoner, Founder of ZipDial, has done that and been there (on TechCrunch). ZipDial is one of the fastest growing global startups emerging from India and Valerie will share her experiences of getting covered in global tech blogs and tell you how your startup can also get featured with no money spent!

“Positioning for Getting Acquired”

So you think acquisition only when you have reached a certain level and scale of business? Well, that’s what a lot of entrepreneurs in Bangalore thought before they attended this round table. How do you know if the time is ripe for your company getting acquired? How do you choose between multiple suitors you may have? What are some of the key things one should keep in mind so that all the stakeholders have a favourable outcome? While an acquisition is a regular business transaction in the US, do we Indians get (needlessly?) emotional about it?

Jay Pullur, Founder and CEO of Pramati Technologies and Sanat Rao, Director, Corporate Business Development (Emerging Markets) at Intel will facilitate this session. iSPIRT has a very active M&A initiative with Jay and Sanat actively leading the M&A Connect. You’d surely not want to miss this opportunity to understand how you can set yourself up for a nice acquisition.

“The Forum or Where You Can Bring Out Your Worst Fears!”

Every CEO needs somewhere to turn for the insight and perspective only trusted peers can provide. When such peers meet together in a setting where there is an atmosphere of confidentiality, respect and trust, it can become a supreme sounding board. We will call such a setting a “Forum”. Such a forum can become most valued asset for the members, because the maxim holds true: it can be lonely at the top, but it doesn’t have to be.

At #PNCamp, we want to experiment, for the first time, with building such a Forum by forming a small group of peers who meet regularly to exchange ideas, thoughts and experiences on the issues that matter most to them. During the first meeting at the PNCamp, this group will be taught effective forum techniques, a set of protocols and a shared language that creates immediate and meaningful connections among members.

We expect that once created, the Forum group will periodically meet either in person or online with the following agenda:

1- Update each other by looking back since the last meeting and looking forward

2- Identify, discuss and park business issues that are typically Important but not Urgent

3- Make presentations around these issues and get non-judgmental feedback from the fellow members

I’ll end this post with a quote from the very inspirational movie, The Shawshank Redemption.

Dear Red, If you’re reading this, you’ve gotten out. And if you’ve come this far, maybe you’re willing to come a little further. You remember the name of the town, don’t you?

Of course, you remember the name of the town. It’s Pune and we look forward to see you in Pune on Dec 4 and Dec 5 for #PNCamp.

PS. After all this if you haven’t still applied for #PNCamp yet, we’re afraid you may be a little late. Apply Now here!

08/11/201308/11/2013

Creating a platform needs a broad vision and a long leash from investors– Ranjit Nair, CEO of Germin8. #PNHangout

Ranjit has a PhD in Computer Science from University of Southern California and is the CEO of Germin8. In this #PNHangout we had a chance to catch up with Ranjit on the challenges of building a platform and finding the initial market fit.

Market research companies world over found conducting surveys about brands and products difficult. People were reluctant to take surveys and those who did take these surveys were not representative of the target audience, eg: housewives and retired folks instead of working professionals. We saw a trend where people would often go onto social media sites and/or company owned channels of communication such as emails to express themselves. Hence, as a solution to this market research problem we developed NLP algorithms which were capable of understanding opinions expressed in textual conversations. These algorithms were designed to perform functions such as topic segmentation, topic identification and sentiment analysis. Although these theoretical problems were interesting to solve, it was far from being a product that had much broad commercial appeal.

The push to create a market fit for Explic8

By March 2009, I had assembled a team to develop a commercial product that harnesses these NLP algorithms in order to draw actionable insights and leads from public and private communications channels such as social media and emails. To fill the missing features that could make this product commercially viable, I had challenged my team to build a working prototype in 23 calendar days — just in time for the General Elections in India. Our goal was simple, to analyse what people globally were talking about politicians and parties during the election and make this data available to the public.

This sprint drew us closer to creating the foundations of a minimum viable product which solved a market research pain point (i.e. reliability of surveys). But we knew that the technology we had developed could also solve pain points felt by customer service, sales and corporate communications. For example, this tool could be used for lead generation by a sales team by finding conversations where customers had expressed a stated or latent need for certain products.

An expanded vision could mean a larger product development cycle, but it was worth it

We knew that if we expanded the product vision to solve problems beyond just market research and in multiple verticals, we were setting ourselves up to be a little unfocused; instead of narrowing the focus on one specific problem, we chose to develop a platform that could be used in different applications. We chose this approach because there was no market player who had taken the platform route and attacking the larger market would make this product more feasible. We were lucky to have the support of our investors to back us up on this decision.

We, as a product company, were a little bit ahead of the curve where we sometimes ended up with features that the Indian market wasn’t even ready for. When we launched our product, we realized a lot of the features we built weren’t actually being used by our customers. For example, we have a feature that allows our users to analyse sentiments not just at the brand level but also for each of the brand’s touch points. We realized that apart from a few brands, most were satisfied with just using the overall brand sentiment without concerning themselves about the sentiment for each of their touch points. We preserved this feature and as users evolved, this feature became one of the differentiators that is now used by most of our customers.

Hindsight is always 20/20 and as we went about from concept to production there were many ups and downs that I think are common with every start-up. We would battle between adding features that add functionality and features which made the product more useful, usable and scalable. I think if I had to do things a little differently today, I would have focussed a little more on marketing initially and a little lesser on building many features. However, we have reached a point where our product speaks for itself and customers from a variety of industries are interested in using Explic8.

Platform and Goals

We are now more than a product but a platform. Explic8 is one of the apps which reside on our platform and we’ve built it in such a way that it could be used in multiple use case scenarios such as analysing emails, chat conversations, etc. We also allow third party applications to use our API to develop their own tools. Analytics that comes from our app is very industry focused. For example, if you’re an automobile brand, then the insights you receive will be benchmarked against competitors using metrics and sources relevant to the automobile industry. Hence, the insights you get are highly actionable. The sentiment algorithm is tuned for each industry, for instance “unpredictable” in the context of a steering mechanism would be treated differently from “unpredictable” in the context of a movie plot. We are also in the midst of expanding our platform to encompass predictive analytics.

If you have any feedback or questions that you would like answered in this series feel free to tweet to me: @akashj

06/11/201306/11/2013

Experience. Peer. Learning.

How can these 3 words go together? Experience is all about failing. We’re competing with peers. And who the hell wants to learn ??

Allow me to sell to you – India’s first true bootcamp for Product Entrepreneurs – #PNCamp, happening in Pune in December this year.

“…to your context…” – watch this video about a customer. You’ll appreciate why learning is directly connected to decision making.

“…I thought it was me…” – another customer. Why and how peers can play a fantastic role in arriving at solutions. They’ve made mistakes that you don’t need to. Vice versa.

“….tunnel vision….” – the curse of knowledge. From a veteran.

Product Entrepreneurs are battling their demons every hour, every day. And inside this battle lies the glory of winning. From the outside it looks like chaos and madness. But there is a sense to it all. See this deck below to get a better idea.

How silly of me… almost forgot to mention … this is a by invite only event. You don’t want to be left out. You’ll find the registration links below the deck.

See you in the city that was the top 3 shortlisted cities to be India’s capital back in the day.

06/11/201309/11/2013

Bend Me, Shape Me, Anyway You Want Me – Responsive Design in Action!

Bend Me, Shape Me, Anyway You Want Me – Long as you love me, It’s alright! – goes the catchy song from American Breed in 1968. It captures the essence of Responsive Design! Do not make people adapt to your web or mobile experience on various devices.. You make the user interface adapt to the device that is being used. And talk about adapting? Watch the drummer also play the saxophone towards the end! This song was so catchy and appropriate they used it for Flexon flexible eyeglass frames and Gap Stretch Jeans ads! Let’s enjoy that song first, shall we?

Why is responsive design needed? Let’s start with a simple example of what happens when I access the IRCTC website on my iPhone:

Here the website is not doing anything except display the desktop version in a smart phone with small fonts. I can barely see anything.

I will have to zoom in and locate the login section to login. The web page is doing nothing to adjust to my device. It is up to me to zoom around different parts of a static, same sized page and do my work.

To see Responsive Design in action, I took a good example of how they have done it at worldlife.org, the US web site of World Wildlife Federation. I visited them on my laptop, ipad and iphone and here is what I saw:

First my laptop:

Next the ipad when I hold it in a landscape mode:

Most of the details are still there in this rendering.

In the iPad Portrait Mode the browser adjusts and is able to show more of the screen; all fit within the available screen real estate automatically! Since it’s an iPad, the real estate is still big enough for them to fit everything in.

Now when I look at the same site through my iPhone Safari browser, the site strips it down to the bare essentials – the logo, the picture of the snow leopard and the two most important links to them – Donate and Adopt.. More of the picture is also visible in the Portrait mode.

In the iPhone Landscape mode the picture adjusts automatically all of the elements.

How do we do Responsive Design?

There are many different ways to do Responsive Design and all of them have pluses and minuses – You offer information and functionality only through browsers and make the pages be responsive to the device – laptop, tablets, smartphones or feature phones. Or on smartphones you can create apps that replace webpages or a dedicated mobile website. Initially the whole movement started as Responsive Web Design but the movement has spread to include mobile devices also since users are transitioning a lot of the time they spend doing things on those.. Ethan Marcotte has written a very good book, Responsive Web Design, that outlines a number of techniques to achieve responsive web design:

Specifying design elements in terms of percentages instead of pixels
Sensing the width or the browser and using different CSS Styles accordingly
Extensive use of server side enhancements to enhance the user experience on mobile devices that have narrower bandwidths than an ethernet or wireless connection at home.

Responsive Design is not a single, monolithic approach. You don’t need to rigidly try to offer ALL of the functionality on every device. Like this blog entry on the facebook developer pages indicates, it can be optimized by different companies for different purposes for different devices. Luke Wroblewski writes in a compelling way that different devices like laptops, tablets and mobiles have different contexts of usages – some on your sofa at home, some in a hassled situation on the move on your mobile. What you would like to accomplish in those two situations are very different and so your user experience could be limited or more, depending upon this kind of context.

Clarissa Peterson provides a number of additional compelling examples in her presentation here.. If you are worried only about Mobile Responsive Design, the underlying approaches may be the same but the tools may be different. They are outlined here in this article with other references from there.

As with anything, any approach comes with their own pluses and minuses. This article – The Truth Behind Responsive Web Design: Is It the Next Great Hope or All Hype? explores some of the minuses in greater detail.

Benefits of Responsive Design

Consistent user experience, same URLs on every device
Single website/code base to create/maintain for a variety of devices
Support for a variety of screens and also future-proof – New screen sizes are automatically accommodated

Drawbacks of Responsive Design

Sometimes developing one app for each platform may be the right way to go! And sometimes for News, people prefer browsers over apps! You may have to look to your own application for an answer. Responsive design may not be applicable if you decide to go the app route!
Not very efficient and can be slow on mobiles with slower connections. All elements may be downloaded whether they are displayed or not.
Initial development cost could be more than developing just for a browser
Consumers may not necessarily want the same user experience on every device

So next time you design something remember the song – Bend Me, Shape Me, Anyway You Want Me!

Simplify before you suppress. If it’s not worthwhile to show to mobile users, what value does it have to other users? – Ethan Marcotte

05/11/201305/11/2013

First Look – #PNCamp Day 1 (Discovery Hacking)

Exactly a month away from the inaugural #PNCamp and as schedules and attendees are being finalized, we are getting a lot of questions about what exactly is going to happen on D-Days, especially since we have told everyone we are not going to have one-to-many speaking sessions and workshops that have been the norm.

I spoke to Pallav Nadhani(FusionCharts) today, who is planning and designing the first day of #PNCamp, on 4th December, focusing exclusively on what we are calling the ‘Customer Discovery’ stage, the race against time to get those first 10 customers on board.

So much depends on those first 10 customers, and all of us product pros know this. It is not just the matter of the first customers, the first 10 are a validation of the time and effort you have built, a proof of the market that you’ve bet on and the first high-five entrepreneurship is going to give you.

What Pallav has envisioned for the first day of #PNCamp is a one day experiential learning bootcamp that will take a product entrepreneur across the entire journey he is going to take, from the initial idea to his first customers in a series of closed workshops. The small teams that we have planned will enable direct conversations and peer learning like no other format can.

Exciting, yes?

Let’s dive into the program then.

Entrepreneurship is a 7 year ‘bitch’

As a product entrepreneur, are you scared? At the end of this session, Pallav wants you to be. There are so many things that can go wrong in an entrepreneurial journey that starts off looking like a dream. The people who have been there, done that, will be talking to you about what they had to go through before they got to where they are. This is the session when you will be forced to think about what you have gotten yourself into. It isn’t going to be easy. You have to be strong if you want to weather the 7 year ‘bitch’.

Picking your battles

Are you building a product because you can or because you should? Is there a market for it? How do you know? Have you tested it? How have you tested it? What are your strengths that makes you believe you can win this battle? Get ready for a maelstrom of questions. Pallav and co. are going to help you chose the battlefield you are going to fight in. This is important, and you know how important it is. You should be the Indian Army fighting in Kargil, knowing that you have the upper hand. You shouldn’t be the US Army in Vietnam, fighting in a terrain you don’t know against an enemy you don’t understand.

Customer Development through design thinking

In the business of designing, building and selling products, the customer is sometimes left in the lurch. As Pallav says, you should be asking the customer what he wants to eat, and then try to give it to him. You shouldn’t be asking him if he wants Hyderabadi Biryani, for instance. Talking to the customer will give you more ammunition than you can ever use. But you should know how to do that, what signals to watch out for, and how to use the information you have gleaned. This session plans to make you masters at this.

Experiments never killed anybody

How do you know what is going to work when you are designing a product mockup, or when you are doing usability testing, or when you are testing a new kind of email form, or when you are booking an expensive ads in a magazine, or perhaps composing a quirky email communication to send out? You don’t. And that is why you do as many things as you can, and choose the best, which you replicate and optimize. But again, how do you do that? What are the tools, the processes to do this? This session is aimed at making you the greatest judge of such experiments.

Shameless is the new sexy

This is the session that is going to put all the disparate pieces of the puzzle together. Now that you have done all you can – you have designed a product for the market, you have studied customers, you have positioned your offering perfectly, and it’s time for you to go after the first customers, you need to remember something, a principle of sorts. Shameless is the new sexy. In short, no customer is going to come use your product because you have something special to give them – if it isn’t broken; they are not going to fix it. You are going to have to convince them. And for that, you are going to have to be shameless. Shameless really is the new sexy. And yes, this is the session I’m most looking forward to.

I think this is more than enough to get you excited for what we are trying to put together. More information will be forthcoming right here, and if you have any questions, remember the hashtag #PNCamp.

If you haven’t applied yet for #PNCamp, you can do so here

04/11/201312/11/2013

Demystifying SaaS conversions – a pragmatic approach to improving your website

The biggest challenge a start-up faces in its first year is not discovery but assertion. Assertion comes from customers agreeing that the product is of value and can provide RoI for both time and money. While advertising dollars can bring your audience to you, only quality can keep them engaged and interested.

As a SaaS based solution, your website is THE most important avenue for your customers to see. Did you know that on an average customers spend only 15 seconds on a web page? If you are in the SaaS business, those 15 seconds are all you have to present your case and convince your customer. A startup could have a brilliant product but when it comes to customer acquisition, a poorly designed website or a weak positioning message could kill your customer’s interest in your solution in a matter of seconds.

Let’s say you rework your website with an improved positioning and value proposition and start attracting an audience. Here are some questions you should ask yourself:

– Do you know what actually worked on your website?

– What percentage of your audience are your target customers?

– How many of these customers can you actually retain or convert to paying customers?

When you go from a website that doesn’t work to one that does, it is important to analyze what is driving those conversions and use that feedback to iterate the website design and improve your positioning. Unlike product usability testing, this process cannot be simulated in a controlled environment; you have to let it play out in the wild. In the context of muHive, there are two things that helped us figure this out: Customer feedback and Analytics. Never discount a conversation with the customer. When we started talking to our BETA customers, we asked them what about the marketing message caught their eye. Their answers caused a radical shift in the way we perceived our own value proposition and led to us iterating our message over and over to appeal to a wider audience. We validated these iterations with comprehensive web analytics.

All of this is definitely not an easy process. It took us more than 4 iterations spaced out over a year to get to a value proposition that actually works, but we still haven’t stopped tweaking it.

Here are some of the optimizations that have given us a big advantage in our customer acquisition initiatives. I hope some of these will work for you as well.

Website optimization for SaaS conversions – muHive from muHive Technologies

Guest Post by Ritesh M Nayak, muHive Technologies