Posted on

‘Ensure that your product delivers more value than what customers expect out of it’ – Shaudhan Desai, Founder and CEO, D’Soft Infotech

In a reflection of his journey spanning 25 years, Shaudhan Desai, Founder and CEO of D’Soft Infotech Pvt Ltd., makers of India’s leading Jewelery software shares his experiences in building the company during the license-raj era, and the changes he has seen in the business of recent times. Read on… 

You are celebrating 25 years of operations at D’Soft.  It is indeed a great milestone for an Indian products based company. Can you share with us how you started on this path? 

I was working with GE Medical Systems in their marketing division around that time. The use of computers by western countries during that decade made me realize that computers could help automation of routine tasks, even in India. This was the trigger to set up a company in India. The plan was to leverage computers and help data processing forms and share forms be processed quicker than the manual process. This is how we began our company during 1988.

Starting a software company during that time should have been a very daunting task. Can you share your experiences as you worked on establishing the company?

You are right. There were many issues that had to be taken care of. To begin with, there was no computer dealer in our region. Cost of procurement of one computer itself was very high – and that too for one with a 4.77 MHz processor. Secondly, there was no skilled labor available who understood how to operate computers, the punched cards etc that was the key to execute our plan. Thirdly, you had to deal with skeptic customers who resisted any change to their existing way of doing things. Overcoming all these were quite a challenge during our initial years.

How did you overcome these challenges? What was the first success you tasted as a company?

The first real success, in my view came to us during the years 1993-95, when we designed, developed and sold an accounting software package in Gujarati language. This was triggered by an advertisement from CDAC about a multilingual card which could be inserted in the computer. Based on this idea, we developed the basic tenets of accounting which would work in Gujarati language. We targeted professional accountants who would go to every shop and write accounts. These accountants realized that they could scale their business (as in, they could attend to more customers) by using our package – since it standardized all entries and made it easy for them to provide the final computations. A few others realized that they could save themselves from doing mundane and repetitive work, and hence bought on to this new offering. In all, this offering got good traction with the segment we targeted. Even today, while we don’t sell this offering too actively, we still have about 5000 to 6000 active users of this software.

Very interesting… How did you engage with customers back then, and what changes do you see now, after 25 years? 

During our initial years, to gain access to prospective customers, we relied initially on our personal networks – reaching out to accountants who maintained books at shops of our acquaintances. When we saw initial successful adoption, we resorted to making ourselves present in the seminars, specifically held for accountants. This helped us reach to all parts of the state. Now of course, with internet and other technological advances, we use all the modern methods of gaining access to potential customers.

Back then, the awareness of our customers in using the package was very low, and the expectations out of the software package also were limited. During the initial years, we had to even provide a guarantee to buy back hardware, if the customer decided to stop using our software. We had to print bound manuals and ship it for every customer – as a means of support, since no other reliable method of communication existed. Even if a customer had some feedback or a requirement, we would implement the same in the next version of our package; release it after 6 to 8 months since his request.

Fast forwarding these to now, the expectations of customers from a software product have grown tremendously. While our initial versions were on Foxbase and DOS based, we now ship products that are accessible on any device (computer, cell phone, tablet etc). Our product updates now come in 2 to 3 week cycles. Internet has helped us to support our customers better, and in real time. However, what has not changed is the reason customers buy a product. No customer will be willing to buy the product unless it delivers value to his/her business.

How did your flagship product – Ornate Jewelery Software come to be? Can you share us the making of the product and its current state?

A few factors led us to discover and develop on this opportunity to serve jewelers with our offering. A lot of our existing customers of our accounting package used to maintain books with jewelers. So, in discussion with accountants, and further probing, we discovered that jewelers’ operational lifecycle was very different than the ones followed in a typical industry. We also noted that there was no specific software available worldwide that would help jewelers benefit from automation. Hence, we designed and developed the first version of Ornate Jewelery Software during 1998 to 2002, and then subsequently have revised it many times thus far.

Our initial clients were retail jewelers, and even now, a large chunk of our 3000 odd customers are small and mid size jewelers. Since this was a segment that was largely underserved, we are able to attain leadership position in this segment within a decade. Right now, our focus has been to enhance our leadership in this domain. We now have introduced a disruptive offering – ‘Jewelery Kiosk’, through which one can virtually Try / digitally wear different ornaments or combinations and make a purchase decision. This patent pending offering has helped large jewelery houses to reduce customer churn and increase sales on account of our offering. Through our offering, customers of any large chain of showrooms can go to one retail outlet of theirs and virtually Try out all the jewelery available across any of their chain of establishments across the world.

As you look back, are there any opportunities that you felt you could not capitalize on effectively? 

The only aspect that I feel we should have addressed earlier is to focus on international customers. We now have customers from UAE and US. However, I feel that we neglected a bigger opportunity, given the needs of jewelers worldwide are similar. Having said that, with so much of traction and customers behind us, I believe we now are in the best position to make our presence in the worldwide markets. This shall be one of our key priorities going forward.

As a parting thought, what advice would you like to provide to fellow product entrepreneurs operating out of India?

First and foremost, I would say that you should continuously ensure that your customers are happy and satisfied. Irrespective of whether a customer’s business with you is small or big, ensure that you serve their needs. This is a key prerequisite for growth. Every customer is very important and we must satisfy them.

Secondly, ensure that your product really delivers more value that what customers expect out of it. This will help you to sustain your competitive advantage. Good luck!

Posted on

Reduce Data – Programmatic Advertising Platform

Reduce Data is a programmatic advertising platform. Reduce Data helps advertisers buy media efficiently using programmatic means – machine learning, real-time data driven optimization and real-time bidding. Asif Ali is the founder of Reduce Data.Asif has over 15 years of technology experience. He previously ran ZestADZ, a mobile ad network (acquired by Komli in 2011). ZestADZ was a global mobile ad network with presence and advertisers in over 25 countries. Before that, Asif was the CTO / Co-founder of a wireless and enterprise startup – Threesixty Technologies Sdn Bhd, in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. ThreeSixty maintained app stores on Carriers, built and rolled out mobile commerce solutions such as prepaid SMS topup solutions and had the top 2 telcos – Maxis, Celcom, Top banks – Public bank and Ministry of Education, Malaysia as its customers. The current team strength I s about 15 with 4 people in US, rest of the team is in India. The team is roughly 40% sales, 40% engineering and 20% operations.

The Company

Reduce Data is an early-stage company offering a programmatic advertising platform. They pivoted recently from being an analytics-focused company to a company that offers an integrated platform for media buying and analytics.

Asif says the idea came about in his last ad network, where he found advertisers unable to effectively measure and optimize ad campaigns across various networks. The scale and size of data that was being generated in advertising was huge and there were very few platforms addressing this scale to drive efficiencies. It is also estimated that nearly 30% of media spends are wasted. Reduce Data was started as an attempt to solve this problem.

Reduce Data is what is called as a Display Advertising Platform. Display Advertising Platforms typically focus on Banner Advertising as opposed to delivering text ads within search results (like the way Google does) – see understanding display advertising for a simple view of the display advertising platform and marketplace.

Any company that needs to buy advertising typically buys media from various platforms (this varies, depending upon their goals). Display advertising is one such kind of platform where media can be bought.

Let’s say if Flipkart wants to buy media to promote its new tablets-only store.

  1. They will sign up with Reduce Data
  2. Either through self-service or with the help of Reduce Data’s team, they will identify and select the right target audience and segment of traffic (for example – Male / Females, aged 25 and above in urban centers only and those who are available within a list of top 10 cities)
  3. Assuming that such audience information is available, Reduce Data’s team will make that available and kick start the campaign.

When a user visits a web page

  1. The publisher (like Times of India) auto requests the ad exchange for an ad
  2. Ad exchange will in turn send this request to Reduce Data and various other buyers to ask them whether they want to buy the user.
  3. Reduce Data, will check whether it has relevant information about the user.
  4. Reduce Data’s machine learning algorithms predict whether the user can be bought and if so at what price.
  5. Assuming that Reduce Data wants to buy the user on Flipkart’s behalf and assuming that this user belongs to the right target audience that Flipkart wants, it will bid and either win or lose the auction.
  6. On a win in the auction, the Flipkart ad is shown to the user.

This automated auction called Real-time Bidding (RTB). This entire process 1,2 and 3 happens in 1/10th of a second.

The Product

Reduce Data provides the best of programmatic and a measurement platform in a single platform to its customers (advertisers and ad agencies). The programmatic ad platform allows them to display ads for their clients on a large number of publishers’ sites, and for the most targeted set of audiences. The measurement platform allows their clients to analyze the impact of their campaigns and make the most efficient utilization of their ad budget. Such an integrated platform allows them to offer a low-cost, integrated solution to its customers.

Some of the features of the platform are:

  1. Programmatic Buying capabilities: Reduce Data is focussed on delivering ROI by leveraging superior programmatic approaches.
  2. Measurement and Programmatic in a single Platform: Advertisers using Reduce Data can leverage Reduce Data’s analytics to measure advertising spends through the same platform they use to purchase ad space.
  3. Rich Media and Video Campaigns: Reduce Data allows video campaigns to be run in addition to other media-rich ad campaigns such as MRAID-compatible (a mobile rich media standard) HTML5 mobile campaigns.
  4. Web and Mobile Advertising: Allows brand advertisers to reach both web and mobile users using a single platform.
  5. Retargeting: Re-targeting enables advertisers to follow the user after a visit to a website. This approach generally enables better conversions and improves ROI for the advertisers.
  6. Audience Segmentation: Reduce Data has partnership with three data providers to enable delivery of highly segmented audiences (available currently for US and UK, more international data providers are being added).
  7. Self Service Console: Reduce Data enables self-service advertising through an easy-to-use, self-service user interface to manage the campaigns and check its effectiveness.

Technology

Core of Reduce Data is a technology platform that participates in Real-Time Bidding as a Demand Side Platform(DSP). Given the fact that the real-time bidding protocol is run across these players for every visit to a site, the turnaround time from a DSP has very stringent requirements. Typically, an Ad exchange expects the response from a DSP within 100 milliseconds; including network latency (turnaround time includes time taken to process the bid request, and time taken for the message to travel from exchange to DSP and back). Hence there are 2 technology challenges they need to solve:

  1. Low response time: The time taken to process the bid request by Reduce Data software has to be very small. Reduce Data currently can process a request in 4-6 milliseconds.
  2. Low network latency: The time taken for roundtrip between Ad Exchange server and Reduce Data server. Hence the location of the servers matter. They have tried to use Amazon Cloud, but aren’t happy with the costs and latencies, and are deploying datacenter infrastructure close to the supply side partners and exchanges.

Differentiators

This is a highly competitive market and many of the features they offer are standard features offered by lots of players. A few features that differentiate them from rest of their competition are:

  1. Measurement Tools: Reduce Data provides an integrated platform which very few players offer. However, integrated doesn’t mean reduced set of features –Reduce Data offers full blown real-time reporting that enables advertisers to effectively measure and optimize their ad spends without having to use a third party platform.
  2. Superior programmatic technology + big data driven optimization
    1. Real-time machine learning systems with various algorithms for various needs
    2. Big data technology driven real-time data processing / analysis capability which is extensively used in the feedback loop to drive highly optimized ad spends

Market

According to EMarketer’s latest forecast, RTB (Real-time bidding, the programmatic advertising) portion of digital display ad spending is steadily increasing, from 8% in 2011 to 19% in 2013, and projected to be around 29% in 2017 – $8.49 billion – a huge opportunity.

Reduce Data has a dedicated Sales team, and even though they have launched very recently, they see 15-16 leads a week, and all their current clients are paying ones. They expect to reach $2-3M revenue within next 12 months.

Building Credibility

They need to build credibility in the market that is filled with competition. To ensure that brand gets built quickly, Asif has moved to US, and is focused on marketing Reduce Data. Through tech meetups, publishing whitepapers, speaking engagements, getting published in print media, and of course by delivering good value to his clients, he hopes to build Reduce Data into a credible player in this space.

India offering

They recently launched an India offering too. This is a smart move from them because this helps them to position themselves as a big player in this space which has presence in multiple countries. India being an important market, some exchanges like Facebook Ad Exchange, tend to give preference to companies that have India presence when they let DSPs connect.

Future releases of their platform are likely to focus extensively on improving algorithmic and data processing capabilities.

Competitive Landscape

This is a highly competitive market. There are a large number of very well-known DSP in the market: Adroll, Dataxu, Mediamath, Turn, Google (InviteMedia), AppNexus, Komli Media, etc. Since all of them connect to same Ad exchanges (and hence have the same access to ad inventory) and offer similar functionality, it is hard to distinguish between them. Competition is based on pricing and ease-of-use. Such a crowded space with little differentiation will mean that prices will be squeezed and this will impact new players like Reduce Data.

If we do try, we can see 2 areas of competitive differentiation (other than pricing, of course!):

  1. Inventory access: Though all DSPs aim to connect to all Ad Exchanges, some have better access than others. For example, Facebook hasn’t allowed all DSPs to come on their Exchange, and so it might disadvantage a few DSPs. Similarly, some publishers (too specialized, localized, etc.) may be available only some specialized exchange, and not all DSPs may be connected to them.
  2. Effectiveness of data-based decisions: DSPs use data to make the decision about which impression to bid on. Decisions depend on proprietary algorithms, data available about the user and processing power, and this distinguishes different DSPs.

As the space evolves, vertical integration is a possibility – DSPs getting acquired by (or acquire) upstream or downstream players. Such a consolidation is more imminent as RTB grows at a rapid pace and become critical to display advertising.

The Road Ahead

Display Advertising is undergoing significant changes over last few years, with technology creating never-before opportunities for innovation as well as disruption. Demand-Side Platforms have the potential to make media buying and campaign management extremely effective and provide significant ROI to the advertisers. Reduce Data is in a very competitive space with large and well-known competitors. This industry will evolve along 3 dimensions:

  1. Data-driven decisions: One of the promises of DSP is to offer compelling value using deep data analysis. Reduce Data needs to continue to focus on its machine learning and big-data capabilities.
  2. Tools: Brand safety, Measurement, ROI calculators, more variety of algorithms etc. are keys to interest brand marketers to switch to new platforms and Reduce Data will continue to innovate and rollout various tools as per the needs of the marketplace.
  3. Media focus – DSPs tend to focus either on Video, Online or Mobile and that is going to continue for a while. Reduce Data will eventually need to choose a sweet spot for itself in one media.

One of the things going for Reduce Data is the credentials of its founder: Asif has deep experience in the advertising space from his prior company (which he sold to Komli). Another is the fact that they are an engineering driven organization and are focussed evolving the platform faster than the incumbents in the marketplace.

If they execute well on these dimensions and leverage their technology focus and industry connect, they have a real good chance of becoming a force in this fast-evolving space and carve out a name for themselves.

Posted on

‘From zero to 9 million customers in a decade’ – The Xgen story!

Product Nation interviewed Dr. Ajay Data, Founder and CEO of Data Infosys. In this freewheeling chat, Dr. Ajay discusses his journey of creating a world class product for the masses, and his key focus areas as he built and scaled his organization from scratch. Read on…

Your company, Data Infosys, in a fairly short span of 15 years has managed to emerge as India’s leading ISP as well as the #1 communications product provider. Can you describe how all of this started? 

I hail from a business family whose interests were primarily in ceramics and edible oil. Like many other business persons in India, I too involved myself in family business and was well on path to take it to the next level. During 1998, I began to notice the initial signs of Indian government’s intent in allowing Internet usage for its people. Having read about the disruptive nature of internet and its advantages in the west, I always had kept tab on the developments on that front. So, when Satyam, the key ISP at that time issued an advertisement for partnership, I immediately jumped on this and initiated discussions with them.

During the course of discussions with them, it became clear to me that those folks were being very unreasonable in their terms. I did some more background work to examine the feasibility of becoming an Internet Service Provider – and initial evaluation suggested that while the path to do it alone was very difficult, the returns would be lucrative if one did it. Hence, I chose not to partner with them, but instead compete with them. This led to creation of Data Infosys, primarily with the aim to be the Internet Service Provider of choice targeting audience from North India to begin with.

Deciding to foray into a new business, of which you had little knowledge, is extremely risky and outcomes are uncertain. How did you navigate around these challenges in the initial years?

Starting any new business will bring with it its own risks and uncertainties. In my case, I had no knowledge of dealing with servers, hardware, no proper mentor or guide to work on the domain specific aspects. I think I overcame these challenges due to two aspects. The first one – is to get your hands dirty and learn the nuts and bolts of the business yourself. This meant that I learnt how to install a modem at a customer’s place, how to plan, set up and run a call center, how to order, procure and deploy a server, configure a router etc all by myself. Once you got a grasp of the basics of the business activities, it is easier to plan and track the activities.

Secondly, my approach was to plan and execute short set of activities as quickly as possible. I failed many times trying different approaches to meet an end goal. However, since I failed early, every next attempt – I knew what not to do. Both of these helped me develop the required expertise and knowledge of the business very quickly.

While the learning may have been quick and useful, how and when did the actual validation come that your business was in the right direction?

In 1999 I planned to invest about Rs. 40 lakh as the first iteration on the infrastructure to provide ISP services. To test the receptivity of customers, I placed an advertisement in a local news paper about offering our service. The next day, I saw 200 people queued up in front of my office, even when I had not started to execute on my plan. This was good enough indication that I was doing the right thing at the right time. All that was necessary was for us to execute on our plan – and we did it well.

How did the company’s transformation to products happen? What were the key drivers?

The focus on building products got amplified due to market conditions that developed in 2001. Due to increased attention on the ISP business, there was lot more competition in the market – and prices for a new internet connection drastically fell from about Rs. 2700 to Rs. 800 almost overnight. This sharp fall triggered the need to look for ways in which we could retain our customer base and provide them more value. We decided to shift gears and develop an IP based portfolio that would help us sustain and monetize our existing customer base.

It was at this time, we discovered that among our 1 lakh user base, a lot of them were dissatisfied with the email service provided by the ISP. This led us to design and develop Xgen, initially using the LAMP stack. We offered this service to our customer base. The customers provided valuable feedback on various aspects of our product – which we quickly addressed. This ensured that we built this product, ground up based on customer requirements.

The email / communication / collaboration product is not very new to market. Also, there are existing MNC giants in this space who dominate the market. Despite this, how were you able to sustain your product offering and emerge successful? 

It is obviously not easy to enter into a mature market. However, to our advantage, we had an initial customer base from our ISP services that we could start with. Their feedback helped in developing the product specific to the unique and unmet needs of the customers that were hitherto ignored by the existing vendors. While there were MNC products already in the market, we were able to execute faster than them to capture the growing base of new customers who got added to the ecosystem. Several differentiating features such as superior processing of data, optimal transmission of data over the wire helped us differentiate from competition.

For example, among our recent wins at India’s leading PSU, the customer wanted to test the ability of all the short-listed vendors to send and receive an email with a 100 MB attachment. We came up trumps and bet the competition hands down all aspects of their evaluation such as speed of handling the traffic and delivery, transmission of data from two separate physical points in least amount of time, bandwidth consumed while transmission etc. So, in summary, our ability to understand the latent communication requirements of our prospective customers, the robustness and scalability of the technical architecture we have built in our product, coupled with superior round the clock support has enabled us to become the leader in this space in our country. I feel proud to state that we have gone from zero to 9 million customers in a span of 10 years for this product!

A quick look at your customers reveals that you have a lot of government departments as your customers. A lot of people find it difficult to work with this sector. Can you share with us how you have succeeded in building such good relations with them? 

At the highest level, I do not differentiate between any customers based on the sector. It is my belief that as long as you can deliver value and solve their issues, you can acquire customers in any sector. Talking specifically of the government sector, you need to understand not just the end goal that they are trying to achieve, but the mechanics of getting there – within the framework of the government rules. As with any other sector, the decision makers and the workforce using the product will have their specific challenges. One needs to understand the limitations and propose a solution that alleviates their pain points in a way that is win-win to both the parties. Constant engagement, superior support is two aspects that one needs to focus on while dealing with this sector.

Once you have succeeded in demonstrating your product capabilities and the value to the department, word spreads by itself about our product and service, and a lot more doors will open up. This is how we have managed to build and develop long lasting relationships with the government customers.

On a parting note, what are the key tips that you wish to share with fellow entrepreneurs?

I believe that we have a very big opportunity in India to develop innovative products. Looking back at my initial years, I recollect that I have spent sleepless nights attending to the needs of the business – purely because I was driven by the passion to deliver value to our customers. There have also been times where I had to engage with customers for years before they decided to choose our product. So, I urge all product entrepreneurs to follow their passion, persevere and never give up; do not hesitate to dream big. If you have the conviction and the ground intelligence about the market fitment of your offering, do not look back.

Secondly, do not let recognitions and accolades distract you from achieving better. These recognitions are good in that they are a validation of your success thus far. It helps to motivate you to do better. However, do not rest on these laurels, since a slight digression from your goals might mean you are out of the race.

Posted on

Q&A with Manufacturing ERP Provider Syscon Solutions

Syscon Solutions was launched in Hyderabad, India in 1996. Its ERP product, Syscon Cronus, is targeted for small and medium manufacturing enterprises. In 2006 it became one of the first ERP solutions to be offered in the SaaS/cloud model. We talked with co-founder and managing director S. Vijay Venkatesh about Syscon’s startup experiences and lessons learned. This article is brought to SandHill readers in partnership with ProductNation.

How did your company originate — what was the original vision?

Vijay Venkatesh: Having worked for 13 years with various midsize manufacturing companies, I thought of starting my own business and started a chemical trading company dealing with pharma and rubber chemicals and representing manufacturers from Tamil Nadu, Mumbai and Gujarat.

When the opportunity came to start Syscon with one of my old colleagues with two developers, I thought it would be something which was of my type. Added to this was the fact that IT was only afforded by big corporates; SMEs could not dream of it.

Our initial idea in 1996 was to develop a customized solution for manufacturing industries. As we started, I observed that we might end up doing the same thing differently for different people. This would leave us with several versions of codes, which might make the maintenance and upgrade impossible. With all the facts, we decided to go in for a product development and tell the customers to use what we have rather than asking them what they want. We shut our marketing department for a while and went for a small loan and working capital. There was no looking back. 

Is there a story behind your company name?

Vijay Venkatesh: Syscon stands for “System Consulting” or “System Configuration.”

What are some of the challenges you’ve had that you didn’t anticipate? How did you resolve them?

Vijay Venkatesh: I always used to think, though there is a huge number of SMEs in the market, that the rate of customer acquisition is very slow. But now, instead of blaming the SMEs, I think that it is due to the fact that there are more failures than successes of ERP among SMEs in India.

It is the responsibility of the ERP vendor to bring in all the missing links to address this challenge. I learned that we needed to make our ERP product simple and also train our customers because SMEs are not computer savvy. I also recognized that SME CEOs have so many things to do that they cannot devote time to software product reviews. To address this challenge, we implement only the essential modules to start with and then scale them up step by step.

Please describe one of your company’s lessons learned and where it occurred in the time line of your product development.

Vijay Venkatesh: We have learned several important lessons of being a product company as opposed to an IT services company. First, instead of asking the customer what they want, we learned to tell them to use what we have. Next, we needed to make sure any new requirements made sense for larger target clients and make sure that we take time to bring those features carefully in to the product.

Also we learned that a software product company needs a complete ecosystem including sales, implementation, support and training, coupled with training partners, technology partners, hosting partners and industry associations.

How did you find your first customer? Did it take longer than you anticipated?

Vijay Venkatesh: Everest Organics Limited (EOL) became our first customer in 1999. I met the managing director and told him about our product and vision of being a long-term committed vendor for the SMEs. We gave several rounds of demos for EOL’s core team. After four months they released a purchase order for us.

At that time our product was not fully mature in several functionalities. We have done numerous amounts of customization (almost 60 percent) and made more than 250 visits over nine months for training and implementation. Since there was no Internet in those early days, the data transfer was happening through floppy discs on a daily basis.

The EOL office and factory works online now. We are proud to continue serving EOL today after 14 years!

With our experience of EOL and the product maturity of our ERP solution we are in a position to serve much bigger clients in the pharma segment. Some of the new pharma clients have seven manufacturing units. Our implementation now takes eight to 10 visits over three to four weeks compared to nine months with EOL. We also have started remote implementation for SMEs, which is very cost-effective and easy to manage.

Read the complete interview at Sandhill.com

Posted on

‘Making Readily Available Useful, Robust, Easy-to-use & Affordable Software Products for Millions’– the NRich story

ProductNation interviewed Badrinarayanan V S (Badri), Founder of NRich Software. In this discussion, he explains how he was able to build a sustainable business by focusing on solving simple everyday problems of the commoner. Read on…

NRich seems to have more than a decade of experience in offering products and consulting services targeted to Indian customers. Can you tell us about how it all started?

As I gained professional experience working at different software companies in India such as Wipro, Polaris, Kumaran Software and Cybertech, I noticed that none of these companies prioritized software products as their engine for growth. Large part of their portfolio and revenue realization aspects relied on services. To me, this was a disturbing thought, since I was convinced that products based strategy would actually benefit a firm in the long term. This led me to establish NRich software

My initial thoughts were to try and understand why software products did not sell in India. I was puzzled that although there were many software products in the accounting space, Tally ruled and others weren’t even being noticed. This sparked a detailed research and analysis which pointed to the lack of market-readiness amongst most product vendors in India.

Out of this research was born NRich*Scan, a consulting service that helped diagnose and assess the state of Market Readiness of software products based on 51 critical parameters over the Ideation, Development and Sales & Marketing Phases.  Through a series of questions, I would finally arrive at a score that would indicate the areas where the product was strong and areas that one needed to focus on to achieve market success.

How did your first offering fare in the marketplace? What experience did you gain through this? 

Given that the concept of market readiness itself was new, there was high resistance amongst large companies towards NRich*Scan. Surprisingly, entrepreneurs were very receptive to NRich*Scan because they were committed to the success of their products.  We worked with products across different domains such as Resume Management, Correspondence Management , Jewellery Design, ERP for Process industries, Carnatic Music Tutor etc.  Some of our customers saved a lot of cash that would have otherwise gone towards selling an unready product and some even addressed the failings befor re-launching their products.

While it was easy to develop a product, most founders found selling it very tough because their sales people were inadequately skilled and equipped.  I created a specialized training program for selling software products called ExSell.  Seeing the struggle in selling Hospital Information System (HIS) packages, I have recently launched a special edition of ExSell for HIS.

When and how did your first software product come out from NRich? What factors led to its creation? 

From my consulting services, I clearly understood that to design, develop and sell a software product, one need not be a domain expert. Since I had started my analysis of product readiness in the accounting/finance area, I had noticed that not only the businesses, but individuals also needed to be fiscally prudent to manage their expenses. I noticed that no tool existed for this segment and hence developed a simple and easy to use product that would help individuals manage their personal finances powerfully. By the time this product was in the market, Outlook group of magazines were rechristening their personal finance magazine as Outlook Money. They were impressed with our product and ordered 3000 licenses, which they decided to gift to their subscribers. This was a great validation of our product and helped us get traction in the marketplace. Based on this, we created a much more robust product ‘Enrich’ that offered more benefits.

What marketing efforts did you undertake to penetrate the market?

Since we clearly identified that the success of our product required a shift in attitude and behavioral aspects of individuals, we zeroed in on advertising in personal finance magazines. This was largely because we figured out those who buy or read these magazines are concerned about their money and hence would find our offering attractive.  We talked about their lives and their issues by not managing their money powerfully and positioned Enrich as a solution to their problems.  We were amazed at the response we got.  People from all over the country including small towns and villages, readily paid money into our bank account or ordered via VPP (the India Post option of Cash on Delivery) just on the basis of our empathetic ads.

How did the transition from offering personal finance product to a healthcare offering happen?

With the success of our personal finance product, we realized that consumers were willing to look at software products to help them manage their lives and that inspired us to address the health care especially chronic disease management.  We clearly observed that just as how people were careless in managing money, they were equally casual about their health. It was not that they were neglecting their health, but many other things occupied their minds which made them attending to regular tests or attend reviews a low priority.

We also observed that the approach by patients and doctors towards chronic diseases was callous. Most patients would file their test results and prescriptions and forget and the doctors would probably look just at the latest result for diagnosis and treatment. In this process, vital information about the history of the patient over time was being missed out.

To make a difference in this scenario, we conceptualized and implemented Diasof (www.diasof.com) an online service that helps diabetic patients to be Healthier Anywhere, Anytime.  DiaSof helps the users share their analyzed medical history with their doctors either online or via a hard copy and also remind them via email and sms to take their tests in time and meet their doctor as scheduled. Further, they would be able to access their own records from anywhere using their mobile phones or tablets, which could be invaluable whilst travel and in cases of emergency.

How did your customers receive the new product? What challenges and successes you have had selling this to your target segment? 

Although we tried reaching Diabetic patients through pharmacies and diagnostic labs, we found that their receptivity and willingness was maximum when their doctor recommended DiaSof.

We were fortunate to find a very patient-responsive and forward looking supporter in Dr Vijay Viswanathan, an eminent Diabetologist and the MD of MV Diabetic Hospital in Chennai.  Together, we have made DiaSof available to many Diabetic patients from all over the country and the numbers are increasing at a rapid pace.  The response from many senior diabetologists and endocrinologists is also very encouraging.  Our goal is to Save A Million Diabetic Lives By End Of 2015.

We are in the process of signing up more hospitals and physicians and replicate this model across major towns and cities in India in the months to come.

Upon observing your offerings thus far, I notice that you are focused on solving the often overlooked and very minor problems that people may face. How does this approach help you succeed or differentiate with others – and is this mode sustainable for a company? 

It is my belief that a software product is successful when it is simple and extremely easy to use besides being affordable. Hence, at NRich, we are maniacally focused on delivering lean software solutions so that our users can realize the value quickly.  We add facilities only when we are doubly sure that they will add value.  We recently added a facility for the users to upload their photograph into their DiaSof account, not for cosmetic purposes but because doctors will be able to recognize their patient’s face better than by name.

Although the framework of DiaSof can be applied for any chronic disease without much modifications, we have consciously kept the focus on Diabetes.  We have, for example,  developed a product that addresses Thyroid management but we will launch it only when DiaSof reaches a critical installation base.

From your experience, what are the key aspects one should focus on when building a product based business in India? What needs to be kept in mind if one needs to sell to Indian customers? 

Firstly, one should identify the target customer segment, in a way that it is not too narrow (in which case you cannot scale) nor too broad (which makes focus virtually impossible). This is absolutely critical. Once this is done, there must be high clarity on the pain points of this segment and how your product solves those pain points.

Posted on

Top 10 reasons why NASSCOM Product Conclave is #unique this year #NPC2013

1.       Speakers who you will not be able to hear any other place in India. While most other conferences will get you the name-brand speakers or practitioners from India, we went far and wide to get you Rahul Sood (head of Microsoft Ventures, founder of Voodoo PC and entrepreneur), Orna Berry (SVP of EMC, a very successful entrepreneur and Charles Phillips (CEO of Infor, previously at Morgan Stanley and board of directors at Oracle) and 4 more high quality speaker who will not be speaking at any other event in India.

2.       The global business and startup #quiz – the funnest session on the planet. If you are a startup junkie and have a knack for trivia, team up with fellow entrepreneurs and participate in the global startup quiz.  This session promises to have you learn the most useless of trivia, but those that you cannot forget.

3.       The largest gathering of payments experts in India in one place. The #payments track is hosting the top 10 investors, companies, entrepreneurs and innovators all working on sharing with you opportunities in payments in India.

4.       Enough talk, more demos. 25 of India’s best mobile applications, SaaS solutions, a few robotics and hardware companies and very early stage payment companies will demo their solution live to give you a flavor for building awesome applications. Some of them will be launching for the first time.

5.       Open your eyes to the largest opportunities in the biggest markets. For those looking to startup a new company or those already in their own startup, NPC features the large opportunities and the future of Automobile technology, Salesforce application platforms & medical software technologies.

6.       The funniest two technologists will share their top secrets to being spontaneously creative and funny while still being in your startup. Twitter celebrity Ramesh Srivats (@rameshsrivats) and Blogger Krish Ashok (@krishashok) will take you through their recipe for building great stories and still keeping your mind fresh.

7.       One word – BitCoin. Even if you don’t know what it is, or are an expert miner you will see for the first time in India any session on the future of this digital currency. NASSCOM product conclave will feature the session on giving you an overview to bitcoin and its implications on the future of currency.

8.       The best 3 workshops on Design – for the design oriented developer by Intuit, on the design of mobile applications by Source Bits and the design philosophies of award winning designers from Cleartrip.

9.       Networking with Angel investors from the world over who have invested in startups from India – and are looking for interesting opportunities. Early stage angel investors from Singapore, New Zealand, Russia, Switzerland, London, Indonesia and Sri Lanka will be there at NPC. This is the only conference where we are providing a more structured means for you to connect and talk to them about your startup.

10.    The most advanced topics on sales – from making a move from an engineer to a sales person, to the best way to split your base and commission compensation for sales professionals. There’s also a workshop on getting started with your inside sales led by 2 folks who have grown from INR 0 to INR 50 Cr. in revenue. The track also features startup sales managers who have grown their sales teams and will share their hands-on knowledge of how to hire and manage sales people in India.

This year’s NPC promises to help you learn from your peers, get inspired by successful entrepreneurs and network with the right folks to help you build great products- you gotta be at NPC this year.

Register now.

Posted on

Keeping Data Theft Prevention Simple & Green!

Zarir M. Karbhari is the Chief Architect of CopyNotify! & Founder of CygNET Systems Pvt. Ltd shares his journey of diversifying a outsourced programming services company into a software product company. The company was founded in 1995 with a focus of offering hi-tech outsourced programming services for companies based all over the world. The company maintained this hi-tech niche by ensuring that most of its projects involved network programming, communication protocols and device driver development for various operating systems.

Decision to diversify to product development — What factors contributed to this?

Based on inherent in house expertise and experience of over 100,000 programming hours in the field of application development, networking, security and communications, a strategic decision was made by CygNET Systems Pvt. Ltd. in 2007 to move up the ‘value’ ecosystem and develop a network security software product which catered to the needs of the small business user which was at that point a perceived need of the hour.

Explain the journey of evolving your core product. What aspects and feedback were important in this process?

Security against data theft of source code was becoming paramount in the outsourced programming industry in India and many nightmarish stories of how data was being copied in an unauthorized manner and without detection via USB flash drives were beginning to surface. So theft via USB became the initial ‘problem to solve ‘. Instead of searching the web for similar
anti data theft products and cloning them, the engineers at CygNET Systems Pvt. Ltd took the route of talking to system administrators & small business owners and created a vision specification for CopyNotify based on their feedback.

The company had identified a problem, spoken in detail to those who were facing the problem and then went on to design a software product to solve the problem. From a simple beginning of just detecting the insertion of USB Flash Drives, the product soon evolved into a full fledged Data Security Software for small office networks.

Can you share details about your products.

CygNET Systems currently has released 3 products.

1. CopyNotify! (Data Protection that went GREEN)

CopyNotify! is an entry level data protection software designed specially for the small business / SOHO networks. The software deploys anti data theft measures for computers on the office network by disabling the copying of data to external USB drives and Smart Phones, blocking internet connectivity via portable modems / data cards as well as restricting browser based uploads of data.

The software monitors user logon activities such as privilege levels, remote logons and invalid logons. Software installs and un-installs on the network are logged as well as rogue devices attempting to access network resources can also be detected.

CopyNotify! goes GREEN in data protection by also offering electricity saving features such as switching off IDLE machines and the auto shutdown of computers after office hours.

2. Insta-LockDown ( Data Protection at a Key Stroke )

The personal edition of CopyNotify! is called Insta-LockDown. It has been designed for single computers / laptops and locks down the copying of data with a simple keystroke combination.

Insta-LockDown restricts the copying of data through various routinely used data channels such as the internet, file attachments, removable USB devices and Bluetooth transfer to smart phones and comes in handy when single PCs are used by multiple users and protection of confidential data is a concern. It also plays a protective role against data theft when administrative privileges are granted to multiple users of the same PC or the admin password has been inadvertently compromised.

3. GreenNotify! (Energy Saver Software)

GreenNotify is an energy conservation software that reduces electricity bills of small businesses by automatically switching off computers that are not being used and shutting down computers automatically after office hours.

Your views on how your offering is differentiated in the market / Competitive advantage you have over others in the same space. Your plan of achieving success in a crowded and mature marketplace.

During this endeavor of developing a security software, CygNET Systems Pvt. Ltd in its strategy never tried to compare or clone its software with those released by its perceived competitors. A data security need had been perceived and the requirement of simplicity of acquisition, cost and expertise for Indian conditions had to be addressed.

In today’s digital world, protection from data theft is crucial and soon will become a ‘must’. However for small business users, the prohibitive acquisition costs of sophisticated Data Loss Prevention software and the level of IT expertise required at times results in data security being ignored all together. Also more often than not, the DLP software is an overkill in terms of ‘cost versus capability’ for small organizations due to non suitability of all available software features.

With CopyNotify! and its affiliated products, data protection software is made as easily available and affordable as a ‘wada pav’. A ‘wada pav’ is a popular spicy fast food native to Maharashtra. It is filling, inexpensive and caters to the masses.

Keeping the analogy of the ‘wada pav’ in mind, CopyNotify! offers data security solutions that brings enterprise level data protection to the average computer user. The software does basic data protection, is inexpensive in acquisition, feasible in implementation and simple enough to accepted by the average business user. CygNET Systems firmly believes that in India unless the use of data security software percolates down to the average user, an acceptable deterrence against data breaches will never be achieved whatever the size of any organization.

Very low cost of acquisition, suitability for Indian conditions and ease of use of the software products developed by CygNET Systems Pvt. Ltd are already paying rich dividends by the way of increase of sales.

Key learning from selling to customers

Feedback is crucial for a good product. Right from its inception, the team behind CopyNotify! have taken the feedback of users in the field, tried to understand the problems they face in a routine day and then design the software to alleviate these problems. This principle of user feedback based feature additions has made CopyNotify! very popular with its existing customers.

Your views on relevance or importance of leveraging channels and partnerships to sell.

It is far too expensive and time consuming for a startup to set up its own channel of resellers / distributors or having its own sales force. Partnering with existing VARs/Distributors/Resellers is best way to proceed as these organizations already have existing sales networks which can used to push the product out to the market.

The biggest difficulty is getting a partner / distributor to sign up with a start up is the ‘curse’ of being an unknown brand as the effort to push non branded product becomes more time consuming and expensive for the partner hence the reluctance to partner with a start up.

Your views on alliances and its benefits/pitfalls.

For any software product, alliances should not be shirked away from, be it technical, financial or by the way of sales and marketing however care should be taken that all is in ‘black and white’ and immense care should be taken that in the hype tornado of ‘promises and assured success’ the best interests of the start up is kept in mind at all times.

Your views on networking with industry colleagues and participation in conferences. The benefits or pitfalls of the same.

Networking is great provided one can get themselves in a group that is one step ahead of one’s current stage of business and can actually help with getting more sales. Networking is about getting the right connections to make more sales and not just about collecting visiting cards. 

Your message for product development entrepreneurs for India.

You might have a great software product but unless you know how to tell the world about it, it will never sell. If it does not sell, your idea was of no use in the first place.

Posted on

The Who, What, When, Why and How of Consumerization of the Enterprise

Users of enterprise software marvel at the ease of use of facebook, twitter and gmail on their mobiles, tablet computers and desktops! Then they wonder why their enterprise software should not be as easy to use or at least be available from their own devices. The CEO wonders why she cannot see the company graphs and charts in vibrant colors on her iPad at home on her sofa, while watching TV! This is where the consumerization of the enterprise sets up expectations of mobility, flexibility, ease of use and at a minimum, just being able to access enterprise applications from these other devices!

Consumerization of the enterprise is exciting from an end user point of view, but brings with it a number of new issues of security, availability, and application responsiveness that need to be addressed by the enterprise software maker or the IT department. Enterprise software product start-ups need to take this trend very seriously since mobiles and tablets are getting only more powerful, less expensive, and ubiquitous. By the time they mature and emerge from a start-up stage, this may not be a nice to have but a must have. So, here’s a Who, What, When, Why and How of Consumerization of Enterprise Software. This is a rather involved subject to be covered in a single article. I will cover the basics and provide links to additional material as appropriate.

The Why

Users of enterprise applications like the mobility that comes with smartphones and tablet computers. They see fairly sophisticated things done with these devices in their personal lives and are wondering why the same should not be true of their enterprise applications! They see that these devices are powerful computers in their own right and are wondering why they should not be using them for work.

The What

Consumerization results in a number of new expectations of enterprise software – use of inexpensive commodity servers for hosting the application if on-premises or a Software As a Service (SaaS) model, browser based interfaces, access from mobile devices and ease of use that matches consumer applications like Google, Twitter and Facebook. Consumerization involves the design and implementation of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policies where employees use their own devices to access enterprise applications and data. What happens to the enterprise data that may be stored on them,  if they lose this device or it gets stolen? What happens when this employee leaves the company? How do you make sure that the company data or the applications are no longer accessible?

The When

In many developed countries, smartphones and tablet computer penetration are near saturation already with many individuals and households having many of these devices, each. In India, the annual penetration and total market saturation may be lesser but it is only a matter of time. Even in India,  at the C-Suite level usage of these devices may be pretty much near saturation. So it’s not a question of if, but only a matter of when. This is especially important to enterprise start-ups that will face all of these issues by the time they have their products ready and achieve market fit.

The Who

Consumerization involves a host of policy and technology issues. Not all of them could be resolved only with the software product maker or the IT department. Access to applications and data may be policy issues to be determined by management and implemented by the IT security folks within the company. Software designers may need to address the ease of use issues that bring the enterprise applications closer in user experience to popular consumer applications like Google, Twitter and facebook.

The How

Consumerization involves making the user interface of the enterprise application on mobile devices, easy-to-use like those of consumer applications, native or HTML5 based. Bring Your Own Device policy implementation may involve the use of Mobile Device Management (MDM)  software which allows organizations to register and allow only authorized devices to access enterprise applications. In case employees need to be allowed access only to certain applications and not to others selectively, Mobile Application Management (MAM) software may need to be used. Chris Swan presents these issues in a very organized and understandable fashion in a video here and a presentation here, in case someone wants to dive deeper into the technology issues.

Consumerization of the Enterprise is about managing the expectations of the users of enterprise applications properly; answering questions such as – why can’t I use my smartphone or tablet to access the company’s application? Why shouldn’t their interfaces be as easy-to-use as my Gmail, Twitter or facebook? The technology and the design approaches for making this happen are already there. It’s only through careful analysis and addressing of issues that these objectives can be met, while at the same time balancing other issues such as security of data and applications!

Water cooler chatter 15 years ago used to be about what happened on Seinfeld. Now it’s ‘Look at what I’m doing on the enterprise network with my mobile device. – Bob Egan, vice president of mobile strategy at Mobiquity

Posted on

India has the potential to create great product companies. The ecosystem is evolving and we are glad to be part of it

Anup Tapadia, CEO, TouchMagix, has revolutionized interactive systems with his innovation. Driven by an aspiration to innovate and deliver great experiences in gesture based interactive display systems, his products have reached numerous brands and consumers since the company’s inception a few years back.


His work has earned him recognition from the likes of Bill Gates, Dr. Abdul Kalam, Dr. Raghunath Mashelkar, R. Balki and Azim Premji who have acknowledged his sheer intelligence and tech driven entrepreneurial spirit. The British Government awarded him the “Global Young Creative Entrepreneur” honor in 2010.  In an interview with ProductNation, Tapadia talks about his aspirations in making India an innovation hub and to develop world-class products.

You offer a variety of interactive display solutions. What is the market potential for these products?

At TouchMagix, we are focused on creating next generation interactivity and engagement technology and have created products that use motion, gesture and touch for various applications. We manufacture and supply both technology and equipment that have been creating global standards for giving audiences a lasting impact and brand impressions. TouchMagix has a variety of interactive display products like Interactive Floor, Interactive Wall, Multi-Touch MagixKiosk & Table, MagixFone and rich capabilities to build customized solutions and content.

Customization of content is an aspect which increases the market potential of these products manifold. These applications range from creating engagement and experiences for brands, creating an interactive ambience in hotels and lounges, to marketing initiatives at on-ground activities. This technology is also being used for children entertainment, education and health. Being unique in nature, it enables brands to create conversations with their consumers, thus enabling them to become one with the brand. Over the years, we have penetrated globally across a variety of sectors including real estate, banking and financial sector, education, information technology, pharmaceuticals, healthcare, and hospitality sectors.

Is the market willing to bet on new products?

Today, Indian and global brands are looking at innovative avenues and channels to communicate with their target audience be it customers or internal audience. With brand fatigue becoming a cause of concern for brand managers, interactive products like TouchMagix is an ideal solution. The real USP of our product is in the usability, open SDK interfaces and core tracking technology IP which allows us to track gesture/touch at a higher accuracy level and speed.

How soon was /will be your company feasible in terms of generating revenue? What are your sales projections?

We have been profitable since the first year we started business. More than a million people have engaged/experienced TouchMagix products world wide and the number is growing continually.

Indian IT industry has largely been IT services focused. What has been your experience in building products? What were the challenges faced?

We firmly believe that India has the potential to create great product companies. Our experience in building products based out of India has been quite interesting. Building electronic products is not an easy task in India as it is capital intensive and expensive. A major challenge was to find the right people and retain them for R&D based jobs. The ecosystem is evolving and we are glad to be part of it.

Do you feel the Indian ecosystem is software-product friendly? What is needed to create world-class products?

The eco-system is still evolving and education needs to promote research driven product innovations. Most of us prefer the safer route and hence many end up in starting service based companies.

For a young 24-year old guy to have been honored with the ‘International Young Interactive Entrepreneur Award 2010’ by British Council, and ‘Best Young Entrepreneur Award’ by a business magazine, says a lot about your achievements.

I was drawn to computers when I was just seven. In the subsequent five years I mastered over 15 different computer programming languages. Art and Technology have always intrigued me. When I saw Tom Cruise playing around with large displays in Minority Report, it triggered a series of thoughts in my mind on the possibilities of this kind of technology if brought to reality. This led to launching of TechnoKarma Labs. At TechnoKarma, we undertook many projects in the IT networking space such as creating low-cost firewalls and a low cost wireless mesh router, which enabled Wi-Fi connectivity in IIT Pune’s campus. One of the projects from TechnoKarma Labs was later spun off as TouchMagix.

My passion and perseverance to create a truly Indian product for global markets was the reason for my success.

You have also received appreciation from the likes of Dr. APJ Kalam, Bill Gates, Azim Premji and others. How does it feel to be acknowledged by these eminent people?

It is overwhelming when stalwarts from the industry appreciate your efforts. These endearing comments reinforced my confidence and also encouraged me to keep moving on the path of innovation.

What is the road ahead like for TouchMagix? Where do you see the company going?

While multi-touch technology revolutionized the way we currently perceive and engage with technology, gestures and motion will make user-interface even more immersive and instinctive. The potential of this technology is great today, and we are seeing that with the response for our products globally.

From keyboard and mouse to touch and gesture, the human interaction with devices have evolved in a big way to help people interact in a manner that is appropriate for their lives. In future, we aim to create products and content that would make human interaction with devices more intuitive and enable us to create memorable experiences.

What learning would you like to share with others from what you have learnt?

For emerging entrepreneurs I would suggest it’s essential for one to work at one large corporation and one small start-up to experience and understand the functioning of both setups. I feel India is a land of great opportunities and there is never a better time than now to kick-start new business in a growing economy.

TouchMagix Products

  • MotionMagix™) converts any floor/wall into an interactive space for educating and engaging users with fun, action and excitement.
  • MagixTable™ is world’s thinnest 40 point multi-touch plug-n-play surface computer table loaded with rich application suite and easy customization for corporate and entertainment application.
  • MagixKiosk™ 32″ 1080p HD can be used in 4 different form factors like table, tilted kiosk/workstation, high bar table, or as a standing flat display.
  • MagixFone™ is Any Display Any Phone interactive technology which gives your audience the ability to control the screen for playing games, answering quizzes, sending social messages and much more using their mobile phone.
  • MagixFone™ hardware picks-up the call or interprets an SMS which allows the user to use his/her mobiles keypad or voice to interact with the display.
Posted on

The importance of organisation architecture

We are used to talking a lot about Organisation Structure in prevailing literature. I believe Organisation Architecture is more fundamental and instrumental in taking the company to the distances they desire. Organisation Structure, to me, is a subset or a component of the Organisation Architecture.

So what do I think of as the Organisation Architecture?

The Organisation Architecture is one that encapsulates the vision of the company, the direction in which the leadership of the company wants to proceed, and the culture that they want to inculcate such that they would get there.

One of the companies I have known said it thus, “We want to go from 4 big ships to a 1000 speed boats (each being a point product from the platform products they were known for), achieved through the means of small, self-contained teams that identified market opportunities, built and shipped the products, and generated business from those”.

While this may read as yet another vision/mission statement, what was implicit in this statement was that they laid out the direction and way of how they will execute it. In essence, it was an architecture on top of which you could have specific manifestations of “applications” that would work harmoniously by themselves and among themselves.

Such an organisation’s architecture gives great latitude for the leadership team to execute on specific initiatives as they identify market opportunities. It gives the company agility to tackle opportune situations and be ready to capitalise on serendipity.

When you look around, every company starts off wanting to be “something”, pivots along the way, and ends up striking pay dirt in another application, then scales or lets go of the opportunity. At all these inflection points, the company needs a fabric of people and mindset that supports a new direction or a change in direction. The organisation architecture enables one to do that.

What do you think?

Posted on

Insights from the Sales Playbook RoundTable Led by Ambarish, Knowlarity in Gurgaon

The second Sales Playbook RoundTable in Delhi-NCR was held at EKO office in Gurgaon, led by Ambarish Gupta– CEO/Founder, Knowlarity Communications. About 10 companies attended the meet such as EKO, Easework, Busy, Yippster, Conixevus and few more. The format was quite engaging and action oriented as participants were asked to come with their own set of sales challenges for the RT. The session started with a brief introduction and the specific challenges participants were facing.  There was a good degree of overlap among sales challenges of different organizations. The common theme emerging out of the challenges can be divided into three categories – Profit margin, Velocity of Sales & Scaling up. I’m listing down few of the actionable learning discussed

Improving Profit margin:- 

There was unanimous agreement over the core purpose of business among participants i.e to make profit which is a very elementary mathematical equation i.e difference between revenue from a unit customer & cost of serving a unit customer. Even if somebody is making revenue, he may choose to leave a particular customer if cost of serving customer is more than revenue. Exceptions are always there if the unprofitable customer is a source of bringing other profitable customers. Organizations should have real time view of profitability of different customer segments and may focus on segments with maximum profitability. While formulating any pricing strategy, the above mentioned formula should be kept in mind.

  1. The most important point in improving profitability is to understand the sustainable value coming out from the different customer segments & know associated risks. For example- startups as a major customer base are not good for companies because most of them die in a year so average cost of acquisition & serving is always going to be more than the average revenue for these customers. Similarly, up gradation to the existing customer may enhance profit margin significantly.
  2. Ask the customers to pay for the product you are providing, you will be getting right kind of feedback about product & business model, if majority is not willing to pay, it’s a red flag and one may need to modify the business model & product
  3. The pricing model should be taking care of mind set of customers so if the target customers are not in a position to shell out big amount of money, the pay as you go model may be applied with known risk that churning of customers is going to be high risk for the company.
  4. Payment term is also quite important, For example – Even in SaaS model once can ask for yearly payment rather than collecting on monthly basis. It has got several advantages-a) Advance cash flow b) reduced tension & effort of collecting money c) you have got a time in which you can make customers use the product and take benefit out of product.
  5. Make customers’ use the product so that they can feel the business benefit. A happy customer’s life time value is quite high for the company. The companies need to make as many happy customers as possible as a brand ambassador so after getting word of mouth publicity /referrals the cost of acquiring customers reduces significantly resulting in better profit margin for the company in long run.

Enhancing Velocity of Sales:-

A lot of participants expressed their concern about increased sales cycle and discussed the ways to reduce the cycle time & find a right process for reaching out to prospects.

  1. Network is very important in finding first few customers; it was observed that most of the companies got first few clients from personal network which resulted in an early traction for products.  So build a network of mutually beneficial relationship much before you try to reap the benefits.
  2. For reducing the time cycle, team should focus on finding the person in the target companies who is feeling the maximum pain for the problems you are going to solve and identify the decision maker such as CEO/CMO.
  3. For finding the relevant personal details such as mobile no. /email id internal to an organization, various tactics may be employed such as finding details from LinkedIn & Naukri profile, calling the board member as a journalist for interview etc.
  4. It is always advisable for going through a referral route if available so that the prospects would be in a frame of mind to hear. Moreover, while interacting on phone for the first time, you have just first 30 seconds to impress, be precise to what you are going to deliver in terms of benefits not about details of products. You will be getting enough time and a meeting with all the key executives if you can hold call for first 30 seconds.  The benefits should be clearly leading to either increasing the revenue or reducing the cost in direct or indirect ways such as, “I will help you in making additional money from existing customers” or “I will reduce the cost of serving to your existing customers”.
  5. If your product is new in market, one needs to identify the early adopters who are willing to take chances for launching the product with assessment of the probable competition, barrier to entry, market potential & preferred business/ revenue model in different markets.
  6. If the product is a replacement of the existing product then value from the replacement product should be of at least 10x more value than that of the existing product. The product companies need to understand & answer the key questions- why people should be replacing existing system/products? The mindset of a customer is always going to maximize the value per unit cost. One needs to find a solution of this puzzle for individual prospects before reaching them so one needs to concentrate on understanding the pain points with existing product and how to help prospects with those pain points while still providing the others as usual benefits to the customers.
  7. Both tangible and intangible value should be taken into consideration while evaluating overall value to the customer. One needs to be very careful if you are changing the path of doing business as usual for the prospects as there would be a degree of difficulty in doing something new for the customers. This is going to create negative value to the prospects.
  8. Keep customers / prospects engaged in a personalized way such as sending some information that may or may not be relevant to the product but may help prospect. Always keep a updated social profiling of the prospects from Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn and find an excuse to follow up such as Congratulations for getting award etc. One need to understand that we are dealing with human beings not machines so clubbing of trust and emotions is extremely important to reduce sales cycle.
  9. The first point of interaction with customer is what you are going to provide. Talk to the customers in a language they can understand rather than focusing on product and features, it comes later in answering to the question how you are going to provide. For example- Our product will reduce the serving cost per customer in call center from 50 paisa to 10 paisa or our product is going to help in your business conversion by x% that is going to increase your revenue by y%.
  10. Even from the same target customer segment, different prospects are at the different stage of the sales cycle so marketing pitch should be in line with different stages in a sales cycle i.e Awareness – attract – Engage- Convert – Happy customer – Referral / word of mouth – new customers and so on.

Scaling up:-

  1. Product companies should connect to prospects to understand the pain points of the customers rather than building a perfect product with no market requirements. They should start talking with customers even if the product is not ready to receive valuable feedback.
  2. Time to make entry in the market is quite important as  it decides the opportunity windows of a company to tap maximum benefits in minimum time & effort
  3. The system & processes during the early stage of startup should be highly flexible. After a certain period the same flexible system should be converted into process driven system to run the show. Therefore, one should evaluate & understand the system / processes / resource that are needed to drive the expected sales after scaling up & manage the changes from the existing level to the future level smoothly.
  4. One needs to find the sales model that is highly effective and scalable after market test and multiple iterations. Once you have found the right kind of value proposition and target set of customers for that value proposition with effective sales channels, you can scale up same model exponentially.
  5. The choice of domestic vs. international market is quite tricky. In developing market competition is less, quality expectation is less, market potential is high but customers are not willing to pay so ticket size is small. One of the biggest obstacles is the mind-set of customers in developing market. However in developed market ticket size is high, less hurdles with mind-set but competition is intense with very high expectations on front of quality. So considering these two facts one can take domestic market as a test market for testing and enhancing the product. Once it reaches the level of international standard, one can make international markets as the primary source of revenue. Jumping to international market without having a tested product may block all the future chances in that market forever.
  6. The selection of appropriate sales channel may be explored after trying established model such as telesales, channel, face to face & enterprise sales. Only after market testing, one can determine the right way to get more profitable customer at lower costs.
  7. The product companies need to create a sustainable source of inbound leads rather than outbound leads to improve efficiency of the sales system. Sales people should not be engage with every potential customer, they should be getting filtered list of potential customer for engaging & converting
  8. Another basic question is how customers are going to discover you? One needs to see the whole picture from the lens of customers for scaling up. Depending upon the computer literacy of the targeted customer offline or online or combination of marketing tactics may be deployed. For example- if customers are searching heavily over internet for the keywords associated with the products- Google organic and paid search could be good idea to hook the prospects. However if the search volume is less then display tactics may be needed to create the awareness among targets & later for hooking.
  9. The product companies need to understand the mindset of channel partners and dynamics that is happening in the channel partner industry. As profitability is going down, existing good partners may be looking out for new streams of revenue. So, they would be happy to work on a more profitable venture for taking a new product to the market. Apart from that capability, influence into target market and willingness to sell must be evaluated for potential partners.
  10. The big channel partner may not be a good partner unless the new product can create immediate good streams of revenue for them, so small partners would a preferred set of partners because they would be devoting dedicated time even for small revenue however the impact on company’s revenue per partner would be limited so number of such working partners come into picture for getting maximum revenue in a given time.

These insights were the result of the sales round table meet. The round table meet ends with a promise of meeting again for discussing and sharing experience again in coming month. Thanks to  iSPIRT ProductNation in being instrumental for building core competence in product organizations.

Guest Post by Manoj Kumar, a volunteer for ProductNation

Posted on

ParaBlu: Store, Sync, Share, Stream, Search

ProductNation interviewed Kameswaran Subramanian, Founder of ParaBlu Systems, which focuses on helping its customers take their business to the cloud. ParaBlu offers cloud storage solution with emphasis on privacy and control.

Learn more about how Kamesh and his team built a world-class product from India.

What was the motivation to start ParaBlu?

I love bringing new products to market. I have been doing that for over a decade now with other MNC’s and startups. ParaBlu is my second startup. I was technical partner of another Switzerland based startup where we developed products for Swiss Banks. The fundamental premise of starting ParaBlu is to start a global company from India.

Digital Privacy and Security is of paramount importance.  I have tons of data and tried using many major offerings. But if you dig deep enough, we can realize that all of them have poor-to-none full user privacy. The recent revelation about NSA/Prism is only the tip of the iceberg. We wanted to provide a solution that can be used by enterprises in a manner they deem fit.

How did you zero in on offering Storage as a service to your customers?

The original idea was to provide a simple mechanism for people to seamlessly synchronize data (photos, videos, digital files, folders etc.) across all devices for an individual or family. We were developing the product for consumer market and lot of emphasis has been given on user design and simplicity of usage. We wanted to bring the cloud-storage into individual’s home. Towards end of last year, we saw an opportunity in the enterprise market. After piloting the product with businesses, we quickly realized that there is a market-fit and moved into SaaS model. We are now offering multiple variants of our products. 

What is so unique and differentiated in your offering compared to others in the same space?

People think about Google Drive, Microsoft Sky Drive, Apple iCloud or Dropbox when we talk about Cloud Storage. They are public cloud storage and we are fundamentally different from them. For example, if you put a document in Google Drive, Google can read, create derivative works, publicly display and distribute the content. These are not entirely apt for businesses.

We offer private cloud storage to our customers with clear understanding that they own the data. ParaBlu offerings bring you the all familiar cloud storage, sync, share, stream and collaboration facilities with privacy and control that ensures that none of your files, media and assets are lost.

From technology perspective, we have had tons of breakthroughs and some key differentiators are mini-clouds (Cloud within a cloud), content search, end-to-end encryption, etc. We are also coming out with a plug-and-play hardware offering.

Key differentiators, which our customers love, are not from technology 🙂 They love our extremely dedicated-customer support, simple and intuitive design, installation within 60 seconds, lowest total-cost-of-ownership in our space and ability to use a technology product without having to even have an IT admin. The most liked feature for an SME about our offerings is the ability for the management to see the entire company information (Engineering, Planning, Production, Sales, Marketing, etc.) with detailed auditing in a single place from anywhere in the globe.

Can you throw light on the interactions with your initial customers? What have you learnt from them?

A Lot! We spent a lot of time with our customers understanding how their business works. We spoke to 100+ SME’s during our pilot stage. Many of our features were driven by market. We use LEAF – Listen to our customers, Evaluate the idea with other customers, Analyze the results and then convert them into a product Feature.

For Indian businesses, technology is a means of achieving their business productivity.  Their major questions are about how the product increases productivity, impact on bottom line and ROI. If a product genuinely solves their pain point, then they are ready to accept an IT solution. There is a dearth of high-quality cost-effective solutions for the SME sector in India. That is both a market opportunity and a saddening fact that mainly “service” and “outsourced” companies crowd Indian technology space.

Some examples of our learning:

  • Many SME’s operate on low bandwidth Internet connection and we had to go-back and optimize data-transfer and network usage for them.
  • Businesses don’t care if we use 128-bit or 256-bit encryption. They trust us to take care of their digital security. There is a huge onus on us!
  • Customer support is extremely important. It doesn’t matter what your contract or SLA says – they need to speak to someone who can answer their questions, anytime of the day.
  • What is obvious to engineers need not be obvious to users. Understanding customers’ psyche and working pattern is important. We ran usability sessions to make our product features easier to use.
  • Customers found use cases for our product. We would have never thought about it!

Indian SME customers are known to be averse to embracing cloud-based solutions. They also harbor doubts about security of any offering, which is outside their organization. How have you dealt with these perceptions? 

It is true that a large section of this segment is currently skeptical about working with something that is outside their physical organizational boundaries. However, I see that there is a rapid reversal of this tendency. This has primarily been due to the adoption of cloud by some early movers in the same clusters. As the fence sitting potential customer listens and understands the value and the precautions taken to safeguard the privacy and security of their data through another colleague who has embraced our solution – the acceptance levels increase.

Our offering actually provides more security to business – since its architecture was built keeping the retail consumers in mind. When you think of devising a solution that any end user could use, naturally you would place more emphasis on the access privileges, backup options, and data storage and synchronization aspects.   Most of our customers are via referrals from other customers and it has become easier. For extremely paranoid customers or where there are specific requirements, we also offer on-premise installation of our server.

How helpful has the channels route been to work with your customers?

Working with channel partners is a new experience. If you can ensure that entry barriers to use your offering are minimal – such that value can be shown in minutes, and if the post deployment maintenance is negligible – both these factors form a very compelling value proposition for any channel partner to sell your offering.  

We are also looking for new channel partners for expanding our product reach.

I notice that you have leading industry veterans as your mentors. Can you describe how having them on board has benefited you?

They have been of invaluable source of strength, inspiration and support. Nagendra Satyan has tremendous experience in growing enterprises and has done it successfully across many companies including EMC2 India. Anand Prahlad is currently MD of McAfee India and has experience of taking a startup to an IPO in US. Startup is like a maze and it is very helpful to have people who have done it before. It is necessary to bounce ideas off somebody. They have played a crucial part in multiple aspects – from refining the product, helping in acquiring pilot customers, industry connect, and so on.

I would recommend that all budding entrepreneurs, specially the first time entrepreneurs to have experienced mentors on board.

What are the three takeaways that you would provide for your fellow product entrepreneurs operating out of India? 

First, get your family’s buy-in prior to venturing into product development space, especially when you operate out of India.  Running a startup is like having a kid. There are no off-days or even off-hours. Everything else will take a back seat. Startups are not easy and are NOT for everyone.

Be very passionate about the idea. Startups do not succeed over-night. There will be too many distractions that will come your way and there will be times where it will be easier to give up and get back to work with an MNC. It takes passion to keep going.

Finally, like I stated earlier, get advisors and mentors early on. They will act as a rudder to your ship and will help you navigate the ship in case you land in chopping waters.

Posted on

Building a Customer Focused Technology Business

Building a successful technology business requires an organization to have a clear strategy that connects several dots. From Market Place Relationships, Technology and Product Capabilities, Empathizing and Understanding Client Needs and Building Successful Business Models that create win-win-win relationships.

Strategizing in a dynamic ever changing market place requires several sub-strategies working with each other. These sub-strategies are united in their orientation by a strong team that delivers value and ROI to customers and fundamentally use that value to drive the strategy train to create a superior business organization.

These sub-strategies can be powered by groups within a single business unit or groups working across multiple business units. In fact, it is entirely possible that different process teams may work together simultaneously powering market place strategies focused on different markets and solutions.

To a client looking at the organization, what is visible is a perfectly choreographed interaction with a relationship manager that offers a compelling business and technology stack that comprises of a well defined problem space, a compelling well positioned solution based on a product and technology platform that delivers value at each level of the stack.

The business itself is organized into technology, product and solution groups simultaneously working on multiple business opportunities through carefully orchestrated business processes.

Such a customer focused organization delivers the rich feeling of a customized solution with the efficiency of a generalized product.

You can build a customer focused organization and yet win in the competitive market place through a generalized delivery platform. Here are some useful guidelines to follow:

  1. Clearly define the market places in terms of problem space, competition and your own solution position. Make a list !
  2. Have a dedicated business development manager well versed with at least 1, possible more of the solutions located close to the market
  3. Put a solid workflow management process in place to receive problem statements and create solution proposals driven by the business development manager acting in concert with the customer
  4. Build agile solution teams that build customized solutions quickly from verticalized solution platforms
  5. Build strong technology and product groups that work with solution teams and ship frequent product releases every 6-8 weeks
  6. Build a powerful support group with a mature director that can provide strong pre and post-sales support
  7. Invest in R&D, raise R&D funding and look out for collaboration opportunities.
  8. Build a strong and disciplined inside sales force

That for you is a text book approach for building successful technology companies.

About The Author(s):

Prasad Bulusu is a CFO at Sankhya Technologies Private Limited. He is a blogger and offers consulting services to hi-tech organizations. He also mentors startups. You may reach him at [email protected]

Gopi Kumar Bulusu is the CEO and Chief Technologist at Sankhya Technologies Private Limited. He may be reached at [email protected]

Posted on

How does an Ecosystem need to help itself? The Zensar way of doing it!!

As part of the iSPIRT ProductNation initiative, we work together helping product startups to connect to the enterprises to find, build and utilize the synergies and in the process helping the product startups as well as the enterprises have a inclusive growth. As part of this initiative we are very proud to bring in such a TechShowcase organized by Zensar Technologies from Pune.

When we approached Ganesh Natarajan of Zensar, he was more than happy to make this happen. Later we worked with many other heads at Zensar and we were astonished really at their eagerness and the hurriedness and for a second we were confused at the speed of execution. We have so far never seen this sense of urgency from a large enterprise. Anyways we got around 73 applications for this coveted TechShowcase and Zensar as promised chose the top 10, which makes a lot of synergy for their offerings and for their customers.


Last Saturday (Sept 8 2013) they flew us all the ten companies to Pune and the startups had to do a double presentation – one in front of the executive council and the other in front of the tech council. To be frank we were amazed at the preparations at Zensar with the kind of welcome we got, the setup, the welcome boards, the executive & the technology council being ready and on time considering it was a Saturday and it was a long weekend, and of course the goodies we got. Just amazing!! I think if Zensar is anything to go by the discipline and sense of urgency and the diligence they showed they have a great future for sure!!

Thank You ZENSAR – we appreciate all your efforts and your hospitality – from iSPIRT as well as all the participating companies.

Here is the list of 10 companies that Demo’d @ Zensar (& in the order they presented)

    1. Germin8 – Mumbai based company, which works on big data analytics on social media mainly that is text based. They started in 2007 and they mainly target Marketing and Corporate Communications team in an organization.

 

  • TriggerO – Delhi based; working mainly in the Rewards & Recognition space and employee engagement via Social. Their tag line is “Recognition is Social”. They provide smart analytics about employee engagement as well as ROI.

 

 

  • GoDB – Chennai based; started on 1999; Creates vertical focused mobile apps, which come with scalability and security, and is based of their platform and their main focus is on FMCG, BFSI and Retail verticals.

 

 

  • Kreeo – Bangalore based; Started in 2007; Helps share knowledge within an enterprise like what you do in the social outside. They call it a Collective intelligence and a unification platform for enterprises.

 

 

  • Seclore – Mumbai based; Started in 2007; they work in the space of information security policy based. Their tag line is security not at the cost of collaboration.

 

 

  • i7 Networks – Bangalore based; Started in June 2012; they work on the space of BYOD security; Their sweet spot is 100% Agentless device discovery, fingerprinting and health-check and then denying infected/malicious devices from connecting to corporate network.

 

 

  • Teritree – Bangalore based; Provides social commerce platform

 

 

  • Knowledge Foundry – Bangalore based; Advanced segmentation and profiling to target Ads and helps run smart campaigns and helps ecommerce with tools with Amazon-like recommendations.

 

 

  • Vondasoft – Mumbai and Bangalore based; Scans multiple social media for your relevant brand, filters data based on many attributes and provides the true social image metrics for your brand.

 

 

  • MeshLabs – Bangalore based firm; has a text analytics platform. Listens to all stake holders and unlocks the hidden value via text analytics.

 

As next steps, Zensar will shortlist those companies that they and their customers will find value to take them to their customers. We are sure this will be a huge value to the selected startups and ofcourse for the whole ecosystem. Can we have some more bigger companies doing the Zensar way?

We would like to thank Kumar Gaurav, Vice President at Zensar to lead this initiative with the support of Ajay Bhandari, Chief Corporate Development Officer, Sanjay Marathe – Head, Strategic Services Unit and CTO, Krishna Ramaswami – Senior Vice President, Healthcare Vertical & Global Infrastructure Management Business, Lavanya Jayaram – Head – Marketing and Sales Enablement & Vivek R Sarnobat – Marketing, for their support.

We also feel that these kind of events can be a huge boost to the whole ecosystem as well as a win-win proposition for both service comapnies which now can innovate and provide services that make a difference to their customer while the product companies can benefit hugely as their biggest problem today is not the product development itself but taking them to market. These kind of partnerships and differentiated solutions will help both and in the end help customers to get better, innovative and faster solutions.

Posted on

Why we won’t have a Steve Jobs from India

Two copies of Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs have been on my bookshelf for close to two years now, but the size of the book deterred me from starting to read it. I didn’t think I was ready to read 570 pages about the enfant terrible, particularly after I heard that the book had several instances of his petulant and downright bad behavior. So, I must thank my colleague and friend Sourav Mukherji for giving me the impetus to start reading it. And, I was not disappointed. In fact, I spent two whole days immersed in the book, literally gobbling every word in print (yes, I still read books the old-fashioned way!).

As I was reading, one question kept popping up in my mind – could we have a Steve Jobs from India? The immediate trigger came from a recent interview in Mint with legendary tech investor, Vinod Khosla, in which he said that the environment for entrepreneurship in India is improving, and we could see a Facebook or Google in the years ahead. I have asked similar questions earlier, most prominently in one of my columns in Outlook Business.

What made Steve Jobs “Steve Jobs”?

I guess I don’t need to list Steve Jobs’ accomplishments here (Isaacson lists eleven instances where Steve’s products transformed industries! – see below).

So, let’s jump forward and take a look at the man himself.

Steve had some distinctive characteristics: A keen sense of aesthetics; an eye for detail; an intuitive understanding of what makes for an outstanding user experience; a belief in simplicity and minimalism; an obsession with getting things right, even if that took more time and considerably more resources; a very strong and highly polarized opinion about anything coupled with the ability to change his opinion if convinced; strong self-belief; showmanship; ability to communicate and connect with an audience; the ability to “distort reality,” to make people think they could do “impossible” things in crazily ambitious timeframes; the perspective to combine art and technology to create well designed, high technology products for (a relatively affluent?) mass market.

Where did these attributes and skills come from? Was Jobs simply born with them, or did he develop these along the way? And, what external influences played a role in this process?

The Source of Steve Jobs’ Genius

Isaacson’s book offers some clues:

Steve Jobs’ (adopted) father Paul Jobs re-conditioned old cars and then sold them. He had a workshop at home where he spent hours in various mechanical activities. Paul also built anything needed for their home, from cupboards to a fence, himself. Steve learnt the importance of craftsmanship and focusing on the details from Paul. Steve’s obsession that whatever is invisible to the customer should be as perfectly designed and executed as what is visible had its origins in Paul Jobs’ attitude towards his own work.

Steve’s practical bent was helped by his early exposure to Heathkits (“do-it-yourself” kits for electronic products and amateur radios), membership of the HP Explorers’ Club, and an electronics class at school where students were encouraged to tinker around with a variety of electronics components. An area in which Steve exercised his ingenuity was in playing pranks on fellow students and teachers, leading to several punishments by his school. Jobs’ first “business” came from trying to “fool” the telephone system into making long-distance calls for free by simulating the tones that routed signals on the phone network, and then selling the box that allowed him to do this. (The box itself was designed by Steve’s friend and Apple co-founder, Stephen Wozniak, as were many other gadgets including the Apple II computer).

Steve had a spiritual side to him from an early age. This appears to have been partly driven by his endeavor to come to terms with his biological parents giving him up for adoption, and partly was a function of the times – Steve was a teenager in the late 1960s, a time of great political and social ferment in the US. This was the time of the anti-Vietnam protests, an interest in Indian spirituality and culture. This is when Ravi Shankar became famous, and the Beatles embraced Mahesh Yogi!. Steve spent several months in India connecting with different spiritual leaders, and this was the start of a lifetime interest in Zen Buddhism. His belief in simplicity and minimalism, and his ability to maintain a laser-like focus on a few priorities had strong links to this interest.

Isaacson quotes Jobs as saying, “I began to realize that an intuitive understanding and consciousness was more significant than abstract thinking and intellectual logical analysis” (p. 35).

Steve dropped out of college after a year because he didn’t like the regular routine and the mix of subjects he had to study. But the college allowed him to continue to attend courses of his interest for some time. It was during his stay at Reed College that he developed his lifelong interest in calligraphy (which played a big role in the graphics capabilities of the Macintosh), and took basic courses in design.

Why India won’t have a Steve Jobs

Very few of us in India do things with our hands. “Brahminical” India consistently ranks the brain and intellect over the hands and creative skills. So much so that even people from traditional craft backgrounds want to flee to white collar vocations. How many of us grow up with a workshop in our homes? No Paul Jobs-like inspiration is likely in our immediate environs…

Most Indian families would shudder at the kind of unstructured experiences that a young Steve Jobs had. Hanging around in another country for months in the quest of a spiritual experience? I can’t imagine anyone I know allowing their children to do that. And this is not a financial issue. So many of my friends and acquaintances are spending upwards of $200,000 educating their children in the US or UK. But they would go apoplectic if their children were to take a “break year,” let alone get an unstructured experience of the Steve Jobs type.

I was recently chatting with the fellows at Ashoka University’s Young India Fellowship (YIF)  Programme, an exciting postgraduate, liberal arts / critical thinking-oriented education initiative created by my good friend Pramath Raj Sinha. I was surprised to learn from many of them that they had a tough job convincing their parents that YIF was a worthwhile investment of their time! Recently, one of my acquaintances, a senior manager in a leading multinational decided to cycle from Bangalore to Hubli – by his own account,  his mother and brother made a considerable effort to dissuade him from doing any such thing. I am sure everyone has heard similar stories or faced related experiences…

Our whole system pushes people towards conformism. A good friend, HR head of a leading multinational, proudly told me over dinner recently that HR is good at getting people “in line.” And snuffing out enterprise in the process?

Are things changing? I was enthused to read about Akhil Mohan, a young student, who has become a passionate advocate of conservation after an interactive trip with the Bishnoi tribe in Rajasthan. But, how many of our young students get exposed to such experiences?

Conclusion

Of course, Steve Jobs’ success was not due to his individual genius alone. He grew up in the right place at the right time – Silicon Valley in the late 1970s was the centre of the personal computer revolution. As Amar Bhide pointed out so eloquently in The Venturesome Economy, customers in the US have shown a proclivity to try out products from unknown entrepreneurs that is perhaps unmatched elsewhere.  The US is certainly a more conducive place to do business than India – in Isaacson’s book, you won’t come across a single one of the typical constraints that a company in India faces. Steve’s colleagues and employees at Apple, Next and Pixar seem to have put up with a lot of his bad behavior, and I am amazed that in a country as litigious as the US, he got away with all this without a significant lawsuit against him

But it seems clear to me that as long as we cloister and mollycoddle our youngsters, and prevent them from having a wider range of influences and experiences, our chances of ever producing a Steve Jobs from India are very dim indeed.