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Indian Entrepreneurs & The Happy Confused Stage

Last week, I met Sharad Sharma, an angel investor & the prime mover behind the iSPIRT, a think tank for software product startups. For those who have been into software products, he is a familiar face. We’ve met many times before but this time around, we talked about the dangers of mass entrepreneurship, which I’ll keep for a later post. That’s because I stumbled upon a more pressing issue, particularly painful to the Indian entrepreneur: The Happy Confused Phase. I’ll try and paraphrase some parts of the discussion here with a few additions of my own.

What is the happy confused phase?

The happy confused phase comes after the entrepreneur has discovered his customer and found a product market fit. Ideally, a startup would now be ready for the growth execution phase. But in India, the happy confused phase takes over. In mature markets, after finding the product market fit, an entrepreneur hires a team to execute. In India, you can hardly find the right talent (for various reasons). So then, it is up to the entrepreneur to train the existing team and the transition takes longer than you would imagine. This in-between phase, is called the happy confused phase.

Implications of this stage

“The execution team is hard to find in most cases and you end up retraining existing staff to do execution,” Sharad says. This is time consuming. Unless you cross this happy confused phase, most Indian VCs won’t fund you despite having found the product-market fit. Indian VC’s won’t come into a deal too early because they have their exits which is time bound in nature, to take care of. Running out of money is one of the many things that can go wrong in a startup.

Who can help?

Accelerators can help. But there is another problem here. Accelerators in India are time based. Which means, when they run out of time, they have to send the startup away. This is one reason why you would have started hearing of “accelerator horror stories.” After time runs out, many will promise you support but it is flaky at best.

A four month acceleration period is hardly enough in Indian conditions. There are exceptions to this. However, the general idea is that accelerators, especially the ones that take equity in the company, must be stage based.

Mentors can help. Mentors in the same industry as yours, who can help you with deals, are very valuable. They can also help you find talent and customers. However, as veteran Silicon Valley investor Vinod Khosla pointed out at his talk in Bangalore, “It can’t be people who are sideline cheerleaders who have never taken risks.”

Focused events like Uncafe or Playbook Round Tables by iSPIRT can also help. These events help speed up learning. Peers and people who have been in your shoes can help you learn faster. The important phrase here is “ experiential learning,” and not “startup event.”

Conclusion

The existence of the happy confused phase is not the only issue that Indian product entrepreneur has to deal with. With Indian startups, the discovery phase is longer than usual as well. An informed product entrepreneur who is aware of these issues can hack his way through these stages better than his uninformed peers.

If you’ve been in a similar situation and have found a clever way out, leave a comment or write a guest post for us.

Reblogged from NextBigWhat – Post Contributed by Jayadevan

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Next Gear into ProductNation Summit

The journey is unstoppable. India has started building software products that the world recognizes… a far cry from the days when it was known only for software programmers and not for software. Through its successful Playbook RoundTables and Community platform, iSPIRT’s ProductNation initiative has touched the lives of hundreds of product entrepreneurs across India.

ProductNation thrives on the strengths of our Volunteer community who are people just like you. This community is proud to announce the ProductNation Summit coming this December in 2013. We will soon be on twitter, just follow us @Product_Nation and the #PNSummit hashtag.

#PNSummit is selflessly hand-crafted by Product folks, a Summit attended exclusively by Product folks. A lot is going to be talked about Customer Discovery and Growth Hacking. #PNSummit has lean forward and lean back sessions and is practitioner led with over 70% of the sessions being interactive. These sessions are no holds barred. They are practical, frank and maybe even brutal. It will be a gurukul, where teacher and taught share the same platform, only the roles are reversed. Yet there is no sage on stage, only like minded peers.

If this sounds like just what you are missing, we’ll be delighted to send you an invite. Just let us know a little more about you, so we can ensure the other folks in the room are also passionate Product folks. Seats are extremely limited and there is a marginal Attendee fee. What gets you in is not the fee, but your passion, i.e., what you do.

Once you’ve been there, you can take back a lot more that what you learn in 2 days. Insights from great like minded people like you, a platform to share and learn for 4-6 months after the summit, and friendships for a lifetime. Seats are extremely limited and open only for the first 100 who get invited.

Your current situation is not important. If you have the mindset, Invites for the lucky 100 will not remain available for long. Gates close on 30th September.

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“We want to be the analytics app store to the world” – Mahesh Ramakrishnan, Founder, Nanobi Analytics

Mahesh Ramakrishnan, Founder and CEO of Nanobi Analytics shares his fascinating journey of how he, along-with five highly accomplished professionals are out to disrupt the analytics space by providing an analytics platform and applications for every business sector. Read on…

What was the key driver to the inception of Nanobi Analytics? 

Nanobi came to existence after a rigorous and intense thought process that spanned over eight months. A couple of factors sparked the thought. First, our background and corporate experience has been in delivering analytics to large companies for over two decades. Second, I spent 18 months working for the UID project that exposed me to the open source environment of working. I was fascinated by these concepts of working on technology, wherein simplicity, agility, speed and the mode of working with constant change formed the core tenets of operation.

As I reflected upon these experiences, it occurred to me that we could combine the good things from both the above and create a platform for analytics apps, which could benefit a large set of untapped customers.  We envisioned a platform that would host very small analytics (business intelligence) applications (hence the word ‘nano BI’) and is made available to customers on a pay per use basis. This led to the formal incorporation of Nanobi Analytics.

What type of customers do you see benefiting from your platform, and how is your offering different from traditional business intelligence solutions?

Traditional business analytics solutions in large enterprises are built for usage by highly skilled workforce and require regular maintenance. Secondly, these solutions are by design, not suited for agility. It takes months for a large bank or a manufacturing behemoth to drive a small change in its business review process.

Contrast this with the medium and small enterprises. These enterprises around the world do not have access to analytics solutions simply because the costs are prohibitive, and usually it is difficult for these enterprises to employ highly skilled personnel. However, this does not mean that small or medium enterprises do not need analytics. In fact, given the constant churn, volatility and agile nature of work, it becomes all the more important for these type of industries to take decisions based on data, to ensure that they make course corrections as business circumstances change. It is this segment of customers, who thus far have not been able to leverage the power of business analytics that we target.

We have developed this analytics platform, keeping the constraints of the small and medium enterprises in mind. From a market segmentation perspective, this is a completely untapped and complementary set of customers that we are targeting. The system is designed in such a way that it is usable by any business person, who does not need to have any IT training. In fact, we do not do any end user training for our customers who sign up for usage. Also, we have made these solutions affordable to their price points.

Your concept of providing an analytics appstore should be pretty appealing to other product companies as well. How can other companies make use of this platform?

We have built analytics applications that can easily be consumed or integrated with existing products or applications. Besides, the platform on which these are hosted is open. This allows any other product developer to simply use our platform or use any of the analytics capability from us. The product developer now can only focus on providing the core business function, and can aggregate the analytics capability to their products from us. So, this largely reduces work of other product vendors and enables them to go to market faster, or reduce the time of development. We have a variety of adapters to connect data from anywhere, so our platform and our APIs will be a great advantage to these folks. We even provide training to interested product vendors on getting the best out of our apps and our platform. 

How are you influencing the channels ecosystem to reach out to your target customers? What has been your experience working with them thus far? 

We have a very effective channel partnering mechanism that helps us connect with our customers. We work with different kind of channel partners – those who already are selling to small and medium enterprises, those who specialize in selling aggregated solutions to this target customer base, and some who help us purely by generating leads to potential customers. We have early successes in each of the above approach, validating our strategy on this front.

We also partner with other vendors for technology, digital marketing and allied activities. Given our previous experience, we have forged win-win relationships, which are bearing fruits as we gain momentum in the marketplace.

On a different note, I am curious to understand how the ‘founding five’ came together. You have a strong Board of directors as well as advisors. How much of all these is relevant in the initial years of your startup? 

Well, although all members of the founding team have worked in the same organization before, each brings in complementary skills that are essential to run a company. The common thread across all of us is that each one of us has worked in product development companies and has a very good understanding of the domain of analytics. All of us had to leave lucrative and successful corporate careers and indulge in building something new from the scratch. When the goal you are setting is very big, you need equally competent people to work with to bring it to reality. I have been extremely lucky to get a competent team such as this to start up.

As regards to the Board of directors, I feel that even for startups, you need at least one person outside the founding team who takes an independent view of all actions you take as a company. In our case, since the goals we are chasing are tall and ambitious, an experienced Board will help us bring back the focus on key activities to pursue, in case we digress.

We also have well respected individuals as our advisors. They help us in unique ways. We rely on them for advice on technology, managing the ecosystem and governance needs. Having their inputs largely benefits us – since it sets the fundamentals of all aspects of the company in place right from inception. Even though we are a startup, it is our belief that setting clear practices for each function will help us grow and scale faster.

Thank you for these insights. In closing, could you please share three tips that would be useful for fellow product entrepreneurs?

I would say that one should hit the market as soon as one can. Your product is never really ready with all the features at any point in time. So, analogous to the MVP theme, if you believe that you have some capabilities that a customer would be delighted to use; go ahead and test it out. Keep in mind that it is always the customers who make your products good. Lastly, during the early startup days, it is paramount that you act immediately on customer feedback. Initial customer feedback should be the prime source of your next steps. This will ensure that you sustain yourself in the marketplace while delighting your customer with your attention.

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iSPIRT ProductNation Branding RoundTable: Why Product Branding is important for Startups?

As usual, the 16th iSPIRT RoundTable was a great learning experience. Many thanks to Avinash Raghava & iSPIRT for conceptualizing it, and to Helion Ventures for sponsoring the venue and the snacks.

Dhruv Shenoy of Knowience Consulting, a well-known Marketing Guru, was the facilitator, along with Rajan from Intuit. Thanks, Dhruv and Rajan, for an educational and entertaining session.

I used to think that product branding is only for large companies and startups and early stage companies don’t need to worry about it.  So I was skeptical at first – but I trusted Avinash’s judgment in putting together this session.  And it was an eye-opener.  Dhruv explained to us what “brand” is and why it is important for products at any stage of maturity.  Building the product without doing an exercise in defining the brand can lead to lot of wasted time and money.

Branding consists of three high level activities “What to say”, “How to say” and “How do we reach the target customer”.  This round table focused on “What to say”. Future round tables will cover the other two high level activities.

Starting with the definition of “Brand”, we covered “Customer Insights”, “Product Proposition”, “Target Audience”, “The Six Tenets of Product Branding”, “Brand Essence” and “Brand Positioning Statement”.

After reading this article, give a shot at creating a Brand Positioning Statement for your product.  From my personal experience, I assure you that it is time well spent.

What is a brand?

We normally look at only commercial products, but the concept is broader.  Mother Teresa, Lord Ganesha, Santa Claus are also brands. So are Diwali and Valentines’ day.  Or even the concept of “Brand India”.

The three key attributes of a brand are:

  1. Most Unique (not overlapping with others).
  2. Most Relevant
  3. Large following

For example, among the 33 Crores of Hindu Gods, which God is known for removing obstacles and hence needs to be worshipped first?  Everyone knows it is Ganesha. Ganesha satisfies all the three conditions above.

Brand is how consumers identify the product and recall it. Brand is built over a period of time by the consumers/target audience.  The manufacturers can do brand building activities keeping the above three attributes in mind. Brand building takes time. For example, Gmail built it over several years to overtake Yahoo.

To be successful, the product should not be a commodity. It should be a brand. For example, rice is a commodity and is talked in terms of Rs. 43/kg or Rs 50/kg. But Kohinoor Basmati is a brand.   A brand kindles attributes about the product in the mind of the consumer.

Brand creates a promise. This needs to be delivered by the product. Otherwise, it will backfire badly.

So how do we go about creating a brand for our product?  The first step is to get customer insights.

Customer Insights 

It is very important to realize that there are thousands of things going on in the customer’s mind.  How do we get into the mind of the customer and grab mindshare?  Even if you have a great product, if the customer cannot identify and recall it, you have lost the customer.

To understand how to get the customer’s mindshare, we need to get customer insights. Customer insights are at a deeper level and not just at the level of product benefits/features.  These deeper insights should be used to differentiate your product and get the customer’s mindshare. 

Here are some examples of customer insights:

(Disclaimer: All the statements about different brands and products in this article are hypotheses made by RT participants as an exercise for better understanding.  They may not reflect reality)

  • SalesForce:  Before SalesForce, companies had to make large investments in Software and have it installed and maintained on premise. This was keeping SMEs away from expensive Software. They could not afford to make such investments to see value. Subscription based, on-cloud service appeals to this customer segment.  SalesForce targeted this customer insight.
  • Dove: As women get into early 30s, they have the insecurity that they are looking older.  Dove promises that they will look younger.
  • LinkedIn: Man is a social animal and wants to keep in touch with his contacts.  In the offline world, the mindshare of friends (whom you meet at home in a relaxed environment) is different from mindshare of professional contacts (whom you meet in a coffee shop with some agenda).  LinkedIn’s insight was that what you do offline (meeting people, networking etc), you can do online also in a separate way. Online life mirrors real life.
  • Instagram:  People want to look like professional photographers. People are taking photos from their mobiles and sharing, but the photos were not looking professional.  Instagram lets you do that from your mobile.
  • Scooty: Kinetic Honda is very heavy for young girls.  They need something lighter without gears.
  • Gmail: Other mail providers were limiting the max space. Gmail came up with 10GB space.

Focus on only one thing from the customer mindshare point of view.  Which part of the customer’s problem are we solving? Focus on the deeper benefit.  David Ogilvy said “Interrogate your product till it confesses its strengths”.  What can my product do that others can’t? Without this, your brand will not have recall value.

If we have multiple product lines, then we should have a main mother brand (e.g. Microsoft) and the sub brands for individual product lines (e.g. MS Office).

Study the market dynamics and focus on customer insights.

  1. Customer Insights should be the foundation of business planning.
  2. Remember that customer attitudes are never static.
  3. Customer insights are the key to building a discriminator.

How do we go about getting customer insights?

  1. Usage.  This is the best way – find out how the customer is using your product and take feedback.
  2. Observation.  For example:  shopping insights, product usage analytics, surveys, research.
  3. Probe. Ask open ended and close ended questions and analyze responses.

The best way to get consumer insights is to go back to the people who are using your product and find out why they are using it.  This will also give you insights on your product differentiation.

Ask customer to describe your product.  It can illuminate you on what you think your customer thinks (apologies for the thought twister).

Once you’ve got the customer insights, the next step is figure out which insight you want to target.  And that brings us to “Product Proposition”.

Product Proposition 

How will my product be different with respect to the competition?

  1. Filters down from consumer insights.
  2. Discrimination starts with the product.
  3. Brand builds on product promise.

Here are some examples:

  • iPod: iTunes + iPod. Buy one song instead of an album. Biggest storage capacity.
  • Nissan Sunny:  More legroom for people sitting in the back seat. Longer car in the same category (i.e. at Sedan cost).
  • Google:  With earlier search engines, you had to think what to type. Google addressed this with “Search the way you think”.
  • Flipkart: Hassle free delivery.  Very fast.
  • Maruti Car:  How much mileage? Value for money.

It is very important to be unique on some dimension – even from the day you conceptualize the product.  And, the product proposition has to be very simple to have recall in the customer’s mind.  One rule of thumb is to aim to explain your product to your child/grandmother.  Typically, this can be done.

Think of what is keeping your customers awake at night.  And use that to grab the customer’s mindshare. For example, let’s take my company’s product – KeyMails – which solves the problem of email overload for Microsoft Outlook users. The insight could be that the target customer is worried about missing an important mail. So, something like “Never miss an important mail” could be one approach to branding.

Think in terms of “Unique Atomic Unit” about your differentiator.  For example, with facebook it is “update status”; with twitter, it is “very short message”.  Spend some time thinking about what the unique atomic unit is for your product.  Do it now.

Go to market with the differentiating “hero” feature.  Other features are needed, but they do not form part of go to market strategy.  Example, Scooty is a vehicle that has good mileage and a good engine, but they focus on their differentiating factor of being usable by girls.

Once you have the product proposition, the next step is to understand the target audience.

Target Audience

You need to have answers to the following questions about your target audience:

  1. Why should we understand the target audience?
  2. Who are we talking to? And why?
  3. What are his/her attitudes to the category?
  4. What defines him/her?

For example, for Naukri, the recruiter thinks he needs their service if he needs to hire 200 people in a month. If it is just for one or two positions, consultants might work better. This customer attitude is important to know.  Online recruitment is for scaling.

You need to create a persona for the target customer. In the initial stages of a startup, it is better to have only one target persona.  Having multiple target personas causes confusion.  Pick the persona that is most promising.  The persona needs to change and be refined as you get more data.  For example, though Practo is a general purpose solution for doctors, they first picked dentists and later expanded to other segments. “Everybody is my customer” does not work.

Give the target persona a name – say Molly/Tom/Rohan and write down as many attributes as you can about the persona – what is the annual salary, spending habits, attitude towards buying products similar to yours etc. This helps in identifying who is a target customer and who is not. This will also help in decision making – for example, if you want to add a feature – ask if Rohan will like that feature. And base your decision on the answer to this question.

You can have multiple target personas once you become more mature.

What if there are multiple people who are involved in the buying decision for the product? Who should you focus on? Your pitch should be to the buyer. You have to talk to the users and the influencers too, but the pitch must be to the buyer.

With this background, it is time to introduce the six tenets of product branding.  This is a concise summary of the discussion so far.

Six Tenets of Product Branding

You need to study and arrive at your understanding of the following six pillars.

  1. Market Dynamics
  2. Target Audience
  3. Consumer Insights
  4. Competitive Environment
  5. Key Brand Benefit.
  6. Reason to Believe.

If even one of the above is not satisfied, you might not get the results. For example, one of the most common reasons for failure is that brands do not address the “Reason to Believe”. It is easy to make tall claims, but the consumers must clearly see the reason why they should believe your product’s differentiator.

All the learning above are inputs to two tangible outcomes for your brand – (a) Brand Positioning Essence and (b) Brand Positioning Statement.

Brand Positioning Essence 

“Brand Positioning Essence” typically consists of two to three words.  It is that one aspiration of the core target audience that the brand would like to uniquely own.  For example, “Feminity Restored” can be the essence for a soap targeting middle age women.

Take a few minutes now to think about those two or three words that communicate the essence of your product.

Brand Positioning Statement

Create a Unique Brand Positioning Statement that covers the six tenets above.  A template for your statement is given below:

My product is a ________ (market dynamics) for ______ (target audience) who are ______ (consumer insights) and my product does _________ (key brand benefit) because ____ (reason to believe).

Here is a shot at KeyMails brand positioning statement.

“KeyMails solves the problem of email overload for business people who use Microsoft Outlook, and who do not want to miss important mails; by ranking the mails in the order of importance to the user, by automatically learning from the past email behaviour and easy and minimal configuration.” 

I request other participants to write down their unique positioning statement for the benefit of the readers.

For your reference, here is the silde deck used by Dhruv for the round table.

Conclusion

Branding is a must for any product, whether it is in a mature stage or early stage.

Particularly for product startups, the “brand” of the product is important. It is more challenging when the product is still evolving and the startup is trying to figure out the product-market fit and a minimum viable product.  However, brand is in the mind of the customer and it is evolving. It can change with product market fit, but it has to be present at every time.  You always need to have a differentiating factor that addresses a deep need for your target audience.  And your brand positioning can and must change as you change product strategy.

It is similar to your business model.  It is not advisable to start building a product without having a business model and business plan.  Sure, it will change and evolve over time – but at any point in time, you do have a business plan.  Same thing with branding.

If you’d like to share your knowledge on product branding, please do write them in the comments section.

Tweetable Tweets

Branding is as important to startups as it is for mature products. Tweet this.

Brand creates a promise. This needs to be delivered by the product. Otherwise, it will backfire badly. Tweet this.

Thousands of things are going on inside the customer’s head. How do you get mindshare for your product? Tweet this.

Even if you have a great product, if the customer cannot identify and recall it, you have lost the customer. Tweet this.

Customer insights are at a deeper level and not just at the level of product benefits/features. Tweet this.

Focus on only one thing in the customer’s mindshare. Without this, your brand will not have recall value. Tweet this.

The best way to get consumer insights is by asking people who are using your product why they are using it. Tweet this.

Ask your customer to describe your product.  It can illuminate you on what you think your customer thinks. Tweet this.

Go to market with the differentiating “hero” feature.Tweet this.

Create a persona for your target customer. Give a name like Tom and write down Tom’s attitudes. Tweet this.

Brand positioning essence is two or three words that you’d like to own in the customer’s mind. Tweet this.

Create a brand positioning statement addressing the six tenets of product branding. Tweet this.

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Bootstrapping Products with Services

Because it’s often so difficult for entrepreneurs to obtain seed funding for their startups, bootstrapping is one of the best methods to self-fund their projects. If outside investment capital is for whatever reason undesirable or unobtainable, bootstrapping a product by offering a service is one of the best ways to go. This, by the way, remains a controversial point-of-view, and most industry observers will take the position that companies get distracted if they try to bootstrap a product with a service. At 1M/1M, we take a pragmatic and contrarian position, and back it up with numerous case studies. From where we sit, bootstrapping products with services is a tried and true method.

RailsFactory, a consulting and app development company that provides solutions for the web application framework Ruby-on-Rails, was co-founded by Senthil Nayagam and Dinesh Kumar in 2006. RailsFactory provides numerous services—primarily focusing on app development for the Ruby on Rails platform, but also including Rails version migration, E-commerce solutions, Email campaign system implementation, and iPhone and Android app development.

Senthil and Dinesh bootstrapped RailsFactory themselves, starting with about $1,250 in seed money. When they needed to, they each utilized other personal resources: Senthil reached into his savings, and Dinesh turned to his parents. But they started generating revenues fast—thanks to the services they offered, they were generating revenue by their second month, and they’ve been growing since. To date, RailsFactory has executed over 100 projects and have worked with clients in the US, Canada, India, Australia, Singapore, and the UK. Their services revenues have crossed a couple of million dollars, and the company has recently built a product that they have started validating with those 100 services customers. The productized offering enables them to offer a support package to the SME segment based on packs of trouble tickets.

Similarly, Mansa Systems is a SaaS-based IT company, founded by Siva Devaki in San Francisco in 2006. Siva founded Mansa Systems to focus specifically on cloud computing. Currently, Mansa Systems publishes a number of apps to be used in conjunction with Salesforce.com through Salesforce’s AppExchange app marketplace.

AppExchange allows partners to create apps to enhance Salesforce for business, and Mansa Systems currently offers eight different apps for Salesforce. Each of the apps is designed to address a limitation with Salesforce; for example, cloud storage app Cloud Drop gives users additional cloud storage space, MassMailer allows users to circumvent Salesforce’s bulk email limitations, and EaglEye provides Salesforce users with secure, trackable document filesharing. Mansa Systems remains entirely self-funded via the company’s service business, and there are currently no plans to use outside funding. The company already has achieved $2 million in annual revenue, and enough profitability to be able to develop and launch its apps at a steady clip.

AgilOne, a company that provides cloud-based predictive customer analytics, was founded by Omer Artun in 2006. Initially, the company relied entirely on services to get close to customers, understand and address their problems, and in the process generate revenues. Today, AgilOne’s product is a software-as-a-service platform. Much of what the company learnt about its customers in the services mode have been productized, although a percentage of revenues still comes from services.

AgilOne’s platform is designed to make it easier for companies to see how their customers are interacting with their products. For example, a company’s online retail customers can be broken into different “clusters” based on their search and shopping preferences. These clusters then enable the company’s marketing department to more accurately target those users with specific promotions.

Omer bootstrapped his company from no revenue or employees in 2005 to about 45 employees and over $15 million in revenue by the time AgilOne partnered with Sequoia Capital in 2011. Silicon Valley’s top venture firm made a sizable investment at a high valuation in a company that was bootstrapped using services.

I have often heard that capital intensive businesses are difficult to bootstrap. There is some truth to this observation. However, Finisar offers the counterpoint.

Finisar produces optical communications components and subsystems and was founded 25 years ago by Jerry Rawls and Frank Levinson. Jerry and Frank bootstrapped Finisar by first providing consulting services while doing product development in high-speed fiber optics for computer networks. They searched for a need in the computer industry that wasn’t filled, and discovered that need in the early 1990s when they pioneered a low-cost gigabit optical link that economized the standards for optical drives. By 1994, their product had changed the fiber channel standard, and following that year, the sales of their optical components doubled every year for seven years in a row.

Even while Finisar was taking off, the company remained fully self-funded. Jerry and Frank bootstrapped Finisar for the first ten years of its existence and received no outside funding until 1998. In 1998, they were approached by TA Associates and Summit Partners, two private equity firms who bought 20% of Finisar in anticipation of an IPO. Jerry estimates that the company’s sales pre-IPO were in the $30 million range in 1998 and, by the time the company went public in 2000, sales were around $67 million. Finisar went public at $19 and closed at $86.

Optical communications components and sub-systems, for all practical purposes, are considered to be extremely capital intensive. Yet, Frank and Jerry, obviously, managed to bootstrap their venture using services almost all the way to an IPO.

Each of the four companies I have introduced you to bootstrapped to profitability via services. Not only is this a viable method of getting your startup off the ground, it’s a proven method of reaching profitability, as well. In some cases, it can take you to the enviable position of Sequoia Capital knocking on your door. In other cases, you could even have investment bankers come calling, wanting to take you public, and a whole slew of late-stage funds wanting to shower you with funds.

All those are desirable outcomes!

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Success Factor: Idea with Business Potential

Every engineer dreams of building his/her own product. Most ideas don’t progress any further, either because it was idle thinking, or on further reflection, they become less interesting. When a concept refuses to die, and you feel driven to explore it further, then some basic analysis must follow. What problem does it solve? Who benefits from the solution? Can you quantify its impact on the beneficiaries?

Ideas emanate in a number of ways. They can be a solution to problems that you observed at work or elsewhere. Perhaps you have spotted new opportunities arising from evolution or disruptive change in technology, environment or circumstances. For example, the advent of the PC, internet, and broadband connectivity over the past three decades, led to software that provided unique new functionality (e-mail, internet chat) or simply a new and better way of doing old things (online purchases).

Many companies have succeeded by catching a new technology curve early, and overcoming existing players (Microsoft with PC operating system, Novell with networking, Hotmail with internet mail, and recently SalesForce.com with SaaS).

Responsiveness to technology shifts is not an attribute of only small companies. IBM, for instance, has adapted to several generational changes in hardware and software. After its formal naming in 1924, IBM has seen competitors appear and fade away in the punched card, mainframe, minicomputer, PC, networking and the internet eras. Through them all, it has remained the No.1 technology company by re-inventing itself.

In comparison, here is what the CEO (Ken Olson) of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), a mini-computer vendor and strong IBM competitor, had to say in 1977, “There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home”.

Not surprisingly, DEC was eventually over-run by the PC revolution. IBM, on the other hand, launched its PC in 1981, and tied up with Intel and Micro- soft, to emerge stronger.

Your generic idea should be transformed into a rough product concept. Entrepreneurs should have sufficient domain and technical expertise to conceptualize how the idea, combined with its practical implementation, can address specific user or industry challenges. You can then, scope the problem and formulate a distinct and bounded solution.

The next step is to explore who your customers will be. At the most basic level, the product should provide a good solution to a known problem for a reasonably large set of people. The product may enhance a capability (what it can do), process (how to do it), performance (speed of doing it), or usability (ease of use) relative to the current methods. It must be reasonably unique and fairly difficult for someone else to quickly emulate.

Ideas don’t have to be unique to be successful. Excel overtook Lotus 1-2-3, the leading DOS spreadsheet, only because Lotus failed to make the transition to Windows quickly.

Sometimes, leaders don’t recognize disruptive changes. In a 1998 paper, Google’s founders described an innovative concept called PageRank, which took advantage of the Web’s link structure to produce a global importance ranking of every web page. This helped users quickly make sense of the vast heterogeneity of the World Wide Web. AltaVista, the leading search engine amongst 30+ others at the time, turned down the chance to buy Google for $1 million, saying spam would make PageRank useless. Yahoo also declined to purchase Google, supposedly because they didn’t want to focus on search, which they felt only sent users away from Yahoo.com.

Size also does not guarantee success. After their search engine and Gmail made Google into a challenger to Microsoft, they attempted to target Microsoft’s cash cow (MS-Office) with an online spreadsheet in 2006. Analysts expected this to eat into Excel (and Office) market share, but the latter continues to dominate. Still, in 2009, this competition forced Microsoft into announcing a future online, free version of MS-Office.

Ideas are like movie scripts. Most of them sound familiar. They are often a combination of previously seen sub-plots, with new twists added. Still, many of them become successful, especially if they have some novelty and are executed well. Even remakes succeed if presented differently. Very rarely do you see a hit movie with a truly unique script.

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

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PromptCloud is a powerful cloud-computing DaaS (Data as a Service) engine involved in ‘Big’ data acquisition

PromptCloud is a powerful cloud-computing DaaS (Data as a Service) engine involved in ‘Big’ data acquisition. PromptCloud crawls data that’s spread all across the web and converts it into meaningful insights. It was founded by Prashant Kumar. Before starting PromptCloud in late 2009, Prashant was at Yahoo! with their data team working on Yahoo! Frontpage which was one of its hottest products back then. He was mostly involved in data crunching using big data technologies that were still evolving. Prashant graduated with a B.Tech-M.Tech dual degree in CS from IIT Kanpur in 2007. He was later joined by Arpan Jha in 2012, who is a Carnegie Mellon alumnus and took over the Products & Market Strategy function. Prior to joining PromptCloud, Arpan has worked as a Consultant with KPMG & Deloitte.

Introduction

Let’s consider a scenario: say pn.ispirt.in decides to launch a section on the website where they rank all “Made in India” products based on popularity, usage, quality, and some other criteria. One approach is for them to go out and subscribe to the news feed of all important news sites all over the world and try to track all the news and events about all ‘Made in India’ products. This data can then be used to rank them. Given that data about popularity, usage and quality can be generated all over the web (a product review here, a customer complaint there, a Facebook mention, a tweet, a youtube video gone viral, a buyer praising the product on his blog, you get the idea), such a list of websites will be incomplete at best, and the volume of data will be too much to handle for the ProductNation editors.

Enter PromptCloud. PromptCloud offers its Data-as-a-Service for clients like ProductNation who need large volume of data from all over the web for further analysis (this is just one of the use cases, PromptCloud offer many more services). Continuing with the same example, ProductNation and PromptCloud work through following steps:

  1. ProductNation provides 2 pieces of information to PromptCloud: a list of websites they are interested in, and a list of keywords they are interested in
  2. They will also mention how frequent they want the data to be crawled which is dependent on ProductNation’s estimate of how fast their data is likely to change. If they need fresh data (say every few minutes), they purchase PromptCloud’s ‘Low-latency Crawl’ service
  3. PromptCloud will crawl all the data, matching keywords to find relevant content, and then convert it into structured data (XML, CSV, XLS, etc.) for ProductNation’s consumption
  4. ProductNation can do 2 things with the data
    1. It can fetch all the data through API calls and download them into its own servers for further processing. This will be done at a regular schedule, agreed with PromptCloud
    2. ProductNation may not want (or may not have capability) to host all this data. So they buy PromptCloud’s Hosted Indexing Service and they can now let their editors search this index and only fetch relevant content.
    3. When ProductNation gets the data, they are also provided a relevance score for each data item (as judged by PromptCloud’s algorithm) so that they can optimize their analysis efforts and keep their results very relevant.

If Internet was small, say 1000 sites, this would be a trivial problem to solve – just get all the data and be done with it. Scale of Internet (and the rate at which data is growing) makes this a complex problem to solve. This is a technology problem which needs to solve 4 critical issues:

  1. Velocity: How fast and how quickly can data be fetched?
  2. Structure: How can the data be structured meaningfully when data on the web is largely unstructured?
  3. Volume: How much data can be stored and processed efficiently?
  4. Relevancy: How relevant the data is to the keywords supplied, and to the overall intent of this data crawl?

PromptCloud is a technology company which aims to address all these issues and offer services to businesses who need to analyze web data at scale.

The PromptCloud Service

Offerings

PromptCloud offers services built on top of their cloud-computing DaaS (Data as a Service) engine. They offer custom crawl services to their clients. Specifically, following offerings are available:

Their three primary offerings are:

  1. Site-specific crawl and extraction: Given a set of sites and fields to be extracted, their crawlers will fetch relevant data from the web, which then gets converted into structured data and delivered to the clients via API
  2. Low-latency Crawls: These are highly optimized crawls which can fetch data in intervals as low as 5-10 minutes
  3. Hosted Indexing: Structured data created from custom crawls is hosted and indexed and exposed to clients via query APIs.

PromptCloud Service Offerings

Features

They offer following features as part of their services:

  1. Deep data crawls- all past data on the site
  2. Structured data feeds are available to the clients daily/weekly/n times a day
  3. Ability to supply only incremental data
  4. Crawling data from AJAX/non-AJAX based sites
  5. Indexing of data as per requirements
  6. Custom Analytics

Their technology stack uses a lot of open source solutions right from Linux, Hadoop and NoSQL to various cloud and cluster management tools. These are augmented with custom components they have written to solve their unique challenges and serve their customer needs better. They serve data to their clients via API which can later be synced to their FTP, AWS S3, Google Drive or DropBox accounts.

Differentiators

Offering web-scale crawling services is a hot space and there are many competitors with similar services. When looking at their differentiators, 3 things stand out:

  1. Vertical-Agnostic: Their offerings are based on URLs and the keywords they use to filter the results of their crawl, so they are independent of verticals, and can cater to a large number of verticals. This also helps them quick turnaround on new features which then become available to all their clients.
  2. End-to-end Monitoring – Web sites regularly have dynamic content on their pages, and things can change pretty quickly. While most other providers offer a do-it-yourself solution (essentially making you solve this problem), PromptCloud monitors structure changes on the web and supports clients until data gets imported into their systems.
  3. Large-scale complex crawls – Managing large-scale crawls is one of PromptCloud’s USPs. AJAX elements on the web sites make the pages unique and dynamic. PromptCloud’s platform can crawl pages that use AJAX and interactions very well.

Market

Being a technology-centric company, CTO or Product guys on client side are the decision-makers and buyers for their product. Their adoption has been good so far, catering to clients in US, UK, Canada, Western Europe, Singapore, Hong Kong etc. Being a vertical agnostic solution, they have clients from all domains be it e-commerce, travel, market research or classifieds and across the globe. They are an early growth stage company and are growing at the rate of 4X in revenues each quarter, with healthy pipeline of clients.

Since they offer custom services, their pricing varies a lot – it could be anywhere from $200 to $10K a month for a given customer. Pricing depends on what types of services are being consumed, as well as on crawl frequency, data volume, value added services, etc. Users can control the price by setting limits to data that they fetch in a month. They also can do some sampling of data to get a sense of pricing run rate, before committing to the crawl.

Currently, most of their marketing and sales happen through referrals. As they go forward, brand-building is going to be key marketing strategy and they are investing in that right now.

They are looking to address a larger market and to expand their offerings across more and more geographies. Scale is the #1 imperative for them right now. The aim is to build a brand around their solution and increase the loyal customer base.

Future releases will focus on following themes:

  1. Make data richer by applying AI and Machine Learning
  2. Offer standardized data sets in some verticals

Competitive Landscape

Web Crawling services is a space that is hot and has many players. There is 80Legs (any guesses why they are called so?) which offers a programmable platform for custom data crawling, and there is Grepsr that offers its services to individuals, and there are a lot of them in between – Fetch, Mozenda, Spinn3r (blog, news and social media crawling), and of course an open source web crawler (Apache Nutch).

These products vary along 2 dimensions (and hence they should be visualized in a 2×2 box)

  1. Horizontal (Platform) or Vertical (Business Solutions)
  2. Level of programming required to achieve business value

#1 is obvious, let’s talk about #2. Level of programming required to get value depends on the interface that is exposed by these services and who does it appeal to the most. Most of the consumers of data are business people; however, most of these offerings are technical enough that business teams need to work through their technical teams to get value (one reason why PromptCloud sells to Product guys rather than business guys). It is hard (though possible) to have a platform offering and still provide an interface consumable by business teams (because business value will be generated only when platform outcome is processed using vertical business rules which is hard to do without some amount of programming).

PromptCloud is a horizontal (platform) offering that requires a little programming to get it integrated with business flows of the client. For them, this positioning makes sense for 2 reasons:

  1. Revenue Spread: Horizontal increases addressable market because all verticals can be targeted. However, this also means that value provided per client is less and hence revenue per client is going to be less while number of clients might be large. At this stage of their company, this is a better revenue mix (since it exposes them to a large number of clients).
  2. Cost of Innovation: Vertical requires more business focus and hence innovations that are specific to a vertical may not be applicable to another vertical, while horizontal means every innovation benefits every customer. This makes innovating for every client a costly affair when focusing on a vertical.

However, it is important for them to make sure they are moving continuously along the spectrum of offering vertical solutions (without compromising on their innovation abilities) and offering business-consumable interfaces.

The Road Ahead

The road ahead for PromptCloud is tough but inspiring. They are in a space that will require much more services in future as data continues to proliferate, data-driven insights become the order of the day, and web data continues to become more unstructured. They have a good set of offering and a good list of clients to work with. However, they do face some challenges:

  1. They need to gain more visibility in existing and newer geographies; building their brand is going to be key.
  2. They need to add more products to their bouquet of offerings
  3. To maintain their technology edge, they need to continue to build the team even through the shortage of trained professionals in this area.

They also need to figure out where they want to put themselves on Horizontal-Vertical axis, we feel that they need to move towards offering vertical-focused solutions, in addition to maintaining a horizontal data platform. PromptCloud (and most of its competitors) offers a technology product to business teams to do their data analysis well (and hence business teams need to involve their technology teams to consume PromptCloud services). We feel that a way forward for PromptCloud will be to become a business product that the business people can consume directly and come to build critical business on. They platform approach (vertical-agnosticity) is a good foundation on which such a business product can be built.

They have the right trajectory of growth, and good momentum and team to continue to push and become a name to reckon with in this space.

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Part 2: Emotionalizing the software products .. Uh…what?

The first step: build customer empathy

Microsoft built test tools in Visual Studio 2005 to address a virgin test market worth about USD 3 billion at the time. However, the product met with little success and did not create much excitement in the test community. A later in depth observational research of testers to see how they work—what’s their workflow, what tools did they use, what’s their contextual environment, revealed that more than 70% of the testers did manual testing. Most of the time they worked on one test case at a time. Their tools were manual – Microsoft word, excel, white board, paper. For many of these testers, Visual Studio became sort of a four letter word.  They would complain- why are you making me do this? You are making me think like a developer!

In contrast, the test tools in VS2005 were automation based API testing tools designed for specialist testers like Microsoft SDETs. They were optimized for complex testing that required setting up a suite, a plan, a configuration, and all these things that were super-flexible and powerful.  Test tools were like the Swiss army knife that could solve many problems many different ways. But to the average tester, it was impossible to get started and if one ever did, hard to use.

In short, majority of testers worked very different than the programmer testers within the company and elsewhere. It was really a case of lack of customer empathy. The team initially failed to recognize that testers outside could be entirely different beings from a Microsoft tester. After an expensive lapse, they identified a new tester persona named Ellen and released a test management environment for them in the form of Camano with VS 2010.

The cause of this lack of empathy is the curse of knowledge that software developer suffer from. They just know so much more about technology that they can’t see from an average real life users’ point of view. Microsoft software engineers did not understand majority of software testers. Possibilities of software engineers not understanding lay users are far higher.

It is important that the people behind technology products, as Tim brown, author of Change by Design, puts it, could see the world through the eyes of their customers, understand the world through their experiences and feel the world through their emotions. That is the essence of empathy.

Empathy is about knowing your customers deeply, in fact better than they know themselves. Product managers I meet recount how they are trying to do this through surveys, focus groups, usability studies, customer visits and conjoint analyses. But they are missing the point. All this data are meaningless without empathy.

So how can software developers factor in customer empathy in the software products?

One, change focus from feature driven, technology driven or competition driven product development to customer focused product development.  Features often creep into products because management wants it or competition has it or because it is technologically cool. Shun these practices totally and make all your product processes customer-centric.

Two, develop strong understanding of your customer and make them center-piece in all your engineering and product decisions.  Give face to those single word descriptions of customer segments. Develop personas. Put them across your office to remind developers who the customer is.

Develop customer insights beyond the obvious. Only then you have a chance to differentiate and be a winner. Use open questions and empathic listening when talking to customers. Do not stop at asking customers what they want. Customers often can’t articulate what their needs and wants are. They often learn to live with current reality thus killing all useful feedback they could give you. We have all seen people writing passwords on their palms, chaining their bicycles to the park bench, using all kinds of objects as door stoppers and so on. Such consumer needs become latent and never get surfaced in any questionnaire or interview.  Customers are too occupied with their current business to be able to paint great future scenarios. They are no experts to tell you what will be a successful product in the future. Go live with them (ethnography), observe them going about their tasks in their natural habitat. Use empathy map to capture what the people in observation said and did, your interpretation of what they thought and felt and inferences of what their pain points are and what they desire to gain.

Three, stop developing features. Start developing scenarios. Scenarios are short stories told from the customer’s point of view that explains their situation and what they want to achieve. Scenarios describe the journey to a happy ending. Scenarios help shift focus from technology and mere use cases to customer. Remember, human brains are hardwired to understand stories. If you can’t tell a story out loud and have it make sense, you’re probably missing something. Make scenarios the heart of your product. Don’t ship a product with a broken heart!

Four, develop and live by a set of clear user experience (UX) principles. These principles help you make decisions that deliver a product with a clear point of view. An example of experience principles from Windows 8 (details available on the web) includes – pride in craftsmanship, change is bad unless it is great, be fast and fluid, solve distractions not discoverability, reduce concepts to increase confidence, win or lose as one.

Five, develop clear scenario success metrics. Test your scenario to this metric. For example a metric could be –

1)     UX performance – did users successfully complete this scenario? How long did it take?

2)     User perception – were users excited, frustrated, satisfied or annoyed while completing the scenario?

3)     Functional test – does the scenario function as per specs?

Empathy approach to designing winning products has an underlying belief – it’s better to build a product that delights a small segment of users than to build one that targets everybody but doesn’t really nail it for any of them. There are countless examples of products like iPhone and OXO kitchen tools that are a roaring success with customer segments beyond what they were originally designed for.

Steve Jobs once said, “It is not the customer’s job to know what they want.” That’s absolutely right. It is yours.

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Interviewstreet’s Role in Recruiting Software Developers

Launched in 2009, Interviewstreet’s recruiting tool helps companies hire software programmers. It was the first Indian company to be chosen for an incubation program at Y Combinator, a Silicon Valley seed fund. Co-founder Vivek Ravisankar discusses the company’s journey to a differentiating recruitment product. This article is brought to SandHill readers in partnership with ProductNation.   

Please give me the elevator speech about what your company does. 

Vivek Ravisankar: We are on a mission to connect great talent with great opportunities in the fastest, efficient and the most fun way. We use coding challenges and contests to help companies hire programmers. Our product is used by startups (Drchrono, Matterport, etc.), fast-growing companies (Palantir, Evernote, Box, Quora, etc.) and large companies like Amazon, Facebook, Walmart, etc.

Is the contest aspect what differentiates your product in the recruiting marketplace? 

Vivek Ravisankar: There are a lot of testing platforms on the Web, but most of them focus on testing through multiple-choice questions, poor programming questions or good programming questions with no customization to the hiring company.

We worked around these parameters to build the best platform to screen programmers. It includes theoretical and real-world coding challenges that are customizable as much as possible by every customer to match their bar. Performance is measured on both speed and accuracy.

Has the tool made a difference in your own company’s recruiting? What challenges have you encountered as a startup that you didn’t anticipate?

Vivek Ravisankar: I didn’t anticipate that hiring people would be so tough. A good guy has at least three companies competing for him. It takes a lot of convincing and a lot of people talking to get the person on board.

If you could go back and start your company all over again, what would you do differently the second time around? 

Vivek Ravisankar: I would fail fast. We took a long time to figure out that our first product (mock interviews) wasn’t working well. 

Please describe one of your company’s lessons learned and how it affected your product development. 

Vivek Ravisankar: We learned to test the app thoroughly before we make a major production push. It’s very easy to get hooked into the “move fast, break things” model, but it may not work if you are in the enterprise business. Your product is being used by large enterprises and any change breaks their process and flow, which is hugely unproductive for them.

This was a big learning when we almost screwed up a good relationship with a customer because of a component that broke. Since then, we have constant tests that run in the background testing every part of the application to ensure nothing breaks.

Read the complete story at Sandhill.com

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In praise of the Sales Playbook

There have been a lot of posts recently on the need to have a well-defined sales process: something I heartily endorse, by the way. The challenge often in smaller companies is that they are resource constrained and so putting thoughts down on how sales should be approached tends to rank way down on the priority list. This is a mistake. 

Call it what you want but a documented approach that talks about what your company is about, who the target is, and how you sell to them, is not only critical, but I would argue, the only thing between you and extinction. I know, at this point you are saying, “Yeah, yeah, we know this and we do something very similar”. The problem I have found is that even in successful companies, this successful formula/approach is locked inside the head of the star performers and the founders. A small company can’t afford to rely on a handful of resources; everybody needs to be on board.

If you can’t afford to spend the time or money to have somebody like me come and help you with developing a sales playbook and a process, what I recommend is you take a DIY approach to it and follow the KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) philosophy. Just make sure it at least, has the following 

What is the business problem?  – Everybody, especially the sales folks, need to know where their solution fits in. Knowing about your product’s bells and whistles, won’t let them relate to buyer pain. They will be unable to articulate how your solution will help the buyer unless they understand the context of the business pain.

Who is the buyer? – An understanding of both the class of companies as well as the buyer profile will let your sales team figure out the best approach to reach them with. Instead of a generic message, just think of how much better a targeted outreach would be once you understand who you are selling to.

What is the competition? –  Other vendors, internal development or third party IT services companies, will all be likely vying for the business. Think through what your story is against each of them. There will always be situations where you have to defend yourself or create doubt for your competition in the buyers’ mind. Unless you have thought about the competition, you can’t do it effectively.

The three levels of pitches – At a minimum, your sales people need to be prepared for three pitches – the elevator pitch, the short pitch and a full-blown presentation. An elevator pitch, so called because it alludes to catching somebody in an elevator and having the length of the ride to get them interested, is a critical tool to have. Think conferences and chance meetings.  That’s where you will use this. If the prospect has a little more time, you can get into the short pitch. Lastly, the full-blown presentation is used when the prospect has given you time to come and pitch to them. In any/all of these pitches, you have to be careful to talk the language of the customer (don’t use technical gobbledygook, or clichéd phrases like “best-in-class”, “value-added” or “scalable”).

If you are going to cold call, you  need a call script – Cold calls have a notoriously low success rate but they do work. I can attest to that since one of the biggest deals I ever closed came from a cold call I made. The reason that call worked for me, and why good cold calls work is that you have thought through what you are going to say on the call and are not winging it. Make sure you have a clear understanding of why the call is being made and what the action items are expected to be at the end of the call. 

What happens next aka the sales workflow  – Everybody’s time is precious. Nobody knows this more than the overworked folks in a small company. Make sure the sales process is widely understood and followed so that you are bringing in folks at the right time for the right reasons and not burning them out.  The sales qualification is ideally done by sales folks. Product folks/presales should come in on qualified opportunities. This can happen only if you have an educated sales force.

There are many ways to implement this approach. A document called a Sales Playbook is one way. Another way is to have lots of informal sessions where folks share war stories and learn from each other. What I have found is that putting thoughts on paper i.e. creating a sales playbook, forces you to think, which is never a bad thing. It also allows for easy transfer of knowledge and can be used for on boarding new resources. Just remember though that this is a living, breathing document that will frequently need to be updated as more information comes in.

Agree. Disagree. Or have another viewpoint. Would love to hear your thoughts.

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Corporate Trainings are now Fun and Digital, thanks to MindTickle

MindTickle – ranked by Business Today as India’s coolest startups – is a gamified social learning platform founded by four enterprising men, who are were so passionate about games that they decided to make it their vocation. While the three were hard at work, we managed to draw Mohit out for a quick chat. So here is Mohit Garg, CoFounder MindTickle.

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

Mohit Garg: Thank you, productnation for this opportunity.

MindTickle has four cofounders – Krishna Depura, Nishant Mungali, Deepak Diwakar and myself.

I am an electrical engineer having studied and worked in the US. While in the states, I had a chance to work at some great software product companies like Aruba Networks. My experience with a software product company straddled the entire spectrum, when it comes to business outcomes. Not only was I witness to an IPO exit, but one of the companies (x) raised $100 million only to go down under. Such has been the intensity of the learning.

The four cofounders of MindTickle have been friends and work colleagues. Krishna and I were batchmates at ISB, while Krishna, Nishant and Deepak were colleagues at PubMatic.

The genesis of this idea came from our combining our personal interest with a market opportunity. The four of us had been hacking away on weekends to create quiz based games. In fact, our quiz based games for IIT Mumbai Mood Indigo and few sponsored contests that were integrated with Facebook were immensely successful.

Since all four of us were passionate about creating high engagement oriented digital products, the combination of corporate training and gamification just looked perfect. We had observed that corporate internal training programs were time-consuming, with very little excitement and no connection to business outcomes. Then one day in 2011, all of us decided to get started with MindTickle.

ProductNation: Interesting, tell us about the name, how did you guys crack it?

Mohit Garg: We wanted to pick a name that is appealing and fresh, yet has enterprise appeal. So we put down a framework to score many names and we got MindTickle.

ProductNation: Mohit, please tell us about your customers and your future plans.

Mohit Garg: Some of the World’s finest brands are the customers of MindTickle. Ebay, SAP, Yahoo, InMobi, MakeMyTrip all have experienced high engagement rates and consequently improved business outcomes with the products from MindTickle.

While technology companies in the market have understood the importance of engagement when it comes to corporate training programs, the traditional real economy companies are also realizing the importance of high engagement delivery. A dominant young workforce is also a driver in this shift.

Most of our enquiries at this point in time are from the US market. We have a sales team in the US as part of our business development efforts. And we continue to invest in that market which is a priority.

India is also tickling with opportunities and we are very excited about it. It is not just the Indian arms of technology giants that are taking interest, but even the domestic organizations.

ProductNation: MindTickle’s moment of glory, what comes to your mind?

Mohit Garg: We have won the GAward for the Best Use of Gamification in HR (Enterprise) in the World for two consecutive years in 2012 and 2013. That has been the proudest moment till date. We came trumps ahead of formidable competition that included startups as well as large investor backed companies.

ProductNation: What have been your big lessons – personal and professional?


Mohit Garg: On the professional front, first, there is too much focus (at least in India) on overcoming weaknesses. My experiences have shaped me into believing now that a successful professional career is more about playing to your strengths. Second, the power of being disciplined and diligent is often underestimated. Once you start any business you will find low hanging fruit in doing a better job than your lazy competitors. Therefore, often market share is a vanity metric, one should focus on how to develop a mind share among the customer segments that matter.

Third, there is a good chance that 10 people across the world are thinking or working on the idea that you just came up.

Have the tough conversations early in any relationship, things which could be sticky later are best addressed while there is little contempt in a relationship… “Familiarity does breed contempt” from what I have observed. Lastly, all said and done, speaking direct and clearly will provide better results with less heartburn and confusion in the long run.

ProductNation: What would you like to tell someone, who is struggling or planning to start a product company?

Mohit Garg: Product entrepreneurs should dream big and not be scared of competition or large existing incumbents. Market leader in a marginal niche is worse than a contender in fast growing and large market.

One has to take a very realistic view of the size, location and maturity of the target segment, especially in B2B. One should design experiments to validate those hypothesis and quickly focus on early adopters as opposed to going after large horizontal markets at least initially

Many product entrepreneurs take the market as a given. In my opinion and experience, the market risk is generally bigger than the product/technology risk

If possible and if you can pull it off, get professional money early. You can be more aggressive with your business plan, invest more for long term, and stay focused. Moreover, investors on the board forces a discipline which is really valuable in the long run. Having to worry about having enough to pay the bills and salary every month may sound romantic, but its only as romantic as war

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

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Protect your Enterprise Network from infected BYODs – A disruptive product from i7 Networks

Manjunath Gowda (Manju), CEO if i7 Networks, shares his experiences of starting up a products based company, ground up from India. In this freewheeling chat, he discusses on various topics ranging from branding the products, managing investor relationships to seeking IP protection for products offered in a niche, evolving marketplace. Read on…

What was the motivation for you to start i7, a product based company?

The decision to start i7 actually was spurred due to a comment from a CEO of a multinational company. While in discussion with him in the valley, he seemed to indicate we folks from India would never be able to run a product company successfully out of India specifically in networking. While his comment pricked me instantly, I took time to objectively reflect on his observations. After analysis, it occurred to me that I could prove him wrong – since I figured out that we had all ingredients to build one and sustain it too. Besides this, I had just then successfully sold off my previous venture. I was looking at doing something more exciting. All of these converged, and so i7 Networks came to be.

You have chosen to build products in the Internet security space, and specifically addressing the BYOD challenges. Can you explain the reasons behind choosing this segment?

First, the Internet security space is the most volatile and evolving area that businesses need to deal with. Hence there is lot of opportunity to offer disruptive products and services, to meet diverse security needs of enterprise customers. The emerging challenge these days is due to change in the nature of threats. Earlier, most products and solutions were geared towards dealing with threats emanating from sources external to the enterprise. Now, enterprises are grappling with the damage that could be potentially caused due to the internal threats – ones that emerge from within the organization. BYOD is an easy entry point that could cause this. So, we chose to focus on providing products and solutions addressing this area.

How do you differentiate your offering with other players in your field? What are your strategies to achieve competitive advantage?

Our product is disruptive in the segment. Traditional vendors and competition is focused on deploying an agent on to every device that needs to connect to the network in order to discover and manage security threats. We have completely inverted this proposition – and are offering a purely agent-less and zero latency based solution. This means that users won’t in any way be disturbed as they connect their devices to the network and work. The IT policies in enterprises are increasingly being influenced by end users in the company these days. We plan to effectively leverage this shift in the decision making patterns of the IT companies and use it to our advantage.

Since you are offering an unconventional product, what steps are you taking to market your product, so that it is viewed favorably by prospective customers?

The folks in the line of business readily can see the benefits and advantages that our product brings to the table. However, to ensure that we have buy-in from all stakeholders in the enterprise, it is important to make them aware of our product and our strengths. Hence, brand building has become an important activity for us. We do it by positioning ourselves as the thought leaders in the BYOD security space. We are active on all the related forums on BYOD security; we publish and provide insights on BYOD security regularly in leading worldwide magazines, blogs. We are present in all leading conferences on this topic. These have helped us to gain visibility to a large extent. We are seeing some early successes. You should note also that we have not spent much by taking this course to market our product.

Second, recent developments in the world, especially the programs like PRISM from the US government have actually helped us open up new markets and opportunities. A lot of developing countries are now seriously considering evaluating indigenous security solutions rather than depending on MNC based vendors. This is one development which we plan to leverage effectively. In this regard, we are coming up with an alliance of likeminded security solution providers from the developing economies. We intend to form a common forum and through it, we want to engage with governments of emerging countries.

I would imagine that channels are an important aspect of you reaching out to the market. What has been your key learning, working with them?

Dealing with channel partners who operate in services space is entirely different on how one would work with channel partners in the products space. Having come out fresh from selling my services venture, I had a lot to unlearn in this aspect, and learn new ways of dealing with products selling channel partners. In the products space, the channel partners will listen to you only if you can help them solve today’s problems, or if you can solve a real need in the market that has not yet yielded satisfactory outcomes. As always, relationship and transparency builds in trust – and so, we have been able to rope in credible channel partners in East Asia, Europe and US.

I notice that you have repeat investors, even when the nature of your current company is vastly different from your earlier one. In this context, I would like to know what it takes for one to build sustainable relationships with your investors.

I guess being honest and being punctual with my investors helped me a lot. I respect human relationship without expecting anything from them.So, when I need anything it becomes easy to ask something. This is what I think has led to sustained faith being imposed by my investors on my ventures and plans.

You have taken steps to protect your IP by filing patents. Tell us your experiences as you filed your first patent?

I was completely naïve on the aspect of IP for my product. However, when I visited my friends in the Bay Area and discussed my product and its features with them, all of them educated me on the value of protecting my IP, especially given the disruptive nature of the offering. They forced me to file for a patent ASAP. Having done that, and after spending more time with them understanding the nuances and benefits of filing patents, I realize the merits of doing so. I would urge all product entrepreneurs to consider this seriously, especially when your product idea is in a niche, underdeveloped marketplace.

You have used media/PR effectively in both of your ventures. What tips do you have for product entrepreneurs in India regarding these activities?

In India, we tend to focus a lot on engineering/product development aspects, at the expense of other key and important aspects such as positioning and selling your products. One should realize that marketing your product is of paramount importance. Media and other online mechanisms such as blogs, online magazines etc are a great way to reach a wider set of audience. The key thing is to not do these activities in spurts, but as a regular habit. Results from these activities cannot be achieved overnight – it takes time, and a lot of hard work, patience and perseverance. You need to establish yourself as the go to person in the area of the product / offering. You also have to be honest and genuine in your views and opinions. This is how you can build credibility. In summary, never take your foot off the marketing pedal is what I would say.

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Are you asking the right questions?

Similar to the Chief Executive (CEO) of a company, a Product Manager should also question the process that goes into the creation of a product / service. Treating the organization like a living and breathing creature, a Product Manager should have in-depth understanding of the workings of its vital organs that are responsible for the following:

  1. Listening to external and internal business related signals
  2. Analyzing  the impact of the data signals collected from external and internal sources
  3. Taking appropriate actions based on impact analysis
  4. Measuring the effectiveness of the actions

If one or more of these vital functions are broken, then the organization cannot function at its peak capacity and may succumb to the dynamic business environment. One of the most critical questions to ask in any situation is…’What does it mean?’ ‘it’ could be an data point or an event or any other external  / internal stimulus. Then look at ‘it’ from different perspectives such as:

  • What does it mean from business perspective?
  • What does it mean from revenue perspective?
  • What does it mean from process perspective?
  • What does it mean from marketing perspective? Etc…

This line of questioning will help in the impact analysis across organization and take appropriate measure to react to the external stimulus.
This article focuses on ‘Listen’ and ‘Analyze’ aspect that has been shown in the virtuous cycle above.

Listening

A Product Manager should tap into and harvest as many sources of information as possible. Getting external business signals is not only a function of number of sources but also the frequencies with these sources are tapped into. It’s the continuous ‘chatter’ that really matters. Collecting information once in a while is not sufficient and may lead to incomplete information. Here are some of the questions that must be asked when validating the data collected from sources of listening

  1. What sources of data collection were used?

a. Internal

  • i. Customer service
  • ii. Marketing
  • iii. Sales, etc

b. External
      • i. Customers
      • ii. Competition
      • iii. Industry experts
      • iv. Company executives
      • v. Partners, etc

  1. How recent is the data?
  2. How frequently was this data collected?
  3. Which systems were leveraged to pull the data from? (e.g CRM)
  4. How many direct customer inputs does this data include?
        • How valuable are these customers to the business?
        • Which revenue and vertical segments do they belong to?
        • How frequently was the data processed and conclusions from that data refreshed?
        • Who has reviewed this data prior to being getting used in the road mapping process?

Inside Out Data Collection

Product Manager doesn’t necessarily have to wait for signals to come from outside. In order to be on the top of the game the Product Manager can also initiate ‘Inside Out’ process for getting the pulse of the market and business environment. For example during the process of building business case for new feature / product or when conceptualizing solution at the time of writing PRD, the Product Manager can reach out to Customers, partners and internal entities.

These are some of the questions that a Product Manager must ask of him / team in order to ensure inside out approach of data collection:

  1. How many customers were involved in PRD process?
  2. How frequently were the customers contacted?
  3. How many of those customers are expected to use the feature / product after it’s rolled out?
  4. How many customers are holding their breath for the feature to be rolled out?
  5. How many prospects are cancelling deals for the feature?
  6. In which revenue and value bands do these Customers fall under?
  7. How the does the actual customer interactions compare with planned customer interactions?

Other entities within the organization that can use the Inside out approach are Marketing and Sales teams. For example Marketing team can involve Customers in the process of creating case studies and white papers.

Analyze Impact (immediate, medium and long term)

Once the data is collected and processed the next critical activity is to analyze the impact of that on the various aspects of the organization. Understanding only the Product impact is not sufficient. A holistic organization impact assessment should be done. The impact assessment questions that follow can be asked to:

  • Assess the impact of external events such as a competitor make announcements or change in industry regulations, etc.
  • Assess the impact of features on roadmap, etc.

The goal is to really get a thorough understanding of the impact of external and internal events on the business.

  1. What is the revenue impact?
  2. What is the customer acquisition impact?
  3. What is the customer relationship impact?
  4. What is the new vertical (market) impact?
  5. What is the impact on strengthening position in the existing verticals?
  6. Impact on brand value of the company?
  7. What is the impact on employee skills acquisition?
  8. What is the marketing impact?
    1. Case study
    2. White paper
    3. References, etc
    4. How does the roadmap help plug competitive gaps?
      1. Fill gap
      2. Create gap
      3. How does the roadmap help displace competition?
      4. How does the roadmap help create though leadership?
      5. How does the roadmap differentiation from the competition?
      6. What Sales and Support changes need to be made?
      7. What Marketing changes need to be made?
      8. What changes need to be made to the Product development plan?

I’m sure most readers can add to this list of questions and make it even richer and actionable for Product Managers.  Remember the path to the right solutions begin by asking the right questions…

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KeyMails is making the email smart for Outlook users!

Still believe email is small and dying a slow death in the world of IMs, tweets and Facebook messages? Just have a look at the massively viral ‘Every Second on the Internet’ and scroll till the end to get a visual realization of how big a part of our life email still is. Email is still the first choice for internal communication and chatter within a number of organizations owing to its ubiquitous nature and presence, not that it was intended to be used that way.

A number of startups are now building tools to help users get more out the email ranging from helping you get the social media information to turning your inbox into a to-do list in itself. But it is no wonder that the biggest peeve with the email has been its overload. With independent researches confirming the belief held for long that the overdose of email has severe effects on productivity costing precious man hours and increased costs.

With the latest Gmail update the users found the presence of the tabbed inbox easily helping filter the signal vs noise between social media, promotions and genuine email content. But Bangalore based KeyMails is looking to provide a similar level of productivity for the Microsoft Outlook users. Keymails is a plugin for Outlook helping users to prioritize the email and the best part it becomes efficient over time based on the usage patterns.

What is KeyMails and how does it work?

The KeyMails team is reinforcing the belief that for a large number of corporate users the desktop/laptop is the device where the emails get done with. Thus the plugin keeps all of the information on the device itself and doesn’t send anything on the cloud. Options like the ability to archive a mail till a due date along with being fully functional offline makes it an impressive tool for Outlook 2010 users.  

KeyMails works within Outlook system by creating a separate folder which implies that the user is still using the familiar Outlook interface thereby reducing the learning curve. By default the system prioritizes the mails based on the previous usage patterns but moving on the user can upvote/downvote certain users or domains to affect their priority ranking in emails for the KeyMails folder.

But why email and why Outlook?

Pankaj Kulkarni is the founder of Colimetrics the parent company behind KeyMails and he has been in the corporate world long enough to understand the email usage tools and patterns. According to him there are enough corporate Outlook users out there to keep them busy in building more efficient tools. With such a big market, building tools for them just is the right place to be.

Users & Funding

KeyMails had a public launch in June of this year and right now they are working on adding more users. The current user base befits a product newly launched but they have seen individual beta users come from organizations ranging from Viacom to Infosys to even the White House.

The venture is partially self funded by the co-founding team of Pankaj and Phaniraj with the money coming from the sale of their previous venture S7 Software Solutions and venture money coming from investor Yogi Kandlikar, who also happens to serve as the teams resource in the Silicon Valley.

Product timeline

Pankaj promises that what the user sees right now is just a sneak peak of the things to come. In the coming months they would be focusing on marketing campaigns and documenting content to help make the on boarding process a breeze. 

The short term goal for KeyMails is to introduce a freemium model of the product to get the user a taste of the product which is currently priced at US $25/year or US $3/month with a 30 day trial period. Apart from this Pankaj emphasized on the long term vision of building a host of services and tools around and email and productivity itself. Which would begin with email diagnostics and team collaboration to knowledge management, to help document recurring issues in the organization to help the staff.

On one hand desktop users would find boon in the tool built by Colimetrics on the other lack of multi-device or mobile support could be a bummer in certain regard. But then no two email users are alike head on to Outlook and give your productivity a spin on KeyMails!

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Choice Overload prevents a Sale. The 4C approach may overcome this!

Too many choices make your customers just stop with browsing. They don’t buy and move on! So if you have too many looky-loos and not enough purchasers, you may be giving them Choice Overload!  Too many Free Trial users and not enough conversions? Choice Overload may be one of the problems in that case also. Whether you are an e-commerce business or designing a user interface, you may be overwhelming your intended audience with too many choices! Luckily there is a 4C approach, proven with social research, that may help you overcome this problem.

Here is a terrific TED talk by Social Researcher, Sheena Iyengar:

Sheena talks about experiments they did with handing out free samples of 6 different kinds of jam vs handing out 24 different kinds of jam. They found out that more people bought the jam when they were shown fewer choices, only 6 kinds of jam!

More people put money in retirement savings accounts when they were shown only a handful of retirement finds than when they were shown hundreds of options!

That’s the Choice Overload problem! Too many choices, people don’t choose and move on! Nice insights! But how do you overcome Choice Overload? Sheena recommends the 4C approach.

1. CUT – Cut the number of choices you are presenting. Whether it’s your e-commerce site or your user interface design, too many choices frustrate people. You need some choice, but too many choices may hurt your objective!

2. CONCRETIZE – Make your choices vivid! Don’t describe something. Show pictures of what happens when someone chooses something. Show the consequences of making a choice, not just more about the features of that choice. Talk about benefits of a choice!

3. CATEGORIZE – Chunk your choices into Categories that make it simple for your customers to narrow down what their choices are. Don’t overwhelm them with too many choices upfront! Make pre-defined combinations of packages where you could. In User Interface design, Wizards are a great example of making choices on behalf of the user, making it easier for them to start quickly.

4. CONDITION – Condition for Complexity! – Make simple choices easy to make and hide complex choices for later, once they have some experience with you.

Great research whose applicability can extend beyond just social research! Can help a lot in product start-up companies in designing and presenting choices or in designing user interfaces.

When you have to make a choice and don’t make it, that is in itself a choice – William James