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Explara – The new journey begins…

There are some companies which start their business with a bang but can’t sustain their growth. Then there are other firms who seize market opportunities and add value to it. These companies succeed in the Indian Market and then get ready to go Global, including taking on the hard to penetrate Asian Markets. The following Interview is of a company that has reached a turning point and  is ready to leave their footprint on the world markets. With new products in the making and a new brand name,they are ready to take Asia by storm. In discussion with Product Nation, Santosh Panda Founder Explara (formerly Ayojak) shares his strategy on the company’s plans ahead.

What was the vision with which you launched the company and how has the journey been so far? 

We saw a need in the small to medium event organizers to streamline their businesses. These organizers did not have any technology input/help and we thought we could provide the same through this platform. We launched Ayojak in September 2008 and after adding ticketing and other features to the product we upgraded it the following year. In 2008 we started with listing of events with 4-5 customers. At that time event organizers were using handouts etc. to reach out to their customers and could not anticipate how many customers would come for the event. In 2009 our turnover was 1.5 Lakhs with 5 customers that went up to Rs.30 Lakhs in 2010, clearly establishing that there was a need in the market for the product which we were offering. In 2011 we clocked revenues of Rs. 1.69 crores and since then have been growing at over 75% year on year and today we handle over 300 events per month.

What was the competition like in 2009?

There was hardly any competition, the infrastructure was getting built, we had to call customers and tell them how to use it. There were people who sold only a particular event and nobody was looking at the platform as a one stop solution for all event needs.

Ayojak has gone in for a rebranding exercise; do tell us about the same. What prompted you to choose a different name? 

Initially we were looking at solving a B to B problem, as in how to run an event, get details of people who are coming, collection of entry fee etc. We chose to address these problems for the event organizers. Therefore the focus was event organizers. But after some time the name which we had  chosen – Ayojak, was perceived to be more of a name for an event management company and thus called for rebranding. Also since we were operating only in India, even then people had problems pronouncing the name clearly.

We thought, that if we need to target B to C customers and look international we should have a name which will be easy to pronounce and at the same time clearly be able to define to the customers what we were all about.

We want to be known as the go to site for any event organizer. Hence an opportunity to all event organizers and customer to Explore hence – Explara

Which other markets other than India are you looking at operating in and why?

We are looking at Singapore, South Africa, Philippines, to begin with, since we have already operated in a tough market like India, the learning has been immense and we feel that we will be able to apply the same in other developing markets, which are equally challenging. Our foray into international arena would be by end July.

What are the new features which you are planning to launch to supplement your existing product lines?

In our view the next two features could very well be the game changers. Any event organizer today still has two problems, Firstly, to identify who all have come for an event and who are yet to come. Through a new product  – Entry Management, we will enable organizers through a smart phone to read the bar code/QR Code/NFC for every visitor attending the event, thus will at all times know the details of people who are in the event, yet to come or are outside the event.

Secondly, In India 30-40% of the attendees still come directly at the event. To help the organizers with this problem, we will give them an app based Box Office application which they can use to scan credit cards, debit cards etc, at the venue itself, thus ensuring that end moment gate collections are just as easy.

What advice would you give to product startups based on your early experience in the last few years?

Communicate clearly too all employees that you are there to stay, thereby keep reiterating to your employees the same message amplifying the fact that you are there for the long term.

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Lead, but consciously nurture talent

My wife forwarded me an article recently that Booz & Co. had written on India’s leadership challenge. You can read the full article here.

This confirmed something I have long suspected. While there are great leaders in the Indian business, there are very few great companies. Let me explain what I mean by that. In the business, we are in, i.e. IT, some companies have done very well financially, and yet, if you talk to employees at the very same companies, you will realize very quickly that folks aren’t happy. That they feel they are under-valued and under-utilized. That they have limited growth opportunities. That they are stuck in a rut. That has made for companies that can execute well, but cannot innovate.

That niggly attrition problem that so plagues the India IT business? Well, guess what, it doesn’t have anything to do with making an extra buck somewhere else. It has everything to do with having equally dreary workplaces that stifle growth. So if one has a choice to make a little more money doing the exact same mind-numbing work, well, that’s what one does. This is not just me talking. Check this out

I can empathize. I’ve been there too. 

So what’s the point of this post? After all this is supposed to be a blog about the software product business in India. 

The reason I write this is because we have an opportunity to create an eco-system of companies in India that are creative workplaces. Where individuals want to have fun and innovate. If we want world-class innovation out of India it has to start with the work culture. So to that end, I jotted down some thoughts on what we should be consciously thinking about.

Money is only a motivator in the short-term  – Many companies believe, IMO incorrectly, that giving people great compensation is more than enough. This thinking is especially prevalent in sales groups within companies. While you have to compensate your employees adequately and at wages that are competitive, money is really not a great motivator. And if this is the only carrot you have, there is nothing stopping your best employees from seeking greener (more carroty) pastures. 

MBAs are great managers(leaders), NOT – Many years back, just starting out in the workplace,  there was a clear hierarchy in new hires. There were the MBAs (preferably from IIMs) at the top of the heap, then there were the engineers (preferably from IITs) in the middle, and then were MCAs. The MBAs were fast tracked on to management roles whereas the rest of the people were expected to be the worker bees. That is a ridiculous way to build an organization. Many years later, the thinking persists and the results are evident. A degree does not make a great manager. Empathy and interpersonal skills, among other things, do. 

Doing a job well is not a predictor of management/leadership talent – I have seen this many times in my work life. In one particular instance, a person who was a fabulous individual contributor was an exceptionally bad team player. Well, he was elevated to a very senior position because of the fantastic work he had done as an individual contributor. I have lost touch with him so I don’t know how he fared. He is a very smart individual so I assume he figured things out but the company had done no favors to him or the company, by not grooming him for that role.

Just some thoughts on a topic I feel strongly about. I keep hearing of all the fabulous things that are happening in the Indian product eco-system and I am excited about that. But we must always be aware of the cultural baggage we come with. And the cultural baggage has a strong authoritarian component to it. Where commands are given and dissent is not tolerated. If we want to build a generation of leaders that can spawn multiple companies doing innovative work, this needs to change.

But all is not doom and gloom. Things are changing. One of my clients, Moonraft Innovation Labs, a UX design shop out of Bangalore has created a relaxed work environment to foster creativity. Titles are fluid, no assigned seating and an entire floor devoted to artsy endeavors. The quality of work they are putting out shows their approach is working. This is just one example. I am sure there are many more. The objective should be to drive the old command-and-control structure into extinction.

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

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SaaS Pricing – the role of customer value proposition

The trend of pure-play SaaS providers and on-premise software ISVs diversifying into SaaS is on the rise. SaaS revenue for global top 10 ISVs forms 40% of all software revenues. According to Gartner, the SaaS revenues will grow annually at 17.5% to form 24% of all software revenues in 2016. This would amount to USD 22.5 billion up from USD 14.5 billion in 2012. While SaaS makes a perfect business sense in the long term, in the short term, SaaS providers face unprofitable business for two or more years among other challenges in marketing and product management. SaaS has given birth to new ways of pricing like fixed-fee or usage based pricing, pay-as-you-go, freemium model and so on. Pricing is an important aspect of SaaS business.

I will be covering SaaS pricing through a series of blogs on topics like concept of value pricing, role of segmentation and tiers, pricing structure, metrics, managing pricing over product life cycle, competition and product positioning. I start with concepts of value and role of segmentation.

A Google search throws up ‘n’ number of SaaS pricing models. But success of any pricing model is always rooted in a sound value proposition of the offering. Cost plus pricing is common, seems financially prudent thing to do but is known to leave a lot of money on the table. Also remember, even when offered free the customers would not pick up your offering if they do not perceive value in it. The first step in pricing strategy is to ascertain value of your offering.

Demonstrate value of your offering

The economic and emotional values are the primary drivers of purchase decision. The economic value of your offering is has two components – price of the next best alternative and the value of what differentiates your offering from the next best. You have no control on the competitors’ price. Therefore differentiation is the way to go to provide better overall customer value and better price. Sometimes customers may not perceive the value. It is critical your marketing communication ensure what is important to customer, specially differentiated features and benefits come to the buyers’ notice. So develop your value proposition and communicate it clearly to the customers.

A simple equation for the value proposition is (Value = Benefits – Costs). For this, you must quantify the economic value of your products features together with the emotional and psychological value. One way to do this is to quantify impact of your offering on customers’ revenue, productivity, profitability and so on. Here is an example of computing economic value of a feature.

A midsize software product MNC in India was considering moving to Google Apps. Google Apps offer benefits to two entities in an organization – IT and end-user. The IT benefits include cost savings on licenses, IT infrastructure and operations and maintenance. The end user benefits include – 1) productivity gain due to improved email search, spam filtering, archiving and improved response times, 2) quicker issue resolution and decision making thru shared editing of documents and 3) improved response time to customers and partners. Let us see how we can calculate productivity gain from just one benefit, say, and faster email search. Assume –300 employees, 5 day workweek, 50 work weeks, average per hour employee cost of $10, average 1 hour email usage per day, and a 10% saving (estimate based on previous implementations). This translates into an annual productivity gain worth 300 x 1 x 5 x 50 x 0.1 x $10 = $75 K.  The total benefits (productivity gains + IT cost savings) for three years operations worked out at $81K, $111K and $123K. Total subscription costs in this period were $18,900 (300 x $63 per user) per year. There were initial costs for transitioning from legacy system, testing, pilot and training amounting to $5K.  The overall risk adjusted net present value of benefits (including several other benefits like archiving, SPAM filtering, threading, IM etc.) was $205K. The customer went ahead with the purchase.

Segment your customers

All customers do not have same needs, value perceptions and the willingness to pay. Targeting the whole population with one product and one price is not the way t best financial performance. It leads to leaving money on the table for some customers who are willing to pay higher and losing out another set of customers who can’t afford the price. Thankfully, the customers can be sub grouped or segmented based on certain similarities. Value based segmentation helps create pricing commensurate with the perceived value by those customer segments.

Segmentation requires creativity in addition to analysis. It must reflect your marketing strategy. For example, Zoho, Google Apps and Microsoft Office 365, compete in online document management area (word processor, spread sheet, presentations, email).  However, Zoho Docs views the market in three segments represented by personal, standard and premium licenses priced at $0, $3 and $5 per month per user. Office 365 has more complex view of the same market. It segments it into seven segments, namely small, midsize and enterprise business, education, government, professional and home with fourteen different licenses ($0 to $20 per month per user)! In contrast, Google Apps has just one offering at $5 per month per user. So, why does Microsoft has seven segments and fourteen price points? A closer study would reveal that the breadth and depth of features / functionality offered by Office 365 far outstrips Zoho docs and Google apps. It allows creation of diverse bundles of features and pitch them to different segments at price points that meet respective value perceptions. By doing this Microsoft is able to capture the students segments (low paying capacity) while maintaining premium pricing for the enterprise. Microsoft would lose both lot of money and a large chunk of market if they decided on just one segment with one price. Interestingly, it is possible to create segmentation and variable pricing without bundling different sets of features i.e., on an identical offering. For example, railways transports grains at much cheaper rates compared to manufactured consumer goods in the same wagon. There is very little difference in the inputs that go into transporting the two items. I have yet to see this in software or SaaS.

One more point in favour of segmentation is as follows. In a high fixed cost industry like software and SaaS, it is a good strategy to capture the large volume of customers in the long tail with a price that is just equal to the offering’s variable cost. This is good for revenue. Generally, more segments the better. The factors that limit number of segments are complexity and sales administration cost, smaller differentiation between the offering for adjacent segments and customer propensity to select the lower priced segment when differentiation is small.

I will close this blog with a quiz. Given below is the old pricing page of Serverdensity (http://www.serverdensity.com). Serverdensity is a provider of cloud based server monitoring. They have tiered pricing based on number of servers that a customer has. What is good, bad and ugly about this pricing?

Please look for the next blog on SaaS pricing metrics.

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3 Reasons why stories will help you win business

Your product does something unique and interesting and you tell people and they go …. Oh well, that’s great and walk away. Would you agree that they just do not get it? All of us have faced this problem sometime or the other.

Let me emphasize this with an example:

A large company was pitching to my customer for a partnership deal. Four French guys and I represented my customer. Into the presentation, they used words and phrases like propensity, appetite, whole nine yards of solution, womb to tomb, boil the ocean, and sweating the assets among many other jargons. In 20 minutes, couple of French guys almost started dozing off, one of them started fiddling with his blackberry, and the other one started ferociously working on the laptop. Obviously, there were not any questions from our side at the end of the presentation as they lost us much early in the pitch. The partnership talk also did not move forward.     

This anecdote emphasizes the fact that higher order words and phrases should not be a part of your vocabulary, as it does not let you connect with your audience. How do you go about connecting?

  1. Stories are a brilliant way to connect with your audience. They help people understand, remember, and re-tell them and this is how Dan and Chip Heath define sticky communication in their book, ‘Made to stick’.
  2. Human beings remember the narratives better than remembering unrelated stuff. This is what we have been doing right from childhood.
  3. Use stories to substantiate your product positioning – A positioning statement per se is a placeholder in your website, presentations and other collaterals. Beyond that, it actually does not do anything unless stories substantiate them.

Now, how do we go about creating stories? Isn’t that an artistic pursuit and a rare skill that only a few have? This is the common belief about creating stories, but in reality, you do not have to be a master storyteller to create your product story. Product creation itself is a story and you are addressing a need or a gap in the market. This would provide the benefits that your customers would get out of your product.

Your product stories ought to have the context defined, action performed by your product and the results expected from it.  Why don’t you start defining the context, action and results of your product and write down everything that comes to your mind? Put them together as a story once you have all the information. It’s that simple!

I would be sharing tips in the subsequent blog posts on what makes a great story, what do good stories have in common, how you can use your personal stories and how you can use stories in your pitch.

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Fifth iSPIRT Playbook Roundtable: Product Manager, the Skill in Demand

It is a cliché to say product management is both art and science. The product manager’s function encompasses a range of tasks, only limited by the company’s vision. Deep Nishar, Senior VP, Products and User Experience, at LinkedIn, told the audience at Nasscom Product Conclave 2012 that, “product managers should have brain of an engineer, heart of a designer and speech of a diplomat.” The product manager with such an expanse of skill set is hard to find in India. With the intention of bringing experiential learning and to ignite conversations among product entrepreneurs so that they learn from each other, iSPIRT, the think-tank for startups, is organizing Playbook Roundtables that facilitate transferring of key knowledge through an open discussion. In the fifth Playbook Roundtable organized at Chennai by iSPIRT, Sridhar Ranganathan, who has rich experience as a product manager, shared anecdotes quoting from positions he held at Zoho, Yahoo, and InMobi to define who a product manager is.

Sridhar’s naval architecture career did not last long. A chance meeting with Sekar Vembu, founder of Vembu Technologies, landed him a job at AdventNet (all three Vembu brothers, Sridhar, Sekar, and Kumar were part of AdventNet then). He was placed to manage a team that was working on a product. Not a geek, he took three months to understand Java Script. A management shake-up at AdventNet properly designated him as product manager. Then began his tryst with product management. At Zoho, the discipline of product conception, execution, and delivery was practiced with a high level of checks and balances. With a small team and margin for error almost non-existent, Sridhar learned to work with constraints to deliver software products. Moving on, he headed the team working on Maps at Yahoo. This proved to be challenging as managerial oversight was nonexistent but any senior level meetings thrashed any feeling of achievement. Sridhar by now had crafted the art of product management and he had an excellent team to work with. Then at InMobi, his challenge was scale. He was able to successfully navigate through the phase where InMobi’s ad impressions went up from 50 million per month to 2 billion per month.

The product culture

There were 15 participants from OrangeScape (Suresh Sambandam and team), Fresh Desk (Smrithi, product manager), Kallos (George Vettah), LPCube (Lakshman Pillai), Array Shield (Vasanthan Kumar), ContractIQ (Ashwin), Twenty19.com (Karthikeyan Vijayakumar), RailsFactory (Mahendran), Fix Nix (Shanmugavel and team), Social Beat (Suneil Chawla), and Humble Paper (Vivek Durai), represented by its mostly founders. Suresh was keen to know how with a small product team (Zoho instituted a culture of a seven-member team to work on a product), Zoho was able to recruit college drop-outs and train them to work on products. Sridhar said if the company is big enough and has a strong culture (such as escalation of wrong codes, build times, and customer complaints to the highest level if not done within a set time frame), such experiments are possible. In Google, you know the person who is going to work because of the recruitment process but at Zoho, you have to groom the person.

Sridhar strongly emphasized that data plays a big role in product management and went on to say that “if you build technology products, your core data model and technology stack determines your business model.” He listed various challenges faced by organizations such as SalesForce to remove duplication of data. For example, to change a primary key, Zoho needed 14 months. George Vettah added that Ramco had to reengineer its offering after SAP effectively took away its market share. Sridhar gave away one more of his product philosophies: “If there is a constraint in the product, and if you have the market, you could only pray that the market does not go away till you reengineer the product.”

Education to Product: the product continuum

Through a graph, he illustrated the various stages of the product continuum: Taking problem complexity on one axis and scale or impact on the other, he said, for low problem complexity and low scale, education (of the customer to tell them why your product) is needed. At the next level, process needs to be defined (to quote an example, the process of how to apply for a passport online), Still further, at the higher complexity and more users, you need to define the procedure (how to fill in the form of the passport application), and still at a higher level, you need to provide a solution to the problem. But for a very complex problem with the highest impact (nonlinear), you need a product. So by understanding the need and the impact, you can execute your product strategy.

The product manager

He said that the fundamental role of the product manager is to identify the product that has the maximum probability of success. “The success metrics of a product determines the product manager’s action,” he added. This was followed by an interesting discussion on how the founder passes the baton to the next product manager as the company scales up. Kaushik from OrangeScape provided a fine example. The product manager has to work on three aspects: hygiene, spoiler, differentiator. A hygiene part of the product is not impactful but without it the product wouldn’t work. The spoiler is beating the features of the competition, and differentiator is the difference that your product makes. Further, at the first level, the product manager has to find users for the product, at the next the user level should be scaled, say from 2000 users to a million users, and further at the next level, if there is a drop in user level due to competition, the project manger has to devise ways to retain the user level. These three different stages require product mangers of different skill sets.

Finding the right product manager

Finding the right product manager is a challenge. Sridhar said the right product manager is identified by his ability to align with the vision of your organization and should have the potential to grow with the organization. For him, the hiring decisions are not done in a day. Sometimes it stretches to two months as he engages in long conversations with the potential candidate. Then an interesting discussion on organization structure where most of the times the product manger is asked to “influence without authority” was discussed. “The product manager has to be temperamentally strong,” stressed Sridhar. In many organizations, the developers and engineers are not direct reports of the product manager. Engineering team is headed by a senior engineering head. But your input on the engineer decides his grading. So at most positions, product managers have to work with teams that don’t directly report to them. By telling the team the importance of the product and by selling the vision (by exercising influence without authority), you need to get the work done. Smrithi, from FreshDesk, said influence without authority was one of the attributes looked for in a product manager in her earlier employment. George Vettah added that research has shown that for product managers did not possess strong right brain thinking (creative) or left brain thinking (analytical), but somewhere that balanced both.

Building the product, managing the team

The ideal way to enforce build discipline is to have a release ready after every build. This is practically impossible but if achieved, gives the product management team an edge on product release. This also makes sure that the product isn’t broken. Several R&D prototyping needs to be done before the product is handed over for completion to the engineering team. Once the product is fixed and passed to engineering team, it’s difficult to tweak again. So spend as much time in R&D rather than “release early, release often.” Sridhar said managing multiple products only requires you to have user interface and data operability aligned.

The product manager has to find the right time to pivot. Sridhar asked the participants to read Lean Startups by Eric Ries. The author has dwelt at length on pivoting. Failures are part of product management but how the product manager negotiates such down moments counts. The product manager has to be mentally strong. For any of the product manager initiatives, winning the trust of the stakeholders is key, stressed Sridhar. He added that the satisfaction of seeing the product completed after your visual thinking on it is immense. He said that the product manager’s role is cerebral as it involves a lot of thinking.

There were intense discussions when each of the issues was discussed among the participants. Vivek Durai, who is now solely developing a product, said his priority listing has changed and his to-do list has a lot of elements to add up to. Kaushik said his respect for his previous product managers had risen after this discussion. Suresh felt some more improvements can be made to the discussion format. Suneil felt that the discussions were insightful and opened his world to product management. Karthikeyan Vijayakumar said he would implement a lot of stuff from the discussions.

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Aurus Network CourseHub: Delivering on the promise of classroom-in-the-cloud

Aurus Network was founded in 2010 with the vision to make quality education accessible to masses at affordable prices. It is revolutionizing the way distance/online education is delivered. Aurus offers CourseHub, its flagship product, which is a cloud-based solution for educational institutions (higher education, test prep and training,schools, etc.) to capture, store and deliver (live or on-demand) lectures online. The company has been funded by Indian Angel Networks and is the recipient of Microsoft Bizspark 2012 Startup Challenge in cloud category. This is a review of their flagship product CourseHub and the company.

Introduction

When I was in college and bunked classes (which was fairly often; it was hard to get up for 8 am classes), what usually got me through the course were the notes photocopied from one of the studious guys of the class. It was not the best solution, but was good enough. Then, in my 3rd year, my college introduced a special studio classroom where one of the course professors used to hold his lectures – a sound-proof, sanitized room where the professor used to write on a paper with marker which would show up on screen for us, and for recording. The recording was supposed to be available as a bunch of video cassettes (yes, I am that old!) in the library. It was painful to attend these classes because they felt so unlike a classroom, and of course, it was too complex to watch these recordings so I never watched any, and photocopied notes continued to save the day.

I was 15 years too early! If it was 2013, I probably would be sitting in a regular classroom whose lectures were being recorded, and recordings were available right after the class, on my course portal online, in an easy-to-consume format on the various devices I own. Recorded (and indexed) lectures would allow me to have lectures-on-demand, which is so cool.

This is what Aurus Network offers through its flagship product CourseHub. It is a cloud-based solution for educational institutions (higher education, test prep and training schools, etc.) to capture, store and deliver (live or on-demand) lectures online. CourseHub is also offered to corporates to manage remote training sessions and schools for capturing their classes.

Aurus Network was founded in 2010 by Piyush Agrawal and Sujeet Kumar, and is based in Bangalore. 

The Product

Usage Scenarios

There are 3 primary usage scenarios for CourseHub:

  1. Lecture Capture: A lecturer captures his/her lecture for offline viewing by students or for creating blended learning content (for MOOC or other delivery mechanisms).
  2. Self-paced learning: A lecturer’s class is recorded to be viewed later by students to allow them to review the content at their own pace. Lecturer can edit the video and add pop quizzes and assessments online. This is usually used by universities.
  3. Extend the classroom: In this scenario, a lecturer’s class is streamed in real-time to remotely located classrooms or students. This allows the lecturer to have a very large classroom and have it closer to where the students are, without spending time in physical travel or money to build a single-location large classroom. This is usually used by training and test preparation centers.

For all of these scenarios to work, the capture device needs to be set up in a studio or classroom, which is a 1-time activity.  This is typically done with a server class machine connected to internet via high speed broadband connection (higher the speed, better is the quality of video streamed and stored) and a capture device (HD camera and microphone) connected to the machine.

Development

The product was conceptualized in Nov 2010 in response to the problem posed by their first client. Their V1 was released in Nov 2010 and V2 in Feb 2011 with the first deployment and roll-out to 10 centers across India. Their tech team comprises of about 10 people, who are working on various technologies like video compression, video streaming, computer vision, large scale load balancing and engaging front end technologies.

Most of the innovation in the product has been achieved by applying technically simple but important insights about customer behavior and preferences. For e.g., one of the USPs of the solution is that they are able to deliver almost HD quality videos at as low as 200 Kbps, while other conventional solutions (web conferencing, video conferencing) require atleast 1 Mbps or more for the same. This has been achieved by prioritizing the encoding parameters which matter more for the viewer while watching educational videos (like clear audio, sharp writing etc.) rather than doing a one-size fits all kind of video encoding.

Features

Some of the product features are as follows:

  1. Record video with any HD camera and microphone
  2. Enable automatic focusing on teacher with Intelligent software based tracker
  3. Teachers can teach in their natural style
  4. Schedule captures in advance
  5. Automatic archiving to create media library in the cloud
  6. Integration with client’s website
  7. Integration with Learning Management Systems like Moodle, Blackboard, etc.

Differentiators

There are a few standout features in the product which are well worth the mention:

  1. They can deliver HD video quality at 200Kbps, which makes this available to all students who have a broadband connection. Other solutions use much higher bandwidth (around 1 Mbps in some cases). The reason they are able to do this is because they can optimize their compression algorithms using their knowledge of what is important for students (clear audio and writing is much more important than clearly visible instructor for example).
  2. No human intervention is required (after initial setup) to capture, store and deliver lectures, they have fully automated the solution (including tracking the presenter, managing connectivity disruption, etc.).
  3. It is a cloud-based solution, so clients can try out their solution without any hardware setup.
  4. Aurus provides a home-grown Learning and Content Management System which allows their clients to manage users and lecturers, edit video lectures, and add quizzes and assessments to the videos. This means that the clients get a complete product.

Market Adoption

Typical market for CourseHub in India are test preparation and training institutes like Career Point, Career Launcher, etc. and universities. CourseHub is sold on a monthly/yearly subscription model, for example Rs. 20K a month can get you 500 hours of lecture time (1 lecture + 99 students in a 1-hour lecture will constitute 100 hours of lecture time) and 50GB of storage (500 hours will fit into 50GB). However, for someone in the market for such a solution, there are many options to choose from:

  1. VSAT based classrooms (Hughes is the biggest player) – These are expensive to set up and require dedicated hardware, but offer highly reliable infrastructure
  2. Internet-based classrooms (like Aurus) – Some of these require expensive studio setup, while others, like Aurus, can work with regular hardware.
  3. Ad-hoc systems: You can use youtube (or other video streaming sites), Google Hangouts and some local capture method to enable a large part of functionality of capture, store and distribute, and save some money. Operational hassle will be larger.
  4. No system: this is still not a critical need for educational institutes and a large number of these institutes just don’t have any solution in place.

For all these solutions, technology is an important piece, but so is the overall package (that includes setup, operations, essentially IT-free solution), since the clients are not likely to be tech-savvy enough to manage these technological solutions.

Currently, Aurus is the technology solution provider of type #2 – allowing their clients to create internet-based classrooms. They have about 30 clients out of which around 20 are actively using their system. They have a healthy pipeline of future deals, sales cycle tends to be long and seasonal (because of academic session dependency).

The Roadmap

With the goals of capturing more clients in India in different segments (Corporate, Training and Test Prep, Schools) and also expanding outside India, Aurus has an ambition pipeline of features and innovations.

Product Roadmap

Over next 12 months or so, Aurus intends to deliver the following to its clients:

  1. Launching a completely Do-It-Yourself version of CourseHub, which will allow institutes based out of India to use the product
  2. Launching more features to allow professors/trainers to effectively analyze student performance and take pro-active actions
  3. For professors, adding multiple ways to lecture capture in their classrooms – using a dedicated capture appliance, an android app or manual uploading

Technology Roadmap

Aurus hopes to deliver following technology enhancements in this period:

  1. Enhanced Capture – Enhance and decouple capture process from software so that the solution can work with any kind of capture device and hence can allow them to go global. This includes allowing the use of high-end camera (which ship with Android OS) and remotely controlling it from server through an Android app.
  2. Deep LMS integration – Current LMS integrations are very shallow since it uses LTI. Deeper LMS integrations will enable more complex use cases to be supported.
  3. API solution – Allowing API level access to the video catalog to enable integration into client’s portal will allow CourseHub to be more tightly integrate with client portals.

Competitive Landscape

Companies offering such a solution (capture, store and distribute – live or on-demand) are very hot in US. Echo360 is a Steve Case backed venture that focuses purely on universities and offers socializing the learning (learn in groups and collaborate using social tools) and flipping the classroom (use classroom to discuss and clarify doubts rather than lecturing). Sonic Foundry is a public company, and Tegrity is a McGraw Hill company, both offering solution similar to CourseHub.

One of the reasons for this space being hot is the fact that flipping the classroom is becoming the craze, and with MOOC (Massively Open Online Course) also being the next big thing; capture, store and distribute of video lectures suddenly seems like a key technology piece to allow everyone to offer a MOOC.

In India, it is still early days for flipping classrooms and offering MOOCs. CourseHub is primarily being used to extend the classroom, and make star lecturers available in remote classrooms, in addition to using it for self-paced learning by making recorded lectures available for later viewing. However, as Indian universities catch up to these concepts, Aurus seems to be well-positioned to be a leader in the space if it plays its cards well.

The Road Ahead

If I have to go to college again, I will probably bunk again (while managing the attendances somehow since they are mandatory now). When I do so, I will probably still go for photocopied notes because they are so brief and quick to go through. I would really love to look up appropriate pieces of short video clips of the lecture when I get stuck in the notes so having notes and videos cross-indexed will be so useful; also useful will be the ability to find other lectures on the same micro-topic and try to really understand it from different perspectives. Essentially, videos become any other type of content which can be searched, used and mashed up together to create learning assets that are reusable and easily consumable.

Aurus is a pure technology provider in education space. It becomes apparent when you go through their solutions, their brochure, or the cool features they showcase on their website – they are technology-heavy. However, education sector doesn’t yield itself well to pure technology players, primarily because technology is hard to use, and very few institutes have technical/IT teams on their rolls. So what they need is complete solution (including service, personnel, etc.) so that it becomes plug-and-play for them. Aurus needs to be on top of its clients’ complete technology needs and should be willing to offer various value-added services.

Blended learning holds lots of potential, be it universities, training institutes, corporates or schools. Aurus seems to be well poised to help them deliver on this promise through technology.

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Product Manager, or Product Experience Manager?

In my last post Experiencing the product, or productizing the experience?, I talked about my experience with SiteZ and how their overall experience left much to be desired even though the core product was good enough. In this post, I will try to analyze things that went wrong which shouldn’t have.

Here are 5 things that went wrong for SiteZ if I look from a customer’s perspective:

  1. They misled the user about the time it takes to register. 
  2. They didn’t allow the user to abort the registration attempt gracefully (which left the email address behind and created rest of the mess). 
  3. They were not forthcoming about who is sending me these spam emails (the email address was hidden with a display name that was the advertiser’s). 
  4. They exposed a feature to me (unsubscribe) which didn’t work
  5. They didn’t give me an easy way to delete my account – emails bounced, UI didn’t have a button to delete, etc. 

It is easy to jump to the conclusion that the feature designers have a malicious intention: somehow get people’s email id and keep spamming them. However, let’s assume that is not the case, and that this is a case of incremental features ruining a product. With this assumption in mind, let’s proceed to analyze how each of these situations came to be:

  1. Misleading ad – Assuming it was not intentional, there are 2 possibilities:
    1. Marketing person would have asked someone in products about whether it can be done in 30 seconds, and someone said yes.
    2. Marketing person asked to tweak the flow to make it finish (with basic details) in 30 seconds, but the development team didn’t do the work and instead reused the longer flow.
  2. No graceful registration abort – This is purely a feature design or prioritization issue, probably they didn’t think abort is an important use case.
  3. Spam mail identity – I think the assumption would be that these mails go out after user has agreed to be spammed, so they would know (this information is anyway mentioned at the bottom of the mail in small fonts.
  4. Unsubscribe not working – Again, feature prioritization issue. Not having unsubscribe button is probably illegal in such spams, so the next best thing was to not code the functionality.
  5. Can’t delete account – A feature prioritization issue. Account deletion is usually an expensive operation (complicated to implement and get it right, and heavy on processing) and so someone somewhere decided it was not important.

A question that comes up: are we talking about one feature, one product, or one experience? Should the feature designer of registration flow worry about spam mail identity? Aren’t these very distinct features?

Yes, they are indeed distinct features. At the same time, they need to co-exist peacefully, without causing troubles for each other. SiteZ is one big product, which has multiple features in it which need to plug into each other, and play well with each other. However, if we say SiteZ is a product, it becomes hard to explain #1 above: who should be responsible for advertiser misleading the user. This is the reason why I would like to think of SiteZ as one big experience. Advertising is just augmenting the experience, or in some cases act as the invitation to try the experience. If a restaurant’s brochure misleads the customer and entices him with a 30% discount, which turns out to be only 10%, it is still a problem for the restaurant.

So who is responsible for SiteZ product experience? Enter Product Management team (see this discussion thread too). I would like to think it will be Chief Product Officer or VP – Product Management who has ultimate responsibility for the experience. Is it fair to product management team to have such a broad charter? I think it is fair, because the organization needs it and there is no group better positioned to do this.

To recap, here is what we have established so far:

  1. SiteZ had multiple features and services dysfunctional which combined to give a terrible overall experience.
  2. Even though they are diverse features and services, in the interest of the customer, overall SiteZ experience needs to be treated as one big product experience.
  3. The group that owns this one big product experience is Product Management team. They are in the best position to do so

In the next post, we will see how a product management team should have operated so that such issues can be minimized/avoided. Stay tuned!

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Pixel Jobs – Product review of a job portal by designers for designers

Pixel Jobs Image

Pixel Jobs, designed by the talented folks at Sparklin, is a refreshing look at the boring world of job portals. The problem to solve was simply, “How to get a job post seen by the best creative talent?” An old fashion job-board served as a physical metaphor to yield a clean, simple and inviting job portal cheekily named – Pixel Jobs. It has nifty filters to make searching easy and a straightforward form that allows you post a job in a few minutes.

Pixeljobs Screenshot

 

 

On April 3rd, Avinash and I had freewheeling chat with the young founders of Team Sparklin – Gurpreet Bedi and Himanshu Khanna – on the hows and whys behind the product. 

How did it all began? Are you trying to become Cleartrip for the job space?

“Pixel Jobs really started based on internal need of hiring the best designers. Sparklin started a Facebook group last year to reach out to the designers through personal networks and within a short time close to 1200 people had signed up. That clearly indicated a need for a specialized job site for designers. There are already sites for coders, so why not for designers. This is purely a niche product,” on the why.

“There was a concern on excessive moderating to ensure the postings to be creatively-relevant and accurate. I had to overly moderate the Facebook group for the first couple of months. But then everything kind of fell in line. The relevancy and quality of postings sort of improved on their own. Very little moderation was required. That’s when an open job forum became a viable next step. We still moderate but only for completeness.”

So what is the initial marketing strategy?

“We have deliberately taken a slow approach towards marketing this portal. First, we want to ensure that the platform is robust enough to handle large volumes. Second, by only allowing a selected well-known companies in the creative domain to post (for now) will increase the quality and credibility enough to not warrant a serious marketing push,” elaborating on the initial word of mouth approach.

How is the product going to evolve over next few months? Semantic search, LinkedIn connect, company-based hosting, additional views, etc. are some gaps.

“This is only a version 0. We are improving the product on a daily basis. All these features and many more are in the pipeline and you will see a gradual improvement over next few months. For instance we are working on an Android app to launched soon and targeting companies to use Pixel Jobs to host jobs on their sites. They can just use our embed our code with their branding on their site. There is a big need for this. For example, some of our clients already have a job board on their site but prefer to here.”

Even though the initial version is impressive, there are some user experience improvements to consider. For instance, extending the card metaphor by not going to the next page for a more fluid interaction (too many new windows), introducing category tags as alternate searching mechanism (search only for graphic designers), making search more central to the experience, introduce shared vocabulary (minimal difference between UX Designer and UI Designer), personalizing content based on previous searches and making it easy to follow-up on interesting jobs.

“We agree with all these points. Most of these are being worked on currently. For example, in the Android app you can favourite your job and city. Only those jobs will then be shown by default. These will help personalize your experience. Easier to do this on Android for now and eventually we will introduce them on the web as well.”

How do you plan to distinguish the experience between job seekers and posters?

“This will be a very important strategy once we build some traction and gain volume. For now the obvious focus is job seekers which will help drive better companies to the portal.”

Why is there a disconnect between brand Pixel Jobs and the URL (jobs.pixelonomics.com)? This could split the brand between Pixel Jobs and Pixelonomics. Better to build a single brand for consistent messaging.

Without elaborating on this too much, “We will merge these very shortly under a new brand name in the next release. We could also launch series of boards across other verticals as well – mobile developers, etc. under the same brand.”

It will be hard for the creatives to search on cluttered and difficult to use popular job sites from now on. 

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How to get your product’s content marketing juggernaut in place

Congratulations, you have just started up. It has taken so long to get here – you’ve worked hard, saved up, staved away every comfort, and your product is out, garnering rave reviews. Now you turn to the other important stuff you need to do – get your product in front of your market. It’s time for the marketing and selling push in a startup.

And this is when you know you have to set up a content marketing effort. You know it costs less, brings in way more, and can contribute to branding in an unimaginable way.

But how and where do you start?

I’ll try to answer that.

When I started out, content marketing was just about catching fire as a viable marketing channel. The field was nascent (and in many ways, still is) and everything we have learned about it, we have learned by doing. I’ve tried to make a small guide out of what we’ve learned.

The two towers of content marketing 

There are two separate efforts involved in content marketing. I call them the two towers. One of them is of course creating the content that will educate the market and convince people to buy your product. This is your first challenge. The other is getting it in front of them, what we call ‘distribution’. Even if you have written and designed amazing content, it’ll only be valuable if your audience reads it. Your second challenge lies in grabbing the eyeballs that will translate into greenbacks.

Wading in, then.

The first tower – content

1. Blog
2. Whitepapers
3. Case Studies
4. E-Books
5. In-product help texts
6. Infographics
7. Videos
8. Presentations

The list I have compiled above is just a snapshot of the things you can do. Platforms and formats abound for people who want to get more creative and tell stories in a new way. But to get started, the list above will do very well. For any B2B product, educating the customer about what your product can do and what your product can do better than others is the aim, and all the content generated should be tailored around specific takeaways for the audience.

I still believe in the blog as the key channel for any startup. A few months after my CEO Girish Mathrubootham had started up Freshdesk, he wrote a post on the Freshdesk Blog about how a Hacker News comment had been his inspiration to quit his job and start a company. The post went viral, people across the world read it, shared it, and were inspired by it. It brought us recognition on a scale we hadn’t even imagined. And this was when we didn’t even have a marketing plan in place. It is just not about the customers the blog brings as well; a good blog is a good branding statement. The first thing that most people look at when they reach your site is the blog. It just has to be amazing.

All of the rest come under the banner of educational informational content. Make it a point to tailor content to different stages of the sales cycle and deliver it when the customer has the most need for it. For example, when a customer is trialling your product, make sure he gets in-product help texts to help him navigate the newness of it. You can send him white-papers comparing your product with your competitors and tell him all the reasons he needs to choose you. You can send him videos showing him little tips and tricks in the product that makes his work easier. You get the point.

Now on to the trickier part of the equation.

The second tower – distribution

1. SEO
2. Social
3. The Community

Anyone getting into the Content Marketing equation should understand this first – one thing you do will feed into the other.

Now that you have created the stuff you think your audience will like, you need to get it to them.

Basic SEO is imperative. This is the most targeted form of inbound marketing there is. If you do not deliver content to the people who are actually looking for it, you might as well pack up and leave. And make no mistake about it, this is grunt work. You have to get down, get your hands dirty, pick through tags, metatags, best practices, measure impact, rinse, repeat. Use a tool like Scribe. Think keywords, SEO pages, landing pages and more.

This should get you started.

Now to the social web. Your social presence is your admit card to the masses. You now have access to people all over the world who are looking for and consuming information just like what you are creating and some of them are ready to open their wallets for the product you have made if it is going to give them any value. But again, it is not something to be totally enthralled by. The worst thing you can do is consciously try to ‘go’ viral. Get on the social platforms that make sense for your business, and build a consistent and interesting presence. Share stuff that your followers are interested in, and not just what you create. Build a social community. This will give you credibility as well as an audience that wants to listen to what to have to say.

For a product, it is sometimes better to build communities by themselves. One way to do this is like how Dropbox does it, forging a community by giving users incentives to evangelize the product in exchange for more space. This is a great way to growth-hack, if your product is something as inherently social as Dropbox. But for other ‘normal’ products, several support tools let you build your own community, including Freshdesk. When you let customers talk to each other, put forth new ideas for your product, vote on new features, share tips and tricks and so on, what you have is an engaged community that co-owns your product, has a stake in it becoming better and even more amazing, and will go out of their way to help you make it so. This community will be the greatest pack of evangelists you’ll ever have, and your content will be shared and trumpeted by them, thereby reaching audiences far beyond what you’ll be able to reach yourself.

I was talking to my boss Vikram last night, and standing on the balcony of our 7th floor office, he told me about how “There is no shortcut to slogging. You just have to. Only then will anything worth learning be learnt.”

An so it is with Content Marketing. To get better at it, you need to put in your hours, grind it out, make mistakes, learn.

So that is what I urge you to do. Start.

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M&A is critical for the Product Startup ecosystem in India

Small $20-30m M&A transactions are the lifeblood of Silicon Valley. Over 400 such transactions happened last year. Israeli companies accounted for over 20% of these transactions. India had only a couple of transactions to speak of. This has to change of Indian has to become a Product Nation. 

iSPIRT is focusing on this issue through its soon-to-be-announced M&A Connect Program. The M&A Connect Program team – led by Jay Pullur and Sanjay Shah – was in Silicon Valley last week for listening meetings with various stakeholders. As a part of this exercise they hosted a long brainstorming session with more than a dozen M&A heads of serial acquirers ranging from Facebook to Vmware.

One other listening meeting was with about 20 Indian product entrepreneurs camped in the Valley. I was privileged to attend this meeting. It was a delightful 3.5 hours discussion. There were three set of issues that were discussed. One set of issues related to improving discovery of Indian startups. It turns out that addressing this is not as simple as doing a SV delegation or getting TechCrunch coverage. More than that is needed. The second set of issues related to the regulatory friction of doing small M&A deals in India. The third set of issues were about improving the readiness and preparedness of product entrepreneurs.

There was active participation by all the attendees. These included:

  • Indus Kaitan,Bitzer Mobile
  • Suresh Sambandam,OrangeScape
  • Manjunath M Gowda, i7 Networks
  • Asif Ali, Reduce Data
  • Vamshi Mokshagund, Credii
  • Rohit Nadhani, Cloud Magic
  • Madhur Khandelwal, ShoppingWish –
  • Kumar Rangarajan & Satyam Kundula, LittleEye Labs
  • Deobrat Singh, Gazemetrix
  • Rajan Arora, SchoolAdmissions
  • Bharath Mundiapudi, Orzota
  • Annkur P Agarwal, PriceBaba
  • Srikanth N, Arktan
  • Jay Pullur and Vijay Sundaram, Pramati (they hosted the meeting) 

 

I was most impressed by the dedication and passion of the iSPIRT team driving this effort. Their selfless commitment to making a difference was heartwarming. I could sense that most of us attendees felt the same way. The self-help community that iSPIRT is creating is truly inclusive and impactful. 

If you are product startup interested in exploring a possible M&A exit in the future do watch for more details about the M&A Connect Program. Try and become part of this. Given what I heard in the meeting, I’m sure that this new Program be game changing for the ecosystem.  

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Which feature to prioritize first ? – Wrong Question

When building a product it is very easy to make a list of features to build. One could brainstorm to create an initial list, copy features from a similar product or ask others (including potential users or customers ) via a feature wish list.

However which feature to prioritize and what to build first?  is one of the most burning question for  startup founders and early employees.

There will always be more features to build and add than there is the capacity or bandwidth to build.The additional challenge is even after building it is not clear if it was the right decision.

These decisions typically happen based on what one thinks is cool to build or someone has asked to build first.  For lack of a better framework to use to decide that is how things move forward but time runs out, product builder stand clueless what should have gone in the first place.

LeanStartup principles offer a framework for thinking about this. BUILD gets complemented by MEASURE & LEARN and which further loops.

At the beginning of an idea building an MVP is good step forward (which as we previously is tool for learning & may not be any feature of the product) to learn a little bit more.

With learning from MVP additional features can be decided upon. List each feature in terms in terms of the learning that they should yield along with a defined metric.

At various stage of a startup different metrics matter and come into play. For instance in the very beginning along with the MVP – validation of problem & solution is the important metric. Once that is established metrics relevant user acquisition, retention, referrals become important.

The first step to decide before periodization is to decide the metric for startup to focus on. Once the metric identified picking the feature become easy.

For instance for a product the problem/validation is established the next important stage is to acquire users really fast then to prioritize a feature ask the question “Does feature X allow to acquire users more by Y%”. Pick the feature first that will have the higher score for this. If development time comparison for the feature is steep then factor it in the trade-off.

In essence the question “Which features to prioritize to first” is to be really framed as “Which learning to prioritize first ?”

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Stairway to Success – Nurturing your leads online

It’s not all about leads. The sales process in the B2B landscape has embraced a significant change. A purchase typically involves multiple decision makers, multiple teams and multiple stages. Creating awareness and interest about your products is just the first step of a long process. The bulk of your prospects, while having a fair idea of what their objectives are, are unaware of what your company exactly offers. Only 27% of B2B leads are sales-ready when first generated, according to MarketingSherpa. The remaining 73% constitutes a glaring opportunity and a stairway to success for sales growth. There is a high risk of the leads generated being lost, ignored or scooped up by competitors. It is thus essential for marketers to educate prospects and move them ahead in the sales funnel in order to increase the lead-conversion rate. And this is where lead nurturing comes into the picture.

B2B Lead Nurturing caters to prospective buyers during the early stages of the buying process by providing them with highly relevant educational content. It can help build preference for your products and brand in the minds of prospects long before they are actively engaged and reach the buying stage. It is about building relationships and trust to ensure success at a later stage.

Traditionally, marketers and sales-reps responded to prospect enquiries and their interest in a company’s services and products. But with the advent of online channels and their ever expanding reach, prospects are spending more time online obtaining, researching and analyzing information. On average, customers progress nearly 60% of the way through the purchase decision-making process before engaging a sales rep, according to the Marketing Leadership Council. The companies are hence, although indirectly, meeting their prospects at a much earlier stage than before. There is where companies have to leverage digital marketing and capture leads; with an aim to maximize the conversions.

After you first identify interest and generate leads from different channels and awareness efforts – Social Media, PR, Search Marketing, Content Marketing or Direct connection – the next step to build this buying interest through relevant and valuable education efforts. Online lead nurturing, as a process, can target specific audience sets at different stages of the sales process with a singular aim of moving them forward. Once you set up your lead nurturing process, your campaigns can cater to someone who opts in at any of the early stages. There are 5 key points to optimize your online lead nurturing process.

Audit your current state

Before putting in place a lead nurturing strategy, audit your existing campaigns, current lead generation rates, traffic levels and the corresponding conversion rates. Having a lot of website visitors is great, but they are of value if they do not lead to any conversions. It is also important to evaluate what information you gather as part of your lead generation process. By gaining data like an email address, website, social media handles, etc. you can continue to monitor and engage them.

Establish the target audience

Once you have established your lead generation strategy, you need to create a plan in order to reach the right people at the right stage. Typically, there are different types of prospects with different requirements and objectives, at different stages of the sales process. You have to validate your prospects and identify who needs nurturing. There are different ways in which you can segment your customers – seniority, company size, industry, role, etc. Once you have the types of prospects in the bag, segment them accordingly and map them to their objectives and requirements.

Offer valuable and relevant content

Your objective is not to hit your prospects with one sales pitch after the other. Instead, offer them valuable and relevant information (for example, webinars, eBooks, and whitepapers) that would educate them and drive them to make the buying decisions. There are various ways in which a company can share lead nurturing information. Content Marketing, Social Media, Email Marketing, Mobile, Blog, etc. can enable you to share information different kinds of information depending on the nature of the content. To reach out to specific audience, you can target the prospects specific to the particular sales stage and deliver highly focused content.                 

Set concise and measurable goals

Once you zero in on the target audience and offer them content, you have to define the consequent actions that you’d want them to take. For example, once you share a white paper with your prospects, you may want them to visit a specific page on your website. After a webinar, you may want them to download a business case, or an ROI calculator that allows them to further investigate your products. It is important to define what you qualify and quantify as a prospect moving ahead in the sales process.

Establish timelines for your campaigns

Your prospects do not want to see a barrage of emails about your products, no matter how relevant and valuable, flooding their inboxes or on their social media profiles. It is always a good idea to have a lead nurturing cycle in place. How long do you want your lead nurturing process to be? How often should you share the content you have decided on? It is important to create a lead nurturing calendar for each campaign and set the timelines.

Analyze and optimize

As you kick off your lead nurturing campaign, you have to monitor its state with respect to the measurable objectives that were set in place before. The results can give you an understanding on what works and what doesn’t in terms of various parameters like prospect segmentation, timelines, types of content or even subject lines for the emails. Evaluate them against your set targets and optimize your campaigns.

Online lead nurturing, if done effectively, can work wonders for your sales process and improve the lead-to-customer conversion rates.

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Insights on Building Sustainable, High-Growth Product Company

Manav Garg’s career exemplifies the statement “where there is big risk, there is big reward”. Throwing up a lucrative, six-figure plus salary and bonus as a commodities trader to start a software company that would build a commodities trading product required guts. Manav took it in his stride and today has built a world-class company that competes globally with its commodities trading software. He’s also built a company – EKA Software – that is domain driven and highly customer centric. In this interview with ProductNation, Manav talks about the origins of his company and some key factors that went into building it. 

You began a career in trading commodities. So when and how did you foray into the software industry? 

Yes, I am not a techie. I used to trade commodities enjoying import and export for a firm in Mumbai. But during this time, I saw a need for software for commodity trading. So, I spent more almost 24 months meeting with customers as a trader, trying to understand how to fill the gap and how systems would be a boon to traders like me. Since I have no background in software, I researched for a year on the requirements of the commodity trading industry, how it works, how to install a system for a particular pain point.  I moved to Bangalore, and set up shop, hired people and started out, spending almost 50% of my time meeting and talking to people on the benefits they would get from the software. This was how I educated myself about software.

So you are saying that your entrepreneurial spirit was lit by your ability to identify an opportunity.  While there are opportunities everywhere, the main point is you  need to  have the guts to take a risk, and the research to back it to believe that  the opportunity can be translated into business success. 

Obviously, in my experience this is exactly what happened — careful research combined with my intuition that this opportunity will be a success.  Many times too much research is done with no action. I do not believe in market reports. I believe that research and  study done by yourself and through interaction with customers and feel of the market is what will make your product a success.   

How do you identify customers and ensure that they will give you the right picture while your product is being built?   

Since I was in touch with customers for 24 months before starting the business, it was easy to contact them.   It is important to know how to convey the right message to your customers, tell them about the kind of solutions you are proposing.  Moreover, if you are connected on LinkedIn through your professional contacts and friends, you can easily connect with customers. 

I don’t think it’s a big a challenge to identify customers. I think the biggest challenge is the right approach. I recall when I contacted people whom I have known for at least five years, be it in Hamburg or Amsterdam, we were able to relate because they felt that I understood their pain points and were confident that I would bring to the table valuable solutions.

So your next step was to build the team.  So how did you form the right team, especially the founding team? 

You must be passionate about your product because then you can speak with conviction about the advantages of your product. 

When I started, I used the personal contacts route. At that time, I did not know anybody in the IT sales or products fields.  All that I was confident about was that Bangalore is a good place to do business in the IT field.  I met people, worked with them for some time, and they helped me understand how the whole industry works. 

For product development, I also reached for professional assistance to some of the larger technology MNCs who had more experienced talent. Since I did not have a software background, I decided to concentrate on sales from inception. 

For any start-up I think it is very important to decide from an early stage as to what is the main driver in the business. If you are doing business applications then sales is key driver, if you are doing online sales then marketing will be the key driver and if you are making tech based products then technology is the key driver here. But if it is very important to identify the key driver that will then help decide the skill set of the team. 

Today, what would you say are the key things that differentiate EKA in the market? 

For many years, people have been trading in rice, sugar, wheat and metals. It is important to have a good supply chain to manage this trading.  And for this you need excellent software that simplifies the supply chain. This was the challenge as a trader I was trying to overcome.  We basically cover that need in EKA today.  

A lot of our competition, mainly in the US, is focused on crude oil, gas, trading industry. We were the first one to focus on the commodities industry and therefore had an edge in the market.  We carved a niche for ourselves. 

Please share with newer entrepreneurs the learning’s that you have had over last five years, especially  amidst the challenges you and other emerging companies in India face?

The biggest challenge is putting together the right sales team. The product might be good, but it is the taking of it to the market that will bear fruit.  You also need an efficient global online distribution model. Another serious issue is how to retain employees. How do you convince people that your product is here to stay for a long time and not just a couple of years.  Emerging companies need to convince employees that their products are not fly by night, but bring value to customers and, thereby, employees over a longer span of time.

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Designing Great Products: A Startup CEO’s perspective

I had the opportunity to attend iSpirit Foundation’s #PNMeetup: Design great products through experiments – Product Leadership Workshop on 20th April 2013 at TLabs in Noida. 

Avi from iSPIRT put together a delightful, half-day session that brought together a smattering of product people from Delhi-NCR region.  In addition to product managers, CEOs, and senior executives from a wide range of Delhi startups, the icing on the cake was the presence of a hard-hitting product team from Intuit that had travelled all the way from Bangalore to share their experiences with the assembled audience. The Intuit Team included Deepa Bachu (Director, Emerging Market Innovation at Intuit), Samarjit Ghosh, Lalitha Ramani, Vivek Vijayan & ThiyagaRajan ) 

The Intuit posse had experiences working on a variety of products from the uber-popular Turbo Tax to the socially relevant Fasal and an engaging discussion on their diverse experiences exposed the audience to a wide range of challenges that the Intuit teams faced and the teams’ approach to overcome these challenges.  Many an aspiring entrepreneur has been flummoxed with multiple questions vis-à-vis product development, not limited to prioritizing features, costs, and release cycles and the Intuit team cleared a lot of misconceptions around commonly accepted best-process with their highly structured product management approach.  Intuit’s product management model is largely based around the hypotheses driven approach that, in addition to software development, is the bedrock for business decision-making from optimizing scientific discoveries to underpinning most strategy consulting engagements.  We were walked through a detailed explanation of the Intuit way and were then led to put our newfound knowledge to task with an actual exercise on the streets.

The hour spent on the streets by 25 eager entrepreneurs, braving the Noida summer-heat led to the thread baring of multiple, seemingly unambiguous truths about how we thought about product research, design, and development.  The interesting aspect of the exercise was that that like many frameworks, the Intuit approach brought out its share of naysayers and skeptics among the assembled audience but the healthy discussion that followed enabled multiple perspectives to heard and discussed. 

 

As a startup-CEO at Studycopter, managing the product development process is an integral part of what I do, day in and day out.  Sharing of notes and perspectives with fellow CEOs and product managers was a unique opportunity for me to test my assumptions and build a new way of looking at problems and coming up with solutions. 

I can write with a reasonable degree of certainty that all participants would share my thoughts about the utility of the aforementioned session and moving forward, I look forward to the Studycopter team and I participating in multiple such meetups to build the intellectual rigor that would be critical in delivering breakthrough product experiences for our customers.

Guest Post by Adi Jain, Founder and Chief Awesomeness Officer at Studycopter, a mobile + online learning platform to enable students to get their best possible scores in competitive exams such as the GMAT and GRE.  

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The dream of developing Enterprise Software Products from India

ProGen Business Solutions is a software products company with core focus in the Business Intelligence (BI) & Analytics space. The DNA of ProGen is built around R&D and Innovations, which drives the team to deliver State of the Art & High Quality BI Products that can add value to the customer organizations. Rahul Sharma, Founder & CEO of Progen talks about his joruney of building an Enterprise Software Product from India.

What is your Story? What inspired you to be an entrepreneur? 

I wanted to  create a Global Enterprise Software Products company from India that would challenge the market biggies and create a brand for Indian Products in the Enterprise Software Domain which is today largely  dominated by MNC products. 

Why and how did you start your company? Why this Area? 

The dream of developing Enterprise Software Products from India was the primary reason for starting ProGen. A True “Made in India” product that can deliver “Value for Money” to customers motivated us to take this road less travelled by Indian IT companies. 

The company was started as a garage set-up in Hyderabad with initial seed capital secured from like-minded individuals/friends who believed in the strength that India possesses in developing global software products. The initial team size in 2009 was 5 members, which has now grown to 25 plus. 

We selected the area of Business Intelligence (BI) & Analytics because of (i) a growing market demand (ii) Gaps in existing offerings with an opportunity to innovate both in terms of functionality as well as delivery (iii) Product Development expertise in the BI Domain.

Delivering superior value proposition through our simplified yet powerful BI Platform ‘pi’ has helped ProGen create a niche for itself. This is evident from the fact that within a short span of 1 year, customers across 4 countries trust our BI Platform for their daily & strategic decision making needs. Our customers include market leaders in their respective segments across diverse industry verticals such as: Airports, Travel, Pharma, FMCG, Retail, Distribution etc.

What is your product’s differentiator from the competitors? 

Our biggest differentiator when compared with established MNC offerings available in the market is our Product Design Approach. Unlike MNC vendors who conventionally follow a technology oriented design approach, we focus on a customer centric design approach that incorporates an Agile Product Development Philosophy. 

The approach has yielded tangible results in form of a simplified yet powerful BI Platform, which is as efficient and feature-rich as any of the contemporary product offerings from the established MNC players and is available at a cost much lower than other products. 

What is the biggest challenge ProGen has faced so far? 

Selling a “Made-in-India” Enterprise Platform to customers in India. 

Like any start-up company it was a challenge for us as well to sign the first few customers and being an Enterprise Product Start-up accentuated the problem further. It was extremely difficult for us to convince our customers about buying a business software package from a start-up that would eventually become the part of their organizations DNA in strategic and operational decision-making. There were multiple scenarios where business users at customer organizations had a buy-in on the value proposition from the Product but the IT Department was not willing to take the risk by engaging with a virgin product and it was frustrating for us to lose deals after months of sales efforts.

Rather the interesting point to note here is that the IT Teams in the prospect organizations still ask us ‘which Global Company’s BI software are you representing’. This reflects the acceptance level of Indian Enterprise Software Products among Indian customers and is indeed the biggest challenge that we face ALWAYS 

How did you address the challenge? 

The challenge was addressed through our Channel Partner Strategy.

Signing up channel partners for a new product in the Enterprise Application domain turned out to be as challenging and difficult as acquiring new customers but the mileage that a good partner brings to the table goes a long way in building the business. 

Similar to customers, channel partners also look for engaging mostly with established product brands or for companies from outside India. 

Channel Partner strategy requires lots of hard work in identifying and working with those partners who are open to align with new product companies and see the product as an opportunity to add value to the customer ecosystem. Our initial few partners sensed this opportunity and took the initiative of introducing our BI offering to their customers or to the prospects they had. 

Who is your customer? 

In today’s world, data is growing at a rapid pace across all types of organizations irrespective of their size and industry vertical. BI as an application is a need of the hour across customers and verticals. Being a company in the platform business our customers are not restricted to a specific vertical or size and they are scattered across verticals such as: Airports, Travel, FMCG, Retail, Contact Center, and Pharmaceuticals. 

Our target customers can be basically classified as “Value-Conscious” organizations that are not “Brand-Conscious” and are looking towards a Product that is a combination of “Rich Features” and “Value for Money” 

What’s been your success mantra in expanding to emerging markets?

1)     Keep your Product Simple

2)     Clearly Communicate the Value Proposition

3)     Trust your Channel Partners 

What are your future plans? 

In the next Financial Year (2013-14) we target to increase our customer base in India with a growth focus on Middle East and Australian/APAC markets and augment our BI Platform with new product features/modules that are currently under different stages of testing and development. 

In the Medium term we plan to expand to other global markets and release our BIG DATA Analytics engine integrated with our BI Platform. 

Plans of providing a SaaS/PaaS based cloud offering in the BI Domain to customers in the Matured Markets of USA, UK, and other parts of the World is also in the pipeline and official release on the same will be announced in the coming months. 

What have been your BIG lessons – personal, professional and otherwise? 

Running an Enterprise Products Business in India is a mix of “Loads of Patience without losing Focus on R&D” coupled with right amount of aggression and perseverance. 

Overnight success in Enterprise Products domain is unheard of and one should be prepared enough to face the challenges presented by different phases with each phase demanding different approach and strategy.

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

            • Get the right team in place and plan for a strong resourcing strategy
            • Stay Focused on your R&D Mission
            • Don’t get lured by the early revenue opportunities from services that may dilute the product vision
            • Raise Sufficient Seed Capital (if you plan to) that can cover the cost of your first commercial release and also considers for first 2-3 paying customer acquisition cost depending on your Sales Cycle. Early dilutions should not be seen as a threat and should not stop you from raising bigger money (if it’s available)
            • Work hard to get Testimonials and References from your initial customer