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Sapience Analytics is driving over INR 10 million in annual value per 100 employees

CEO and Co-Founder, Sapience Analytics, Shirish Deodhar, is pleased with the market response to their first software product, Sapience, and says their objective is to become the default standard for Automated Enterprise Effort Visibility and Gain

Sapience Analytics was set up in 2008, as a software products company. It was formed by four serial entrepreneurs, who had come to realize that the future of Indian IT belonged to product ventures and that software services was a commodity business. The team faced the compelling need of stepping into the market of software products. The core product in this case is an award-winning, patent-pending, Sapience, an employee productivity analytics solution that claims to deliver over 20 per cent increase in work output from your existing team. In an interview with ProductNation, Shirish Deodhar talks about the Sapience product journey, its unrivalled position in the market and the company’s future plans.

Why and how did you start Sapience? Why this area of work efficiency?
Sapience Analytics has been co-founded by four serial entrepreneurs. By 2008, we had spent 25 years in outsourced product development, including successful exits of previously founded companies. After mentoring a few product companies, one of us, Swati Deodhar, decided to build a solution to address the challenge of measuring and improving productivity.

In mid-2009, we had a prototype with an integrated dashboard displaying software engineering metrics aggregated and analyzed from different tools. This had to do with visibility into the underlying effort of employees and teams as they went about their assigned work.

Absence of work visibility makes it difficult to increase work output, and affects productivity. Contemporary practices of 24×7 work using laptops, flexible office hours, work-from-home (WFH) policies, globally distributed teams, and outsourcing intensify the problem of measurement. Many companies even stop these progressive HR practices in order to improve productivity, just like the recent controversial ban on WFH at Yahoo. We saw an opportunity to benefit the business through greater productivity while encouraging employee friendly policies. The solution also helps employees work smart and improve their work-life balance.

What are your product’s key differentiators?
Sapience helps deliver over 20 percent increase in work output from the existing team without requiring any change in process or additional management overhead. Sapience achieves this through Automated Work Visibility. This is a game-changer for any business, driving over INR 10 million in annual value per 100 employees.

Sapience captures employee work patterns in a highly automated manner with virtually no manual intervention. Agents installed on the individual machines collect user data, and forward it to the central server. Each user gets an individual dashboard, while long term analysis / reporting at business level are available to managers on the central server. Sapience integrates with the customer’s ERP and other systems to enable effort analytics and capacity optimization across all aspects of the business. Customers can opt for Sapience hosted cloud server (SaaS) or an on-premise server.

Besides the revenue/profit gain for the business, here are a few benefits for various stakeholders:

  • For employees – they can ensure better focus on key activities
  • Managers – they can guide their teams to work smarter
  • Senior management get the ‘macro view’ – pointing out which teams are under-utilized

 

What was the funding strategy to create this product? Time and effort taken to develop it
Once the product concept was validated with some initial installations, we received US $350,000 from the Indian Angel Network in May 2010. Then in November 2011, we received around US $1 million funding from Seed Enterprises.

Who are your competitors? What is the biggest challenge Sapience has faced so far? How did you address that challenge?
Sapience remains the only product available globally that delivers enterprise class automated time/effort analytics. At first glance, some prospects confuse Sapience with employee monitoring tools that have been around for a long time. User time is classified into productive and non-productive work, and aggregated for a pool of employees on weekly and monthly basis.

One of our challenges is to highlight that Sapience does not change corporate culture, but adapts to it. We are addressing this with focused messaging, listening to employee and management feedback from our installations, and building the required capabilities.

What’s been your success mantra in expanding to emerging markets / its reach?
We have been fortunate to have India as a large potential market for Sapience, since it keeps the cost of sales and support low. The product timing has also been good, since productivity at work is becoming a key concern at IT Services companies and for subsidiaries of global MNCs. Since the economic downturn in 2008, revenue growth has declined and billing rates have remained flat or even dropped. Costs have continued to escalate, and profit at IT companies is now taxed.

We were warned that India is considered a very challenging market in which to sell enterprise products, especially for a start-up, and even more so for a ‘Made in India’ product. We encountered the classic innovation curve when selling the products. While everyone liked Sapience, most managers were reluctant to change the status quo in their companies. However, a few bold and innovative leaders recognized the value and signed up as our initial customers. In late 2010, the first release was picked up by companies such as IdeaS (a SAS subsidiary), Excelize, and EnVenture. These were all 75 to 150 user license deals. The next step was to persuade larger 2,500+ employee companies. In mid-2011, senior management at Zensar and KPIT gave Sapience its initial break into the medium sized segment. By early 2012, we got a breakthrough at Tech Mahindra, a leading IT company.

What have been your BIG lessons – personal, professional and otherwise? What lessons would you like to share with someone who is struggling or planning to get into product development?
I wrote a book called ‘From Entrepeneurs to Leaders – Building Billion Dollar Product Companies from India’ that was published by McGraw-Hill in 2010. But the BIG lesson is a very fundamental advice from an ancient Indian text (the Bhagvad Gita): ‘Do your work well for its own sake, without aiming for rewards.’

What inspired you to be an entrepreneur? What lessons would you like to share with someone who is struggling or planning to get into product development?
I did my B-Tech (EE) in 1980, from IIT Bombay. Following a Master’s in the USA, I worked at Burroughs Corporation in Southern California for several years. Got a US patent for the work that I did in my first year of work. I became an entrepreneur by accident when I met someone from the US, who wanted to outsource work to India, and helped co-found my first company, Frontier Software, in 1989. Frontier was a pioneer in outsourced product development, and with product offshoring to India being uncommon then, it took us 10 years to scale to 150 employees. One of our first customers, VERITAS Software (now Symantec Corp.) acquired Frontier in 1999. By 2003, we had scaled VERITAS India to over 600 employees in 16 product teams, and over 30 percent patents filed (though the India operation was 22 percent of worldwide engineering).

In late 2003, I and two others came together at In-Reality Software and grew it rapidly, before another successful exit to Symphony Services Inc. We scaled the Symphony Pune business to US $25 million and 700+ employees by 2007.

After mentoring a few product start-ups between 2007 and 2009, we decided to try and build a successful product company from India. We are now focused exclusively on Sapience Analytics.

Time on Work matters not Time in Office
Sapience automatically determines on-PC and away-from-PC time, and differentiates between actual work and personal time.Your 9-6 pm staff (typically women) may be more efficient than those staying late

The 9-6 pm employees are most efficient at work – since they contribute high work hours in proportion to time in office. They often tend to be women employees who have commitments at home.

Programmers don’t spend even 50% of their work day in programming!
It is about whether you are focused on activities that matter and which result in most work being done, rather than less important but seemingly urgent tasks.

Sapience is discovering that a large amount of employee time is being spent on emails.
This is often a case of poor email habits: opening each email as it arrives, copying too many people, etc. Similarly managers spend a lot of time on planned and informal meetings. The two most important training programs required in companies are on email discipline and how to conduct meetings.

What are your future plans –in terms of this (work efficiency) product / and any other?
We have a multi-dimensional ‘expanding web’ growth strategy that covers product functionality, platforms, enterprise scale, and geography. The goal is to become the default standard for Automated Enterprise Effort Visibility and Gain.

For example, in the current year, we will cover all platforms including Linux, iOS, smartphones, calendaring tools and third-party presence servers. We have just released mSapience beta for Android smartphones, which help you track time spent on phone calls, travel and meetings away from office. You can distinguish between business and personal work.

What has it taken so long for Indian software market to focus on software product development?  What changes have you see in people’s perception toward domestic software products?
India has dominated in the IT Services space for the past twenty years, which has benefited the country and generated self-confidence and reputation for India on the global stage.  However, IT Services growth has slowed, and profitability is down. Cloud technologies and widespread adoption of mobiles and increasingly smartphones has caused a technology disruption that new companies can exploit. Indian market for IT products is reasonably large and growing. Moreover, the presence of MNC subsidiaries and large number of experienced software professionals returning back to India means that the right kind of product talent is available. Finally, some degree of angel and VC funding is now possible in this product ecosystem.

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How Adoor Gopalakrishnan’s Kathapurushan became a Software Product Entrepreneur ?

From being the protagonist of an Adoor Gopalakrishnan national award  winning movie to a graphics trainer, from a book publisher to a printer, from services to products, our guest today has been there, done that. Meet Vish, the MD of Logical Steps.

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

Vish: I was born in an entrepreneurial family. My family ran a printing press in Kerala. So I grew up living entrepreneurship and also picking up skills to run a printing press. Childhood was exciting, as we were always creating something. As far as my education is concerned, I enrolled for an undergraduate Physics program at the Moscow State University. University had some of the finest minds in Physics teaching the subject. But, the 1991 coup cut short all this excitement. This brief stint while I was in Moscow, made me realize that college education does not prepare you for life. Though, I was not keen to go back to college, it was family pressure that saw me write three years physics papers in one shot. All this for a degree from the University of Kerala, Trivandrum. Isn’t degree everything?

It was around the same time that I got introduced to computers. My father had made investments into offset printing and desktop publishing. I soon found an entire computer science department to myself, right from laser printers to 486 machines. I learnt everything from scratch. It was time for my first fling with entrepreneurship. It was an MS-DOS pocket reference manual. Using a microsoft reference manual as the guide, I printed out some MS-DOS reference manual copies and handed it over to a local bookshop for sale. Surprisingly, the book shop came back for more. Simultaneously, I also ventured into Desktop publishing training, as the printing industry was moving in that direction. These experiments gave me the confidence that I could do something on my own

ProductNation: When did you get the time to do the Adoor Gopalakrishnan movie? And why do you consider it your first product experience?

Vish: Adoor Gopalakrishnan is a family friend and I had done a small role in one of his earlier films. He talked me into playing the lead role in a film called Kathapurushan. It went on to win the National Award in 1996. He knew about my background in printing. So, during the film, I got involved into many aspects of the movie production – recording audio, printing of collateral and special books. And working with Adoor Gopalakrishnan, who cared about every little detail and to experience his passion and leadership. I consider that experience extremely precious and a sort of first in making a product.

ProductNation: Which were the other movies you did?

Vish: No, I went back into computer training with a company called Tandem. Tandem, which was based in Trivandrum, sent me to CDAC Pune for a course called DACA – Diploma in Advanced Computer Arts. As a trainer, I was to learn this course and come back to Trivandrum to teach. At this course, I was the only one from a non-arts background, as the others were all from JJ and similar schools. But, I topped the class and got a break into advertising with a Kirloskar group company – Pratibha Advertising. One of the noteworthy projects that I did while at Pratibha was a digital kiosk that was showcased at the first Auto Expo in New Delhi. I quickly realised that digital advertising in India at that time was still very early. So I packed up my bags and went to Singapore for a teaching assignment with a University. But, I ended up joining a digital marketing company there. It was here that I spent close to five years till the dot com bust in 2000 consumed it. During my stint here, I got in depth experience into e-learning.

ProductNation: Is that when you started your current company, logical steps ?

Vish: Yes. I came back to India, after the dotcom bust. And that is when we started Logical Steps. We began by supplying learning content for television. We were paid 10% of the contracted amount. That is when I understood the trouble of doing business in India. So, I went back to Singapore to source business and keep the business running. It was challenging. I was using my salary to finance the business. I was not keen to close down and let go of my staff who had picked up extremely useful skills. So, we kept going. It was during this that we got a chance to service AIG for one of their projects. So that is how our services business started.

ProductNation: What happened to e-learning, then? And the platform? How did you start silver bullet?

Vish: An opportunity came up to create an e-learning engine for the US Market in the area of Medical Entrance exam called MCAT. A doctor who was considered the guru of MCAT had already created a large amount of content plus created analytics metrics to appraise students. We were given the project to create a platform that could provide all of this. This project gave us tremendous exposure to learning frameworks and gave us the idea to create a product on our own. That is how the idea of SilverBullet came up.By that time, I had also realised the limitations of a services business. So, we were all set for a product pitch in late 2010. While we built the platform quickly, content became a challenge. So we had to invest resources in training teachers to address this issue of content. This consumed our resources and it was our services business that was feeding silverbullet. It took us some time to adjust to this new reality, as we were dealing with an individual customer, unlike a corporate entity as in our services business.

ProductNation: Let us talk about silver bullet? Any learnings that you would like to share.

Vish: Silver Bullet is an online learning system for engineering and medical entrance examinations in India. There have been tremendous learnings. Unlike servicing a business, in this case, it was a B2C online product. It took us some time to figure out our Go-To-Market approach. We felt schools were the touch point, but it wasn’t so. Then we tried facebook, and it wasn’t the touch point. The most profound insight came from my 10 year old daughter, who frankly said that students are not interested in adding more studies to their daily work. She went ahead and said that no one would like to put themselves into trouble by opting for a Free Trial. How true? Students are already overworked. In all this, we figured out that it is the parent who is the touch point. And the parent was in a totally different world and a world that wasn’t online. The only way to reach them was through traditional media. It was then, that we checked out the media budgets of other online learning companies and found that they spend 19% to 20% of their revenue on ad budgets that run into crores, it is a totally different league. And that is how these companies are reaching out to parents. Parents are more than happy to add to the kid’s collection of material to consume.

ProductNation: Interesting, allow us to end this interview, with a difficult question. Looking back on your career, it is easy to see that you have been all over the place. How has it helped you in approaching your product business?

Vish: [Laughs] The product business is much like the movie business. If you see, my experience in diverse areas has given me ideas and the aptitude to create a wonderful product. Whether it is design or delivery, content or its packaging, all my earlier experience have served me well in developing Silver Bullet.

ProductNation: Wearing two hats at the same time i.e. services and products. What would you prefer? And what challenges do you face, while doing so?

Vish: Product without a doubt. It is something that you can own. But, when working on a product, especially when you are just starting off, managing the internal aspirations of the team becomes difficult.

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

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So you want to enter the US market

As many of you know, Avinash Raghava is a persuasive individual. So when he approached me first to write for Product Nation, after some hemming and hawing, I agreed. On a recent call, he told me that nice though my writings have been so far, he was hoping I could help our readers with specific issues related to entering the US market.  He is absolutely right and I will start looking to him for guidance on what topics might be of interest to our readers. One of the first things we agreed, I’d write about is how companies should think about entering the US market. So here goes. 

I have been associated with the Indian IT business since 1989 and so I have seen the peaks and the troughs over the years. The IT services business and its offshoots into KPO and BPO have thrived over the years. And even now, if you are an entrepreneur and have a captive client, you can make a 20% return on your top line with some work and a tailwind. It is the product or IP related business that is a different animal.

I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to understand the product business during my rather long stint with i-flex (now Oracle Financial Services). I had patient bosses, excellent coaches and the opportunity to understand three very different geographies – North America, Asia Pacific and Latin America. There are a few lessons I learned along the way and I am happy to share them with you. This is not an exhaustive post on the subject by any means, just some thoughts. Here is the first set of lessons learned:

Lesson #1 – Stay away if you can, it may not be worth it – Entering the US market (or any foreign market for that matter) is a big, messy, expensive proposition, if you think you will make money from day one, think again. It will take time and commitment to make it work. For example, in my previous life, it took investment from our company in a full blown sales and marketing organization, PR, analyst coverage, partners etc for close to over two years before we saw anything resembling success in the US. Latin America was a different story, the company did it half heartedly and did not invest in what was needed. Needless to say, we weren’t too successful in that geography. Entering a foreign market is not for the faint-hearted, it will take time and resources AND there is no guarantee of success.

Lesson #2 – Product business is not like the services business – Given the extensive experience that Indian companies have in the outsourcing world, it is no surprise that many startups are founded by folks with a services background. And since they have a services background they bring some of that mindset to the table. The challenge is that the product business is different in just about every way that matters to the services business. The approach to selling, the pitch, the implementation, support, partnerships, the list goes on and on. Unless the management is willing to change its outlook, this will cause you problems.

Lesson #3 – Awards are great, case studies are much better – I often come across promising companies in India that have been recognized for the excellent work they are doing. While awards are great, they are not enough to mitigate buyers’ concerns around vendor risk. Remember, you are an unknown quantity for the buyer, and as the old saying goes – “Nobody gets fired for buying from IBM”.  That is where case studies come in handy. If you have a multinational client, try and enter a foreign market through one of their subsidiaries. I know this works because I have used this strategy before. If you don’t, perhaps you can build case studies around a business reason that will resonate with similar companies in overseas markets.

Lesson #4 –  Get your story straight – One of the biggest challenges I see for Indian companies is around messaging. Most startups are founded by techies.  As a result, the messaging is very tech heavy.  I suspect the current crop of buyers is suffering from an overdose of “Cloud”, “Enablement”, “Web2.0”,  “Enterprise-class”, “Multi-Tier” and “Mobility”. The problem is that when everybody ends up sounding exactly alike, nobody stands out, and the message doesn’t address the problem they are trying to solve directly. A good message should be free of geek speak (to the extent possible) and to the point. Always remember that to the buyer you are relatively unknown, highly risky and you have a short time to grab the buyer’s attention. If you can’t even get them to understand what you do, well, good luck with closing the deal. This is hard and requires skill. There are people (like me) who can help you with this but it is critical that you do it.

Lesson #5 – Have a plan but be willing to change – When you are trying to get a foothold in new market, it is very tempting to get opportunistic. You leverage your contacts and get that first critical deal. That is how you get into a market, but what you do after that depends on whether you have thought about it or not. I encourage my clients to think about going after prospects that make sense in the larger scheme of things. In a significant departure from the services way of thinking, product companies can’t be everything to everyone. You have to think about what you are about and what business problem you are tackling. Based on that, you form a hypothesis and a plan. Then you test it out in the market. If it works, you are golden, if not, you tweak it. The point is, you can’t go after anything that moves: you don’t have the resources for it plus it WILL dilute your brand. Get opportunistic within your framework and you will already be ahead.

These are just some initial thoughts. Remember that like anything else in business, there are no guarantees. What you want to do is to increase the probability of success. Do companies succeed without the points I have listed above? Sometimes. Do companies fail even after they do everything above? Sure.

I can’t promise you success if you follow my advice but you’d be ill advised to ignore it. If you have thoughts, experiences or comments, please do share.

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Q&A with ERP Ecommerce Company, InSync Solutions

InSync Solutions Ltd. provides ecommerce solutions for online retail businesses. Many software services companies in India are evolving to products companies. Atul Gupta, founder and managing director of InSync Solutions Ltd., describes how InSync made this transition. 

SandHill.com: When did you launch InSync as a services company, and what led to the switch to a products focus? 

Atul Gupta: We launched in October 2005 in Kolkata, India. At the time it was the only prudent career choice for me, as I was unwilling to work as an employee.

InSync was made to be a service company targeting small and midsize businesses (SMBs). But after four years we realized we couldn’t build a sustainable business with services. There were too many challenges. So we changed direction in the winter of 2009, switching our focus to products and incorporating the learnings we had gained up to that point.

SandHill.com: Did you also encounter unanticipated challenges when you started out as a product company? 

Atul Gupta: Once we changed gears and became a product company things started to fall in place. The challenges we have encountered since then are not related to building great products and delivering them to customers; our challenges since then are related to non-core activities of running the company. 

SandHill.com: What steps have you taken to overcome the challenges of an entrepreneur dealing with running a company? 

Atul Gupta: Having a strong management team / leadership team is very important, and it is equally important that they bring in unique skills on to the table. 

SandHill.com: Please describe your products and their differentiation in the market. 

Atul Gupta: Our Flagship Product is SBOeConnect, which integrates SAP Business One ERP and Magento eCommerce. SBOeConnect has gained good traction in the market so far. We have acquired the business of more than 100 Magento merchants globally with 95 percent customer retention, which means the customers benefit from our product.

SBOeConnect is the number-one choice for an ecommerce platform among SAP Business One users. Our market focus is on SAP Business One ERP users in the retail industry.

As to differentiation, no other ecommerce solutions have the capability of back-office ERP, and none of the ERP systems so far have been able to come up with a compelling ecommerce solution.

Businesses need to use multiple systems to be functional. We help businesses keep their investments in multiple systems intact and yet be efficient by integrating these systems.

Read the complete interview at Sandhill.com

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Entrepreneurship as an extra-curricular and hobby

Anatomy of an Idea

If today a survey in done in schools across India and students are asked some questions like,

  •         What are your favorite hobbies or pastime?
  •         What do you do after going back home from school?
  •         What do you do during holidays? 

You’ll get all sorts of answers but ‘Entrepreneurship’. Even worse, if the following question is also included,

Have you heard about the word “Entrepreneurship”?

I am guessing a depressingly low percentage would answer ‘yes’. That’s because the concept of ‘entrepreneurship being taught as a subject or an extra-curricular’ is non-existent in Indian schools. 

Schools play critical role in defining and determining a child’s way of thinking, perception about the world, mental and physical development and so forth. Schools shape children’s goals and aspirations. Children have an amazing ability to pick things up very quickly. The adoption of a concept is much easier in case of a child than an adult. We cannot expect India to produce a huge army of young home grown entrepreneurs when we don’t introduce this concept to them early on. It’s like expecting a country to have successful scientists or doctors without introducing science in schools. We benchmark Indian startup ecosystem against that of US based total annual VC funding, number of technology startups emanating, number of successful exits, etc., but forget that beneath all those facts and figures, there lays a very fundamental difference in the philosophy these two societies and, thus, their education systems have been built.  Success of America has a lot to do with their education system which promotes entrepreneurial and excogitative attitude. Indian education system, on the contrary, is more conservative and inclined towards rote learning. 

Trust me when I say that planting the idea of entrepreneurship in a child’s brain can do wonders!!

That’s because, it will ensure,

  •      Smarter kids (child’s development wont be restricted by bulky books)
  •      Better leadership qualities (entrepreneurship is all about leadership)
  •      Better problem solving and analytical thinking (child would explore innovative solutions as no   book would have written answers)
  •      Better sales/marketing skills (something which Indians are always criticized of!)
  •      Better programmers (I guess in many cases the next logical step after ideating something is learn programming)
  •      Increased employability of Indian engineers (Isn’t above mentioned skillset what every employer wants!)
  •      Better understanding and acceptance of entrepreneurship by parents and society at large, since schools would push the concept (again a major problem area, especially for young entrepreneurs)
  •      More experienced and more successful entrepreneurs (Serial entrepreneurs tend to succeed more than first timers)

In short, a win-win situation for entrepreneurs, employers and employees.            

Entrepreneurship may not be popular in Indian schools, but it is increasingly focused on by under graduate and graduate schools. Almost every good B-school has incubation cells and courses focused on entrepreneurship.  Also the companies hiring from B-Schools love to hire ex-entrepreneurs (not necessarily successful ones but also failed ones). That’s because in the fast changing times, it has become imperative for companies to innovate and evolve in order to stay relevant and flourish. In this context, entrepreneurs bring in a refreshing thinking and ‘challenging the status quo’ culture to the table. 

Today both schools and children are becoming more and more technology savvy. While Internet is within the reach of many, others are joining in. In that context, there is not much schools need to do, to ignite the spirit of entrepreneurship among students. All they need to do is realize its importance and try to build some very basic subject matter expertise of entrepreneurship in the form of a subject, extra-curricular, summer holiday project, workshops, etc.  Tying this to overall grade of the child would ensure parents’ buy in. The government and other stakeholders of startup ecosystem (investors, entrepreneurs, enablers, incubators, etc.) can also pitch in and organize competitions and events to promote the concept. Just as we have Science or Maths Olympiad, we can have similar Olympiad for business ideas as well. NEN is doing an amazing job in replicating this model in undergraduate schools across India. It is time that we move a step prior in the value chain and introduce entrepreneurship in secondary schools in some form. 

Think about this, the secondary education dropout ratio in schools in rural India is almost 50%. The major cause – as child reaches the employability age of 12-14 years, he is expected to add an extra shoulder to support household income. Mid-day meal, the driving factor behind sending child to school, becomes irrelevant. But if students are encouraged and supported (finance, mentorship, subject matter knowledge, etc.) to become entrepreneurs and thus, support his family by generating some monthly income, the school dropout rate can be brought down significantly. Needless to talk about the employment opportunities created! Here the definition of enterprise can be totally different – it may not be a technology focused one. A person procuring purified water from somewhere and selling it in villages is also an entrepreneur in one way.

P.S. : When thought about earnestly, this can be a billion $ idea !! J 

I sincerely hope in coming years we hear success stories like Yahoo acquiring Summly (a teen startup out of London) from India, in addition to a 12 years old cracking JEE or an Indian kid winning Spelling Bee.

This article first appeared on NextBigWhat

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How and why you should kickstart your Retention Marketing.

I first read the term ‘Retention Marketing’ in an article in a marketing journal at University and dismissed it immediately as one of the new terms we marketers come up with. It was for an assignment and I did not pay it a second more attention than was needed to write a passable term paper.

I heard it next at a meeting in office, about two years later. And was promptly dumbstruck by how important it now seemed.

Munch on this –

1. Repeat customers spend 33% more than new customers.
2. Referrals among repeat customers are 107% greater than non-customers.
3. It costs 6 times more to sell something to a prospect than to sell that same thing to a customer. And of course, the one stat that was drilled into my head so many times during my brief stint in retail.
4. 80% of your profits come from 20% of your customers.

If you are among those who rely on instinct and not so much on data, the fact that it will cost much more to find a new customer than to retain an existing one is just common sense.

I experienced this firsthand when after the exhilarating first few months of pulling in new customers, we suddenly had to contend with churn. I realized that even when customers are using your product enthusiastically and find no fault with it, they will still immediately switch when they see something even remotely better as an offering. Of course, my more experienced colleagues knew this; it is the major advantage of the SaaS model.

And this is why as product marketers, we have to keep our brand in the minds of our customers. The recall has to established, the emotional attachment has to be drilled into minds and hearts. Most importantly, no hint of a reason, however far fetched should be given to the users to think about switching.

Here’s a list of five things you can do –

Push your content
Keep reminding your customer about the product he’s using. Send him newsletters, put him on a blog mailing list. Keep popping up in his attention span in a way that is not obtrusive but makes him feel he’s using something made by committed people. Do not let the customer forget you. That’s where the trouble begins.

Reach-out
Call your customers every once in a while; institute a process for the same. Write a case study or a blog post from what they tell you and put it up. This will feed into your content, and give your customer something to show others as well. This is precious – never underestimate the value of making your customer feel good.

Listen to product suggestions
When your customers have sensible suggestions for your product and if the suggestions are feasible, implement them. And once you have, tell him & the world what you did. This has a two pronged effect. Because any suggestion an active customer makes is bound to make sense, it’ll be good for the product. Two is that the customer will also be reassured that there are people listening. This customer will never leave you.

Focus on high risk customers
Look for customers who are suddenly using your product less or aren’t using it at all or have suddenly downgraded from a higher plan. These are the ones who are on the ‘endangered species‘ list; they may soon decide to go extinct. Engage with them, call them up, do something special for them, give them some freebies, anything. Come up with something that makes them start using your product again.

Actively up-sell
This is something a lot of amazing companies can fail at. It is quite a common misconception that ‘good‘ companies don’t up-sell. Some important person once said that if you don’t up sell to your customers, you are cheating them of something. I agree. They could be using your product so much better if you do up-sell, and customers, would never think of leaving. Give your product that advantage.

Keep your customers happy and in doing so, keep them with you.

Source for stats: 
1. http://marketing.about.com/od/relationshipmarketing/a/crmstrategy.htm
2. http://marketing.about.com/cs/customerservice/a/crmstrategy.htm

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The network effect playbook: Social products win with utility, not invites

The proverbial chicken and egg problem of building a new social product is well understood among tech startups, and it’s been commonplace to follow two contrasting mechanisms for getting traction.

Traditionally, startups have solved this problem by racing to connect users with each other, essentially providing them the pipes to interact with each other. Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn have grown big with this connection-first model.

However, a new breed of networks is gaining ground with the content-first model. They provide users with tools to create a corpus of content, and then enable conversations around that content. Behance, Pinterest, Instagram, Dribble, Scoop.It have all gained traction by building a corpus of content before building a social network.

The two contrasting approaches are summarized below:

The rules of building a social product are changing. It’s important to understand this shift to build social products that can effectively gain traction on the internet today.The connection-first model is no longer as effective as it used to be. As the social web grows, and a larger number of social products compete for our attention, we are seeing a dramatic shift towards the content-first model. If you’re still getting users to send out Facebook invites, you’re adding to the noise, instead of standing out and getting noticed.

The Connections-first Social Product

Traditionally, the playbook for building network effects has been the following: Get users on board, connect them to each other and have them create content and conversations.

Social networks like Bebo, Facebook and Twitter used this playbook to create their respective networks leveraging address-book integrations and other hacks to rapidly build a large number of network connections.

The importance of building connections, in this model, cannot be emphasized enough. In fact, the growth teams at Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn specifically aim for ‘X connections for a user within Y days of sign-up’ to activate the user.

Since a critical mass of connections is required before users experience value, the key to building a successful network is minimizing the friction in creating connections. Contact-list integration helped social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn gain initial traction through the removal of sign-up friction.

In spite of growth hacks like contact-list integration, there is always a lead time in getting users on board and reaching critical mass. This is the ‘gap’ where it becomes very difficult to demonstrate value in using the product.

Frictionless sign-up + Virality = Network Effects? Or not!
Startups often believe that removing friction in sign-up and creating some form of viral acquisition are the two key elements to reaching critical mass. In fact, with the rise of Facebook Connect and the social graph, a large number of social products have sprung up on the promise of frictionless sign-up and viral growth. However, users on the internet have limited time and attention. As more startups leverage the social graph and flood users with invitations to join their networks, users have started to develop invite fatigue.

Clearly, frictionless sign-up and virality are not the one-stop solutions we were hoping they would be.

The secret to network value
Startups often fail to appreciate the gap between technology and value proposition. For products like Evernote, technology serves the entire value proposition. However, for social products, the value proposition is a combination of technology and the content that users create on top of it. YouTube’s value lies in its hosting and streaming capability, but more importantly in its vast repository of videos.

The secret to creating a social product that demonstrates immediate value is to enable content before creating the network.

Content created on the network is the new source of competitive advantage. The videos on YouTube, the pictures on Instagram, the answers on Quora are the primary source of value for users and the key driver of competitive advantage for these platforms.

The Content-first Social Product

Today’s social startups don’t start off as networks. They start off as standalone apps. These products enable users to create a corpus of content first. They then connect the users with each other as a consequence of sharing that content.

Instagram started out as a photo-taking tool and built itself out into a social network subsequently. The initial focus was entirely on the creation of content and the connections were formed over time leveraging other social networks. It is unlikely that Facebook would have considered Instagram a direct competitor in its early days, largely owing to its model of deferring network creation.

How to create a network in stealth mode
Instagram started off as a standalone tool. In doing so, the product provides ‘single-user’ utilityto the user even when other users aren’t around on the network. There are two aspects to building single-user utility:

1. The single-user utility should allow creation of content that will ultimately form the core of the network. The core of Instagram is pictures. Discussions are centered around pictures. Hence, the single-user tool needs to allow creation of pictures. This is an extension of the OpenTable model, where a restaurant first manages its real-time seating inventory on a single-user tool, before that very inventory is exposed to consumers on a network, to allow them to reserve tables. Curation-as-creation products like ScoopIt and Storify also use this model to curate content which will serve as the core for network interactions.

2. The product should deliver greater value when users share their content with their friends. The product builds out the network at the backend as more content is shared. Hence, the social network gets created, effectively solving the chicken and egg problem. A new breed of curation-as-creation startups (Scoop.It, Paper.Li etc.) is gaining traction on a similar model.

The new playbook for creating social products is essentially the following:

  1. Have a vision for creating the network but do not start executing on network creation
  2. Enable a single-user tool that creates content that is core to social interactions
  3. Share this content on external networks (social networks, email, blogosphere)
  4. Capture interactions around the content to build network linkages at the backend
  5. Open out the network once a critical mass of linkages have been built

The rise of the content portfolio
Instagram demonstrates how a network is created around a portfolio of user-generated content. Behance and Dribbble have followed similar strategies by providing a portfolio for hosting designs, before adding value through the creation of a peer-review community. Initially, Pinterest appealed to the designer community as a tool to ‘bookmark’ their favorite designs, before it built out the network. Early adopters found enough value in the ability to store designs and pictures, to use the product before the network became active.

The new success factors
Frictionless sign-up and virality are important but they are no longer the key to building social products. The following are key to building content-first social products:

  1. Removal of barriers to the creation of content: Startups like Instagram, which succeeded in simplifying the creation process and in enabling users to spread the word, succeeded in eventually building the connections between users.
  2. Growing the creator base, not just the user base: Since value for the overall networks is scaled by scaling content creation, the platform needs to focus on incentivizing and increasing the percentage of users who create content.
  3. Strong curation models: Content-first social products scale well only when there is a strong curation model in place to separate the signal from the noise. Without strong curation, greater content can actually lead to a poorer user experience leading to reverse network effects.
  4. Incentives: The platform needs to encourage users to build out the connections. This works best when the platform encourages an innate motivation (self-expression or self-promotion) in the user to spread the word about her content. In doing so, the users build the necessary connections that set up the network.

The new growth hacks
In the connections-first model, the one hack that minimized friction in building connections was the contact list integration. In the content-first model, the hack that minimizes friction in creating content is the creation widget. Creation widgets have grown in popularity in recent times, spreading across the internet in the form of browser add-ons and one-click buttons. Several curation-as-creation startups like Pinterest and Scoop.it have used widgets to enable users to create content easily.

The future
This new model of building networks allows a social product to gain traction while value is being created by users. Once enough content is created, the users are connected and the network builds out. Social products that win will focus on enabling users to create content first and generate conversations around it. The creation of the actual social network will be a final step, as a consequence.

Note: This article was first featured on Sangeet’s blog, Platform Thinking (http://platformed.info). Platform Thinking has been ranked among the top blogs for startups, globally, by the Harvard Business School Centre for Entrepreneurship. 

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Presentations to CIOSE and the KUDOS!!!

In our latest blog we had written about CIOSE(CIO Strategy Exchange) and  about the 5 companies that were shortlisted to provide a presentation to Ernest M Von Simson and these five companies were 

  • ArrayShield – “Two-Factor Authentication”
  • C2il – “Asset Life Cycle Management”
  • i7 networks – “Agentless BYOD Discovery & Control”
  • Fieldez – “On Demand mobile workforce management”
  • Kreeo – “Knowledge management”

Everyone who presented to Ernie walked out with a smile, with abundant knowledge on how to pitch for the CIO and also what makes sense in the local market and what might not. Ernie was very happy to be the audience for these presentations and he was all praise for the Indian companies and this is what he had to say:

Though the presentations and dialogues were fairly brief, I was impressed by the sophistication shown by the Indian developers of mobility apps and mobility cyber security. They had learned much from analyses of their American counterparts and developed products that produced similar results with much, much lower TCO. “Less is more” in the words of the famous architect Mies van de Rohe.

Manjunath M Gowda, CEO of i7 Networks who was one of the presenters was very happy with the outcome and was amazed how much he knew of  the space and how laser focus were his feedback and this is what he had to say “He knew the subject very well and he asked me the right questions and his help in how to position was amazing. Looking forward for the next step”.

Pavan who is the CEO of ArrayShield was amazed to know how well it can fit into US enterprises too and he was thrilled and he profusely thanked Product nation for providing this opportunity and he said “The feedback and suggestions shared by Ernie was quite valuable, especially good to know that the market demand for our kind of products in US is high and we are addressing an opportunity which is currently under-served”

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The Indian startup ecosystem should look at Israel as a role model

I love Israel. Having been there 7-8 times over 5 years when I worked for a company (Mercury Interactive, acquired by HP) that had its development center there, I believe they have some of the best developers, product thinkers and execution oriented folks.

They are also amazing at marketing. They have successfully convinced the world that they are the “startup nation“.

Never mind that they have 1/3 as many product startups as India produces annually and never mind that Indian companies acquire or get acquired twice as much as Israeli companies.Indians also make up 52% of Silicon valley startup founders, whereas Israelis make up less than 8%.

Take a look at those 3 data points and tell me they are not facts. The PWC report is for 2012, so its relatively recent. The # of companies we track in India versus Israel startups in our database is three times as well. The # of companies on Angel list or Crunchbase reveals a similar statistic.

Still its Tel Aviv that creeps up on Silicon Valley as the top startup center. If you read the startup genome report, you’ll be convinced of the same based on their methodology.

What are the arguments I have heard against India being the startup nation?

1. Quantity not quality:  We produce numbers, but not quality. Many of our startups are clones of Silicon Valley companies featured on Tech Crunch 3 months post launch. I looked at the 3 top Israel incubators and found that over 60% of the companies they were helping were clones as well.

2. Exits: We dont have a significant number of $billion or hundreds of million $ exits. I have found that while we do not have those exits, the number of companies listed on the stock market in the US for both Israel and India are comparable.

3. Market access: Israel has excellent knowledge, insights and know-how about US markets. Since Israel itself is a fairly small market, most Israeli entrepreneurs focus on US markets solely, even though they are geographically closer to Europe. Technically the # of people with market knowledge of the US in India far exceeds that of Israel, but they are not in product startups but at large companies.

4. Services mindset & positioning: Thanks to the ginormous success of Indian services companies who helped position India as the “world’s backend” (comparable to China being positioned as the world’s manufacturer) we have been already positioned as low value, low margin, consulting providers.

5. Late start: Even though Israel is 60 years old and India as a nation is a little older, we had a late (2001 or so) start to technology startups. Compared to Israel which had some interesting companies (need references here, what I have heard is mostly anecdotal) in the late 90′s as well.

Why do I still say Indian startups should look at Israel as a role model?

1. They champion their startups very well. They are very well vested in their startups success. They are constantly talking about how good their startups are, how they are possibly better than the valley and why they have the best talent in the world focused on startups.

2. They take significant risky bets. The # of investors in Israel (seed, angel and institutional) is comparable to those in India even though the number of startups is a third.

3. They look out for each other. The community is so well connected with each other that they genuinely look out and help each other. I dont know of any other place that supports their own as much as Israel does.

If you have been to Israel or have lived / worked with Israeli’s please tell me in the comments if there are a few data points I missed.

If you have any good data (not anecdotes, I have enough of those) to counter any of my arguments, feel free to call those out as well.

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Q&A with Seclore CEO on Information Rights Management Software

Often, enterprise goals of security and collaboration are mutually exclusive. Seclore, with customers in Asia, Europe and North America, resolves that dilemma. Seclore’s CEO, Vishal Gupta, discusses Information Rights Management trends as well as development of the company’s IRM product. This article is brought to SandHill readers in partnership with ProductNation.

SandHill.com: Please describe your company’s software product and your market.

Vishal Gupta: Seclore is an information security software product company. Our core technology enables information to be “remote controlled.” So you can send me a document, image or email and then, after 10 days, if the relationship changes, you can press a button on your computer and the information will effectively vanish from my computer! Sounds Mission Impossible? It is definitely doable.

During the 10 days you also can control whether I can edit, print, forward or copy-paste from the document, image or email. You can also monitor who is doing what (tried to print the document) with the information, when (on Sunday morning) and from where (from his home computer).

The mission of the company is to help enterprises achieve the mutually conflicting goals of security and collaboration together. We currently have customers in the financial services, engineering services, manufacturing and defense sectors across three continents.

SandHill.com: How does your product differ from other security products?

Vishal Gupta: Seclore’s technology is different because it allows information usage to be controlled without the prerequisite of everyone installing a local agent. It is the most integration-friendly Information Rights Management (IRM) system in the world. Any person or system within the enterprise that is creating documents or emails can use Seclore’s technology for securing the information.

SandHill.com: How did your company originate?

Vishal Gupta: Seclore came out of the IIT Bombay incubator. The company was initially a campus project, which became a company. The company was launched with the specific mandate of providing a secure outsourcing solution to enterprises looking to outsource business processes. Over a period of time we realized that what we had created as a solution to a specific problem was in fact applicable in a much wider context.

The formal operations of the company were started in June 2006. The name Seclore comes from “Sec” (for “secure”) and “Lore” (for “knowledge,” as in folklore). So Seclore stands for Secure Knowledge.

Read the complete interview at Sandhill.com

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#ReversePitch “The day VCs pitch the Startups”

Depending upon who do you ask the question, the answer to “Indian Startup ecosystem has a shortage of good quality?” would oscillate between kick-ass investors and great customers. While the presence of both is crucial to validate the success of the startup, founders always seem to be cut-off from both of kick-ass investors. With India poised towards climbing up the entrepreneurial ladders, no wonder we would see more first generation product startups coming out of unheard Indian towns and cities.

With this in mind, the recent edition of #ReversePitch took place at 91SpringBoard. The premise is simple, at any conventional networking/demo event the startups are the ones pitching their ideas and its potential to a room full of investors. But by turning the tables in favor of the startups the idea of reverse pitch was born. Investors now make their pitches to a room full of potential startups as to why they are the best bet.

For those of you wondering whether this was another bout of “networking” and “gyaan” session by investors making tall claims for their funds haven’t seen Mukund Mohan in action. Seeing that the founders were taking time to warm up that too in a room full of people having the exact same question in mind. Mukund brought everybody at ease and what followed were interesting rounds of presentation by VCs and subsequent Q&A by the audience.


The questions were spread across the entire spectrum from the usual one on how to raise their seed fund to a startup specific. What tricked both the founders and the VCs were the most simplest of questions which required the greatest insights. Not many might have wondered about “How do VCs actually decide their investment amount?” or our personal favorite “Who gives money to the VCs?” The latter had the entire crowd glued should they find their secret!


With the wheel set in motion the post event discussion was full of its own share of fun. Where else can you find a startup sharing their experiences on raising their first round with a former-founder-turned-VCs chipping in to reminisce about his own life.


This was not the first time #ReversePitch took place in India and this will definitely not be the last time it takes place in Delhi. Nothing is more better than learning from shared experiences. For those of who missed the event can search for the official hashtag #ReversePitch on twitter and relive the moments and maybe even catch the VCs no hold barred in the after party!


A handy list of the VCs who presented at #ReversePitch in no particular order of their likeliness to fund your venture:

 


The pitch sessions was followed by networking with the investors and the community had an amazing time. Thanks to Subhendu(ReversePitch), Mukund, Mukul(Saif Partners), Apurv & for the 91Springboard team for putting together an amazing show. Stay tuned for some more excitement in the next few months!

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10 Rules for Effective Product Company Advisory Boards!

Advisory boards are rarely meant for fixing fundamental flaws with business plans. Having big names on the advisory boards, purely for their name value, rarely works. It might help a little in raising venture money, if at all. However, when composed and used wisely, advisory boards can help your product company choose the right corporate, product, market and sales strategies. Simply put, your advisors should be people whose expertise or experience you respect highly, and feel sincerely that their advice will benefit your business. And if giving advice is an art, asking for, receiving and using advice is also an art!

Here are 10 rules that can help you make effective use of advisory boards:

1. Friends and Family may not be good candidates:   A natural instinct with some entrepreneurs is to appoint some of their friends and family members to the advisory board. They usually may not turn out to be good advisors unless they are otherwise qualified to be there.

2. Get advisors with fully complementary skills: Have three or four advisors, maximum. Find people with strong engineering and product development skills,sales experience or marketing experience in products related to yours or subject matter expertise.

3. Find the right people for your advisory board:  With LinkedIn and search engines like Google and Bing available, you can always find the right people for your advisory board and reach out to them. Their experiences need to be related to your product company. You may need to do the research to make sure that your company and products may be of interest to them currently. With internet connectivity linking people all over the globe easily, a company need not limit itself to any particular city or even the same country. You can even reach out to people in the US or Europe if you think they may be interested.

4. Clearly outline the time commitments to advisors:  Typical time commitments for advisors are one face to face meeting for a few hours every quarter (if everybody is in the same city or online, if not) and one full-day meeting and discussion once a year.  This may work out to be about 40 to 50 hours per year including their time for reading your materials and preparing answers and discussing them in your meeting.

5. Prepare a list of questions or topics you want advice on and send it ahead of time as an agenda:  Prepare an agenda of topics or list of questions in different areas like technology or science involved, product strategy, product management, engineering, marketing or sales. Sending it ahead of time to advisors will help them prepare properly for the meeting, quarterly or the annual one.

6. Arrange for convenient ways to participate:  With web conferencing services and tools like Skype and Google Hangouts, it has never been easier to arrange online advisory board meetings when advisors are geographically dispersed.

7. Compensate them for their time, expertise and advice:   Product companies rarely can compensate advisors with cash but the customary way to compensate them is with stock options. Usually it is around 1% or less of the company vested over 4 years or so. You can vest the first year’s options  (1/4th) at the time an advisory board agreement is signed and 1/4th the total number of shares every year after that.

8. Hold the right to fire them:  Advisors may sign on with the best of intentions in the beginning and for many reasons, it may not work out well for you subsequently. They may not find the time or may not be interested any more. The agreement should have a clause that lets you remove them from the advisory board if it is not working out for any reason.

9. Don’t confuse the advisory board with your board of directors:  Keep a clear separation and distinction between your advisory board and your board of directors. Your board of directors can introduce you to potential clients or customers, and they can help you with thorny issues with your management team, stock options or compensation issues. Advisory board members are there for a different reason and may not be compensated enough on the same scale for such activities.

10. Don’t confuse your advisory board with an extended sales team: Some companies sign up advisors for the board and also provide them with a small commission percentage for prospect introductions and such. This rarely works out in practice and confuses issues and may cause problems down the road. It is better to keep advisory services separate from sales activities.

All of us, at certain moments of our lives, need to take advice and to receive help from other people graciously- Alexis Carrel.

 

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Learnings from the 4th #PNMeetup – Making your product go viral on a low marketing budget

They say lighting does not strike twice, but it definetly did at Kunzum café where the 4th #PNMeetup  was happening. The theme “Making your product go viral on a low marketing budget” got over 40 people to the venue all intent to desipher the Virality dilemma. We had Amit Ranjan from SlideShare’s, Pathik Shah from Hike & Bipin Preet Singh from Mobikwik.

Amit from Slideshare started off first by asking What is Virality? The ability of an object to self replicate.

He took examples why sites like facebook are viral, the basics of virality being- the ease and ability to get referrals from existing users. Increasing the Viral co-efficient – for every additional user how many additional users do you get.  If it is greater than 1 than we get unbounded virality and if it is less than 1 then it grows to a certain level and then stops. The different Channels of Viral Distribution being Newsfeed, Widgets, Notifications, Email and Inviting a friend – any one will get you more additional business. These Viral channels are not the same as features, features essentially keep existing users happy, Viral channels are vectors that grow your business. He stressed that Design, Convenience, Speed of the app or website matter, to create a good user experience which has a impact on the virality of the product.


Pathik from Hike then takes over and talks about how Hike touched 2 Million downloads in two weeks of launch, he goes on to outline some basics for a startup product to go viral. In his view the product needs to truly be a great product addressing a real need thus building a strong core value for the product. Once we have a good product the Desigining and the U&I needs to be of very good quality thereby getting eyeballs to the product. The next stage will be to have a large Distribution channel focusing on Growth and Retention of all new Customers. Smart Marketing will play an important role in being able to get the message across to the user base in a fast and simple manner. This may include offering free talk time, additional storage space on referring etc, anything to spread the message especially through one customer to another. An Innovative business model will ensure that the longevity of the product is maintained.

Pathik then goes about to explain the concept of Growth Hacking –  a new process for acquiring and engaging users combining traditional marketing and analytical skills with product development skills. In the past, marketing and product development departments were often at odds where marketing groups would be spending significant amounts of money to acquire users but couldn’t get any development resources to build something as simple as new custom landing pages. And on the other side, product development teams would often build what they think users want and will attract users without deeply measuring and understanding the impact of their changes. This concept of “growth hacking” is a recognition that when you focus on understanding your users and how they discover and adopt your products, you can build features that help you acquire and retain more users, rather than just spending marketing dollars.

Growth Hacking is one very fast way to get Virality of Sales vis-a-vie the traditional Marketing Channels.

By being able understand the needs of the customers you reach the A-HA point with the customers which is essiantialy the main reason of the product going Viral.

Bipin from Mobikwik then takes over and talks about Virality. He emphasis on the 3 basic things, First Product Innovation is the key for any product. The Product needs to be disruptive to create new positive impacts for the users for them to get hooked to it. Secondly, Cheap Acquistion for a startup is essential. The Aim needs to be able to target a large audience for the product at a low cost. Thirdly, their needs to be high rates of Retention on the client base which has been acquired enabling you to ensure the client base continues to grow.

We then moved onto the session where we featured a new company, this time it was Zest.md. The company offers saas based platform, providing eclinics for medical practioners. The participants shared their product and got feedback from the audience in relation to scaling their businesses.

After a very interactive 3 hr session the time was just right for everybody to interact with the speakers and network with the audience. It was a session which helped people share some interesting conversations and am sure all the people who came gained a good insight .


We eagerly now await the next #PNMeetup in April.

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LurnQ: Indian startup that’s building a personalised MOOC

Update: Some readers have asked for information about MOOCs. A (MOOC) massive open online course is an online educational resource that is available for open access via the web. MOOCs originated around 2008 within the open educational resources (or OER) movement. For more, refer to the Wikipedia link.

Online learning is undergoing a paradigm shift and this Forbes article is a pointer of the shape of things to come. Coursera, Khan Academy, Udacity, Udemy etc are growing into large public platforms and likely to give competition to universities and colleges in the years to come.  

LurnQ is an Indian startup that is building a personalised learning management solution which can aggregate and curate content from the web. The key part of LurnQ replicates an experience that everyone is familiar with – using a user’s preferences to aggregate content from the web and display it like a Facebook newsfeed (see screenshot). This is a smart strategy and takes advantage of the the benefits of recognition (rather than recall).

The LurnQ platform consists of different applications that are bundled together into a SaaS platform. The core of the platform is a repository of web content from established MOOC sources like Coursera, Udacity, Khan Academy etc. There is a learning app that displays content in multiple formats – video, slides, multimedia. And a teaching app that gives teacher the capability to put together a course.

The site has over 5000 registered users and is growing socially over 100% every month via Facebook (without ads). They also run a student ambassador program. And here’s a list of LurnQ lessons if you want to check them out.

For monetization, LurnQ is aiming Freemium. The core consumer product will remain free at all times  for learners and teachers. A premium version will be available for private or closed community deployment by individuals and organizations. Pricing details are still in the works.

For targeting growth, LurnQ plans to extend the Student Ambassador Program and drive teacher side adoption through special initiatives aimed at teachers. On the application front, they want to focus on viral features (follow lessons, users, Invite friends etc). Also possible is the route of content partnership with conferences. Mobile apps are planned at a later stage to drive on the go consumption across devices.

LurnQ looks like a refreshing idea and a spin on what others are doing in the MOOC space. The first challenge they face is getting to a threshold for their user base. The adoption of the newsfeed as a core experience is likely to help in viral growth. Though the homepage is a logged in experience and departs from the design pattern that characterises Web 2.0 user generated content platforms… this might prove an impediment to quick user acquisition.

Here’s wishing them the best in their efforts.

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Entreprenuers should’t sweat small stuff!

Was going through popular book “Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff … and it’s all small stuff” by Richard Carlson, PhD and realized lot of the points outlined by Richard are applicable precisely for enterpreneurs in their startup journey.

Make peace with imperfection:

As a startup, we always are short of resources that are typically available for a big corporation. When resources are scarce, its difficult and often impossible to achieve perfection in all things. Its better to accept the same and make peace with imperfection. The same applies to all activities in startup – whether it is do with kind of talent we might want in the team, the kind of expectations you have with the sub-ordinates/peers or simple things like the way office is maintained, non availability of admin support when you have your important meetings scheduled in the office.

Remember that having zero items in ToDo list doesn’t mean success:

As an entrepreneur, your To-Do list is almost infinite. You have hundreds of things to do and the more you complete the activities in your to-do list, the more seem to get added. Don’t worry about this as this is more than natural for all entrepreneurs. So never get yourself so tensed up to complete all activities in your ToDo list. Prioritize and work on important tasks and move on.

Learn to Live in the Present Moment:

It’s important to learn from the mistakes in the past and plan for the future. But the most important success factor for any startup is execution. And key for succesful execution is to focus on the present moment. Focusing on present moment, important tasks that we are working on hand will give us best results and success.

Allow Yourself to Be Bored:

As entrepreneurs, thanks to the infinite ToDo list, we will ending up having no time for ourself or to relax. It’s a good idea to take some time out of our busy schedules and be idle. Being idle atleast for few minutes each day will give us new perspective and believe me this is the time most of us will come up with breakthrough ideas to scale the venture to the next level.

Repeat to Yourself, “Startup Isn’t an Emergency”

One can’t run a startup or a business as an emergency. Startup will usually go on if things don’t go according to the plan. And infact most of times in startups, things will not go per the plan. If one feels it as an emergency, things will only go worse from where they are.

Do One Thing at a Time:

Multi-tasking will do no good to any entrepreneur. Focus is the key. Work on one thing at a time, complete the same and move on to the next one. Your productivity will go manifold by just focusing on one thing at a time.

Get Comfortable Not Knowing:

You will not know about many areas of the business. Instead of feeling overwhelmed on multiple facets of business which you don’t know, get comfortable with the same. Most of the times, it will turn out to be a blessing in disguise. People who know all the things, will end up not doing anything as they are scared how tough it is to do!!

Give Up on the Idea that “More Is Better”

It’s always easy to believe that “More is Better”. Who doesn’t want more funding, more people in the team? But the point is that if you always want/desire more then you will not be able to focus on achieving results in what you have. Focus on what you have and maximise the results from it. If you do it right, automatically more will come to you.

Keep Asking Yourself, “What’s Really Important?”

With limited resources, limited time its important that one focuses only on few important things that have a maximum impact. In the rush of things, lot of us end up spending lot of time on things which are not really important. Always take a step back and keep thinking what’s really important and that will help you to focus and maximise the success.

Startup Is a Test. It Is Only a Test

When you look at startup and its many challenges as a test, or series of tests, you begin to see each issue you face as an opportunity to grow, a chance to roll with the punches. Whether you’re being bombarded with problems, responsibilities, even insurmountable hurdles, when looked at as a test, you always have a chance to succeed, in the sense of rising above that which is challenging you. If, on the other hand, you see each new issue you face as a serious battle that must be won in order to survive, you’re probably in for a very rocky journey. The only time you’re likely to be happy is when everything is working out just right. And we all know that won’t happen anytime.

Do add to the list of the “small stuff” that entrepreneurs should not sweat about based on your experiences in the comments section!

Guest Post contributed by Pawan Thatha, CEO, Arrayshield Technologies