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Announcing the First Playbook Roundtable: Positioning and messaging for Product Entrepreneurs

We are pleased to announce the first Playbook RoundTable for Product Entrepreneurs around Messaging & Positioning. A strong, differentiated & memorable product messaging is essential in creating traction for your product. Effective product messaging speaks directly in the langauage of your target audience. This Playbook Roundtable is brought to you by iSPIRT. One of the initiatives of iSPIRT is to convert conversations into playbooks for product entrepreneurs.

This Playbook Roundtable is led by Shankar Maruwada and is intended for companies that have a software product (consumer or enterprise), have initial customers and are trying to scale to the next level. They are keen to make more crisp their value proposition to the target audience and more clearly articulate their position relative to competitors.

This Playbook RoundTable will be interactive and will help your team step into the role of your target audience, map your features to benefits, organize those benefits into message themes, and summarize the product in a positioning statement.

To apply for this workshop please send a PDF document(one pager) to avinash(at)ispirt.in with the following information by 23rd March ‘2013:

  • Name of the company
  • Name and title of the intended attendee
  • Mobile phone of attendee
  • Email ID of attendee
  • The top two practical problems your company faces in messaging, communicating, positioning your product, that you would like help with. 
  • Top 2 desired outcomes from the workshopPlease share, as briefly as possible, your current resources and efforts in this area
  • Write (max 150 words) on the ‘What’ and the ‘Why’ of your product, in simple language. You may accompany this with a single visual (optional).
Find more details about the playbook roundtable here.
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How educational content and live demos got 7,000 websites using WebEngage in 15 months

I believe one of the best ways to learn marketing and business in general is to learn from other people’s successes. And in a bid to do that, I am going to bring to you interviews of Indian startups that have taken their products to the world. We will talk about how they got the initial buzz going, where they got their first set of customers from, how did they scale that up, what marketing metrics they measured, the mediums they used, the stories they went to press with, the biggest mistakes they made, how they handled criticism and more.

Here I am in conversation with Avlesh Singh, co-founder and CEO of Webklipper, the company behind WebEngage. WebEngage is a powerful customer engagement suite for your website that lets you collect feedback, gather customer insights and ultimately drive sales and conversions. They have gone from nothing to 7,000 customers (both free and paid) in less than 15 months and have done it all with a very lean team. Let’s get started.

What does WebEngage do? How does it help websites engage their visitors better?
Avlesh: WebEngage is an in-site marketing toolkit for online businesses. We help companies improves sales/conversions and help them collect awesome insights from their customers. All in real-time.

Using our Notifications, companies run targeted promotions by offering discounts and value adds to people “most likely” to purchase. Surveys on the other hand help customers collect insights to measure customer satisfaction and do lead generation on their site. And our Feedback product is the world’s simplest customer support tool that gets you up and running with a no-frills support channel on your website in less than a minute.

So who do you pitch your products to in a company? Marketing?
Our primary audience is Marketing and Product Management. They see the most value in this tool.

What’s your pitch to them?
Simple. In this order:

  1. Ever walked into an offline store? How often did the salesmen try to educate you or nudge you into buying something? We let you do something similar; ah, for your online store!
  2. Not sold yet? Okay, your marketers can run in-site campaigns without changing any code on the site; without seeking any developer or IT help. Oh yes. This is true. And these are truly rich messages with dynamic targeting capabilities. Care about user insights on your product or catalog? Care about user feedback?
  3. Not sold yet? Okay, see who uses our products. Also see some live demos on these sites.
  4. Not sold yet? Okay, take a live demo.
  5. Not sold yet? Here’s the website and our blog. Look forward to work with you. Bye.

Let’s back up a bit here. Tell me how you got the initial buzz going for your product? What part of it were you able to convert to real paying customers? Where did you get your first customer (or first set of customers) from?
We were in private beta for 5 months. Forget paying customers, we had a tough time finding the bigger guys to use our product. We focused a lot on education through content on our website and blog, answered direct question on Quora etc. Our live demo feature went viral and a lot of developers came out of curiosity to the site to find out how that thing worked. Here’s a sample of how curious developers got :-)

From free to paid, it was a three month journey. We went live in Oct 2011 and it took as good 2 months to get our first set of paying customers. We reached out to our beta users announcing the paid plans and features that would come along with it. Some tried out but never paid; a few took the big leap of faith and became our first set of paid customers – Art.com, Park-n-Fly, MobileDevelopmentIntelligence, Cleartrip, Justeat, Makemytrip etc to name a few.

75% of our customer base (free and paid) is outside India. That is how it was to begin with, too. With most Indian customers, early on, we had to go for F2F demos and explain the product in-depth for them to take the plunge.

Did the marketing start as you were developing the product or only after it?
It almost went hand-in-hand. So far, we have only done content marketing. And we have been done a fair job. Our plan is to do 100x better with content.

Did you have a marketing plan in place? Did you have numbers, like say, I would be able to get 100 signups if I do this and this and this? How much of that worked out?
No, we never had that. And it’s difficult for our category because customers are not “looking” for a push messaging tool on Google. We are trying to “create” a market and content is the only predictable way to go about it. This is definitely not true for customer support tools as they can direct their marketing spends on Google because too many people look for such tools everyday.

Also I see you have a Powered by WebEngage link in your surveys and feedback? Is that like a major marketing channel for you? What kind of traffic and conversions does it bring in?
It is the biggest source of inbound leads for us. Over 40% of our sign-ups happen from those logos in the three products. It is also a blessing in disguise because over a period of time we have started commanding huge premium from our enterprise customers who would otherwise want to get rid of those logos on their sites. We end up losing a lot of visibility but then get paid well for it too.

What other marketing channels have you used? What has been the most effective for you? How do you go about figuring which marketing channel will work for you?
We tried display ads. We tried paid app directory listings. We tried outsourced sales and marketing arms in the US. None of these worked very well from customer acquisition viewpoint. Content continues to rule our marketing plans. We are spending a lot of time and money now on building great quality content – videos, how-tos, galleries, use-cases etc. In the next month or two, you’ll see a lot of stuff on this front. We plan to do display advertising too, but with some corrections by incorporating learnings from our previous experiences.

As WebEngage grew, how have you scaled up your marketing?
In our case, we focused a lot on support. We used to (and still do) take calls at 2 in the night, pretty much everyday. We have managed to do this with great success. Happy customers are the best marketers. We got a lot of referrals from them. Most of our marketing efforts are around content creation. And so far, we have managed to do it in-house. We haven’t spent too many ad dollars.

How do you measure the success of your marketing? Compare them to historical data, industry benchmarks or…? And by marketing I don’t just mean paid campaigns, even a new website, new onboarding emails or anything on those lines.
We measure it based on conversions. Be it paid marketing or content, we have always believed in creating a workflow to measure and track conversions. Free tier sign-ups through paid marketing don’t work for us. That’s the reason we don’t spend ad-dollars. Content gives us a low cost channel of customer acquisition which we can further up-sell/cross-sell to. That’s one area we are trying to improve upon.

For our website, blog, video etc, we measure the success by amount of time spent on each of these. Customers on an average spend over 7 minutes on the site. It used to be less than a minute 6 months ago. In any SaaS business, customers want to read a lot and be sure that they want to pay before choosing to do so. Content helps in decision-making.

How do you keep a visitor engaged right from the first time he hits your website to him becoming a customer? How does your tool itself help with this?
We eat our own dog food. Spend a minute on our pricing page and you’ll come to know :-) . Take a look here – http://blog.webengage.com/2012/11/24/how-we-eat-our-own-dog-food-at-webengage/
Plus our live demo feature keeps users busy and educates them very well on what we do; it generates a lot of leads for us too.

What are the top 2-3 insights you got using WebEngage that you wouldn’t have got otherwise?
Here, in this order:

  1. The amount of time and effort needed to sell a $100/month product is the same as $1000/month product. I’d rather channelize my efforts into finding high ticket size deals than smaller ones; I used to think otherwise until an year ago.
  2. There is no better marketing tool than a bunch of happy customers. Some of our biggest enterprise deals have been through warm intros by such customers. How did we keep them happy? Beautiful product and proactive support; I undervalued the importance of latter until an year ago.

What are some of the biggest mistakes you have made on the marketing side of things?
We “outsourced” our sales/marketing to a sales-on-demand team in the US. I won’t name them. We spent crazy money in “retainer” fees and had 0 conversions by the end of pilot. Their so called “smart team” had no clue of what we were building, even towards the end of the pilot.

What marketing numbers do you measure? How often?
Money spent. Number of conversions – free and paid. Every month.

Let’s talk pricing. How did you get to the $15-$99/month model you have? Is that the price you started off with as well?
Mostly by talking to customers on how much are they willing to pay. Yes, this is our original pricing. But, we have made a lot of tweaks to the features being offered in each of these plans.

What tools and systems do you use?
Our own for tool for in-site marketing. And Adwords. Nothing major apart from that.

Your new website is a massive improvement over the old one. How has it increased your conversions? What objectives did you have in mind going into the new website?
Oh yes. We had only one objective, have people spend more time on the site and “see” what we do. Everywhere you go to, there are links to see our products in action. That was the only way to educate people on what we do. Take a look at this page – webengage.com/how-it-works

What advice do you have for startups planning to do an overhaul of their website?
Only one – decide what you want from it. Sign-ups, Conversions, Branding, Education … You can’t design a site to do all of the above. That’s the area we generally go wrong. Designing it with one objective always helps.

What kind of community do you have around your products?
None, yet. We want to build one.

What about partnerships and integrations?
We have focused a lot on integrations. Take a look here – webengage.com/integrate-with/your-website. This has worked out very well, because all of a sudden, customers start discovering you on new platforms. They would have otherwise not even known about us. We continue to focus on this. Second, we are building robust API’s with a larger goal of involving developers in building some intriguing applications on top of WebEngage. First cut here – docs.webengage.com

We have just started exploring partnership opportunities. Too early to comment.

What about your personal brand? How have you used that to increase the visibility of your products?
Yes, I am a classified spammer in the virtual and real world who leaves no stone unturned when it comes to promoting my product. Too bad, I know.

What do you think is an ideal marketing team for a tech startup?
I keep saying this – initial selling and marketing has to be done in-house and preferably by the founders themselves. If you, as a founder, cannot sell your product, no sales guy can. It is that simple. But its tough to understand as well, because I see most founders in tech companies get uncomfortable upon hearing this.

With 6700+ customers, you have been very successful in taking your products to the world. What advice do you have for other Indian startups who are looking to take their products to the world at large?
See, how fast things are changing. That number is now 7100+, both free and paid :-)

Here, in this order:

  1. Build a good product. Great brands were not built by advertising or marketing.
  2. Make sure there’s zero human touch in the product. Customers outside India don’t like getting stuck in a workflow that needs human intervention.
  3. Selling and marketing is a D-I-Y job until you reach significant scale.
  4. Network with right people. Don’t shy away from seeking help or intros.
  5. Have a good website. There’s no alternative.

Educational content and live demos definitely go a long way with marketing a product that customers are not looking for. Thanks Avlesh for the great insights.

Dear readers, if you have any follow up questions for Avlesh, please leave them in the comments below. He’s a busy man but I will get him to answer them :)

This article was originally published on Sanket Nadhani’s blog Poke and Bite

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NowFloats – Getting small businesses online in 4 SMSes and 13 minutes!

NowFloats – Getting small businesses online in 4 SMSes and 13 minutes! 

I love clear mission statements, and NowFloats couldn’t be clearer:

9.6 million small and medium businesses need a website. Only 0.6 million have one. That’s 9 million tasks on our desk (and that’s just in India!)

I recently got a chance to catch up with Ronak and Jasminder (Jas), 2 of the cofounders of this exciting company called NowFloats that aims to bring SMBs online, without making them sweat over it (other 2 co-founders are Nitin Jain and Neeraj Sabharwal) . NowFloats is a team of 20 (4 founders, 4 tech, others in sales and support), based out of Hyderabad, though their customers are spread all over India. Overall, I was very excited by what I listened and saw, I sense that NowFloat holds immense possibilities for small businesses and has all the right ingredients to be successful in its mission.

The problem for small businesses

Given increasing reliance of users on search, it is becoming important for offline small businesses to have an online presence. An online presence needs to have discoverability (users know that you exist), engagement (users interact with you and like you), and conversion (users visit your offline business). However, when creating such an online presence, a small business has to grapple with 3 problems:

  1. Creating a website takes too much time and effort – even for tech-savvy type, which a small business owner is not.
  2. Updates require engaging website developer again – too much effort and dependency
  3. Online marketing is hard and expensive, and requires digital marketing expertise, not something a small business owner has

Standard option currently for a small business is to do nothing about online presence; very few businesses hire someone to create, maintain and market their site which is very expensive option without clear ROI.

NowFloats solves this problem for small business in an easy-to-use manner at an extremely affordable pricing.

NowFloats Promise

NowFloats promises to allow a business owner to create a website in 4 messages and in less than 13 minutes – send the name and address of your business, website name you desire, and your website is ready to use! If you wish to update the site (messages on message board or updating any of the original details you provided while creating the site), it is as simple as sending another message.

It may look like a simple and easy website to create, but it packs a lot of punch:

  1. Site and every message are geo-tagged, which means local searches will show up your website and deep-link to your message.
  2. Your website and each message is search engine optimized
  3. Each update is a page so it can be shared by your customers on social networks, which again has endless social, search and business possibilities.
  4. Visitors can subscribe to get all subsequent updates, or leave message for you to follow up with them 

NowFloats – The Product

Design: NowFloats is a very well-designed product. Their company website as well as the customer sites are beautiful in their minimalist and pleasing design.

Technology: They have a scalable architecture, built using Microsoft technologies. They have 4 patents filed and 2-3 are on the way. They offer subdomains under nowfloats.com in addition to allowing customers to use their own domain names if they wish – like Body Granite Gym and The Courtyard & Cafe Courtyard do.

Analytics: They care deeply about analytics that customers get about their online visitors. Businesses get weekly information about how their site is doing (# of page views in a week). On their product roadmap, they have features to provide details like which messages got max view, keywords which generated maximum views, etc., goal being to show what type of content is attracting maximum traffic.

Pricing: Pricing Plans (5K to 12.5K a year) are very competitive, given that even hosting a site costs 3-5K a year.  NowFloats is still reviewing pricing strategies based on market feedback so expect this to change soon.

Test-driving NowFloats

As I took the service for test-drive, here are my impressions:

  1. It is very easy to set this up indeed. I was up and running with http://ilovebooks.nowfloats.com/ in less than 10 minutes.
  2. As soon as the site was created, I got a call from their customer service. They wanted to confirm my identity and walk me through the next steps, including collecting payments.
  3. I realized I picked a wrong name for my business, so I wanted to change. A call to customer support informed me that they will have to do the change for me, though an app is coming which will allow self-service. Later I found it was only partially true, the name (and many other details of the business) can be updated through SMS messages even now. I promptly used the service.
  4. I wanted to update the site using my laptop, but changes can only be done using SMS, upcoming app, or customer support. I find this a little annoying.
  5. I tried to get creative and sent an html fragment as an SMS message, which created a broken message on the site. Given that I can’t update it online; this requires me to call customer support. Later I was told how to do this, and also given the current target audience, this is not an often used feature.


Customer Acquisition

Clearly small businesses see value in NowFloats offering. In a short span, they have 1600+ customers live, including customers like Hazzel Ice Cream Cafe and Dr. Chandrika’s Kerala Ayurveda . I was fascinated by the variety of customers they have attracted, including my favorite restaurant in Hyderabad, a Nokia Priority franchisee, and even a personal branding site. These sites are discoverable (through geo-tagging, auto-generated tags and other SEO techniques, sites and messages come up in ahead in all search results) and drive engagement (users subscribe to the messages, businesses get notified when someone subscribes or shows an interest). Conversion (people visiting the business) is hard to track and NowFloats team is working on some solutions that will allow such tracking.

NowFloats has multiple approaches and channels to acquire customers:

  1. Geography: Started out with targeting Hyderabad businesses. Currently they are focused on Bangalore businesses. The goal is to have pan-India sales presence soon through partnerships and other means and continue to expand city by city.
  2. Catagory: One of the innovative ways they target a particular category is to target the franchise business owners of a particular brand. For example, they have brought many Nokia Priority franchisee owners online, same with Printo. Given the huge number of franchisees in India, this seems to be a winning sales strategy.
  3. Partnerships: They have a shop-in-a-shop model with Printo. Since Printo serves much of the same customer segment as NowFloats but with a complimentary service, this is a great move to gain customers.  They are exploring similar partnerships with complimentary service providers.

Couple of other things I would like them to focus on:

  1. Online Presence: I can’t discover NowFloats online. Google search for getting my business online didn’t say anything about them in first 3-4 pages. I think they need to make their discoverability better as they go forward.
  2. Social: Small businesses thrive on communities and loyal customers who like the service they get. One of the best ways to reach small businesses is to tap into this community and loyal customer base, through social or other platforms. I would love to introduce NowFloats to the small shops I visit near me, but there is no good way for me to do so.

Competition and Differentiation

When I researched around, surprisingly, there aren’t many cost effective ways for small businesses to create online presence. India Get Online program from Google aims to get Indian businesses online and are a viable option for a small business. However, I think NowFloats offers a more targeted and sustainable product, that can potentially complement the Google offering.

Google’s strategy is to get a basic site up for you so that you are visible in local searches, to stay visible. NowFloats focuses on getting a site for you and market it online for you, thus helping you stay focused on what you do best – run your business.

What Future holds for NowFloats

I see NowFloats extending itself in 3 areas:

  1. Richer Eco-system: NowFloats plays in the local search space through their mobile app. A successful ‘NowFloats for business’ means rich data about local businesses available for their app to make use of. Controlling the supply of rich data from small, local businesses has lots of grand possibilities.
  2. Richer Revenue Models: Currently, there revenue is subscription-based, and it may be hard to show how an investment of 12500/- per year translates into increased traffic (and revenue) in their offline business. Their goal is to evolve newer revenue models that can directly tie NowFloats revenue with SMBs revenue, thereby creating a symbiotic and sticky relationships.
  3. Richer engagement with businesses – Businesses need many services as soon as they realize the potential of an online presence. Selling online, driving deals, building software solutions for their businesses, etc. all can be offered once the business is on-boarded.

Power of an idea lies in simplicity and pervasiveness. After I talked to NowFloats team, I have been observing small shops around me in a new light. If the great little corner shop selling briefs could be easily discoverable, If my favorite restaurant in Greater Noida could be more engaging, if the grocery shop in my apartment complex had an easier way to let me know of his deals, I am sure these businesses would benefit immensely. And it is so simple for them to do so now – by using NowFloats. Nowfloats is a very powerful idea whose time has come – may all the power be with small businesses and NowFloats!

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How to debug a product startup idea ?

You may find it useful to read the previous post on importance of ambiguity tolerance and questioning for an engineer transitioning to a product guy before reading this post.

When I was first tasked with writing new features for an existing product that contained thousands of lines of code I earnestly started reading through the documentation & code to understand how it is structured and to figure out the APIs to use. My then engineering mentor said to me

” Reading through the documentation & code you will spend days or even weeks forming mental model which you will learn may not be accurate as you implement your code later on, leading to a lot of wastage of time and redoing.  Instead setup your environment, load the code inside a debugger, put a breakpoint and run it through. If there are specific areas you want to learn  then ‘step in’ to that function. This way you will learn about it faster, more accurately and spend less time redoing “

I found this advice to be a great insight and I think it extends in many places.

As a product startup one always start with an idea and then forms mental models around that (business plan or business case studies) and then build things based on these models to later realize they were not accurate thus wasting a lot of time. In the harsh world of startups you don’t get another chance to re-write.

You have to know very early if your idea will work before you can commit a lot resources on it. Things that determine if your idea works are some of the following –

Will it be adopted by users,

Will it talked about to friends,

Will it paid for by someone,

Or even celebrated & craved.

Essentially will it create the impact for you and the world that you dream it will.

MVP – your Idea Debugger

To know if your idea will work you should run it through a debugger that can tell you that the logic of idea will lead to its intended impact.

Enter the Minimum Viable Product (MVP), a term first coined by Frank Robinson and further popularized by Eric Ries.  Today it is a term that is quite loosely & liberally used and at times even abused.  MVP is a misnomer in the sense it is not the stripped version of the product but it is really a tool about learning & risk reduction around customer & market.  It is employed to uncover critical learning of your idea.  MVP is best thought of as the debugger of your product idea.

Before we start getting into the details of an MVP, let’s examine the anatomy of an idea first

Idea Anatomy

An Idea consists of the following elements

Anatomy of an Idea
Anatomy of an Idea

Vision – A new state of the world that will be in place if the idea becomes successful.

Problem – A friction that is coming in the way of job that a beneficiary is trying to get done

Solution – A proposed alternative for removing the friction

Beneficiary (also called as Customer* or a User**) – Someone who is going to benefit from the idea

* Customer is one who writes the cheque for the service consumed.
**User is someone who uses the product or service

 

Example:

Let us take an example to illustrate. Suppose you came up with an idea for creating a mobile SariApp that shows how to drape a sari.  It could be dissected the following way.

SariApp Vision:  More women in the world  in touch with their Indian traditions (or traditional Indian dressing)

SariApp Problem:  Would like to wear a sari for attending an Indian function but have no past experience or knowledge of draping a sari.

SariApp Solution:  A screen by screen illustration of each step of sari draping.

SariApp Beneficiaries (customer):  Women who have been fascinated by this Indian dress or those who who grew up outside of India never bought a sari before.

Once you do this you realize that problem, solution & beneficiaries are all at best guesses or assumptions that you make.  The task of debugging your idea thus becomes one of converting each of these guesses into verifiable facts that either proves or disproves them.

How MVP clarifies Idea logic

After you list down the things that are big unknowns in your idea you build something minimal (your MVP) to question it. The interesting thing about the MVP is that you have to build one for every idea, the same debugger can’t be used for every idea and the same learning does not apply everywhere. You could design an MVP to test or uncover learning one element or combination of elements (about just problem or combination of problem/solution/customer segment in the idea).

An example of an MVP for the above SariApp could be a simple landing page that articulates clearly the problem statement, the solution and call to action (such as leaving an email address to get contacted when solution becomes ready). Responses from traffic directed to the landing page  will  help learn about the merit of the problem/solution. If there are high number of clicks on your landing page but very few clicks on call to action a most likely interpretation of that could be those who visited care about the problem but not the solution. If the visits itself was very few then it is most likely they don’t care about the problem itself as you have stated it and so on and so forth.

Few things to keep in mind

The fidelity of the MVP is very important aspect to note which describes the minimum-ness of the MVP and plays a key role (see diagram) on the learning and how fast you get it. You have to start with testing the value proposition (a concise statement of problem & solution together) of the idea and increase the fidelity to learn more.
Fidelity of an MVP
Fidelity of an MVP denotes the minimum-ness of the MVP

 In most cases MVP mostly tells what does not work rather than what works or even why it works. One has to iterate over changing the MVP and increasing the fidelity of it.

So what are the debuggers (MVP) you have built for your idea?

In the next post we will look at “Four critical stages of Product Startup Fitness” 

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Conversation with Software Vendor Stelae Technologies

Software vendor Stelae Technologies provides a content extraction and automated conversion solution for multiple categories of content. Its product Khemeia™ is a cloud-based technology that combines multiple analytic methodologies into one product. In this interview, CEO and founder Aruna Schwarz discusses the unique nature of the company’s product and shares product development advice for first-time entrepreneurs and startup CEOs. This article is brought to SandHill readers in partnership with ProductNation. 

SandHill.com: When and where was your company launched?

Aruna Schwarz: Stelae Technologies was launched in 2002 in Paris and was flipped to an Indian company in October 2012. It’s based in Chennai.

SandHill.com: How did your company originate — what inspired you to launch the company and what was the original vision/hope?

Aruna Schwarz: Stelae Technologies was born out of my experience as marketing director of a content management solutions vendor, where one of the service lines was manual and semi-automated processing of magazine and newspaper print content to create Web publishing outputs.

Khemeia originated out of the idea to create an automated conversion solution for multiple categories of content. My original vision to create a product company in the content analytics and conversion space has been rigorously maintained throughout and 80 percent of our revenues are from product sales (license and maintenance revenues).

SandHill.com: Please describe your company’s products.

Aruna Schwarz: Khemeia enables automated analysis, metadata extraction and structuring of unstructured content from multiple formats (e.g., PDF, Word, ASCII, HTML) and creation of multiple outputs (e.g., XML, XBRL, S1000D, Epub). It enables customers to produce structured, indexed, searchable and pertinent information quicker, better and cheaper.

The product has been developed from scratch and contains over 90 content analysis algorithms. The content categories we focus on are financial accounts, technical documentation, legal content (cases, judgments, legislation, statutes and regulatory information) and publishing (newspapers, magazines and books). We have processed over 10 million pages in multiple categories, formats and languages.

The other product in our portfolio is pdf2xbrl ™, an XBRL taxonomy editor with multiple accounting taxonomies (UK GAAP, Indian GAAP, etc.) integrated.

SandHill.com: Who are the funding sources behind your company?

Aruna Schwarz: My first investor, Barrington Davies (former MD of BT France, former MD of Business Units of Cable & Wireless), was my former boss at Cable & Wireless UK. Over breakfast in a café in Paris we discussed my business idea and he was excited enough to invest and also be the chairman of Stelae Technologies France. He continues to be an investor in the Indian company.

R&D, product development and customer acquisition has been funded with innovation grants from the French government, customer revenues and investment from angel investors in France, UK, the United States, Israel and the Indian Angel Network.

SandHill.com: Please describe how your product provides business value for your customers.

Aruna Schwarz: Khemeia enables up to 70 percent cost savings for end users and BPOs and faster turnaround times (two weeks compared to eight weeks). For the BPOs that currently use manual and semi-automated processing and separate work flows for each content category, Khemeia significantly reduces set-up times and costs.

Read the complete article at Sandhill.com

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7 Ways to Avoid Your Product Company Becoming a Services Company!

Product companies (especially those focused on the Enterprise) always face pressures, primarily that of cash flow in the earlier years, forcing them to take on more services components. This is especially true in countries like India where angel and venture investments are not as plentiful as in Silicon Valley. This is a trap that product companies will find it difficult to emerge from once they get into it.

Just to be clear – there is nothing wrong in being a services company! In many ways, it has better cash flow profiles in the earlier years enabling companies to ramp up with additional people and “projects”. But, you may not be able to make progress on your product vision, unfortunately!

How do you avoid this situation? Here are 7 ways you can avoid this trap:

1. Stick to your Vision, Test and Pivot: As we learn more about Lean Startups, one of the best ways to avoid becoming a services company is to make sure that your product is needed, clients will pay for it and you can build a company on it! You talk to potential clients before you build the product. Even then, you build only a Minimum Viable Product (MVP), roll it out and test your hypotheses by getting to revenues. If revenues are minimal or non-existent, you pivot and build something that someone will pay money for, and soon!

2. Build Features Based on How many Users Ask For Them:  In one of our enterprise product companies, we had a simple rule – If one client asks for it, it goes into the backlog list. If two clients ask for it, it goes into the next major release. If three clients ask for it, it goes into the next sprint!

3. Turn Custom Components into Product Features if you can: Try not to build components for any one client. Parameterize the client’s requirement into a more general idea and make what they are asking for, a specific case of that! For example, if they require your product to work with a certain brand of a reporting tool, think of how you can generalize it so that it can work with most reporting tools. You may need to build additional components but it will be worth it when the next client needs your product to work with another brand of a reporting tool!

4. Line up Services Partners Early:  Large product companies deliberately price their professional services much higher than their service partner ecosystem does. For example, if you were to source Oracle product expertise from Oracle, it will be an order of magnitude more expensive than obtaining it from a service partner of theirs. That’s how they prevent themselves from being sucked into spending too much time on services and away from their products. For small product companies this may be difficult to do, but if you find service partners who are also service partners for related products, they may be interested. It will involve sharing your revenues but that’s the tradeoff!

5. Line up Product Partners Early:  Products have natural boundaries and it’s good to recognize them early on and bring in product partners that do those things better. For example, if your product addresses a specific vertical with a core solution, line up product partners for related needs like reporting, social media integration, telephony integration, etc. You cannot be everything to your clients and identifying related product partners early on will help you avoid the trap of reinventing all related wheels all over again! Of course, you need to architect your product in such a way that it can easily integrate with other solutions!

6. Refuse Non-Core Competency Opportunities:  This is easy to say but tough to follow in real-life if you are a product startup. If a client offers you money to do a related thing but not quite what you were hoping to sell, you may need to refuse it! But that’s exactly what a product startup needs to do to stay true to its vision. If three clients ask for this other thing, that’s a Pivot! Take it and go forward!

7. Plan ahead for Cash Flow Pressures: Product companies are not for the faint hearted! Do not embark on even writing one line of code before you talk to potential prospects about your ideas, show them sketches of what you were thinking about, and finding out what they are willing to spend for such a solution. If you are already well into having two or three clients and it is a case of scaling, you may need to pivot to products that could scale up better, faster.

It pays well to remember that with product companies the goal is to write code once, get paid many times. With services companies, you write code once, you get paid once! Very rarely do you get to write code and retain the Intellectual Property that is general, and can quickly be sold to other clients, unless you subsidize the initial development substantially!

Again, there is nothing wrong with being a services company. It has its plusses and minuses, but without paying attention to strategy, proper architecture and partners, you could end up becoming a services company when you want to go the other way!

I already am a product – Lady Gaga
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“E” is for empathy

The last three business books I read were seemingly all different. “Wired to Care” by Dev Patnaik, “Nanovation” by Kevin and Jackie Freiberg and “Customer Centric Selling” by Michael Bosworth. The first was how humans are genetically designed to care for others, the second was the story behind how the Tata Nano was launched and the third was a book on more effective selling. But there was a common underlying theme to it all.

The theme was empathy. The Merriam Webster dictionary defines empathy as

“the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another of either the past or present without having the feelings, thoughts, and experience fully communicated in an objectively explicit manner; also : the capacity for this”

All the books in various ways said this and I am paraphrasing here – in order to to create a compelling offering you need to understand your customer’s pain and create a solution for it.

This should be self-evident but unfortunately that is not what we find in reality. What we find too often is a situation where a company creates a product without fully understanding how it will solve a customer’s problem. Even if they have a legitimate product solving legitimate problems, they are so caught up in the gee-whizziness of their product that they stop listening to their customers.

This is a big problem. A company that has a valid solution for a defined problem can last for a while. It might even get some early adopters but it will have a hard time sustaining its momentum and will run out of steam unless it starts a dialog with its customers and is empathetic to their needs. This is because your mainstream customers, the ones that will sustain you, are not early adopters and need to develop trust before they do business with you. One of the surest ways of building trust is to make sure the customer feels that you feel their pain and understand their unique situation.

This is not rocket science. It can be easily instituted in an organization. Designing a consultative sales process around understanding a customer’s needs first is a great start. But the culture of making sure that every touch point with the customer listens more than talks starts at the top.

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Inspiring quotes from Woman Leaders in the Product Space

Everywhere you look, there is an Indian woman in pursuit of an entrepreneurial dream. With a GDP growth rate of 8.2%, women product leaders have a whole reason to be bullish. This International Women’s Day, we choose to celebrate pioneering Woman Product Leaders among us, choose to celebrate the success of these efficacious women. This is not a comprehensive list, and if there are some Women Product Leaders whom we have missed and should be in this list, please feel free to email us or drop in a comment and we will add it to the list. 

Read along as these women share what advice would they like to impart to aspiring women product leaders. Please find the views in an alphabetical order below.

Anuradha Acharya, Ocimum Biosolutions: CEO with a vision for better health for Indians using technology, Anuradha believes in management as a fine balance between delegating and getting things done. More than often one needs to get theirs hands dirty, she quotes. 

Anuradha Bansal, Verity Solutions: Anuradha admires the women who juggle the pressures of corporate life and rear a family. She considers Failure and Success a sinusoidal wave that indicates the state of affairs in the organization during different points in time. Even if one were to wind up an enterprise – the terrific learning that one takes away cannot be ignored. Even the most substantial started small.

Entrepreneurship in common parlance often gets construed as “risky”. To her it’s a misnomer – everything is risky, just that the risk matrix differs. 

Pooja Goyal, Intellitots: As an entrepreneur so many benefits which seemed meagre in a corporate. Environment feel like hefty perks be it IT support or HR support or for that matter janitorial support. It is a tough transition especially in the early days when you have to be extremely hands on and set the tone for the company culture. Having said that it is also the most fulfilling opportunity to create something from scratch and shape it and grow it.

What I have learnt in my two entrepreneurial ventures is ‘ a bad decision is better than no decision.

Sairee Chahal, Fleximoms: The co-founder for the most women inspiring start-up, FlexiMoms, assures us product is less about code and more about people skills, conversation and trend spotting. Our constant job is to keep looking for the best people and move their discretion in our favour. Sometimes the best brains don’t come from expected quarters but the most unlikely places hence it’s most important to invest time in ourselves and people around us. And one has to enjoy the process and the journey – the most exciting part. 

Sangeeta Patni, Extensio Software: Sangeeta Patni, President, Extensio Software, considers the journey as a worthy mountain to climb. She affirms that entrepreneurship is all about leadership. A product leader will always tell you “What to do” and not “How to do”. 

She admits that a woman is a product leader because she has the passion for your product, and vision for her business. To embark on being a Product Leader means being able to have a very clear vision of the value you want to bring to the world, and the immense passion required to execute the vision, and also to be able to successfully make money from it – in face of competition, the technology changes that render the window of opportunity to be really short, and to be able to have confidence in ones ability to change and innovate. 

Sangeetha Banerjee, Apartment Adda: Sangeetha is convinced of a woman’s natural virtue of sincere empathy, which enables them to understand Customer Pain Points and pump those into their Product Strategy.  The founder for Apartment Adda, Sangeetha shares that while Building or Enhancing a Product substantial forethought is required towards After-Sales Support – Deployment & On-going Support, which is critical for the survival of a SaaS product. 

Interestingly, she connects it with a woman’s natural instincts, because when we buy that cosy bulky Sofa, we are not thinking only about the Comfort. Women are thinking how easy or difficult will it be to clean or move around, and whether the maid will double her rates just at the sight of it in her Living Room! 

Zeba Zaidi, GameOnIndia: ‘As a woman you lack nothing that would bring you success’,  Zeba Zaidi, Co-Founder and CEO, Game On India, believes that the satisfaction you get from running your own business is something worth striving for. The economy in India is perfectly poised to support new business, people are getting more and more open to newer ideas, there are enough funding options out there and all in all it’s a fantastic time to be thinking about your own business. There is a lot of knowledge sharing and avenues where your goals can get support. So my advice would be to just go for it.  

Our goal is to highlight what worked for these successful product leaders. Every input is appreciated for raising a new challenge for women in the entrepreneurial world. 

As mentioned, if (and we must have) we have missed out on some names, either yours or another you know of, and would like it to be added to the list, please comment below here, or email us. 

With Inputs from Kanika Bhatia, Boring Brands

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Whats your product – Dabangg Or Paan Singh Tomar?

Image courtesy - graphicleftovers.com

As a part of my product management training, I insist on the importance of understanding of behavioral science while managing products. I am both puzzled and irritated when a participant, that is mostly an MBA educated product manager tells me – Viveck, can we skip to the section of how to write a PRD as these principles are only relevant to my boss, VP – Product Management. On the contrary, designers and engineers hardly have ever raised such a moronic concern and are solely focussed on learning. Another, one such idiocy MBA product managers display is the need for ‘certification’. More about certifications in another blog.

Irrespective of your level as a product manager, its important to know about these behavioral principles as only through constant practice can you become adept at applying these with ease when you reach higher levels. Contrary to the mythical belief of our MBA product manager, knowledge doesnt descend down from heaven as soon as you are christened the VP of Product Management. It takes hard work and consitent practice to apply what you have learned

Why is it that I insist on understanding behavioral science especially w.r.t Internet Product Management?

Internet is about dealing with market risks

If you were to rate the risk for an Internet related business – one of the highest risk will be that of the adoption of the market. Internet is rarely about creating a ground breaking technology like the search algorithm of google and is more about marrying the existing technology with that of a market need. Dropbox did not create new technology, neither did twitter or  Facebook – all they did us marry the market to the technology. Here is one of the good diagrams from Steve Blank.

Market is about understanding people

Understanding market is about understanding people. More importantly, their irrationality. Here is an example of product – market reaction

One of my favorite examples is Dabangg, the Salman Khan starrer in the year of 2010.

The movie was one of the biggest box office hits. In a recent flight journey, I was reading an interview of Akshay Kumar who (along with the folks from the industry) was extremely puzzled at the overwhelming success of this otherwise ordinary masala movie. It seemed that there was no takers from distributors for Dabangg post watching the initial promos. Make no mistake – I am not saying Dabangg is a bad movie, I am just equating

the unexpected success that the movie enjoyed with the usually storyline. 

09-paan-singh-tomar-090312

 

Contrast this with the year 2012, the relase of Paan Singh Tomar. Well scripted, extremely gripping and real.  

The box office nos are noway close to what Dabangg is. Dabangg did a collection of Rs 105 Crores in the first 10 days whereas Paan Singh Tomar did not more than 9 Crores. Isnt this confounding? Werent we taught that a better product, in this case paan singh tomar, should outdo their otherwise ordinary counterparts in the market? Isnt that how rational audience had to react?

The answer is the audience wont and more often they dont. The understanding of this lies in the tenets of behavioral science. I will cover this in my next part of the blog.

Why did I choose Paan Singh Tomar against Dabangg?

  • Similarities of a rural setting
  • Both revolve around an inconoclast – in this case the leading male character
  • The lead character is a rebel in both the movies in their own ways
  • Lastly one of the good movies in the recent past

Whats your take on this?

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The Gap Unfilled

No one is sure of their exact number, but a census of micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) done a few years ago estimated that there are 26 million small and medium enterprises in India. It is well known that this market is fragmented and price-sensitive and, hence, large companies have tried to tailor products and services to target this market. But, is that enough? Take a look at the case studies below and see for yourself. 

MSMEs often complain that they don’t have adequate access to financing. One reason for this is that banks and financial institutions find it expensive and difficult to do a thorough analysis of a small firm’s credit-worthiness. Seven years ago, Crisil, India’s premier rating agency, stepped in to address this problem. The challenge was that any credit-worthiness assessment had to be completed within a reasonable period of time, maintain Crisil’s standards of analysis, and yet be affordable.

Crisil launched SME ratings in 2005. It created a network of qualified individuals in more than 180 cities, who were given intense training based on a specially-developed methodology, and had to meet rigorous certification requirements. This network of trained professionals became the bedrock of the SME rating system. To attract these individuals who are not formal employees of Crisil, the company even brought their parents to the Crisil office to show them that the company was solid and that this could be a career option. Reputed chartered accountancy firms with an all-India reach were hired for verification and oversight. The rating was based on a simple, two-dimensional scale of performance capability (five categories) and financial  strength (two categories). Once all the data is collected, technology is used to complete a rating in a few days. Overall, the rating is completed within about a month. With this process in place, Crisil is able to do about 10,000 SME ratings a year, making it the largest SME rating agency in the world.

With a credit rating, an SME can get better access to bank finance and, sometimes, even lower interest rates. However, even with these benefits, the Rs 50,000-1 lakh price tag was found to be too expensive by many SMEs. So, in spite of the well-designed product, and the business and process innovation that Crisil introduced to make the rating product accessible, the government had to step in to provide a subsidy for those MSMEs who couldn’t afford it. But, pricing is not the only barrier to adoption of new products by MSMEs. In 2007, India’s largest IT services company, Tata Consultancy Services, identified SMEs as an important segment. But since it lacked adequate experience in working with SMEs, the company met with more than 250 organisations to understand how they use technology.

TCS found that SMEs had made significant investments in devices and hardware, including networking, and used their computers mainly for accounts and inventory. But MSME owners complained that the reports they generated didn’t reflect actual performance because there were islands of data that were not integrated with each other. Others reported that they struggled to keep up with technology changes, keep their systems virus-free, and to hire and retain staff for IT. Even evaluating offers made by vendors was a tricky task.

Based on these customer inputs, TCS saw an opportunity to take responsibility for running SMEs’ IT, based on some basic principles such as covering all key business processes and providing for all statutory compliances. To avoid fresh capital expenditure, the company provided an operating expenditure-based service.

The resultant TCS cloud-based solution, TCS iON, was launched in the market in March 2011. iON is periodically upgraded by TCS, but the user doesn’t have to do anything extra at his end. Though iON is available across six verticals, in the first year and a half TCS had only about 300 installations, with the largest concentration in the education space, apparently much less than what the company hoped to achieve.

Overcoming the trust deficit between technology acceptor and new product is the biggest barrier to innovating for the MSME market

At the other end of the spectrum is Tally, arguably the most successful product ever built for MSMEs in India. It is estimated to be in use by about two million users although less than one million users have purchased licences. Right from the beginning Tally was built with Indian users in mind — it used minimum hardware resources, and was tailored to Indian accounting practices. Even novice users were able to quickly learn how to use the product and it rapidly gained a large installed base of users, thereby creating a platform for the positive returns of network economics. Tally worked closely with hundreds of institutes across the country to impart training and thus create a base of accountants with Tally skills. Early on, Tally created good relationships with the chartered accountants community. With its huge installed base, Tally has become a basic requirement for any accountant in India — if you don’t know how to use Tally, you can’t be a practising chartered accountant! 

To address the piracy issue, Tally reduced its prices substantially a few years ago. The product has also kept up with changes in technology and applications — it was very quick in providing VAT functionality after the law changed; it is available on the cloud; and the product today addresses much more than just accounting, it has become more like an ERP software. Of course, Tally’s success was also the result of some historical factors such as the decision of the Income Tax department and the Department of Company Affairs to make e-filing compulsory. Not all companies will have this path-dependent advantage.

The formula for success

So, what does it take to innovate for the SME market? Recently, a senior industry executive told me that the key to meeting the needs of the MSME market is realising that it is more like the enterprise market of the West than the consumer-like Small Office Home Office (So-Ho) market. Early adopters in the MSME market are very small in number and crossing the chasm to a larger “technology acceptor” market is very difficult. Many “technology acceptors” are reluctant to buy a new product even when they see a business case for it because they have had bad experiences in the past with products that were pushed to them with exaggerated promises, at high prices, and with limited post-sales support. Overcoming this trust deficit that has been created is the biggest barrier to innovating for the MSME market.

Innovation may be the solution to this problem as well. iSPIRT, a think tank recently launched by software product companies, is creating iSMB to be a market maker for software products in the MSME community. iSMB will bring out product guides for important segments of the MSME sector so that they can make informed choices regarding the software products that suit them. They will also certify products and encourage product companies to create visible dispute settlement mechanisms.

So, the key to innovating for the MSME market is not only tailoring products to their needs at easily affordable price points, and updating them to adapt to evolving use needs as Tally has successfully demonstrated, but providing effective ways of bridging information gaps, establishing and communicating a clear business value proposition and lowering the risk of purchase by the customer.

This article was first published in Outlook Business

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Q&A with Cloud-Based Application Penetration Testing Company iViZ Security

iViZ Security “takes ethical hacking to the cloud,” says Bikash Barai, its co-founder, CEO and director. Currently iViZ focuses on cloud-based penetration testing services for Web applications. He shares insights for other entrepreneurs about lessons learned in finding a market and growing a startup. This article is brought to SandHill readers in partnership with ProductNation. 

SandHill.com:  Please describe your product and your market. 

Bikash Barai: We provide application security testing in the cloud. The idea is to hack yourself before others do. We figure out the flaws and also provide the recommendation to fix them. We conduct tests so that you can protect your website from hacking attacks like cross-site scripting, XSS, business logic flaws and many others.

Our solution is beneficial not just from the perspective of security/business continuity but also for compliance with PCI, SOX, HIPAA, etc. Today for any company doing serious business, it is mandatory to conduct such tests.

We primarily focus on verticals like banking/insurance, online/ecommerce and manufacturing. Basically anybody who has an online application that is critical for running their business finds us useful. 

SandHill.com: Please describe your product’s differentiation and how it provides business value for your customers. 

Bikash Barai: Let me first talk about the customer problem before I get into the differentiation. If you have to conduct a penetration testing/security testing, there are a couple of conventional options. One is that you buy tools and the other to hire consultants. The tools throw a lot of false positives (vulnerabilities that are not true) and also cannot detect advanced business logic vulnerabilities. So you need to hire an expert who will have to augment these gaps manually. But the biggest problem is to hire enough good guys and retain them. On the other hand consultants are costly, non-scalable, time-consuming and also not flexible to work during non-business hours.

Our differentiation is that, unlike any other competing products, we provide advanced business logic testing by leveraging our patent-pending “hybrid approach” that integrates automation with manual testing by security experts. So you need not buy tools or hire people/consultants. Unlike consultants, you can test anytime, anywhere. For organizations that make frequent changes in their applications, we provide unlimited testing at a flat fee.

SandHill.com: How did your company originate — what inspired you to launch the company and what was the original vision/hope? 

Bikash Barai: While studying at IIT (Indian Institute of Technology), I approached Nilanjan De (the current CTO of iViZ) for collaborating on a possible venture on ethical hacking. We made the decision in our hostel room. And that’s how the company was born.

While conducting a conventional penetration testing exercise, it dawned on us that even as security experts we could not comprehensively detect all multi-stage attack-path possibilities. Especially, once a network is successfully broken into, people tend to become complacent and the incentive to find all ways to penetrate diminishes.

To overcome this barrier related to basic human instinct, we began in 2005 exploring the use of artificial intelligence to simulate all multi-stage attack possibilities. We built a prototype and refined it over nine months and then stabilized it after testing it in several environments. Thus, the automated penetration testing product was born. This technology is currently under “patent pending” with the US Patents & Trademark Office. We formally launched our company in 2007 in Kolkata, India.

Read the complete story at Sandhill.com

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How a much needed niche banking product was born – The iCreate story.

ProductNation caught up with iCreate Software co-founder Naren Santhanam, on what went in to the making of a successful product.

It was circa 2006 when Naren met Anup while they were consultants on the Banking vertical at a technology MNC. They knew from experience that banks had a challenge in accessing information across different systems and there was potential in pioneering something exciting. Over a series of extensive debates they decided on developing a decision enablement product exclusively for the banking sector b leveraging the best of Business Intelligence and Data Integration technologies. 

At that point in time Banks which wanted to have BI & analytics had to develop a customized solution over the available tools, employing the services of an SI. The banks functional team would provide the business requirements. This resulted in substantial lead times apart from higher costs; even then, id guarantee the desired results. 

The big idea

The iCreate idea was based on the founders’ expertise with the functional nature of systems that banks used and other transactional systems. They conceptualized a product that could connect with the bank’s ecosystem quickly. 

This ensured the product could be up and running powering the bank’s decision needs in a fifth of the time conventional approaches take. Also, ideated were new versions/modules of the product that could be rolled out quickly, making the product scalable and customizable to a bank’s requirements.

Both Naren and Anup were confident that banks in emerging markets would see most value in their product as they were still in early phase of technology adoption and competition was low.

Between then and 2009 they invested substantial efforts in understanding the intricacies and pain-points faced by the banks in emerging economies before deciding to focus efforts on them. 

Naren does a quick flashback, “It was an early stage in my career and life, when I had an abundance of energy and not too many strings attached, which made it easier for me. We were clear on the direction, given our past lives in the banking technology space. The big idea was to create a banking-specific decision enablement product”. Since it was a capital intensive proposition, they agreed to embark on the consulting route and then deploy the insights in shaping the product. Naren continues “Yes, there were several challenges of staying afloat and not losing focus on the long-term goal of creating a product company. The last 7 years have been the most fulfilling and exciting ones- something I wouldn’t have ever experienced in corporate life”.

On high octane

They began providing high-end banking technology consulting to select banks in Africa. In 2009 they approached the prestigious National Bank of Kuwait (NBK); while the product was still in its infancy. It was their domain knowledge and technology expertise that won them the account. NBK signed up iCreate to play a pivotal role in their ambitious enterprise transformation initiative, which is lauded as a first-of-its kind for a start-up. By late 2009 iCreate was well entrenched in the banking decision support space. This was around the time they received their first round of VC funding from IDG Ventures India.

By then the product had started taking shape and was christened ‘Biz$core’ – a unique name that encapsulated BI, Core of Banking Systems, Score for Scorecards, Biz for Business and the $ sign signifying money.

iCreate began quickly onboarding the best tech brains to work on the product. They also put together a global GTM team with a ‘whatever-it-takes’ DNA to take Biz$core’s unique value proposition to banks worldwide. By then Vivek Subramanyam was onboard as CEO to pilot iCreate’s growth and revenue strategy. 

Proof of the pudding 

With the change in strategy, the journey started getting more exciting and iCreate found itself in an accelerated growth mode. iCreate’s banking customer count today stands at an impressive 22, of which 16 were added in the last year and a half alone. From a revenue stream comprising 25% product sales and 75% consulting services in early 2010, the split reversed to 70% product sales and 30% from consulting services towards close of FY 2013. 

iCreate’s early stage  banking customers from across diverse geographies, played an active role in in defining their products into a well-rounded ones. Naren explains “Leaders like HDFC Bank and IndusInd Bank with complex business processes, trade finance specialists like Ghana International Bank, Metro Bank – UK, progressive banks like East West Bank, Philippines helped us tremendously with their insights as we were developing our product.” 

Mission to achieve the vision 

iCreate today boasts of five banking-specific products that span critical areas like decision enablement, risk, compliance, regulatory reporting and Basel; and has plans to launch five more during the next year. The recent series-B funding from Sequoia Capital and IDG is expected to help them further expand their product portfolio and foray into newer geographies including North America. 

“Our focus on emerging markets like Asia, Africa and West Asia continue, and we have already established our presence in markets such as Egypt and the Philippines. There are two promising deals in the offing from the UK as well. Most importantly, there is that sense of pride of having created a product that completely changes the way banks look at information management”, remarks Naren. 

iCreate’s road map definitely looks interesting and seems to be aligning well with their vision statement what they call the ‘Vision 5:50:250’, i.e., to be among the top 5 in BI for banking space, win 50 strategic banking clients world-wide and touch Rs. 250 crore in revenues by FY 2015.

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Find out what emerged when the Geeks met #Dilliwallas #GOAP

It was a usual Thursday morning, chaos at the Mathura Road, but once you got on to the 91SpringBoard office, you could feel the aroma of the paints, etc in the new office which is beautifully done and very colourful. Few guys were sipping their early morning coffee and some interactions by entrepreneurs and some folks who usually give gyaan to them:). Few minutes and you could see the geeks walking in, interacting the dilliwallas and then also trying to figure out a space where they can settle down.
Yatin from MoonLighting kicked of the session and the Geeks introduced themselves to the #dilliwallas. We had around 50-60 startups from dilli who were here to meet with the Geeks….some of the best startups in NCR were present and we had the Bangalore Product guy – Sharad Sharma who was there to set the ball rolling. He started his talk on how entrepreneurship is happening in the small cities of rural India, software products are being made in this New India. Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore are seeming to be focusing on fixed templates, whereas the rural India’s innovation are more creative disruptions and they seem to be focusing on problems and therefore providing solutions to these problems. The guys in the smaller cities and rural areas are keeping a more open mind and are more willing to weather the storm and be persistent with product.

Don’t be dismissive of Small cities or Rural India, in the next 3-5 yrs the best start ups would be from here. A Revolution is happening in India similar to the mobile revolution – that is to do with the software as a service. Service being used by wide variety of segments from a big multinational to a small business. It is happening at a price point that will fit each and every need that is out there. India’s future is dependent on its small scale sector transforming itself and becoming competitive over time which is  based on three things –  The democratization of productivity which is happening of the mobile phones, democratization of  best practices which is going to happen in the software as a service and the third thing is building trust networks. This Revolution needs to be taken to the next level among ourselves by using the open source method which will help the industry to go forward. Creating communities of entrepreneurs to help solve the problems of fellow entrepreneurs. The Entrepreneur needs to give back to this community during the process of being successful and not only at the time of being successful. Sharad Co–founder iSPIRT seems to say what Mahatma Gandhi said of India at just before Independence —India does not live in its big cities but in the smaller cities and villages

Dave from 500 Startups takes centre stage and describes what they do by making a lot of small investments in tune of about $ 1-5 Million. The aim is not to own more than the 5% of the bigger companies. They know most companies may not see the entire life cycle therefore they do their do diligence well and invest quickly. The First tranch is the huge risk but the future investments are based on what they do with that money. Engaging with Communities of specialists in design, data and distribution which act as Elders or Mentors to these companies  help them grow. Usually the Distribution / Marketing aspect is the main factor which helps companies being successful.

Concepts of Marketing have changed dramatically compared to change in programming in the last 20 years. Therefore it is important to get the Marketing right. Entrepreneurs need to focus more on Marketing than on the programming. It is very important need to know the customer acquisition cost vis-visa-vie customer revenue being generated and the cost of financing the project for how long. Concentrate on the Indian Market, it will be easier to do business in an environment which you know of rather than a new international market of which you don’t know anything of. Things may not be that settled yet, but it will be in the next 3-5 yrs. Imagine if you are able to build now focusing on India and by the time support services improve, payment channels ease say in the next 3-5 years you as an entrepreneur will be able to go in for the kill. The Fruit will be ripe for plucking. Message : Look Inward and build slowly. Wait for the Time its just round the corner.

The Stage was set after two very insigntful speeches about what is yet to come. Kunal Bajaj then lead a B2B Space Panel Discussion with Ambarish Gupta from Knowlarity, Ketan Kapur of Mettl and Paras Chopra from Wingify  1)    How do you find the right person? Panel: The team was brought together through references and own networks. 2)    How do you market to customers? Panel – Start early, Be Focused and be Disciplined. 3)    How have you raised funds and raised capital? Panel – Raising debt in US much easier than in India. In India the process is Angel Money. But is important to know what your burn money is MOM enabling you pitch it right and get it.  Kunal then lead B2C Space Panel  Discussion with Aloke from Ixigo, Kavin Mittal from HIKE Mobile app, Rajat from SocialAppsHQ.

  • How do you find the right people and keep them engaged?
    Panel – The Challenge is to make people understand what a startup is. The Initial hiring was done through references and interactions through likeminded people. 
  • How do you market to customers and build Brands?
    Panel – Give swops on getting referrals to new clients. Understand your market clearly and go micro and specific.
  • How have you raised funds and raised capital?
    Panel – Raising debt and funds in US much easier than in India. In India to raise funds traction in business is very important. 

By the time the Panel finished answering the questions there was a group of over 55-60 people eagerly waiting to interact with them and the Geeks. 

 

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How Sales and Support can also be ‘Marketed’!

The best marketer of our time was, inarguably, Steve Jobs. And everything Steve Jobs did was aimed at one thing – marketing his products. His presentations were performances, his product demos were carefully directed and choreographed; there was an air of showmanship about everything going on at Apple leading to a launch. Even their support stories became huge news. Walter Isaacson and others dissected this approach later, but at that time, all of us consumers were led to think only one thing – I need that Apple device!

That need wasn’t an accident; that craving was the result of an orchestrated marketing campaign, parts of which would never come under the understood umbrella of ‘marketing’. And that is where they won. 

The lesson in this is very simple – everything is marketing. Every single thing. Even something like customer service. In fact, here’s Forbes terming customer service the new marketing. I couldn’t agree more.

But it’s not just customer service that now falls under marketing’s all encompassing realm. Sales and support can also be ‘marketed’. In fact both sales and support, tied in with customer service, can become integral parts of the marketing machinery, using every customer touchpoint as a marketing channel.

The ‘support is marketing’ line

This is the first point of customer contact and definitely the most important. An indifferent support experience is not going to get a prospective customer to open his wallet. We need to make him pause, make him think, and make him buy. Every support query should be treated as an opportunity to clear roadblocks a customer has in using the product. Anticipating the next question and offering help before the customer even asks is part of this. This is just good support, you might argue, and that is exactly what I’m talking about – great support is great marketing.



The ‘sales as marketing’ story


It was the last week of the month and our sales team was rushing to complete targets. A colleague called up a hot lead and it turned out the lead, the CEO of a small business didn’t know about our occasional agents feature, which would cost him a lot less than actually buying usage for a whole agent. My colleague could have sold the customer the extra agent, but he didn’t. He explained the occasional agent concept, and when the customer purchased our product, he spent less and got more value. 

That customer would now think twice before leaving us, if ever. If that is not spectacular marketing, I don’t know what is.

The Bottom Line
As marketers we are looking for a customer to 1) spend more on our product and/or 2) tell someone else he should be using our product. 

When sales, support and customer service add up to give a customer a smooth and satisfying experience, he’ll have no qualms in spending more on our product or recommending us to others. Our job is done.


And that is why I think we need to take that lesson from Steve Jobs to heart. Everything is, in fact, marketing!