New age platform. What it could be?

We have multiple definitions of platform, but in today’s world where reaching out to people is so easy and absolutely free, one can argue that in today’s context a platform is a vehicle to extend people’s voice beyond the ears closest to you. The channels that we use to have were very expensive – all required expertise, money or both whereas the new channels are over internet – mostly free. This is a fundamental change in the way culture is unfolding in our age. The cost of conversation is almost zero.  The time people spend is largely in creation of content, moving it through the channels, making a connect and building a relationship.

That the channels are free, doesn’t mean it’s without other costs. It requires time, creative efforts, lot of nurturing and applying yourself. It has a lot of human element involved to make it a success. It is about delivering information that’s useful to the people you hope to reach and to build relationships that lead to value. Do you have time and this skill? Does businesses has time and this skill? Do they even need it in-house? We will come back to it.

Hierarchy of needs theory by Maslow ranks human needs as physiological, safety, love & belonging, esteem and self-actualization. I believe that I can safely assume that people who are using the new channels are looking to satisfy needs at love & belonging and higher level. People in this group has emotional needs to have friends, intimacy, respect and to be valued. We have examples where people are ‘famous for being famous’ like Paris Hilton by effectively using the power of channel platforms. Even in India, people like Amitabh Bachchan and others are very active on social media.

It is obvious that business has a need for reaching out to people through the low cost channels (power of network) and on the other hand we have people having  esteem and self-actualization needs.  The new age platform will be the one that provide value for both businesses and people.

Education sector which is at $1,332B market size (source: NeXT Knowledge Factbook 2010), has been waiting for a major disruption for decades.  I am not talking about TV or a projector in a class room or a web interface for questions and presentation sharing here. I am talking about a major disruption in the way people learn; questioning the fundamentals of traditional ways of education where teachers are not just giving lectures (monolog), but supporting students individual needs.  A system which assist student to learn at her own pace, subjects of interest, allows to interact and collaborate with peer group, teachers, publishers and experts from across the globe. A preference based, self directed, collaborative personalized learning platform that helps in better organizing learning, flipped class room, group projects, expert guidance, mentoring and so on. A ecosystem of  students, teachers, publishers, mentors and parents working towards a common goal of education by leveraging new age education platform.

Interactive marketing a new way of marketing, riding on the availability of new digital communication channels is enjoying a double digit growth rate (source: Forrester Research) and is expected to grow even rapidly in the near and coming future. A flood of new tools have emerged and would continue to emerge to assist marketers with leveraging new emerging digital channel technology. These channels are mostly free, but the challenge is effectively using the various different channels available and also the enhanced focus on content creation, curation and interaction with customers and influencers. A new age platform which can bring people and business together on a common marketplace where business can market themselves through the current customers to attract potential customers and people share ideas, content to fulfill her higher needs.  A ecosystem of business, customers, freelancers and other business all working together to meet mutual aspirations.

Lean way of sales

“Not meeting desired sales target?” is perhaps the most important question in any of senior management meetings.  But how do most companies react? Answer: “Re”setting the targets,“Re”structuring marketing campaigns and finally “Re”placing sales team (starting from executives ending up replacing sales director) and what will happen by doing several “Re’s” together…absolutely nothing. On the contrary such measures can damage team morale.

It is time to change, to replace traditional methodologies, to innovate and to spark. Time to analyse the mistakes.

Let’s rethink

What is a sale?  Act of selling a product or service in return for money or other compensation

Whats makes a sale?

  • Make the relevant presentation – Yes.. its necessary
  • Create connection between product/service and prospects. .. – Yes.. its necessary
  • Get to the point – Yes…its essential
  • Be animated … OK
  • Use showmanship… Ok ok
  • Use physical demonstration … Yes It’s necessary.
  • Believe on your product and Services… Aaahhhhhh….Its impossible….I have never seen it never utilized it ..how can i.. yes but I have capability to convenience customer though I haven’t  Utilized it …” True Salesmanship J”

And How much % this “making of a sale” will individually or contributed generate sales ?…Can’t Say. May be our sales guys are not proper… (In reality, sales guys are the most smartest guys in any of the organization).

It’s time for thinking…and changing. Let’s  make it the Lean Way…change “Re’s with Do’s

  • Do we are really addressing customer problems, completely?
  • Have we minimized cost of consumption (Price+ Time+Hassle)?
  • Do we provide exactly what customer wants?
  • Do we deliver value where customer wants?
  • Do we supply value where customer wants?

Remember, first sale to a customer could be important but it is the second sale that matters the most. Second sale will happen only if customer the is satisfied. Maximum value and minimized organizational waste is key to customer satisfaction. These are the only things that make a sale, make a customer buy, make it a competitive.

Guest Post Contributed by Meghshyam Gholap, Lean Sales Specialist

Getting business to use technology and improve productivity – Knowlarity Communications

Inspired by the vision to help small businesses make better use of technology, Ambarish Gupta gets talking about how his Cloud Telephony product Knowlarity, fills a crucial gap in business struggling to use costly and cumbersome technology to improve productivity. In a world gone all mobile and integrated, Knowlarity’s hardware free, web based solution, frees you from the traditional PBX machine and lets you communicate seamlessly on the move, even integrating with your CRM and ERP systems, thereby fetching you prospects, business and the extremely crucial customer analysis information.

Getting business to use technology and improve productivity

Q.  What was your vision that inspired you to launch Knowlarity?
I wanted the regular mom-and-pop businesses in India to become better by using technology. These mid-size business form the bed-rock of Indian economy contributing to more than 10% of Indian GDP and employing millions of people.  I have a degree from one of the IITs. If these business could use technology and improve their productivity by even 10%, our vision will be fulfilled.

The problem with technology adoption however is that the Indian business owner is not very tech savvy and does not always feel very comfortable about using complex software. We solved the problem by designing all our products to be accessible over telephone. With close to universal telephony penetration in the business sector, this is a very powerful solution. Our virtual office product – SuperReceptionist makes office phone super intelligent and powerful. Another product – SuperFax allows business owners to receive faxes as PDF documents on email and not worry about owning a fax machine. 

Q. What is Knowlarity’s product positioning?
We are a Cloud Telephony company targeting SME in emerging markets. We want to be super hassle free. We want to be simple and intuitive. We want to remain inexpensive so that a large number of SME can use our products. Above all, we want to use technology to help Indian SME improve their revenues and decrease cost, thus improving their bottom line.

Q.  What problem did Knowlarity help solve for its customers? What were the existing products lacking?
At the most basic level, our products replace office PBX system. You remember the big black machine that a receptionist in any office has? Somehow hooked to a telephone? That is called a PBX machine. When someone calls to the office, the phone rings, she can pick and route the call to employees inside. If you open an office, you need one such machine.

This is a very cumbersome hardware to handle. It is very difficult to configure. It is expensive with cost approaching to 1 lac for a regular offices. It also ties you down – the calls are forwarded to your desk phone when employees are increasingly becoming mobile. It also has no integration with your enterprise softwares. Your office phone is where every single one of your new prospect and customer calls. All the logs should go to your CRM or ERP system for very important customer analysis. It can never get done with such systems. SuperReceptionist  solves the problem. It does not require any hardware. You come to our website and get a phone number that you can configure on the web. You can upload an mp3 greeting saying “Welcome to your company. Press 1 for sales and press 2 for support” for example. You can configure it over web to forward the calls to your mobile number when people press 1. 

You can avoid fixed expense by using it as per-use system – paying every year of use. It also integrates with your CRM system – Salesforce.com or freshdesk or sugarCRM come pre-integrated. It makes telephony super intelligent and useful for your business. 

Q. How different is it from its competing products, if any?
We get competition from companies that have built their products over Asterisk – an open source system. These are on-premise systems that have problem with stability, scalability and are really expensive when you calculate the total cost over a period of a year. We differentiate by providing advanced telephony applications that are hassle free, pre-integrated and are really inexpensive to use. 

Q.What was your biggest struggle with bringing Knowlarity to market?
Indian business are difficult to sell to and the technology adoption is pretty slow. We struggled in maturing our processes to sell at scale. It took time but we are able to do so now.  

Q. What was experience of the core team that worked on the product?
The core team is composed of people with deep experience in technology in general and in products in particular. Bipul – the CTO – worked in technology industry in Silicon Valley designing embedded device products. He is IITK CS 1999 batch. I started out my career with a product company in Valley named Electronics for Imaging after graduating from IITK in CS in 2000. Pallav – the other founder – also an IITK EE 2000 batch worked from NVDIA chip manufacturing company in valley.

We wanted to build a product that Indian businesses can derive real value from and use with ease. We developed the technology in-house to make sure that the product remain really easy to use. I am happy to say that we seem to have had reasonable success in achieving that 

Q.  How does the product help start-ups/companies?
Cloud technologies are god-sent for status companies. Our products scale as the companies scale, do not require up-front investment and are usable from a simple browser. SuperReceptionist gives startups an office number that they can print on their business cards. It is really important for startups to keep track of customer inquiry and publishing mobile number as your customer care number can really hurt  there credibility. With an office number, the startups can look like a big and established company. Also, with a log of every call going into their CRM system, startup companies can kick-start their customer engagement processes right from the beginning.

We love startups and provide them free services as well. For example, you can have a free conferencing service from us by giving a missed call to +91 9650 235522. You will receive your conference ID and PIN in SMS. We want startup companies to get started with least possible hassle. 

Q. What are your learnings in doing business in the SMB market in India and would advice would you want to share with startups?
SMB markets are not easy markets to build large revenues quickly but at the same time these are really un-penetrated markets. There are huge opportunities available. I think startups should build SaaS products for such un-penetrated markets. They should take it to the customers quickly – even when it is not fully cooked. When there is real pain and real need even a half-baked product will be taken with open arms by the customers.

Q. What are the future plans for Knowlarity?
Knowlarity wants the enterprises in the emerging markets to be able to use the advantages of cloud telephony to the fullest. We are looking to consolidate our position in India and grow in the international markets. 

Lessons on Pricing for Product Startups – Consumer and Enterprise!

Since the time Philip Kotler wrote his valuable tome on Marketing, technology has evolved so much that new pricing models like Freemium pricing are possible for both Consumer-oriented and Enterprise-oriented product startups. In addition, Free Trial pricing models and conversion to paid ones are common in both. In a price-conscious society like India, pricing can mean all the difference between a successful company and one that is not!

What have been some valuable lessons learned by companies in the recent past using all of these pricing models? If you were a product startup, what would be some of the pitfalls to watch out for?

Main lessons from using a Freemium Pricing Model for Consumer Internet Businesses

First, here are a few YouTube videos of Drew Houston presenting DropBox’s use of Freemium pricing with consumers, the lessons they have learned, and the pitfalls they encountered.

  • Use of SEO for lining up free users is very expensive
  • Affiliate Marketing is also expensive and does not work very well
  • Make sure that there are enough Paid Users that can support Free Users and you can still make money! Make sure that the Long Term Value (LTV) of Paid Users > Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC) of all users. Otherwise, the more users you line up, the more you lose!
  • Build as many tools that help your free and paid users do viral and word of mouth marketing for you as you are building features!
  • Once you have given something for free, it is very difficult to take it back! But it can be done, as the videos show!

Drew Houston : Freemium for Consumer Internet Businesses, Part 1

Drew Houston: Freemium for Consumer Internet Businesses, Part 2

Drew Houston: Freemium for Consumer Internet Businesses, Part 3

Main lessons from using a Freemium Pricing Model for Enterrprise Businesses

First here are a couple of YouTube videos of Aaron Levie presenting Box.Net’s use of Freemium pricing with an enterprise product, the lessons they have learned, and the pitfalls they encountered. Their product is an enterprise collaborative portal that competes with Microsoft Sharepoint Portal but is hosted by Box.Net.

  • Tomorrow’s Enterprise decisions are made by today’s free users. So keep them happy! They are your marketers inside the company.
  • Sell enterprise freemium models to end users, not IT.
  • Unlike other models, Inside Sales will be taking calls from already existing free users – no need to prospect them. They come already qualified!
  • Conversion is key and is harder in enterprise freemium. This is purely because of the sheer larger numbers in the consumer space as compared to enterprises.
  • Understanding the difference between a “Free Trial” customer and a “Freemium” customer! Freemium customers stay on long after Free Trial customers are gone because their trial period ran out!

Aaron Levie: Freemium and the Enterprise, Part 1

Aaron Levie: Freemium and the Enterprise, Part 2

Dumb Pricing Mistakes

Here is an interesting video on dumb mistakes that people make in pricing, especially multiple tiers with different sets of features. And how to fix them!

Pricing Strategies: The dumb pricing mistake people make (and how to fix it)

Price is what you pay. Value is what you get – Warren Buffett

 

ProductNation is now Proudly Powered by iSPIRT.in

I am happy to inform you that ProductNation will now be part of iSPIRT – a think-tank focussed on transforming India into a hub for new generation software products, a thought which finally is seeing action. Welcome to the new look of the website where we have made it easier for our readers to find stories that interest them and share it with friends and professional colleagues. Do drop by and share your comments if you like the design or have any suggestions for improvement.

Let me tell you how this all started. For a long time, I have had this urge to make a substantial contribution to the product eco-system in India and I shared this in my previous blog. I am proud to say that in less than five months, we have been able to do 175+ blogs, got around 20+ blog contributors, and featured 40+ #MadeInIndia Product stories. With the support of few PNEvangelists, we have been able to do few #PNMeetups in the NCR region.

But ultimately it’s not about what we want to do but about what the product ecosystem expects. I think the real value comes when ProductNation is looked upon by this emerging industry as the most favored watering hole for good ideas and thoughts that will contribute to the growth of the industry.

It’s been an exciting journey and going forward we will be able to add value in a much more structured manner to the ecosystem. As I write this blog, I’m already working on few partnerships which will be able to give more visibility to the product start-ups from India.

So what does this alignment with iSPIRT mean?

The goal of ISPIRT is to help product entrepreneurs learn from each other and from experts so that they grow their companies faster. We also seek to encourage the right policy environment and the availability of public goods so that the industry can scale more rapidly.
In the first year, we aim to achieve the following:

  • Explain simply, cogently and persuasively to public intellectuals why a vibrant software product industry is vital to India’s future
  • Establish pn.ispirt.in as the open platform for deeper conversations within the industry
  • Spawn new community-led initiatives like iSMB and M&A Connect to address critical gaps.,

You can find more details at www.ispirt.in.

Finally, I’d like to thank my supporting partners (Sandhill, Yorke Communications, Iridium Interactive & Boring Brands) and the contributors for ProductNation who have actively stood by me in making ProductNation a destination for software products in an extremely short time.

I continue to seek your support in the journey ahead. Let’s all contribute and make a positive impact to the eco-system. Thank you.

Have a plan B to sustain yourself, while you are trying to make it big as a Product Startup says Amarpreet Kalkat, Frrole

Ciafo is a software products startup, based out of Bangalore focused on building consumer products for the web (including the mobile web). Ciafo has three products – Travelomy, Wayr, Frrole. In this interview, Amarpreet Kalkat, Co-Founder, Ciafo discusses aspects of building a B2C product from India and shares some of his learnings with startups. Frrole is an information exchange medium, not a unidirectional news provider. It has a heart and it likes to talk – hear from the people what they want to say, and tell them what they want to know.

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

I always had a passion for building intelligent products. If I have adequate resources, I find a way to connect the dots. This is what I have always been good at, and this is what I always wanted to do – use these skills to create intelligent products that could simplify lives.

In a large corporate setup, an individual is constrained in more ways than he can be comfortable with. A typical project manager or a product manager profile in a large company strictly limits one’s degree of freedom, thus affecting his ability to innovate. While some people love to work in a focused, defined way, I believed I needed more freedom than was possible in a normal corporate setup. By the time I realized this, I was already juggling with a few ideas in my mind. So, it was not difficult for me to quit my job and create Frrole, independently.

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

We were working on our first product Travelomy and one of the features we wanted to build in there was ‘real-time social information streams’. We were surprised at not finding any readymade localized streams, so we just decided to build one of our own.

But as we started digging deeper, we could see that real-time, curated social information was missing not only in travel guides, but at a much wider level. The challenge was in separating out that 1% signal from 99% noise, and we thought that we could do it. Slowly, we became sure that this could be an independent product by itself, and that is how Frrole was born.

Why the name?

The name Frrole is a derivative of a word in Punjabi language that roughly translates into ‘to play around, to discover, to explore’. We had always thought that this project was about building a brand new way of exploring around the cities that we live in, hence the name was always there in the shortlist.

The fact that it met 6 of the 7 criteria we had for choosing the name (refer Paul Graham’s essay) and had the .com domain available, finally sealed the deal.

Also, the core of Frrole is to find and present information that is nowhere else available. Justifying its name, the application enables people to discover news from sources totally unknown to them. Just like ‘Googling’ has become a generic term for ‘finding things that are known’, we hope to see a day when ‘Frroling’ becomes a generic term for ‘discovering things that are unknown’.   

What is your product’s differentiator from competitors?

Frrole is a twitter based product. It analyses a million+ tweets every day, posted by individuals, companies and mainstream media and selects 0.5% of the most informational ones among them. These tweets are then displayed to the users as news items. In doing so, Frrole creates an additional source of unbiased news, in the form of individuals like you and me. These million additional news sources are the core strength of Frrole, making it a superior product than its competitors.

The news on Frrole can be sourced from a common man like your friendly neighbor or from a giant publishing house, with complete impartiality. The core philosophy behind Frrole is to create a democratized platform using which any person can spread useful information, making each one of us a citizen journalist.

Like all other news apps and websites, Frrole gives you information collected from various news publications, blogs and your social media acquaintances. But, that is only half of what Frrole is all about. The other half is about news ‘for the people, by the people’. There cannot be any news source faster and more accurate than a common man who has witnessed an event, and this man is where Frrole sources its news from.

Other important differentiator between Frrole and its competitors is Frrole’s ability to generate localized content. Frrole lets its users select a city to enable them to get news relevant only to that city. Thus, Frrole makes you a person more aware of your surroundings, unlike any other news product.

What is the biggest challenge Frrole has faced so far? How did you address the challenge?

Not having a full-fledged, full-time team has been the biggest challenge by far. But we have come past that point and now we have a core team of three people. Nishith Sharma, an IIM Kozhikode grad who has earlier managed marketing for Jaguar Land Rover in India, takes care of marketing and Abhishek Vaid, an IIIT Gwalior grad, is responsible for building our backend analytics engine.

Who is your customer?

  1. We have a prize for everybody who claims he is not our customer.
  2.  We have yet to find a person who doesn’t find value in Frrole.
  3.  A typical customer of Frrole is somebody who can read English, aged 5-100 years old, living in any part of the world, and not totally disinterested in life.

On a more serious note, we define our core user as somebody who is 24-40 years old, socially active, and comfortable with the concept of informal information.

What are your future plans?

The mid-term future plan is to establish Frrole as the ‘world view’ news source. Something that people use to hear what the world around them is really talking about instead of being limited to only what mainstream media has to say.

In the longer term, we see ourselves doing the same thing for social web what Google did for the web – make sense of it. And while Google started with the search as the first application of that technology, we are starting with news as the first application. This technology can be applied to any more use cases as Google has shown, and we hope to emulate the same.

Your moment of Glory

Nothing really that big yet. Maybe a few small things like being called the future of news, having a TV feature on Frrole etc, hitting half million monthly unique visitors mark with only one full-time person etc.

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

See the last response below. Those lessons for others are derived from my personal lessons.

What kind of support would you have liked?

Entrepreneurship requires three kinds of resources – Man, Material, Capital. While ‘Material’ is not very important in the software context and entrepreneurs possess the ‘Manpower’ resource, what they usually lack is ‘Capital’.

India has very few investors who invest in early stages, so the ‘Capital’ is a big constraint for Indian startups. A report comparing funding in US and India says that while more than 60% of US startups manage to secure angel funding, only 15% manage to do that in India.

The situation is especially lackluster for products that are in the consumer web space. I hope that changes soon enough; otherwise there is absolutely no chance of a Google or Twitter coming out of India any time soon.

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

  • Have a team. Startups are way too much work for lone founders.
  • Show investors some incoming money. It’ll increase your chances of getting funded manifolds.
  • Start with a founding team, finding co-founders later can be an incredibly tough task.
  • Have a plan B to sustain yourself, while you are trying to make it big.

 The future looks very promising for Frrole and we wish Amarpreet all the best! Don’t forget to download their iPhone or Android app.

The Frrole Team
The Frrole Team

 

#FoundersMeet 3 – Collective learning of 20 Early Stage Startups

Background – I was fortunate to be invited for the #FoundersMeet 2; informal get-together of 7 startup founders last year. This time around AnirudhSidNischalDeven and I suggested to move it beyond our circle and extend it to 20 startups to come together and share our small success stories, failures and challenges. We also wanted to create a strong connect for ‘Mumbai-Pune Start-up Ecosystem’ which sort of never existed.

The 3rd #FoundersMeet happened in Mumbai on Wednesday 23rd Jan 2013 (a working day)., was expected to go on for about 7 hours, the interaction continued for 13.5 hours (yes!) with some amazing insights discussed and shared. I’m sharing this post on behalf of all the startups (& their founders) who participated.

Selling a SaaS Product:

  • International Customers are more inclined towards using self-service products. Indian counterparts expect hand holding and need assurance of customer service at arm’s length even when not required.
  • Customers in India will insist even on customizing a standard SaaS product. This tends to be service-model trap, best avoided.
  • As long as the user-proposition communicated during sales pitch or on the product is fulfilled, International customers are satisfied. They will switch the product fast if they find another product delivering more value. On other hand, Indian customers take time to switch product if a good relationship is established.
  • If a competitor is offering a product for free, users will not like to pay you for that product.
  • Sell the product to the poster-boys of the industry, rest will follow by themselves. 

Product Pricing:

  • There is a disproportionate value in the word ‘Free’. Use it whenever you can.
  • Over 90% of users will sign-up on the Free plan. When they move to the premium plan, they are most likely to use the plan that has the lowest value. Ensure that this low value plan has a disproportionate value for its price. That makes customers love you instantly.
  • When someone is making money because of your product, make sure you are making money out of it too.
  • Positioning your product / business is important. It can either be in Income side or Expense side. Always pitch / present your product on income side – “we help you generate money / your earnings will increase / your savings will multiply.”

Up-selling Product:

  • Acquire with freemium plans. Ensure enough hooks are in place that leads the customer to purchase the product post the free period or upgrade to the next paid plan.

Identifying Product Drivers:

  • A SaaS based product will not be driven by technical people, its driven by functional people. Build a product that can be installed by techies in less than 5 minutes, and can be driven by functional people without interference of tech people.
  • Sell the product to decision makers. Never pitch any product to a tech person. The tech person will always think that he can build it by himself.

User Acquisition Hacks:

  • For B2C products: Sell traction of existing users to new users. Create a feel that – Yes, there are people here, you’re not alone. That gives new users confidence about the product.
    Example – In Mumbai when you see 3 Vadapav stalls on a street, unknowingly you will go towards one that has maximum people eating and buy from there.
  • For B2C products: Show activity. Existing activities drive more activities.
    Example – IRCTC, startup folks and early adopters think the platform sucks and fails whiles booking; common people think of IRCTC to be a big corporation that there is always high demand. That leads to perception of credibility for IRCTC.
  • Use Associations for Endorsements – IRCTC mentions – ‘A Government of India Enterprise’. This is a big endorsement for IRCTC and brings credibility to it.
  • Bounce Rate Reduction – A transactional consumer site was featured in leading newspapers. When they mentioned ‘As seen on Newspaper A, B and C’ on their homepage – it boosted its credibility and reduced the bounce rate.
  • Social Proof for User Acquisition – The Facebook widget that displays people who have liked the brand also builds credibility.
  • Real People – A SaaS based startup focusing on product for Chartered Accountant features a local/prominent CA on its homepage. That quickly build credibility for itself in eyes other CAs. It was easy to acquire more customers.
  • Investor Hack – For SaaS startups, whenever any VC reaches out to you, get them to introduce to its portfolio companies. Its quickest way to demonstrate more traction and more importantly to add new customers.
  • Physical World – Example., Printed Coupons redeemed at Restaurants are social proofs in real world. Makes other users curious on how did a customer get discount / where did he get the redemption coupon from.

Ecommerce:

  • Thoughts on heavy discounting in current Ecommerce business in India, its like ‘Selling a Rs.100 note for Rs. 90′.
  • Potential in disrupting offline business is huge. All online businesses are not even 1% of the offline businesses.
  • Offline products are indeed cheaper than online. Consumers researching online and transacting offline is big. This market is ripe for disruption.
  • Ecommerce players are now less focused on doing marketing campaigns, but more focused on increasing conversion ratios of existing traffic.

User Experience:

  • UI is ‘relative’. Focus on User Experience.
  • Cleartrip is loved by all of us; but its clearly MakeMyTrip / Yatra that works with masses.
  • Make the product work 100% of time for what you promise.

Entrepreneurship:

  • Don’t fall in love with your product. Fall in love with being successful.
  • Things that work in west don’t work in India. Specially with funding and investments. Currency for investment in India is not traction, its revenue.
  • Be a salesman. Never miss a opportunity to make noise about your product.
  • Don’t focus on a niche market, there are very high chances of failure. Instead focus on a large market opportunity, its more likely to find success here.
  • Notice early signs if things are not going your way. Pivot fast.

Product Distribution:

  • SaaS products: Explore opportunities to integrate with large platform players – Domain Cpanels, or ecosystem creators like Shopify, BigCommerce, etc.
  • SaaS products: Label your widgets – ‘Powered by You’. They are most valuable for Inbound leads.

Product Scaling:

  • Don’t just design products for scale / growth; also ensure you design the business model for scale.

Essential Traits of Consumer Product:

  • Curiosity. Rely on Curiosity – (Example LinkedIn – 2 people have seen your profile today).
  • Build the – Theory of Reciprocation into your product.
  • Gamify some features, let users do free marketing for you before unlocking information. (Example – Tweet about something to show details).
  • Understand show-off value in your product. People love to show off on Twitter & Facebook. Capture such points to your product.

Social Media Marketing:

  • Twitter links have a CTR of 0.5% to 0.8%. Customer acquisition here happens in scale. Spend energy wisely.
  • Don’t spend time on talking to random folks on Twitter based on their conversations. Extremely time consuming and most unlikely to convert.
  • Facebook advertising does not lead to conversion. Its best suited for brand building.
  • Facebook Contests that involve sharing real pictures of users online brings lot of credibility to brand.

Competition:

  • Once a user has signed up for the product; make sure it works it. Don’t bother about competition. He has taken pain to signup to your product, make the promise work.
  • You’re the only one who know about your competitors; not your customers.
  • Many SaaS verticals are getting crowded to an extent that price remains only factor to decide. Only the ones that are able to innovate will survive.

Visibility:

  • Founders should be visible on Social Media. Talk about the product and should be able to convince their followers about their passion. Only passion attracts initial traction.

Market Penetration:

  • If you are doing something innovative (either B2C or B2B) – you will need to spend good amount of time on educating your users / customers. Its easy to get frustrated in this loop.

Content Focus:

  • Don’t get carried away by ‘Content Marketing’ or ‘Content Sharing’.
  • Building products that have content plays is difficult – content creators are few and content sharers are in plenty (Usually 1% to 99%)
  • Look for plays that involves sharing of content already created.

Building Relationships:

  • B2B: Build great relationships with your marquee customers. Keep them educated on new initiatives, new market dynamics and help them monetize better.
  • B2C: Continuously stay connected with your early adopters and take feedback from them. Keep them informed of new updates, they’ll love you. Whenever any suggestion is considered, incorporated into the product – communicate to users.

Driving Engagement:

  • Build features that would enable discovery of relevant / contextual information – that leads to higher engagement on the product.
  • Keep users involved… the trick is dashboard views. They create the “I’m in control” feeling for users.

Search Engine Optimization:

  • Figure out what you are optimizing for & the competition on that. Example., if you are trying to optimize now for ‘Apple iPhone’ – you would be the millionth website trying to do that. Get your own niche, it works best.

Mobile Apps:

  • Discovery of mobile apps is biggest challenge for them. Notice that many apps are trying a generic name for better discovery while users are searching for any other app.
  • Integrate app with key functions of phone. For example, on Android – phone book integration, and so on.
  • There are many hurdles in mobile app development cycle, best to understand from multiple startups who have built mobile apps earlier.
  • App Ratings matters, a big consideration factor for user to download the app. Get the initial ratings by distributing the app between family & friends.

PR:

  • A press release in India goes not get you much traffic. Its great channel for visibility, but don’t depend too much on this channel.
  • International Blogs & Coverage had a higher conversion ratio for products. International users give a try to product, sign-up, explore and use it.

Mobile Advertising:

  • Despite all the hype, Mobile Advertising is still considered as experimental budget.
  • Mobile Industry – one cannot be stuck in a region or one product for more than 18 months. Fast innovation required.

Venture Capital:

  • Stop chasing VCs or attending events that have VC meets or Demo Days. Hardly any investments happens that way.
  • A VC is most likely to invest in your startup when he is chasing you.
  • Indian VCs are yet to understand product driven consumer web-plays despite traction. Skip them and move to the west, it also brings lot of traction.

Biggest Learning of #FoundersMeet: Keep Plumbing. (Those who were present would understand this!)

Note: Some of these thoughts/hacks listed above may sound very generic since we have decided not to mention the context / startup involved. Providing too much information in public domain would not be right for startups who participated. You can connect with any of them directly, the founders would be glad to help you.

#FoundersMeet 3 Participating founders:  AnirudhDevenNishcalSiddharthKunalSahil,PravinKulinSameerTalvinderGargi,
GarimaShekharAvleshRohanSushrutSarangRaxit,NoelSoumNitinRonakPranay,
AnnkurDivyanshu

Many thanks to all startups who participated in the #FoundersMeet 3. Thanks to Nischal, Deven, Anirudh and Sid for reading/editing the draft of this post. Special Thanks to the wonderful folks at The Playce (a great co-working place for startups), Mumbai for hosting us.

Stay tuned for the next #FoundersMeet 4!

Q&A with Communication Platform Waybeo Technology’s CEO

Waybeo Technology Solutions was launched in December 2009 and was selected by Nasscom as one of the top 15 emerging, innovative companies in India in 2012. Its product, BounzD, is a global inbound communication platform enabling instant voice assistance to customers using a variety of mobile devices. In this interview, CEO Bushair AP discusses aspects of staying focused in the journey of product development. This article is brought to SandHill readers in partnership with ProductNation  

SandHill.com: What was the vision you originally had for your company? 

Bushair AP: We are a young team who is a part of a movement to change how the world communicates in the new age. Our team was formed out of our never-ending passion for creativity and social contribution. We all were fascinated by the revolutions in the communication sector. Our first attempt was a global group-messaging platform, which we developed for our early European customers. This was much before we formally launched Waybeo as a company. This opportunity opened up our vision to create products that we believe will attract millions in the future.

BounzD is a stepping-stone to achieve our vision of a well-connected world without any barriers like cost and geography. Once integrated with an enterprise’s online channels, end customers would be able to connect businesses with just an Internet connection without being charged across the world.

We work with large-scale and midsize enterprises in India and abroad that have online channels as a major way of customer acquisition. We handle their voice communications with potential customers and provide business insights and analytics. Our global plan is in beta stage and releasing this month. Waybeo is based in Trivandrum with offices in Mumbai, Delhi and California.

SandHill.com: Is there a story behind your company name? 

Bushair AP: The name Waybeo was derived out of our ambition of going way beyond by exploring an inspiring way of entrepreneurship.

SandHill.com: What differentiation and business value does BounzD provide to your customers? 

Bushair AP: We connect business and potential customers across the world within seconds. Besides being cost free, we have made it easier to connect with a business located in any part of the world. Our product has helped our customers improve their customer acquisition, sales cycle and cost of sale.

We have helped various companies in industries such as hospitality and realty to reduce abandoned calls by 30 percent and achieve an increase in online visibility. Many of the large enterprises in India have told us that they “felt” their Web presence after taking our services. In the hospitality sector, we have reduced contact center cost-to-sales ratio in a drastic way. And the business insights we provide though our analytics has helped various realty segments to plan contact sector operations and customer support services.

SandHill.com: How did you determine the right pricing for your product? 

Bushair AP: We reached out to a limited number of customers with a cost-plus-margin model. From limited early innovators, we moved to value-based pricing, which had improved profitability. The business dynamics of our customer segment had to be learned during this engagement with early innovators to have a better pricing. The key realization of how much value we create for our customers had to be quantified during this period. Value-based pricing involves understanding of business dynamics of a customer’s model, customer revenue generation checkpoints and behavior of end customers.

Read the complete article at Sandhill.com

A Platform Thinking Approach to Building a Business

Every business is an engine. It needs to do a certain set of things repeatedly to create value. If you haven’t figured out that set of repeated operations, you probably haven’t created a scalable business yet.

Ford needs to repeatedly assemble cars, Google needs to repeatedly run its crawler, Facebook needs to repeatedly get users to interact with other users.

THE BUSINESS ENGINE AND REPEATABLE OPERATIONS

Every business goes through three stages:

Creating the engine: Early stage, figuring out the set of repeatable operations it needs to do to create value.

Oiling the engine: Rapid testing and iterating to refine and optimize the repeatable operations

Stepping on the gas: Scaling by repeating the repeatable operations

THREE APPROACHES TO BUILDING A BUSINESS

So this is the formula for building a business. You figure out how you are creating value. You identify a set of operations that repeatedly create value. You figure out a way to efficiently conduct these operations repeatedly.

There are three broad ways that businesses conduct these operations repeatedly and get things done:

  1. Get employees to do the work
  2. Get algorithms to do the work
  3. Get users to do the work

Let’s think through the problem of navigating the web for the most relevant information for the day. Three companies try to solve this in three very different ways:

Yahoo: A bunch of editors decide the best content for the day

Google News: Algorithms decide the top news of the day

Twitter: Users’ tweets and retweets decide the top news of the day.

For those of us who read the earlier article on the three broad models for problem-solving, here’s the interesting part. These three approaches correspond exactly with the three models for problem solving.

A brief recap of the three approaches to problem solving

The ‘stuff’ approach: How can we create more stuff whenever the problem crops up?

The ‘optimization’ approach: How can we better distribute the stuff already created to minimize waste?

The ‘platform’ approach: How can we redefine ‘stuff’ and find new ways of solving the same problem?

Essentially, the three approaches to building a business now are:

The ‘stuff’ approach: Get employees to do the work

The ‘optimization’ approach: Get algorithms to do the work

The ‘platform’ approach: Get users to do the work

Depending on which approach you take, the way you build your company could vary significantly.

A platform thinking approach to building a business involves figuring out ways by which an external ecosystem of developers and users can be leveraged to create value. The iPhone app store does this, YouTube does this, and so does Wikipedia.

UNDERSTANDING REPEATABLE OPERATIONS

It’s important to note that we are talking about repeatable operations. Writing code is not a repeatable operation. It is a one-time infrastructural activity, similar to building out the assembly line or setting up the factory. The operations that the code automates (e.g. login management) are the repeatable operations.

WHY ECOSYSTEMS, NOT ALGORITHMS, ARE YOUR COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE

Most problems that could be fully automated are already automated today. The next level of scale will come not by automating alone (and letting algorithms alone do the work) but by leveraging an ecosystem ( and letting algorithms synchronize disparate actions).

There are very few companies that compete purely on the strength of algorithms. Google is a rare example of a company whose competitive advantage lies in a set of very complex algorithms that it fiercely protects. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube etc. compete not on the strength of their algorithms but on the strength of their ecosystems. The algorithms are easily replicable but the ecosystems aren’t. Hence, building a business where the ecosystem scales the value creating operations is quite different from building a technology-only company.

PLATFORM THINKING AND SCALE CONSIDERATIONS

Scale is achieved by making repeatable processes more efficient (faster/cheaper) and effective (accurate).

One of the ways to infuse platform thinking into your business is to look at a problem that is being solved manually, and repeatedly, and see if it can be solved by external users instead.

Facebook realized that it would have to translate its interface for every new foreign language. The norm was to do it with an in-house or outsourced translation team. Facebook chose to crowdsource it, building not just a more scalable model, but in many cases, better translations as well.

This is also demonstrated in the evolution of an online community. Quora started off with employees asking questions and answering them. Over time, it transitioned both these activities from the employees to the users.

The problem that comes with this, of course, is that you let out control and with that you need to build in checks and balances to ensure that no one is gaming the system. Quora and Reddit offer good examples of bringing in these checks and balances and scaling them along with the community.

THE THREE QUESTIONS FRAMEWORK

What are the repeated chunks of work in my business?

The first part involves identifying the activities that need to be repeated to scale and expand the business.

Who is doing the work today? 

Secondly, is the work being done manually or algorithmically? If so, can we bring in greater efficiencies (speed) or effectiveness (accuracy) by leveraging an ecosystem?

How can we get someone else to do that work? 

Finally, users,  like employees, need incentives. Fitting in the right organic and inorganic incentives forms an important part of relying on an external ecosystem to build value.

This article was originally published on Sangeet Paul Choudary’s personal blog Platform Thinking – A blog about building early stage ventures from an idea to a business, and mitigating execution risk.

Image source: Flickr/Creative Commons

3 trends that we noticed from over 500 Indian startups that we reviewed

Over the last few weeks we reviewed over 500 startups and talked (phone, skype, etc.) with over 100 startup founders. This was our shortlisting process to get to 15 companies that will make it to our Spring 2013 batch at the Accelerator.

First, we reviewed a lot of travel startups. Especially the problem of helping travelers with trip planning. A list of things to do, places to see, restaurants to eat, etc. With all the data available from multiple sites including Yelp, Facebook friends recommendations, and other online sources there seems to be enough data to form a more informed trip plan. Unfortunately we picked none of them. Its too hard to see what will differentiate one company from another. Some claim it is their User experience, others their recommendation algorithm and still others their human-powered technology planning.

Second we reviewed many more gaming applications than we did in the previous batch. Zynga’s performance notwithstanding, many folks are jumping on the in-app purchases and social gaming concept. Most start with a web social game though, not mobile. That’s fair, since the number of mobile smartphone early adopters in India is still far and few between. Again, we passed on all of them since the teams did not seem complete and hiring design talent is amazingly hard in India.

Third we reviewed many SaaS applications in the help desk and customer support area. There were 3 teams with excellent experience & background in the space and all had some initial customer traction. Many were gunning for BMC Remedy, but my sense was although the market is fairly large, nothing set one team apart from another. They all pretty much had the same feature set as ZenDesk or FreshDesk.

Bonus trend – we saw many education “ERP” applications. School management, test preparation academy management, College alumni management etc.

M. A. P 2013 – Your Bridge to Global Brands.

ProductNation is pleased to support M.A.P 2013 a unique project supporting Asian innovation and designed to match new companies to the most senior decision-makers in global marketing and media. Since its launch in 2011, it has had applications from over 50 new companies and awarded four “Hot Company of the Year” citations. All applications are assessed by a jury of VCs and successful media entrepreneurs who then shortlist 5 companies that are asked to join the speaker line-up of The Festival of Media. This becomes the entering company’s chance to pitch their businesses with one company being voted by the delegates as “Hot Company of the Year”.

If you are a startup which is:

  • Part of the next generation of advertising and marketing?
  • Behind a breakthrough idea or product that might disrupt established practices?
  • Part of a new breed of Asian businesses?

Few quick links:

Are Product Managers Future Entrepreneurs?

Prof. Rahul Abhyankar, Director of ICPM Programs at the Institute of Product Leadership summarized it well in his message to the Graduating Class, “Product Management is more of a mindset change merely skillset”

Product Management has many definitions but most experts will agree that its essentially the art & science of delivering delighting solutions to real market problems and doing it rather predictably.

So if a Product Manager is supposed to
1. Get Customer Insights
2. Validate a proposed solution
3. Develop a Business/Monetization Model
4. Develop specifications/requirements for teams to build a delighting solution
5. Help launch and figure out the GoToMarket Strategy

how is it different from what an entrepreneur ends up doing?!

Here is my take on how Product Managers need slightly different skills than a startup entrepreneur –

a. Leadership Skills – Conflict management, stakeholder management, influence building. Product Managers have to influence multiple stake holders for decision making, leadership skills are more critical.

b. Internal vs External – Product Managers have to spend more time internal to the company compared to an entrepreneur who might be completely customer/market focused (funded startups have Boards to answer as well but time investments are lower)

c. Plumber vs Oil Digger – As a Product Manager you have potentially lots of resources that one needs to be aware of and know how to leverage (existing customers, brand, sales force, budgets etc.). So the key thing here is to “connect” the right pipes in the organization so oil falls in your bucket as opposed to dig for oil (find early adopters, investors etc.)

d. Risk Appetite– Emotionally a Product Manager might be less attached to the business as personal wealth is not at stake (reputation is on the line though!). A good product manager should have the right passion for the product and a good entrepreneur knows when to quit and pivot based on market feedback!

While there are differences in skillsets, the end goal for both seems to be aligned – delivering value.

So is it fair at the end to say that Product Managers are Future Entrepreneurs?

We will be asking this question to 10+ senior product industry veterans on Jan 30th at the Graduation Party for ICPM Class of Fall 2012. Come grab a beer with them if you are in Bangalore!

Indian start-up ecosystem – in a sweet & sour spot

Health warning: this post is slightly longer than the regular articles as the subject calls upon a more detailed discussion of the issues, so please be patient and read on!

Our start-up ecosystem has come leaps and bounds over the past few years, the sheer development can be measured by the rising number of early stage investments, the increase in the number accelerators and the number of wannabe student entrepreneurs aspiring to become next Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg. On the face of it all this may sound really promising (which it is!) but many cracks begin to appear as one starts scratching the surface. The current rate of ecosystem development will fall way short of the challenge that currently faces this nation and unless we change gears it will be difficult if not impossible to meet the expectations in the next decade.

When I was kick-starting my journey, I came across a startling fact that reinforced my belief that Indian start-up ecosystem needs more momentum if it is to come anywhere close to meeting the broader socio-economic targets. According to a recent planning commission study, India needs to support nearly 10000 scalable start-ups by 2022 to provide some level of sustainable job creation to the 140 million potential job seekers entering the workforce over the same period but currently around 450 new tech start-ups are launched and overall just 200 start-ups get funded every year by angels / VCs. So what is fundamentally going wrong here? Why can’t a country that prides itself on its intellectual horsepower, huge proportion of adults and a maturing market not able to get its act together?

This prompted me to explore some of the underlying root causes within the ecosystem (i.e. non market or policy related) that are impeding the ecosystem growth. A deeper look into the ecosystem value chain reveals fundamental gaps along the start-up journey starting from entrepreneurial desire through to building sustainable businesses and obtaining early stage funding.

 Cultivators

Cultivators are the first level institutions that provide exposure to the budding entrepreneurs and help them find their starting point. These institutions play a key role in igniting the dormant fire and giving birth to entrepreneurs. But let’s face it our social, education and even the corporate culture is not actively embracing the entrepreneurship phenomena. According to a Gallop study, India ranks in the bottom quartile for culture and social capital for entrepreneurship. India’s premier institutes fall way short of global benchmarks on producing entrepreneurs (5% versus 10% in premier global institutions) and the innovation rank is also not something we can boast about (62 out of 125 nations).

Break the shackles and come out of the comfort zone: Indian culture broadly lacks that entrepreneurial spirit and does not encourage risk taking – the fear of failure is the single biggest challenge we need to overcome. Institutions promote careerism over entrepreneurship and traditionally our family culture dominates our career decisions. This has changed recently but we need more of this to drive faster change. We need more leaders and risk takers!

Let’s set up few tables and open this space, should we call it an e-cell?: There are E-cells in pretty much every college campus these days but the quality of support provided is an issue up for debate. Majority of the incubators see their role as limited to providing physical space and hosting few business plan events. The institutions usually do not have relevant entrepreneurship driven structured programs and courses that can encourage students to get a real taste of this exciting pursuit.

Learning starts right here: Those brave ones who dare to opt for entrepreneurship as a career option lack an understanding of what a sustainable, global and truly innovative business means – their aspirations are not BIG enough. The education and corporate system struggles to explain these notions as a result of which the quality of entrepreneurs / ideas is generally weak.

Promoters & Nurturers

These enabling institutions (usually run by volunteers as non-profit ventures) provide the necessary glue in the value chain and ensure a supportive environment is created that encourages entrepreneurism. The institutions are doing an excellent job in encouraging entrepreneurs by providing a platform to connect likeminded individuals in a short, intense and fun product building format but fall way short of following this through and nurturing them into a start-up mould. According to an estimate from one of the founders of such initiatives, only 20-30% participants consider launching a start-up out of which a mere 5-10% can hope to find a place in a structured program like an accelerator.

Spread the joy – we need more: It is believed that the cumulative attendance at these events stands at less than 20000 entrepreneurs per year which is only a fraction of the potential entrepreneur base cultivated upstream. These institutions have done a fantastic job at glamorising the entrepreneurship phenomenon but the potential reach of such initiatives has so far been limited due to domain and geography focus.

When just being sexy alone doesn’t work: Majority of these  1-2 days format programs / events are successful in creating a buzz in the community but fail to instil a deeper and broader desire among the participants to take the plunge and do something more intently with their ideas and teams. As suggested above, usually around 20-30% participants think of taking the next step and starting the venture.

Don’t say goodbye yet!: Some institutions provide a level of structured support to the entrepreneurs interested in starting up post such events but the ecosystem in general lacks the infrastructure / will to sustain their momentum until they are ready to be passed on to the downstream institutions such as accelerators. On average less than 8% applicants are acceleration ready when they approach the program suggesting the underlying weakness in the pre acceleration support system.

Accelerators

Accelerators help build the fundamental blocks of the start-up business i.e. finalising the product, launching and gaining initial traction, building a clear business strategy etc. Most accelerators barring a few have popped up in the last year or so and are still devising an optimal model for the Indian start-up ecosystem. The accelerator success metrics are yet to be defined / standardised but if we take the typical business performance indicators, start-ups going beyond a critical mass (revenue, customers, funding etc.) post acceleration program are exceptionally rare – funding for less than 20% of portfolio companies compared to more than 80% for top performing accelerators in US. This is quite alarming.

Accelerators, accelerators, accelerators: A lot has been debated about the recent growth in the number of accelerators. But the reality is India currently has close to 25 accelerators that provide money and/or mentoring to approximately 150 start-ups annually whereas in US top 3 accelerators alone are able to accelerate as many start-ups. We will need many more “quality” accelerators with both tech and non tech focus to give promising start-ups a fair chance to learn the tricks of the trade and provide them a strong launching platform.

Soft touch is not good enough: From my personal experience, I find a huge expectation mismatch among start-ups and accelerators. Where the later believes that following a similar sort of model to Y Combinator is all that we need but the reality is we must understand that the mindset of western entrepreneurs is very different from that of an Indian. Having lived and worked abroad for quite some time, I can certainly say the air of capitalism is very thick in the western culture whereas we don’t get a similar level of exposure from our educational / professional backgrounds which can enable us to become commercial in our thinking. Therefore a complete hands off and short duration engagement model underpinned by too much “gyaan” has had limited success so far. There is a need to do some hand holding during the program to get the start-ups proficient in various aspects of their business. Mentoring alone won’t do it, we need commercial partners who are engaged with the start-ups throughout the program.

Money – not a big deal anymore: Let’s face it, in today’s world raising few lakh rupees is not an insurmountable challenge for start-ups, most wannabe entrepreneurs are capable of scratching theirs’ or their folks’ wallets to gather the initial seed amount to build their MVPs. With money not being a huge issue the start-ups are not willing to give away a substantial amount of equity to accelerators in return of limited perceived value. The value proposition doesn’t appear to be compelling enough to attract good quality start-ups who could otherwise benefit from the acceleration process and proceed efficiently to the next level. 

Investors – Angels/ VCs

Investors are the big daddies of the start-up world and arguably play an instrumental role in making or breaking the dreams of the entrepreneurs who want to leave their mark on this world. They provide the impetus necessary both financially and operationally to scale the business to the next level. So what are the reasons why only 1-2% of the start-ups that approach them are successful in raising funds whereas in US this is close to 15-20%.

Hey Start–ups – what were you thinking?: One of the main reasons cited by VCs is that most start-ups are not ready for the next big leap – they have not showed much traction or demonstrated enough maturity to justify a heavy cheque. To some extent I can also substantiate this as most of the ideas I have seen going through to the VCs or angels are not ready for funding – there is no clear validation, few (if any) early adopters, little revenue and limited clarity on the business direction. But why is the quality of the start-ups not good enough at this stage? The answer lies in the journey of the start-up up to this point!

Everybody loves the good kid: Although many early stage funds and angels claim to be open to all start-up types but sub consciously there is a strong bias towards best performing tech or web enabled companies (65% of total investments in 2012) where the business models appear more scalable and capital efficient. There is nothing wrong with this investment philosophy but we also need players who are willing to make some riskier bets on a decent team / idea still in early stages and support more non tech focused businesses as well where potential returns could be comparable. 

Where are the resources gone!: I have also observed that in some cases although investors like the idea and team but feel restricted in terms of financial and/or human resources. This is less than ideal as the last thing we need is to let the great start-ups die because of lack of resources. More than money lack of quality advisors who can actively work with the portfolio companies is critical.

These issues among others that have not been covered here aim to illustrate some of the potential gaps that exist in the ecosystem. However I must reiterate that where we are at today is a great position to be in and has given us an excellent launching pad. I am very optimistic about the future and I hope by addressing these challenges we can further improve our ecosystem and come closer to meeting our targets and building a sustainable start-up nation!

Please stay tuned for the next post in the series that will look at the potential solutions to these challenges…The start-up – ecosystem nexus – “as-is” vs. “to-be”

How to come up with a great company or product name? – A few YouTube videos can teach you that!

Who said YouTube is a waste of time? It can even teach you on how to come up with a great company or product name!

Naming a company or a product is so crucial in a product start-up. You can call your services company – “The Great Maharashtra IT Services and Systems Company”  and your clients may not care too much! Product startups, especially in the consumer space, need to think a lot before naming their company or their product. This is only because it needs to be simple to  pronounce and spell, may not mean something bad in another language, and most importantly, domain names need to be available and make for good branding and trademark protection!

Rather than me making this a lecture, I thought this time around I will have YouTube videos tell you the story of why Company and Product naming is important and more importantly, how to go about doing it in a systematic way. And how not to do it!

Here is a five minute video that gives you a quick overview of why names are important and a systematic way of going about it! This company’s own name CatchWord is a great name for a consulting company that specializes in providing naming services! They seem to have come up with that name following their own process.

The main takeaway from the video above is that it is an involved process and worth taking the time to do it carefully and painstakingly!

If you think that some very successful companies have not made mistakes in their own names, watch this clip from the movie The Social Network. Facebook was once The Facebook until Sean Parker, Co-Founder of Napster advises Mark Zuckerberg to take the “the” out!

 

If you are wondering where the name Apple came from, here’s a video that explains that! The Macintosh was almost called The Bicycle and the iMac was about to be called MacMan! And those were Steve Jobs’ ideas!

If you want to be rolling on the floor laughing, here’s a presentation of failed product names! Good lesson in checking what your company or product name means in other languages and your own!

 

What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet – William Shakespeare.

Well…..May be Not!!

Learnings from the 2nd #PNMeetup – Selling your product Gangnam Style

#PNMeetup on Selling your product Gangnam Style was the topic at the recently concluded Meetup(Podcast link). We had over 45-50 people across products and the services who came out to gain an insight into the Enigma of Gangnam Style Sales, with their eyes wide open and all ears the speakers Mr. Sanjay Agarwala MD of Eastern Software, Ketan Kapoor Co-Founder and CEO  of Mettl and Vishal Jain Chief Product Officer of RateGain gave an eagles eye clarity of how one could reach the summit of the Gangnam Style Sales.

Sanjay set the tone of the session by sharing his experiences of Eastern Software system which he started in 1991 and where he saw an opportunity in the product space in 1997 and ventured therein. The company dived headlong into ERP where there was a huge demand in the small and midcap segment. The larger players were serviced by prominent players. They clearer pegged themselves below these big players. The positioning was very clear to all parties concerned form the beginning. Because of their positing they got Pvt Equity Investments which enabled them to concentrate on Product development and Market Development which helped them scale to 100 customers in 2 years and 800 customers by 2001-2002.

They looked for newer markets outside and concentrated on newer markets. Africa was a huge virgin market, every body was skeptical but it was an immense market waiting to be tapped. They tweaked their sales model from a direct Sales(applicable in India) to partnering with the local companies(In Africa), they believe when you partner with anyone the relationship has to be a win-win. The partners should benefit first and then you. That builds trust which is further solidified when you match your own money with the amount the partner spent, sending clear signals to all. Since the partner operates in the market and is now highly motivated he is able to better understand the changing environment and this helps in better customer deliver.

 Sanjay’s  Gangnam style  for Eastern Software

1) Positing of product to be very clear – To Market, To Employees and To Self

2) Concentrate on Product Development

3) Build the Market.

3) Focus on New regions and localize regularly

4) Most importantly Build Trust and Partner well.

5) Customer Deliver the Key

6) Understand Markets well.

Listen to the Podcast here.

The baton now passed from to Sanjay to Ketan CEO Mettl. Ketan gives a very good insight into Mettl and sets the stage.

Ketan believes that business is like a marathon but one must run it like a sprint. Therefore must Start selling Early- even before the product comes out enabling you to get the information to all. Prioritize – Initially launch the product on what you feel–then tweak it to evolve the actual needs. Use Analytics to identify differentiators and then set benchmarks. Focus on Closures but budget for long sales cycles – have enough gas in the fuel tank. Always treat your feedback seriously this helps you to better customer delivery.


Build your brand well – Build Trust – Hire the Best – Hire slow. Clearly specify the product mix therefore maintain the Brand.

Interestingly Ketan remarked that Introverts can be better sellers than extroverts- Why? Well the key is to establish strong personal connects, be clear and not over-commit. Qualities where Introverts can be better sellers.

Ketan’s  Gangnam style  for Mettl.

1) Start Selling Early

2) Prioritize and Launch Fast

3) Build Differentiators

4) Course correction based on Feedback

5) Have the Bear Fat to sustain theWinter.

6) Most importantly Build Trust.

Listen to the audio podcast here of Ketan’s talk.

Ketan gave a wonderful insight of his company and then Vishal of Rategain share his story.

Vishal says that before they launched their products they started writing articles on the subject/space of their product and this helped them to get the first order by engaging their customers and peaking their interest. This helped them to partner with their biggest competitor and thus tap their(competitor’s) home market – Spain first. Vishal believes the speed to market is very essential to launch your products fast. When you sometimes target the weakness of your competition new opportunities open up. They were able to get 300 hotels to sign up in a just a matter of 3 month. This helped them to partner the competition to market their products. This also had a problem, the local hotels did not know RateGain but knew their competitor. Team Rate Gain then made a real effort to delink themselves and market the product directly this ensured that their Brand was known. They invested in it to Build the Brand.

Since they have operated in various developed markets some things which work for them are Webinar sales – where they invite their prospective clients to join in and make their own mind. From Customers becoming advocates for them on Linkedin to localizing their business to peer marketing, all have worked to create huge amount of word of mouth and Brand Awareness which have all helped in Sales.


Vishal’s Gangnam style for RateGain

1) Write articles on the Space of the product

2) Partner with Locals or Competition

3) Prioritize and Launch Fast

4) Build the Brand

5) Focus on New regions and localize regularly

6) Use Linkedin, Twitter and Webinars to reach out

7) Partner Well

8) All Chain Stakeholders need to be targeted.

Listen to the Podcast here.

The Various inputs helped in gaining a wonderful insight into how a company could go Gangnam. Hope I have been able to capture every bit of information hear, an hope if you have attended the sessions you will be able to add your takeaways too.

The Wonderful insight shared will certainly help all the entrepreneurs out there and for this Avinash deserves huge credit in ensuring that latest trends are captured. Also Rajat for very aptly naming the theme Gangnam style.

Listen to the Podcast here.

Look forward to seeing you all at the next edition in Feb….

Guest post by Nakul Saxena, NITEE