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Announcing the angel investor office hours in Bangalore (soon in Mumbai and Delhi as well)

How to hack your seed round in India, got 63 emails, comments and twitter messages asking me to take the post to its next logical step.

The 3 biggest issues entrepreneurs raised were:

1. They dont have the email addresses of these angel investors. Even if they did send them an email, responses were slow or went into a “black hole”.

2. The angel networks in particular have a fairly arduous process to filter, select and decide on new companies.

3. Many angel investors were not proactive in telling them what areas (sectors) they were interested in funding, so entrepreneurs could tailor their pitch to be more specific and target the right person.

I am extremely pleased to announce that in Bangalore (soon in Mumbai and Delhi as well), we will have a few of the top angel investors from IAN (working on Mumbai Angels and others as well, stay tuned) who are committing to office hours each week to meet entrepreneurs and provide them quick feedback on their funding options.

From January 2013, five of the most prolific IAN investors, Venkat Raju, Manav Garg, Nagaraj Prakasam, Sharad Sharma and Sundi Natrajan will hold monthly office hours in 2 locations – the Microsoft office at Lavelle Road and Eka Software offices in Outer Ring Road.

Update: Anil Joshi of Mumbai Angels has also agreed to host office hours in both Bangalore and Mumbai once a month.

Each session will be for 30 minutes per entrepreneur and a max of 4 entrepreneurs will be given time on a first-come-first-serve basis every month. Only one session per entrepreneur per year will be allowed.

Second, after each investment led by these investors they will write a quick note to tell us more about why they decided to invest. This will tell us more about what their thesis was, the trends they were betting on and other relevant details.

Finally each of these investors will share their investment thesis for 2013 and the sectors or areas they have expertise in or are passionate about. For example, Sharad’s an expert in Internet and advertising, whereas Sundi is passionate about education.

I am very excited that they are committing to these office hours. As entrepreneurs we will get a chance to interact with them and get their initial feedback so we can fine tune our plans and strategies to maximize our funding chances.

I do have one request: We’d like a volunteer to help program manage this effort. You should be willing to commit about 1-2 hours per week. If you are interested, please send an email to: mukund at thrisha dot com.

If you are a seed investor and you’d love to join this program, do send me an email as well.

P.S. A few folks have been asking me about other cities, such as Chennai, Hyderabad, Pune, etc. I wont be able to commit to these investors coming to those cities, but will try and get a few more local investors from those cities to hold office hours.

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MusicFellas makes music more cool!

MusicFellas is a social, indie music discovery platform where one can have meaningful interactions around the music. It helps discovering new music, have conversations and support the artists. The artists get 70% of whatever people pay to buy their music.

In conversation with Aakriti Bhargava from Boring Brands , the young co-founders talk about their startup moments and life in MusicFellas.


 

 

How did you get the idea for your startup?

We just wanted to build something which was more personal and easy to buy music from. Earlier, we used to write a music blog. This tool was carved out of the blog.

 

Tell us something about Musicfellas?

Musicfellas is a social discovery platform for independent music. We help the fans to have meaningful conversations. We’re doing this to create a better listening experience.

 

Who made the initial investments and how did you get it together?

We’ve invested our own money, our savings from our respective jobs.

 

Your Favourite Start-up moment so far?

The launch day – we got insane amount of love from everyone who used the product.

 

Tell us the toughest investor question put across to you guys and your answer for it?

Tough because many of them can’t believe it

It was the market size for digital indie music – $ 2.8 Billion

 

How did you get your first 10 customers / clients?

We started discussing the concept with mostly our friends who then spread the word. And thankfully, the artists themselves have shared about us a lot.

 

What is the biggest asset for your startup?

The team ofcourse.

 

What is the founder’s biggest fear?

Cash in bank – because that might be a reason we might look at short term goals instead of more fruitful long term strategy.

As an endeavour to give a platform to product startups in India, Product Nation will continue to bring to you a short tête-à-tête with some really cool and young startups.

 

 

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Q&A with Startup ArrayShield’s CEO

Editor’s note: Two brothers co-founded ArrayShield Technologies in Chennai, India, in 2010 to provide a two-factor authentication product for secure access to corporate data. We interviewed co-founder and CEO Pavan Thatha about lessons learned thus far as a startup in the security space. This article is brought to SandHill readers in partnership with ProductNation.

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

Pavan Thatha: ArrayShield’s flagship offering is an innovative pattern-based, two-factor authentication (2FA) product for enterprises to protect against Identity theft and other hacking attacks. ArrayShield’s patent-pending technology is backed by extensive research done by my brother Rakesh, who is the co-founder and CTO of ArrayShield. 

Password is one of the most outdated forms of basic security. Relying on mere password strength to grant access to an organization’s customer, business, prospect and financial data in an environment of high competition is very risky for businesses.

Our 2FA solution leverages visual patterns that users can remember and a card that can be carried in a user’s pocket. Our innovative solution ensures only authorized users are allowed to access key applications and IT resources, thus offering productivity and flexibility along with security to our customers. Our product easily integrates with most of the applications and technologies such as VPN to ensure connectivity and access along with security. And it’s affordable, easy to deploy, use and manage. 

SandHill.com: How did your company originate? 

Pavan Thatha: I always wanted to be an entrepreneur. I spent a few years early in my career getting an understanding of how the software industry operates. Once I got a good understanding of various aspects of the technology business, I decided to start. My brother Rakesh meanwhile had been spending a lot of time researching the information security space, which is his passion. He hit upon a very simple but effective idea of replacing obsolete password-based authentication with an alternative pattern-based authentication that provides a very high level of security against modern hacking attacks. We decided to take the plunge of starting up ArrayShield to commercialize his innovative 2FA idea. 

SandHill.com: Please describe an aspect of your company’s business that has been frustrating and how you worked through the challenge. 

Pavan Thatha: Our major challenge in the initial days was to convert the interest from prospects to get an order and get them to use our product. Being in a sensitive area of authentication and security, very few were ready to experiment with a new product.

To address this challenge, instead of building a full-feature product, we developed the product with minimal features that are highly stable and secure. We worked very closely with our initial prospects and took a consultative approach in building their confidence that our product is highly stable and secure. Once they got the confidence on our product, they implemented to a limited number of users followed by rollout to a larger user base.

Read the complete post at Sandhill.com

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Why they’re not giving feedback to your idea

Ideas used to be a dime a dozen. Now they’re a dime a million. 

Ideas have a short life. But you need to get some kinda feedback on your idea. It makes all the difference doesn’t it? Here are 3 reasons your idea isn’t getting validated feedback. There’s a clue in #3 that you should try and tell me if it worked for you.

1. You are verbose. Don’t write like diarrhea. Do this – send a single 140 Character tweet to the world about your product’s chief USP. Did someone respond? You get the picture? 

Your idea doesn’t reach the target audience if you’re writing more than 300 words. However, that’s not to say that you can’t draw your audience into a 3-5 min unsolicited engagement through the audio visual format. 

2. You are irrelevant. The person you’re asking feedback from has no relevance to what you’re asking. She doesn’t understand it, doesn’t care about it, and has no time to appreciate why its important for you. 

Your idea doesn’t reach the target audience if you’re talking bananas to a penguin. Penguins don’t eat banana. In all probability, they don’t even know what a banana is. 
 
3. You are being selfish. Don’t ask before you have something to offer in return. My permission is my property. Don’t try to take that from me. So don’t spam me unless you’re offering some free money. (And I will not click on your AD – just send the money in cash please.)

This Validated feedback that I glorify will be amazingly well received by your marketing function. This time, DO trust a marketer – go get that feedback.
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Indian Product owners solving problems that Indian Business Owners are facing

In the Speaker Lounge at NPC12, I asked Bob Wright what new he saw at the conclave this year. He said this year he sees Indian Product owners solving problems that Indian Business Owners are facing. This SMB market in India is lying legs-wide-apart – only money can be made here.
Here are 3 industries that I believe are fertile grounds in India:
1. Diagnostics – Data that allows the doctor to search through a list of symptoms and identify possible diseases. Usually the earlier you catch the disease – the easier it is to kill it. 
Which is why Vinod Khosla is betting on this company. That heart monitor can go with you everywhere – so there’s a doctor in the world willing to pay for it. Insurance money, hostpital earnings, patient benefits – you can see there’s nothing not to like in it – as long as it does its job cheaply. 
However dependence on hardware is still mandatory in this space. So before you jump in with your cloud-ready software and all that – do note that the doctors haven’t used computers like you have. The still get scared when you ask them to log off their machine and log back in. 
2. Aviation – the Indian government has crippled the Aviation business. There’s a massive gap between government policies (esp. taxation) and consumer need (Cheaper faster travel). Which is all the more why software is needed to bring in automation and tremendous savings for the Service provider – the Airline. Last I checked – that was what the LCC business was all about. 
IBS Plc is one of Kerala’s success stories that’s got logistics sorted through software. But there’s no success story for software that got the Airline industry sorted. Sabre and SAP solve part challenges. Most Airlines have their software custom crapped or have to invest in scary expensive systems built over the last million years. 
3. Parental Policing – Parents are shit scared of their kids getting hooked to the wrong things on the internet. And by scared I mean paranoid. A wireless router that looks sober and protective, priced at around $70, with a cloud based service that allows data reporting on the pad. 
Meraki does enterprise policing. They’re trying to do whaling, but their product can easily be turned around to make mothers feel so much secure.i7 networks – are you listening? 
Do you know any Indian companies in this space? I would love to get a chance to tell their stories.
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BrightPod makes collaboration for digital marketers simpler and faster, much faster

Synage Software, more popularly known as the DeskAway guys, are on to their next thing and they are calling it BrightPod. Sticking to their expertise of developing collaboration software, BrightPod is a collaboration tool built specifically for digital marketers. I got an early peek into it and while the the product and the segment they are going after hold promise, it needs work on the interface and a big push on the adoption side.

Just like any other collaboration tool, you create a new pod (a fancier term for project) to get started. But that’s where the similarity ends. Now instead of adding individual tasks to it, you choose a workflow from the existing ones or you create your own (coming soon).

Most common marketing projects like an email marketing campaign, a Google Adwords campaign and a social media campaign are covered. Select the email marketing workflow and all the tasks that it needs are automatically added to the pod. Just assign a client, set deadlines, add team members and you are good to go. Digital agencies, who run the same kind of campaigns (at least structurally) for different clients will find this a huge time saver.

I tried two of the workflows – Google Adwords and email marketing. While the Google Adwords workflow was well defined, email marketing had me lost. The team would do well to reduce the number of tasks or mark the ones that not everyone bothers about as optional. Another challenge going ahead with the workflow would be that a large company works very differently from a startup, who would overlook a lot of the tasks to push the campaign out of the door as quickly as possible.

Moving on, BrightPod has another two more very interesting features. Focus and Round Up. Focus, as the name suggests, helps you focus only on key tasks and drown out the others. Temporarily from your mind, I mean. Marketing, unlike other functions in a company, is typically about a lot of small things coming together to form the complete piece. Star a task that is important, and it will appear in your Focus tab to allow you to, well, focus, on the task.

Before we get to Round Up, you need to get this. BrightPod is meant for marketers, with workflows and terminologies that marketers feel at home with. But marketing never functions in isolation. You have design involved, you have the web team involved, you might have other agencies involved and if you are an agency yourself, you need to get the client in on the project. This is where Round Up comes in. Just throw in the email address of the person you want involved in the conversation and they are in. They don’t have to get on to yet another app, they can just reply to that email and it will get added to the pod.

So far, so good. Now the things that BrightPod needs to improve. Simplicity is one of the main principles BrightPod is built on and while it delivers on certain counts, it doesn’t have the same kind of simplicity that Asana (something I have used extensively) or Trello (something that I have seen in use around) have.

The BrightPod dashboard, the first thing you will see each time you log in, has an activity stream of all the active pods. Every task added, every comment added, every milestone added, every task completed. For me, that was plain overwhelming, given how each workflow adds 20-30 tasks straightaway. When you log into your collaboration tool first thing in the morning, you want to see a list of the tasks that are due, the overall state of different projects and the important tasks for the day. While tasks due are presented in the dashboard, they are on this section on the right that doesn’t catch your eye first thing.

Also when you click on a pod to make additions and modifications, the navigation is different from that of the main screen, again leaving you a little lost. While these are small things that a user can get used to in a week of working with the app, these are things that typically come in the way of getting the buy-in of the whole team to move to a new application, or even earlier during the evaluation phase.

The biggest challenge BrightPod will face with adoption is getting companies used to the idea of having a specialized collaboration tool for marketers. Organizations like to have the same tool for everyone in the organization, so it would be interesting to see how the company solves this challenge.

All said and done, the product is still in alpha phase, so a lot of these things will get better with time. If you are digital marketer, go ahead, sign up for a BrightPod invite and let us (and the BrightPod team) know what you think.

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Project v/s Product

Every Technology driven work is supported by a piece of software and that software may be a very small piece of code written to fulfill requirement like recording expenses of house, artificial intelligence, robotics or weather forecast.

Some daily life impacting processes converted from manual to totally computerized like medical consultations,  online airline ticketing, books and gifts purchase, hotel booking etc are some of the process achieved through software.

These software’s may be broadly categorized in two ways :

1)  Software Project: A project, by definition, is a temporary activity with a starting date, specific goals and conditions, defined responsibilities, a budget, a planning, a fixed end date and multiple parties involved.

2) Software Product: By Dictionary Definition: software product – merchandise consisting of a computer program that is offered for sale

Software Project: We may consider project which consists of finding solution to a particular problem to a particular client. It depends on various products. By using the Hardware, Middleware, Operating system, Languages and Tools only we will develop a project. Here the requirements are gathered from the client and analyzed with that client and start to develop the project. Here the end user is one and complete development is based on the end user needs.

Software Product: Products are developed not for any specific client or one customer. Here the requirements are gathered from market and analyze that with some experts and start to develop the product. After developing the products they try to market it as a solution. Here the end users are more than one. Product development is never ending process and customization is done regularly and continuously.

In business and engineering, New Product Development (NPD) is the term used to describe the complete process of bringing a new product to market. It starts from Idea generation, Product design and deal engineering along with market analysis and business opportunity size.

To give a real life example of popular product v/s project ,some are as below :

From India – Well-known software products

From abroad: Well-known software products

From India – Well-known software projects

From abroad: Well-known software projects

The companies who make these small to big software projects targets for getting a software project delivered to the users’ satisfaction, ontime and on budget. Sometimes someone has to ensure the system lasts for the long term.

The project and the product might start at the same point, but they usually finish at very different points. A project finishes with the last milestone release of the code — and a party. The product finishes with the opposite: the last byte of code being removed from the servers — and a party only if it was really nasty software.

From the above examples, you might question how Gmail or Meramail is a project  v/s MS Exchange. My point of view on this is very simple. Gmail/ meramail  Software is not available for sale / FREE or downloadable even for trial. So I would assume it’s a project built as per the need of the respective company and  is made available to be used as service. On the other hand Gmail App available on IOS and Android phone will be called as product, which is available and downloadable from respective app store.  Like wise you can purchase / download MS Exchange and XgenPlus email software, but cannot download / purchase  Gmail and Meramail software.

You might argue that Gmail is available as SaaS i.e Software as a Service. Sure it is, but it does not fit in the definition and nature of the “product”.  Moreover, if we remove service out of the Gmail, Do we get software product ? The answer is “No”, on the other hand if we provide SaaS on MS Exchange, the story will be different. May be this difference will be well understood if the difference between Product / Services / Software as a Service are understood properly. May be need of an another article 🙂

Post Contributed by Ajay Data, Data Infosys

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Forget coding. Startup founders should focus on Product & Design.

Last year (2011) learning coding was hot, may be it still is. Sites like Code for America came up; startups like Codecademy, Learnstreet, Udacity, etc came up that were focusing on building products that enabled others to learn coding in an interactive way. Then it looked like a kind of movement, a revolution in making.

Being a startup founder some of those effects trickled down to India – that made me seriously consider coding. And there were some other reasons as well. We started Wishberg by outsourcing product development to another company. As deadlines were missed repeatedly, this whole ‘founders should be coders’ effect started growing on me.

During this phase I did two things a.) started hiring our own engineering team b.) learn coding inspired by this noise. I started learning very enthusiastically to an extent that my bio read that I was learning to code. Going through multiple forums, registering on these websites, taking lessons on LAMP stack and so on. A bit of background, being a engineering student (though Mechanical) – I had some basic coding background. Few years back, I even built some basic websites, did a bit of javascripts, etc.

As we started hiring engineering talent I asked myself two questions –

  • Will I ever come up to the level of proficiency that matches our engineering team?
    No. I was no where close to them.. while I was doing ABC of coding, our team was super involved in deploying code, implementing Redis / Node.js, building scalable architecture, mobile infrastructure and so on. I didn’t want my team to tell me I suck on programming (which I knew I did anyway). More importantly, I wanted the team to focus on building our product and not spend timing teaching me code or correcting my code.
  • Will I ever hire anyone who has learned programming through online sites?
    No

I also checked with few technical founders who raised investments; few agreed that being a tech founder was probably a added advantage while raising money. But many of them also mentioned that post investment they spent more time finding product-market fit, doing business, improving their product, user experience, managing investors (many a times!) and eventually spending lesser and lesser time on coding themselves.

Eventually all startup founders end up focusing only on consumption side of product (front end user experience, improving funnels and conversion metrics) than the one under the hood. This is when I gave up my decision to learn coding and started focusing on learning design (user design and user experience) which is as core to product as technology is. I started spending more time understanding design tools, design patterns and implementing them on Wishberg. I am no where saying underlying technology, architecture, speed, and scalabilty are not important.

For online businesses, there is no doubt scarcity of good engineering talent; but there is more scarcity of product designers and even much more scarcity of product managers. Startup founders knowingly / or unknowingly start getting into product management role.

I have been a product guy for about 7 years and now feel that I should have learned design long back. Our team not just gets product documentation from me, but also product designs including all scenarios and exceptions. There is a certain clarity of thought which engineers appreciate and exactly know what is to be built – which save lot of time while shipping code / features. Every month, we look at data, un-design by removing clutter, remove additional clicks and aim to improve conversions on every step.

Geek Example – The 2012 Formula 1 Season had 12 teams of which 4 had the winning Renault RS27-2012 engine on their cars. Yet there was only one winner – The Red Bull Racing team. The original Renault team (now Lotus Renault GP) which manufactured and supplied the RS27-2012 engine to Red Bull team stood fourth in overall 2012 championship. In fact Red Bull won the championship for last 3 seasons with the Renault engine. What really mattered – the product RB8 chassis. More importantly the people driving the product, its team – drivers Sebastian Vettel & Mark Webber, Team Principal and Chief Technical Officer.

Concluding Notes:
What engine you have under the hood (technology) matters. What car / chasis the engine drives (the product) matters more. But what matters most is who is driving / leading it. Don’t get over obsessed with technology, focus on product & design.

So all those who complimented us on Wishberg‘s product design & usability… need a hint on who was the person behind it? Yours truly.

Contributed by Pravin J, Wishberg

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Does India provide a supportive environment for getting value out of innovation?

When we talk about supporting innovation in India, the first things that come to mind are the availability of capital and people with the right skills. But, the efforts and risks involved in innovation don’t make sense unless inventors and firms can get value out of their innovative activity.

When will innovation make money for inventors? That depends on issues like: Are users willing to try out new products and services? Do the capital markets place a premium on companies that are more innovative? Can an inventor protect his innovation from being copied by others, i.e., can he be sure that he (and he alone) will be able to capture the value from the innovation he creates? The right hand side of the framework below captures these “demand-side” factors.

In this article, I will focus on the last question – the issue of value appropriation – and ask a broad question: Does India provide a supportive environment for appropriating value from Innovation?

Appropriating Value from Innovation

To answer this question, I will investigate whether the Indian system for protecting intellectual property provides an effective mechanism for protecting inventor rights. Please remember that there is an exchange relationship at the bottom of the intellectual property system: the State gives an inventor a limited time monopoly to exploit her idea in return for the inventor sharing her knowledge or idea with society. So, a good intellectual property system has to balance the needs of both inventors and society at large.

Of course, I must add that from a firm-strategy perspective, appropriating value does not depend on intellectual property alone. As the graphic below (adapted from VK Narayanan’s book Managing Technology and Innovation for Competitive Advantage) shows, a firm’s ability to appropriate value from innovation also depends on its product market actions as well as its ability to innovate continuously and stay ahead of competitors. But, the intellectual property environment, and IP strategies followed by the firm form an important third prong, and these are the focus of this post.

A Historical Perspective

Independent India started off with a fairly strong intellectual property protection system. This should not surprise us because this was intended to protect the rights of British inventors under the colonial regime. However, there was growing disquiet about this system in the first two decades after independence, particularly in the area of pharmaceuticals where strong patent protection was seen as enabling multinational drug companies to extract monopoly profits from a poor country. As is well known, this culminated in our making important amendments to the Patents Act including removal of provisions to patent new molecules, and providing relatively short periods of patent protection in all cases. The new legislation – the Indian Patents Act of 1970 – is commonly credited with the growth of India’s generic pharmaceutical industry (based on an ability to create new processes for known drugs and scale them up effectively) and some of the lowest priced drugs in the world.

By the 1990s, many things had changed. Globalization was the order of the day, and India had climbed on the globalization bandwagon. International talks were on to provide a supportive environment for global trade. These talks expanded in scope to incorporate intellectual property protection. In 1995, India signed up for the GATT treaty and promised to put in place stronger intellectual property laws by January 1, 2005. India kept its promise, though not everyone is happy about this! But, the timing was right – by 2005, many Indian companies were taking innovation more seriously, and were therefore looking for stronger intellectual property protection for their inventions.

Where do we stand today?

Information

While the law changed, the procedural aspects of patenting have taken time to catch up. One of the important characteristics of a good patent system is easy availability of information about what patents have been issued. For several years this was a major bottleneck in India with such information not available online, and available only through a set of CDs compiled by TIFAC in Delhi. Even now, though there is an online database, it is nowhere as powerful or as comprehensive as the US PTO’s website. I would have thought that with all our software and IT prowess we should have been able to build something better than what the US PTO offers but…

Procedures and Process

Another important procedural issue is the speed with which the Patent Office considers applications, and the quality of the examination process. The importance of this dimension was recognized some years ago and a drive to hire and train patent examiners was launched. But, I saw a recent advertisement of the Controller General of Patents, Designs & Trademarks calling for applications for trademark examiner positions in which they are offering a consolidated salary of Rs. 25,000 per month to people with a degree in law and 3 years experience. I am sure it will be a challenge to get well qualified people at that level of compensation.

In an alternate effort to speed up the process, there was a proposal to involve the CSIR in preliminary screening and evaluation. But this was objected to by many as the CSIR itself is an active player in the intellectual property space and is, in fact, the Indian entity with the largest number of US patents.

While it’s difficult to judge the quality of patent examination, what we do know is that after an initial spurt in the speed of examination and grants, the process has slowed down again at a time when the number of applications is on the increase. Mint newspaper carried a useful graphic recently summarizing the challenge:

The Law Itself

As far as I can make out, there has been reasonably widespread acceptance of the amendments to the Patents Act made in 2004, 2005 and 2006 except for a couple of issues. The first issue is the now infamous Section 3 (d) that seeks to prevent evergreening by pharmaceutical companies by requiring a major inventive step as reflected in enhanced therapeutic value for a molecule to be awarded a patent. This has been a contentious issue almost since Day 1 of the new patents legislation, and a series of refused / cancelled patents to big name pharmaceutical companies has shown that the law has bite.

The second issue has been the issue of compulsory licensing. On March 9, 2012, the Controller General of Patents issued the first post – 2005 compulsory licence to Natco Pharma to manufacture its equivalent of Bayer’s Nexavar, a drug for treatment of kidney cancer. This has raised a hornet’s nest, as it has raised contentious issues like (1) what is a reasonable price for a drug? (2) what constitutes “working” a patent? and (3) what is the appropriate royalty to be paid to the inventor company in the event of compulsory licensing?

It’s fascinating to note that most of the controversies regarding the new patent law in India have centered around the pharmaceutical space. Globally, the big debates on intellectual property in recent times have been in the smart phone space involving companies like Apple, Samsung, and Google (Motorola Mobility). It’s almost as though we live on two separate planets! I suppose the reason for this is that India is still not a big market for high end smartphones and therefore the patent and design wars of this industry have not spilt over into India. But this is also another indication that India has failed to find a place at the high table of the most active innovation domains (see my earlier post on the areas in which India has the most active researchers).

In our obsession with the healthcare domain, we might be missing out on developments in other sectors that call for changes in our intellectual property protection laws. A new generation of software product companies is emerging from India (see my recent article in Outlook Business), and large companies like TCS and Infosys are embracing products and platforms in their quest for “non-linear” growth. But we continue to deny software products patent protection and limit their intellectual property protection to the Copyrights Act.

Awards & Enforcement

Consistent with their position in other matters, Indian courts tend to be conservative in penalties and awards for intellectual property violations unlike the multi-million dollar (or even multi-billion dollar) awards of American courts. In a way that’s good because it prevents intellectual property from becoming a separate game of corporate strategy. But the flip side of this is that there is the distinct possibility that an inventor may not receive adequate compensation for infringement of his intellectual property rights.

This become particularly critical in the case of the small inventor who anyway fights a David vs Goliath battle if the infringer is a large company with the ability to exploit all the procedural opportunities for delay available in the Indian legal system. In fact, if I were an inventor in India that would be my main fear – I may be able to obtain a patent and other forms of intellectual property protection, but will I be able to enforce my patent rights in a meaningful and timely way? Even in the US, the inventor of the intermittent windshield wiper, Robert Kearns had to struggle for years in his battle with large US auto companies (see the graphic below); I shudder to think what would happen to an equivalent inventor in India!

As we go forward, there will also be a need to ensure greater consistency in judicial decisions in the intellectual property domain. Without any disrespect meant to our honourable judges, I can see that in some of the recent judgements they have struggled to cope with the technicalities involved. Not too far in the future, when we have a critical mass of intellectual property cases, it will help to have a single court at the appellate level as has been done in the US.

Conclusion

In the 1950s and 1960s, we saw companies like Xerox and Pilkington Glass that established monopolies in their respective industries based on technologies which had strong patent protection. Today, the pace of innovation in most industries has hastened to the extent that companies need to innovate continually to derive maximum benefit from their innovations. But, intellectual property rights continue to provide the first-level protection for innovator companies.

As India develops a modern industrial economy, and more companies depend on innovation for their competitive advantage, our need to provide an appropriate level of legal support to enable innovative companies to capture the benefit of their innovations will grow. In this, our priority should be on improving IPR-related information flows, better processes and procedures, and enforceability, and on shifting our attention beyond the healthcare industry.

Original article can also be accessed here(from Juggad to Systematic Innovation).

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Organize BarCamp and Build a $ 119 Million Idea: The Amazing Story of SlideShare

The first Indian BarCamp was help in 2006. At this unconference, it was the fortuitous breakdown in managing the distribution of speaker presentations that led to the Idea we all know as SlideShare. Today, we hear their story in an interview with the SlideShare Co-Founder – Mr. Amit Ranjan.

ProductNation: Hi Amit, Welcome to ProductNation. We are really looking forward to hear your story. So please share all the excitement and emotion that you have gone through in your journey as a product entrepreneur.

Amit Ranjan: The team got together in 2004. We were three founders including me of which two were based in the US. We built another product before SlideShare.

We were building an online research application called MindCanvas that had a narrow focus on design, user experience and usability. We started building in 2004 and launched it after eighteen months. We were a team of 7 – 8 people then.

Once launched, it started doing very well. But, what we realized that this product was suited to the B2B consulting space and thus would scale with people and not technology. So that was a disconnect. And we asked ourselves if this is what we wanted to do for the rest of our lives? The Answer – No.  So we started looking for other options.

ProductNation: SlideShare, you mean

Amit Ranjan: SlideShare as an idea happened at this juncture. The SlideShare idea was born in Delhi itself.  Avinash is aware of this. The story goes something like this. We were instrumental in organizing the first BarCamp in India. This was in March 2006 at the Adobe office in Noida.

A BarCamp is like an antithesis of a conference where attendees interested in a particular topic come together and put up a show. The SlideShare idea was born at that Bar Camp.

As the organizers we found ourselves sandwiched between two groups – presenters and attendees. The presenters wanted to share the presentations and the attendees wanted to have them. So, pen drives were being exchanged and emails with attachments were flying across the BarCamp. At the same time, there were a bunch of guys who had taken photos and videos of the presentations to put it up on YouTube and Flickr.

So, presentations that formed the Centre stage of the conference, their sharing process itself was broken. So, we started looking around if there was an online tool available to share presentations. And we found that nothing existed. So that was the starting point for SlideShare.

ProductNation: Wow. Amit, would you like to talk about your pre-2004 days? How were you thinking about entrepreneurship? Was it something that you had it in yourself? Would you like to describe that journey?

Amit Ranjan: Entrepreneurship has been accidental. It is not something that I had planned. I am an MBA and a mechanical engineer. Post MBA, I worked in the consumer products sales and marketing space. I worked with Asian Paints for four years in the Sales and Distribution function and then with Pepsi. So, I did not come from a technology background. My six year experience in the Corporate Sector was good, just that I could not see myself doing that for the rest of my life. And there was a lot of exciting stuff happening around. It was not planned that way, but when an opportunity came to try something new, we went for it.

ProductNation: Superb. Please tell us about SlideShare journey, the acquisition by LinkedIn and the future plans.

Amit Ranjan: SlideShare was started in 2006. Thankfully, since then we have seen continuous growth. This meant scaling up in technology, hiring a team, which meant funding. The sheer frenetic pace at which the application was growing taught us all about building a startup.

We had an office in Delhi and in the US Bay area. At the time of the LinkedIn acquisition we had 35 people in Delhi and 13 in the US.  Delhi team was always dominant.

In terms of the acquisition, we had a relationship with LinkedIn since 2008. LinkedIn has an application platform in which they had invited a bunch of companies. SlideShare was one of them. LinkedIn knew the company and the people. So, a relationship already existed and acquisition was a logical next step. LinkedIn is the World’s largest professional network and SlideShare, a large professional sharing community. We all agreed that there was a strong product level fit. So we began acquisition talks in the beginning of 2012.

ProductNation: Would you put the LinkedIn acquisition as your moment of glory?

Amit Ranjan: The acquisition, the way I see it was a logical step in the evolution of the company. For me, the greatest thing is SlideShare itself that we could build something large and useful. The evolution of SlideShare has always been centre stage. After five years of starting up, in 2012 when the LinkedIn opportunity came by, we saw the possibility of having more resources through a large company to grow SlideShare. And we went with it.

ProductNation: What are the future plans for SlideShare at this moment, Amit?

Amit Ranjan: SlideShare will continue as a LinkedIn subsidiary. Going forward, you will see more integrations being offered to users.

ProductNation: What has been your key learning’s while building SlideShare?

Amit Ranjan: Sharp focus on Design, Engineering and Product Management. The web is changing furiously. Applications are being launched at the drop of a hat. Most die in days. So, if you are in the products space, you have to get on top with Design, Engineering and Product Management. No doubt about that.

ProductNation: Do you have a Top 3 for a budding product entrepreneur? Top 3 things you would like product entrepreneurs to register when approaching a products business.

Amit Ranjan: An engineering culture. In the long run, you need to have a strong engineering oriented culture in the company. Because culture would define a lot of things. It defines the organization itself, the people who join, the way you work, the way you tackle competition and the way you tackle markets.

The product and technology should be built for speed and not initially for scalability. This way you can focus on acquiring users, initially. There are cases where products optimize for scalability but struggle with the initial traction.

Thirdly, access to strong mentors. At SlideShare, we had some great advisors and mentors who really helped us think clearly. Having a bunch of good advisors really helps.

ProductNation: Amit, can you please explain this tradeoff between speed and scalability with an example, if possible?

Amit Ranjan: Technical example – Databases. Relational databases hit a wall when hitting a certain number of users. But, it is easy to find talent for relational databases. So, when starting off why bother optimizing with some other database. Scalability is a Rich Man’s problem.

ProductNation: Superbly put and aptly summarized. Amit, you have been in the products space for a while. Do you see entrepreneurs committing mistakes and it’s too late before they even realize it?

Amit Ranjan: Difficult to generalize. If you ask me personally, if I start again, would I do things differently. The answer is YES. And it would be Time Management. When building a startup, there is a lot riding on the entrepreneur. Looking back, I reckon if I had hired senior / specialized people for a few functions, I could have focused time on the product. That is one area, where I could have really done better.

ProductNation: Amit, how much did the US presence, being in the valley help SlideShare?

Amit Ranjan: I wish I could make a claim that SlideShare is completely an Indian company. Unfortunately that’s not correct. Our origin has a mix on India and US. The product was born in India, two of the three founders are Indian, the majority of the team is in India, but the company was headquartered in the US as the business was more US centric. Having a presence in the Bay Area and being connected to the early adopter crowd there is a great advantage. But unlike our times, now in 2012, an environment is now available in India.

We had Dave McClure as a mentor and there was no way we could have accessed him in India in 2006. But now Dave McClure’s fund is extremely active in India. They are looking at opportunities. So entrepreneurs in India now have the opportunity.

ProductNation: Before we let you go, you have to take this one. Name Top five hot products from India.

Amit Ranjan: Oh gosh. While a lot depends on how you define a product, but I would like to mention Zoho, InMobi, SlideShare. There are some smaller startups that are creating a global impact like Fusion Charts, Visual Website Optimizer.

ProductNation: Last question. What is next for Amit Ranjan on the professional front?

Amit Ranjan: I am part of LinkedIn. I continue to head the Delhi office of SlideShare. With the LinkedIn angle, we want to take SlideShare to the Next Level. That goal stays and I work as hard as before. Being part of LinkedIn, we have a better chance with access to resources and talent. So I am busy.

Product Nation

Amit, thank you for talking to ProductNation. Good luck to you and your team

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Microsoft Accelerator Research on Starts and Closures in Indian tech startups

We are planning to release research findings every month week as part of our startup support program at the Microsoft Accelerator in India. There are about 50 different topics that we are curious about and are consistently doing research to find out ways to help our accelerator companies perform market research, target early adopters and focus on getting more customer traction.

This series is part of our accelerator database on engagement with startups, investors, mentors & entrepreneurship. Last week we did a report on Smartphone usage in India.

This week our focus is on the rate of companies starting and closing in the technology product space. Over the last few years Microsoft has been tracking new companies as part of its Bizspark program. Besides this we have access to several databases from multiple sources which has allowed us to consolidate all these into a single system to track startup activity. While we currently track over 73 different elements including founders, starts, closures, funding, etc. our focus is on trying to find patterns that can give us more clues to remove the roadblocks that reduce entrepreneurial failure early in the system.

We track over 6200+ entities – which includes services companies with a “product” they are building and also many viable side-projects, where the founder is generating some traction or revenue and 3900+ companies that are solely focused on building products (includes SaaS, eCommerce, traditional software, consumer Internet, etc.) in India.

On average there are about 450+ starts annually over the last 3 years, which has grown dramatically thanks to eCommerce.

While Bangalore has the most number of technology product startups overall, at neary 40%, Delhi/NCR came a close second in 2011, only to return to normalcy in 2012.

In terms of closure, 26% of companies still close within a year of them starting (either the founders giving up and moving on, or the company going dormant).

The biggest issue for closure (given that nearly 80%+ of all companies are bootstrapped) is collecting money from customers who have committed to paying for their usage of the product.

While not being able to raise funds is really #1, that seems to be a generic reason enough and a motherhood-and-apple-pie situation.

Unlike the valley (anecdotal information alone) most failed entrepreneurs dont go on to start another company or join a startup, but instead go to work at a much larger company (over 60%). Most reasons given were because of loans to payoff or pressure from parents (surprisingly not from any others).

Our recommendations are for new entrepreneurs to have a “cushion” of nearly 18 months in funds in their personal capacity before they delve into a new venture as opposed to 6 months.

We also recommend asking new customers for an advance in payment as part of the Proof of Concept instead of payment after the fact to aid in managing cash-flow more effectively.

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Changing user behavior – Cardback

This time, we feature Cardback a Delhi based startup, focused on helping today’s retail consumers discover the best deals and offers available on their credit, debit, loyalty and prepaid cards across merchant establishments. Its first product, also by the same name, is a location-aware mobile app that is currently in public beta for Android and in an invite-only phase for the iPhone.

What inspired you to build such a product?
We ourselves have always been sensitive to saving as much as we can while spending. While faced with a peculiar challenge of figuring out which one of our cards is best suited to use at a particular place, we identified it as a business opportunity that could be addressed using modern day computational techniques and the power and ubiquity of smart phones. That was, essentially, the genesis of Cardback.

Who all make up the core team at Cardback?
Nikhil Wason and Nidhi Gurnani started Cardback in July 2012 after months of brainstorming on the fundamental challenge faced by today’s credit and debit cardholders. Engineers by profession as well as by passion, both Nikhil and Nidhi are technologists, but with a business sense. While Nikhil, a graduate of Columbia University, was previously working with Adobe, Nidhi contributed her bit to the Aricent Group for a while. The core team got expanded with Ankita Garg joining a couple of months later to handle marketing. Ankita, a social media expert, has in the past helped several start-ups acquire a considerable user base during their initial days.

Can you tell us a bit about your product roadmap?
We currently have an Android app, while the iPhone app is in private alpha testing. We made a conscious decision to focus our initial energies on Android, as India’s mobile user base is more Android-oriented. Since its beta launch in Nov 2012, we have analyzed enough user behavior on the Android app to make fundamental decisions on its user experience on other platforms. We plan to ship a public beta of our iPhone app in January 2013. Cardback for Windows Phone and Blackberry are currently under development.

One very important aspect of our future roadmap is to build a partnership with banks and other card issuers. Using our platform, they will be able to push their special deals and incentives to cardholders at the right place and at the right time. Meanwhile, they will be able to gather valuable analytics, which will help increase the repeat usage of cards issued by them.

What challenges have you faced in your journey so far?
The biggest challenge that we have to address is changing user behavior.  While many people today claim to be tech savvy and gadget comfortable, they’re still very averse to making changes to their credit and debit card usage habits. Even though they would be interested in discounts, they rarely remember they have several excellent entitlements by virtue of holding certain cards. With these cards, many discounts become their “birth right” or so to speak. Cardback provides them the tools, but those tools won’t help unless people make use of them.

As a mobile application, another major challenge that we have to face is discoverability. With millions of products out there on every mobile platform, it becomes very difficult to make users notice your app, even if it solves a genuine pain point.

Are you collaborating with other startups?
At Cardback, we do not believe in re-inventing the wheel. We realize that the challenge we are trying to address is so specialized and requires such clinical execution, that if there are specialists in the periphery zone who have proven solutions, we will happily bring them on-board.

We have recently partnered with dineout, which is India’s premiere restaurant booking service, to allow our users to make table reservations at their favorite restaurants through our application itself. Our application already helps users save money, now with this feature, they save time too. And they even get discounts with every table booking they make.

How would you rate yourself in terms of achieving the targets you set out to achieve so far and what are your targets for future?
Being engineers ourselves, we are very data driven in our approach towards everything. Setting targets and evaluating our performance is no different. We have defined metrics that we’re tracking ourselves against and so far we are very satisfied with our performance.

Qualitatively, we set out to achieve two things by the end of the year. First, technological proof of concept, and second, basic customer validation. We’re proud to say we’ve done very well on both those fronts and we will be starting 2013 with a brand new level of excitement due to these accomplishments.

For the near future, our target is rapid expansion of our user base and scaling our platform to support that rapid expansion. We will also be adding new and innovative features as we get our apps synced across all operating systems.

As a long term goal, we would be partnering with card issuers such as banks, as mentioned previously.

How do you cover the operational costs?
Cardback is currently being bootstrapped. Several investors have expressed a keen interest in what we’re doing and we are evaluating the right time (and the right investor) to infuse additional funds into Cardback’s mission.

Wishing GoodLuck to the Team!!

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How To Do Pricing For Enterprise Sales #PNMeetup

Pricing is a mix of art science. Most product startups have a hard time figuring out their revenue model (freemium or, paid only) and what they should charge. If you chose freemium, you have to be careful that cost of incremental customer is low and it will be great, if this customer also helps spread the word about you. On the other hand, if you choose paid, you run the risk of having minimal traction, especially if your sales cycle is long and complex.
In either of the business models, you need to have clarity on who your customer is, what they are really looking for, does it have a direct impact on creating additional revenue or, eliminate inefficiencies and what your competitors are charging and why. Is your sales cycle long or, short? In a product company, you expect to cover the cost from multiple customers and not just one. However, most businesses falter as they fail to take into account the cost related to acquiring paid customers and customer service.

All being said, do remember that for most companies, pricing is an evolution as your product is.

You will hear from our experts on how they went about pricing their products and what if any adjustments they made along the way based on their learning.

Speakers:
– Tushar Bhatia – (EmpXTrack) Saigun Technologies
– Varun Shoor – Kayako.com
– Prashant Singh – TheSignals

#PNMeetup is an initiative by ProductNation and is meant for Entrepreneurs, Product Startups, Product Managers in the NCR Region. Here you can share, learn and network with fellow Product Managers and also discuss new trends innovations, get feedback on prototypes and insights from experienced people in the industry.

The objective of #PNMeetup is to provide each attendee with practical skills and knowledge that they can put into practice tomorrow to improve the products they bring to market, enhance their companys success and further their own careers. Some of the people supporting this initiative are: Amit Ranjan(Slideshare), Arvind Jha(Movico Technologies), Jainendra Kumar(Pitney Bowes), Pawan Goyal(Adobe), Rajat Garg(SocialAppsHQ), R. P. Singh(Nucleus Software), Vivek Agarwal(Liqvid eLearning).

These meetups will be done on Third Saturdays of the month and will include an opportunity for professional networking. If you would like to volunteer and make a difference to the Product Eco-system in NCR, do send us a mail at volunteerpn.ispirt.in

Supporting Partners:
– Indian Product Management Association, Institue of Product Leadership, Delhi Startups, TLabs, The Hatch, Startup Saturday. Ignita

Registrations:
Limited seating and registrations is strictly for Product Startups and Product Managers. No onsite registrations will be allowed. Register Now to avoid disappointment. This is a closed event and If selected you will get the confirmation for the event.

Venue: 
Kunzum Travel Cafe: Address: T-49, GF, Hauz Khas Village, New Delhi, Delhi 110016

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The three stages of the buying mindset

The buyer had told you that they were in the market for exactly what you were selling, and the timing couldn’t be better. The pricing was right and your solution met all the buyer’s needs but lo and behold the sale did not happen. Has this ever happened to you?

If you are like me and many others, you have been in this situation before. Why does this happen? I had thought long and hard about it and developed some theories around it, and then about 10 years back my boss introduced me to a book called “Solution Selling” by Michael Bosworth. As I went through the book I realized that what Mr. Bosworth said made perfect sense and was completely consistent with my experience and hypothesis. We were losing deals in situations like the one described above because we were too late.

What Mr. Bosworth suggests is that there are essentially three phases a buyer goes through.

Latent Need – The need is either not defined or the buyer is resigned to the fact that no solution exists for her need. For example, it could be that buyer has collection of old 78 RPM records (remember those?) and has in the past tried to digitize them. The last time she looked for a solution it was prohibitively expensive to do. So she shelved the idea and the need to digitize became a latent need.
Pain – This is when a latent need becomes an active pain. In our example above, the need would become a pain if the buyer reads an article about a new inexpensive service that digitizes old records.
Evaluating Alternatives – This is the last stage. This is where the buyer is convinced that they have a pain and that a solution(s) exist for it. This is when they are in the market for alternatives.

To often, a smart seller has already taken the buyer through the stages of latent need and pain and painted a shared vision with the buyer to where they are “singing his tune”. When you come in at this stage you are at a disadvantage because you are playing a game that somebody else has defined the rules for.

The ideal situation, therefore is to think hard about what you have and help walk your buyer through all the three stages of their buying cycle. If you do it right, both the buyer and seller will have a shared vision of the end state. The shared vision will solve the buyer’s problem and result in a sale for the seller. A win-win situation for all.

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Will your Differentiation pass the D-Cubers Test?

In my previous blogs, I wrote about how differentiation is a must and even wrote about how Bob Wright and Raj Shetty spoke about the differentiation @ NPC-12.

Ok now comes the most critical issue of “yeah I understand differentiation but how do I do a valid differentiation rather than doing for the sake of doing”.  Let me give me an example to showcase the issue. I want to start a tooth paste company and I want to differentiate as the market today is very saturated. What is the differentiation or what the traditional marketing calls as the USP going to be? It cleans your teeth of course, real white, mouth freshening too and removes plaque, cavity etc. and all are taken over already (by your competitors). How about we provide a way to give you a feeling of chewing a bubble gum along with cleaning your teeth!! That’s a nice differentiation but the question is who wants it. Can’t they just chew a bubble gum to get that feeling? Are people asking for it? Or when you provide will they like it or prefer it?

So here comes the real problem of finding the right differentiation and this is what I suggest the RD2 (RDSquare) Test as a way of validating the same (Refer to Killer Differentiators by Jacky Tai and Wilson Chew)

R – Relevance

D – Desirable

D – Defensible

The most important thing is, will your differentiator be relevant (R) to your customers (or a segment of customers). One needs to answer this before appreciating the value of being different. The bubble-gum effect might not be so relevant but assume you come up with Sugar Free tooth paste and it is relevant to your customer segment which is the diabetic crowd and also those who are health watchers.

Once we know there is good relevance to your chosen customer segment that you are attacking, time to see how desirable (D) the difference is. Difference is great, relevant but should be desirable too (else they may not buy your product for that differentiation). Going back to the same sugar free tooth paste, I say that it is desirable because it will help control sugar level in the diabetic patient and by not using they are not only risking their health but also the cost of the treatment. Yes it is very desirable. On the other hand look at this difference which is relevant but may not be desirable. Let’s pick the same toothpaste example where in it makes bubbles like ghost or evil characters – good differentiation and relevant too (for kids) but not desirable as no parent (or say most) will buy that (not Disney characters, as that will be a different story 🙂 ).

Then comes the toughest one in my books, how defensible (D) is your differentiator. The market today is so hyper competitive that you find an attribute to differentiate and your competitors find it very relevant and desirable for their customer segment, they will copy the same in no time. Bigger organizations have much bigger marketing muscle and budget, and they will get to all of the market much faster than you think you can. Today in this hyper-connected and in the hyper-competition world, your competitors are watching you like hawks very closely than you think. Yes there will be an advantage of early mover but again depends on much marketing muscle you have to inform the market that you are the early mover. Also early mover advantage does not last long. Hence it comes back to the same question on how defensible is your differentiator is. Google’s page ranking or the original formula of Coke or may be the market share or the distribution arm of HUL has in India etc. that you have but others don’t have and cannot be easily copied – can be a measure of how defensible is your differentiation is. Coming back to our toothpaste example, assume for a minute that the formula that makes tooth paste sugar free is patented or something only you know and others cannot replicate easily, becomes very defensible now.

Along with this RDSquare test, I also like to introduce another measuring attribute called the “Size of the market” (S) and I feel is also really critical. Assume you have a great differentiation, very relevant to your segment of customers and also very desirable but the size of the segmented market you have chosen is very small. The whole idea of entering the market with this product becomes unviable and not worth investing or creating a product for that market. Let’s consider the same example of sugar free tooth paste and in a country where there is less than 1% population of diabetics. The whole idea of selling that product becomes unviable as the market is very small and will never be profitable or scalable either.

Together I call this the D3RS test or better “d-cubers test” of differentiation. Also I wish there was a way we can measure (say on a scale of 1 to 10) all these attributes D,D,D,R & S and a cumulative measure which says how strong the differentiation is.

So I guess make a list of all attributes of your product differentiation and see which one can pass the d-cubers test 🙂