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Product Conclave: Why I Love It

I really loved being there because:

  1. You meet and get to know some really cool people (Sharad, Avinash, Mukund, MR were just a few cool people I met at these events first). There is a bigger list but this will give you some idea of what I am talking about)
  2. The quality of conversations is one of the best in the industry. I have been to several conferences in US and India. This one beats them all.
  3. You get to hear some outstanding plenary sessions (Guy Kawasaki, Vinod Khosla in the past Neil Patel this year)
  4. There is a strong sense of community and a great feeling that you are among some of the smartest entrepreneurs in the country.
  5. It is a place where I love to experiment. The Unconference sessions were one such experiment. I really enjoyed them. I was thrilled to the core when some people showed up in all 4 of them. I was thrilled even more when I heard a few comment  ”we come here because we can discuss our problems”.
  6. If you volunteer for the event (hint, hint) you get to rub shoulders with some of the most dedicated and successful people who are interested in growing the product eco-system. And you get to wear a cool T-shirt that says that “I Put This Together”.
  7. Every one seems so approachable and helpful. This is something I heard over and over again from many of the participants.

I can make a bigger  list, but you get the drift.

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5 speaker quotes @NPC12 & what they mean

5 phrases I heard and overheard at NPC12 and what they mean. I’m open to a thrash-out on this.

1. “Initially I was skeptical about coming to NPC. Now I want to come here every year.”

– First time at NPC + US based speaker with 100% audience feedback. 

Achievers in America are looking towards India. There’s a reason.

The PULSE that ignited so many industries in the 90s with the sudden wave of IT based services has had no follow up. Companies were able to generate value from the cost arbitrage. Labour was (is) cheap and American companies found (find) Indians to be extremely high ROI.

Until now.

The ITES model has not been able to add the same value as earlier. The pipes are drying out. Software demand has moved away from custom services to problem-solving-price-effective-free-support software.

Almost no one wants to pay for software that doesn’t save lives or makes money.

The ITES ecosystem is attracting the lowest ranks of talent. The good and smart ones that remain are breaking out and building products. Or at least in deep contemplation. Much expected – as a nation of the smartest chimps on earth – we’ve been solving the world’s software problems for over 2 decades now. It’s time we build products. And that’s what we are doing. And these speakers now want to come here every year because its helping them.

Watch this space as I share a video about MR asking Ram Shriram a few questions – one of which is a very interesting angle on why bandwidth is a problem solver.

2. “They (Indian s/w products) are looking inwards to solve the problem. India’s HUGE as a market”

– American born and based speaker.

The Indian SMB industry is upwards of $40Bn worth. But adoption is where the challenges are. If I get your payroll problem solved for INR 1.00 per employee per day – would you still worry about hooking yourself up to this system? At its least – you’ll give my system a shot won’t you?

The cost arbitrage that existed earlier through the service model is now visible through the product model. Companies are not just building the problem solution pairs. But they are creating disruption and then asking for very little money in exchange for it.

And they can do it cause they’re based in India. It costs virtually nothing to setup and build a product from India. Selling it globally may seem lucrative – but not everyone intends to go global immediately. Don’t need to.

Flipkart.

3. “Failing is no longer a social taboo” – everyone.

As a social fabric – we Indians have had this problem for a long time. The class topper is celebrated. She gets the biggest chocolate – both in school and at home. The second in class gets a smaller chocolate.

The one who was failing in Math all along but passed this year without any cheating – is considered a failure.

Not anymore. Finding your own battles and winning them is more important than winning battles others have set for you.

Its the pursuit to excellence that’s taken precedence now. Companies and founders are realizing their shortcomings. And are working to address them quickly. And that signifies a major shift in thinking.

Accepting the possibility of failure makes it easier to accept risk. And risk precedes rewards. So as the Indian smartie moves away from the cushy air conditioned cabins to the street side hustle – the ecosystem around him will prevent him from being ridiculed for his failures.

Every little success is being celebrated here.

4. “Indian products still don’t understand their TG perfectly” – Entrepreneur with thorough experience with software products in the valley.

This one is a serious flaw. Not understanding the target group (TG) is a recipe for disaster. And of all the entrepreneurs I met – finding the TG was in many ways the biggest challenge.

This is because what works and what doesn’t needs a qualitative feedback. This means you tell someone what you think they’re doing wrong. And then superimpose that opinion with what can be done right. Perspective is what the NPC community now offers through the Open source model.

See this video to wrap your head around this ‘open-source’ model. Sharad’s articulate mind encapsulates the theory. If you were at NPC – you would have seen it in action. You’re reading this on ProductNation ! 🙂

5. “Stop wasting time on the Blogosphere” – Ex Facebook, ex AOL, investor who speaks harsh truths.

Though in many ways this is important – it also signifies the importance of content and content marketing. I missed cornering Naren Gupta on why he feels marketing talent is low in India and how we can improve it. But to cut a long story short – the noise on the blogosphere is preventing the Indian product owner from creating, marketing, measuring the effectiveness of content and marketing. Independently and as a whole.

Investors, angels, and startups all seem to agree that products with initial traction need to increase the effectiveness of content and its marketing. Reading techcrunch is great to sound smart – but its got no relevance to the Indian ecosystem and how technology products can be built and grown here.

Conferences like the Nasscom Product Conclave are by design meant to share and exchange ideas. It takes a little time for a new comer to get acquainted. But my first time experience volunteering with this community taught me so much. The software product ecosystem is brimming with energy and confidence.

Yes on many fronts we Indians are at rock bottom. But from here,  the only place you can go is up.

If you’re on the boat – grab an oar and start paddling. We gotta take this ship to the other side. Wish you all a very happy good-wins-over-evil festival of lights – Diwali.

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Day 2 of NPC: Attempting to Steer in the Right Direction

As NASSCOM Product Conclave 2012 drew to a close, Sharad Sharma reiterated that product technology will eliminate poverty in India. The social consciousness and import of this statement, usually reemphasized as electoral slogans of gharibi hatao by politicians, points to envisioning a future in which the role of product technology encompasses not only growth of global companies, impacting the world (changing the world!), in India but also its increasingly central role in the nation’s development. M. Rangasami is the visible face of NPC, curating sessions with childlike enthusiasm. He wants to pay back his home country, from which he grew up for the first 20 years of life, something substantial and impactful. And he sees product technology as one means, as it is likely to explode in the coming years. The Valley has about 30% plus of Indian cofounders in startups and innumerable successful product executives and entrepreneurs. If they are inspired by MR to pay back to the nation, imagine its impact. In a way, NASSCOM Product Conclave brings some of them into the sessions to inspire the product entrepreneurs in India.

India—what is happening really?
As predictions are glorious of the future, what is happening on ground in India? What prompts envisioning a game-changing future for product tech? Maybe success of companies like InMobi. Naveen Tiwari, InMobi founder, was generous with his time to explain how InMobi succeeded and was seen in the hallways talking to people wanting to strike a conversation. In the breakfast session, he explained the InMobi way of global growth and scale. InMobi did not go after developed markets like US and Europe to start with. They identified huge white spaces in markets like Southeast Asia and Africa where customer needs were identified by online sales first. Then one of the founders would typically fly to that country to understand the market. This is not an easy task and over time, InMobi would hire a local person to run its operations. And thinking big and not content with growth, the InMobi team constantly brainstorms on how to usher in say 10x growth. Any big achievement starts with thinking big and following it up with risky initiatives. And you should stay undaunted by failure and missteps. There was a mention by Niel Patel, founder of QuickSprouts in his keynote in the evening, that product ventures don’t succeed at first iteration. They turn successful at third iteration. And product ventures cannot hit scale on a template model like services. In addressing the press, to showcase apps that promise to be game changers, Sharad Sharma said, “TCS showed the way and everyone followed it [in services]. But in products, it cannot be done.” Each story is different and each endeavour unique. Naveen Tiwari and InMobi can inspire product entrepreneurs to think of huge possibilities if one goes cracking. And identifying the sweet spot to achieve that takes multiple iterations. Deep Nishar, the star product manager at LinkedIn, earlier in the keynote, pointed out that no first iteration was successful. For example, PayPal started initially to enable payments on handheld devices and then changed to Internet payments. YouTube started as a video dating site and became a social video site later. Some have vanished on the way too, due to various reasons.

Where is the market?
Market evolution and customer adoption are crucial to succeeding in a product venture. Deep Kalra’s story is well known. When Internet was still in nascent stages, he started a web-based travel site. Sensing that opportunity exists outside India, he first served NRIs travelling to India. It took close to five years to find that customers will go to Internet to book tickets in India. Effectively, MakeMyTrip took off in India only in 2005. Indian product technology skill sets are not in question. But is the market ready for your offering? That is another question to keep in mind. Apps are exploding. Child prodigies are pouncing on to that space. But where will apps lead India into? Will it stay a diverse apps market with thousands of apps or will something like a global rage app (say Angry Birds) come out of India?

The kind of pertinent questions that are asked at this stage is how to move to the next stage. A vast number of sessions addressed challenging questions such as pitching right to the investor, a novel reverse pitch for investors to find suitable entrepreneurs, how to take mobile apps global, hiring the sales people, and metrics-driven marketing. When the question to Deep Nishar was put forth on what to focus upon to build a business in products, he pointed out to disruptions in enterprise software and building over it. His take was that enterprise products could be tested in India and taken to the rest of the world. The sense one could get out of these types of propositions and expert speak is that the market is in a flux. Enormous product tech activity is happening. But for some products, the market has to mature (adopting Indian products in enterprise) or be created for others (for example, SMBs). Deep Nishar pointed out the new smart phone like iPhone and Galaxy as not overnight innovations. A combination of earlier developments only results in a new innovation. Palm top, touch screen, iPod all combine in a new visual and spatial thinking to result in an iPhone. Can you think of a combination of such innovations to create something new and create a new market for those products?

Building products for India or the world?
A common prescription of experts like Amar Goel and Deep Nishar is that you stay close to the customer for whom you are developing the product. There is another school that thinks customer care shouldn’t be needed as the product should be simple and self-explanatory for users anywhere in the world. Deep Nishar laid seven components of a product to create a product bliss. Simplicity is one overarching principle. He opines that too many choices would make the product unattractive. Focus on select features and build on them. He showcased several LinkedIn features to validate his statement. For example, when LinkedIn was on mobile, the team did not adapt Web into mobile. They sought to understand what LinkedIn would look like on a mobile and created a new look. And sensing that customers log on to mobile devices such as iPad and smart phones early in the morning or late at night, news was added to mobile LinkedIn. Moreover, a feature shows the day’s appointments too.

Given that there is a possibility of Cloud to build a product and sell it all over the world, what kind of products could be developed without needing customer in proximity is an innovation that could be thought of. And most Indian product companies now have a global market. But scale is the question.

More questions than answers
By showcasing successes outside India and bringing in product developers like Tarkan Maner of Dell Wyse who has sold his company to Dell for a billion dollars, there is an endeavour to instil right thinking and point to pertinent directions. And by engaging several people in the ecosystem to understand their experiences of what worked and what hasn’t provides a clarity picture for the product entrepreneurs. At this moment, though, there seems to be more questions asked than answers given. The important need of the moment is asking the right questions. So it is the hope that answers will evolve and such answers would lead to a product tech revolution, as in MR’s prediction, or it would even answer India’s societal concerns of eliminating poverty, in Sharad Sharma’s extrapolation.

Both predictions are not imaginary but understood from the success of products and its greatest impact in the United States. The wealth that Bill Gates created is being channelled into health care concerns of the world and when iPhone 5 was released, there was a report that its sales across the world would contribute a significant percent to US GDP. Such developments set the context for India to take the cue and look ahead.

Contributed Venkatesh Krishnamoorthy, Product Tech Ecosystem Enthusiast

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Product LaunchPAD: Putting the spotlight on 9 quality tech products

On day two of the NASSCOM Product Conclave, nine ‘Product LaunchPAD’ companies were announced. These companies were recognized for their high-quality, emerging products.  The gathering, which took place in the ‘Agenda’ hall at the Vivanta by Taj, comprised representatives of the selected companies, industry veterans, the co-hosts of the event (Sharad Sharma and MR Rangaswami) as well as members of the online and offline media communities.

In a time when the product ecosystem in the country is gaining momentum, it’s important to recognize the efforts of companies like these who are focussed on delivering high-quality technology products and putting India on the product map of the world. As Sharad Sharma pointed out while addressing media at the Product LaunchPAD event, the considerable phase of acceleration in the Indian product space demarcates the ‘tigers in the ecosystem’ — but why is it so important for the product ecosystem to grow?

Let’s get some context.

There are two paths that lie in front of India today: either it can go the way the UK went — where globalization hollowed out the the SMB sector — or it can go the way Germany went — where it’s vibrant and thriving SMB industry shaped the development of the country. So what role does the Indian product story have in this situation? Well, the answer to how the Indian SMB story shapes up depends largely on what’s happening in the Indian SMB ecosystem today. And this means that Indian product companies have to embrace new trends like non-traditional business models and cloud-based technology which enable the availability of software at every available price point. Sharad Sharma highlighted the importance of this last point — he drew a parallel to the revolutionary Nokia phone that was priced Rs.2000, which completely changed the way the aam Indian communicated. This is exactly whats happening in the software world today. More often than not, software is the carrier of best practices in new environments, and this is what makes India uniquely poised to start a new journey of transformation.  And this transformation depends largely on the ability of Indian SMBs to re-invent themselves around these new technologies.

Luckily for India, it’s economic structure is quite similar to the German economy. The data tells a strong story : 26% of India’s GDP comes from the SMB sector, which is growing at a much faster pace than the large businesses sector. For the overall Indian economy to treble, this Indian SMB sector has to not just double but treble — because the burden of the growth of the Indian economic sector is dependent on the growth of the SMB sector, which needs technology to help re-invent itself.

The Product LaunchPAD initiative provides a platform for these companies to showcase their products, which have been in the market for at east a few months.

This year, the judges received 54 entries and shortlisted nine companies after much deliberation. Reflecting the current trends in the industry, many of these companies showcased products and concepts revolving around the cloud, localization and location services, mobility, web applications, social media and script-less test automation.

The nine Product LaunchPAD companies selected for 2012 are:

Qualitia Software Pvt. Ltd (Pune): Qualitia is an easy-to-use yet powerful test automation B2B platform which supports leading test automation tools like HP-QTP and IBM- RFT, including open source solutions like Selenium / Webdriver. This is a script-less test automation platform that transforms the way existing QA teams work in organizations. It empower existing QA teams and automated testing teams.

InSync Tech-Fin Solutions Limited (Kolkata): InSync’s product SBOeConnect is a simple, integrated and flexible solution aimed at Magento (an eBay e-commerce platform)  merchants. The product enables fully automatic and bi-directional data synchronization between the SAP Business One ERP system and the Magento e-commerce platform.

The product is already being used by 80+ Magento merchants, as it fulfills a need that e-commerce businesses have which is a need for an integrated ERP system. The company recently launched a Windows 8 application.

Magnasoft Consulting India Pvt. Ltd (Bangalore): Magnasoft focuses on the geospatial industry, specifically on three segments: content (maps), enterprise (large software for corps) and consumer (child safety). Their product NorthStar caters to the third segment, as the company identified a sweet-spot in the area of child-safety in the K-12 ages. The product used Amazon’s cloud platform to offer a subscription based model to parents who pay Rs.50 a month to receive SMSs that tell them when exactly the school bus their child is on will reach the designated bus-stop. The system works with an accuracy of two minutes and focuses on improving the safety and accountability of school bus systems using the RFID system.

Ciafo (Bangalore): Ciafo’s product Frrole sees itself going beyond mainstream media to revolutionize the news industry. It relies on people enabling news to move faster, and champions the thought of news not being controlled by one single entity. With increased direct sharing and historically low trust levels in mainstream media, Frrole presents a revolutionary new alternative for users to discover news about and around them. By promoting citizen journalism, it also hopes to create a society with more symmetrical distribution of news and opinions.

Silver Stripe Software Pvt. Ltd (Chennai): Tour My App is Silver Stripe Software’s new product which aims to increase user engagement and trial conversion in self-serve web apps. When people sign up with web apps online, its important that they know how to use the app by themselves otherwise they lose interest. The product solves the “what should I do next?” pain point. It lets web application developers create guided tours inside their application on the Tour My App site.

Greytip Software Pvt. Ltd. (Bangalore): GreyTip’s product Greytip Online is a cloud based HR and payroll software (SaaS) that is suitable for SME companies who have between ten and 250 employees. It simplifies and automates most payroll and employee data management activities, including statutory calculation and reporting. With this product, the company takes automation to smaller companies in order to make them competitive, but uses Indian prices. It currently has a user base of 95,000 employees.

Pipal Tech Ventures (Bangalore): Pipal Tech’s application is B2C free application that  aims at bringing Google like search capabilities for offline retailers. DelightCircle is the company’s customer engagement and location based marketing platform. The DelightCircle Smartphone app allows consumers to discover places to shop and eat based on their location and interests, and get rewarded for this. There’s also a DelightCircle SMS based app and a DelightCircle website that offer the same capabilities.

SignEasy: SignEasy is an iPhone, iPad and Android application that offers a a simple and quick way to sign and return documents securely from a device. It allows for multiple signers to accelerate professional transactions and close deals from virtually anywhere. The app also allows for text and image insertions and it can be linked to Box, Dropbox and Evernote for retrieval and archiving of documents. It supports several document and image formats and also offers the ability to set a personal passcode to prevent unauthorized access to signatures and files.

 Selasdia (sales aid spelt backwards) is Aiaioo Labs’ product  which is an intelligent sales assistant for brands. It is essentially a CRM system that has access to customer information, which it uses to listen to all that customers are saying on blogs and  other areas online, and capture this information. It tracks blogs, understands the posts and lets brands know when it is relevant to them and the products they are selling. It tells brands what their customers’ interests are, helps them build relationships and helps them find people they should be talking to.

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First Day of NPC 2012 a Roller Coaster between Hope and Reality

A broad sweep of the first day of the NASSCOM Product Conclave gives rise to emotions of a day that rose in energy, stayed sober at the reality picture,
and then gave a reason for cheer as the day drew to a close.

On the shore of Big Blue ocean breakfast session opened up the world of possibilities for Indian product technology. IBM-mers Peter Coldicott (Chief Product Architect), Robert High (IBM Fellow in IBM Watson), and Daniel Yellin (Enterprise Mobility Chief Engineer) perhaps gave a thunderous opening. What products can do and how it can envelope the whole world in its embrace was shown by these three IBMmers. While Robert High showed his project of deciphering human language to understand behaviour to solve people’s problems, using huge chunks of articles data to arrive at solutions for health problems using NLM and cognitive science techniques, Peter Coldicott took “Smart” control of the cities, traffic, commerce, and manufacturing to usher in a Smarter Planet. These two endeavours redefine the role of technology in solving the outstanding problems of humanity and governments. For example, Smarter Traffic will help you negotiate the city traffic by understanding how traffic is regulated and data on what’s real on the road. Daniel Yellin’s mobility solutions through apps would reconfigure enterprise functioning. While IBM is engaged with the whole planet (as it seems to be), Indian product entrepreneurs are just sensing the opportunity on the horizon.

Sharad Sharma’s passionate opening in calling product entrepreneurs transformers of the society gave a sense of purpose beyond the lure of money that gets one to business. His even bolder prediction of product software eliminating poverty gave rise to cheer. “The product entrepreneurs will rule” proposition put product technology on a pedestal. NASSCOM President Som Mittal’s emphasis on the enabling role of NASSCOM by its various initiatives such as it entering into an MOU with SIDBI for risk capital funding of SMEs promised hope. M. Rangsami’s Westward view (or call it Silicon Valley view) of Indian product landscape becoming affordable for millions gave it a mainstream leaning, given that still product entrepreneurship languishes for lack of attention save a few niche communities and select media coverage.

This glorified image was enhanced by Naveen Tiwari’s three mantras of building a billion dollar company. InMobi’s commanding success ranking next only to Google in mobile advertising is a reason for celebration of Indian product entrepreneurship. His trillion ads making $2 billion business impact was transporting us to a dizzy world of big numbers. And the global reach of InMobi in 165 countries employing people of 28 nationalities, less than half of them Indian, gave it a healthy gloss. “We take pride that this company is out of India,” said Naveen, taking with him the aspirations of more than 1200 plus delegates, a major chunk of them product entrepreneurs, to a dizzying high.

The Reality
Soon the hopes that rose high with the keynotes, especially the exuberant one by Tim Paries of Yahoo! on design, surrendered to the reality of so much work left to be done to reach where IBM is today probably taking control of the planet through technology. Product business for Indian SMB market is not VC-fundable, said Pari Natarajan of Zinnov backed by data. The potential user base dramatically shrinks when reality calculations are added. That comes to something like 2000 users in the leather SMB microcluster, for example. Pivoting is not an easy task given various factors such as motivation of employees and financial health of a company. It is a tough and hard decision that product entrepreneurs need to make. “Pivoting is like changing a punctured tyre in a moving vehicle,” said Ashish Kashyap of Ibibo.com, reflecting the real challenges in changing directions of a company.

The failure unconference session by Dorai Thodla attracted a sizeable number of participants willing to pour out. If you started counting failures of product startups, maybe that would make you feel depressed. The rate is high but that’s changing. Product entrepreneurs are evolving to treat failure as a hiccup and move ahead by pivoting or reinventing. The ecosystem is playing a stellar role in holding the entrepeneur’s hope. The sense of issues debated at the unconference as cofounder leaving, developing product before testing the market, and taking care of finance well ahead showed the maturity level of product entrepreneurs in understanding the rough and tumble of this journey. In a typical session like this, a few would have huddled together to exchange views and that’s what Dorai expected. But the huge turnout was a surprise to him but hidden in that was the aspiration of the product entrepreneur to learn from failures that characterizes the entrepreneurial journey.

Raghav Sood, a 15-year-old 10th grader, is the hope of the future. Along with him Thrisha, a 11-year-old, ruled the stage as Archana Rai, the Economic Times journalist, engaged them in a conversation, another novelty to this year’s program. Raghav has now uploaded 8 apps on the Android platform, has authored a book about augmented reality in Android (another book signed up for user interface), and is founder of Appoholics, Inc. What Raghav has done could be dismissed as a genius among a million but if you watched the media closely, reports of teens developing apps are finding a noticeable mention. Some come on the surface and that’s what we think. This holds immense hope for the future as product technology will grow to occupy a prominent position in the Indian technology space in the time frame of 15 years that Sharad Sharma predicted. Together with an army of young entrepreneurs who would have tasted success with app development in their teens, there is a possibility for a robust growth of the Indian product space. Girls like Thrisha, who is developing an app, also lead to your thinking of women playing a greater role in the future. Women delegates were seen in good numbers and that should be an indication of the interest of women in this space.

Founder to CEO
Naeem Zafar gave a realistic account of the role of CEO in his engrossing presentation with a humour embellishment on how founders should be prepared to become CEOs. This transition is perhaps the difficult phase for a founder of an enterprise. But beyond a scale, the founder should make way for an executive better equipped with skills to take the company forward. In this discussion, Prof. Zafar dwelt upon the challenges of a CEO and the focus.

In my view, save the sessions where I did not have an opportunity to participate, the product space has become less inhibiting to test, more
supportive to grow, and, given the holistic dimension of ushering in a better world that IBM has shown the way, it is the future for the world of
depleting resources.

Contributed by Venkatesh Krishnamoorthy, Product Ecosystem Enthusiast

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NASSCOM Product Conclave 2012 Reflects the Arrival of a Vibrant Product Ecosystem in India

The kind of conversations that you heard around product companies are changing. From an ambitious “billion dollar companies” born out of India (the overarching goal of NASSCOM Product Conclave last year), the focus is shifting to the bold prediction of product software’s robust growth, in the coming decade and half, eliminating poverty. In his opening remarks, Sharad Sharma, NASSCOM Product Chair (who I hear across the board is an inspiration to the whole community of product guys) called product entrepreneurs by labels as aggressive as “arms merchants” and “disruptors.” He went on to make a bold prediction: “product industry will lift India out of poverty.” He sought to portray Cloud as instrumental in product space becoming an affordable, productive, and collaborative space that would transform public health centres and schools in India.

Reflecting the evolution of NPC, Som Mittal, President of NASSCOM, said that NPC is a great platform to compete and collaborate. He also revealed that NASSCOM is entering into an MoU with SIDBI to provide risk capital to small companies, which would include IP-led product companies. (SIDBI was provided a fund of Rs. 500 crores in the Union budget for investing in SMBs.) He saw angels, investors, and incubators becoming active in the product ecosystem. Mr. Mittal’s statement that CIOs were open to buying from startups should give product entrepreneurs a sweet ring in the ear.
M.R. Rangasami, co-host of NPC 2012, saw three phases of evolution of the product industry in India: mimicking US to get funding initially, growth of enterprise software in the next decade, followed mobile and Cloud computing causing a paradigm shift in this decade. He was optimistic that software products offered at low price points offered by product entrepreneurs (leveraging the Cloud) will be consumed by thousands of customers.
Naveen Tiwari’s Leap of Faith

In a sort of answer to the overarching question of a billion dollar business emerging from India (the same time around last year when Flipkart was rumoured to have obtained a billion dollar valuation), InMobi, a mobile advertising ecosystem player, has emerged as perhaps the biggest company to grow out of India in the last 5 years. Naveen Tiwari’s keynote should be remembered for something alien to product entrepreneurs in India: talking numbers that are in the million and billion range—a trillion ads providing $2 billion worth of economic transactions, reaching 80 million people across 165 countries. The mercurial growth of InMobi has been made possible by the “Think Big” approach of the team and not being complacent with the present status. The company is devising methods to grow five to ten times in the 5 years from now. Naveen Tiwari said that massive scale happens with huge risks and the InMobi team was willing to bet on it. Aiming big, going global, and hiring the best are the three mantras Naveen Tiwari proposed to build a similar company in India.

Ram Shriram’s Bet on Mobile and Tim Parsey’s REM
The man with the Midas touch could not touch down at Bangalore as personal commitment stayed him put in the United States. Ram Shriram of Sherpalo Ventures who delivered the keynote on video sought to paint a glorious future for mobile phone-based innovations going by the sheer number of them. (An exclusive coverage will be done on his address.)

As M. Rangsami announced the TED-like speech of Tim Parsey of Yahoo!, who has changed seven domains and as many companies, it brought a fresh whiff of outside air. Instead of thinking inside, this change of thinking by organizers to bring in someone with a different perspective seemed to have carried well. Tim Parsey gave an absorbing, exuberant keynote on design being important for products. Using the bicycle as an example of his REM framework, he translated the evolution of bicycle to products within the REM framework. Rational value, Emotional, and Meaningful are important components of the design, in Tim Parsey’s philosophy. A rational value in terms of performance and new capabilities, designing for feeling, classic minimalist, and ultraminimalist (appealing emotionally) styles, and being meaningful (aligning to values and evoking personal memories) make a product appealing to the customer. The design principles and design culture should be enticing for the employees as well as end customers for whom the product is aimed at, he emphasized.

So many of them, which one to go?—Indian SMB market too small
End of keynotes opened up to six parallel sessions and thankfully one was cancelled. The sheer excitement of peeping into several sessions would have satiated the delegate but wouldn’t have had a carry on their learning. Color codes in the Agenda clearly showed the prospective audience base for the sessions. If I would have made a point of covering them all, I would have left the readers disappointed with piecemeal quotes that wouldn’t serve purpose. I stayed on with one session per slot. In a curiosity to understand the Indian market, I walked in with a lot of hope of three wise men telling us how Indian market so big as an ocean could be tamed with a magic wand. In the end, despite “doom and gloom” sought to be avoided, Indian market despite millions of potential customers turns to be less attractive for a product entrepreneur if segments are suitably sliced. Pari Natarajan of Zinnov showed the microcluster of leather SMEs finally boiling down to 2000 users. Terming product business in India for SMBs non-VC fundable (implying lack of scale), Pari however said e-commerce is a robust segment. Naru Narayanan, investor, mentor, and former executive selling retail products across India, cautioned the lure of big numbers. He sought to convey that any big number showcased should be treated with caution and provided his guestimate method of arriving at a rational figure. Vijay Anand put the conversation in perspective by bringing down the glorious 900 million mobile users to an active 300 million (multiple SIMs being the discounting factor). Despite the promise of the billion plus, Indian market is yet to become technophilic. Technology touches a niche and not yet mainstream.

This led me to a conversation with Kishore Mandyam of PK4 Software, who led a panel on AWSME Survey, the Nielsen survey commissioned by NASSCOM to look into the SMB market in India. This is an awareness survey by NASSCOM to understand what ails the SMBs in terms of buying software. In over a 1000 SMBs surveyed, it was known that only 30% of SMB owners were approached by a software provider and for example in Kochi, 86% of SMBs were not approached. Out of them, only 9% know the term Cloud computing. To make SMBs adopt technology massively, NASSCOM mandated this survey to drive its Software Laga Do Yaar! Mission. The survey will be used to further enhance the market penetration of software by understanding pain points, influencers, and decision makers by a follow-up engagement perhaps by using case studies to influence buying decisions.

Pivoting is painful is what I got to understand in the panel discussion on pivoting. Naveen Tiwari, Ashish Kashyap of Ibibo, Rajat Agarwalla of RJ Softwares were engaged in a panel led by Shruthi Chella of Groupon. Instituting pivot as part of culture is next to impossible. Pivoting in a small company is easier whereas in a big company, it is first tested within a small group before massive adoption. Customer needs, market opportunities, and competitive advantage drive pivoting. Ashish called pivoting as “changing punctured tyre of a car in motion.”

As the afternoon set in and more sessions awaited, the delegates swarmed the lunch area exchanging contact details and engaged in conversations.

Contributed by K. Venkatesh, VirtualPaper for YourStory.in

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Building a great product takes time and happens over a number of years…

Getting patented has immense aspirational value for product developers, but it is a long drawn process and takes normally anything between 5-8 years. Our story this time is about how a bunch of very intelligent individuals, who got together to build a product and have it patented within two years.  If it is aspirational to have a patent against one’s name, it is certainly inspirational, the time frame in which it was achieved.

We got talking to Anand, who is based out of Bangalore, and was only 15-days old at Vigyanlabs  handling the marketing activities there. The passion with which he spoke, belied his short stint and seemed as if he had spent his entire lifetime in the organisation. Shortly thereafter, we were joined by Srini & Vatsa, the founders of Vigyanlabs. Hugely experienced, cumulatively they both have 50 + years (Vatsa 30 + & Srini more than 20) of building products and software architecture in very large organisations like HP, IBM & Hughes Network Systems.  Both had held senior positions in HP, where Vatsa was the Chief architect, and with Srini later, went on to hold Senior Technical Positons at Dell-Perot, just before starting Vigyanlabs. Vatsa had also worked in Processor Systems India, where he did some very innovative and cutting-edge work. These would prove to be building blocks, someday. A very potent combination indeed, which helped file 9 Patents. Slowly but surely the spirit of building an Indian product was taking shape.

Early days:

After  calling it quits with their present employers, the duo spent two weeks in just defining Vision & Mission of the company that they would build, and establishing short-term & long-term goals. This brainstorming session helped them in creating the DNA : It was going to be an innovative Science & Technology Organisation; it would focus on green technology and social responsibility to be a key driver. All this would be achieved by harnessing the power of teamwork. The customer and his needs would be primary to all business concerns. A deep-dive helped identify the three major problems that the world was facing: Food, Environment & Energy. The seeds were sown – it would be a Science & Technology company where IT would play a vital role.

Vigyanlabs would primarily focus on : Consulting, Architecture & Design and aim to solve problems related to food, environment & energy.   The name itself was very Indian and spoke of the future, The “Science” of it, being right here. Vigyan.

Ideation:

After much study and prior experience, the team soon identified a “hole” in the market and a plausible approach to address the same. Efficient power management was still not very popular in India. The existing solutions were not upto the mark and this was evident, the way laptops consumed power. The battery would get heated and run out sooner than desired, putting user at a disadvantage. The higher income group consumed a lot of power through a freakish number of gadgets and electronic devices. The wastage was huge and put immense pressure on the environment as a whole.  This was early 2009, and out of an Incubation Centre in Mysore, was born the idea which took shape and one day be the product IPMPlus.

The concept that was used to build this product had widespread usage and would be extended to other industries as well. In the US markets, patents were filed for something similar, but not so India. It was built around power consumption and its optimization in laptops – all this without causing any obstruction in the normal flow of work.  Intelligent Power Management Plus was about maintaining user experience.   

The Passion:

For Srini and Vatsa, it was always about building an Indian product which aimed at fulfilling the vision and mission of the company. They found obvious role models in the likes of Ratan Tata and Sir M. Visvesvaraya, who is also a Bharat Ratna awardee – the doyens of innovative thinking in this country.  

Wow Moments:

The Beta version itself helped a customer save 40% on energy cost and the need to come out with a marketable version was even more palpable. Within two years of filing for patents, the founders  got it done, a record of some sorts, which normally takes anything upto 5 years or even more.

Marketing Outreach & Strategy:

The stretch has been to create a global footprint and get the product onto the AppStores so it can be used with Android, Apple and Windows applications. The other initiative, is integrating with device OEMs and capture a major chunk of the market.  On the Enterprise segment, tablets and servers opened a whole new world of opportunity. Just to give an example of how big the problem really is, the amount of power consumption in large organisations is enough to even run a small town, cited in a recent NYT article. Large businesses have 50 – 100 data centres and do not have many tools which harness power optimisation.

Key Learning:

Building a great product takes time and happens over a number of years. The gestation period is long and during this time patience and sustainability is what really matters. Unlike the Valley, the market in India is not so matured and there is an initial resistance to try out Indian products. Somehow product developers should aim to break that.  Finally good products come through good people – who are technically sound, who you can trust and who have the business acumen too.

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Commitment delivery percentage – an indicator of future success of startups?

Here’s an interesting new term for entrepreneurs to be aware of – Commitment delivery percentage. I dont know for sure but I think in a year from now, most startups will start to follow this metric more seriously than others. Some investors are already claiming this metric to be the #1 indicator of future success of startups.

At the Microsoft Accelerator in Bangalore, there are 11 companies in our current batch (Sep to Dec). Every week I send our reports to all our mentors with the weekly commitments that startups have signed up for and how many of them have met their commitments.

Since startup discipline is something I am very passionate about, it goes without saying that I track everything at the accelerator.

Commitments fall into 2 buckets – product and customer. Overall we focus on 3 areas in the accelerator –Product development, Customer development and Revenue development, but initially revenue development is largely ignored since most folks are building MVP and getting early adopters.

Each of these 2 buckets of commitments is not something the startup comes up with alone in a vacuum.  I typically discuss the commitments at our weekly all hands and it is a fairly public affair. While some teams try to lower the bar for their commitments, most are aggressive with what they commit to.

Product commitments are delivery of new set of features, versions or changes per a customer / early adopters requirement. Since many companies have mobile or web applications, most startups at the accelerator become customers of other startups so the feedback loop is quick and immediate.

Customer commitments are a combination of # downloads (if mobile app), or active users, engaged users or user feedback. Since I fundamentally believe that nothing’s possible without customer’s (who have a problem) at a startup, most companies have customer commitments from the first week. During the early days it was mostly meeting customers to get feedback and showing mockups, wireframes, etc.

The weekly report I send out to all mentors (currently over 70 folks) are to people who are committed to helping these startups and are engaged with them every week, either making introductions or reviewing progress and trying their product.

As with most reports, I can tell quickly who has read the report and who has not. On average 30 mentors (less than 50%) read the reports each week. They dont take more than 5 min to read and review.

Most of the investor mentors were reading the reports (of the 13 investor mentors, 8 were diligent and even asking questions every week to clarify certain points).

Over breakfast and a few lunch meetings I had a chance to get & give some feedback to some of our mentors. One question most people asked me was:

What % of commitments were being met and which companies were best at meeting commitments?

The answer is a surprising 70% of commitments were being met consistently and 63% of companies were consistently (with 1-2 exceptions per company max) exceeding their commitments on both product and customer traction.

Most seed-stage investors in India have a revenue requirement (not all, but most) so I was surprised they were the most aggressive in asking me questions about commitments. Seems to me, thanks to the early visibility, investors, were willing to make earlier bets, but needed some sense of the team’s performance.

What better way to judge performance than see the team making commitments weekly and delivering on them?

Investors have mentioned to me the in their experience the #1 indicator of a venture funded startups’ success is crisp execution and if they are going after a large market, then fantastic execution makes a good team great.

So how can we help more companies get on this instead of just Microsoft Accelerator companies?

We plan to release a version of our startup connection system (internally called The Borg) to all Indian companies by mid January 2013. With this solution all companies (who opt to do so) can make their commitments and report them to over 250 seed and early stage investors, mentors and advisers. And yes, its free to all startups.

The next experiment is to see in June of 2013 if the improved visibility into a startup’s execution increases the chances of funding for entrepreneurs. We are currently tracking that as well, and will be able to report in an automated fashion.

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SaaS and Silicon Valley are Game-Changers in India

A revolution is taking place in India’s businesses, which is transforming India at large. It began with mobile phones. Although there were telephones in India prior to mobile phones, they never took off in a big way. But mobile phones are so inexpensive and provide such great benefits that now everybody has a phone. The software-as-a-service model is a similar phenomenon in that SaaS fills a void that could not be filled in any other way. SaaS is an inexpensive way for India’s businesses to have good-quality software that makes their businesses much more efficient and effective.

SaaS will be even more of a game-changer in India than it has been in the United States. It’s not just because of the pricing model; it’s also because the time is right. SaaS products are proliferating at the same time as ubiquitous mobile devices and the flood of Big Data are causing companies to look for new business solutions. As businesses embrace SaaS for their critical business functions, they get more velocity in their business, which makes them more competitive in their markets.

Local products — made by local Indian software companies that understand the local business needs — are a key factor in the growing use of SaaS solutions. Improvement of Internet services in India has also contributed to SaaS adoption. A third factor is the fear that not using SaaS solutions will cause a company to be an outlier. This was not the case a couple of years ago. So it’s a tipping point-phenomenon coupled with more availability of local products at a very attractive price point.

A major transition is underway in the technology stack. In the life cycle of the software industry, new solutions typically come from startups and small companies as opposed to large companies. We see this happening again today in India where the small, nimble startups are shifting their business to create SaaS solutions. Even so, some startups are dramatically more successful than others, due in large part to two enablers.

Read the Complete article at Sandhill.com

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Lean Experimentation as the way to faster progress in product startups

“It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory (idea) is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong” – Richard Feynman

Building a successful product startup is like trying to win a race driving a vehicle that has less than half its fuel tank filled, whose controls you don’t fully understand and moreover don’t know where the finish line is. What is known is the visibility of runway for next few meters and inspiration from stories of how many has won such race to gain riches.

While the analogy might look far-fetched but startups work under the circumstances of extreme uncertainty.  They might herald around a great idea that they think will change the world there is many things that are unknown – the problem being solved, if their solution is the right one, they have the right team to make it happen and so on.

Risk

Risk is the common language that is used to describe and address the elements of uncertainty in life. There are few kinds of uncertainty that a startup has to eliminate as it goes forward on its road to success. Some of these risks are the following

Technology Risk – Can the startup build what it is planning to build with the current state of the art technology?  In many cases this may not be a question but products that are at bleeding edge of technology has to evaluate this question. For technology entrepreneurs this is where the motivation for them to build the product would have first started and thus they start the journey here and spend their most of the time.

Product Risk – While the aspect of can build or not is one thing, the other element startup faces is what kind of feature to build first. What is must-have & nice to have feature.

Execution Risk – Is the startup staffed with right team to get things done. Are they able to pull off what they plan to do or are just paralyzed while coping with ever changing conditions on almost everything.

Customer Risk – Finally whether what the startup is building will be used by a set of users, if they will or somebody else will pay for the usage, recommend it to friends after they have used it.

Market Risk – This is aggregated customer risk, are there enough number of customers who will use, pay & recommend?  Is there a viable way to reach to them, interact with them and also collect from them?

Resources

While startups address these risks an important law of life – “Resource are limited”

‘Time is limited’ – Startups would have setup or planned a certain time duration during which they wanted to try out their startup.

‘Money at disposal is limited’- Regardless of how financing is done (self or external) money is always in short supply

‘Energy is limited’ – Ask any entrepreneur who has been at it for couple of years and has not seen any breakthrough in progress, he would tell how jadedness and fatigue starts to set in.

‘Even a supporter’s patience is limited’ – In initial days many encourage to give support , after not seeing much tangible progress for a while there is degradation in their support in kind or even words.

Given that the resources are limited how startups approach addressing the risk matters.

99% of the time the following is how startups address risks

Many startups try to extend their resources by raising money. But that alone is not the resource that is limited. Moreover even after extension through infusion of money if startups can’t remove customer risk then the same fate applies.

A workable approach however could be trying to address elimination of customer risk first and also broaden it to market risk.

The most important thing for any product startup is to reach product/market fit .

By focusing on eliminating customer risk is the fastest way to reach there.

Over the last few years a lot of learning has been understood on how to eliminate customer risks, these learning are well documented as customer development and lean experimentation.

Few key principles of these are the following

  • All statements are assumptions or guess
  • All answer lie outside the building
  • Change guesses into facts using experiment with customers
  • Start by building uncomfortably small prototypes to test with customers.
  • Run those experiment and measure on the metrics
  • Incorporate learning into next experiment
  • Move through the loop quickly
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And You thought Friday was just a Day of the Week…

What happens when six engineers with cushy corporate jobs decide to invest? And that too in a Whiteboard and an imported Smartphone. Yes, they grow up into mobile entrepreneurs creating android apps that millions the World over love. If you are reading this on an Android device, quickly search for “Friday” on the Play Store.

Today, we hear their story in an interview with the Chief Executive of Dexetra – Narayan Babu.

ProductNation: Welcome to Product Nation. 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.
Narayan: I was mentored by my Dad. My father used to be a CDAC Scientist (it was called ER&DCI then) and a member of the team that created Param – The First Supercomputer from India. So, Binary and Boolean Logic all came to me at an early age.

When I came into college after school, I realized that I could do technical stuff well. I could code and program, but I had no people skills for a startup. But I always wanted to do a startup like my father. So this startup was always playing at the back of my mind. While at college, I did create a portfolio of websites and apps (they were called applications then) but never made money as I hesitated to ask.

After college, I joined Bosch as an engineer. Bosch had an amazing culture and it gave me a nice view of the Corporate World. But it is a great place for the 9 to 6 crowd. The only problem – I did not find the work challenging enough. In three years at Bosch, I also found a good team. And it dawned on us that we better do something before growing old. So I pulled in two hackers from my college and two others from Bosch.

At that point in time, there was no idea. But we were all excited about doing a startup. So we began thinking, what to do?

Luckily, at that time Android was just announced. Incidentally, I was working on the WinCE and few other mobile platforms at Bosch. The platform was unwieldy and so I began experimenting with Android. The Android interface and features were just fascinating. At that time, Google conducted the android app developer contest and giving away US $ 100,000 as prize. We could not participate in the first edition, but it was a fascinating entry into the world of apps. We saw very simple apps being awarded US $ 50k and US $ 100k. We found it pretty cool and thought that we should do something around Smartphones.

Our first investment was in a Whiteboard, to brainstorm what all could be done on a smartphone. So, we listed down all the features of the smartphone and we realized that there were 7 – 8 data point sensors on a smartphone compared to almost no features in a desktop computer. And then in an “Aha” moment we thought we could do something using all those sensors – A diary of one’s life maybe. We really went crazy with the possibilities. Crazy because at that moment neither we had any smartphone nor there was any android phone available in the market.

Coming back to our senses, we decided to create a basic version and participate in the next Google App Developer contest. We only had a month and we were able to put together a crude version of it, and eventually we didn’t submit our app. When the winners were announced, we saw that most of the apps were very basic and not as grand as what we were thinking. This made us think if our idea was too grandiose. But, we worked on it and after two months of effort, we felt that we could pull it off.

ProductNation: What was the name you gave to this initial app?

Narayan: First, we called it Chrone (for chronology) and then owing to the confusion with the Google product, we called it “Instinct”.

ProductNation: Ok. Please continue
Narayan: So, it was end of 2009 and we got our first android phone. It was an HTC phone with a 3.5 inch screen – a rare feature then. We ordered it from the US and specially took leave from office to receive the courier. And when tried running our app on it, it crashed. That is when we realized that emulator and the phone were different. So we had to work on the app, again.

Meanwhile, the android app marketplace had reached thousand apps or so. We decided to try something simpler. An android game which was a cross between pacman and Mario. We called it tintumon. And we launched that game. The app became popular, got 10,000 download and qualified for the Google Nexus One phone prize. It went on to do about 60,000 downloads. This was a big morale booster. That was when we started thinking about leaving our jobs and doing this full time. I had support from home and my other team members though concerned were way too excited about starting up.

This is when things got serious and we got our 6th founder. I reached out to one of our college mate who had done his MS and asked him to help us raise some money so that we could move into a place and leave our jobs. Basically he was the business guy we wanted in our tech team. He spoke about the app to a number of people and then finally an Investor who used to do only investments in rubber estates got really excited about it and put twenty lakhs into the business. So we quit our jobs and started Dexetra in April, 2010.

For a couple of months, we played around with all the mobile platforms – iOS, Blackberry, Android. We used to make apps, sell them for Free and also some for paid. One of our iOS games apps became the top 50 paid app in the App store. It was exciting. But it was time to focus on the main idea – Friday.

In the end of 2010, we shut down everything else and just focused on Friday. In two months we released the Alpha version and the users loved it. It was like SIRI but almost a year before SIRI. We got covered by Techcrunch and it was good fun speaking to all who covered us.

In this version, all the data was being collected locally on the phone. So the next step was to move all this data to the cloud. And we started working on the Friday cloud part. Quickly we realized that we had to build for scale. Since, we had been in a startup mode for close to a year, we understood issues of scale. So we consumed lot of information on scalable architecture to put it all together.

This was the time we met Vijay (Founder – One97). He instantly liked the cloud first version and the next day he signed the term sheet and put in a crore of rupees. This way we could recruit a couple of more guys into the team. Around this moment, the product was a little more than fifty percent ready. But in cases like this it is the last 20% that really takes the time.

ProductNation: Was that time when the Apple SIRI came by? Tell us about it and the eight hour SIRI bet.
Narayan: Yes. It was October 2012 when Apple launched SIRI. The World was touting it as the next big thing. We were irritated as we had been trying to put something together since 2009. And SIRI was not even close to what we had planned for Friday. But yes, conceptually similar.
Internally, we took up a bet to create an app exactly like SIRI in 8 hours flat. We managed a version and called it IRIS. It wasn’t for the public marketplace, but a tweet was picked up and it went viral. So we released it into the public marketplace. It got a million downloads in the first month, two million the next. Then, Micromax Aisha also leveraged IRIS.

IRIS becoming a sort of distraction and it was becoming hard to manage two entities. After spending a couple of man months, the team gathered itself and decided to focus most of its efforts into Friday. And it made good sense since we were just ten people then.

ProductNation: What prompted your team not to pursue IRIS?
Narayan:  One, we were occupied with Friday. Second, for IRIS to scale, it needed a strong content pipeline. This would have entailed partnering with a number of content providers. All this meant a different set of skill sets. That doesn’t mean we gave up on iris, just that we put most of our tech energy behind Friday.

ProductNation: So, you guys got back to Friday.
Narayan: Yes. February 2012 end, we launched Friday beta on a closed basis. After four months of improvisation based on user feedback, we released it into the Android marketplace in July, 2012. Friday sees about 100 million documents in the cloud with a 30% daily user engagement.

ProductNation: What should we expect from Friday, going forward?
Narayan: We are focusing on making smartphones intelligent. We are making efforts to put context into smartphones with powerful software. e.g. your smartphone instead of showing “recently dialed numbers” should prompt you with the names of people depending on the context of location or time.

Those are the things we are working on. Plus we are working on building the UX as well. You would soon see a major new release on Friday.

ProductNation: Are you doing the UX internally?
Narayan: I am doing it myself, internally. It is challenging to get external UX guys working on a consistent basis. And UX needs sharp focus. And it has been painful to source UX guys. I have tried freelancers and outsourcing it to experts overseas. The problem of getting UX done outside the team, is to really get the job done. The creative guys are a different set altogether and they have a challenge adhering to timelines. Also, the external guys are not able to experience first-hand what is happening with the product. So, you need a UX person internally who can feel what’s happening.

ProductNation: Narayan, why the name Friday? Do you guys take off that day, is it?
Narayan: We wanted a simple one word name. We started with Chrone that came too close to Google Chrome. We tried Instinct. Then we hit upon Friday. It sounded crazy, it sounded bizarre, so it sounded good. ‘Friday’ sounded happy and it went well with the established meaning of “Man Friday”. And above all, it was easy to remember unlike the names of other apps, which you struggle to recollect at the right time.

ProductNation: What has been your learning’s during this journey? What would you like to share with an entrepreneur?
Narayan: We went all in. There was no plan B. We went all in with one plan. Many people ask us quizzically that you spent two years just building an app. But we did that and survived well too. It just makes sense to sell out to one meaningful idea.

I like the quote by Drew Houston, the founder of Dropbox – “It is better to fail than building a mediocre product”.

ProductNation: Before we let you go, would you like to share the complexity of your six-member founding team?
Narayan: Yeah. Investors used to express shock on the size of our founding team. Fortunately, inspite of having different backgrounds and personalities, all of us were excited about the startup. We do have differences but is mostly around the product. And most powerful bonding force is that all differences apart, we all want to build something really praiseworthy. This single thought ties all our efforts together.

ProductNation: Narayan, thank you for talking to Product Nation.
We wish the entire Dexetra team many more million downloads soon.

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Does your customer know what you are talking about?

Let us face it, technology startups are often founded by geeks, employ geeks and hence are, more often than not, geekdoms. There is tremendous value in it. However, there is a significant downside to this as it relates to communication.  Geeks speak geekspeak and unfortunately that is all the customers hear a lot of times. This is a HUGE mistake.

Never forget who you are in the business for. It is your customers. If your value proposition is not clear to the customer, you will perish. The customer needs to see value. She needs to know that you understand her pain and will help her. She needs empathy not geekspeak. And this is true even when you are speaking to tech buyers. You need to be very clear on how you and only you understand the pain they are feeling and can help them. If you can establish that empathy and can weave it into the product you are pitching, you are already ahead of the competition.

Abandon the geekspeak and the discussions on all the bells and whistles that your product has. Instead, focus on business value it creates or the business pain it alleviates. Use simple, easy to understand language. For example, instead of saying “the product has an enterprise class data warehouse based on a dimensional data model, supported by all major RDBMs, that houses information from disparate sources”, you can say that “using a single repository of data all the business users see the same version of truth. This allows for accurate and timely decision making and meaningful interdepartmental communication”. By eliminating geekspeak you have shown how the product is meaningful to the business user. Nice technology is good, in fact it is essential, but it is not an excuse for clearly articulated benefits. It is almost as though most technology companies operate behind a cloud of geekspeak, and it is the company that breaks through the clouds and communicates simply, that stands out.

So, spend some time. Understand the business problem you are solving, develop empathy with your potential customers and analyze your competition. You should then be able to come up with a story that resonates with the customer. If you are able to do that, you have the power to change the dialog, project yourself as the hero and differentiate yourself from the competition. And that can’t be a bad thing.

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Expect a Microsoft, Google or facebook out of India? Won’t happen unless we THINK BIG!

When VCs from the US flooded into India about 5 to 10 years ago, they were expecting to invest and make happen, a number of Microsofts, Google and facebooks!

They ended up buying shares of existing public companies and became more of Private Equity investors rather than VCs who could put in a 1$ in 100 companies and have 5 block-busters like facebook or Google that returned $100 each! That’s the nature of Venture Capital – taking risks on 20 companies so that one becomes facebook or Google or Microsoft and makes up for all the losses in those 19 other companies.

This is as much an indictment of Indian start-ups not being bold enough as much as VCs turning into Private Equity investors. They did not find enough companies that were bold enough or thinking big enough!

First, some disclaimers! If you are building an Indian version of a successful US company or targeting a unique vertical in India with your SaaS or Cloud solution or trying different Consumer plays, all success to you! You can still be very successful and thrive!

This is not an indictment of the Software Services business! It helped enormous numbers of Indians stabilize and improve their lives and others that depend upon them, building a huge economy around them. But we need to move to the next stage. The thinking needs to be different this time. When the first services companies like Infosys, Tata Burroughs and Tata Consultancy Services started, you needed lots of  money to buy mainframes and minicomputers. Today, it does not take the same amount of resources to get started in the software business. The only thing that will make a difference now are Innovative Ideas!

This article is for people who wonder what it takes to build a global blockbuster like facebook and Google!

That has to do with NOT THINKING BIG ENOUGH! It does not mean just doing products for the Global Market or going for a huge blockbuster IPOs! That may come later. It has everything to do with going after BIG problems. Big What-Ifs! Big Experiments, Big Thinking!

This has to do with our general instinct to jump too quickly into “how do I make money” and risk aversion and the inability to postpone these questions and address some fundamental problems and find innovative solutions for them, not thinking about immediate payoffs!

Opportunities are everywhere if ONLY we stop being followers and start being leaders! In Consumer oriented startup companies, everybody is still dealing with information – work and social in many different platforms – smart phones, laptops, desktops. They are trapped in multiple formats that are incompatible with each other and causing endless frustration. Documents, status updates, photographs, videos, spreadsheets, presentations, databases are all still in many repositories leading us to waste enormous amounts of time just shuffling all of this!

On the enterprise side, Cyber Security is still a large, large problem! Nuclear facilities, Utilities, Government systems of every kind are subject to Cyber Terrorism more than ever before!

Companies are moving rapidly to the cloud; cloud security is even more scary than internal systems that can be cutoff from external access if someone suspects break-ins. Credit card information and online banking have only led to even less secure places to handle money.

Two days ago Amazon Web Services in Virginia ground to a halt because a monitoring system developed a memory leak and brought many, many companies’ servers to a grinding halt for hours!

Backups and Disaster Recovery are still problems that many enterprises have not found good solutions for yet, globally! There are technologies like Cassandra databases that can have three or four copies of the database automatically synched and updated. No need for backups – they are already backed up in real-time in multiple locations. You can almost build indestructible computing if you wanted to, if you choose cloud resources in multiple geographic locations, even across continents. The video streaming service NetFlix already does this with databases synched up across the Atlantic between US and European Data centers of Amazon!

Companies are just getting into collecting lots of Big Data – social media mentions of their companies, products, detailed information about what every visitor to their websites and online presences did when they are there and wondering how to use all of this information with customer and order information they already have in traditional database systems.

All of these are BIG PROBLEMS begging for BIG THINKING!

When Thinking Big, pick any of these above or other problems, they could lead to the next Microsoft, Google and facebook! It requires an obsession with ONE of those problems and a relentless drive to solve that, first.

When you solve big problems, you don’t need to worry about sales, investors and global blockbuster status. They will come as surely as night after day and high tide after low tide.

We have a tendency to equate technical knowledge, prowess and hacking with success. In software services they are important. But not elsewhere in the software business!

They are important tools but not your mission when it comes to building fast growing, large companies. You need to address problems and create innovative solutions that have clearly identifiable benefits. The benefits are the only things users care about. They do not care about Java or Python or Oracle or MySQL. They have a problem; do you have a solution?

The thing that is holding us back is our own thinking! Getting out of that box is the first step towards THINKING BIG! Thinking big takes the same amount of effort as thinking small but the payoffs are disproportional.

Think little goals and expect little achievements. Think big goals and win big success – David Joseph Schwartz.

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10 No-Brainer Marketing Lessons for Nerds

Marketing a product is always tricky business. Step into a marketing discussion and it invariably ends with, “Should we really be spending so much on marketing? Isn’t there a better (read: cheaper) way to do this?” Now observe the marketing head honcho whose responsibility it is to get the product into the hands of users. He or she will scrunch the shoulders into a compact shape, ready for the tackle. You instinctively know the two tactics that will be used: First, he or she is going to talk about the need the company has to get its brand under the nose of users and next parade the marketing figures of successful competitors in the hope that reluctant bean counters will write the marketing cheque from sheer fright.

I don’t know if you noticed, but the head honcho just used the two key tenets of marketing we can all learn from:

You can market something only when there is a need. Figure out why someone needs something. Then fill the gap.

There are lessons in what others have done. First observe; if necessary, follow.

These are seemingly simple – and obvious – guidelines for successful marketing. But over the years I’ve noticed that techies make several marketing mistakes that can be easily avoided. These should serve you well if you are planning to release a software product for the first time:

  1. Don’t sell anything that is half baked: If you think the product is not ready, don’t waste time and money marketing it. Good marketing can’t fix a bad product.
  2. Don’t sell anything that the customer doesn’t need: Stop trying to convince others that your product has more features than competition. Focus instead on how your product meets customer needs better.
  3. Don’t blitz the customer with jargon: Chances are that the person about to buy your product doesn’t understand a word of technology. Would you buy a product you don’t understand? The same applies to your customer.
  4. Don’t believe you are the product’s ideal user: Often, a product begins by trying to solve a problem its user experienced. Over a period of time, this leads to the mistaken impression that the developer is the best use case. Remember, you are not trying to sell to yourself.
  5. Don’t bulldoze the customer with information: Don’t think a thick brochure or a 60-minute slide presentation that explains everything about your product can sell better than a sentence or a paragraph. You know that no one has time (otherwise, why would Twitter be such a killer of an idea?). Now make your marketing strategy understand that.
  6. Don’t spend marketing rupees without a sales process: This is a problem typical of start-ups. You may go and spend on fancy collateral, online media, cute videos, a stunning website, mobile marketing and discover you have customers but no sales process in place. By the time you wake up, the customer is gone.
  7. Don’t sell to customers who don’t have the budgets (or think of innovative business models for them): You can sell, but only if your customer has the budget to buy your product. In really crude words, target your customer better. If your customer doesn’t have the budget think of innovative business models that can co-opt the customer (outcome oriented pricing, co-ownership, pay-as-you-go, rental, profit sharing, etc).
  8. Don’t believe that marketing is maths: Just because you can measure some metrics doesn’t mean you can completely manage marketing by applying a couple of formulas. You can bet Steve Jobs did not have a metric to measure his ability to market Apple products. So, use instinct, see what works for you. On the other hand, don’t ignore the story marketing metrics are telling you!
  9. Don’t ignore the mistakes: Even a company like Google has seen hundreds of failures. Remember Google X? It was a version of a Google home page launched in 2005 that was made to look like a Mac OS interface. The bottom of the page said, “Roses are red. Violets are blue. OS X rocks. Homage to you.” Google removed it within a day of launch. Can’t imagine Google wanting to do anything with Apple today, can you?
  10. Don’t slash prices: The idea of marketing is to sell and make profit, right? So why hurt yourself by slashing prices? Instead, keep pricing realistic and competitive (unless you hold a monopoly in the market, in which case, why would you be wasting your time reading this?). With right-pricing, your customers will know you are in the market competing with your product, not with a price tag.