iSPIRT works to transform India into a hub for new generation software products, by addressing crucial government policy, creating market catalysts and grow the maturity of product entrepreneurs. Welcome to the Official Insights!
There is heavy pressure in our industry for everyone to get on the train of entrepreneurship or startup, startup mode is on, Govt is supporting this, communities are on it, and now even banks are starting fund startup. This is all great news.
But should everyone having a entrepreneurial spirit, become an Entrepreneur?
Not necessarily. Many prefer to be, but different circumstances in career, money , family and culture make them not venture into that. So whats the option for them.
Here is where I would like to introduce my Kamal and Rajini analogy. I am sure most of you know about these cinema stalwarts from south india. They both had a completely different style and both were successful in their own way
Kamal , the startup guy – Entrepreneur : Kamal Hassan always tried like a startup guy, tried new things, ventured into unexplored territories, ahead of times, reinvested most of earnings in his movies, and his movies (product) appealed to a certain set of audience (market). Lot of his movies were commercial failures when they were made , but when you go back and watch them after several years, they are gems. He is like Jeff Bezos, not caring about short term, about profits, but only the long term impact his movies creates.
Rajini, the commercial superstar – Intrepreneur : Rajinikanth on the other hand mostly went for the trusted entertainers, big banner , big investment movies, he built his unique differentiation with punch dialogues, style and tricks, and many movie themes were already successful themes elsewhere. He partnered with big cinema houses who would bank on him for delivering what the audience wants, a mass market. Most of his movies were commercial hits.
Having provided this analogy, I often can relate to each of us, with an entrepreneurial spirit, mostly falling into a bucket of Kamal Hassan or Rajinikanth – and we can learn from how these personalities carved their path to success for so many decades.
While most of us have lot of understanding on the Entrepreneur part, I thought of spending more time in Intreprenuer journey. How do you identify them.
In a Forbes article, its nicely highlighted as “those highly valuable executives and team members who will perhaps never become a company founder, but who have learned to apply the essential principles of entrepreneurship to the roles they fill within a company.”
Understand Money : Intrapreneurs -while do not put in their money into the business, they think like its their own business, and strive to make every rupee or dollar count. Often they are the pillars for success of the company. Also they expect to be rewarded well for this
Idea mongers – Greeehousing : Intraprenuers are often thinking like owners when trying to carry the ideas forward, the ideas never goes away from them, they make sure that they can deliver on them or bring in the plan /action to do it
Into the future : Intraprenuers are forward thinkers, thinking what’s next, not satisfied with what is today. They are someone the founders and leaders love to brainstorm and take guidance for investing.
Disruptive thinking : Intrapreneurs are out of box thinkers, often challenge the conventional wisdom, often carve out the next course of investment
Don’t miss these great articles on Intreprenuers in Forbes and HBR from where I picked some of the attributes.
So in conclusion, Stay happy as an Intrapreneur – you have lot of company – and if you are the owner, please take care of your Intraprenuers – and think about success of Rajinikanth 🙂
Growth through innovation is much discussed these days as most other paths for growth have been exhausted. The innovations that get easy acceptance are those that create significant value for the Customer. This value should be the basis of product differentiation.
Most of the innovation initiatives in the industry are targeted for growth by extending into the technology or market adjacencies. The real opportunity for growth is through transformational innovation – new technologies for new markets. New technologies, many of them disruptive, are entering the market (Additive manufacturing, Autonomous vehicles, Delivery by Drones etc). The market needs are also continuously changing – there are times when the market is ahead of technology and there are times when the technology is ahead of the market. The synchronization of technology and the market is one of the success factors for growth through innovation.
When we develop new technologies for new markets, there are two types of risks – technology risk (we may or may not succeed in developing the technology, the technology may or may not give the expected performance) and market acceptance risk (this is about the diffusion of technology among the users). One way to mitigate these two risks is to visualize multiple scenarios of the future and systematically track the evolution of each scenario objectively. The innovations are directed by the technology paths that lead to these future scenarios.
Growth through innovation is best achieved through a systematic and well-structured approach. iEnabler’s growth framework removes the process complexity through its structured approach and systematically mitigates the risks associated with transformational innovation.
“Start it first and everything will follow”, says Aruj Garg, CEO aka Chief Bhukkad and founder at Bhukkad. In an exclusive interview with Ashutosh Ranjan and Ragavendra Prasath of iSPIRT, Aruj shares how he identified the unhealthy junk food problem and created natural fast food chain. Here are the edited excerpts from the interview.
Q. What was your eureka moment to come out with Bhukkad? How do you evaluate your idea?
A. First Bhukkad started as there were very few good food options in and around college for food. During my college years, I ran Bhukkad like that. Post that, in 2013, when I graduated, I found that I had a high cholesterol problem and I couldn’t find places to eat. Whatever options were available, were very expensive and were available in a very formal niche environment. Hence the new bhukkad version was born to make food which is fast and also good for the consumers.
Q. How do you select menu or items to be served through Bhukkad?
A. We have our food philosophy how we want to do it. Whatever food items fits this food philosophy we will do it. We follow natural fast food philosophy which basically means that whatever we serve is actually made up of natural sources as much as possible. Making food from natural sources is very challenging because raw materials are not available or it is too costly.
So, there are two things we focus on:
How we can make a product in natural way
In our operation how premium quality and food safety is ensured.
Q. What are the other new varieties of food items when can expect from Bhukkad? Apart from Sandwiches, salads, burgers, beverages, sweet treats.
A. We recently launched the Main course meals. The idea is that how you create hot and natural main course meals with same kind of philosophy and enthusiasm. We are getting some good feedback on it. We are improving it every day. Whenever we get any feedback we try to incorporate and improve it further.Are you a still a bootstrapped or funded startup? Currently, how big is your team? What are your plans to scale it up?
Q. Are you a still a bootstrapped or funded startup? Currently, how big is your team? What are your plans to scale it up?
A. We are funded startup. We are looking for more funds to expand our business in other parts of Bangalore then to other cities as well. We are about 35 people now. This involves people in different area of operations including senior team as well. Delivery is not run by us, it is outsourced to different logistic partner.
Our presence is mostly in the south side of Bangalore. However we are planning to cover rest of Bangalore pretty soon.
Q. Start up is a lot about sacrifice. So what about your family and hobbies?
A. There is nothing called work life balance and its fine. Work is equivalent to life and that is what is happening. These are no efforts to make balance right now because this is what I have and I will continue to do it for long time. My parents live in Mumbai and I live in Bangalore. They are very supportive of everything.
Q. What are the key milestones for the 6 – 12 months for the company to be achieved?
A. In next 6 months we have to be serving more parts of Bangalore, also make sure that we are consistence, keep pushing our agenda how food should be to more people, make more people try our food and make them understand what we do in good and effective way.
Q. What are the potential challenges you expect?
A. For us one of the biggest roadblocks is that to communicate what we do in effective manner to masses. It is a big challenge for us. Second important thing is that we always have enough capital to grow and use that capital effectively and judiciously. Third is to make sure business runs smoothly because there are so many moving parts in this business. I think last challenge is to figure out a way to use more technologies and make it more data oriented than what are we right now.
Q. Finally, what is your vision for Bhukkad?
A. I want to Bhukkad to become the McDonalds of natural fast food.
The core idea of a startup is to tap into the previously unexplored markets, identifying unsolved problems and bringing to the market innovation that disrupt the existing eco-system. It’s about understanding complex problems and coming up with innovative, disruptive solutions…a process that requires understanding the consumers’ requirements and behavior patterns to create a well-thought out solution for the customers’ benefit.
While most entrepreneurs spend weeks brainstorming about the idea, they often ignore the key ingredient to innovation : design.
Design /dɪˈzʌɪn/ (noun) – do or plan (something) with a specific purpose in mind.
The Design thinking Playbook Roundtable organized by iSpirit and conducted by Deepa Bachu from Pensaar helped startup founders understand the importance of design thinking and integrate design into their workflow. Here are some key takeaways from the Playbook Roundtable held at the head office of Instamojo in Bangalore:
Design thinking is not just about the graphic elements, UI or tools. It is a creative approach to a problem. It is a problem solving methodology – whether it is blueprints for a building, a beautiful graphic design for a brochure, a sleek UI for a website or a comfortable piece of furniture, design helps to solve any problem, visual or physical.
While it is important to engage a professional, it is crucial that everybody on the team thinks DESIGN. Entrepreneurs should be able to step away from their immediate environment to look around and view their idea from the perception of the consumers, a process that requires creative thinking.
As a good product manager, a startup founder should be able to connect the dots in non-obvious ways to come up with a unique and innovate solution for the consumers. It is crucial for entrepreneurs develop a deep insight of the problem they are seeking to solve and be passionate about it before coming up with a solution. More startups focus more on the solution and forget the initial problem statement. You must never lose sight of your problem, constantly revisiting it while fine-tuning and tweaking the solution.
A product is valuable only as long as the consumer users it. It is thus important for entrepreneurs to understand customer behavior in order to make their product user friendly. Usability studies though interesting, aren’t always reliable. Startup founders thus have to seek out customers and work with them closely to understand what they need, what they think, how they use the product and how they feel about it.
Customer behavior v/s customer intent – it is important to understand the difference between the two. While a user may want to do something in the ideal world (intent), she may not be able to do it in the real world (behavior). As entrepreneurs it is important to differentiate intent from actual behavior. If this is geographically impossible, startup founders should not hesitate to use data analytics to tap into the users’ behavior patterns and modify the product.
Design thinking allows entrepreneurs to look at their idea holistically and come up with the best possible solution for their users. Design after all enables people to create and come up with the unimaginable and unexpected designs.
The life of an entrepreneur is really interesting and very challenging. It is interesting because they are trying radical ideas and something which has possibly been never tried before. Challenging because they are walking along unchartered territories and there is joy, disappointment, surprise, shock, failure and success lurking around every corner. It really tests your persistence, patience and steadfastness as you keep discovering your path amidst this uncertainty.
The question is – what keeps him/her going? What is that single most important trait which gives strength to the individual to beat all odds and deliver something which is valued manifolds as time progresses?
I think that the single most important talent is to use every challenge he faces to his advantage, by resolving to fix it for the betterment of the product, team and overall venture.
Now contrast this to the corporate world. When majority of the employees in a corporate run into a problem which they couldn’t foresee or have no clue about, they usually resort to one of these standard options (i) find an excuse which can convince their manager (ii) present data or polish a ppt in a manner that the problem is under wraps (iii) find a scapegoat to take the blame. In the end, when faced with a challenge which has disrupted all their planning, the recourse is to save their skin one way or the other. Nothing wrong here; as this is the inane tendency of all living beings!
The entrepreneurs also do exactly that, i.e. save their skin in the startup game. It’s just that they know that the only way to do this is to get a handle on the problem and find a fix or a workaround so that the venture can still make progress. Actually, they have no other option. There is no boss to think of a convincing excuse, no scapegoats to take the blame and any data-dressing to swipe the problem under the carpet will tantamount to fooling no one else but themselves!
So, the entrepreneur does what they must – take the bull by his horns! Roll-up their sleeves and get down to fixing the problem. What could it be – is it because the customer does not understand the true value proposition of the offering? Is the UI confusing and not good enough? Are people gaming the system? Or is he targeting the wrong segment altogether. Could it be that their go-to-market is not really helping him to reach their target group? This analysis starts and one by one, every single proposition is ruled out with the data available at hand; and accordingly the solutions are deciphered. By the time they have fixed the problem, either the product has improved or the go-to-market strategy has become more laser-focused. Whatever the case may be, the venture has moved one step closer to success!!
But then the dawn of the very next day brings with it new challenges and the entrepreneur gets into this never ending problem-solving mode. With every fix you rise, create a new set of challenges and fail a little, solve them and then rise again. The cycle just keeps going…
In light of the findings at the recently concluded iSPIRT Roundtable at Mangalore. There is nothing to get disappointed if your team did not get shortlisted. There is always a next time as long as you improve your business plan and think about how to be a market disrupt-er or your category leader.
Here is something to consider for your business plan if you have already not done it.
Have you thought about this?
Who is your customer?
Think about a “persona” for your product or service. This means a “typical” customer who might buy your product and what they would do with it.
What can you do for your customer? a. k.a addressing “Pain point”
The next thing is connecting with your customer by addressing a pain-point they may have and developing a solution for their problem with your product/service.
How will your customer acquire your product?
The next thing to consider would be they ways in which your customer would get your product. In the case of “software” one needs to think about perpetual “licenses” or the more recent cloud enabled offerings which are “subscription” based or mobile app downloadable formats with “freemium” & Ad enabled models.
How do you make money off your product?
Think about a business model of how you make money off your wares and make it worthwhile for yourself and your potential investors in the future. As many would say its not enough if you have a mobile app which can be downloadable by many but a real business behind it like Uber or Ola cabs!
How do you design and build your product?
Here think about Design Considerations like programming languages/dependencies (technology) that assures scalability of your product/service, user interface (UX design) that appeals to your customer, or ease of acquisition/use and some key assumptions that can be quickly, cheaply, effectively tested in the market. Identifying your “beachhead” market to target is “Key”!
Don’t forget the importance of developing a high level product specification and modify this through the primary research and inquiry process as you go along building your product.
Lastly, How do you scale your business?
Think about if your product is a market disrupt-er as was envisioned by Segway Inc., the developers of the Human Segway Transporter, an electric vehicle with two wheels. Their plan was to make this the next “big” revolution in transportation in an urban setting. Apart from having design issues for stabilization, the product had acquisition and storage challenges to be universally adopted by many in urban areas of the US. But a little know company called “Hubway” captured the imagination of the urban residents by their modified bicycle with not only their design but also the operational model of making it easy to acquire, use and store the product.
Note: See pictures –
Hubway paid particular attention to storage of the device in bike racks at various locations for example in a City setting and make it easy to acquire it by just presenting a credit card in a vending machine type of access but also return it at other locations like what one would do with a rental car. This enabled them to capture significant market in the US.
While doing this don’t forget to have fun and as they say “fail fast” and “pivot” often!
iSPIRT is happy to collaborate with and encourage YESSS – Young Entrepreneurs & Startups in Soaring Spirits.
08 to 10 December, 2015 ,The Lalit Ashok, Bengaluru,
YESSS is designed in association with various Startup networks. At YESSS, select startups – with great business ideas offering unique technologies, products or services – will be given an opportunity to pitch to potential investors. We are on the lookout for razor sharp minds, financial hawks and techie wizards and we will be testing their talent, tenacity, and the team work!!
YESSS invites applications from
Technology Entrepreneurs in the early stage of business (0-3years)
Innovative Business Ideas that have a wide impact on society
Startups requiring mentoring, incubation and investment to shape and grow their business
Who will attend
Companies looking for innovative business ideas and technology solutions , IP firms, IT industry captains, angel investors and VCs, government funding agencies and financial institutions.
How to Participate
If you are a tech entrepreneur with an innovative idea or a budding entrepreneur with a simple business plan, send your application/abstract on or before 3rd December , 2015.
The abstracts would be reviewed by an Expert Committee and you may be invited to make a presentation. The Expert Committee will choose 8 finalists, who would be offered an opportunity to make a presentation during the YESSS session at Bangalore ITE.biz 2015
For Registration and Participation opportunities, kindly contact Prabha –
A mentor and guide to many, Ram Shriram, managing partner at Sherpalo Ventures and one of the first investors at Google, addressed a rapt audience last week at the Bangalore office of [24]7. Opening the hour long session with his reaction to the start up scene in India, Ram Shriram applauded the dynamic vibe of the IT capital of the country, even as he lamented the lack of infrastructure and the paucity of good Universities to channel the talent of the nation. A few snippets from the conference for those who missed it.
So what is Culture? Does Organizational Culture matter?
Culture is about living your values, every single day. From an Organization’s stand-point its a way of working that ensures that critical operating values persist at all times. Some of you might already know the importance of Company Culture or Organizational culture, I will however enumerate, the most important effects of having the RIGHT culture.
Culture helps Build Social Capital (Good will) ahead of Monetary Capital.
Culture helps REFINE your GOALS & helps you build long-lasting Organizations.
Organizational Cutlure hence matters immensly. So, what should be your Company or Organizational CUTLURE?
While I am not an anthropologist or an Organizational Psychologist in any regard, and I do not understand the nuances of all Organizational Cultures & their importance in the economic function, its imperative that I comment on Software & Product Organizations, specifically with regards to employees helping each-other & their Culture towards Contributing to Communities. THINK Opensource or think Volunteer Communities.
Before doing that, our track record says, its not a CULTURE for INDIAN Software companies and Software programmers to contribute to Opensource communities or Volunteer Communities. If within any organization as an employee, we believe in helping each other, then why don’t we think about doing the same outside of our work? Do we really empathize at WORK, & believe in the CULTURE of selfless giving or do we do it, because its a GIVE-and-TAKE inside a company? Have we ditched our own Culture of Karma? Have we become too Individualistic, and think its NOT our JOB, to do even small community chores?
Why is Culture needed? Why should we put Culture FIRST?
Almost every Lean method today is about empathizing with the Customer, keeping the Customer-centric view first and then rapidly building tools, products, services, etc. Customer Development is a priority, rather than Product Development. Empathy is a Core-Cultural construct of today. Come to think of it, our entire Indian Cultural ethos is based on Empathy. “Karuna” is the foundation of almost every teaching in our country. Indian institutionalization and Orientation has Empathy by Design. Why is it, that we have not built community products, community services & community experiences that cater to the needs/wants/aspirations of people, when there is Empathy by Design in our culture?
Tough questions to answer universally or generally. However focusing on Software and Services, I think we have gotten too-carried away with MOBILE FIRST & MARKET FIRST Culture, rather than thinking ECO-SYSTEM & COMMUNITY CULTURE FIRST. Business Ecosystems today emphasize a lot on Monetary Capital, but empathize little about Social Captial. We have become too focused on Systems, Processes and Technology, rather than addressing the concerns of people. That should explain why we have failed to reciprocate to the needs of people around us.
Fellow Customers/Consumers/Citizens are the first GOD. When we truly realize this Consumer-centric view, we quickly understand that no single Organization with all its Monetary might can take care of all the needs of the Citizen/Consumer. Individuals & Organizations need to have a Culture to collaborate with other Partners, and build Social Capital first. They need to put Culture as a priority in building Ecosystems.
Culture By Design – Can Culture be Designed?
YES. One needs to focus on their core values and the specific outcomes they want to produce. Some of the values that help in having a long-lasting Culture are simple.
Producing Collective Public good is more important than Individual Private Profits.
The Collective-Mindset needs to be at a higher priority than Individual-Mindsets.
The Ecosystem Focus is critical than the narrow-focus of just One Organization.
Let me go a little further, your Cutlural design many times will be simple to Understand, Implement and Follow, but will have far-reaching behavioral outcomes. Focus on seemingly trivial Individual Behaviors. Here are 2 simple Cultural Design Elements, that focus on Individual behavior in an Organization.
Acknowledge Individual Short-comings at all times.
Seek help from the Community/Crowd to fix those short-comings as fast as possible.
All major companies like Google/Facebook and successful Open source Organizations actually practice the above 2 cultural design elements religiously. Below are a few examples.
e.g. Successful Open source organizations (Linux, Redhat, Ubuntu)
We will not hide any issues from the Consumer. (acknowledge short-comings)
We will Release early and Release often. (Fixing with help from Community)
Google’s 2 most well known cultures also follow the same cultural design constructs
Don’t be evil (acknowledge shortcomings)
Perpetual Beta (Continuous fixing of issues)
We are all flawed. Software products are also imperfect ideas, and need to be tested locally, and refined continually. Having a culture designed to help take IDEAS or PRODUCTS go past their imperfect states & attain Global Standards, requires a Culture of Openness, of being able to work with Others to fix individual shortcomings.
Conclusion – Codifying Community Culture
We are a country blessed with Empathy by Design. We are a nation that believes in Karma. So, fellow Entrepreneurs, if there is one CULTURE that we need to re-learn, it is to contribute Selflessly to Communities and Ecosystems around us. We at iSpirt and ProductNation fundamentally believe that “You will get all you want in LIFE, if you help enough other PEOPLE, to get what they want”. The future is a world where, while enriching others, you will enrich yourself. iSPIRT volunteers and Community Mavens are there to help you build this Culture and are more than happy to be cheerleaders from the sidelines! Part 2 of this culture series will provide insights into Codifying the iSPIRT Culture.
Perseverance or persistence are the 2 most important characteristics for an entrepreneur, says Vijay Bhaskar Reddy Dinnepu, the Chairman and CEO of KisanRaja. In an exclusive interview with Ashutosh Ranjan and Ragavendra Prasath of iSPIRT, Vijay shares how he came out of the monthly salary mania and started working to solve the problem of farmers. Here is the edited excerpts from the interview.
Our first question to you is, how did you come out of the monthly salary mania?
Starting Vinfinet Technologies (KisanRaja) was not a sudden decision. In fact, I was doing research for quite some years during my weekends and evenings after work hours on how do we solve the problem of farmers. Before starting KisanRaja, I took an excel and jotted down how much will be my family expense with out my salary for the next 2 or 3 years. How to manage it. I wanted to keep my expenses very minimal.
How many iterations and months have gone into developing KisanRaja?
It took 8 iterations to reach our current version of KisanRaja which is very compact. The very first prototype was 8 Kg. We used 2 wheeler battery to power it. Many months have gone into each iteration. One iteration took 2 months and some others took more time.
You get lot of ideas when you start developing products? How did you prioritize Must have and Good to have features in KisanRaja.
We use the term Co-Creation. We collaborate, ideate, explore and experiment with farmers who are our customers. We understand what is actually required to them. We note down the conversations with them and work based on those inputs. We learnt that our first version had too many features which are actually not required by the farmers and as I mentioned it was 8 Kg. Even in our IVR to assist farmers, we use local slang. For example, slang used by people who speak Tamil in Chennai is not the same as people speak in Madurai. So took a blend of slang using it in our IVR.
Currently, the world is moving towards smart phones mania. We are a GSM based controller. Do you have any plans to upgrade to App based monitoring?
We have an Android App. Farmers can control the motor from their smart phone. So far 100 downloads done. We are working on the UI part to provide better experience.
How currently, how big is your team? (employees)
Currently, we are 20 member organization.
Are you a still a bootstrapped or funded startup?
We are looking for funding. So far, we have taken bank loans and support from family members. We want to expand in other regions in India. Currently, we have 16000+ installations in more than 10 states through our dealer network.
Any other new products that we expect from Vinfinet Technologies?
KisanRaja is our current focus. We are working on similar products lines with some enhanced features.
If you are a small team, starting out to solve a problem, having a mission is hardly a concern. What must concern you at that stage is getting to the product market fit and customer validation.
But even after building a successful product and scaling the business to a sizeable extent, many startups hardly articulate a compelling mission for themselves. With early signs of success, founders directly jump onto growing the team, building feature-sets and scale the organisation. Not very far in the journey, many startups end up facing employee attrition, lack of passion in teams and alignment issues in their organisation.
Founders of growth stage startups often mention retaining talent and alignment as a big area of concern; and end up applying many tactics to resolve talent-related problems. However, the cause of these issues is much more fundamental and intrinsic to the organisation.
Before your push the scale button and look outside to attract other people to your startup, the impact of your mission can’t be overstated. It is very important for the founding team to sit together and extract and articulate the mission for their business. A meaningful mission that matters to the world would instantly change how you look at yourselves and the business. The same regular job would inspire a lot more passion and a sense of pride in doing it. A well-articulated mission makes it easier for prospective team members, customers and investors to relate to your business, decisions and get similarly inspired.
Every problem worth solving is hiding within it a deeper challenge and glorious mission, which needs to be extracted with patience. For instance, the mission for a food delivery startup could be “Savings humans worldwide from the discontent out of hunger”.
Beyond inspiration, a mission opens up the avenues of long-term thinking and frames the canvas of opportunities, ideas and themes of innovations for the business to pursue.
Typical startup scene. Cash running out, existing product not scaling fast enough to excite Series A investors and the worse part, need to let go some awesome employees who believed in our vision & promises. For a few nights I couldn’t sleep properly in the hope of getting that “one” idea which could give us a new direction and the enthusiasm to keep going.
During all this time what fuelled me was the support of my co-founder & the core team, blessings of family & friends and most importantly, my mentor & a few friends who I could call anytime to discuss all of my silly ideas. Finally, one day, after tons of calls and brainstorming sessions, it happened! The idea of the new product was finally clear in my head, so clear that I could visualise it. Even though it was 3AM, I couldn’t sleep. I woke up, made myself a cup of cappuccino and started drawing the wireframes. I was done by 4AM but still could not sleep. The thought of discussing the new direction with the team and wondering what their reaction would be, made my brain explode with excitement!
Fast forward 2 weeks, the team had loved the idea and started working on the first MVP (for non startup folks that means minimum viable product)). The idea was to build a curated YouTube videos app with the possibility of creating memes and doodles to help discover the best online videos. We launched the MVP on Android and got fairly good user traction, keeping us excited about the opportunity-
Apr 2015:
Though the investors were excited about our new idea, the hitch was users were not sticking to the app (see the downward trend on graph). We knew that the video space is promising but somehow the trigger to use our app everyday was not strong enough. We had two options at that point- keep pursuing the investors and burning money in acquiring new users or go back to the whiteboard (again) and build something which users would truly love. We didn’t have much cash left and since investors were showing interest it was hard to let go & get back to the drawing board.
However after an internal discussion we decided that we would build again. It was a difficult decision given that ‘getting funded’ sounds a lot sexier than ‘let’s take a crack again’. But for us the choice was easy, because we always wanted to build something which millions of people would want to use everyday. So I went back to my mentors & they helped us quickly raise a small round from some awesome investors. That gave us enough bandwidth to focus on building the right product.
Back to the whiteboards. Back to basics. We spent lot of time discussing how can we really solve video discovery problem. I also read Nir Eyal’s “Hooked” and we built the product chapter by chapter, brainstorming on key concepts like “Trigger, Action, Reward and Investment”. By June 15th we had an iOS version ready, I felt that the trigger to open the app everyday was still kind of weak but in the process we had invented a new way to quickly discover videos, we called our invention a “Vid”. The app looked neat and concept of Vid gave the app a visually attractive & differentiated feel. With the new app I started meeting friends who could give us feedback.
Jun 2015:
I met Ashish Tulsian of Posist who had visited Valley recently and showed him the product. He loved the concept but he advised me to visit valley and try to get early adopters there. We both knew that for social products & apps, India is a “follower” market. Although there are few exceptions like Whatsapp but in a price sensitive country where SMS/MMS were not free, Whatsapp came in as a Messiah and gave unlimited messaging for free (or at least at a fraction of cost). So for us the logical thing was to try finding influencers in Valley rather than trying to ride against the tide in India.
The decision was made. I was coming to Silicon Valley. Thanks to Wipro (my only employer till date) I had a Business Visa ready & was ready to fly any day. If it was not that meeting with Ashish, I might have still been procrastinating the US trip.
San Francisco (Bay area), 20th June 2015:
When I came to valley I literally had nothing apart from my old iPhone 5 and one among many apps installed in it, named “Vidzy” (that’s our app). Two of the other important apps were “Meetup” and “Eventbrite”. My first concern was to check if people here will find the idea unique and useful. What if they say, “Oh we use this and this app for this. Why should I use Vidzy”?
But that did not happen. In fact people loved the concept and started giving me their email IDs (because the app was still in beta and not live on App store). In a month I collected about 100 email IDs. I started going to more events and started meeting lot more people, one such event was at InMobi’s office (the unicorn startup from India). Guys at InMobi loved the app and asked us to present as a potential partner in their Miip launch event.
There you go, within a month of coming to US, I was talking about Vidzy at Fort Mason center (the same place where Facebook’s F8 developer conference happened) among hundreds of industry veterans from mobile and advertising industry. I couldn’t have thought about all this exposure within a month, if I was not in Silicon Valley.
July/Aug 2015:
We started getting interest from some investors (some of who got in touch after the InMobi event), but for us key was to find out the right product market fit. We still did not have a strong trigger remember? Our beta users loved the concept but not so much the use case- few of them got back to me saying, “when will you enable personal video sharing?”. I was not sure about personal video sharing because we still believed that YouTube video discovery is a big enough problem to solve.
One day during some event I got an opportunity to pitch to Rick Marini. I had only 2 minutes. Rick being a pioneer in social consumer startups who has invested in companies like Reditt and Snapchat, his point of view mattered a lot. His reaction- “well the app and concept is good, but building on top of YouTube means they can shut you down any day and also this to me looks like a Vitamin not a Pain killer”. Those words got stuck in my head. I knew that something has to change, but what was that? How can we make this a pain killer?
August 2015:
After my meeting with Rick, I started looking for answers and connecting dots. Is personal video sharing a bigger problem? I starting thinking about it from the perspective of someone who record lot of videos everyday. Who is that user? And suddenly it occur to me that my brother makes lot of videos (of his daughter) and sends them over Whatsapp everyday. I decided to speak to him about the new use case.
To give a little background my brother is not a heavy app user, he owns a Windows phone and keeps a low profile on Facebook. The only way for him to share his daughter’s video is Whatsapp and that too reaches a limited list of his friends and family members. When I asked him whether he would like to use an app where he could share his daughter’s video with anyone who would like to watch, he immediately said “Yes”.
This gave me a huge boost, I called up my co-founders in India and we had a good 2 hour discussion on the use-case. We all agreed that it made lot of sense. We were still not too sure whether it was “the” pain which needed a pain killer. There was only one way to find it out- ask people! I started checking out important events on Meetup that week and found a “mobile innovation” related event in Mountain View. I still did not have the app with the feature built but the concept was there with YouTube videos, I decided to test the new hypothesis.
I showed the app to the first guy I met in the event, and told him the use case. He started staring at me and stared at me for good 10 seconds, I felt as if I had stolen his idea (that’s typical valley, I thought). It turned out that indeed I had stolen his idea, but he was glad that a solution for his problem was now out there. This guy said he has tons of videos of his kid but couldn’t find a decent app which could take those videos to interested people. Suddenly I felt like I was dreaming, for me that was like being closest to see a “product market fit”. During next half hour of the event, I didn’t talk about my product, instead that gentleman did all the talking on my behalf 😀.
Past few weeks:
Once the idea sank in, we discussed the opportunity and realised that the potential was huge. One key insight that emerged from these discussions was that the people could relate to the problem of videos sitting in the gallery and later getting deleted because of low storage space. We did a simple math: 1 Billion smartphones= at least a billion videos waiting to come out, multiply that by videos which will be recorded in future! Does it sound like a billion dollar opportunity? Hell ya 😍!
We got so excited that by 3rd week of August the test app was ready (we had to add the “record+upload” feature). Now an important decision was whether to keep both YouTube and personal videos in the app or focus sorely on the personal video space. We discussed & chose to avoid ambiguity about the core objective of the app & removed YouTube video sharing.
I’m staying at an Airbnb place in Valley, so I get to meet new visitors every other day. I used the opportunity and got some of them as beta users. They immediately related to our new proposition of sharing personal videos. All of them had a couple videos sitting on their phones that they had not done anything about and they promptly uploaded & shared them via Vidzy. This was a big confidence boost. Their reaction told us that maybe we finally had the ‘Pain Killer’ we had been wanting to make.
House where I stayed during first two months in Valley- Foundersbase
Surprisingly, no one owns the “video” trigger yet. YouTube is for professionals, Facebook/Twitter focus on brand/viral videos (to make money) while Instagram and Vine videos are too short to appeal to consumers beyond professional bloggers & artists. We realised that with our app we can own that trigger- i) Record/upload and share videos instantly (main trigger).
ii) Make video sharing fun through “Vid” concept (external trigger).
iii) Capture & share a video instead of a photo because, well… now you can! (ability).
To understand above terminologies do check out Nir Eyal’s awesome Slidesharedeck.
What next?
Our app went live last week and some of my friends and our beta users have started uploading and sharing their videos. Our idea is to grow the app organically through word of mouth and see if the network effect kicks in. We are working on few ideas like launching it on Product Hunt, showing it to the tech community during Techcrunch disrupt (21st Sep) and an offline event for students at UC, Berkeley. The idea is to meet our first 100 users face to face and learn from each other during these activities. Will keep on updating the results and learnings on Medium (please follow me if you are interested).
For startups outside valley (be in US, India or elsewhere) who are contemplating their visit to valley, I would like to share a few pointers:
If you have a global consumer product, don’t even think twice. Come as soon as possible. The learnings which I got here in 2 months, are worth more than my whole startup life’s experience (3 years). In addition to tech savvy consumers, the other thing which helps is extremely high living cost which pushes you out of your comfort zone 🙂 There is no option here, but to move fast or… die!
Do not worry about leads or network. If you have a good product, people are more than willing to listen. DO NOT come without a prototype as people are bored of listening to ideas (every Tom, Dick and Harry here claims to be an entrepreneur). You need something to differentiate yourself, jump the queue and get noticed.
Getting investors just on the basis of an idea and product is next to impossible. This is a mature market and an innovator’s market, so you can not really say that we are “Uber or Airbnb for India 😛”. To raise funds you must show a real product-market fit with real traction unless you have a well connected network (which I’m assuming you won’t have if you are reading this).
I will keep on writing more stuff as things progress, including our app experiment results, user response & off course funding status 😀.. You can ask me any specific questions on the comment section (if you have). I will try to answer them.
You can find Vidzy on AppStore. If you are interested in reaching out to me, please email rabi(at)vidzy.io.
The globalization of new ventures, be they from advanced or emerging economies, may sound like an oxymoron: how can a young firm with limited resources go global? Research by various academics, including my own for over a decade in India, UK, US and latterly China, shows that in many cases the answer is: by leveraging network relationships. Entering international markets typically entails building and leveraging network relationships because new ventures rarely have the wherewithal to internationalize exclusively on the basis of their own resources.
Internationalization activity in new ventures is often opportunistic and serendipitous. This is integral to the nature of entrepreneurial activity. New ventures can, and should, flexibly take advantage of unexpected opportunity. That said, the argument here is that new ventures are more likely to be effective at internationalizing entrepreneurially when they are also strategic. In particular, it pays to be strategic in relation to cultivating, nurturing and leveraging network relationships.
Being strategic entails three key partnering capabilities:
Leveraging relationships proactively. Relationships are widely recognized as being key to new ventures’ growth and success both in general and specifically in relation to internationalization. However a passive approach to relationships will result in suboptimal network benefits. All things being equal, firms that are proactive in cultivating and leveraging their network relationships are more likely to succeed on the global stage. Furthermore, they not only leverage their networks proactively, but they also broaden their original network portfolios.
Leveraging relationships reflectively. It is important for entrepreneurs to recognize that while generating revenues through network relationships is important, a more sustainable benefit is gaining learning outcomes – learning new knowledge and capabilities through network relationships. This calls for deliberately devoting attention to knowledge transfer and acquisition, which can require even greater effort whilst dealing with dissimilar partners. Picking good “teachers” is important. Having the intent and patience to gain non-monetary benefits such as knowledge – which can in turn be monetized by applying it to enhance international business revenue – is crucial and may go against the natural tendency of new ventures to focus exclusively on business revenue outcomes via networks.
Leveraging relationships discerningly. Entrepreneurs must recognize that different types of networks are good for different things. This is important because certain relationships are easier to access than others, but their benefits may be limited to early stages of the internationalization process. For longer term success, new ventures will have to go beyond their comfort zone to build new types of relationships. Typically, forging relationships with other similar entities is easier to do, but it is necessary to build a portfolio that includes links with dissimilar actors too. That is, it is important to build a holistic portfolio of network relationships over time. To do so new ventures will need to, over time, go beyond easy-to-access network relationships both at the interpersonal level and the interorganizational level.
In sum, of all the special capabilities that new ventures to globalize arguably the most important is that of building and leveraging network relationships. This applies to both interpersonal relationships of the entrepreneur and interorganizational relationships of the venture as a whole. How well networks are managed can have a considerable influence of the pace and trajectory of new ventures’ internationalization.
The emergence of an IP and technology-based leader from India will have a bigger long-term impact than a few Indians heading major global corporations
Isn’t it strange that we were obsessed with happenings at Google while the really momentous news of the coming of age of a serious desi challenger got lost in the noise?
Sundar Pichai and Google
News of Sundar Pichai’s ascension to the Google throne hogged media headlines for almost a week.
While I could understand the excitement instigated by the front page of Dainik Bhaskar in a young tier-2 and tier-3 city audience for whom a compensation of Rs 300+ crore would seem out of this world (however misleading that figure is since Pichai’s actual compensation in his new role is not known, and conversion from dollars to rupees doesn’t make sense anyway), the hoopla in the metro-based English language press was surely misplaced.
After all, what’s surprising? Indians including Ajay Banga (MasterCard), Victor Menezes (Citibank), Indra Nooyi (PepsiCo) and Anshu Jain (Deutsche Bank) have been CEOs of global corporations. And it’s now more than 20 years since Rajat Gupta became the CEO of the world’s bluest blue management consulting firm—McKinsey!
Indians are smart, ambitious and can communicate well. Once they have studied at a top US university and worked there for a while, they fit well into American corporate life, capable of discussing football and technology, and being politically correct. Most importantly, they can be quite conformist and refrain from rocking the boat. Clearly a good choice if you are a culturally diverse company like Google.
And, mind you, this may not really be the throne anyway as Larry Page and Sergey Brin are just one degree of separation away.
I have nothing against Pichai who appears to be a perfectly competent technical manager with the right credentials. But for me there were more interesting and promising events happening recently that didn’t get the attention they deserve.
What We Should Have Focused On…
For years now, we have bemoaned the absence of a Google-like company from India. Yes, we have had successful tech enterprises from India but these have been in the difficult-to-relate-to business-to-business (B2B) IT services space. The real big news of the last few weeks is that we now see some green shoots pointing to the emergence of an IP and technology-based leader from India.
On August 5, in a virtuoso performance that had a clear Steve Jobs touch to it, the CEO of InMobi, Naveen Tewari, introduced his company’s new advertising platform, Miip, to a gathering of who’s who in the technology world at Bangalore.
For the technological cognoscenti, InMobi is not a new company. It calls itself the “world’s largest independent mobile advertising platform”. Funded by Softbank, Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers and Sherpalo to the tune of $220 million, InMobi reportedly served 2.2 trillion advertisement requests in 2014. Its revenues are not in the public domain though some reports suggest that they could be as high as $500 million.
So, What Is Miip and Why Is It Significant?
Firstly, mobile advertising is huge and growing rapidly. With the shift of the internet to the mobile, most dramatically underlined by some Indian e-commerce giants’ decision to be “mobile-only”, the clear trend is for advertising on mobile.
Secondly, the whole promise of internet-based advertising (and now mobile-based advertising) is better targeting and customization. But this promise has to a large extent been belied. I am repeatedly amused by the fact that after I have purchased a ticket from, say, Indore to Delhi, I see online advertisements offering me low-priced Indore-Delhi tickets. These are completely wasted on me.
And, as InMobi keeps reminding us, many users see advertising as a distraction and an intrusion rather than something they find useful or enjoy.
Most extant internet or mobile-based advertising is intent-driven. You search for something you want to buy by entering it in a dialog box, and the search engine helps you by displaying related advertisements in addition to the search results. Once you have done such a search, related advertisements keep popping up even though the purchase may have been completed or you no longer have the requirement.
Such advertising makes limited use of analytics and doesn’t prompt you to check on other things you may be interested in. The range of products or services offered is also very narrow even though we know that there are hundreds if not thousands of companies that may be offering other products or services that may be of interest.
InMobi’s Miip is a mobile-based discovery platform that not only uses advanced analytics to overcome this problem, but also features a cute mascot that enters into a dialogue with the user to make suggestions and elicit user feedback. Along the way, the user can consult her friends before making a purchase choice using social media. All of this is done with high-quality visual content that exploits the superior graphics of today’s smartphone screens. Together, these enable an enjoyable and comprehensive shopping experience.
What’s significant in this case is that the company is already a strong player in the mobile advertising space, having entered at the right time about seven years ago. This gives it the muscle and the connections to capitalize on a big bet like Miip .
I particularly liked the launch of Miip in San Francisco, Bangalore and Beijing in quick succession, as these could very well represent loci of technological advancement and economic growth for the next decade. Unlike the earlier generation of Indian companies that shunned collaboration, it was good to see InMobi sharing space with important partners like Paytm and Walmart at the launch event itself.
I have only one regret about InMobi: I wish it wasn’t into push-based advertising that will promote even more consumerism.
India as a Product Nation
India’s success in services came from our ability to write high-quality software at low cost, without the need to make large irreversible upfront investments in technology or products. Companies like InMobi represent a new frontier where we are taking large bets and investing in platforms and new technologies.
This article is not only about InMobi, but about this new generation of companies that’s changing the way we do business. If sustained, this trend could help India become a Product Nation. In the long run, that would have much more impact than a few Indians heading major global corporations.
As founders, many of us had to learn skills that don’t come naturally. Some responsibilities are better handled by your co-founders and other team members. You may be an amazing engineer, but a weak product manager. You may be a great product manager, but terrible at sales.
And then there’s the universal challenge that every founder has to deal with – hiring.
Founders have an internal compass of identifying people in their own area of strength. But we generally cannot replicate that compass to other roles,which require different strengths. Moreover, most of us make the mistake of mirror hiring i.e. hiring people like ourselves, or of not defining a common evaluation process across all interviewers.
With growing teams, it can become messier and messier as founders discontinue their involvement in the hiring of certain roles. As a founder, you inform three crucial elements of the hiring process: (1) how you pitch the company; (2) how you screen beyond paper qualifications; and (3) how you evaluate against what the role and company require. You might be doing these three things well today, but the point is that you need to depend on others on your team to do these well, too. Hence you need to define a process around hiring. Founders don’t scale, processes do.
Over the last year, we defined a process that we employ across all our roles. And we have put it all down in a book so that it can help other founders and teams.
A. First Bhukkad started as there were very few good food options in and around college for food. During my college years, I ran Bhukkad like that. Post that, in 2013, when I graduated, I found that I had a high cholesterol problem and I couldn’t find places to eat. Whatever options were available, were very expensive and were available in a very formal niche environment. Hence the new bhukkad version was born to make food which is fast and also good for the consumers.
Back to the whiteboards. Back to basics. We spent lot of time discussing how can we really solve video discovery problem. I also read Nir Eyal’s “
After all, what’s surprising? Indians including Ajay Banga (MasterCard), Victor Menezes (Citibank), Indra Nooyi (PepsiCo) and Anshu Jain (Deutsche Bank) have been CEOs of global corporations. And it’s now more than 20 years since Rajat Gupta became the CEO of the world’s bluest blue management consulting firm—McKinsey!