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!
When I was a kid, the only goal that I had in my mind was to become a cricketer and play for India. But never did I get an opportunity to play beyond the gully cricket and few matches as part of the school cricket team and my cricket was just restrained to the park …
Continue reading “What I learnt from organising 100 #PlaybookRT. #iSPIRT”
Building great products requires us to understand customer needs and its nuances, are more often than not, counter-intuitive to our assumptions. The Design Thinking Roundtable session by Deepa Bachu helped us identify methods to bridge this gap between building great products and understanding customer need. I was lucky enough to be part of the small …
Continue reading “Understanding Your Customers And Building For Them – #99PlaybookRT”
Recently, I got the opportunity to participate in a virtual product teardown session. After attending SaaSx4 teardown, and participating in PNCamp hyderabad tearddown, I was curious to see how it would work in an virtual format. In a teardown, you get critical (sometimes more critical than you expect!) feedback on your product, if you don’t …
Michael Jordan once remarked: “I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times I’ve been trusted to take the game’s winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life and that’s why I succeed.” Ask any entrepreneur, and they will say, well, …
Continue reading “Are you having fun in what you do? #PlaybookRT”
The toughest challenge in your startup journey is getting to the milestone of first 100 customers. iSPIRT’s 97th PlayBook RoundTable, ‘Zero to One’ was held last Saturday in the hot and humid city of Chennai. Ankit Oberoi from AdPushUp moderated the RoundTable which was attended by 13 other startup founders eager to know how to …
Continue reading “0 – 100 customers! How fast can your SaaS startup accelerate?”
‘SaaS’ can drive the future of Indian IT Industry both in International trade as well as domestic front. With changing dynamics in Software sector globally, ‘SaaS’ can help India remain a Software power house. iSPIRT has been following ‘SaaS’ industry growth from this perspective. The realization that there are several policy hurdles for ‘SaaS’ industry …
Continue reading “The cause of ‘SaaS’ Industry is top priority on iSPIRT’s policy radar”
Let me set the stage for iSPIRT’s 98th Playbook held at the EKO office in Gurgaon. 43 Degree Celsius in a very dry and dusty Gurgaon summer, a Playbook on “The Hard Truths of Entrepreneurship” and a bunch of battle-hardened entrepreneurs of the size of a cricket team – What do you think was …
Continue reading “Are you a Baba Entrepreneur? 98th #PlaybookRT”
Attracting potential customers on your website is always challenging. While you somehow manage to figure that out by SEO, Adwords and Social Media Marketing, the second challenge comes up – how to get those potential customers to pay. Getting customers to website is the tip of the iceberg, getting them to pay is the real …
Continue reading “Experiments with psychology that got us 4x Conversions on our website”
[Given the course of events that have unfurled recently, iSPIRT created IGCC to investigate, and strengthen governance. Sharad Sharma, who has previously apologized and accepted responsibility on Twitter, has reflected further on the topic, and written this post. We are putting it out to ensure that this starts the right discussion inside iSPIRT and outside …
Continue reading “The End Doesn’t Justify The Means: A Public Statement”
“If I had to guess, Social Commerce is the next area to really blow up” – Mark Zuckerberg ‘Social Commerce’ or more simply ‘Social Payments’ has been a relatively new concept to come up in the last few years. And in most cases, it remained like the early days of big data – easier to …
Continue reading “Time to decode the ‘Social’ in ‘Social Commerce’”
One of the top two responsibilities of the CEO is to ensure that there is sufficient cash in the bank at all times. That often requires raising money from investors; an unpleasant task for most people! This article discusses a mindset change that is useful for fund raising. The company by itself is a product …
Continue reading “Creating a company brand — outside a product brand”
The capability to build something – a product or a solution – is, but, just the start of things. Capability is needed to build a product but capability is not what gets your product to be loved by your (potential) customers. One leverages capability to create a functionality (call it a feature, if you may). …
When we launched iKen two years ago, (The Way of Successful Entrepreneurs and Launching Pre Entrepreneur Program) we weren’t sure if a “reality-focussed”, “deep-dive format”, “away from jingoism”, bootcamp would have many takers. More importantly we weren’t sure of the impact that we would have. This was after all a side project for everyone involved. Two years hence, this …
For the last two decades I have followed global products and success stories, and a question constantly in front of me is why India has very few globally comparable products and even fewer category leaders? Despite India’s vast engineering resources, budding design talent, and our hustle mentality, we have not been able to create a …
Continue reading “Do we have the DNA to build great products in India?”
How one entrepreneur’s mountain looks like a VC’s molehill The apocryphal story of a newbie B2B founder, with deep domain knowledge, but no experience as an entrepreneur or in a startup. Note that while this example is not based on a single entrepreneur, it’s a composite to highlight the extremes. Amita was a deep domain expert, …