On Aug 15th 1947 at the dawn of India’s political Independence, Jawaharlal Nehru delivered his “Tryst with Destiny” midnight speech. In 1991, India gained economic freedom from a clutch of socialist era shackles. In 2017, it is time for India to redeem its “pledge in full measure” towards freedom of the individual and enterprise to …
Build On IndiaStack – Venture Pitch Competition
Announcing ‘Venture Pitch Competition: #BuildOnIndiaStack’ Dalberg and iSPIRT invite applications from early-stage ventures that are tech- based solutions leveraging the India Stack platform at the core of their business model to bring financial or transactional services to the underserved in India. Pitch to some of the leading investors and thinkers in the Indian start-up ecosystem, including …
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Being entrepreneurial isn’t just for startups
An unusually hectic travel schedule this summer took me to four great cities in four weeks: London, Chicago, Dubai and Beijing. In each, I learned about at least one interesting organization. In London, I added to my knowledge about Unilever, the well-known consumer goods giant whose products range from soaps and shampoos to ice creams …
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Innofest to Innonation
Evolving from a festival of innovation to a platform helping innovators to succeed… Over the past 3 years, while volunteering for Innofest – the platform for hardware entrepreneurs – I realized two things: Doing a hardware product in India is much tougher …. … but there are several resources available across the country that can …
Announcing Product Pathshala #ProdShala, 15–16th Sept, Goa
I’m sure you remember the popular song Masti Ki Pathshala from Rang De Basanti. We are planning to pull together something similar for the Product Thinker community. Last month, in a collaborative post, we spoke about the missing Product DNA in India. We got an excellent response. Many product guys resonated with the problem and …
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What I learnt from organising 100 #PlaybookRT. #iSPIRT
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 …
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Understanding Your Customers And Building For Them – #99PlaybookRT
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 …
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Virtual Teardown Experience
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 …
Are you having fun in what you do? #PlaybookRT
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, …
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0 – 100 customers! How fast can your SaaS startup accelerate?
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 …
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The cause of ‘SaaS’ Industry is top priority on iSPIRT’s policy radar
‘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 …
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Are you a Baba Entrepreneur? 98th #PlaybookRT
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 …
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Experiments with psychology that got us 4x Conversions on our website
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 …
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The End Doesn’t Justify The Means: A Public Statement
[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 …
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Time to decode the ‘Social’ in ‘Social Commerce’
“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 …
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