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!
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, …
iSPIRT does not fit into known mental model for many folks, they often ask what exactly is it? Few say it is hard to pin it inside a known category or even describe it in words. The 2017 annual letter contains thoughts on what iSPIRT stands for. Some more explanation below on the why …
Continue reading “Explaining iSPIRT – ‘Olympic Gold Quest’ for India’s Product Winners”
When #iSPIRT announced a roundtable on ‘Building & Scaling Growth Teams for Saas Founders’ with Ashwin Ramesh (Synup) leading it, I was thrilled to join it, assuming it would be a direct take off from Ashwin’s session at #SaaSx4. Well, we were not disappointed. I am sure the other participants share my feelings on the …
Before writing something down about our experience at the recently held Product Nation Camp (PNCamp) product teardown session, I think it would be better to give a short perspective on the overall event from the viewpoint of a fairly reclusive startup in the B2B Saas space. UrbanPiper has been around for some time; however, for …
If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses There is a pretty high chance you have heard the quote and an equally good probability that you yourself have used it to support or demolish an argument on “customer knows best”. It is quite interesting to note how quotes …