Note: SaaSx is an invite only event, for SaaS founders, by SaaS founders. Are you ready to push beyond SaaS survival? Are you all set for Chennai on March 17th? The SaaS world is changing. Niches are breaking out, the number of SaaS startups is increasing by the day. Competition is fierce and being SaaS …
Place of Effective Management (POEM) of a business
Finance minister had announced during budget 2016 that place of effective management (POEM) will determine if a company is resident in India or not. Accordingly, this was notified in Finance ACT 2016 as under. The details of what will determine the place of business rules was not decided in the Finance Act 2016. The POEM …
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Survival is not enough if you are a SaaS founder in India
In an explosive SaaS market with entries from all over the world, survival is not enough. “Survival is not Enough” is the theme of #SaaSx4, scheduled for 17th March in Chennai, and like last time we are heading to the beach. 🙂 SaaSx is a community for SaaS founders by SaaS founders, so if you are just contemplating …
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Why No One Responds To Your Customer Success Managers
Who am I writing this for: people who are building or managing a Customer Success function. What’s my key point: your CSMs need to provide value, and for that it’s better they specialize based on industry (or business-type) versus round-robin or regional distribution. Our experience with the Hubspot CSM When we bought Hubspot as our marketing …
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Startup Playbook for Potential Strategic Partnerships
We spoke to couple of Indian product founders (who went through M&A or strategic investments) and friendly lawyers to extract advice on tips that they will keep in mind when making their next deal. Two key things emerged Unlike a product sale where the value to different buyer is roughly the same, in case of companies …
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How limited access to paid tools as a startup made me realize the need for a community
When I started out as an entrepreneur the journey was fueled by big dreams that were perhaps a bit too daring. It wasn’t smooth sailing and early days were tough. Life in a startup is dotted with challenges that can be overcome only by sacrifice. Bootstrapping required a lot of restraint – both professionally and …
I am the Product Manager
Of the various hats I have worn all these years – Founder, Sales guy, Deployment Specialist, Level 1 and Level 2 Support, DevOps, Coder, Cheque depositor – I have come to realize I was a Product Manager all along – right from the get go. Putting a label on what you do is extremely important. …
A Framework For Building SaaS Products That Don’t Churn
When you say “reduce SaaS churn”, most people will immediately imagine tactics like drip email campaigns, great onboarding, customer marketing, gamification and automated alerts when users show signs of leaving. But this post is not about tactics. This post recognizes that users are smarter than any of the cute tricks we can come up with, and …
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Announcing #BeyondFounders – Connecting Entrepreneurs in need with Doers indeed.
As an eco-system builder, I’m always challenged with finding more Founders to contribute or help other early stage Founders. Normally, successful people have very little time to contribute and many a times, there is no formal platform which allows them to engage on an ongoing basis. Unfortunately, our eco-system has many fake mentors and founders …
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Volunteer Hero: Vivek Raghavan
iSPIRT volunteers build public goods inspired by open-source Linux and Wikipedia. Our volunteers are selfless, committed and conflict-free. They are animated by a burning cause. One such cause is about creating technology platforms that will help make India a Product Nation. Building a successful country-scale technology platform is hard. And doing this as an open …
How we built iSPIRT from scratch, with nothing except a lot of spirit. #iSPIRTturns4
I missed the 4th anniversary celebrations of iSPIRT in Bangalore today as my father has been unwell for the last couple of weeks and I have been avoiding travel. I thought it will be good to refresh my memory by reading up some of the old emails and also share the journey of the 9 …
2017 iSPIRT Annual Letter
Problem solvers, responsible builders of companies, communities and ecosystems are the foundation for progress and growth of any nation. What drives all of them is a sense of challenge, ownership of problems, allegiance to autonomy, demonstration of personal accountability and the thrill of finding a solution. This energy is fueling a growing product movement in …
A budget for “Digital Economy” sake
Looking deeper in to the budget 2017. [An immediate official iSPIRT response to the budget was issued as a Press release on 1st FEB 2017. It is placed in media section. You can access it here.] Budget can’t be construed as main stream policy making exercise. Yet, the policy analysts and experts, track it with …
RBI allows convertible notes for Startups from foreign sources
As part of policy hacks, we covered the issue of Convertible notes being recognized by Ministry of Company affairs (MCA) in our earlier blog here. For benefit of users to start, the convertible note has been explained below. What is a convertible note? Convertible notes are debt instruments that converts in to equity, at a …
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Are AI and Automation dirty words for some?
Man being replaced by machines has been a topic very well documented in our academic and social history. While, designing machines that can replicate human intelligence is ‘the dream’ for many, the idea has seen its fair share of resistance from anxious workers afraid to lose their livelihood. It would be a mistake to think …
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