5 ways to increase your CTR on blog posts

For those who don’t know what CTR or Click-Through Rate is, it is the number of times visitors click on the ad placed on your blog divided by the number of views your blog gets. The business rules are simple. You get paid per click that is made on an ad placed in the blog. …

8 Personal Finance tips for Bootstrapping Entrepreneurs

Starting up is hard, make no mistake about it, while media romanticizes startups and mostly talks about the glorious success stories, what goes behind is months and years of toil, frustration, fighting all kinds of odds. Cliched as it might sound but overnight success is the culmination of years of hard work. Bootstrapping a startup …

Learnings from iSPIRT Product Roundtable: Building a supercharged team in Silicon Valley

How should Indian entrepreneurs think about hiring and scaling teams in Silicon Valley? What are the thorniest hiring challenges? Who should the first hires be? How can founders scale culture globally? To focus on this topic, iSPIRT  organized its 2nd Bay Area playbook roundtable– “Building a supercharged team in Silicon Valley”. It was moderated by Jaspreet …

India in 2030’s – Impact of India Stack

The year is 2030. India is a developed, happy democracy. With a population of over 1.5 billion, it has become a role model for other nations, both developed and developing, in putting public digital infrastructure to enable paperless, presence-less, frictionless transactions. The new generation does not know what a government office looks like and has …

Taxes on Imported Services

Tax on Services procured from foreign service providers Startups and SMEs in a digital world use many services from across the world. Skype, Google ADwords and hosting services from foreign hosting providers are some examples. So also are the online services of consultants, designers, content writers and developers etc. There is a service tax required that apply on …

Scalability Vs Sustainability – What should come first for a startup?

In the highly competitive market today, it seems like a trick question on whether a startup should focus on scalability, which seemed to be a trend until last year, or sustainability. Though one might toss for scalability at the very outset, facts speak otherwise. This year, a lot has been written on the high “cash …

Google Analytics For Particularly Curious SaaS People

You are what you measure. This is especially true for SaaS businesses. Our goals and endeavors center on user growth, delivering consistent value, and profitability. This again depends on the efficiency with which customers can be earned, and nurtured. All this begs a question: how do you know and measure the most crucial KPIs to …

Instant, Automated, Remote: An Introduction to Digital Credit

There is today in many countries a proliferation of new digital credit services. These have been especially prominent in mobile money markets in sub Saharan Africa. The poster child has been M-Shwari out of Kenya; though there are a burgeoning array of new varied services in many places. The signals of deep interest from India …

Freedom from fragmentation! Welcome to the ecosystem

The emotions of independence and freedom are flowing around in our hearts; hence it is befitting to discuss the same in a domain where most people haven’t pictured these yet. Let us talk about the product that is eating the whole world – yes, we are talking about the world of ‘Software’ after all. Even …

8 tech products from India for the World

India has come a long way since its Independence on 15th August, 1947. One industry that has really shined for India is IT/ITES and that really have put India in a global map. The major contribution has come in the form of Software services with names such as Infosys, TCS, Wipro & HCL being the …

Uber – Didi Deal – an analysis

On August 1st Uber agreed to hand over its Chinese operations to Didi, in return for a 17.7% stake in the combined company’s equity and $1 billion Didi investment in Uber. Uber, though, will get only 5.9% of the voting rights in the new entity. Investors in Uber China, including Baidu, a big Chinese Internet …

6 challenges faced by early-stage startups that some effective tools can help you combat

Harbouring an idea in your head is one thing. Taking the leap of faith to execute, nurture and grow the idea is an entirely different ball game. It calls for a tribe of people that we call Entrepreneurs. Fortunately, this breed is on the rise. They make this game look deceptively simple. Apart from the …

Announcing #PNcamp2(8th Oct, Pune) – Not bigger, but definitely better

In late 2013, the iSPIRT volunteer team I was part of decided that the best way to approach the problem we had on our hands was to simplify it. We wanted to bring together a group of product people who were ready to ask each other the tough questions. When they came out of the …

Design Thinking- The UnConference way

Gerard Butler and his army of Spartans walking down the stone corridors of the beautiful and mythical surroundings of IIM-B paint a beautiful picture. It’s really not too hard to picture them there, blending in beautifully with the surroundings too. ‘Preparing for glory’- Like the Spartans, Pensaar too is setting stage for the ultimate revolution. …

Through the Effectual Looking Glass

I began my entrepreneurial journey in December 2014. The incidents of 2014, when several cases of child molestations were reported in Bangalore’s schools, had spurred me into trying to do “something” about it. The key to keeping children safe in schools is to ensure that the people who work with them have a good track …