A Recipe for Selling a Product Globally from India

iSPIRT regularly organises Playbook roundtables to help startups succeed by learning from successful entrepreneurs. One of such roundtable was conducted at GS Lab in Pune on 10th Oct 2015. This PlaybookRT was focused on Product startups (B2B) who are keen to sell to the global market. The PlaybookRT was facilitated by Samir Palnitkar, President of …

How “born globals” dance with gorillas to punch above their weight

For over a decade now I have been studying “born globals” i.e. new ventures that internationalize rapidly, and in particular how these firms leverage relationships with large multinationals to facilitate this process. My studies on this topic span China, India, UK and USA. I recently published a book targeted at other academics, based on this …

SaaSx2 – The Afterword

SaaSx2 just got over last week, and we’ve been talking to several people who attended about what they liked, what they didn’t, and what they might want more of when we plan SaaSx3. We have the ratings from the attendees and also several testimonials that we pored through to get these up for you. Fireside …

Product Market Fit – Pre Event playbook by @Avlesh @WebEngage & Arvind Kumar, @attunetech

The morning of the SaaSx2 event saw a great pre-event playbook at the Attune Tech’s Office. Avlesh from WebEngage, Arvind from Attune Tech. and Suresh from KiSSFLOW came together to host the session and anchor the round table. With a casual round of introductions, Suresh kickstarted the entire roundtable discussion with a question: Who is …

SaaS is the new black – and it has found a place in Chennai

At SaaSx 2015, Girish Mathrubhootham, CEO of cloud-based customer support software Freshdesk and popularly known as the Rajnikanth (think an acting, singing James Bond) of India’s Software as a Service (SaaS) scene, did the unthinkable. He revealed the entire spreadsheet of internal data-based metrics that he presented to his investors in 2011. All the media …

Funding Game – The rules and the hacks via @skirani & @BKartRed

The weather in Chennai was finally getting kinder & more pleasant in tune with the time of the year, much like the funding climate which has been less testing on the entrepreneur in general. Depending on whether you ask a consumer product entrepreneur or a B2B SaaS product entrepreneur, the level of optimism could vary, …

The #PNgrowth #OneThing Series – Mohit Gundecha, CEO of Jombay

When we as a ecosystem try to help our entrepreneurs, we make the mistake of always focussing on the mistakes others have made, and trying to steer away from those. This is evident even from the stuff we write on blogs and platforms with the specific purpose of helping others. Maybe it’s time we step …

The importance of having a defined mission for your start-up

If you are a small team, starting out to solve a problem, having a mission is hardly a concern. What must concern you at that stage is getting to the product market fit and customer validation. But even after building a successful product and scaling the business to a sizeable extent, many startups hardly articulate …

Are you in India/SaaS, and not at #SaaSx2? You missed transparent mind-blowing insights

SaaSx event is a meetup organized by a bunch of SaaS entrepreneurs for all SaaS entrepreneurs in India. SaaSx Chennai event enables SaaS start-up founders to learn and share tribal knowledge from SaaS (software-as-a-service) start-ups in various stages of the evolutionary ladder.  Every participant registered for the event and was vetted for fitness with theme of the …

SaaSx2 rocked :-)

I have read about startup founders who don’t (or stopped) attend events – justifiably so. In ecosystems where there is now an entire industry of events springing up (i.e. it feels to me that some people’s startup in itself is all about organizing events), it becomes very difficult to separate the wheat from the shaft. …

The difference between iSPIRT’s Playbook RTs and what we have planned for the #PNgrowth Camp

We are now only about 90 days away from what will be a first of many sorts in the Indian ecosystem. The #PNgrowth camp at the Infosys campus in Mysore will be the first long-term program ever initiated for product startups in India. That much has been established. But at the Google hangout we were …

The Freemium Business Model – What it is and how to make it work.

Summer’s here! The sun, the vacations, the beach and last but not least, the lemonade stands. Those little kiosks on the roadside and kids standing beside each of them with jars of cold lemonade, glasses, and inviting smiles. So Joshua was among those 8-year-olds who had setup his own lemonade stand, for the first time. …

What the Uber-Lyft war teaches us about success and failure in the on-demand economy

This article is based on the book Platform Scale, written by Sangeet Paul Choudary. Platform Scale is available for free download for a limited period between October 5th and October 9th. To access additional bonus content, check the book website here. The on-demand economy is bringing together technology and freelance workers, to deliver us services …

The #PNgrowth Series 1 – The @Vidooly Secret to Scale

When we as a ecosystem try to help our entrepreneurs, we make the mistake of always focussing on the mistakes others have made, and trying to steer away from those. This is evident even from the stuff we write on blogs and platforms with the purpose of helping others. The things ‘not to do’ always …