Started in 2011 with only three employees, Emportant has grown to serve thousands of users with their cloud based end-to-end HR and Payroll products. Co-Founder and CEO, Emportant, Sandeep Todi says his company is focused to appeal to firms that would identify with its motto, ’Employees are Important’. In an interview with ProductNation, he says …
Product RoundTable Bangalore @ Vizury Office
We had some very good hosts @ Vizury office and also joined by their product folks Shiju and Subra for the Product Round table that was organized last Friday. The other awesome people who were part of the event were Siddharth Ramesh (Exotel), Jose (Weavedin), Vinay Simha (Dfy Graviti), Sridhar (ex-Inmobi), Avinash Raghava (Product Nation), …
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SMBs and Indian Software Product Industry: Intertwined Fortunes
A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty. ― Winston Churchill Small and Medium Sized Businesses (SMBs), the growth engine of India, are on the threshold of a tremendous opportunity. Globalization of trade and the rapid proliferation of computing and communication technologies are affording them a platform to …
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Learning and growing together at the iSPIRT #Playbook Roundtable
The Product Management Playbook roundtable repeated last week with an intent to check progress. The mentors – Amit Ranjan & Amit Somani were keen to know the problems product managers faced while they executed on ideas discussed in the previous episode. We could guess this would be one power packed session, especially from the conversations …
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“Customer Relations is very important” – Kailash Katkar, CEO, QuickHeal Technologies
In this fascinating story, Kailash Katkar recalls the past almost two decades of running a business that at one time faced closure. But riding on quality people, constant innovation and proximity to the customer, Quick Heal has become a leading anti-virus software company that is giving even the international anti-virus companies a run for their …
Platforms and Verticals—What to Build on and for Whom
An important decision is about development and deployment platforms. If your product is targeted for a specific operating system, the choice is obvious. When the solution has to be platform neutral, or if the deployment will be controlled by you (SaaS model), then the common options are Open Source (Linux) and Java or Microsoft Windows. …
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Stop Imitating! Finding India’s True Self
A man with a severe tooth ache goes to the dentist, who upon examining the tooth, assures the man that the problem wasn’t anything serious and that a simple procedure performed under a local anesthesia would help repair the damage. Upon hearing this, the man gets very upset and tells the dentist, “What? Local anesthesia? …
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Kreeo Makes Disparate Information Discoverable and Manageable for Collaboration
Launched in 2007 in India, Kreeo helps organizations enable information discovery, collaboration and co-creation. CEO Sumeet Anand discusses knowledge/information management solutions in a Big Data world and shares lessons learned along the startup’s journey and pivot from consumer to enterprise software. This article is brought to SandHill readers in partnership with ProductNation. SandHll.com: Please describe your …
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Quick Research / Usability Methods: Heuristic Evaluation
(Post 2 of a series on quick research and usability techniques. Start-up’s can use these techniques fairly easily to connect to and understand their end users better, as well as maintain usability standards on their products.) In my last post, I introduced a discount usability engineering method called the ‘Expert Usability Review’ – A method best suited to start-up’s who …
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Where is Dropbox headed?
Having started in September 2008, Dropbox today is a leading cloud storage provider (CSP). It has over a 100 million signed free users and about 4 million paid users (4% conversion rate as quoted often by Houston). Assuming the lowest payment tier (100GB at $99 per year), this translates into annual revenue of about $400 …
Why #Hashtags are the future of monetizing social media
You can’t invite people to a party and try to sell them stuff. Pretty much every starry-eyed startup that went after eyeballs gets it by now. Over the last seven years the web has moved away from a consumption medium (think NY times) to a creation-consumption medium (think Twitter, Facebook). But we’ve been very tardy …
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8 Truths why IT Services Organizations cannot do Software Products
The bread and butter of the Indian IT Industry has been IT Services. IT Services, as the terminology implies, is servicing a customer. A customer states his needs, the IT Services organization makes a proposal to develop / maintain / re-engineer / etc., and the deal is done. As offshoring and outsourcing has matured, customers …
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How to think about a product startup progress ?
One of the most difficult things in a product startup is to know when has progress happened and if it is in the right track. This is an even more difficult problem for first time product entrepreneurs. Not to say that it easy for a second time entrepreneur but in that case experience intuitively guides. …
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Crowdfunding In50hrs: India’s Idea-to-prototype Event Platform
I am in the middle of building two platforms. One being The Startup Centre, the older one, and its younger sibling In50hrs. In50hrs does get a bit of my attention, partly because I find my soul being there with entrepreneurs, teams, and ideas when they get that Aha! moment of breakthrough and build something. Its priceless being …
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Cybersecurity: Israel’s Innovation as India’s Opportunity
India is one of the leading victims of cyber-crime and the cybersecurity market is estimated at around US$218 million. Indian cybersecurity companies have developed indigenous products to address rising cyber-threats, but, with limited success. By contrast, Israel is famed for its prowess in developing innovative solutions for fields that encompass agriculture, medicine, clean-tech, hi-tech etc., …
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