Dr Raghuram Rajan, Chief Economic Adviser to the MoF, GoI, was the chief guest at the IIMB convocation this year. I had the privilege of meeting him briefly before the convocation started. We talked about jugaad, Indian industry’s innovation capabilities, and which companies stand out on the innovation dimension. One question that Dr. Rajan asked …
Collating Problems Worth Solving
In my experience working with Entrepreneurs for the past 9 odd years and possibly have seen a few thousand startups, there is one key attribute that instantly sets apart the startups that just might make it, to the ones that would struggle – the clarity on the problem they are trying to solve. While we …
The Business of Accelerators
Accelerators are in the business of creating Startups – or atleast taking the first bet. Its a startup of startups; Which means, everything they talk about as risk, in venture capital nicely gets bundled up and will get put on the head of what is the accelerator. Going back to the basics, Now depending on …
Sapience Analytics is driving over INR 10 million in annual value per 100 employees
CEO and Co-Founder, Sapience Analytics, Shirish Deodhar, is pleased with the market response to their first software product, Sapience, and says their objective is to become the default standard for Automated Enterprise Effort Visibility and Gain Sapience Analytics was set up in 2008, as a software products company. It was formed by four serial entrepreneurs, …
How Adoor Gopalakrishnan’s Kathapurushan became a Software Product Entrepreneur ?
From being the protagonist of an Adoor Gopalakrishnan national award winning movie to a graphics trainer, from a book publisher to a printer, from services to products, our guest today has been there, done that. Meet Vish, the MD of Logical Steps. ProductNation: Hi Vish. Welcome to Product Nation. Let us begin with your story. Vish: I …
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So you want to enter the US market
As many of you know, Avinash Raghava is a persuasive individual. So when he approached me first to write for Product Nation, after some hemming and hawing, I agreed. On a recent call, he told me that nice though my writings have been so far, he was hoping I could help our readers with specific …
Q&A with ERP Ecommerce Company, InSync Solutions
InSync Solutions Ltd. provides ecommerce solutions for online retail businesses. Many software services companies in India are evolving to products companies. Atul Gupta, founder and managing director of InSync Solutions Ltd., describes how InSync made this transition. SandHill.com: When did you launch InSync as a services company, and what led to the switch to a …
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Entrepreneurship as an extra-curricular and hobby
If today a survey in done in schools across India and students are asked some questions like, What are your favorite hobbies or pastime? What do you do after going back home from school? What do you do during holidays? You’ll get all …
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How and why you should kickstart your Retention Marketing.
I first read the term ‘Retention Marketing’ in an article in a marketing journal at University and dismissed it immediately as one of the new terms we marketers come up with. It was for an assignment and I did not pay it a second more attention than was needed to write a passable term paper. …
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The Great Facilitation ballgame of Multi-sided Business Platforms
Let me start with a simple question. What is common among these, as of 2006 (and, for that matter, even as of today)? – Visa – Sony Playstation – Orbitz – NASDAQ – Microsoft Windows All of these are known examples of facilitation based multi-sided business models. These are not just products or businesses; these are …
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The network effect playbook: Social products win with utility, not invites
The proverbial chicken and egg problem of building a new social product is well understood among tech startups, and it’s been commonplace to follow two contrasting mechanisms for getting traction. Traditionally, startups have solved this problem by racing to connect users with each other, essentially providing them the pipes to interact with each other. Twitter, Facebook and …
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Presentations to CIOSE and the KUDOS!!!
In our latest blog we had written about CIOSE(CIO Strategy Exchange) and about the 5 companies that were shortlisted to provide a presentation to Ernest M Von Simson and these five companies were ArrayShield – “Two-Factor Authentication” C2il – “Asset Life Cycle Management” i7 networks – “Agentless BYOD Discovery & Control” Fieldez – “On Demand mobile …
The Indian startup ecosystem should look at Israel as a role model
I love Israel. Having been there 7-8 times over 5 years when I worked for a company (Mercury Interactive, acquired by HP) that had its development center there, I believe they have some of the best developers, product thinkers and execution oriented folks. They are also amazing at marketing. They have successfully convinced the world …
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Q&A with Seclore CEO on Information Rights Management Software
Often, enterprise goals of security and collaboration are mutually exclusive. Seclore, with customers in Asia, Europe and North America, resolves that dilemma. Seclore’s CEO, Vishal Gupta, discusses Information Rights Management trends as well as development of the company’s IRM product. This article is brought to SandHill readers in partnership with ProductNation. SandHill.com: Please describe your …
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#ReversePitch “The day VCs pitch the Startups”
Depending upon who do you ask the question, the answer to “Indian Startup ecosystem has a shortage of good quality?” would oscillate between kick-ass investors and great customers. While the presence of both is crucial to validate the success of the startup, founders always seem to be cut-off from both of kick-ass investors. With India …
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