iSPIRT works to transform India into a hub for new generation software products, by addressing crucial government policy, creating market catalysts and grow the maturity of product entrepreneurs. Welcome to the Official Insights!
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 …
Continue reading “The Great Facilitation ballgame of Multi-sided Business Platforms”
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 …
Continue reading “The network effect playbook: Social products win with utility, not invites”
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 …
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 …
Continue reading “The Indian startup ecosystem should look at Israel as a role model”
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 …
Continue reading “Q&A with Seclore CEO on Information Rights Management Software”
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 …
Continue reading “#ReversePitch “The day VCs pitch the Startups””
Advisory boards are rarely meant for fixing fundamental flaws with business plans. Having big names on the advisory boards, purely for their name value, rarely works. It might help a little in raising venture money, if at all. However, when composed and used wisely, advisory boards can help your product company choose the right corporate, …
Continue reading “10 Rules for Effective Product Company Advisory Boards!”
Building products when you know the need is hard. Building products which create a new market is harder.In the first case, you know a problem, you envisage a solution and you build a product which solves the problem. People start buying your product as they know they have a need for it.In the second case, …
They say lighting does not strike twice, but it definetly did at Kunzum café where the 4th #PNMeetup was happening. The theme “Making your product go viral on a low marketing budget” got over 40 people to the venue all intent to desipher the Virality dilemma. We had Amit Ranjan from SlideShare’s, Pathik Shah from Hike …
Update: Some readers have asked for information about MOOCs. A (MOOC) massive open online course is an online educational resource that is available for open access via the web. MOOCs originated around 2008 within the open educational resources (or OER) movement. For more, refer to the Wikipedia link. Online learning is undergoing a paradigm shift …
Continue reading “LurnQ: Indian startup that’s building a personalised MOOC”
Was going through popular book “Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff … and it’s all small stuff” by Richard Carlson, PhD and realized lot of the points outlined by Richard are applicable precisely for enterpreneurs in their startup journey. Make peace with imperfection: As a startup, we always are short of resources that are typically available …
Continue reading “Entreprenuers should’t sweat small stuff!”
We are pleased to announce the first Playbook RoundTable for Product Entrepreneurs around Messaging & Positioning. A strong, differentiated & memorable product messaging is essential in creating traction for your product. Effective product messaging speaks directly in the langauage of your target audience. This Playbook Roundtable is brought to you by iSPIRT. One of the initiatives of …
I believe one of the best ways to learn marketing and business in general is to learn from other people’s successes. And in a bid to do that, I am going to bring to you interviews of Indian startups that have taken their products to the world. We will talk about how they got the …
NowFloats – Getting small businesses online in 4 SMSes and 13 minutes! I love clear mission statements, and NowFloats couldn’t be clearer: 9.6 million small and medium businesses need a website. Only 0.6 million have one. That’s 9 million tasks on our desk (and that’s just in India!) I recently got a chance to catch …
Continue reading “NowFloats – Getting small businesses online in 4 SMSes and 13 minutes!”
You may find it useful to read the previous post on importance of ambiguity tolerance and questioning for an engineer transitioning to a product guy before reading this post. When I was first tasked with writing new features for an existing product that contained thousands of lines of code I earnestly started reading through the …