Profit from Price, Always – The Bootstrapped Story of RateGain

This is part of our “Podcast with a Product Entrepreneur” series. Do check out the 30 minute podcast! His first fling with business was a video game exchange, while at school. Coming from a family of entrepreneurs, the question was never about the “Why”; it was only about the “When”. A computer science and finance …

Guerilla Marketing 2.0 for Product Startups!

Jay Conrad Levinson, father of Guerilla Marketing defines it very simply as going after conventional goals with unconventional means! When you are a product startup, trying to build a business on little to zero money, you need plenty of unconventional means. With the rise of social media, viral word-of-mouth options with web and mobile global …

Geeks with Dilli Wallas

Geeks on a Plane (#GOAP) is an invite-only tour for startups, investors, and executives to learn about burgeoning technology markets worldwide. #GOAP is headed to India and after visiting Bangalore & Mumbai the geeks will be visiting Delhi from 27th to 2nd March ’13. We (91Springboard, ProductNation & Moonlighting) are hosting #GOAP while they are …

An iSPIRT’ed Budget

One of the pillars of iSPIRT’s mission statement is a focus on converting the needs of the product ecosystem to policy direction. One of the first undertakings of the iSPIRT community will be to formulate suggestions on how to improve Finance and Investment related policies to yield better results for this industry. And what better time to do …

Build it Right, then Sell it to Many (and Keep Repeating)

Building a software product is more difficult than doing projects or providing services. With projects, software is developed to meet the exact specifications of the client. Work begins only when the contract is signed. The project scope can be defined accurately in consultation with the customer, and deployment happens in a controlled environment at client …

Customer support lessons from the Yellow Tire Company

It’s quite a matter of pride for the Dabbawalas of Mumbai to be counted right up there in the performance toppers chart. With efficiency metrics that any manager would die for, I got the urge to look at another parallel hallmark which has been able to achieve customer delight in a quintessentially Indian way – …

How to go from an engineer to a product entrepreneur?

When you work as an engineer regardless of whether it is startup or a big company (in consulting services or products) you are always given guidance on what you should build. Even the most autonomous programmers when working independently has someone tell him what to do. However when you become the founder of a startup …

In discussion with the Founders of Qualitia

Today there are proven automation tools in the market from  HP, IBM as well as open source tools like Selenium, Webdriver but the success does not lies in just investing in to tools but putting right strategies, best practices in place. Qualitia is a one of its kind platform which intern leverages these tools as …

CIOSE selects 8 #MadeInIndia product companies to showcase on global platform

CIO Strategy Exchange (CIOSE) has selected 8 companies from India from the #MadeInIndia tag to showcase them on a global platform. Its director Ernest M. von Simson reviewed many applications that were submitted and chose 8 companies to showcase when he is here in Bangalore. The eight companies are Kreeo, Cloudpact, OrangeScape, i7 Networks, C2il, …

Zomato “gets” foodies, and it gets them so well

I am a foodie. And a big Zomato fan, no pun intended anywhere. Here, I am going to talk about everything we foodies love about Zomato and all the things it could do better. For the uninitiated, Zomato is a restaurant discovery platform with 74,800 restaurants listed across 19 cities and 4 countries, and claims …

Content Generation – The 10 commandments

Content Marketing is increasingly becoming a key strategy for product marketers. With prospects and customers ceasing to be passive and, on the contrary, actively gathering information, comparing product offerings and alternatives, product marketers are now turning to content marketing as a key strategy for their communication operations. The purpose of Content Marketing is to create …

EmployWise: Improving the ROI in employee lifecycle management

Effective employee lifecycle management is acquiring importance from a talent acquisition and retention perspective; from an employee satisfaction angle; as well as from a compliance and regulatory viewpoint. Many organizations, especially SMEs, are discovering to their dismay that the pile of unstructured employee data they have accumulated is a ticking time bomb. They suspect they …

Sustaining India’s IT Exports Growth: Why Products are the Way?

Going by its 12th five year plan projections, the Indian government expects that the IT/ITES exports from the country would reach $130 billion by FY 2016-17, up from $69 billion in FY 2011-12. That is a CAGR of 13.6%. How realistic is it? The Planning Commission’s (it  has got those figures from IT ministry which …

Will B.PAC and iSPIRT Transform Urban Politics & the Software Product Industry Respectively?

While we usually focus on product, process and business model innovation as the main facets of innovation, some of the most impactful innovation can be the result of new organizational forms. Take the case of India’s white revolution. This was driven by a unique 3-tier structure of organizations – the farmers’ cooperative at the village …

Product Business is Very Different from Services

What is the difference between software services and products? Why is it important for India to be developing products? First Invest, and Then Reap The business cycle in a services company starts with sales, and ends with project or product delivery. On the other hand, a product company must first invest in building the solution. …