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Startup Bridge India: Breaking Down Borders, Barriers and BS

India has fast emerged as the world’s second largest Internet market. Since 2012, nearly $15 billion has been invested in tech startups with over 300 M&A deals. However, a large percentage of deals (80%, 2014-Q3’16) were sub-$5M deals driven by acquihires and restructuring. Looking west to Israel and the US, it is clear that for a healthy technology product ecosystem, further acceleration in later stage M&A and buyouts is undeniably required. And with this very thesis in mind, iSPIRT, along with TiE Silicon Valley and Stanford University, organized the inaugural Startup Bridge India event on Dec 2, 2016, with the goal of fostering cross-border partnerships with Silicon Valley corporates to drive investments and/or acquisitions of domestic startups.

We are building auto-pilot software for managing cloud operations. The rocket ship is Silicon Valley and Startup Bridge was our gateway to it. Vijay Rayapati, CEO, Minjar 

The event was an important chapter in the history of India’s tech landscape for multiple reasons.

slack-for-ios-upload-1-nullFor one, it was the first step in breaking down borders between Silicon Valley and India. It is no easy feat to gather the top BD and Corp Dev executives from the largest tech Silicon Valley giants all together under a single roof. But with representatives from 65 corporates meeting 28 startups driving 120 connections for partnerships and investment/acquisition discussions, the very fact that the doors were opened, some even knocked down, was a giant leap for the ecosystem.

We were able to have of bunch of  meaningful 1-1 conversation with potential strategic partners. Sunil Patro, CEO SignEasy 

The second win – a powerful collaborative relationship between TiE Silicon Valley and iSPIRT – was one of breaking down barriers. The coming together of two impactful organizations driven by a similar vision so seamlessly to build a momentous event in ~10 weeks of planning was nothing short of inspirational, an affirmation of the power of the volunteer-driven model that iSPIRT has established itself upon.

The third win, however, was arguably the most powerful – that of breaking down the BS among even the most experienced entrepreneurs in India. iSPIRT has long held a position of being an unbiased stakeholder, with the primary goal of driving positive change in the tech startup ecosystem. Mature entrepreneurs in India, historically big fish in a small pond, have long believed their systems, their pitches, their stories, had been tried, tested and proven. However, playing on the global stage is a whole new ball game and iSPIRT stepped in to break down the BS for entrepreneurs.

I thought I had my deck all figured out. I thought I knew my pitch and had the details at my fingertips. But then I started getting really valuable, thought-out feedback from iSPIRT and I realized I had so much to improve on. I had to focus on pitching to partners, not customers. My narrative was made crisper and my focus was changed from ‘what we’ve done in the past’ to what is coming up next. All of that feedback resulted in a much stronger pitch and more engaged conversations with partners after. Pallav Nadhani, CEO FusionCharts 

slack-for-ios-upload-nullStartUp Bridge India, with an NPS of 68%, was another valiant step towards putting the Indian startup ecosystem on the global map alongside mammoths like the US and Israel. Team Indus, an Indian startup working to land a rover on Mars, is India’s literal moonshot. Startup India, working to increase cross-border investments and M&A, was India’s figurative moonshot. And after Startup Bridge, it was clear, that this moonshop has a robust arm and is gaining an increasingly powerful momentum.

The story of India’s tech landscape is being written as we speak, and the future is nothing short of exciting…

StarupBridge India is an important step forward for India’s journey as a Product Nation. For the first time, it brought together India’s top global startups at this scale to meet and connect with Silicon Valley’s company to explore potential strategic partnership. This conference will be referred as seminal for years to come as it created a key turning point of software products cross border partnerships. M Thiyagarajan (Rajan), CoFounder & Fellow iSPIRT

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Design is about Love and Empathy towards the customer

The Design RoundTable last week lead by Deepa Bachu and Rajan, was not what I expected. By and large, design to me was either a part of an application (UI / UX) or a concept which i did’nt know much about. But, when we went in depth with Deepa, I realized that design is an integral part of who we are and what we see around us.

Through detailed discussions, we were made to think about what design is and what design meant to individuals, communities, startups as well as our customers.  The first task started with a a simple question, what is design? One can come up with several ways to describe it and the audience described it as – Design is something that solves a need, brings convenience, humanizes products (i.e. bringing human touch to products), explores empathy, understands customers and is about continuous learning.  What stood out for me was that design is all about Love and passion in order to bring out the best products/services to address a customer need, in a manner that creates value with ease and convenience. This would enable the users to be at ease and fall in love with what it represents. If a design is thought through with love, compassion and empathy, the user’s journey and experience improves.

The first task in the workshop was to work in a group and explore design features (good vs. bad designs) both within and outside a room. This enabled us to look at things from a design lens. The group came up with very interesting insights of how people dry their clothes in modern buildings differently from those who dry clothes on their balconies or how badly the electric poles in India are designed or how cobbled streets are an interesting design element than traditional tar roads.

IMG_20160409_145508This experience made us understand and be aware of the small and subtle difference between good and bad design. I was able to realize and conclude how crucial it is to be empathetic to customer needs and when, where and how they experience a product / service. Hence, it is essential to understand things from the customer’s perspective which eventually helps us improve the utility of the product and services that one offers.

This applies to all our products and services. We are all trying to build a product around enhancing the customer experience and thinking through each aspect from the users point of view is crucial. How does a user discover your product or hears about you? How do you ease the process of sign ups? How important is the design of your website or application? What does the product do for the customers and what are the benefits of it? These are just few examples of how we can think from the customer’s point of view. By allowing ourselves to think from the customer’s perspective, we are enabling us to re-imagine the product and user’s journey through various channels to engage and enrich with the user.

Another interesting insight was around humanizing products as consumers are humans. Adding a human touch to design can make an experience great. For example, addressing consumers in emails by their names or to have a real person to sign off at the end of an email.

There were many other aspects we covered in our conversations. We discussed the importance of elegance in design and a belief that “UI without UX is Superficial”. We also discussed the importance of creating that WOW factor or customer delight in making customers your brand ambassadors. For creating customer delight, one has to first answer what benefits a customer will get and how one can create customer experience through positive emotion. The combination of these simple three stage processes will help us to think through the various customer delight experiences that we can design.

Another tool that Deepa spoke about and is quite helpful is an Empathy Map. It is a 2×2 matrix to understand the journey of a customer. Four questions need to be asked.

1) What do customers say about your product,

2) What do they do while experiencing your product,

3) What are they thinking while they use the service and

4) How do they feel over all.

This is an experiment which should be done periodically with various sets of customers which can make each member of the team sensitive to the customer journey. An interesting point learnt is that every time we have an insight on one of the four touch points — Say, do, think and feel , we could use this as a starting point. For example, while booking a flight online, how is the customer journey when they first login, are they looking for the cheapest price if so what do they say about that experience, what do they think while looking for the cheapest price (will they get the cheapest price on this website and will the price change later) and what do they feel (lets pay it by it before it changes).

By following some basic templates we can rethink our products and imagine the customer journey in a manner that we could live it on a daily basis. The love / empathy towards our customers, which results in benefits for the customer and eventually helps in designing the WOW (delight) moments are what makes a lasting impact and creates a bond between the brand and the customers.

Hence, design is one of the main pillars of building a successful product and I hope we all can make design an integral part of the organization. Our thinking should bring compassion and love to customers through Design.

Thank you Deepa and Rajan for wonderful session on Design thinking

Deepa is a design and product leader who most recently worked at Intuit as the Director of Design and Product Management. Deepa’s passion is to transform customers’ lives by creating products that solve their biggest unmet needs.

Deepa has 20 years of experience in the Tech industry where she has played a variety of roles across Product Development, Experience Design, Product Management and General Manager. Deepa’s experience has given her expertise in creating and taking global products for both emerging markets as well as developed markets across multiple domains.
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What is Design (Iteration 1)

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What is Design (Iteration 2)

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What is Design (Iteration 3)

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What is design iteration4 ?

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Guest post by Gaurang Sanghvi

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Product positioning is all about connecting emotionally to your prospective customers – Insights from the Positioning and Messaging PlaybookRT

The 50th PlaybookRT session was held at Helion Ventures in Bengaluru to brainstorm and understand best practices for positioning and messaging of startup products. This roundtable was led by Shankar Maruwada, who by virtue of his illustrious past experiences as the brand builder for Aadhar and P&G, and being a successful entrepreneur at Marketics ably anchored the deliberations. Twelve product entrepreneurs spread across IoT, mobile, social, analytics and B2B sectors benefited from the insightful interactions.

This roundtable was special for iSPIRT family, since it marks a milestone of a journey that began with the same person – Shankar Maruwada in April 2013, at the same venue as well! To mark this special occasion, Sharad Sharma, co-founder of iSPIRT was present at the start of the session. He traced back the evolution of PlaybookRTs and explained that these roundtables came to action to fill the need for honest and open peer to peer knowledge sharing and gaining among product entrepreneurs. Shankar recollected his experiences of running the roundtable on the same topic at various locations across India and narrated the differences and common patterns he observed amongst the participants across these sessions. Rajan wrapped up the pre-event activities by describing the metrics iSPIRT uses to measure the effectiveness of such programs, and the way forward.

The roundtable began with Shankar asking all the participants to jot down three things about their prospective customer Bob:

  • The problem that the customer faced/is facing
  • Solution provided by the participants to alleviate the above problem
  • The value/benefit that Bob, as a customer derives by using the above provided solution

Once completed, a review of the pitches that participants had written was done in the group. There was a lot of variety in the pitches. While one such pitch was crisp, succinct and focused on numbers/metrics to drive the value proposition of the solution for Bob, a customer in the B2B space, the other was a story that tried to explain the value provided by the participant’s IoT solution invoking a connect to the customer’s parents. This variety in the pitches generated a lot of discussion among the participants about the best/optimal way to pitch/position their corresponding products.

At this point, Shankar introduced the concepts of curse of knowledge*, and the Golden Circle* that helped the participants to understand the need to emotionally connect with their prospective customers, as well as, the need to keep in mind, the knowledge of the customer (not the know-how presenter of the pitch), while describing the key tenets of their products.

These concepts paved way for further brainstorming on the applicability of the inside – out or outside – in approach of the WHY – HOW – WHAT trilogy of the Golden Circle across different segments. For example, there were discussions on whether it is appropriate in the B2B context to start with an outside – in approach, and vice versa for a B2C context and so on. There was also an opinion that Marketing team in a startup would usually use the Why – How – What route, whereas the Sales team would go vice versa. A video of Steve Jobs addressing his internal marketing team about how they should reach out to their intended customers helped internalize these aspects.

One of the participants resonated with the ill effects of the curse of knowledge when he shared how he had assumed that all of his customer base would be aware of the familiar ‘Settings’ icon. Upon getting a support request from an aged customer, who cited inability to locate the ‘Settings’ option, he realized that he had not provided a text alongside the icon based on the assumption that what he knew would be also known to his customers.

As the group digested these concepts, Shankar nudged the participants to revisit the pitches that they had initially created, and explore if they could make any changes based on the learning they had on account of the above two concepts. This brought about a few revisions to the pitch each of the participants had made. At this juncture, the group listened to pitches from a few more participants and ideated on what aspects of the pitch resonated with them.

The group then moved on to understand in more detail, the art of explaining the core value of their products. This was done by reviewing the Dropbox advertisement* created by Lee Lefever and discussing about how the ad starts by establishing a common connect/chord with the audience (SETUP), and then, in common language (without jargons) explains the key benefits a user would get (SOLUTION) using analogies, and finally, reinforces it with factual details of its features (SUPPORT).

Some time was spent in explaining the importance of using analogies as a bridge to transition the customer attention from the initial few minutes to introducing the product/solution to the customer, while keeping his attention intact. The Dropbox video and another video from the thisamericanlife.org archives*, where a doctor explains the vulnerabilities of children who face daily abuse from drunken parents helped the participants to understand the power of using analogies to convey the right message.

These videos and a couple more on the book ‘Made to Stick’* by Heath brothers helped the participants to craft/revise their positioning and messaging pitches, which started with building a context to establish emotional connect, used analogies to describe the solution and finally strengthened the pitch with factual/logical and data driven narration to make a lasting impression on the prospective customer.

Towards the end of this roundtable, as a last aid, Shankar introduced the 6 tips of persuasion* which entrepreneurs could use to help build up customer connect. As the participants completed these deliberations, they had imbibed the knowledge that being able to connect both emotionally and functionally to the customer is key while positioning and messaging for their products to prospective customers. The participants spent more than four and half hours and not one of them moved till Shankar actually ended this session at about 9 PM.

The evening was very well spent, and the participants had an accelerated learning by virtue of this roundtable. Dinner, arranged by Rajan, courtesy iSPIRT and the friendly staff at Helion provided the perfect way to end a very eventful learning experience to all the participants as they ruminated about the things that they learnt and shared their thoughts about time well spent during the session.

* The following URLs provide additional information about the concepts and views expressed by fellow participants of the previous sessions on this topic. Skimming through these write-ups and watching the videos will provide additional context for those who want more insights:

  1. Simon Sinek’s ‘The Golden Circle’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5Tw0PGcyN0
  2. Dropbox Intro Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4eTR7tci6A
  3. Lee LeFever on the Art of Explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6gyI7_j-1o
  4. Made to Stick–Review of the book (Part 1): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7U74c0Hzbk
  5. Made to Stick – Review of the book (Part 2):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLt3H01XNto

  1. Science of Persuasion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFdCzN7RYbw
  2. Steve Jobs – Think Different Speech:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=keCwRdbwNQY

  1. Summary of the PlaybookRT session on positioning and messaging products, held at Bengaluru: https://pn.ispirt.in/some-takeways-from-the-first-ispirt-playbook-roundtable-on-positioning-messaging-in-bangalore/
  2. Summary of the PlaybookRT on this topic, held at Bengaluru: https://pn.ispirt.in/ispirt-playbook-roundtable-positioning-and-messaging-lot-of-it-is-common-sense/
  3. Summary of the PlaybookRT on this topic, held at Mumbai: https://pn.ispirt.in/8-powerful-things-i-learned-about-positioning-your-startup-at-the-ispirt-round-table/
  4. Summary of the PlaybookRT on this topic, held at Mumbai: https://pn.ispirt.in/why-no-other-product-like-yours-is-not-cause-for-celebration-playbookrt/

12. Summary of the PlaybookRT on this topic, held at Delhi: https://pn.ispirt.in/the-best-things-are-simple-is-your-messaging-there-yet-from-playbookrt/

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The awesome #PNCamp volunteer team

Putting up #PNCamp has not been easy. And the task is only half-done. Volunteering is like an open-source movement. You learn a lot, give back, and lean upon all your co-volunteers to make things happen. There is no institution behind it, no big brother, no event manager, no marketing agency. Just volunteer passion.

It’s the same energy that put up India’s defining product events in the past.

So who are these folks? Lets get behind the scenes…

The Chief Directors… we call them Program Curators

Bala Parthasarthy is program curator and is putting together awesome sessions for Scale Hacking. He is also allowed some free time to run his own venture ! We promise him a lot more free time after PNCamp is over.

Pallav Nadhani is a scale hacking legend and he is program curator for the Discovery Hacking track. His quick fire responses and ability to dissect any situation is only one of his amazing traits. He’s walked the Discovery Hacking trail and has a story or two for you.

Chief Cheerleaders

Our Volunteer efforts would not be complete without the active support of our Product ecosystem stalwarts. Folks like Vijay Anand, Rashmi Ranjan, Kesava, Dorai, Arpit and many of you who have readily helped to reach out.

The Chief Camper

Sharad Sharma, the person who started it all. He has the most amazing vision for Indian software products, and carries this mission with zeal. He unashamedly says he can’t do it alone, so he turbo charges unsuspecting folks like me and we end up being volunteers. Willing volunteers. We get so badly infected by the Sharad virus that we start encouraging others to become volunteers.

The Chief Choreographer

The one man army who’s known as M Thiyagarajan during the day and Chhota Rajan by night. Ok, that’s stretching it but Rajan is one person who’s easily our one man army. Rajan leads the design of the PNCamp. Rajan’s ability to design a program, think objectively and pull resources to make it happen, is unparalleled.

The Chief Distributor

That’s me, Sandeep Todi, reaching out to all you folks with the audience curation team comprising Aditya, Harrshada, Nakul, Sai, Seema and Vijay.  I’m a very responsible person. So for anything that’s going wrong, you can hold me responsible. I enjoy putting fresh ideas and trying the unknown stuff and thinking on my feet. Sometimes these fresh ideas are purely experimental. Sometimes they’re not even half baked. So things go wrong and I look for the villain in our movie so I can blame it on somebody. Trouble is, there’s no villain, only heroes 🙂

The Chief Everything

That’s Avinash Raghava, who is one of guys most well versed with the Indian product ecosystem. Always willing to help, create connects and push for doing things that have never been done before, like the hugely popular Product Nation Round Tables. You name any one part of doing PNCamp that he hasn’t helped with, and I’ll buy you a beer.

The Chief Controller

Dilip T Ittyera, now in his firth startup and previously with a large IT firm, brings you all the goodies. If your Registration didn’t go smoothly, go ahead and blame him. If the arrangements at the venue aren’t up to snuff, you know whom to catch. Be forewarned, he’s one tough guy. If the PNCamp is happening, it’s because he and Avinash went all out to seek support of our sponsors.

The Chief Curators… these are the folks who’ve primarily been responsible for all the chaos. After all, you can’t make a movie without Chaos…

Meet Aditya Bhelande, our Editor. He does more than work on products. He helps people build products. Just as he’s helping to build PNCamp. He’s one of the rare breed who will do anything if he’s convinced about it, and sees it through. Most of us would falter half-way. Many of you will hear from him, the “hand-curtation” is really his editing magic.

Harrshada Deshpande is the Music Director and one of our newest volunteers. If there’s anything beautiful about our movie, its the music she’s produced. Have you seen our awesome website yet? There’s more… the kind of stuff you’re going to see in the coming weeks is entirely her creation. She works on US time, but out of Bangalore, and NOT for US customers. No kidding. Have a call with her at 9pm IST and she’ll come back with a complete set of ideas and mock ups by 9am next day. Awesome!

Nakul Saxena is the Actor-Director-Producer at large. A dependable all rounder, he can act, he can direct and he can even produce. He’s the kind of person who wants to transform from one role to another and does it so fluidly that we find him everywhere all at once!

Sairam is our Scriptwriter. He’s someone all of us turn to. His ability to put together thoughts and communication in a way that is meaningful, impactful and passion-full, is his own undoing. Because if you do something really well, you are destined to do more and more of it 🙂

Sameer Agarwal, the Stuntman. He’s the visionary and the guy who can hypnotize you even on the phone. His vision, design sense and whacky ideas are unmatched in the whole team. It’s what makes us tick. Sameer can jump better than Jeetu, talk better than Big B and dance better than Mithun. So what if these are heroes from the 90s?

Seema Joshi is our Chief Psychiatrist. She can fix all of us mad folks in one stroke. After an hour of meandering discussions, trust her to distil that into objectives and action points. We would be nowhere on a number of things were it not for her extreme clarity and focus on what we need delivered.

Vijay Sharma is Chief Marketeer. the powerhouse that’s probably the combined Klout of all of us. Actually, I’ve never met him but I promise I’ll be able to recognize him within 5 seconds. He’s one of the fastest on the ball and can turn any idea into a plan within that 5 seconds. That’s how I would recognize him!

Each of us has bitten off more than we can chew. Seriously. We’ve got day jobs and companies to run. That should not deter you from talking to us. Click on any of our Linkedin profiles or Twitter handles to reach out.