Posted on

Behind the scenes of $2 billion Indian startup movie #PNgrowth

Last month, for the first time, I witnessed something really special. Even for someone like me, whose very job and calling is to evangelise this nascent software ecosystem of ours, this was something extraordinary.

I’ve been doing this a while, and what happened last month was one of the best feelings I’ve had in this journey.

This is what happened: Some of the leading B2B enterprise startups in the country, including Freshdesk, Eka Software, Capillary, Zenoti, FusionCharts, KiSSFlow, etc all got together under a single roof.

This is what they got together for: To help 52 other, smaller B2B startups in achieving scale, like they have.

It’s no exaggeration to say that the founders of these companies are some of the most important product leaders we have.

In the first session itself, Shekar Kirani pointed out that a platform like this will not be easily available, and the assembled startups needed to leverage the best from the network and from the folks who had arrived with the the express intention of helping them. And the product leaders who also made an important point – that they did not want the new age startups to go through the same grind, or make the same mistakes they had made in their years of scaling.

I was amazed. It is almost never that you see such accomplished professionals come together towards helping and nurturing young startups from their own learnings.

And what was this? What was happening?

This was the 2nd edition of #PNgrowth.

The first one had been in Jan 2016 at the Infosys Campus in Mysore where we had assembled around 186 founders to help companies think about Category Leadership. It went really, really well, but the feedback was that that perhaps keeping it focussed for fewer founders would help the cause better.

Many heated discussions were conducted over breakfast, lunch, dinner, and beer (especially beer) on the program for the 2nd edition and on how we can add value to the content.

These conversations were typically 4-6 hours long, which meant that the entire program/content took us over 200 hours with 12 founders brainstorming for the past 3-4 months.

It really did take us that long.

And those deep discussions based on the 1st edition’s feedback was what the program for November was based on.

And now that #PNgrowth 2016 is over, I decided to take a look back and share some of the learnings in organising this, and on how we pulled this together. 

This year, the program was designed to help companies chase ‘Good Scale’, that is, to achieve high growth without compromising on quality. There were 52 founders with us, from all over India, and a few from outside as well.

Before we get into the details, a larger question must be addressed again, largely because it keeps getting brought up. This time, I’m trying to use a different approach to explain this. Bear with me.

WHY IS iSPIRT DOING THIS ‘MOVIE’ CALLED PNGROWTH?

iSPIRT’s mission is to make India a ProductNation. We have many initiatives like Playbook Roundtables, PNcamp, etc which are focussed around building products and helping companies achieve good scale. Although there are many accelerators in our country, very few offer value to the founders/companies. Keeping this in mind, iSPIRT wanted to do something unique and create a platform which would help companies think about growth in an effective manner. More importantly, we want to make ongoing mentorship accessible to the founders.

_mg_0662The goal was to create 8-10 companies every year which would eventually go on to become $10mn revenue companies in the next 3 years.

WHO ARE THE DIRECTORS OF THE MOVIE? 

These are the co-chairs.

The first edition of PNgrowth had just finished and I was looking for someone to be the architect for the second edition. I met Shankar Maruwada for lunch at Muffets & Tuffets and was having a completely different  conversation. But, as we touched upon the PNgrowth topic, Shankar had lots of suggestions on how we could do this better. I immediately requested him to help in designing the program and helping me organise it better.. He accepted graciously, and was keen to help.

_a5a7389My next request was to get Pallav Nadhani involved again. There is a reason for this. Pallav, in many ways, was the person who forced us to think around Category Leadership. The first meeting took place at Pallav’s place which went on till 2:30 am.

By then, I had had several interactions with Aneesh Reddy, and the early playbook roundtables on Product Management had been done by him. I reached out to him and he was very keen to be part of the program and help us.

With Shankar, Pallav and Aneesh on-board, the pillars of the event were erected.

WHERE DID I FIND THE STAR CAST FOR THE MOVIE?

These, of course, were the facilitators.

Around 4-6 months in advance, we started working on the content for the event. Various topics were discussed. One thing was clear to me: Every founder had immense passion and commitment to add value to a certain topic. The format we had in mind was to make very interactive session. All of us had had enough of the ‘sage on stage’ approach. The founders were to lead sessions and work along with the participating entrepreneurs to help them extract maximum benefit.

Many discussions later, Pallav & Shankar actually started with using the frameworks & mindflips and were later joined by Girish & Aneesh. Manav & Shekhar also used the same in their session. 

_mg_7722It was great to see that all the facilitators did an outstanding job of delivery of the frameworks and ensured that they shared real life stories and lots of data and numbers from their companies. What was more important was that they made sure they spent time with all the attendees and ensured they received personalised attention. They were able to build a personal connect and trust within the startup community by sharing internal information even though they didn’t have to, thereby making the discussion even more credible.

WHO CAME TO WATCH THE MOVIE?

Oh, that. We had huge demand for tickets from the audience, the founders of India’s growing startup community.

_mg_9870HOW DID WE THEN SELECT WHO ACTUALLY GOT TO SEE THE MOVIE?

This time, right from Day 1, we only wanted to get select founders to be part of PNgrowth.

To begin this selection process, we laid out which stage of startups would benefit from PNgrowth. We then went on and created a list of founders and reached out to them. Apart from this, we reached out to folks from within the eco-system and got them to recommend companies to us.

Each company was recommended by atleast 2-3 founders from the PNgrowth curation team. We did zero marketing for PNgrowth except for a video, which we used to communicate to potential participants. We received overwhelming response for the event thus putting me in a fix at several situations where I had to inform founders that they have been rejected for a program/event. It was difficult, but in the interest of the event, it had to be done.

_mg_8362
We finally had 54 founders who confirmed their participation, out of which 52 showed up for the bootcamp. These companies were divided into groups of 6 based on the type of customer/geography they were catering to.

WHERE DID WE HIRE THE SUPPORTING ACTORS?

These were the mentors, and we were able to get around 14 founders as mentors and were simply amazed by their commitment for the two and a half days of the event. Mentors were involved in all facets of the event – from intense board room discussions to the dance floor. Let me go little more deeper on the role that they played. In every session, the founders got access to few frameworks, mindflips which they had to fill and discuss with their peers + mentors. Lot of learnings were shared by mentors and it became very valuable to the founders. Very few of them tweeted from the program as everyone was busy interacting, engaging, absorbing content, but here is one of the tweets which acknowledges the mentors.

_mg_9832WHAT ABOUT THE CREW?

Getting to them, the volunteers.

In my work, I get to interact with many volunteers in many initiatives, but this time the commitment and the passion with which the volunteers worked was unimaginable. Folks would go to sleep at 5am and be ready next day at 8am. They would ensure that mentors/founders have had breakfast, etc and would go an extra mile to take care that founders are focussed on their work and don’t get distracted.

Volunteers also interacted with the founders to understand if the pace/level of the sessions suited them. Lot of planning was done in advance that each and every person who is part of PNgrowth goes back with a WOW experience. I still wonder where they get so much of inspiration from.

_mg_8120I don’t know if i would ever be able to do something like that. Hats off to all the volunteers who put together an awesome experience for the PNgrowth family.

SO, WHAT WAS THE MOVIE ALL ABOUT, THEN?

Day 1

The Founders started with a cricket match between the cohorts itself. 

Sharad Sharma, our guiding light, kick started the event with his words of wisdom for all the founders.

And then it began with Pallav’s session on Who are you? As founders, entrepreneurs have to pitch or sell their ideas constantly, so as to inspire the listener to believe in their dream to either fund the idea, join the team, tie up with the startup, or write about the startup. Is there a method to this? Can this be an acquired skill? 

In this session, founders learnt and practiced a simple framework that enables them to improve their ability to pitch their ideas in the shortest time, to the desired target audience – VCs, journalists, co-founders, customers, business partners, and employees.

The next session was focussed on how to maximise the value of your product. If you as a founder were to increase the perceived value of your offering (Increase average MRR by 1.5X and/or reduce churn to 0.5X),how would your economics change? How would it change your CAC, margins? What would you as a founder then do differently with your product strategy, go to market strategy (positioning, marketing, channel, pricing), team/organization structure, to increase pricing by 1.5X, in the scenarios below as relevant to you. This was followed by an interactive session with the mentors. 

This was end of Day 1 and then we had networking dinner, drinks, some dance and lots of conversations led by Vinod & Ashish.

Day 2

The second day was a more power packed with two sessions. To their credit, the founders were highly engrossed in their sessions, sans their mobile phones and laptops which helped in making these sessions successful.

During the first half, Girish and Aneesh engaged in an extremely fruitful session on product-market how to scale 10X with emphasis on how to establish your sales funnel and building a repeatable sales cycle. This session covered on selling processes from SMBs (by Girish) and enterprises (by Aneesh). They also shed some light on how pricing, positioning and selling varies from one geography to another.

Apart from this, Suresh also gave his insights on selling global products out of India.

_mg_7993The complete session went on till almost tea break after which the candidates came back in for the third and final session by Shekhar and Manav.

This session was meant to give a befitting end to the two rigorous days of activity.

While Manav spoke about how to choose your niche category and expand to other similar industries and geographies, Shekhar’s session was centred around what a VC looks for a in a startup. In the session,

Shekhar did a Q&A round with Nags and Girish on what it takes to build a successful organisation.

He also delved a bit deeper on aspects like how to choose the right market and how to intelligently figure a way out of a market and move into one that is expanding by extracting maximum business value.

Here Raghu also added his thoughts on what it takes to raise venture capital and how one should structure an organisation for a CEO to utilise his time in the most efficient manner.

Though the mentors tried to cover as much ground as possible over the two days, they took questions from audiences on anything they still might have a doubt about.

After this was a complete group photograph since some of the mentors had to leave that night. The energy of the picture speaks for itself. Before calling it a day, the founders were given tasks/homework for them to present on the final day.

Day 3

The third day, we had some inspirational stories from Sanjay Anandaram(Seedfund), Mohit Dubey (CarWale),  Phanindra Sama(RedBus), Raghunandan G(TaxiForSure), Sanjay Deshpande(FortyTwo Labs). We had actually planned for only Sanjay to talk about “entrepreneurial mindset” and then we thought about inviting all of the above folks to share their energy.

Something which we had planned for 20-30 minutes went on for around 90 mins and it was an absolute pleasure to hear some of the learnings/failures from all these founders. Below is the NPS score of 89 for PNgrowth 🙂 

nps-score-pngrowthAfter this, all founders were made to do this exercise on “Getting to 3X Growth in 12 Months”. All mentors with their cohorts spent time with the founders and helped them on what they should be thinking about this. Six Founders got an opportunity to share with the whole group.

Finally Shankar invited all volunteers to share few words on why they volunteered for PNgrowth. With it, a spectacular three days came to end, with some photographs and a lot of hugs, cheers, and greetings.

For me, it was a great feeling to see all of this happen, and at this scale. This probably capped off the year of 2016 for me and iSPIRT as a year in which we were actually able to make the ecosystem function as a cohesive, united entity. Lots of work is ahead of us, but as I write this, I acknowledge a task well begun.

_a5a7717

Many thanks to Sairam for editing & Shruti for filling the blanks.

Posted on

Asserting my Maven code-of-ethics and being a Proud Maven at iSPIRT

I am Pallav Nadhani from FusionCharts. Like my fellow entrepreneurs, who dream of making India as a Product Nation and building a great ecosystem together, I found my calling answered with iSPIRT Playbook round-tables. I volunteered to become a Maven so I could share, learn and disseminate the best-practices I had learnt in my entrepreneurial Journey, with other fellow entrepreneurs.

maven-code-of-ethics

Playbook enabled many of us to learn from each other’s successes and mistakes. It was an exciting opportunity to meet incredible and passionate entrepreneurs, and help them in whatever way we can, and also learn from them. I found that there were many like-minded Mavens, who were already helping many start-up founders (attendees), in a completely self-less way by paying-it-forward and not expecting anything in return – and there was a clear blueprint that I could follow. I felt honored to be a part of this iSPIRT Maven-community.

However, during the course of this journey, an unexpected event happened. A couple of attendees, across different playbook sessions, came up to me and asked what we (or iSPIRT) were expecting in return. Baffled by the question at first, I asked them what they meant. Their answer took me by surprise – they mentioned that at a few other similar forums, which they had attended, the equivalent of Mavens had asked for (free) equity along with a senior designation (typically Director or above), in exchange of the knowledge and network connections they were enabling to help such startups. Initially, I thought this could be fair, as different members of the ecosystem may have different operating protocols, but it turned to a point where our actions, which had no such intentions of getting anything in return, were also painted with a similar stroke of doubt. And I realized that this question was not just asked about me, but also some other contributors to iSPIRT.

I was giving completely selflessly, and so were many other Maven’s that I knew, within the iSPIRT community. We never had any intentions of gaining anything, or to further our own self-interest in anyway. However, the attendees assumed, that I as a Maven, would also do such demands in the future. That day, I felt victimized by this system, as my integrity and good intentions were being questioned.

For a few days, I pondered over this conundrum, and I reached out to Sharad and other Fellows in the iSPIRT community. During those conversations I proposed that the best way is either to set a clear protocol of expectations (from Maven’s side) or to not allow attendees to assume. We needed to Sign a Code-of-Ethics and resolve this conflict once and for all. Once we pledge that we will not breach the Maven-Code-of-Ethics, it would not compromise our own integrity in the eyes of the System or other people in the System. So, with the help of the iSPIRT Fellow-Council, we decided to draft the Maven Code-of-Ethics and I have signed it & abide it.

Maven Code of Ethics

As an iSPIRT Maven, I facilitate PlaybookRTs and Bootcamps. This is part of my pay-it-forward commitment to make India a Product Nation. At no point in time, I expect any payback for this from any participating startups in any form including advisory or sweat equity. My selfless contribution is for a cause larger than myself. I hope to set an example so that the entrepreneurs that I touch also embrace the pay-it-forward spirit.

Along with me the other maven who have signed the Code of Ethics are: Avlesh Singh (WebEngage), Aneesh Reddy (Capillary Techonologies), Amit Ranjan (Ex-Slideshare), Amit Somani (Prime Venture Partners), Girish Mathrubootham (Freshdesk), Jay Pullur (Pramati), Paras Chopra (Wingify), Pravin Jhadav(Servify), Rushabh Mehta(ERPnext), Sanjay Shah(Zapty), Samir Palnitkar (Shopsocially), Suresh Sambandam (KiSSFLOW), Shankar Maruwada (EkStep), Shanmugam Nagarajan (24[7] Inc), Sridhar Ranganathan (CrediBase).

Posted on

#SaaSx3 has made a huge difference for Syscon.

Step-by-step secrets of deciphering the digital world.

We are an ERP product company. Our ERP solution, Syscon Cronus is targeted for manufacturing industries. We have all along for the last 20 years were been following traditional marketing route, out-bound. Though being an IT company, may be due to my manufacturing background and our Customers are from the same segment, we never put our stake in digital marketing. We always believed in Outbound rather than Inbound marketing.

SaaS x3 has completely changed my perspective. It was such a power packed digital Sales event. But the real beauty was the way it was structured. Every step was explained in detail that a dummy like was able to understand and implement it.

I really would thank the great guys like Girish, Suresh Sambandam, Pallav Nadhani & Shekhar Kirani who had taken their time-out and make it a point to hand-hold the eco system. Also wish to put my learning as a gesture to them, though many of this information will be available in a much better way in public domain.

Basics of Digital Marketing

Google Adwords:

Efforts:

  • It is all google Adwords, Analytics.
  • If google does not have a category for your business better do not waste your time (or) you can still run your business a life style one.
  • Having identified your business category, Google might provide its key words suggestion. Make sure that you pick the generic ones.
  • Also spend time in identifying your own key words. After the key words are just the way you think that your customers are searching for your product or service.
  • It may not be wise to use the competitors name / brand as your key words. It may fetch more as impressions and clicks but may not conversions.
  • Make sure that you remove the negative key words at least once a week.
  • You have to spend money on Adwords and but decide how much is feasible for you.

Results: In last 2 months we have generated close to 25 inbound enquiries and closed 4 orders

Website:

Efforts:

  • The first day after completing the above the bounce rate of my website was 99.9%. I never scored good marks in my education and I was happy to see that at least my website was doing better.
  • Later I came to know that it is real bad news for the bounce rate being high.
  • What is bounce rate? Bounce rate is an indicator that shows as to how long the visitor spent time on your site.
  • We then spent time in fine tuning the site performance of home page and other page information.
  • We have recruited a full time digital marketing guy who worked on SEO. After 2 months you know now the bounce rate is between 2 – 6%
  • Most important learning was, Call for Action (CFA). When a visitor comes to your site what you want them to do. So the first image in your site has to tell what you do and now what you want them to do. If this is not addresses well traffic will not lead to conversion.

Results: The bounce rate has reduced from 99% to 5 % which has resulted in 70% increase in organic traffic.

Content on Social media

Efforts:

  • It is important that you need to write original interesting content about your product and business.
  • Earlier I use to write articles in Linkedin. But I never thought that it was to be connected to my site. Now I post 3/4 of the article and for balance article it is linked to our site.
  • Presence in Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin is important.
  • We have been making at least 2 posts per week.

Results: This has created traffic from social media 40%.

Make the Customer as your marketing engine.

Effort:

Pallav’s presentation was so impressive. Soon after the event, we have implemented one small thing. In all outbound documents like Invoice, Purchase order, Offer etc., we have just added in the right bottom “Powered by Syscon Cronus” This was delivered with our latest patch.

Result: We have already received 4 enquiries through this.

The product tear down session by Suresh Sambandam was too good and very detail in highlighting the missing parts of our website from the visitor / prospective client perspective.

But the $1 million to $5 million was an ultimate-one by Girish – Freshdesk. In today’s dirty world, no one wish to give out so much of critical business information. I could also see the openness of the Investor – Shekhar Kirani, Accel Partners.

After this SaaS X3, our business dynamics has completely changed. All of us have developed detail eyes in the company. With so much of activity even our development and testing teams have become more agile. Every time when we make a new version release, there will be at least 1 or 2 critical bugs and 5 -6 non-critical bugs. But surprisingly, this time there were no bugs. Our team has become more conscious.

I wish to thank each and every one behind SaaSX, especially to Girish Mathrubootham, Suresh Sambandam, Pallav Nadhani & Shekhar Kirani for their self-less efforts in creating strong SaaS eco system.

Good karma by iSPIRT

Contributed By S.Vijay Venkatesh – CEO, Syscon Solutions Private limited, Hyderabad

Posted on

Getting Marketing basics Right (for First Timers) by Pallav Nadhani, FusionCharts #SaaSx3

Marketing for beginners
The morning of the SaaSx3, saw a round table by Pallav Nadhani, CEO of Fusion Charts.
And I was one of the few lucky people who managed to find a seat at this already cramped round table.

PallavatSaaSx
Pallav, kick-started the session with a question:

Who are you & what will the world miss if your company dies in 10 years?

The question (although slightly morbid) did its trick.
It gave us an idea of what we had in store for the rest of the RT and beautifully set the context for what we could expect. And what we had to do if we had to market a product.

Interspersed with quirky humour, anecdotes, and important questions to ponder, the session was definitely interesting and novel.
Here are some key takeaways:

Aligning Product with Marketing

We usually talk about our product, our goal as a company. But Pallav stressed on the importance of flipping the question and address the problems of the customer.

It’s only when marketing defines product, will the product shape into an answer for the customer’s problems. And you’ll be building something that customers will get value out of.

He asked us to put a “why” to the problem that we were trying to solve for our customers.

An example he cited from some big companies that asked this question:

“Why shouldn’t you have access to your files, whenever/wherever you want?” was Dropbox’s question before they started building their product. Similarly, ask yourself that “why” to the problem you’re trying to solve.
Quoting Simon Sinek’s TED Talk on the Golden circle, Pallav went on to discuss the important questions of the purpose, the process and the result
– Who to reach
– When to reach
– How to reach

Who to reach?

Identify the three personas you have to sell to: Influencer, buyer and user
Depending on the nature of your product, decide who has to be engaged to ensure you’re able to sell to them.
Figure out “Why” should that person use your product? Everybody has a different reason, but what’s that persona’s reason?

If you’re asking somebody to switch from an existing product to a new one, how seamless is migrating? If it’s a new product, how will you sell him the need?

Tip: Ensure you’re asking the same “why” as your customers. Pallav cited an example here. Every time there’s a new download, they send an email to the customer asking the purpose behind the download. This way, they made sure that they were delivering on what customers expect from them.

When to reach?
Collect as much information on your customer (in a non-stalky way, of course!). The information should include the information that they consume on a daily basis, and how do they consume it. And how do you make sure you are in those media, so as to make an impression?

Pallav's RT at SaaSx
A classic example of this that he quoted was the billboards. He asked us to recollect some of the latest billboards, and then tried to delve into the reason behind it. We discovered that we see the billboards that we choose to see. If you’re hungry, you remember a restaurant’s board, or a car if you’re looking to buy one etc.

Tip: Make sure you actively hit customers that are seeking for your product. Identify where your customers would be, and then hang around to make an impression.

How to reach?
We discussed various ways of doing the actual marketing here.

One of the classic marketing strategies is The Sniper Approach vs Carpet Bombing approach to marketing.
Swearing by the sniper approach to marketing, Pallav said that, rather than trying a wide casting net approach with different experiments, try a laser-focused activity with precision, to ensure you nail the sell!

And the only way to do this would be to, Know your user, see if you understand a DILO (Day In the Life Of) your customer (creepy, but highly insightful) and see how you can fit into the picture.

Also, can you partner with someone to push your product? Or can you poach any partners of your competitors?
Tip: Unless you discover who you are, and why you exist, nothing can help you explain it to your customers.

Here’s a quick summary of all the major points:

  • Find that key problem that you’re trying to address and make it your goal.
  • Identify your ideal user & study the various personas.
  • Now ensure you “marry” the your goals to the user’s needs.
  • Work towards creating an experience, so your prospects take action.
  • Collect as much information as possible on your customer, so you know when and how to hit them with your product.

Happy Marketing!

Posted on

It Was a “SaaS”y Day at Chennai: Chapter 1#SaaSx3

The April sun wasn’t evident at the beach side locale, near the historic town of Mamallapuram, which hold relics of exceptional beauty on its rocks sculpted under the patronage of the Pallava kings. Had it been the early part of last century, in all probability, we could have reached this place in passenger boats sailing through the Buckingham Canal, now condemned to history. It was using this canal route that the national poet Subramanya Bharatiar escaped to Pondicherry to prevent an imminent arrest by the British to endow us with memorable literary gifts in Tamil.

By favourable alignment of choicest factors, Chennai is home to successful SaaS enterprises. To say SaaS is the preserve of Chennai is surely an overstatement. To put it in perspective, it is a worldwide phenomenon and Chennai has made a mark in India. Undoubtedly, the success of Girish Mathrubootham (Freshdesk) has a lot to do with Chennai hailed as the SaaS capital of India, with Suresh Sambandam (KissFlow), Sanjay Parthasarathy (Indix), Krish Subramanian (Chargebee) and Lux (Unmetric) in the elite SaaS league giving an aura to Chennai, not to forget that it was Zoho that made it to the big SaaS league, taking on Salesforce, from Chennai.

At SaaSx3 it was a day filled with peer-to-peer learning, some fun, and a super-duper end. Playbook roundtables, One Thing Series, Product Teardown, and a presentation of “superscaling” (my term!) by Girish as the grand finale completed the agenda. Pallav Nadhani of Fusion Charts and Krish Subramanian of Chargebee (in partnership with Suresh Sambandam of KissFlow) engaged select SaaS startups on a roundtable each. iSPIRT’s agenda of peer-to-peer learning and networking, with the intention of forming a vibrant community of product entrepreneurs, took the form of playbook roundtables where the successful entrepreneurs share the secret of their product success with the product startups. The focus of both the roundtables, where I spent some time in each, was on the product. While Krish focused on taking the product from 0 to $1 million, Pallav chose the marketing as a tool for product’s success.

Find out why the customer chooses your product

Krish spent a considerable time in explaining the key to product success – understanding the persona of the buyer. “Product-market fit is constantly evolving,” he said. The process doesn’t stop with customer acquisition and onboarding but continues with retention of the customer, on what is now called the customer success. Acquiring the customer is a tedious process for which several methods and processes come in handy. The important take-away from this session was understanding the customer’s intent to buy the product. Krish liberally quoted from Chargebee’s experience to explain his perspective – their assumption of why the customer bought Chargebee flipped on its head when they saw the real data on why they did. How to find out? It is best to ask – first through a non-intrusive e-mail followed up by conversations and further e-mail exchanges.

The whole point of the discussion hovered around the 10% conversion rate – of prospects into buyers. But Suresh clarified that it is a benchmark for large enterprises, but the real numbers that convert is the key rather than the percentage if the customers are SMBs.

Krish said that the choice between free trial vs freemium is loaded in favour of freemium. But what usually happens is that the free trial users pump up the numbers (the customer count) but largely the free trial customers don’t turn buyers. The truth is freemium works well but free trial also works. The real answer is it all depends on the product. What also works is adding a “powered by *product logo*.” This has worked WebEngage and Freshdesk. WebEngage had a “powered by *logo*” on its product design (for a cheaper priced version) so that it gets more prospects into the funnel. If the customer is not paying, at least he can be used as a channel for prospecting. Freshdesk used the “powered by *logo*” on all its customer support e-mails (which is actually generated by Freshdesk) sent by the free user in its forever free product.

Another important aspect touched upon was making the pricing transparent and known, especially if the target customers are SMBs in the case of self-servicing SaaS products. If the customer base is large enterprises, the price conversation can happen offline and it is not necessary to provide price information on the website.

Constantly evaluate your customers and look for influencers

When I entered the conversation, Pallav was focusing on why, how and what of the product. He defined customer cohorts as influencers, buyers and users. Pallav’s proposition was a lot deeper – a good product markets itself. But you also ask deeper questions – even the reason why you (your product) exist to answer the other defining aspects of why the product sells (Pallav’s recommendation: view Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle video on why, how, what). The why exists converts simply into what problem is the product solving. But identifying the customer is a continuous evaluation process. Only if you know why you exist can you target the most appropriate buyers for your product so that your solution is aligned to their needs. For targeting customers at the right time, you must understand the customer behaviour a bit deeply. Pallav gave examples of how customer habits can be known from data. His marketing pitch was a bit philosophical quoting Seth Godin, who said, “The valuable forms of marketing are consumed voluntarily” (read Three Changes of Marketing). The network effect is powerful, as Avilesh Singh of WebEngage explained using his product marketing strategy. He said how changing his focus from marketing execs to developers as customers reaped rich dividends.

But, beyond all this, remember the most essential aspect is the product itself, which should be flawless from the customer experience point of view. Then other aspects are built on top of it.

Posted on

Inviting the most ambitious product founders to learn growth mantras at PNGrowth

FusionCharts is one of India’s oldest product companies, and easily one of the first to get on the SaaS wave to world recognition. This makes Pallav Nadhani’s company one of the first few in India to actually face the problems that are now ruining the sleep of the nation’s new product company CEOs. As Pallav himself says, building the product and validating is one thing, and scaling it completely another. The challenges are different and tougher, as are the decisions you need to take.

In answering the question as to what would have helped him and his company at the stage when they were reaching the point when they needed to scale, Pallav says what we’ve heard from so many people in the last year or so – that there was no one to guide him and the organisation at that time. Simply put, no one he knew had done this before, and there was no one to go to for advice.

In this short video from us at PNgrowth, Pallav talks about all of this, and how much organisations need this kind of help at that stage, thus making the case for why we are trying to put together PNgrowth, a platform to bring together India’s early stage software product companies. In collaboration with Stanford’s Graduate School of Business and Duke’s Fuqua School of Business, iSPIRT’s #PNgrowth initiative aims to get the people who want to learn, and the people they need to ask in a room, and give them the perfect space to learn and grow.
In this video, Pallav Nadhani talks about FusionCharts’ journey, why he’s part of this initiative, and why he believes that PNgrowth could help product companies take their game to the next level.
Posted on

Global Lean Sales: The power for Demos

Playbook RoundtableOn Oct 18th iSPIRT organized a #PlaybookRT in Mumbai and the topic of discussion was Global Lean Sales. Pallav Nadhani founder of FusionCharts came down for the RT and shared a lot of useful information about how they do things at Fusion Charts. Most of the information from the RT has been covered in Rushab Mehta’s excellent blog post about the RT. I am just adding to that post…

Pallav showed us the demos that Fusion Charts built for their products and I wanted to share a few thoughts about what I learnt from that…

When selling online using a low touch sales model, the web site must replace the sales person at least in the initial phase of the sales cycle. And that is a very difficult job to pull of.

You need to anticipate every piece of information that the prospect may be interested in and make that easy to find. Your web site must then convince the prospect that your product is the right solution to the problem they are seeking to solve. Or convince the prospect that your product will enhance their business and give them a competitive edge.

But the web site must still be simple and clutter free. Putting pages of text explaining everything is of little help because the prospect will rarely spend so much time reading. So what do you do?

Almost everyone today will put up a product tour/demo to try and solve the problem. But a one size fits all demo has its limitation. Not everyone can see a general purpose demo and connect the features to their business requirements, without help from a sales person.  What can work much better are industry specific demos so prospects see how your product can be used in their industry (or a closely related industry).

Seeing the product in the context of one’s usage scenario can make it much easier to understand. Also instead of throwing all functionality at the prospect, only specific features can be showed in a usage specific demo.

FusionCharts does an amazing job of this. Their products enable data visualization and on their web site they have built a comprehensive section with dashboards to showcase the different capabilities of their products.  This includes a Gym Dashboard which demonstrates how membership based businesses can analyze their membership via cohort analysis and a really cool Music Player which showcases the performance of their product.

Looking at these dashboards it is clear that a lot of thinking and effort has gone in to them. It is surely not a trivial exercise and would require a dedicated person/team to pull off. But I think the effort would pay dividends in prospects understanding the product and encouraging low touch sales.

It has inspired us to try and do the same for our product SOHODOX.

Contributed by Shiraz Ahmed, Founder and CEO – ITAZ Technologies

Posted on

Global Lean Sales – Selling your software online to global markets, without field-force #PlaybookRT

Last week I was going through the startup class videos and one particular statement by Sam Altman stuck with me. He said “All successful founders are fanatics”. And YCombinator has seen a whole bunch of them. The way he puts it is very awesome, let me reproduce the statement here:

“The word fanatical comes up again and again when you listen to successful founders talk about how they think about their product. Founders talk about being fanatical in how they care about the quality of the small details. Fanatical in getting the copy that they use to explain the product just right. and fanatical in the way that they think about customer support. In fact, one thing that correlates with success among the YC companies is the founders that hook up Pagerduty to their ticketing system, so that even if the user emails in the middle of the night when the founder’s asleep, they still get a response within an hour.Companies actually do this in the early days. Their founders feel physical pain when the product sucks and they want to wake up and fix it. They don’t ship crap, and if they do, they fix it very very quickly. And it definitely takes some level of fanaticism to build great products.”

Read the full talk here (later)

2014-10-18 15.23.57

This statement came alive for me yesterday when I met Pallav Nadhani, the founder of FusionCharts. As he walked us through how he built his company and sharing his experiences and wonderful insights in building his company, his fanaticism was apparent. I am sure everyone who was there, wanted some of it to rub on to them. Even though it was a “RoundTable”, I think Pallav had more experience than a lot of us and pretty much carried the group. He shared some very cool insights, with real life examples and actionable suggestions.

There were 11 of us, all selling business-to-business (B2B) products in the range of $1000 – $75,000, some online, some offline, most on a subscription model, some early stage, a few past the validation stage. Almost half of the founders depended on high touch sales and half had products that were Do-it-yourself. Here is a summary of the meetup:

Pallav’s Story

Pallav shared his story on how he started the company when he was 16, to get some pocket money. He made a charting widget for himself and then wrote an article about it, which became popular. Then one thing led to another and he now runs a company that publishes 90+ types of charts has 23,000 customers and 70 people. Some of the things that he focused from very early on was:

  1. Reduce all friction for the user who is evaluating the product.
  2. He promised his users that they would get their money back if they could not build the first chart in 15 minutes. That helped him simplify the on-boarding process and make it very easy for his users.
  3. He was a one person company for a long time and handled everything from developing the product, documenting it to doing customer support.

Documentation

Pallav’s father is an author of 15 books on accounting and that gave him a strong foundation to document his product very well. This was particularly important since his target audience was developers who needed good documentation to use the product.

  1. Pallav himself wrote 3000 to 4000 pages of documentation and still reviews every word that is added by his team.
  2. Documenting the product gave him key insights as a user and helped him refine and debug the product.
  3. Every time someone asks a question. His team is forced to answer using a public document. This made sure that the same question did not get asked again and also created a good knowledge base for his product.
  4. He learned from his father on how to structure documentation (with headings, sub-headings etc) so that the reader can quickly find out the relevant sections to read.

There is another interesting anecdote. jQuery was a late entrant to javascript libraries and according to its creator John Resig, it was because it was the first one that was properly documented.

Marketing and First Impressions

Pallav’s hypothesis is that all sales / conversions are driven by “Fear” or “Greed” and products must highlight these in their marketing copy, specially the headling. He even asked all of us the rephrase the core message of our product to appeal to one of these emotions. I had strong reservations on whether this was correct and if this lead too to much focus on top of the sales funnel (new visitors). Either way, the group seemed convinced. While I thought it went went with Pallav’s aggressive and “switched-on” approach, I have my doubts if it works for all kinds of products. Products have the personalities of their founders embedded in them, and I feel its best to stick with the approach that goes best with the philosophy of the product and the creator.

Pallav also referred Kevin Hale’s analogy of building a customer relationship like a marriage and how the first visit of a customer on the website is like dating. For more on this, I would recommend Kevin Hale’s enlightening talks on the matter (later!).

Some other interesting points that were discussed were:

  1. Classify your traffic into different personas. For Fusion Chart, it is the Developer, Product Manager and Designer.
  2. Deeply understand each persona. Appreciate that they are overloaded with information and identify openings in their daily routines where you can reach them.
  3. For security startups, a weekly roundup of major reported breaches worked well when sent at 8.30 in the morning.
  4. Online marketing has evolved from “carpet bombing” to “sniper”. Audience have to be segmented and messages have to be finely targeted.
  5. It is important to reach the users main Inbox and not the promotions box. So keep the mail personal and do not add an unsubscribe link.
  6. Pallav showed how he used WebEngage for conducting surveys on their visitors and how he tested his hypothesis. For example, his survey would ask if a visitor intends to pay for the product on offer or select an open source alternative. Based on the feedback, Pallav said he would change the marketing copy.
  7. He also used VWO for A/B testing and showed us an example on which one of “HTML5 Charting” or “Javascript Charting” resonated more for the user.
  8. Asking feedback from customers who had evaluated a product was also important. A simple email with the subject “5 minutes of your time for 5 questions” gives Pallav great customer insight.
  9. He said he tests all kinds of hypotheses and keeps experimenting on the message. Examples:
    1. Do users like a simple or complex layout
    2. How many fields should a form have
    3. What colour a button should have

The attendees at PlaybookRTContent Marketing

We spent a whole bunch of time discussing and sharing great insights on Content Marketing. Sahil Parikh of BrightPod.com shared his experiences in content marketing. He has built a product for the marketing community and started a blog with the purpose of reaching out to this community. It took him six months of building the blog before he saw some returns. He has hired two content writers and produces 3 to 4 blog posts a week. He shared that aggressive content marketing teams target producing one post a day. He also reached out to Indian authors on popular blogs like ZDNet and TheNextWeb and pitched the Indian product angle that got him attention. Sandeep Todi of Emportant.com shared that he bumped into a content writer for SiteHR, a popular HR portal and is how working with her to build content for his product.

Content marketing seemed like a favorite of strategy of a Lean Sales team but again it boils down to execution. It is very hard to product high quality content and as more and more people start getting good at it, the bar keeps on increasing.

Some content ideas / anecdotes shared were:

  1. Interview / Talk Show Series: Publish interviews with customers and thought leaders in the domain
  2. Use big brands in your blog posts. Examples from Fusion Charts:
    1. How Unilever / Walmart / P&G uses data visualization
  3. Act on industry events:
    1. Security Breaches
    2. Flipkart Billion Day flop
    3. Home Depot breach
  4. “News Jacking” – Connect popular news items to your product.
    1. GangamStyle in numbers
    2. Infographics on FIFA World Cup
    3. 10 infographics on Fitness Apps
  5. Put customer logos on your site, content unless the customer objects. Don’t mention it in your contract or it will trigger a red flag.
  6. Allow your site content to be reproduced.
  7. Curate, collate good content from other site and credit the original author.
  8. Get quotes from industry influencers, the will also ReTweet your content.
  9. Speed is of essence. Create great content quicly (yeah right!).
  10. Publish whitepapers. They are popular with higher management.

Sales Funnel

Pallav walked us through the various parts of the sales funnel.

[From his slides]

  1. Awareness (ads, blog, event, word-of-mouth…)
  2. Initial Visit
    1. Different channels / different ROI
    2. Best channels = low cost, high ROI
  3. Engagement
    1. Trial, case study, whitepaper, anything that could give you email AND other information
  4. Nurturing
    1. Mix of product, marketing and sales
    2. Sales job: get the customer on the call and do aggressive follow up
  5. Closing
    1. Handover from sales to client success.
    2. Repeat business through subscriptions, up-sells or cross-sells.

Pricing

There was a very heated discussion on pricing. Pallav was of the mainstream industry opinion that price is a reflection of value. The higher the price, the better the quality of customers and revenue. There was a discussion on discounts and how in high touch sales, discounts are a bane. Here Pallav shared that adding artificial constraints to negotiate. For example, you can extend the support by 3 months instead of giving a discount, or increase the number of servers etc.

Open Source

There was some resistance and suspicion from the group in discussing this and understandably so because of the nature of the software products business that depends on Intellectual Property Rights. We did touch upon this briefly and why based on our (ERPNext) experience we see open source as a great way to not only reach out a new generation of users but also believe in an alternative way of doing business.

2014-10-18 15.24.15Conclusion

It was great to learn from Pallav, and we thank him for sharing so many suggestions and learnings. Also a big thanks to him for openly sharing specific insights and walking us through an A/B test or testing an hypothesis. This is also a great initiative by Avinash Raghava and iSPIRT, the think-tank/lobby group for Software Products to bring together entrepreneurs so that they can share tips and build networks. It would have been a bit better if there was more unstructured time so that there would be better interaction between the group, to build deeper relationships between the founders. Also a big thank you to FreeCharge.in for hosting the event and providing lunch.

Finally what really matters is execution. For me the biggest takeaway was that the product is a reflection of the creator / founder and it was important that the founders are obsessed with each detail of the product and its quality and also work with the energy that is required to do so much work. For that it is important that they see success early on as Pallav did and the once they are on to something they make sure that they do not lose it.

Specifically, for me it reminded me that its time to go back to fixing the documentation!

Posted on

Pallav Nadhani @FusionCharts on Bootstrapping your Startup the right way, all the way #BootUpINDIA

Success is often measured by how much limelight you managed to get. Real success however, belongs to those who dig in and chart the fabled hockey stick growth path. Companies like Fusioncharts, Rategain and Wingify are but a few examples of globe scale bootstrapped Startups from India. Does Bootstrapping happen out of accident or by choice? Is it a long term bet or a compulsion? What are the other myths behind Bootstrapped vs Funded startups?

Pallav shares the secret sauce of successful Bootstrapping in this heart-to-heart chat with Sandeep Todi, iSPIRT volunteer and himself a bootstrapped entrepreneur. Listen to him talk about the challenges he faced and how iSPIRT #BootUpINDIA will help you as a Bootstrapped startup. You can view the video and post a question to Pallav right here.

Posted on

Sales Wisdom from Million Dollar Product Companies

Why Buy Mine? This is the question I have kept asking myself ever since Pallav and Paras did their “Global Lean Sales” session at the #PNCamp in November. I used to send a long email before and often had to explain a lot to why we charge higher. Now I just use the below message and it does the job. There is nothing different from what we were doing earlier. But our message to our market is now very different and converts them into trusting buyers faster .

“Industry Leaders like Freshdesk ( Customer HelpDesk ), WebEngage ( On-site Customer Engagement), Flipkart’s Payzippy ( Online Payments) have chosen MyPromoVideos for their videos because we were able to consistently deliver “magic” to our client’s brands, not just videos.”

I was so much in love with two of their slides from their presentation that our team here decided to do a beautiful “Info-Graphic” around the same. If you are not satisfied with just 10% growth every month and want to grow exponentially on steroids, you need to build your sales team. This is the infographic to keep by your desktop.

Sales Evolution - Wingify and FusionCharts (1)Thanks to Pallav, Paras and the Product Nation for helping Entrepreneurs succeed.

Guest Post by Gopal Krishnan, MyPromoVideos. Gopal is the Co-Founder of www.MyPromoVideos.com and takes care of Sales and Marketing. He builds trust with his Sales Systems and brings in the customers

for MyPromoVideos
Posted on

Customer discovery meets Indiana Jones at #PNSummit

If you haven’t made up your mind whether you should be at PNSummit, then you’re probably thinking too hard.

It’s not a Conference.

It’s not a Conference.

Yes, I said that twice.

It’s brought to you by iSPIRT ProductNation. And a team of selfless volunteers who want to give back. These guys have regular companies to run. And day jobs. Putting together #PNSummit is back breaking work. But they enjoy it. Ask anyone of them if you think this is hyperbole.

Product companies at different stages have different needs. #PNSummit is styled like a bootcamp. Only, it focuses on the underserved entrepreneur. Is that you? If you’re between 9 months to 18 months old you’re probably searching for a lot of answers. But we don’t have any. All we have is a method. It’s a secret sauce that’s going to be revealed at #PNSummit Customer Discovery Hacking Day on December 4th. This sauce is cooked by Pallav and his team of cohort leaders who will take you through an entire day of… ok let me stop here.

I don’t want to spoil the fun. Not yet. This is for believers. We’re not taking in everyone who applies. It’s selective, based on your current profile. Even if you don’t make it, you’re probably very good at your trade so we’re not being a judge here. Our goal is to have similar minded people in the room, who want to learn and are eager to share. In many ways Discovery Hacking is also about discovering yourself. It’s like Indiana Jones, who never fails to surprise even himself.

Meet us in Pune this December. Only a 100 will make it, so think later, act now. You can apply here.

Sandeep Todi

Co-founder of a software product and a #PNSummit Volunteer

Posted on

What to expect in the first #PNSummit – 4th & 5th December, Pune

The #PNSummit is going to be an event like none other. Volunteers who are from the Product community themselves, are putting it together and building it on the pillars of intensity, focus and exclusivity (only practicising product professionals attend the PNSummit).

Here’s a quick peek into what #PNSummit is all about

At present, most product companies in India are clustered around two specific life stages:

  • Getting their first 0-10 customers, OR
  • Going beyond their initial 50-100 customers (for B2C one could say 200,000 users). These are also called as being in the Happy Confused Stage (post product/market fit)

It is with these life stages in mind that these two themes have been designed:

Customer discovery hacking – curated by Pallav Nadhani (CEO of FusionCharts)

Customer growth hacking – curated by Bala Parthasarathy (Managing Partner, AngelPrime)

Each of these themes comes with a series of sessions where participants are grouped into circles based on their life stages and will be immersed in an experience of deep discussions, brainstorming and hands-on exercises.

Invited delegates will be grouped into circles based on their life stages and Broadly these circles are:

  • Circle 1  – In Discovery Hacking Stage.
  • Circle 2 –  Happy Confused Stage
  • Circle 3 –  In Discovery Hacking & Just crossed Happy Confused Stage

 

We’re putting together each circle with a lot of effort and each session will be facilitated by an expert in that area. The mode of discussion is expert-facilitated and not expert-advice and that is what will make the discovery process truthful and meaningful!

If you are a product company then you are at some point in the spectrum of  discovery hacking -> product/market fit -> successful product business and are you are pushing yourself to move the next stage.

Reach out to any of the delegate experience volunteers of #PNSummit, Sandeep Todi, Sameer Agarwal, Dilip Ittyera, Seema Joshi, Vijay Sharma, Avinash Raghava,  Aditya Bhelande  & Sairam K to find the right inner circle for you. We’re keen to invite as many companies as we can accommodate, and the quicker we hear from you, the better we can make your experience.

 

Posted on

Pallav Nadhani’s list of Top 10 mistakes entrepreneurs make…(Part 2 of 2)

Pallav Nadhani, CEO and Co-founder of FusionCharts, was just 17 when he started the data visualization product company in 2002. The company today is one of India’s most successful product stories and happens to be one of the first Indian start-ups to have caught the eye of the Obama administration. FusionCharts has a user base of 450,000 across 118 countries, and the company celebrates its 10th year of existence on October 22, 2012. In the second half of a two-part interview with pn.ispirt.in, Pallav Nadhani tells us about keeping a product relevant in the constantly evolving market, how he communicates with team members and what it’s like to work with teams from two very different cities in the country! 

This is part 2 of the interview titled – Find out what inspired Pallav Nadhani to start FusionCharts on their 10th anniversary.

How do you manage to keep your product relevant in the market? How do you keep yourself in the game even after going through the process of scaling and maturing? Usually after this it’s a case of either re-birth or death, right?

For us a couple of things work well : there are nearly half a million developers out there who use our product, so we get more feedback than we can sometimes handle and implement. This is huge repository for us to understand where the market is going. There are some developers out there saying in a few months or few years we see ourselves using the product this way so we require this functionality. So there’s a lot of consolidated information that we get from both our existing clients and prospects, and we add some amount of research and gut-feel to this so that we can improve the different versions.

If you had to pick three functions in the company which are critical for a product company like yours, which ones would you choose?

I’d choose engineering and marketing together first. In our case, marketing and engineering go together because the value proposition and positioning done by the marketing team is done in consultation with the engineering division. Similarly, right from day one of product development, marketing defines the product features such as labels so there is a lot of interaction. I would choose the support function next, because ours is a B2B product so implementation does require some amount of support.

What are some of the tools and techniques that you use internally to keep communication alive? What are some the things that you do keep communication going right from the top to the most junior most employee?

The advantage we have is that we are a really small company — we have a team size of about 60 people. So anything that’s happening gets communicated within the team quite easily. The next advantage that we have is that most of the team is based in Kolkata, and I like to say that the Kolkata team is more like family because of the inherent nature of the city! In terms of messaging, We’ve divided teams into functions so if a team needs to know something, we tell the team head and the trickle down effect just ensures the right communication. All the heads are supposed to involve their team members, and this is relatively easy because there are only four to five members per team. Then we have layers of communication protocols built over this, so engineering has its own system which is visible to everybody within the team. For cross-company communication its either face-to-face or I send out an e-mail — since this is quite rare (like once in three months), people do read them. I also ensure that I ask a question or engage the reader somehow so that I know who is involved. We also use Yammer, the enterprise social network. Another thing we do is celebrate birthdays, so this becomes a one or two hour event which does involve some discussion.

How do you manage the culture difference between Bangalore and Kolkata? Both the cities and their people are very different — Bangalore is more fast paced and Kolkata is not like that.

Like I mentioned, I tend to say Bangalore is the team, Kolkata is family! There are some inherent challenges : when we brought in some senior management in Kolkata there were some issues as most people were used reporting to me and suddenly it wasn’t the case anymore. Now the senior management is trying to put in more systems and processes so that that Kolkata team can work more professionally! There was some resistance, of course, but once they were able to see the value of the changes then things changed. Now there is data to react to, and today they are able to pin-point where things went wrong and fix it. Overall, I’ve not had any major problems. Initially, for the first six months I had to go to Kolkata once every week to act as a mediator. Now I go once in six months so I guess that really shows how far we’ve come!

So FusionCharts has now matured and you’ve been in the business ten years — what are the nuggets of information you’d give product company entrepreneurs out there?

There is nothing thats right or wrong. It depends on the context of the product your are building. A few things that you need to get right are even if you are a developer, you need to focus on packaging your product. Packaging and marketing has an important role to play as no product can really be sold on it’s own — there are only exceptional cases like popular apps which get downloaded millions of times. Team building is another important thing — once your product starts getting traction, your company will get split across so many different functions that you will require help with this. You’d like to believe that you can solve every problem, but it’s not very scalable. Specifically in India, an entrepreneur requires a lot of focus. If there’s a new product idea every week and there’s no focus on one thing, it can disastrous. For the last ten years, we’ve just focussed on data visualization — despite the audience we have and despite our capabilities, we’ve not ventured into other areas  because we know that this particular category has a lot of scope and if we branch out into too many other things we won’t be very good at any one thing.

What is the leadership style that you employ? What do people typically have to say about your leadership style?

I would say mine is more of a laissez-faire style of leadership. It’s very different from the concept that people are not trustworthy. I prefer not micro-manage — I believe in giving people work and a broad outline and let them go about it. At the end of it I’ll tell them how I feel about what they’ve done.

Pallav Nadhani’s list of  Top 10 mistakes entrepreneurs make

  1. Not delegating early and enough for the fear of things not getting done correctly
  2. Hiring senior people who don’t fit and have different expectations and lesser hunger
  3. Not setting culture right – focus is more oriented towards result, than behavior. Also setting unreasonable deadlines which set the wrong culture.
  4. Using the same team to deliver multiple products – bandwidth bottleneck
  5. Not establishing clear communication channels and ownership between teams when moving from generic team members to specialists.
  6. Not getting enough exposure locally for hiring — like the first 4-5 years I lived a cocooned life in Kolkata.
  7. Not bringing in a sales team early — they bring in more deals to close and also free up your time
  8. Losing focus in between — too many products and extensions
  9. Not saying ‘no’ enough to many employee and customer requests
  10. Building custom additions for a few customer along with the main product — upgrade issues.
Posted on

Find out what inspired Pallav Nadhani to start FusionCharts on their 10th anniversary.(Part 1 of 2)

Pallav Nadhani, CEO and Co-founder of FusionCharts, was just 17 when he started the data visualization product company in 2002. The company today is one of India’s most successful product stories and happens to be one of the first Indian start-ups to have caught the eye of the Obama administration. FusionCharts has a user base of 450,000 across 118 countries, and the company celebrates its 10th year of existence on October 22, 2012. In the first part of a two-part interview with pn.ispirt.in, Pallav Nadhani talks to us about what inspired him to start FusionCharts, the importance of marketing in a commoditized industry and how the company believes in training and retaining its talent.  (Don’t forget to download the Free copy which has the complete story of FusionCharts)

Pallav, congratulations to your team and you on FusionCharts’ 10th anniversary. We’re curious to know — when did you decide that you wanted to get into the product space and start a company? What was your inspiration?

I call myself an accidental entrepreneur for a reason. When I started thinking about FusionCharts, I had no idea I was going to develop a product or even run a company. It was something I wanted to do for pocket money! In 1999, I was in Class 11 when I came across this site that accepted innovative articles on technology. By then I had already done a bit of coding (there’d been a computer in my house since I was eight years old) and I was using Microsoft Excel in school, and I hated the boring charts that the program created. I thought — why not convert those boring Excel charts into a lively format for the web? So I wrote some code, and then wrote an article based on that code which got picked up by a website called ASPToday.com. I got paid $1500 for the article which is a lot of money when you’re 16! I got a lot of feedback from developers on the article, and it got me thinking: if so many people were interested in the concept and were giving me inputs, why not consolidate all the modifications and start selling the concept as a product? So there was no market research as such. However, I did make a clear-cut decision when it came to choosing between developing a product and a service: despite the fact that I had some experience working in a service model (I worked in my dad’s web design firm), I knew that there were problems like working with only one client at a time, and the fact that people didn’t trust you as a 17 year old! So for a while my dad fronted me: he would bring in the clients and I would do the work.

 

In a product company there are guys who develop and then the guys who package, market and sell the product. Traditionally, in the services model it’s the developers who tend to take center stage but in the product space people usually say it’s the marketing which makes the difference. What’s your take on this?

I absolutely agree. When we set up FusionCharts we were very aware of the fact that we were going to be operating in a commoditized world. Our top five competitors are amongst the biggest companies today: Microsoft, Yahoo, IBM, Google and Adobe give competing products for free and there are others who also offer charting libraries like ours. On an average, our product is 10 to 100 times more expensive than our nearest competitors. Still, we’ve grown in this fiercely competitive market, and this is not just because of our product: it’s because of our positing, our story telling and the whole packaging. Other products out there directly appeal to developers who often have limited budgets when it comes to purchasing components — but our approach involves appealing to the level just above the developers who are often the decision makers and this has worked well for us.

Much of a product’s success relies not only on quality of the development but also on the kind of people who are part of the team. You have guys who are hesitant about joining a smaller setup because they are worried about stability and are unsure about joining a place which gives no guarantee whether it will exist the next year or not.  What’s your strategy when it comes to hiring good people?

The only time when we found trained talent is when we shifted to Bangalore, but this was for the middle management level. We’ve found it quite rare to find ready-made talent at the development level. At this level, almost everybody who is on our team has come to us fresh out of college, and have been trained by us for anywhere between 12 and 36 months. We’ve trained them with the approach of building the product. This is important because one of the issues we had with people who came from bigger companies was the difficulty they had in adjusting to the fast and agile environment of a product company like ours. So we decided it would be better to concentrate on hiring high intensity guys, giving them some light projects to work on and training them so that they’d be good to go in a couple of years. This also helps create a sense of loyalty because we’re taking them on board at a very early level in their career and this means we have a lower attrition rate.

You make a very valuable point. So what do you feel about the fear in the market about spending time training freshers and then watching them jump ship after spending about two years with you?

I look at it as an engineering challenge: if a guy is willing to move to the competition, what are the incentives that he’s getting? Nobody moves from a product company to a services company purely because of the type of work. Sure, some companies sell to employees just like they sell to customers and the employee may want to opt for a bigger brand name but this is often at the cost of his or her engineering lifestyle. What you do at a product company like ours is something that you can talk about to your friends, you know where your code is going, you have a complete idea about the product and you can proudly point out what your contribution is. In a large organization this is not really the case, and often you don’t have a clear idea of why you are writing a certain piece of code, and you may not be able to talk to your friends about what you do because of confidentiality clauses. Whereas here, you’re given a problem statement and given the freedom to figure out how you want to approach it. Then there are things like the US President Obama selling FusionCharts in 2010 to design digital dashboards for the federal administration. These things inspire confidence in employees, and give them a level of satisfaction. So the employee has to make a decision if this is something he or she wants to give up, as well as give up working with a team he or she has grown comfortable with.

Read the second part of the interview where Pallav shares the list of Top 10 mistakes entrepreneurs make…(Part 2 of 2)