Gandhigiri to the Software & Technology Entrepreneur – Part II

Gandhi and Customer Centricity

The progression of Economic activity as it stands in the Global Economy today has accelerated from commodities->products->services->experiences->transformations. (Pine and Gilmore)

Today we are already in the Experience Economy (Its Apple like experience, its not apple like products), but as professionals we are still grappling with how we build Products, let alone scaling the Economic activity to be staging experiences and guiding transformations!

While I am not an economist in any regard, and I do not understand the nuances of all industries and their current economic function in India (Are we building products? Are we providing services? or just plainly selling commodities?), its imperative that I comment on only Software and Services.

Before doing that, on the Gandhi Jayanti day, I would like to introspect what our Father-of-the-Nation tried to teach us, by emphasizing on making our own Salt, our own clothes with the Swadeshi Movement OR with his services at the Sabarmati Ashram. Essentially he articulated with his actions what our present day government is campaigning for “Make in India”. How did Gandhi understand the evolution of Economic activity more than a 130 years ago?

Because Gandhi was more customer centric a 100 years ago, than we are today. He empathized with every person, much better than we did. Let me quote the now cliched Gandhi’s quote on Customer Service “A customer is the most important visitor on our premises. He is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him. He is not an interruption in our work. He is the purpose of it. He is not an outsider in our business. He is part of it. We are not doing him a favor by serving him. He is doing us a favor by giving us an opportunity to do so.”

Customer is more important

Empathy By Design

Come to think of it, our entire Indian Cultural ethos is based on Empathy. “Karuna” is the foundation of almost every teaching in our country. Indian institutionalization and Orientation has Empathy by Design. Then how is it, that we have failed to reciprocate to the needs of People? Why is it, that we have not built products, services, experiences that cater to the needs/wants/aspirations of people, when there is Empathy by Design in our culture?

Tough questions to answer universally or generally. However focusing on Software and Services, I think we have become too focused on Systems, Processes and Technology, rather than addressing the concerns of people. We have gotten too-carried away with Western philosophy of Professionalism, which emphasizes a lot on Systems, but empathizes little with people.

Let me give you a more concrete example. High exploratory and high mortality nature of software projects is like an Industry Standard. 9 out of 10 software initiatives don’t go anywhere, seems to be an easily accepted norm. All the cash-rich service majors in IT/ITES industry have not re-deployed their capital to building an Indian Apple today, because they seem to have accepted that Software products have a 9 in 10 chance of mortality. However what they have failed to realize, is all Lean Methods today propose Customer Development first, rather than Product Development. Build it and they will come, is almost an era of the past. Every Agile and Lean technique today is about keeping the Customer-centric view first and rapidly building tools, products, services, etc which empathize with the needs of people.

Making in INDIA

India however has a renewed emphasis on the Swadeshi movement. Its now called Making In India. Every body is now encouraged to make their products in India. However, I would like to draw your attention to Gandhi’s philosophy again, which has found a new meaning, with the Lean and Agile world. Customer Development is more important than Product Development.

Let me go a little further, the first realization all product entrepreneurs need to have is this “Customer is the Product”. Your product is just a medium/abstraction through which, you continuously develop your Customer. Stop fiddling with the Features and Benefits. They are the HOW and WHAT for your Customer. WHY the customer does anything with you and your Product, is essentially what we need to understand.

Making In India, is all about making the Customer or Consumer in India happier, healthier and wealthier each day. Do you have a plan for this? Why should you think about Making in India, is it only for Export? Well, here is why. All new ideas, new software product ideas are imperfect ideas, and need to be tested locally, and refined continually, before we can think of exporting. India today lacks any credible domestic infrastructure or support, to even make little bets, so ideas never go past their imperfect states, and hence never attain Global Standards. So, lets make and try it here first.

Mahatma Gandhi

Conclusion

We are a country blessed with Empathy by Design. We are a nation which puts Emotions ahead of Professionalism. We are a nation that believes in Darshan (of all deities). Truth is, Customer is the first GOD. So, fellow Entrepreneurs, if there is one Gandhigiri that we need to learn, it is to do a full-darshan of every customer, their needs, their wants, their aspirations. We now realize Consumer Development is as important, if not more important than Product Development. Is’nt it then, not automatic, that building a Consumer-Centric Nation, is the first step to building a Product Nation. Lets go and create this change, and let initiatives like iSPIRT and ProductNation be the inspiration through which we can channel our aspirations and ideas. Happy Gandhi Jayanthi to all!

Be the Change

Read the Part 1 here Gandhigiri to the Software and Technology Entrepreneur!

12/08/201411/08/2014

BrowserStack: Redefining Web Testing, Globally

BrowserStack helps you test your website (internal or public) on 300+ desktop and mobile browsers on different Windows, Mac & mobile OS flavors. It solves the problem of not having to setup and maintain multiple Virtual machines and devices to test your website. Ritesh Arora and Nakul Aggarwal are the founding team members. The strength of BrowserStack currently is 50+ employees.

Introduction

You are a web developer, you develop a piece of functionality and you want to test to make sure it works for everyone, irrespective of operating system, device, or browser they use. In an ideal, standards-driven world, this would be a trivial problem: you code using the standard, you run it by a compiler/validator which makes sure your code indeed follows the standard, and you are all set to go.

Unfortunately, the world of web development is much more complex:

All web code (HTML, Javascript) are really instructions to Browser (‘interpreted’ by Browser, rather than being ‘compiled’ into machine code that OS understands), so standards-compliance of the particular browser determines the accuracy of your code.
HTML and Javascript standards have evolved over the years and so different versions and types of browsers may have different level of standards-compliance. All these different versions of browsers are in use on different systems out there.
Given this dependency on Browser (which in turn depends on OS which in turn depends on device), we have a large number of combinations possible, each of which may produce a variance from standard and the code will not work as intended.

Given this complexity, there are 1000s of combinations that may need to be tested to give the confidence your piece of functionality will work for everyone.

Developers (and companies) address this problem by doing one or more of the following:

Identifying a few (10-15) common combinations of OS-Browser-Version and focus all testing there – This is risk-based approach and may be too risky for some companies.
Create Virtual Machines for OS-Browser-Version combination (100-200) and use them as needed – Cost of managing so many virtual machine images can be prohibitive for many companies
‘Rent’ pre-created virtual machines from 3^rd party to make #2 more cost effective.

BrowserStack offers live, web-based browser testing to developers, by ‘renting’ virtual machines with desired configuration. Developer uses a familiar web interface and gets an instance of virtual machine with desired OS-Browser-Version combination to test against.

The founders started BrowserStack to solve their own problems – while consulting (after 3 startups), they found it was very hard to ensure web applications have been tested on all possible configurations.

BrowserStack-Time-line

By May ’14, they had 400K registrations and 20K paying customers.

BrowserStack-CustomerGrowth

The Product

Features

BrowserStack has all the features that a developer needs to effectively test their application.

BrowserStack-Features

Screenshot Service

They also offer screenshot service (how does a page look in different browsers), primarily for web designers who want to ensure their page looks good and consistent across devices.

BrowserStack-Screenshot

BrowserStack-PN

Automation Testing

Browserstack’s Automate Product enables automated testing of your web applications over 300+ browser combinations in 2 ways:

Selenium Cloud Testing – You can set it up as a Selenium WebDriver and code your tests in your favorite language. You can use their dashboard or their REST APIs to access information about your test runs.
Javascript Testing API – You can use it to run Javascript unit and functional tests, standalone, or with testing tools like Yeti, TestSwarm, etc.

They will soon support real mobile devices for Automate. You could run your tests on real mobile devices, get 100% accurate results and avoid erroneous simulators. This is a big deal.

Differentiators

While they have a full bouquet of feature, there are 3 areas they differentiate themselves from their competitors.

Usability

BrowserStack is easier to use than some of their competitors that I tried. Even configuring the local testing (which is a tricky concept) was straightforward and I could complete it in a few minutes.

BrowserStack-Home

Technology

They pride themselves on the technology they have built to enable these features, and the continued effort they put into it. 80% of their 50+ strong team is developers. This is not visible but can be a key differentiator in such a developer-centric product.

Local Testing

They enable you to test local setup. Given the fact that most of the time you want to test before you make your application public, this is a powerful feature. This has been done well even though many of their competitors also offer it.

BS-Configureyoursite

BrowserStack-Mobile

Product Development

The entire team is 50+ employees with 80% being developers. Technology consists of but not limited to plethora of languages including Ruby and RoR, Python, C/C++, Java, platforms such as AWS and co-located servers as well as iOS and Android development.

Most of the development effort goes into making the existing features awesome and robust. Some of the areas the team continues to innovate are:

Infrastructure of real mobile devices
Using better streaming technology to make the screen more responsive
Improve Local testing
Supporting newer browsers/OS mix

Market

Potentially this is a very big market, given the large number of web developers in the world, and this number is going up. However, this also seems to be a crowded space – there are many players offering similar services that are largely undifferentiated (or have hard-to-perceive differences). Their major competitors are Saucelabs, crossbrowsertesting, Browsershots, etc. SauceLabs primarily focuses on automation testing (its founders include founder of Selenium), Crossbrowsertesting doesn’t have good interface, and Browsershots is very limited in functionality. They are much better placed than their competitors. They aim to reach 1M developers.

BrowserStackFacts & Figures

They have some marquee names in their customer list. Also, their partnership with Microsoft through modern.ie (Microsoft’s attempt to help developers test their app on older versions of IE) has been very beneficial to them in bringing customers in.

BrowserStack-Customers

Product Vision and Strategy

They are totally focused on making BrowserStack a technically and usably superior product in the market by far. Their roadmap for the next 12 months includes ability to testing on real mobile devices (sort of a ‘device farm’ available on demand), improving the product speed and doing more aggressive marketing of the product.

From a vision perspective, Ritesh would like to give a browser-on-demand feel to every developer in the world – it should be so easy to load (just like I open a Chrome browser on my machine), so easy to use, that it feels like a native/local instance of the browser that you are testing on. They intend to be the de-facto standard for web testing world-wide.

BrowserStack-Marketshare

The Road Ahead

There is no reason to believe that in future, web technologies will become so standardized that cross-browser testing will not be required. In fact the trend is in opposite direction, with the proliferation of devices, OS and Browsers, we are getting more and more fragmented. Given that future, BrowserStack is well poised to be the first choice for development teams and companies to do cross-browser testing.

Couple of things they need to watch out for:

Enterprise Software Development Process is where lots of engineering dollars get spent – and that usually goes to large organizations (Microsoft, Oracle, HP, and many other process/QA/IDE companies). How BrowserStack fits into that eco-system may very well determine how big BrowserStack can become – developer driving the adoption may be the start but it is unlikely to be the stable state.
Being a technology focused company and located in India has its challenges. Exposure is limited, and also it is hard to get talent in specialized areas like design and product management. They need to address this, and their focus on marketing over next 12 months (as articulated by Ritesh) will help address this.

They have a bright future ahead, good luck to them!

15/04/201415/08/2014

“Software distribution in India is limited to only moving products to warehouses, and not really encouraging its use. This needs to change.” Jayaraman Kesavardhanan, K7 Computing

K7 Computing is a leading provider of information security solutions that protect individuals and organizations from IT threats like viruses, malware and hacker attacks. The company, which builds world-class products and competes with global market leaders like McAfee and Symantec, first achieved major success in a foreign market like Japan, where it has a near 28% market share. The Chennai-based firm has now shifted focus to India and is poised to repeat its triumph in the domestic market.

Founded in 1991 by Jayaraman Kesavardhanan, K7 Computing has come a long way. Today, its products are installed on more than 11 million systems across the world. It has set up a sophisticated ‘Threat Control and Prevention Lab’ that monitors and identifies threats and helps improve product development.The company’s strategy is simple: not compromising on customer needs and sharing maximum profits with partners.

In an interview with ProductNation, Kesavardhanan talks about the challenges facing India’s product ecosystem, the lessons he has learned and how he hopes to make K7 Computing a global product company out of India.

How did you get into building security systems?

Photo Keseven When I passed out of class x in 1984-85, I joined a computer programming course during my summer vacation. It was an occurrence that changed my life. I enjoyed programming so much that I decided this is what I wanted to do. System level assembly languages are what interested me most. While both software and hardware were equally exciting, I decided to get into antivirus solutions – more as a challenge to help people facing virus attacks.

Inspired by McAfee and Norton, I decided to develop a security product as nobody in those days was focusing on developing an indigenous antivirus solution. So in 1991, we founded K7 Computing to develop an antivirus product from India.

How has the company evolved over the years to its present state?

We faced a lot of challenges in our early days. First, we lacked the experience or marketing skills to make the company grow. Our mindset was only to help others by creating and sharing solutions for latest virus signatures. We did not really understand the commercial aspects of business or taking products to bigger markets. We were just good at building products. We decided to move from antivirus solution to offering security suite – this included having separate solution for firewalls and making our product to a better one.

In year 1991, we launched our first product VX2000, said to be the first-ever DOS-based antivirus software. The solution was a great success and got us firmly established in the antivirus software arena.

In 2003, we got our first major break in the overseas market with an attractive partnership with a Japanese software firm SourceNext to promote our suite of K7 security systems in Japan. Our foray into the Japanese market proved to be a great success as people appreciated our products and customer support. Even today, we have a strong relationship with our sales partner in Japan. We are now also working in USA, APAC and the Middle East markets.

Like every other company, K7 too also faced stagnant growth. For instance from 2007 onwards, our turnover failed to grow significantly for five years (2007-2012). This was largely due to slow growth in India as well as flat sales in Japan. However, a revamped sales strategy helped the firm make a quick turnaround and enabled us to record Rs 50 crore in FY13. This year we hope to achieve a significant rise in revenues.

To what reasons would you attribute your dominant position in the Japanese market?

It was in 2002 when our product K7 Total Security was getting completed that we met one of the biggest publishers in Japan called SourceNext. They were looking at new products. As the channel partner had worked with McAfee before, they got greatly interested in seeing our passion and creativity and decided to support our product.

Our partnership with SourceNext was the real turning point for our company and realization of a dream. The new opportunity meant getting entry into a big market and competing with established players like MacAfee, Norton etc. in a market which has been traditionally difficult for Indian products to crack. We started focusing heavily on the product and enhancing its quality to stay competitive.

Thanks to our amazing channel partner, we started doing very well in Japan. We were eventually able to garner 28% of the Japanese market share.

How optimistic were you about making an impact in the Indian market after achieving success in a foreign market?

In 2008, when after making good profitability from the Japanese market, we decided to shift the focus to India. We had a success story behind us and we were confident we would do well in the home market. We set up a team, moved to a bigger office and got sales and marketing strategy in place. But we faced tremendous problems here.

What challenges did you face in the Indian market?

India is a very difficult market to penetrate. You need to learn a lot about the market before you can establish yourself. Users are still using old hardware and there is piracy going on. One thing we realized is that India never had a good distribution system for software products. So we tied up with a few software distributors. What we later learnt was that the distributors work more like logistics partner and do not push sales. They just ship products from one place to another without understanding the concept of packaging, or collecting user feedback. Therefore, this makes the customer acquisition pace slow. Also we don’t have the concept of publishers here, unlike Japan.

We realized that if we wanted to succeed, we would have to step up our focus on marketing. We started becoming a marketing company. We established the entire channel network that took us 2-3 years. Another major shift was to focus on customer service and bring in end-to-end enterprise products.

Today, an antivirus solution is like a commodity product. We decided to sell our products through a typical IT distribution channel just as any other FMCG product. We set up a strong sales team with 120 sales guys promoting our products. Our radical change in marketing approach resulted in 500% growth and we started doing well.

In this highly cut-throat market, what efforts do you take to stay competitive?

We strongly believe in technology and building a product from the start. Some companies are building a solution on top of other services. We start from ground up and then build end to end products which are efficient and superior. We don’t scare users with technology, we believe in educating them about the product and then selling our product.

What is the company’s vision?

The vision is getting bigger. We want touch Rs 500 crore revenue in the next 3 years. We are determined to remain a globally top rated product firm in scanning and performance benchmarks by independent labs like AV Comparatives, AV-TEST, CheckMark Platinum, VB100 award or SoftDisk Magazine. When we can lead in other markets, why not in our own country? The domestic market is growing really fast and we are also hearing about the government’s focus on cyber security and stronger security regulation for corporates. Besides, we already have a good market share in the enterprise section.

We are also expanding our product portfolio from antivirus to other domains of enterprise security. We have been investing heavily in product research and development over the last 3 years.

What has inspired you to get this far?

It is very important to stay focused and have patience. Besides, products take time to mature and you have to continuously improve upon it. Indian market has been growing thanks to IT & ITES, Indian companies have started adopting new technologies, we don’t find technology gaps between India & USA any more, and so it is worth to focus on India all the more.We strongly believe that there is no real leader in enterprise security space from this part of the world, and our aim now is to attain that leadership position.

What changes would you like to see in India’s eco-system for product development?

We would like to see government stepping in with initiatives to promote indigenous software product companies that can incubate from India, scale and compete in the global marketplace through tax incentives like they had earlier given to IT service providers through STPIs, SEZs, etc. We would also like to have legal issues around service tax resolved at the earliest,

iSPIRT can play a significant role in consolidating the voice of product industry and communicating with government. I wish them good luck in this endeavor.

27/09/201327/09/2013

Clearing The Air: 3 Roles Indian IT Providers See as Product Management

The Indian IT industry is over $100bn, but still struggles in creating global IT products. While there has been the occasional Tally, Ramco, or Finacle, there is not much else. One critical reason I attribute this to is that Indian IT companies do not really understand how Product Management can create long term customer value and business sustainability. While one can argue that there have been more of these companies in the last 5 years (Livemint: Tech Startups), the next 5 years will determine whether India has actually created global products.

Most Indian companies view product management as either of these: Product development, delivery (or project) management, and marketing (or marketing communications).

Role 1: Product Development: Great at problem solving, developers are expected to provide insights on what they believe the customer wants, and create products based on their understanding. Let’s admit, very few developers are comfortable socializing with customers (aka Raj Koothrapalli – awkwardness multiplied a few times). I have often encountered developers spending hours defining products, with limited idea on how the customer environments actually are (a few minutes meeting customers would have saved those hours). The smarter ones are able to engage with customers, but put them in front of a business strategy plan, and things slow down again. BTW, this may work for startups, where the founder often has a clear intuition about the idea, but when they have to scale revenues up (to new customers or increased wallet share of existing customers), most struggle.

Role 2: Delivery (or Project) Management: They engage with customers and internal teams, to co-ordinate schedules and resources. However, expecting them to gather requirements because they are engaged with customers, based on which products are created, is better suited for an IT services delivery, not for sustainable product IP creation. Today, most Indian SI companies are struggling as they attempt to create product IP and value, because of this belief and expectation from delivery managers to “productize” based on customer specific projects.

Delivery and Services Approach

Role 3: Marketing (or Marketing Communications): Marketing teams are definitely engaged with the market, but most are focused on lead generation and marketing communications, and the execution of those plans, rather than gather actual feedback. Thus, what we get are customer leads, with very little investment in market research aligned with direct customer engagement. Recall the last time you attended an IT vendor’s event, and exchanged business cards with their marketing person – I can’t!

As long as Indian IT companies continue to depend solely on one of the above to help create long term products, they are going to struggle in creating global products, and building the valuations that Apple / Microsoft / Google / Salesforce (and many others) have.

I end with my definition of Product Management – engagement with the market and customers, through multiple channels, to understand stated and unstated needs, analyze the potential opportunities, align with corporate strategy, and work with sales, marketing, and development teams, to translate the needs into a multi year product roadmap, eventually creating products that customers desire (read Apple, though the approach may have been slightly different 🙂 )

If your current teams are geared and empowered to do this effectively, time and again, then you maybe in the right direction to be hailed as an Indian product company (if not already) soon.

Guest Post by Angira Agrawal, AVP and Country Head – Cloud atNEC India Pvt. Ltd

03/09/201303/09/2013

Interviewstreet’s Role in Recruiting Software Developers

Launched in 2009, Interviewstreet’s recruiting tool helps companies hire software programmers. It was the first Indian company to be chosen for an incubation program at Y Combinator, a Silicon Valley seed fund. Co-founder Vivek Ravisankar discusses the company’s journey to a differentiating recruitment product. This article is brought to SandHill readers in partnership with ProductNation.

Please give me the elevator speech about what your company does.

Vivek Ravisankar: We are on a mission to connect great talent with great opportunities in the fastest, efficient and the most fun way. We use coding challenges and contests to help companies hire programmers. Our product is used by startups (Drchrono, Matterport, etc.), fast-growing companies (Palantir, Evernote, Box, Quora, etc.) and large companies like Amazon, Facebook, Walmart, etc.

Is the contest aspect what differentiates your product in the recruiting marketplace?

Vivek Ravisankar: There are a lot of testing platforms on the Web, but most of them focus on testing through multiple-choice questions, poor programming questions or good programming questions with no customization to the hiring company.

We worked around these parameters to build the best platform to screen programmers. It includes theoretical and real-world coding challenges that are customizable as much as possible by every customer to match their bar. Performance is measured on both speed and accuracy.

Has the tool made a difference in your own company’s recruiting? What challenges have you encountered as a startup that you didn’t anticipate?

Vivek Ravisankar: I didn’t anticipate that hiring people would be so tough. A good guy has at least three companies competing for him. It takes a lot of convincing and a lot of people talking to get the person on board.

If you could go back and start your company all over again, what would you do differently the second time around?

Vivek Ravisankar: I would fail fast. We took a long time to figure out that our first product (mock interviews) wasn’t working well.

Please describe one of your company’s lessons learned and how it affected your product development.

Vivek Ravisankar: We learned to test the app thoroughly before we make a major production push. It’s very easy to get hooked into the “move fast, break things” model, but it may not work if you are in the enterprise business. Your product is being used by large enterprises and any change breaks their process and flow, which is hugely unproductive for them.

This was a big learning when we almost screwed up a good relationship with a customer because of a component that broke. Since then, we have constant tests that run in the background testing every part of the application to ensure nothing breaks.

Read the complete story at Sandhill.com

02/08/201302/08/2013

Economists revise GDP estimates with investment in intangibles

The US economy will officially become 3 per cent bigger in July as part of a shake-up that will see government statistics take into account 21st century components such as film royalties and spending on research and development. Billions of dollars of intangible assets will enter the gross domestic product of the world’s largest economy in a revision aimed at capturing the changing nature of US output. A brief look at the emerging scenario.

Gross domestic product (GDP) is the market value of all officially recognized final goods and services produced within a country in a given period of time. GDP can be determined in three ways, all of which should, in principle, give the same result. They are the product (or output) approach, the income approach, and the expenditure approach. The most direct of the three is the product approach, which sums the outputs of every class of enterprise to arrive at the total. The production approach is also called Net Product or Value added method. This method consists of three stages:

Estimating the Gross Value of domestic Output out of the many various economic activities
Determining the intermediate consumption, i.e., the cost of material, supplies and services used to produce final goods or services; and finally
Deducting intermediate consumption from Gross Value to obtain the Net Value of Domestic Output.

Both firm-level and national income accounting practice have historically treated expenditure on intangible inputs such as software and R&D as an intermediate expense and not as an investment that is part of GDP. Now, this exclusion of intangibles is increasingly questioned. Economists in USA pointed that business investment in intangibles is a vital aspect of business activity, and the investments shown below represent a large and growing portion of the overall economy.

Computerized information (mainly computer software)

The rapid expansion and application of technological knowledge in its many forms (research and development, capital-embodied technical change, human competency, and the associated firm-specific co-investments) are key features of recent U.S. economic growth. Accounting practice traditionally excludes the intangibles component of this knowledge capital and, according estimates exclude approximately $1 trillion from conventionally measured non-farm business sector output by the late 1990s and understates the business capital stock by $3.6 trillion.

Can we expect our GDP estimates to be revised likewise?

02/10/201203/10/2012

Software Products: Funding and Opportunities, Shoaib Ahmed, Tally Solutions (Part 3 of 3)

Read the Part 1 and Part 2 of the series.

Shoaib Ahmed, President of Tally Solutions, began his career as a retail
software developer in the early 90s. Formerly the Founder-Director of Vedha
Automations Pvt.Ltd, Mr. Ahmed was responsible for developing Shoper, a
market-leading retail business solution — and the first of its kind in India to
bring in barcoding to the retail space. The company was acquired by Tally
Solutions in 2005, where Shoper merged with the Tally platform to offer a
complete enterprise retail software suite. In the last of a three-part series,
Mr. Ahmed gives entrepreneurs some advice from the product development
trenches.

In your opinion how important is the concept of funding? Do you think
people can bootstrap easily without funding?

Unfortunately, I come from a bootstrap background so I have to admit that I haven’t
watched the successfully funded companies very closely! Looking at the components,
you need money for development and marketing. I also feel one key component is
requiring enough money to bring on board people with enough leadership qualities and
understanding to pre-empt issues on all fronts. You have to have the working capital to
confidently bring on board people with these qualities. In this kind of context come the
questions: who should fund and at what period of time. There are the elements of the
seed and angel fund — in my mind the concept of angel fund hasn’t matured completely
because there is the expectation is that there isn’t complete clarity but there
is an element of being able to patch the company through so that they experiment through
the formative periods, and the VC comes in when the company is ready to scale, like for
marketing to get big numbers.

The sharpness, unfortunately, is not yet there because the maturity hasn’t been
established. For example, once a product company has been funded, there is an
expectation that the trend set by early adopters is what the remaining set of customers are
going to adopt as eagerly. However, this set may not have bought into the idea yet — but
there now is an expectation that based on the reaction of the first set, the next set will get
automatically attracted and it’s just a matter of reaching out to them. However, the method
and timing of reach out will be different. What it takes and what can kind of expectation
to set is dependent on the fund, but it also largely depends on getting the right kind of
mentoring and product mindset so that the entrepreneur is geared in a sensible manner.

What opportunities should entrepreneurs in the SMB space be
focussing on, other than in the accounting space?

Typically, the mid or large market gets most of the attention. For small businesses,
however, the pain-point is bringing hygiene into working systems like managing books,
inventories and people. At this point, there are options for the small business owner

to opt for enterprise integrated business solutions or specialised applications. The
opportunity lies in recognizing that different segments with different nuances exist —
and your focus is to design in such a way that their respective problems are solved. For
example, keeping in mind what a pharmacy needs both from a software and form factor,
I would say that billing is not the problem but replenishment is. Therefore, a large PC
may not be the solution — maybe an iPad or a mobile app makes more sense. So I would
say that you would need to wear the hat. To find a customer is the first element, and
giving a suggestion which works and bringing new technology in place are areas which
entrepreneurs in the SMB space should be focussing on.

What advice would you give to people who are getting into the product
development space?

First, they should understand the product mindset, which is to be able to identify if they
are building a value proposition. The whole process of product development shouldn’t
confuse them – there is the whole question of what the customer is asking for and what
the product will provide them. This is important, but product development shouldn’t just be
about reacting to market opportunities – arriving at a product design is also critical.

Secondly, there’s also a tendency to concentrate on providing too many features,
understanding customer requirements and being in a perpetual development mode. This is
why the development team has to have a strong business and marketing background.

Thirdly, having a face in the Indian market is a huge opportunity, but technology adoption
continues to be an issue so that needs to be kept in mind. This has a bearing on how you
design the product and experience. How much of that product you’re designing needs a
deep engagement, as well as elements like value and price. There’s a catch-22 situation
here because these elements of the product will still be in infancy – I don’t see a method
which a product company can use to address a market across the entire country. This is
where a lot of product companies fall into a gap because they might move to a partnership
model to sell to more people and this may not always be logical because a partner will
be interested in someone who has already created a market! A product company falls
into this gap where it sells to a few people, finds that it cannot reach out to more, gets
into a deeper engagement with the few customers it has and then loses the shape of the
product. Over the past 25 years, many product companies have morphed into service
companies because of this reason. Yes, environments have changed today: there’s
internet penetration, elements of communication have evolved and so product companies
should leverage this.

Read the Part 1 and Part 2 of the series.