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7 Ways to Avoid Your Product Company Becoming a Services Company!

Product companies (especially those focused on the Enterprise) always face pressures, primarily that of cash flow in the earlier years, forcing them to take on more services components. This is especially true in countries like India where angel and venture investments are not as plentiful as in Silicon Valley. This is a trap that product companies will find it difficult to emerge from once they get into it.

Just to be clear – there is nothing wrong in being a services company! In many ways, it has better cash flow profiles in the earlier years enabling companies to ramp up with additional people and “projects”. But, you may not be able to make progress on your product vision, unfortunately!

How do you avoid this situation? Here are 7 ways you can avoid this trap:

1. Stick to your Vision, Test and Pivot: As we learn more about Lean Startups, one of the best ways to avoid becoming a services company is to make sure that your product is needed, clients will pay for it and you can build a company on it! You talk to potential clients before you build the product. Even then, you build only a Minimum Viable Product (MVP), roll it out and test your hypotheses by getting to revenues. If revenues are minimal or non-existent, you pivot and build something that someone will pay money for, and soon!

2. Build Features Based on How many Users Ask For Them:  In one of our enterprise product companies, we had a simple rule – If one client asks for it, it goes into the backlog list. If two clients ask for it, it goes into the next major release. If three clients ask for it, it goes into the next sprint!

3. Turn Custom Components into Product Features if you can: Try not to build components for any one client. Parameterize the client’s requirement into a more general idea and make what they are asking for, a specific case of that! For example, if they require your product to work with a certain brand of a reporting tool, think of how you can generalize it so that it can work with most reporting tools. You may need to build additional components but it will be worth it when the next client needs your product to work with another brand of a reporting tool!

4. Line up Services Partners Early:  Large product companies deliberately price their professional services much higher than their service partner ecosystem does. For example, if you were to source Oracle product expertise from Oracle, it will be an order of magnitude more expensive than obtaining it from a service partner of theirs. That’s how they prevent themselves from being sucked into spending too much time on services and away from their products. For small product companies this may be difficult to do, but if you find service partners who are also service partners for related products, they may be interested. It will involve sharing your revenues but that’s the tradeoff!

5. Line up Product Partners Early:  Products have natural boundaries and it’s good to recognize them early on and bring in product partners that do those things better. For example, if your product addresses a specific vertical with a core solution, line up product partners for related needs like reporting, social media integration, telephony integration, etc. You cannot be everything to your clients and identifying related product partners early on will help you avoid the trap of reinventing all related wheels all over again! Of course, you need to architect your product in such a way that it can easily integrate with other solutions!

6. Refuse Non-Core Competency Opportunities:  This is easy to say but tough to follow in real-life if you are a product startup. If a client offers you money to do a related thing but not quite what you were hoping to sell, you may need to refuse it! But that’s exactly what a product startup needs to do to stay true to its vision. If three clients ask for this other thing, that’s a Pivot! Take it and go forward!

7. Plan ahead for Cash Flow Pressures: Product companies are not for the faint hearted! Do not embark on even writing one line of code before you talk to potential prospects about your ideas, show them sketches of what you were thinking about, and finding out what they are willing to spend for such a solution. If you are already well into having two or three clients and it is a case of scaling, you may need to pivot to products that could scale up better, faster.

It pays well to remember that with product companies the goal is to write code once, get paid many times. With services companies, you write code once, you get paid once! Very rarely do you get to write code and retain the Intellectual Property that is general, and can quickly be sold to other clients, unless you subsidize the initial development substantially!

Again, there is nothing wrong with being a services company. It has its plusses and minuses, but without paying attention to strategy, proper architecture and partners, you could end up becoming a services company when you want to go the other way!

I already am a product – Lady Gaga
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Commitment delivery percentage – an indicator of future success of startups?

Here’s an interesting new term for entrepreneurs to be aware of – Commitment delivery percentage. I dont know for sure but I think in a year from now, most startups will start to follow this metric more seriously than others. Some investors are already claiming this metric to be the #1 indicator of future success of startups.

At the Microsoft Accelerator in Bangalore, there are 11 companies in our current batch (Sep to Dec). Every week I send our reports to all our mentors with the weekly commitments that startups have signed up for and how many of them have met their commitments.

Since startup discipline is something I am very passionate about, it goes without saying that I track everything at the accelerator.

Commitments fall into 2 buckets – product and customer. Overall we focus on 3 areas in the accelerator –Product development, Customer development and Revenue development, but initially revenue development is largely ignored since most folks are building MVP and getting early adopters.

Each of these 2 buckets of commitments is not something the startup comes up with alone in a vacuum.  I typically discuss the commitments at our weekly all hands and it is a fairly public affair. While some teams try to lower the bar for their commitments, most are aggressive with what they commit to.

Product commitments are delivery of new set of features, versions or changes per a customer / early adopters requirement. Since many companies have mobile or web applications, most startups at the accelerator become customers of other startups so the feedback loop is quick and immediate.

Customer commitments are a combination of # downloads (if mobile app), or active users, engaged users or user feedback. Since I fundamentally believe that nothing’s possible without customer’s (who have a problem) at a startup, most companies have customer commitments from the first week. During the early days it was mostly meeting customers to get feedback and showing mockups, wireframes, etc.

The weekly report I send out to all mentors (currently over 70 folks) are to people who are committed to helping these startups and are engaged with them every week, either making introductions or reviewing progress and trying their product.

As with most reports, I can tell quickly who has read the report and who has not. On average 30 mentors (less than 50%) read the reports each week. They dont take more than 5 min to read and review.

Most of the investor mentors were reading the reports (of the 13 investor mentors, 8 were diligent and even asking questions every week to clarify certain points).

Over breakfast and a few lunch meetings I had a chance to get & give some feedback to some of our mentors. One question most people asked me was:

What % of commitments were being met and which companies were best at meeting commitments?

The answer is a surprising 70% of commitments were being met consistently and 63% of companies were consistently (with 1-2 exceptions per company max) exceeding their commitments on both product and customer traction.

Most seed-stage investors in India have a revenue requirement (not all, but most) so I was surprised they were the most aggressive in asking me questions about commitments. Seems to me, thanks to the early visibility, investors, were willing to make earlier bets, but needed some sense of the team’s performance.

What better way to judge performance than see the team making commitments weekly and delivering on them?

Investors have mentioned to me the in their experience the #1 indicator of a venture funded startups’ success is crisp execution and if they are going after a large market, then fantastic execution makes a good team great.

So how can we help more companies get on this instead of just Microsoft Accelerator companies?

We plan to release a version of our startup connection system (internally called The Borg) to all Indian companies by mid January 2013. With this solution all companies (who opt to do so) can make their commitments and report them to over 250 seed and early stage investors, mentors and advisers. And yes, its free to all startups.

The next experiment is to see in June of 2013 if the improved visibility into a startup’s execution increases the chances of funding for entrepreneurs. We are currently tracking that as well, and will be able to report in an automated fashion.

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A great product ends up creating its own market by typically disrupting an industry or creating a new one – Archit Gupta, ClearTax

Here’s an interesting story about a young entrepreneur who put his personal life ahead of cool, calculated business decisions and went on to create a very successful IT Products Business.

Going back in time – background

Archit graduated in Computer Science, from IIT Guwahati and a doctoral level programme in the same subject thereafter, from Wisconsin University. The inherent brilliance and appreciation of things technical, was always there. This story is about taking all this, harnessing it and shaping a model which has all the trappings of a sound product.

A chanced paper publication and presentation thereafter – on network storage and efficiency – earned him many laurels, the least among them being offered a job in a start up, the brainchild of an equally brilliant professor from Princeton. Archit became part of a Core Engineering Team, which positioned the company in its own niche space. A solid reputation built on strong execution capabilities, was what this team epitomised. He put in a two-and-a-half year stint, and later on the company was later taken over by another Fortune 500 Company, EMC. By this time, the spirit of entrepreneurship had germinated inside and was beginning to take shape.

It was in late 2010 that he was faced with a peculiar dilemma – whether to stay back in the Valley or return to India and start off on his own. Personal reasons outweighed business instincts, which necessitated a move back to India. By then, the decision of going the entrepreneur-way was already taken. It was now only about that – what, and when. Having a father, who was a partner in a large CA Firm, helped in sharpening Archit’s laser-like focus and identify addressable gaps in a market dominated by the Chartered Accountants.

The Idea

The existing products (filing of returns) in the Compliance Space (Taxation) weren’t very good and there was a huge potential to design a better product by introducing an Americanised approach to solving bandwidth issues – offer a cloud-based solution. The CA profession has often been cited to be traditional in its approach, and this product which was conceptualised, was doing just the opposite. Break the traditional way of thinking. It offered a platform based product, leveraging future technologies, like SaaS based models on cloud or even build mobile applications in the times to come by. These were the early days of Clear Tax – simple to use and largely influenced by a product called Turbo Tax, from US. A major game-changer was about to enter the market.

The Product – ClearTax

It is not just a rudimentary e-return filing software, but designed to also educate the user and help him / her make informed decisions. Today, the bulk of users are in the Consumer segment but a drive is on to gain larger share of the pie, in Enterprise space too. The company has tied up with Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI) and leveraging this to build strong networks in the user community. Initially there were teething problems of migrating from desktop based applications to a cloud-based one but surprisingly the adoption has been very quick. Presently, the penetration has been in the top 8 -10 cities in India, which means there is a huge potential for growth, in untapped markets.

An Excel sheet based tool provided by Income Tax Department has captured about 40% of the market share and the balance is fragmented, which is where ClearTax operates. In terms of usability and many other critical functionalities, ClearTax is way ahead of even the market leader. On-line filing has been made free for women, which in a way is giving back to the community.

The enterprise segment is what will bring in margins and needs to be penetrated with precision. Reaching out to SMBs is a daunting task. Considering their size and nature of operation, the focus of entrepreneurs is really running their day-to-day show. They are too busy in doing what is their core activity – trading or manufacturing. Not being tech-savvy either, puts an additional pressure on marketing such products which are Internet-driven. The earlier adopters of ClearTax were Chartered Accountants, who in turn promoted it aggressively within their own community. It was also recommended by CAs to the SMB business. Otherwise through traditional advertising route, it is a very costly proposition.

The Product Eco-System and what it takes to succeed

A good product is something which users want. Of course, not all user desires are desirable (say recreational drugs for instance), so when we talk about a good product, it has to be consistent with the founders’ value system.

For success in the market, there are other factors at play :

  • The size of the market has to be sufficiently large for the startup to be able to deploy sufficient engineering, sales and marketing resources, for its success. Software Products interestingly can attack large adjacent markets, so this is something a startup doesn’t necessarily have to worry about when they start creating a product.
  • A great product ends up creating its own market by typically disrupting an industry or creating a new one.
  • Marketing: There is a lot of noise in the market place. Users have to be convinced to invest time/money/effort into this new thing. This requires very good marketing.
  • A good product comes with incentives for its own growth in the marketplace.
  • Good Engineering: Less important in the beginning, but becomes very crucial as the product gains traction.

Incumbents and competitors have to be out-executed.

We signed off with Archit Gupta, Founder of ClearTax, a very successful IT Product in its domain. The spirit of entrepreneurship is oh-so-intoxicating. Entrepreneurs are essentially dreamers who have the ability to make others believe in their dreams.

Here’s wishing the team at ClearTax a great year ahead.