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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.

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Q&A with MAIA Intelligence, India’s Largest Business Intelligence Software Company

MAIA Intelligence, launched in 2006, was the first business intelligence software product company in India. Its product, 1KEY Agile BI Suite, is designed with the vision of serving the analytics and reporting needs of an entire organization from the operational end users to the top executives. In this interview, CEO and founder Sanjay Mehta discusses the product benefits and the importance of customer feedback in developing a market-leading product. This article is brought to SandHill readers in partnership with ProductNation.   

SandHill.com: What is your company’s mission and what was your original vision? 

Sanjay Mehta: MAIA Intelligence is a young and innovative company committed to developing powerful BI reporting and analysis products. MAIA’s mission is to democratize BI and take it from a few expert users to the operational managers, and from frontline executives to the back-office team.

While at my former company (Udyog), we realized that for ERP software there are too many challenges in creating reports as and when required. The Udyog customers wanted a reporting tool to the business software as a plug-in. These customers then started asking for enhanced reporting capabilities and features in other business applications such as CRM, HR Management, etc.

Business intelligence is a domain which traditionally is aimed for the top decision maker. But what we have observed is that with adequate information at hand, operational-level decision making also improves drastically — improving productivity, increasing revenue and market share. We now have more than 45,000 users across India and are the largest BI software product company in India. 

SandHill.com: Is there a story behind your company name? 

Sanjay Mehta: MAIA is a female given name of Greek origin. MAIA also means the eldest of the Pleiades in Greek mythology, also identified with an Ancient Italic goddess of spring and the most beautiful. Similar to Laxmiji, goddess of prosperity. 

SandHill.com: Please describe your product suite and your market. 

Sanjay Mehta: Our flagship product is 1KEY Agile BI Suite, which is a comprehensive business intelligence software application catering to strategic, tactical and operational data analysis and reporting needs of multiple vertical industries. An integrated offering with a choice to pick and choose modules (business user interfaces), it enables organizations to deploy the BI framework with minimal investments and have a secure, enterprise-wide, dynamic reporting platform in six weeks, irrespective of existing applications.

We also have other products such as 1KEY Touch (an advanced interactive dashboard and reporting software), 1KEY FCM (a financial consolidation management solution) and postXBRL software (an XBRL reporting tool). Our upcoming product is 1KEY HPC (high-performance computing analytics software).

Our 1KEY BI application is suitable for small businesses as well as enterprises. We have been making good inroads in almost all the industry verticals, especially BFSI, Manufacturing, Pharmaceuticals, FMCG, Consumer Durables & Retail. As of now we have customers largely in India and the Middle East, but we are looking to expand soon in the other global markets through strategic alliances.

Read the complete story at Sandhill.com

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Q&A with Communication Platform Waybeo Technology’s CEO

Waybeo Technology Solutions was launched in December 2009 and was selected by Nasscom as one of the top 15 emerging, innovative companies in India in 2012. Its product, BounzD, is a global inbound communication platform enabling instant voice assistance to customers using a variety of mobile devices. In this interview, CEO Bushair AP discusses aspects of staying focused in the journey of product development. This article is brought to SandHill readers in partnership with ProductNation.   

SandHill.com: What was the vision you originally had for your company? 

Bushair AP: We are a young team who is a part of a movement to change how the world communicates in the new age. Our team was formed out of our never-ending passion for creativity and social contribution. We all were fascinated by the revolutions in the communication sector. Our first attempt was a global group-messaging platform, which we developed for our early European customers. This was much before we formally launched Waybeo as a company. This opportunity opened up our vision to create products that we believe will attract millions in the future.

BounzD is a stepping-stone to achieve our vision of a well-connected world without any barriers like cost and geography. Once integrated with an enterprise’s online channels, end customers would be able to connect businesses with just an Internet connection without being charged across the world.

We work with large-scale and midsize enterprises in India and abroad that have online channels as a major way of customer acquisition. We handle their voice communications with potential customers and provide business insights and analytics. Our global plan is in beta stage and releasing this month. Waybeo is based in Trivandrum with offices in Mumbai, Delhi and California.

SandHill.com: Is there a story behind your company name? 

Bushair AP: The name Waybeo was derived out of our ambition of going way beyond by exploring an inspiring way of entrepreneurship.

SandHill.com: What differentiation and business value does BounzD provide to your customers? 

Bushair AP: We connect business and potential customers across the world within seconds. Besides being cost free, we have made it easier to connect with a business located in any part of the world. Our product has helped our customers improve their customer acquisition, sales cycle and cost of sale.

We have helped various companies in industries such as hospitality and realty to reduce abandoned calls by 30 percent and achieve an increase in online visibility. Many of the large enterprises in India have told us that they “felt” their Web presence after taking our services. In the hospitality sector, we have reduced contact center cost-to-sales ratio in a drastic way. And the business insights we provide though our analytics has helped various realty segments to plan contact sector operations and customer support services.

SandHill.com: How did you determine the right pricing for your product? 

Bushair AP: We reached out to a limited number of customers with a cost-plus-margin model. From limited early innovators, we moved to value-based pricing, which had improved profitability. The business dynamics of our customer segment had to be learned during this engagement with early innovators to have a better pricing. The key realization of how much value we create for our customers had to be quantified during this period. Value-based pricing involves understanding of business dynamics of a customer’s model, customer revenue generation checkpoints and behavior of end customers.

Read the complete article at Sandhill.com

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ProductNation and SandHill team up to bring industry best practices to the Software Product Industry

ProductNation, a portal dedicated to the cause of the Indian software product industry and Sandhill, a portal that offers business strategy for the software, cloud and mobile ecosystem have tied-up to share industry best practices with companies that are emerging and growing in India. This is an important development in the Indian software product landscape as it brings to the table pragmatic views from Silicon Valley and from India, which has grown to be recognized globally for its software prowess.

ProductNation was launched earlier this year in India to be the one stop resource for companies who need solutions and advice even as they conceptualize, incubate and grow their businesses. The portal is run by industry veterans who act as catalysts to bring in content from around the world and real life examples of companies who are in the software product space. The portal is run in a democratic fashion and anyone who has material to contribute from various domains is encouraged to participate.

Sandhill is run by industry leader M.R. Rangaswami from Silicon Valley, the hotbed of the software industry. Over the years, Sandhill has grown with the software industry and today is an important destination for the newer technologies and developments that must be understood by entrepreneurs who run or are contemplating to run their own enterprises.

Given that more than 400 companies start their businesses each year in India in the software product industry, it is important that an ecosystem support this endeavour to ensure that companies make a success of themselves and provide value to their customers. Today, it is estimated by Zinnov that there are more than 3,400 software product companies in the country alone with 51% located in Bangalore and the National Capital Region (NCR) around Delhi.

ProductNation encourages entrepreneurs, venture capitals, angel investors, advisors and the ecosystem in general to contribute their thoughts for the benefit of this nascent industry which has the potential to accelerate even further in the coming years.