iSPIRT works to transform India into a hub for new generation software products, by addressing crucial government policy, creating market catalysts and grow the maturity of product entrepreneurs. Welcome to the Official Insights!
Last week, we announced the second batch of winners of InTech50 2016. It’s been a hectic month for all the stakeholders.
Happy to announce the third and final batch of 15 companies that are selected for InTech50 2016:
Aujas: Security Analytics and Visualization Platform
Canvazify: Canvazify is a visual collaboration tool for team brainstorming and planning. Its a pinterest of team ideas. Canvazify helps you organize and discuss ideas, derive meaningful insights and plan activities
FarEye: FarEye, is a Mobile Workforce Management Platform. It is a customizable Enterprise Mobility Platform., that automates processes and field workforce thus., helping the enterprises in delighting their customers
Germinait Solutions Private Limited: Germin8 Social Intelligence is a product suite that enables brands to get valuable insights from consumers in social media about the products, campaigns, content and customer service.
Happay (VA Tech Ventures): Happay is a first of its kind, VISA card driven, expense management solution that streamlines a company’s expense workflow from purchase-to-accounting and enables real-time visibility and control over business spending.
Indix Internet India Private Limited: Indix offers a variety of products including a Product API, Reports App, and machine learning services using proprietary data science algorithms. Leading brands and retailers use Indix products to boost productivity, drive innovation, and accelerate growth.
Innotion Technologies Pvt Ltd: Protean is a Business Process Management & Field Service Management Platform, which helps the organizations in automating the backend Processes & Field activities.
Lucep: Lucep is a sales acceleration solution for B2B businesses. Using a website widget and our mobile app, Lucep connects leads generated from your site directly with your team in under 60 seconds.
NavStik Autonomous Systems Pvt. Ltd: FlytPOD is the next-generation flight-computer for commercial drones. FlytOS is its operating system that empowers developers build variety of commercial applications for drones. Together they offer a platform for drone-makers to build next-gen drone applications.
Nowfloats: The NowFloats platform helps large enterprises by getting their local channel online in a relevant, meaningful, frictionless manner. Think how to get all of your retail stores, your insurance agents, your branches, etc all being highly discovered by local consumers via latest, frequently updated content by your extended teams.
Propalms Technologies Pvt Ltd: Propalms TSE: Delivers Microsoft Windows client applications from datacenter over browser to users using presentation virtualization technology.
SayPay Technologies: SayPay Authenticator combines voice recognition and speech recognition seamlessly into one single step. By simply speaking the SayPay “crypto-token” into their mobile banking app, users identify the transaction, authenticate themselves, and lock their biometric signature to each authentication.
Tydy: Tydy is an Automated Employee Onboarding & Engagement Platform. Tydy combines automated workflows, pre-defined content modules and engagement hooks resulting in a personalized & amazing onboarding experience.
Vidooly: Vidooly is an SaaS based video analytics and marketing suite that provides actionable insights to content creators, MCNs and brands enabling them to optimize their videos on YouTube and increase the organic reach, build an audience base and take data driven decisions to create content.
Xtreme Media Pvt. Ltd: XM DSS is a Cloud based digital signage solution, it enables brands to centrally control & manage digital screens located anywhere in the world on a single click.
When we as a ecosystem try to help our entrepreneurs, we make the mistake of always focussing on the mistakes others have made, and trying to steer away from those. This is evident even from the stuff we write on blogs and platforms with the purpose of helping others. The things ‘not to do’ always take a upper hand over things ‘to do’.
Maybe it’s time we step away from that.
In this new blog Series from #PNgrowth, we are going the other way. Starting today, we are going to publish a series of posts on what we call the #OneThing. Our best product people will be asked a simple question – what is the one thing that worked best for you when you were trying to scale your company? These answers will be insightful partly as success stories and partly as guides for other startups who find themselves in a similar situation. In the first blog of the series, we talk to Subrat Kar, the CEO of Noida based Vidooly, the video analytics tool that has just secured its first round of funding, and is on its way to becoming an Indian startup success story.
Subrat Kar, CEO of Vidooly
Vidooly has been one of this year’s poster boys for the Indian startup community. The product is awesome, the market is growing, and the opportunities are endless. The team is completely homegrown, and for a company that’s growing and making waves, has a founding team that lets their work do the talking. There’s no gimmickry and absolutely no noise, except about the product they are making.
When I talked to Subrat, he was travelling back to his home state of West Bengal, and I asked him the question point blank, because I wanted to know the first thing that popped into his head.
On further investigation, this turned out to be a post on the Vidooly blog, published in October last year called ‘How to maximise your YouTube views organically’. Subrat said that though at that time, this wasn’t a marketing move at all on their part, the reader interest and viral lift they got out of that post made them believe in the power of content marketing. “We don’t spend any money at all,” he says, “Our marketing is purely content.” This is incredible for a new entrant like Vidooly, and Subrat acknowledges it.
“This is the one thing that helped us grow”, he says, “The confidence that initial number of readers and commenters told us that we were on to something. And we built on it. We didn’t do anything to actually make it go viral, so maybe there was an element of luck involved. But it convinced us that if we gave out good information, there were people hungry enough for it who would become our customers.”
About #PNgrowth
PNgrowth is ayear long mentorship program with some of India’s top product people and founders, with learning sessions and curriculum prepared in collaboration with the universities of Stanford, Harvard and Duke. Content marketing will be one of the major areas being covered, as will all the other points our #PNgrowth series will highlight. Nominate your Startup here(Apply before 15th November)
It has been one of the wettest April for Delhi in years. 5th April 2015 was no different. An overnight downpour had created a surreal Saturday setting for “Content marketing your way to multi-million dollars in revenue” at the 46th iSPIRT Playbook Roundtable. It was the 7th Roundtable in Delhi. The venue – the playful Wingify office at Pitampura in New Delhi.
View from the Wingify Office
Participants came from far and wide – Gurgaon, Delhi, Noida, Greater Noida, Mumbai, Bangalore – braving the rain, the puddle and the traffic.
The stage was set at the Wingify cafeteria. Interestingly, all the participating product companies were actually seated in a roundtable. A few table tennis bats uncharacteristically placed in the corner indicated that a TT table had made way for the roundtable.
Love all. Play !!!
Paras Chopra – CEO Wingify – opened the roundtable sharing that Wingify was now working with 4000 companies across the World helping marketing guys do technical experiments without writing code. He shared the iSPIRT vision of making India the place for software products.
After calling for a quick round of introductions, Paras initiated the roundtable sesion with the question, “What is content?”
Siddharth, Paras’ teammate and the marketer at Wingify also teamed in to lead the session.
What is content?
Even if you do not read the rest of the post, the following lines should be good enough.
Before inviting the forum to give their definition of “Content”, Paras set the tone for the roundtable.
He said, “Founders should do content”.
“I love writing. I have been writing since 14.”
“A founder is well placed to articulate insights. And it matters.”
Paras emphasised that content should not be one-off. Content – he says – should have rhythm. A collection of outdoor hoardings create better impact than just one isolated bilboard. He mentions the work of intercom.io to illustrate his example, before opening up the discussion to the forum.
The forum was quick to put out a list – emails, landing pages, shareable content (viral), blogs, smart forms, CTA’s, e-books (gated and non-gated) and videos – at which the discussion came to an interim halt, thanks to Vidooly.
Vidooly – part of the TLABS batch – helps YouTube channel owners grow their organic reach and traffic using analytics. Subrat (CEO – Vidooly) mentioned about an impending VC round, but denied YouTube wanted to acquire them. He was quick to point out that DailyMotion was around.
On using videos for content, Paras pointed out the trade-off between a high quality video and the effort. Sub-par videos could compromise the brand.
On the other hand, the forum communicated its excitement about videos rattling out names like goanimate and powtoon that allow for creating quality videos, quickly. Ankit (MyPoolin) shared that they have attracted quality audience with videos, especially in the B2C context. Vijay (ZapStitch) seemed to agree. Subrat was agile to point out corresponding vidooly features e.g. meta optimization features that will help grow organic audience.
Is your business using Videos for content marketing?
Content ROI
Siddharth led this leg of the roundtable on Content ROI.
As the key marketer at Wingify, ROI is his daily job and he did not lose time to mention mixpanel to measure metrics, simultaneously dishing out the following:
TOFU
MOFU
BOFU
Though lunch was an hour way, there was now some food for thought.
Siddharth was describing the marketing funnel. Wingify was using marketing automation tools like Infer, HubSpot and Fliptop to measure how prospects move from TOFU ( top of funnel) to BOFU (bottom of funnel). It helps gauge how business is doing with respect to marketing and business goals. Siddharth built confidence by indicating that users appreciate the funnel and demonstrate desired behaviours.
Did you figure out MOFU?
Sudhakar (RippleHire), who was patiently listening to all this gyaan (knowledge) invoked his consultant avatar and pressed with a terse question, “What to post?”
The question resonated.
What to post? – A quick look at Buyer Personas
Paras and Siddharth teamed up to take this question.
Paras said, “The problem with us entrepreneurs is that we think that all are like us. When it comes to our audience, implicit segmentation is mostly not accurate. At Wingify, we have been scientifically studying our users and customers for the last six months – Who are they? What do they do daily? It all comes down to buyer personas. Your content has to resonate with them.”
“At Wingify, we have created posters (at times whimsical) to communicate to our team about Buyer Personas”.
Siddharth closed this question emphasizing how they did persona surveys, got on support calls, identified problems users were facing, studied linkedin profiles and established KPI’s to scientifically determine what content to post.
Outsource Vs Inhouse
Needless to mention, all were ears on this discussion point. Would this be black and white? Or would it be gray? Siddharth made it clear that each team member at Wingify had to write. Period. It was even integral to their recruitment process. (More on that later)
Ashish from Posist was very forthcoming about their outsourcing attempts. He even admitted that even though outsourced content was good, ironically it wasn’t exciting. It required Vaibhav’s (RankWatch) quote of “1$ per word” comment for a well-known content writer to bring back the fun in the discussion.
Have you experimented with outsourcing content?
Siddharth stressed on the importance of quality compared to quantity. He went on to share that at Wingify, they make a lot of effort to produce one quality post everyday. It is always quality that is priority.
Getting content noticed
If you thought doing content was hard, let us talk about distributing and promoting it. It is hard too.
Guest Posting
We began with guest posting and co-marketing. Siddharth began counting his fingers.
Email influencers rather than commenting on their blog.
Short and longer posts are both OK, but some publishers discourage longer posts.
Important to communicate to publisher how your post is relevant to their audience.
Always stick to guidelines for guest posts.
It is effective to send a TOC first to publishers, instead of a final draft.
Seek out high DA sites with relevant keywords.
When sending in the final post to the publisher, always include 5 to 6 links within the post to increase odds of drawing traffic.
Being opinionated
Paras strongly recommended putting out opinionated pieces of content. Siddharth testified that for Wingify, opinionated blogs drew comments in numbers compared to simple blogs that would not get any. At this juncture, the forum could not help but discuss the Freshdesk Vs Zendesk episode.
The discussion was quick to move to click baiting. Surprisingly, most of us present in the room, admitted falling for it.
Have you?
Siddharth added that Wingify has consciously played trends to attract traffic. It had also done fun stuff like the A/B testing for the Savita Bhabhi website. (please search for the link on your own)
Organization Structure
This track saw everyone pick up their writing pads. While Paras spoke, a few founders were looking only at Siddharth. It seemed they had found the persona for their new content team member – Mumbaikar Dilliwala who gestures to emphasize his point; slighly overbuilt with a Che Guevara moustache.
Paras began by sharing how in the early days of Wingify he used to look at each content piece with a hawk eye. Over a period of time, Wingify has divided its marketing team into two – product marketing and demand generation. And it is looking good. Wingify has also hired a business analyst for content strategy where they are doing really detailed analysis like “what is the worth of a tweet?”. Wingify also has a marketing engineer as part of the marketing team.
How does Wingify hire?
Siddharth sounded sanguine about journalists with 1 – 2 years of experience saying that by that time the editors have chiseled them to write well within constraints. Siddharth adds, “Communicating clearly is fundamental to our hiring process. As part of the recruitment process, candidates are asked to write on a real topic”. Most candidates disappear at this stage.
Growth Hacks
Time was up. It was already quarter past 4 PM. Everyone was given a minute each to share their growth hacks.
Vaibhav (Rankwatch) did facebooks ads comparing themselves to competition targeted only to the fans of the competition. They also sent tweets to conference speakers with some topic suggestions and inputs.
Ashish (Posist) shared how they gave the impression of a local company to Bangalore restaurant owners by using native language on the visiting cards of their sales team.
Shashwat (iflylabs) used the plugin directory list to gain traction.
Saurabh (Airwoot) tagged brands in its tweets telling them how poorly they were doing and with respect to competition.
Kanika (SquadRun) shared how text emails helped them hit inbox rather than the promotions tab.
Vijay (ZapStitch) made a list of top 100 saas companies on its website and promoted it.
Anand (Exclusife) ran a missed call for free recharges campaign.
Sudarsan (Ripplehire) sent cold emails to the intended contact’s colleague to get a response.
Vikram (RateGain) shared how they use ebooks around tent-pole travel events to generate interest.
With that it was a wrap.
The customary iSPIRT roundtable photo followed at the Wingify reception.
Thank you Wingify for your initiative and enthusiasm.
I would also like to highlight the participation from Avinash Agrawal (Eko Financials), Mohit Bhakuni (Contify), Mrigank Tripathi (Qustn) and couple of more participants. I apologize I did not record your inputs in the proper context. Could I request you to add your comments to this post?
