TagRushabh Mehta

Thoughts on Open Source Communities

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Supporting open source users seems like a thankless job. There have been many blogs written on this topic. Developers have stopped maintain popular projects because of the burn this causes. People who use open source projects, indirectly assume that they are entitled to free support, even if they have taken no effort to understand the issue, or tried searching for a solution. Image by...

Why Attend the ERPNext Conference 2016

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The ERPNext Conference is an annual event where the ERPNext community of users and developers meet and share their experiences of how they use ERPNext and what they expect from the project in the future. Attendees at the ERPNext Conference ERPNext today is used by more than 3000 companies across the globe and is one of the few fully open source ERP projects remaining (there are no closed modules)...

Meeting Product Startups #Ahmedabad

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Over the last few months, I have interacted with a couple dozen awesome product startups in India as a part of product roundtables organized by iSPIRT, a non-profit industry group for software product companies in India. The roundtables that were in Pune, Delhi and Ahmedabad included around 8–10 product founders getting direct feedback about their products from their peers and experienced product...

Open Source and SAAS

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While open source software is a fairly well understood in concept, I am always surprised how little it is understood in practice. At a round table of young product companies last month, there were a lot of raised eyebrows and questions when I explained our open source way of working. Jordan Hubbard, co-creator of FreeBSD and open source veteran, spoke on this topic at this year’s ERPNext...

Why You Should Attend the ERPNext Conference

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In year 2000, Apple was lagging far behind Microsoft’s Windows Operating System and it seemed there would be no way it could catch up. In a brilliant and desperate move, Apple decided to build its next generation operating system using the best open source technology available at the time. Steve Jobs hired Jordan Hubbard, the co-creator of FreeBSD, a popular Unix distribution and a well...

Service Oriented Startups

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Last week a very interesting free e-book called “Software Paradox” was trending on Hacker News. The premise of the book is, that the value of software as a product is diminishing, but the value of software as an enableris rising. Pure play software companies such as Microsoft and Oracle are fading in comparison to rising stars such as Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon and newer ones like Uber...

Understanding Software Sales from the Tally Experience

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It is safe to say that Tally is the grand daddy of all Indian Software Products, the only company to have discovered the holy grail of selling software to Indian small businesses at scale. So when one of the key architects of the Tally sales network, Deepak Prakash (Tally employee #3) came down to Mumbai to do a iSPIRT Roundtable, there was little chance I would miss this. And Deepak Prakash did...

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

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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...

"Bootstrapping is tough. Most of the time things take three times longer than what we think. The only way to enjoy this journey is to absolutely love what you do. That is what sustains you.” – Rushabh, ERPNext

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Continuing our journey to bring to limelight bootstrapped entrepreneurs from India, we got a chance to speak with Rushabh Mehta, Founder of Web Notes Technologies, a software product company that publishes a free and open source web based ERP called ERPNext for small and medium businesses. Built by a small team of 8 people, ERPNext has more than 250 paying customers and has also been included in...

Redefining Enterprise Software with Open Source

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Everyone knows that Enterprise Software is bloated with un-necessary fat. And the fat shows clearly in the way sales happens. In the latest book by Venture Capitalist Ben Horowitz, he shares a story where in order to please a customer, they went and acquired a company, whose product was liked by the purchasing manager, so that they could bundle its software with theirs and win the contract. So...