Is there a right age to become an entrepreneur? Any age is a good age. The founders of Microsoft, Google, Facebook started their companies when they were very young. Steve Jobs, who founded Apple at an early age, continued to show amazing entrepreneurial capabilities in his second stint at Apple which began in his 50s. Young professionals in their twenties have amazing energy, and understand the...
An important decision is about development and deployment platforms. If your product is targeted for a specific operating system, the choice is obvious. When the solution has to be platform neutral, or if the deployment will be controlled by you (SaaS model), then the common options are Open Source (Linux) and Java or Microsoft Windows. Always keep in mind the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for...
To position the product, you must first have clarity on the addressable market and its breakdown in terms of different industries or user communities (let’s call both of them as ‘verticals’ for simplicity). Then analyze which of them can benefit the most from your product, where your maximum contacts are, and which has the least competition. You can accordingly initiate preliminary sales efforts...
In this blog post, we discuss ways and means to reach out to prospective clients, position the product, license and price it. However, the question that founders must ask and answer convincingly to themselves is the one posed above. When doing this, they must think like a buyer and question every assumption about the product’s value. There are actually three parts to the question: Who is that...
CEO and Co-Founder, Sapience Analytics, Shirish Deodhar, is pleased with the market response to their first software product, Sapience, and says their objective is to become the default standard for Automated Enterprise Effort Visibility and Gain Sapience Analytics was set up in 2008, as a software products company. It was formed by four serial entrepreneurs, who had come to realize that the...
Any discussion about building products from India is lost in the hype and din about India as an IT services powerhouse. However, the mostly unnoticed surge in product start-ups marks the beginning of a new movement, with potential to re-invent the Indian software industry. Emergence of globally recognized Indian product companies will represent the final step in the software value chain. If India...
Editor’s Note: InnovizeTech Software and its product, Sapience, is an early leader in India’s emerging software products story. Earlier in his career, InnovizeTech’s CEO and co-founder Shirish Deodhar founded two IT services companies, which had successful exits to Symantec Corp. and Symphony Services. Deodhar is also the author of the book, “From Entrepreneurs to Leaders.” In this article...
