Enterprise as well as Consumer Software is moving fast towards a Software As A Service (SaaS) model. Who would not like paying a per user, per month charge as opposed to doling out huge amounts of money for licenses upfront and paying 16 to 20% Annual Maintenance Charges year after year! But the short history of SaaS companies is already full of companies that grew too quickly, or chose the wrong...
Advisory boards are rarely meant for fixing fundamental flaws with business plans. Having big names on the advisory boards, purely for their name value, rarely works. It might help a little in raising venture money, if at all. However, when composed and used wisely, advisory boards can help your product company choose the right corporate, product, market and sales strategies. Simply put, your...
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...
Jay Conrad Levinson, father of Guerilla Marketing defines it very simply as going after conventional goals with unconventional means! When you are a product startup, trying to build a business on little to zero money, you need plenty of unconventional means. With the rise of social media, viral word-of-mouth options with web and mobile global connectivity, it has never been easier to do guerilla...
Since the time Philip Kotler wrote his valuable tome on Marketing, technology has evolved so much that new pricing models like Freemium pricing are possible for both Consumer-oriented and Enterprise-oriented product startups. In addition, Free Trial pricing models and conversion to paid ones are common in both. In a price-conscious society like India, pricing can mean all the difference between a...
Who said YouTube is a waste of time? It can even teach you on how to come up with a great company or product name! Naming a company or a product is so crucial in a product start-up. You can call your services company – “The Great Maharashtra IT Services and Systems Company” and your clients may not care too much! Product startups, especially in the consumer space, need to think...
Lean startups are not about saving money and getting development done on the cheap. They are not about saving money by doing work at home rather than a rented office. That’s not what the word lean means here! Lean is about elimination of waste in development, marketing, selling, and growing a company. And making course corrections quickly and efficiently so that you are precisely pointed...
In a product startup you may need to deal with lots of information about your own product features, your market, your competition, your competition’s product features, results of internal brainstorming sessions you may conduct or information about who you can partner with for various aspects of your business. Mind-maps provide a great way of organizing all the information you gather or...
If I had a Rupee every time I heard the words “If only Venture Capitalists were more active in building the Indian Product Eco-system….”, I would be a rich man! I am guessing that this is because of a lot of mis-conceptions about Venture Capital and how they play in the product space, in India as well as elsewhere. As a Software Product entrepreneur, you owe it to yourself to...
Total Addressable Market, Technology and Market Adoption Rates are crucial for Product Startups! Ignoring them early on will only cause immense heart ache down the road for you, your family, your company, your employees and their families! It’s all well and good to follow your “passion” and do your startup purely for your passion. It will be a great hobby and extracurricular...
