The growing internet penetration has fuelled India’s start-up ecosystem, which is now the third biggest in the world. US-based Compass (Startup Genome), in its 2015 report, puts Bangalore as the world’s second fastest growing start-up ecosystem. There is a massive opportunity within the $2 trillion Indian economy owing to the consumption fuelled by 1.3 billion Indians and a good number of Indian...
I am Taron Mohan, CEO of NextGen Tele and an iSPIRT Volunteer. I usually meet many CXOs of Banks for selling mobile-SIM-overlay based financial inclusion solutions. This one time I was on an email thread with the CEO of a big Public Sector Bank with other iSPIRTers. The discussion was about India-Stack. In my entrepreneurial zeal, I pitched my NextGen Tele SIM-based solution. I quickly realized...
Technology teams can be the biggest asset or worst bottleneck for a growing company based on the strategy taken by them. In name of future proofing engineering, the technology teams become a hurdle to company’s goals. You can see the ‘hidden frustration” in Bezos words below .. Engineers should be fast acting cowboys instead of calm clear-headed computer scientists — Jeff Bezos, Founder &...
We had earlier written about the fundamentals that helped us in growing over past one year but recently we looked back to dig further and list down few specifics that we believe helped our growth. These come from our own experience as a consumer company and might not be applicable to every startup but we hope that something applicable and actionable is derived from the points below. What we did:...
Product Management be it for Internet world or otherwise is an interesting job. One gets exposed to multiple business functions be it marketing, sales, customer support or general management. The only result that is desired from Product folks is to ship a product that users will love and then it should have a network effect — i.e. other associated functions can be almost on auto-pilot. Alas...
Friday 21st Oct 2016 has been billed as the first large scale cybersecurity incident from the IoT world. The widely reported attacks involved inserting malware into devices to turn them into a network of controllable bots that was directed to attack websites. One of the principal targets was Dyn the DNS provider to Twitter, Reddit, GitHub, Paypal, Spotify, Heroku, SoundCloud, Crunchbase, Netflix...
iSPIRT invited select companies to leverage the IndiaStack API’s and collaboratively construct a pilot program, as a demonstrable proof of concept. Broadly, the pilots were established to transfer the invented technologies and expertise to the market. In addition to creating sufficient and supportive infrastructure for technology transfer; to embolden entrepreneurs and businesses create profits...
Bangalore was the next stop for the iSPIRT product round-table around the theme of “Getting Traction for Software Products”. The goal of this round-table, hosted by Niraj Rout (Hiver/Grexit), Natwar Maheshwari (Around.io) Avinash Raghava and me, was to get peer feedback from a group of startups at a similar stage. In this format, around ten participants meet and each one gets around twenty...
Recently I was called into a mid-size software organization – and got right in the middle of a heated debate that had obviously been going on for some time. Development wanted to move to a Scrum-like agile model, and put pressure on the established Software Product Management (SPM) department to change their name to Product Owner which SPM refused vehemently. Development argued that the agile...
Too much has been already written about ‘Growth Hacking’. Having been into product space for quite some time, I believe growth hacking is probably the most confused jargon being used in the business world (mainly product businesses). Hence, thought of writing down my perspective on growth hacking by clearing out few notions around it – For growth hacking, one should know coding? I will say...
