Paras Chopra from Wingify is great story for startup ecosystem in India and I personally become a fan of him after I watched his Unpluggd Talk on “How To Bootstrap A Tech Startup In India” – His simplicity and honesty gives lot of clarity on how he started his company. All that he wanted to earn is 50,000 INR and had no plan to create company that will generate 9M USD revenue. His...
Bootstrapping is hard especially in India! It takes a toll on founders as well as people around them. No fancy corporate trips, no room for slack, myriad things that can go wrong and on top of it, no wiggle room financially. Here is what I learnt during past 3.5 years of bootstrapping SocialAppsHQ and now, Shimply.com – 1) Cash flow is the only thing that matters – I have people who...
Sridhar Vembu is a simple person, and most of what he says are tweet sized bits of wisdom. He inspires you almost instantly when you start conversing with him. That was the first impression when I spoke to him for the first time. He wanted to get into action as fast as possible. Before we recorded this video I was trying to make him comfortable with what I am going to ask but then he almost...
iSPIRT Open Ecosystem Questions(OEQ) Series. The conversation around this exciting session was lead by Sanat Rao (iSPIRT) and the speakers were Jay Pullur (Pramati Technologies), Sanjay Shah (Invensys Skelta), Pari Natarajan (Zinnov), Karthik Reddy (Blume Ventures) & Vijay Anand (The Startup Centre). Sanat initiated the conversation with an observation that it was only the bigger exits that...
The world has been witness to several movements that have changed the face of history. India is not alien to these – Mahatma Gandhi’s silent revolution that finally led to Indian Independence is a shining example. About 18 months ago, a group of software product entrepreneurs got together to charter a course that would make India a Product Nation. Today, those 30 early pioneers of iSPIRT are...
Being Independent is a fundamental right of all living being. But, as entrepreneurs and startups, when we face tons of challenge and deal with sheer hardship we end up submitting to various ideas that may or may not resemble our need. Think about why you become an entrepreneur in the first place – what is it that you wanted to solve and how you are creating value. The support system around...
You start your computer to check the sales ledger, and are in great tremor as it was incapable of opening anything. Some sort of advertisements related to a product kept on flashing on the screen. On further investigation you realize it has been infected by virus and the nastiest part was – the antivirus on the computer couldn’t even detect it. In the end, you had to format the entire computer to...
Saturday, June 16 was the day, the iSPIRT Playbook Roundtable finally arrived in Mumbai. The topic for the Roundtable was Nuances of Customer Acquisition. The Roundtable was hosted at the office of WebEngage by their CEO Avlesh Singh and saw participation from CEOs of around 14 startups from in and around Mumbai. The event went on for around 6 hours but given the variety of issues discussed each...
We are delighted that the Finance Minister singled out the Software Product Industry for mention in his budget speech today. This is momentous… the identity we have been so seeking especially in the corridors of power was finally articulated this morning in the highest legislative body of the land – the Indian Parliament. We’d like to highlight four things. First, the thumping endorsement that...
The Union Minister for Communications and Information Technology Sh. Ravi Shankar Prasad spoke to iSPIRT members on July 1 in Bangalore during his first ever visit as Minister. Reacting to the pitch by iSPIRT members about transforming the face of India through a strong software product industry, Sh. Ravi Shankar Prasad strongly endorsed the Government’s backing to the industry. Government to...
