Competing on price is never a great strategy! Cheap Kills, Value Wins! As long you as you have a clearly differentiated offering, you should calculate the value your solution provides your users, and base your pricing on that! And stick to it! Competing on price creates a spiral of death for all competitors, no matter what the industry, no matter what the offerings are! Some eons ago, in one of...
This Thursday evening will witness the largest gathering of SaaS founders in India. In the event conceived by iSPIRT called SaaSx Chennai, more than 100 people, largely SaaS founders, apart from a few handful of product industry influencers, will brainstorm on various aspects of a SaaS business, especially taking the SaaS organization from a $10 million revenue to a $100 million revenue. Girish...
Are you building a marketplace, social network or a platform? Do you ever describe what you’re doing as the Uber for X, Airbnb for Y or the Twitter for Z?1 Do you want to understand why certain startups scale and others fail?1 Over the last few years, I’ve been obsessed with platform business models and their ability to scale. Unlike traditional enterprises, platforms do not scale by scaling...
Being context aware is about knowing location, identity, activity and time. Many context-aware technologies give a huge importance to location, but location is just one aspect of context, not the context. Location awareness can improve user experience, but knowing a user’s preferences and specific environment makes it all the more personal and all the more powerful. Mobile apps and devices...
We formally launched inBoundio last week, I kept it in beta for eight months and kept working on it. It was slow going since I was the only one working on it — sometimes there was no progress for days. There were times when I got stuck and had to wait for people to reply on stackoverflow and answer my questions so I could finish the coding. Lot of things went wrong or didn’t work out. But some...
One of the most common questions I get asked, while talking about platforms, relates to the issue of labor on platforms. Facebook and Twitter, among others, get a lot of value from their users and make billions of dollars, but the users don’t see much kickback. The economics of free-labor platforms Social networks like Facebook and Twitter leverage free labor from a global talent pool to...
Entrepreneurs from Bangalore had no problem driving into Chennai amid a tense political situation in Tamil Nadu. There was an air of expectation and enthusiasm on the part of more than 15 entrepreneurs who had come in from Bangalore and Mumbai, apart from Chennai itself, to listen to Girish Mathrubootham, Freshdesk CEO and founder, for the Playbook Roundtable on Scaling a SaaS business. Colourful...
In my past several years of running Themeefy, I have gone through many hiring cycles. Over time I have learnt that there is a particular strategy or set of things, that work really well — especially if you are an early to secondary stage start-up, and want to attract good talent, without necessarily paying a lot. Be clear on who you want — Do you want a CSS / HTML guy ? Do you want a server-side...
With new start-ups coming up on a daily basis, the competition in the market is intense. To be successful in this competitive world, you have to think beyond the ordinary. This is probably why growth hacking has become the go-to word when looking for people you may want to hire! If you can scale your growth beyond a linear curve and find multiple ways to expand your reach multi-dimensionally, you...
Welcome to the age of the zero-dollar marketing startup. WhatsApp, and earlier Instagram, have officially become a permanent part of startup lore for having built multi-billion dollar businesses without (reportedly) spending a dime on marketing. Meanwhile, Airbnb has grown from a hipster community of mattress-renters to the world’s largest provider of accommodations without spending even a...
