We had some very good hosts @ Vizury office and also joined by their product folks Shiju and Subra for the Product Round table that was organized last Friday. The other awesome people who were part of the event were Siddharth Ramesh (Exotel), Jose (Weavedin), Vinay Simha (Dfy Graviti), Sridhar (ex-Inmobi), Avinash Raghava (Product Nation), Nari Kannan (The man with experience of over 7 startups...
The Product Management Playbook roundtable repeated last week with an intent to check progress. The mentors – Amit Ranjan & Amit Somani were keen to know the problems product managers faced while they executed on ideas discussed in the previous episode. We could guess this would be one power packed session, especially from the conversations that ensued over lunch. There were active...
In this fascinating story, Kailash Katkar recalls the past almost two decades of running a business that at one time faced closure. But riding on quality people, constant innovation and proximity to the customer, Quick Heal has become a leading anti-virus software company that is giving even the international anti-virus companies a run for their money. Read on…. Why did you start this business...
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...
(Post 2 of a series on quick research and usability techniques. Start-up’s can use these techniques fairly easily to connect to and understand their end users better, as well as maintain usability standards on their products.) In my last post, I introduced a discount usability engineering method called the ‘Expert Usability Review’ – A method best suited to start-up’s who...
Having started in September 2008, Dropbox today is a leading cloud storage provider (CSP). It has over a 100 million signed free users and about 4 million paid users (4% conversion rate as quoted often by Houston). Assuming the lowest payment tier (100GB at $99 per year), this translates into annual revenue of about $400 million. Based on Amazon S3 costing and estimates of Dropbox employee costs...
The bread and butter of the Indian IT Industry has been IT Services. IT Services, as the terminology implies, is servicing a customer. A customer states his needs, the IT Services organization makes a proposal to develop / maintain / re-engineer / etc., and the deal is done. As offshoring and outsourcing has matured, customers have become savvy and are putting pressure on IT Services...
One of the most difficult things in a product startup is to know when has progress happened and if it is in the right track. This is an even more difficult problem for first time product entrepreneurs. Not to say that it easy for a second time entrepreneur but in that case experience intuitively guides. Most prevalent thinking is to go from idea to a product build phase leading to a launch in...
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...
(Post 1 of a series on quick research and usability techniques. Start-up’s can use these techniques fairly easily to connect to and understand their end users better, as well as maintain usability standards on their products.) ProductNation in collaboration with a few like-minded design professionals, recently put together an informal forum for designers, engineers, product managers &...
