Let me start with a simple question. What is common among these, as of 2006 (and, for that matter, even as of today)? – Visa – Sony Playstation – Orbitz – NASDAQ – Microsoft Windows All of these are known examples of facilitation based multi-sided business models. These are not just products or businesses; these are platforms, in the true sense of the word. These...
The proverbial chicken and egg problem of building a new social product is well understood among tech startups, and it’s been commonplace to follow two contrasting mechanisms for getting traction. Traditionally, startups have solved this problem by racing to connect users with each other, essentially providing them the pipes to interact with each other. Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn have grown...
Update: Some readers have asked for information about MOOCs. A (MOOC) massive open online course is an online educational resource that is available for open access via the web. MOOCs originated around 2008 within the open educational resources (or OER) movement. For more, refer to the Wikipedia link. Online learning is undergoing a paradigm shift and this Forbes article is a pointer of the shape...
I believe one of the best ways to learn marketing and business in general is to learn from other people’s successes. And in a bid to do that, I am going to bring to you interviews of Indian startups that have taken their products to the world. We will talk about how they got the initial buzz going, where they got their first set of customers from, how did they scale that up, what marketing...
NowFloats – Getting small businesses online in 4 SMSes and 13 minutes! I love clear mission statements, and NowFloats couldn’t be clearer: 9.6 million small and medium businesses need a website. Only 0.6 million have one. That’s 9 million tasks on our desk (and that’s just in India!) I recently got a chance to catch up with Ronak and Jasminder (Jas), 2 of the cofounders of this exciting...
You may find it useful to read the previous post on importance of ambiguity tolerance and questioning for an engineer transitioning to a product guy before reading this post. When I was first tasked with writing new features for an existing product that contained thousands of lines of code I earnestly started reading through the documentation & code to understand how it is structured and to...
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...
As a part of my product management training, I insist on the importance of understanding of behavioral science while managing products. I am both puzzled and irritated when a participant, that is mostly an MBA educated product manager tells me – Viveck, can we skip to the section of how to write a PRD as these principles are only relevant to my boss, VP – Product Management. On the...
ProductNation caught up with iCreate Software co-founder Naren Santhanam, on what went in to the making of a successful product. It was circa 2006 when Naren met Anup while they were consultants on the Banking vertical at a technology MNC. They knew from experience that banks had a challenge in accessing information across different systems and there was potential in pioneering something exciting...
Hindsight, they say, is 20/20. The advantage of hindsight is that all the data that affects a decision has been revealed and is known. Unfortunately, real life never works that way. As an entrepreneur, you have to operate on a combination of one part data, one part intelligent guesses, and, if we are really frank about it, one part luck. Managing a business, when broken down into its simplest...
