About a month ago, I had a very interesting discussion with Rajan from Intuit about why content is a product and how the lean startup rules should be applied to it. Let’s get the definitions out of the way. A minium viable product (MVP) in its simplest form, is the least number of iterations you’ve done on your product before presenting it to someone who you hope will pay for it. Sure...
Hypothetically speaking, if one was offered a job and the decision to accept or reject was based on how far one had to travel, would “Tenmiles” be a round enough estimate, to base a rejection on? The answer is locked away somewhere in this piece. Read on to find out… Education, bunking and creation Shalin Jain’s enchantment towards Internet started way back, when he was in high school and...
There has been a huge upstart in the number of product companies in India in the last 12 months. 700% is the estimate according to Zinnov Consulting. Most of them, as one keynote speaker at the recently held NASSCOM Product Conclave 2012 said ominously or more from experience being in the Silicon Valley, “will fail”. Why startups fail can be due to any number of reasons but the chances of...
In between that 90-sec video on the homepage introducing your product and a visitor actually signing up for a free trial, there is this glue that is required. The glue that helps visitors map the problems they are looking to solve to the features your product offers. Or the other way round. Back in time when men hunted for food and the web had animated star-shaped red-colored 50% OFF buttons all...
User acquisition is a prerequisite to startup success. Startups often see user acquisition as an act of sourcing traffic to a destination and converting traffic to users. Almost every web business has a destination: a website, an app etc. The destination is often seen as the product in its entirety. Talk to a startup about their product and they will often think of it as a website or an app that...
On day two of the NASSCOM Product Conclave, nine ‘Product LaunchPAD’ companies were announced. These companies were recognized for their high-quality, emerging products. The gathering, which took place in the ‘Agenda’ hall at the Vivanta by Taj, comprised representatives of the selected companies, industry veterans, the co-hosts of the event (Sharad Sharma and MR Rangaswami) as well as members...
Here’s an interesting new term for entrepreneurs to be aware of – Commitment delivery percentage. I dont know for sure but I think in a year from now, most startups will start to follow this metric more seriously than others. Some investors are already claiming this metric to be the #1 indicator of future success of startups. At the Microsoft Accelerator in Bangalore, there are 11 companies in...
“It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory (idea) is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong” – Richard Feynman Building a successful product startup is like trying to win a race driving a vehicle that has less than half its fuel tank filled, whose controls you don’t fully understand and moreover don’t know where the finish...
Every now and then, we hear people arguing about building “Microsoft” and “Google” of India. Companies like Microsoft, Google have built up incredible technologies and their contributions in improving our life is significant. When started, they started with big vision, a tough and relevant problem to solve, and brilliant team behind the vision. While I cannot look into minds of founders of those...
Just look at the money saved by KISSMetrics to achieve a Million Dollar Marketing budget result.
