A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty. ― Winston Churchill Small and Medium Sized Businesses (SMBs), the growth engine of India, are on the threshold of a tremendous opportunity. Globalization of trade and the rapid proliferation of computing and communication technologies are affording them a platform to expand their reach to...
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...
A man with a severe tooth ache goes to the dentist, who upon examining the tooth, assures the man that the problem wasn’t anything serious and that a simple procedure performed under a local anesthesia would help repair the damage. Upon hearing this, the man gets very upset and tells the dentist, “What? Local anesthesia? You think I cannot afford a foreign one?! I demand an imported one!” I...
(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...
You can’t invite people to a party and try to sell them stuff. Pretty much every starry-eyed startup that went after eyeballs gets it by now. Over the last seven years the web has moved away from a consumption medium (think NY times) to a creation-consumption medium (think Twitter, Facebook). But we’ve been very tardy in reshaping business models for this new model of the web...
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...
You’re at an event, and you’re ready. You know your product inside out. You know the competition. You know the licensing terms. The deals. The partners. The competition. Technical details. Market details. Detail details. Regulations. Strengths. Compatibilities. Your head is stuffed. Crammed, just when – A customer comes to you. “I’ve got sixty seconds. Why should I buy from you?” You spent years...
Whenever faced by dilemma over any issue pertaining to sales and marketing, I recall a famous quote by Ben Feldman, who is considered one of the best salespeople in world history. Don’t sell life insurance. Sell what life insurance can do. Just by following this one mantra, Ben was able to insurance policies more than worth USD 1.8 billion in his life! It would be unfair if I don’t mention Steve...
I wish it was mathematical. But it isn’t. There are unlimited combinations when building a story. That’s what makes it so much fun to consume – you never know how the storyteller tells it… So instead of giving you tips in a bulleted format – let’s build a script together. What we know (or must know) before we start: This is for a 60 sec pitch video about a product called Glitch...
