A year back I was involved with a leading mobile apps company on an issue related to product pricing. The company developed customized mobile apps for business. At the time it had a staff of 20 programmers and reasonably successful – having on its customer list several top global corporations like cola companies, few leading banks, advertising giants and others. It had revenues close to USD 1...
Enterprise as well as Consumer Software is moving fast towards a Software As A Service (SaaS) model. Who would not like paying a per user, per month charge as opposed to doling out huge amounts of money for licenses upfront and paying 16 to 20% Annual Maintenance Charges year after year! But the short history of SaaS companies is already full of companies that grew too quickly, or chose the wrong...
If you’ve been around the internet startup world for long enough, you’ve probably engaged in the user-customer debate at least once. Who’s the user? Who’s the customer? Who should we be focusing on? I’m going to start off a series of posts talking about the basic elements of Platform Thinking and this being the first, I’d like to talk about the User-Customer...
In addition to vendors of traditional on-premise products that are shipped or downloaded via web, a different generation of providers is fast emerging. They are leveraging new technologies and business models, often interchangeably referred to as cloud services, Web 2.0 or SaaS (Software as a Service). (Not all SaaS products are truly cloud based but the differences are not relevant for this...
Dr Raghuram Rajan, Chief Economic Adviser to the MoF, GoI, was the chief guest at the IIMB convocation this year. I had the privilege of meeting him briefly before the convocation started. We talked about jugaad, Indian industry’s innovation capabilities, and which companies stand out on the innovation dimension. One question that Dr. Rajan asked was something that I have thought about...
From being the protagonist of an Adoor Gopalakrishnan national award winning movie to a graphics trainer, from a book publisher to a printer, from services to products, our guest today has been there, done that. Meet Vish, the MD of Logical Steps. ProductNation: Hi Vish. Welcome to Product Nation. Let us begin with your story. Vish: I was born in an entrepreneurial family. My family ran a...
If today a survey in done in schools across India and students are asked some questions like, What are your favorite hobbies or pastime? What do you do after going back home from school? What do you do during holidays? You’ll get all sorts of answers but ‘Entrepreneurship’. Even worse, if the following question is also included, Have you heard about the word...
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...
Advisory boards are rarely meant for fixing fundamental flaws with business plans. Having big names on the advisory boards, purely for their name value, rarely works. It might help a little in raising venture money, if at all. However, when composed and used wisely, advisory boards can help your product company choose the right corporate, product, market and sales strategies. Simply put, your...
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...
