Networking is not an extracurricular activity when you are building a product startup company! It is one of the most important things that could enable you to line up angel investor, venture or expansion capital for your startup! It can help you recruit excellent people to your startup and excellent people are absolutely essential, especially in the initial years! It can help you identify...
Get this right and you have taken the first step towards success in your software product venture, whether on the web or on-premise. As a corollary, if this is not clear, then no matter how sophisticated your product is, it will always be a struggle. As many entrepreneurs are aware, the success of a product depends on the product itself, the pricing, the promotion and the physical distribution as...
When we talk about supporting innovation in India, the first things that come to mind are the availability of capital and people with the right skills. But, the efforts and risks involved in innovation don’t make sense unless inventors and firms can get value out of their innovative activity. When will innovation make money for inventors? That depends on issues like: Are users willing to try out...
We are planning to release research findings every month week as part of our startup support program at the Microsoft Accelerator in India. There are about 50 different topics that we are curious about and are consistently doing research to find out ways to help our accelerator companies perform market research, target early adopters and focus on getting more customer traction. This series is...
ProductNation, a portal dedicated to the cause of the Indian software product industry and Sandhill, a portal that offers business strategy for the software, cloud and mobile ecosystem have tied-up to share industry best practices with companies that are emerging and growing in India. This is an important development in the Indian software product landscape as it brings to the table pragmatic...
In my previous blogs, I wrote about how differentiation is a must and even wrote about how Bob Wright and Raj Shetty spoke about the differentiation @ NPC-12. Ok now comes the most critical issue of “yeah I understand differentiation but how do I do a valid differentiation rather than doing for the sake of doing”. Let me give me an example to showcase the issue. I want to start a tooth paste...
Editor’s note: EmpXtrack is comprehensive, global HR solution and the product of Saigun Technologies, a startup launched in 2002. We interviewed Tushar Bhatia, Saigun’s founder and president, about the modern elements of an HR solution as well as the challenges for startups in identifying the right target market and funding product development. This article is brought to SandHill readers in...
I started writing about Thinking Big and it is turning out to be a serial topic! As Indians, technical stuff comes naturally, business thinking comes naturally, but creativity is a touch-feely subject that many of us are not that comfortable with! We usually give it lip service and move on to more important stuff like coding or making sales calls! You ask most Software Product Entrepreneurs about...
Buying vs usage: I read a mention of usage rather than just purchase and it is a very valuable distinction. Let’s focus on that and go deeper in it. Buying does not necessarily lead to usage and I’m being generic here, spanning genres of products. Let’s look at a simple and very common example of a purchase that seldom leads to usage. It is the vacuum cleaner at residences. All of us have a...
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...
