On August 1st Uber agreed to hand over its Chinese operations to Didi, in return for a 17.7% stake in the combined company’s equity and $1 billion Didi investment in Uber. Uber, though, will get only 5.9% of the voting rights in the new entity. Investors in Uber China, including Baidu, a big Chinese Internet firm, will get a 2.3% stake. Uber CEO Kalanick will serve on Didi’s board, and Wei...
Note: Before I begin, I would like to clarify the difference between market potential and revenue estimate. I have often seen entrepreneurs use the two terms interchangeably. Market Potential Market Potential is about estimating the size of the overall market opportunity. It is a sum total of the potential revenues of all players who are addressing that opportunity, if all the potential customers...
I am a big fan of Joel On Software blog & FogCreek Software. Yesterday Joel announced that, Trello, their visual Project Management product, is now an independent venture funded entity, spun off FogCreek Software. One of the comments in HackerNews caught my attention and got me thinking about an issue — how do you decide if your product idea needs external funding or not?. “I am no...
As a think tank, iSPIRT has been constantly thinking, exploring and encouraging numerous models of software product business, all in parallel. This process leads us to gather three distinct categories of inputs that can then be crystalized and shared with the larger ecosystem – practitioner experiences, market trends and industry strengths. Since all the three factors evolve, the class of...
Premise: Wealth creation by humans happens in 2 forms, by making “something desirable” or by helping the maker sell it. Everything else is a support function that brings efficiency to these 2 activities. The Web being a communication medium can only help sell something, which happens through some form of lead generation. One might argue that SaaS tools are “desirable” products on the web but the...
What does the traditional world of manufacturing have in common with the way networked platforms work? How can a basic understanding of factory design help us change the way we think about designing internet platforms, marketplaces and social networks? I’ve written previously about the distinction between pipes and platforms. If you haven’t already read it, you must definitely check it out. It...
Marketplaces are difficult businesses to get off the ground. A marketplace without buyers cannot attract sellers and vice versa. In fact, the infamy of this proverbial chicken and egg problem detracts entrepreneurs from the challenges that a marketplace presents after it has successfully gained adoption and is successfully matching buyers with sellers. After all, marketplaces for products, like...
If 2012 saw a lot of buzz in India about Jugaad thanks to the Radjou/Prabhu/Ahuja bestseller, I am really hoping that 2013 will restore the balance towards systematic innovation. Indian companies need systematic innovation more than they realize because their challenges are different from the ones that multinationals face. Why are Indian Companies afraid of Systematic Innovation? Among Indian...
For any products company, product support is a given, and part of the products business fabric. However, almost all Enterprise Products Companies end-up offering the professional services beyond basic product support. These services could range from simplistic implementation support, to integration, to solutions-building, to architectural consulting, to IT advisory support. The decision to...
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...
