I will be on a panel with several others at the IAMAI conference next week for the India Digital Summit and the discussion is about how to make 1000 digital startups happen annually in India. I thought I’d put some thoughts together and get some opinions before I present at the panel. Currently there are less than half that number of product companies being started each year. There are various...
5 questions for every product marketing team
When Girish Mathrubootham, CEO, Freshdesk) hired yours truly, a complete novice straight out of B-School, I was Freshdesk’s employee no. 8, and we operated out of a nondescript location deep in south Chennai, from two small rooms behind a quaint Catholic church. Painted in our company’s signature teal color and equipped with an internet connection that had a mind of its own, our old office was...
Wingify – optimizing your website, simply!
Wingify’s vision is to develop world’s best tools for optimizing a website. Wingify launched ‘Visual Website Optimiser’ – an A/B testing software. Their products help in increasing website sales, conversions, signups and, at the same time, decreasing advertising budget. All this done by products which are really simple to use. Having hit 1900 customers in about 3 years, they sure have made...
Mindmaps for Product Startups!
In a product startup you may need to deal with lots of information about your own product features, your market, your competition, your competition’s product features, results of internal brainstorming sessions you may conduct or information about who you can partner with for various aspects of your business. Mind-maps provide a great way of organizing all the information you gather or...
Top 10 mistakes Product Entrepreneurs Make
Inspired from Pallav Nadhani’s interview – this infographic is meant for all those entrepreneurs who dream of building a global product. From delegating to hiring a sales team and to putting an end to customizing products – these tips are invaluable. Pallav, you rock! and thanks for sharing these precious jewels of entrepreneurship!
Huntshire – Hiring Talent via Virtual Hunts!
HuntShire’s mission is to match the right candidate with the right employer through online talent hunts that are designed to assess specific skills against job requirements. It conducts role specific talent hunts on behalf of a range of recruiters and registered candidates can simply choose to participate to show they have the right skills for the job. In conversation with Aakriti...
Design-Led Software Engineering Improves User Experience
Editor’s note: Focus on user experience now shows up in numerous surveys as a major determinant of success in software product sales. We interviewed the co-founders of software development provider Clarice Technologies: Sandeep Chawda, who is also CEO, and Shashank Deshpande, who is also president. Between them they have more than two decades of experience in user-centric design (especially at...
iCalibrator – Bridging the Knowledge Gap
The product – iCalib aims to automate the process of practical learning during the training programmes. Trainees are given exercises to practice the skills they are expected to learn. In a typical classroom model, the trainer is not able to evaluate all trainees individually (sometimes the trainers are not capable of it also). The system would provide individual feedback, and also enable...
Aadhaar and the 7 principles of Product Management
Sanjay Jain, Entrepreneur in Residence, Khosla Labs spoke at the IPMA 2nd annual event. The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) is an agency responsible for implementing the AADHAAR scheme, a unique identification project. It was established in February 2009, with an aim to provide a unique identification number to all Indians, by eliminating duplicate and fake identities. Biometrics...
Why a degree of chaos is better than order
I can bet you are familiar with this one, but not its consequences, in product development: you’ve seen project managers in product development teams express frustration at not being able to keep the development on track, on time and on budget. I had earlier written about the kind of expectations people have of product development and its perils – but this problem of project management is worse...