Started in 2011 with only three employees, Emportant has grown to serve thousands of users with their cloud based end-to-end HR and Payroll products. Co-Founder and CEO, Emportant, Sandeep Todi says his company is focused to appeal to firms that would identify with its motto, ’Employees are Important’. In an interview with ProductNation, he says his biggest learning is you must always take good...
July 18, 2013
"For a product business the product roadmap, customer segmentation and a delightful user experience are extremely crucial.”
18July
July 17, 2013
Product RoundTable Bangalore @ Vizury Office
17July
We had some very good hosts @ Vizury office and also joined by their product folks Shiju and Subra for the Product Round table that was organized last Friday. The other awesome people who were part of the event were Siddharth Ramesh (Exotel), Jose (Weavedin), Vinay Simha (Dfy Graviti), Sridhar (ex-Inmobi), Avinash Raghava (Product Nation), Nari Kannan (The man with experience of over 7 startups...
July 16, 2013
SMBs and Indian Software Product Industry: Intertwined Fortunes
16July
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...
July 15, 2013
Learning and growing together at the iSPIRT #Playbook Roundtable
15July
The Product Management Playbook roundtable repeated last week with an intent to check progress. The mentors – Amit Ranjan & Amit Somani were keen to know the problems product managers faced while they executed on ideas discussed in the previous episode. We could guess this would be one power packed session, especially from the conversations that ensued over lunch. There were active...
July 15, 2013
"Customer Relations is very important" – Kailash Katkar, CEO, QuickHeal Technologies
In this fascinating story, Kailash Katkar recalls the past almost two decades of running a business that at one time faced closure. But riding on quality people, constant innovation and proximity to the customer, Quick Heal has become a leading anti-virus software company that is giving even the international anti-virus companies a run for their money. Read on…. Why did you start this business...
July 12, 2013
Platforms and Verticals—What to Build on and for Whom
12July
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...
July 11, 2013
Stop Imitating! Finding India's True Self
11July
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...
July 10, 2013
Kreeo Makes Disparate Information Discoverable and Manageable for Collaboration
10July
Launched in 2007 in India, Kreeo helps organizations enable information discovery, collaboration and co-creation. CEO Sumeet Anand discusses knowledge/information management solutions in a Big Data world and shares lessons learned along the startup’s journey and pivot from consumer to enterprise software. This article is brought to SandHill readers in partnership with ProductNation. SandHll...
July 9, 2013
Quick Research / Usability Methods: Heuristic Evaluation
09July
(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...
July 8, 2013
Where is Dropbox headed?
08July
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...
