The trend of pure-play SaaS providers and on-premise software ISVs diversifying into SaaS is on the rise. SaaS revenue for global top 10 ISVs forms 40% of all software revenues. According to Gartner, the SaaS revenues will grow annually at 17.5% to form 24% of all software revenues in 2016. This would amount to USD 22.5 billion up from USD 14.5 billion in 2012. While SaaS makes a perfect business...
June 14, 2013
SaaS Pricing – the role of customer value proposition
14June
June 13, 2013
3 Reasons why stories will help you win business
13June
Your product does something unique and interesting and you tell people and they go …. Oh well, that’s great and walk away. Would you agree that they just do not get it? All of us have faced this problem sometime or the other. Let me emphasize this with an example: A large company was pitching to my customer for a partnership deal. Four French guys and I represented my customer. Into the...
June 12, 2013
Fifth iSPIRT Playbook Roundtable: Product Manager, the Skill in Demand
12June
It is a cliché to say product management is both art and science. The product manager’s function encompasses a range of tasks, only limited by the company’s vision. Deep Nishar, Senior VP, Products and User Experience, at LinkedIn, told the audience at Nasscom Product Conclave 2012 that, “product managers should have brain of an engineer, heart of a designer and speech of a diplomat.” The product...
June 11, 2013
Aurus Network CourseHub: Delivering on the promise of classroom-in-the-cloud
11June
Aurus Network was founded in 2010 with the vision to make quality education accessible to masses at affordable prices. It is revolutionizing the way distance/online education is delivered. Aurus offers CourseHub, its flagship product, which is a cloud-based solution for educational institutions (higher education, test prep and training,schools, etc.) to capture, store and deliver (live or on...
June 10, 2013
Product Manager, or Product Experience Manager?
10June
In my last post Experiencing the product, or productizing the experience?, I talked about my experience with SiteZ and how their overall experience left much to be desired even though the core product was good enough. In this post, I will try to analyze things that went wrong which shouldn’t have. Here are 5 things that went wrong for SiteZ if I look from a customer’s perspective: They misled the...
June 8, 2013
How to Become a Super Associate
08June
Being an Associate in a Venture Capital firm is a dead-end job*, that you can’t leap without entrepreneurial experience. And, entrepreneurs hate you for your pesky, clueless mails. Here’s hoping to help you out – and help ourselves. Dear Associate / Analyst, I know I took a big stab at you [1] and went public with it. I know you are trying to do your job, but the way you are going about it...
June 7, 2013
#DesignThinking: Desirable. Feasible. Viable
07June
We all know quite well the value of Design to business, and Design Thinking to problem solving. But what remains a bit fuzzy for many start-ups, organizations & individuals is the gap between thinking and doing or making it happen. In this time of volatility and complexity, the role of design to drive meaningful innovation and change is growing and while there are multitude of factors that...
June 6, 2013
Pixel Jobs – Product review of a job portal by designers for designers
06June
Pixel Jobs, designed by the talented folks at Sparklin, is a refreshing look at the boring world of job portals. The problem to solve was simply, “How to get a job post seen by the best creative talent?” An old fashion job-board served as a physical metaphor to yield a clean, simple and inviting job portal cheekily named – Pixel Jobs. It has nifty filters to make searching easy...
June 5, 2013
You are not supporting a device, you are supporting people
05June
Founders of iYogi, Vishal and Uday have a candid chat with ProductNation about how they started the company and the reason for their success in the support space. They assist more than 2.5 million individual and small enterprise users today across the globe. Interestingly the idea originated from a very simple notion – that of “people centricity”. Vishal and Uday, I was just curious about the...
June 4, 2013
How Much is your Company Worth? – A Valuation Toolkit for Software Product Startups
04June
When you see Yahoo offer $1.1B in cash for Tumblr or it pays $30M for Summly, the reactions around the world range from kudos to the founders and initial investors, to “I’ll have some of what they are smoking”! But most of the time, there is some sanity behind all that madness but there have been times when it has been more of insanity as at the peak of the Dot.com boom, in the...
