Depending upon who do you ask the question, the answer to “Indian Startup ecosystem has a shortage of good quality?” would oscillate between kick-ass investors and great customers. While the presence of both is crucial to validate the success of the startup, founders always seem to be cut-off from both of kick-ass investors. With India poised towards climbing up the entrepreneurial ladders, no...
March 25, 2013
#ReversePitch "The day VCs pitch the Startups"
25March
March 22, 2013
10 Rules for Effective Product Company Advisory Boards!
22March
Advisory boards are rarely meant for fixing fundamental flaws with business plans. Having big names on the advisory boards, purely for their name value, rarely works. It might help a little in raising venture money, if at all. However, when composed and used wisely, advisory boards can help your product company choose the right corporate, product, market and sales strategies. Simply put, your...
March 21, 2013
Indian Products- Creating a market
21March
Building products when you know the need is hard. Building products which create a new market is harder.In the first case, you know a problem, you envisage a solution and you build a product which solves the problem. People start buying your product as they know they have a need for it.In the second case, you have to first convince the customers there is a need. You have to show them that things...
March 20, 2013
Learnings from the 4th #PNMeetup – Making your product go viral on a low marketing budget
20March
They say lighting does not strike twice, but it definetly did at Kunzum café where the 4th #PNMeetup was happening. The theme “Making your product go viral on a low marketing budget” got over 40 people to the venue all intent to desipher the Virality dilemma. We had Amit Ranjan from SlideShare’s, Pathik Shah from Hike & Bipin Preet Singh from Mobikwik. At the product nation...
March 19, 2013
LurnQ: Indian startup that’s building a personalised MOOC
19March
Update: Some readers have asked for information about MOOCs. A (MOOC) massive open online course is an online educational resource that is available for open access via the web. MOOCs originated around 2008 within the open educational resources (or OER) movement. For more, refer to the Wikipedia link. Online learning is undergoing a paradigm shift and this Forbes article is a pointer of the shape...
March 18, 2013
Entreprenuers should't sweat small stuff!
18March
Was going through popular book “Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff … and it’s all small stuff” by Richard Carlson, PhD and realized lot of the points outlined by Richard are applicable precisely for enterpreneurs in their startup journey. Make peace with imperfection: As a startup, we always are short of resources that are typically available for a big corporation. When...
March 16, 2013
Announcing the First Playbook Roundtable: Positioning and messaging for Product Entrepreneurs
16March
We are pleased to announce the first Playbook RoundTable for Product Entrepreneurs around Messaging & Positioning. A strong, differentiated & memorable product messaging is essential in creating traction for your product. Effective product messaging speaks directly in the langauage of your target audience. This Playbook Roundtable is brought to you by iSPIRT. One of the initiatives of...
March 15, 2013
How educational content and live demos got 7,000 websites using WebEngage in 15 months
15March
I believe one of the best ways to learn marketing and business in general is to learn from other people’s successes. And in a bid to do that, I am going to bring to you interviews of Indian startups that have taken their products to the world. We will talk about how they got the initial buzz going, where they got their first set of customers from, how did they scale that up, what marketing...
March 14, 2013
NowFloats – Getting small businesses online in 4 SMSes and 13 minutes!
14March
NowFloats – Getting small businesses online in 4 SMSes and 13 minutes! I love clear mission statements, and NowFloats couldn’t be clearer: 9.6 million small and medium businesses need a website. Only 0.6 million have one. That’s 9 million tasks on our desk (and that’s just in India!) I recently got a chance to catch up with Ronak and Jasminder (Jas), 2 of the cofounders of this exciting...
March 13, 2013
How to debug a product startup idea ?
13March
You may find it useful to read the previous post on importance of ambiguity tolerance and questioning for an engineer transitioning to a product guy before reading this post. When I was first tasked with writing new features for an existing product that contained thousands of lines of code I earnestly started reading through the documentation & code to understand how it is structured and to...
