When we talk about supporting innovation in India, the first things that come to mind are the availability of capital and people with the right skills. But, the efforts and risks involved in innovation don’t make sense unless inventors and firms can get value out of their innovative activity. When will innovation make money for inventors? That depends on issues like: Are users willing to try out...
The first Indian BarCamp was help in 2006. At this unconference, it was the fortuitous breakdown in managing the distribution of speaker presentations that led to the Idea we all know as SlideShare. Today, we hear their story in an interview with the SlideShare Co-Founder – Mr. Amit Ranjan. ProductNation: Hi Amit, Welcome to ProductNation. We are really looking forward to hear your story. So...
We are planning to release research findings every month week as part of our startup support program at the Microsoft Accelerator in India. There are about 50 different topics that we are curious about and are consistently doing research to find out ways to help our accelerator companies perform market research, target early adopters and focus on getting more customer traction. This series is...
I came across this rather misleading article by a New Investor in town, that India has a Series A drought. I think its a bit sensationalist and misleading and drinks a bit of his own coolaid and shifts blames on others, but I’d agree with the article on one count – Yes there is a drought. I am going to start this off on the right foot. This whole venture funding phenomenon is about at the best 15...
This time, we feature Cardback a Delhi based startup, focused on helping today’s retail consumers discover the best deals and offers available on their credit, debit, loyalty and prepaid cards across merchant establishments. Its first product, also by the same name, is a location-aware mobile app that is currently in public beta for Android and in an invite-only phase for the iPhone. What...
Pricing is a mix of art science. Most product startups have a hard time figuring out their revenue model (freemium or, paid only) and what they should charge. If you chose freemium, you have to be careful that cost of incremental customer is low and it will be great, if this customer also helps spread the word about you. On the other hand, if you choose paid, you run the risk of having minimal...
The buyer had told you that they were in the market for exactly what you were selling, and the timing couldn’t be better. The pricing was right and your solution met all the buyer’s needs but lo and behold the sale did not happen. Has this ever happened to you? If you are like me and many others, you have been in this situation before. Why does this happen? I had thought long and hard about it...
ProductNation, a portal dedicated to the cause of the Indian software product industry and Sandhill, a portal that offers business strategy for the software, cloud and mobile ecosystem have tied-up to share industry best practices with companies that are emerging and growing in India. This is an important development in the Indian software product landscape as it brings to the table pragmatic...
In my previous blogs, I wrote about how differentiation is a must and even wrote about how Bob Wright and Raj Shetty spoke about the differentiation @ NPC-12. Ok now comes the most critical issue of “yeah I understand differentiation but how do I do a valid differentiation rather than doing for the sake of doing”. Let me give me an example to showcase the issue. I want to start a tooth paste...
From the beginning, we at Ozonetel had always wanted to build a platform. Initially, we did a VXML platform with off the shelf hardware. But VXML was not sexy enough and there were not a lot of takers. So in 2010, we did a pivot and built our own custom hardware( PRI cards) and built KooKoo and top of it. KooKoo was our attempt at Telephony Platform as a Service play. Once KooKoo was opened to...
