The below post is edited from an answer given to ET for this story. This article is 2 yr old. Republished today. The rise of Mobile is a big shift in the way Internet is used, thereby influencing commerce over the Internet. In developed economies it is the desktop based users who have started spending a significant amount of time on mobile. For India specifically, mobile is bringing in lot of...
Freshdesk’s Customer Happiness Tour : Gurgaon – Redefining the Customer Service Experience
In the last few years, a lot of things have changed about the way we do business. For one thing, customer happiness is no longer an accessory to companies. It has become the matter of the hour influencing every aspect of a business, from the way we build the product to the way we support customers. Brands are finding it increasingly important to go the “extra mile” with their customer experience...
Show Me The Money
Who doesn’t remember the famous four words of the 1996 film Jerry Maguire? The relevance of these words encompasses all generations. We look at the rich and mighty with a hint of jealousy, sometimes incredulously , some other times in awe, yet other times perturbed. On the other hand, the poor and downtrodden are subjugated to our pity, dissidence, even repulsion. Now that makes one thing very...
Over seven seas: Why Indian companies are increasingly going global
While there are no numbers or research on how many Indian startups have global operations, I suspect it will be a sizeable number – a number that is growing every month and every year. No longer are Indian startups content in serving merely the domestic market, this new breed of startups and entrepreneurs consider the world as their market. This, however, is not something that has happened...
On that age old debate, Bootstrapping Vs Venture Capital
“The best way to do something ‘lean’ is to gather a tight group of people, give them very little money, and very little time.” – Bob Klein, chief engineer of the Grumman F-14 program. I first came upon this quote on Paul Graham’s website, and it always intrigued me, the small detail about the money – it could be little or a lot, but money is a factor, and a...
Deepinder Goyal of Zomato on “ethics, respect, attitude and skill”
Deepinder Goyal is the founder and CEO of Zomato, India’s first online food guide to go global. Founded in 2008, Zomato recently raised Rs. 227 crore from Sequoia Capital and InfoEdge in one of the largest funding rounds for a consumer internet company in India. This deal values the company at over Rs 900 crore ($150 million) and has “best positioned” Goyal “to build a formidable global internet...
Learnings From Building A Consumer Facing Web Product
Before we got started with PriceBaba, both me and Tirthesh had almost zero experience of building a product. We are passionate about Internet and web services that create an impact. Building PriceBaba over the past two years has been a learning experience and we have been blessed to have some amazing friends who have guided us throughout the process. Here are a few learnings (while we still...
Design in Indian Startups
A brief look at the state of the Indian startup ecosystem from the lens of design and how well it is understood or misunderstood. How the next generation of the technology startups are battling the design challenge in a globally connected ecosystem for the right consumer audience. According to Dave McClure the founding team of a startup should include the holy trinity of a hacker, hustler and a...
Zomato "gets" foodies, and it gets them so well
I am a foodie. And a big Zomato fan, no pun intended anywhere. Here, I am going to talk about everything we foodies love about Zomato and all the things it could do better. For the uninitiated, Zomato is a restaurant discovery platform with 74,800 restaurants listed across 19 cities and 4 countries, and claims to have served 62.5 million foodies till date. More simply, it is about food and where...
5 Indian companies that get marketing
Indians have been known to be poor marketers for long, especially when it comes to taking products to the world. It is easy to blame the lack of good management schools for this but there are a whole lot of other softer aspects at play – limited exposure to different cultures around the world, limited hobbies with watching pirated movies being the favorite one, poor taste in things proven by the...