Unpluggd 2019

Posted in Entrepreneurship by

It was insightful to be at the Unpluggd 2019. With my experience during the previous editions, I was confident that the Unpluggd team would pick up speakers with great quality and they didn’t let me down. Below are the notes I made:

Sachin

Sachin Bansal (Founder of Flipkart) had a chat on building Flipkart, Thinking Big and Next India Opportunities. He said growth hack for the first 1000 customers at Flipkart, when social networking was just picking up was SEO and word of mouth. They gave ESOPs to people which they didn’t appreciate that moment but only  later when it grew in value. He said he learnt management skills as he built Flipkart, learnt from mistakes and moved on. Cash on delivery, returns were easy because Flipkart had its own logistics.

When asked on what the other Indian competition missed, he said, they could have built better tech. He also said that technology changes break monopolies.

In his opinion, spaces which has opportunity for technology to transform are grocery, healthcare, education, and electric transportation. When asked, what Sachin looks for while evaluating an opportunity, he said: market size, is the market available for disruption, people and their commitment. He advised to think big to build a big business, build a great team, keep the bar high and create trust.

Praful Poddar’s (Head of Product, Olx) talk was very appealing. He spoke on how to fail fast, early and cheap and gave the BIRA mnemonic for product experiments. 

B

I

R

A

Recap

Final

Kunal Shah (Founder of CRED & Freecharge) in an AMA session gave some great insights:

  • 95% of credit cards or car loans are by men
  • Only 5% of credit card users have enabled auto debit enabled
  • Only 12% of women in India are part of the workforce
  • Instead of fail fast, research and plan well
  • Easiest way to know product market fit is the measure of organic growth
  • People want to pay for content if they are short of time, which is not the case is here. Ex. when Tiktok and pubg are being banned means people are doing nothing all day
  • In India people have the tendency to give sugar coated feedback.
  • People who understand applause or crowd empathy, training pets are good at product management
  • Any product that is of high value and infrequent purchase needs high trust building
  • In India people buy education like insurance
  • Nobody enjoys fueling the car or working out but enjoying vacations or playing with kids
  • Boring transactions to interesting transactions
  • Countries with multiple ethnicity have trust problem
  • Education, dating have a premium scope, where Indians can spend money.
  • There is not a great platform for investing in fixed deposits, which Indians love
  • Apartments, apparels have foreign names because we trust less of Indian
  • Most customers didn’t know the interest charges on their credit cards

Anuj Rathi (VP, Products at Swiggy) while speaking on effortless prioritization and how to focus on what really matters, gave the below framework:

  • Focus on customers 50%
  • Focus on competition 10%
  • Focus on economics 20%
  • Focus on future 20%

He also advised on how to prioritize using ICE- Impact, Confidence, Effort.

Anshuman Bapnaa (Chief Product Officer, Goibibo at MakeMyTrip Group) while talking on Scaling Products beyond product-market fit phase said Alignment eats strategy. You want autonomy. You earn that through alignment. How do our partners, customers feel about what we are doing. goCash, a wallet which earned when you upload your address book and you earned money when your friend travelled is an example of alignment.

  1. Be explicit about your beliefs. Ex. Spotify Rhythm: Taxonomy
  2. Choose the right metric and then obsess about reporting it.
  3. Set up autonomous, x-collab teams & give them missions
  4. Overlap missions so teams reinforce each other
  5. Finally, create an alignment rhythm that works for you.

Aakash Dharmadhikari (Director Products, GOJEK) spoke on takeaways from 100x growth and the challenges for that are growing team sizes, complex market dynamics, broken communication, and frequent misalignments. He also said lean works, even at a unicorn and told to treat your company as product, and internal stakeholders as customers. He also stressed on the importance of everyone sharing the big picture, transparency around prioritization for which dashboards and showcases for teams helped. He advised to use OKRs.

Reference: GO-JEK OKR FAQ

Rahul Malik (Head of Product, Atlassian, Bengaluru) said, we should learn to set up OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) in your company. Clearly articulate company strategy, communicate. There should be a sense of belonging in team.

David Zabowski (VP of Engineering, NerdWallet) on going from 0 to 1, 1 to N. The 4 stages of 0 to N

  • Finding initial product market fit
  • Scaling the discovered product
  • Expanding to adjacent product areas: 1 to N
  • Scaling, iteration and leverage

Ranjeet Pratap Singh (CEO & Cofounder, Pratilipi) born in a small village in UP, looked inspirational.

Ashish Sinha (Founder of Nextbigwhat) spoke on 7 Sins of Product Managers

  1. Lust – strong desires. Obsessed with PR, cool tech no one is using, desire to be seen as disruptive business.
  2. Gluttony – over consumption of anything to the point of waste. More features, more options, more options. Reverse example- Why Netflix does not have short films.
  3. Greed–
  4. Sloth-stay in the comfortable a/c office and build what you think is right, without talking to the customers.
  5. Wrath-when launch fails, blame game.
  6. Envy-too obsessed with competition. Competition driven. Reactive.
  7. Pride-too obsessed with self.

To be a good product manager, one should have business and analytical skills, customer understanding, influencing skills and the ability to criticize your own ideas. 

Arvind Pani (CEO, Reverie) which was acquired by Jio said, not every startup needs to aspire for billion dollar valuations.

Vivek (Cofounder of BOUNCE) was full of confidence when he spoke on finding Product-Market Fit in a Brand New Category. He said behavioral shaping is happening in India and shared mobility will pickup.

Anandamoy Roychowdhary (Director – Technology, Sequoia Capital India Advisors) while speaking on how to hire and grow team as you scale said, look for passion and grit

Design

Advertisements

Mobile Sparks 2017 by Yourstory

Posted in Entrepreneurship by

Have been a regular reader of Yourstory and a fan of it flagship event TechSparks. This time wanted to witness and learn from mobile entrepreneurs and went in for the MobileSparks, also hosted by Yourstory. The theme of MobileSparks 2017 was “The New Billion”. Over here, I would predominantly be focussing on the session, “Building habit forming products” delivered by Pramod Jajoo, CTO of Big Basket. Here is what he had to say on the 7 principles to follow:

1. Use user-centric design philosophy

  • UCD is a design process that focuses on user needs and requirements
  • Most commonly a four step process
    • Understand the user context
    • Develop user requirements
    • Design/develop
    • Evaluate
  • UCD heavily involves users in all design and evaluation phases
  • Examples of UCD at Big Basket
    • We tend to buy the same product over and over again – smart basket
    • Show available vouchers in the big basket voucher flow
  • Anti example of UCD
    • Online bus site missing the itenary details
    • An ecommerce site showing, you may like similar phones even after purchasing a phone only recently

2. Keep things simple

“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler” – Albert Einstein

  • WhatsApp signup is a good example
  • Remember, most users do not have an engineering or an MBA degree.
  • Keep user flows simple
    • Remove frictions
    • Contextual actions
    • Consistency in nomenclature
  • Use intuitive iconography and fonts
    • Quote and Forward icons in WhatsApp is quite confusing.

3. Imbibe data orientation

  • Make “data actionable”
    • Measure everything
    • Draw insights from the data
    • Take corrective actions based on what the data tells you
  • Make application smarter with smarter notification, personalisation…etc.
  • Few example of internal analysis
    • Cohort analysis
    • Scores of NPS, CSAT, CES (Customer Effort Score)
  • Experiments
    • For any non trivial changes, experiment and measure.
    • Have a representative sample for different experiments
    • Have a baseline or control group

4.‎ Optimize performance and non-happy flows

  • Performance makes a huge difference in user experience and adoption
    • Google found that and extra .5 seconds in search page generation time dropped traffic by 20%
  • Make user actions responsive and (instant if possible)
    • Take action first and then send to server in async mode
    • Tweak the flow to design for performance
    • Image compression, prefetch, HTTP 2…etc.

5.‎ Go beyond metros and English speaking audience

  • Mobile first (or may even be mobile only)
  • Mobile web is super critical. Progressive Web Apps.
  • Supporting variety of devices.
    • Screen size
    • Spotty networks (Use caching, buffering, compression, prefetch …etc.)
    • Battery load, push notification reliability
    • App size optimization
  • Natural Language Processing and voice would play a huge role
  • Vernacular support

6. Tailor solutions for cost/value conscious users

  • Most Indians are cost/value conscious
    • If you are competing on price, then benchmark prices regularly.
    • You need to win on price perception and not just on price.
    • Communicate on the value proposition
    • Look at “cashbacks” as repeat purchase incentives. But keep it simple.
  • Win the trust
    • Explain value propositions clearly
    • Explain the rationale for fees (and do not make them hidden).
    • Provide value – lower cost should not mean “cheap or shoddy”.

7. Behavioral science and psychology

Lots of techniques for creating an emotional connect, effective storytelling, satisfying an itch and designing habit forming rewards. Understanding this well can have a profound effect on product success. A few techniques,

  • Nudge

Made popular by 2017 Nobel Prize winner for Economics – Richard Thaler

“A nudge, as we will use the term, is any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people’s behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives. To count as a mere nudge, the intervention must be easy and cheap to avoid. Nudges are not mandates. Putting fruit at eye level counts as a nudge. Banning junk food does not.”

Example of Nudges at Big Basket:

On the basket page of the first time users without fruits and vegetables in the basket; to nudge the customer to buys F&V, we could say “More than 90% of our customers purchase fruits and vegetables. Great quality. Sourced and packed for freshness.

On the basket page, to nudge the user to qualify for the next offer, “Shop for Rs. 220 more and avail 10% off.”

  • Paradox of choice
    • Abundance of choice paralyses the user.
    • User’s attention is fickle and user’s time is precious.
    • Make smart defaults for the user.
    • Bundle options whenever possible.
    • Limit choices based on personalisation.
    • Smart recommendations. Ex. Facebook’s smart feed.
    • Less is more.
  • Decoy effect (cognitive bias)

One of the many cognitive biases that most humans have. Lets look at an example of decoy effect. Say, we as a seller can afford to give 20% on bulk purchases of a product. Option1; Buy 1 at Rs. 100. Option 2: Buy 5 at Rs. 400(20% off).

Just by adding a decoy choice makes customer choose our option much more. Option1; Buy 1 at Rs. 100. Option 2[Preferred choice]: Buy 5 at Rs. 400(20% off). Option3[Decoy]:  Buy 4 at Rs. 380(5% off)

“The decoy effect (or attraction effect or asymmetric dominance effect) is the phenomenon whereby consumers will tend to have a specific change in preference between two options when also presented with a third option that is asymmetrically dominated.” -Wikipedia

He also advised not to overuse this.

Here are the book recommendations by Pramod:

  1. Design of everyday things by Don Norman
  2. Predictably irrational by Dan Ariely
  3. Nudge by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein
  4. Hooked by Nir Eyal
  5. Paradox of choice by Barry Schwartz

Sanket Atal, Group Vice President, Oracle while talking on rethinking mobile paradigms said the three fundamental things necessary for startups to thrive are an addressable market, talent and technology.

Jason Wang of SHAREit India while talking on the journey of scaling to 300 million users said,

  • Understand what is the opportunity, what are the users pain points.
  • Share it was designed for areas with poor connection but people looking for entertainment.
  • The app should be super simple and super friendly.
  • Have people to answer questions 24/7.
  • Execution matters.
  • Focus organic growth and word of mouth.

Amit Somani, Managing Partner, Prime Venture Partners, while talking on How data can be used to understand the new billion users, and ways for startups to spot the multiple opportunities in India, quoted the below slide:

Maslows-Hierarchy-of-Startups

Special mentions to Arun Babu ASP from Uber India, for making his talk more lively.

Spring cleaning the physical wallet

Posted in Ideas by

Wallet3

A fat wallet  is terrible looking. It gives you that big bulge that’s just ugly. The smartphone can lighten up a heavy wallet. We’ve seen mobile phones displace cameras, music players, books, credit cards and a lot many and we can also digitize stuffs in the wallet like business cards, receipts, ID cards, loyalty cards …etc. Here is yet another suggestion from the Google fanboy on digitizing business cards and eliminating them from your wallet.

  • Digitizing physical business cards

Business cards help us share contact details and make use of it over a long term for mutual benefit. It is pretty much a necessity for networking. But how do you deal with a bunch of 100+ business cards when you return from a conference or trade show. Stuffing the cards inside the wallet or maintaining a box of cards or a rolodex is burdensome, occupies physical space and cannot be carried with us wherever we go. I propose a solution wherein, Google, which also has apps like Google Goggles and PhotoScan, should come up with a mechanism to integrate business cards with contacts by provisioning users to scan business cards using the phone’s camera, transcribe what is written on the card and save or merge it to contacts. From the digitized card, the user should be able to contact them via call, e-mail, SMS, or add them on LinkedIn.

Once the user captures the business card on the contacts screen, it should display the image of the scanned business card followed by the below fields, which should be fetched from the transcribed text on the card and the user should be allowed to edit/enter the missing information manually.

  • Title
  • Name
  • Job Title
  • Company Information
  • Address
  • Phone – with options to add multiple phone numbers
  • Email – with option to add multiple email addresses
  • Website – with options to add multiple URLs
  • Blog
  • Birthday
  • Social Media – (LinkedIn, Google+, Facebook, Twitter, Skype, Others)
  • Label/Category
  • Option to add a note like how and when they met

In some cases, business cards are printed on both the side and hence there should be an option to capture the rear of the card too, which should be displayed at the bottom. When the user taps on a saved card, an expanded view of the card should be displayed with the front image of the card on top, followed by the details, followed by the rear image of the card.       

  • Design, store and send electronic business cards to other mobiles

Your business cards are something that you may need, especially if you are in a profession that needs to build contacts. Handing out your card is a much useful way of making new contacts and it should be just a swipe or flick away with your mobile device. Converting business cards as digital  entities and making them shareable peer to peer using NFC or any other wireless contact sharing would save a lots of physical space and also a few trees. The user should be allowed to capture and save his/her own card or create a customised card, which can be shared over phone to phone wireless sharing or over email.

My card section on top should show the captured image of the business card along with the editable contact details below,

  • Title
  • Name
  • Job Title
  • Company Information
  • Address
  • Phone – with options to add multiple phone numbers
  • Email – with option to add multiple email addresses
  • Website – with options to add multiple URLs
  • Blog
  • Birthday
  • Social Media – (LinkedIn, Google+, Facebook, Twitter, Skype, Others)

Alternatively, if the user wishes to create/design his/her card rather than scanning it, the user should be provided with a create option in the My Card section. Upon clicking create, the user should be displayed a form to fill in the above contact details along with option to upload the company logo under company information. Once the user completes entering the details the next screen should prompt to select from a few available templates of business card. In order not to confuse the user too much and to keep the creation process simple, only limited templates should be provided with options of background colour limited to White, Grey and Blue and prefixed text colours complementary to that of the background. The text font should initially be limited to only one, which looks professional and pleasing. Once the user selects the template, a preview of the user’s card should be displayed with options to finalize the card or to go back and change the template or edit the details. The finalized card should be displayed in the My Card section of the business cards tab in the contacts screen, with options to share wirelessly to others.

Design

Mock-up of Contacts screen with an additional tab for Business Cards. (Designed using Marvel)

 

Using Google Maps to Improve Safety on Roads

Posted in Ideas by

sign7_italy

Improving safety on the roads helps road users, prevents accidents and saves lives. It secures people while traveling on the roads. Improving and maintaining the road infrastructure can ensure on its part, safety on roads and give a great travel experience.

Impediments on roads such as  potholes, unmarked speed breakers, unmarked road turns, fallen signages, malfunctioning signal…etc can cause drivers to lose control over their vehicles and cause  accidents.  Such accidents can be prevented to a significant degree, if there are proper caution signs/marks and when the roads are properly maintained. However it is difficult for the civic agencies to monitor all the roads for maintenance issues . My suggestion would be to crowd source these to bring it to the notice of civic agencies using Google maps. Civic agencies should tie up with Google maps, where Google maps provides an option for the users to earmark locations where there are potholes, unmarked speed breakers and unmarked turns on roads. These markers done on Google maps can be seconded as authentic issues by subsequent users who pass through the same locations. Upon taking confirmation from a few users, Google maps should send notification to the civic authorities, who can in turn address the issue. Such notifications can also be utilised to point out broken/leaking public water pipes, damaged electric poles, unsafe electric cables lying on the roads, or anything which compromises the safety of the road users and which needs to be addressed.

For this purpose, Google maps should place an option on the map screen, to report a maintenance issue, by marking the location, adding specific details and upon submitting, a notification should be sent to the civic agencies.

“Be alert! Accidents hurt.” ~ Author Unknown

An officer and a gentleman.

Posted in Uncategorized by

*Proud to be an alumnus 🙂

SANJAY KAUL'S WEBLOG

 

Sainik Schools  are one of our best experiments with regimental learning. They have produced sterling candidates – both soldiers and citizens. In a time of growing shortage of officers in the armed forces, why are we so short of such schools? 

Just 86 cadets joined the Indian Military Academy at Dehradun in 2008 against a course strength of 250. And, instead of 300 applicants, just 192 turned up at the National Defence Academy, Khadakvasla, at Pune. Defence Minister AK Antony has admitted that the shortage of officers in the Army is around 11,500. In the Navy, the shortage is 1606. The number of vacancies in the Air Force is 1342.

There is an element of irony to the figures of shortage of officers that has been put out by the Ministry of Defence for some years now. The irony is that the shortage has only widened after the deficit…

View original post 1,455 more words

Apps to help during emergency – feedback to Google/Android

Posted in Ideas by

I am a great fan of Google and its ‘Do not be evil’ philosophy. I feel that the utility of mobile devices during emergency situations can be improved, if the below functions are added.

Emergency dialler

In a country like India, when a person meets with an accident and becomes unconscious, those who come to help or the police would want to find out the identity of the victim. They would also try to access the mobile phonebook to contact the family or friends of the victim. In most cases, mobiles are locked using passcodes, so as to protect personal data and hence is not of much help during such emergencies.

What can be done?

The screen 1 below shows the sample screen of a locked mobile, with an option for making an emergency call. When the ‘Emergency call’ option is clicked, screen 2 as shown below is displayed. However, screen 2 allows to dial only numbers like 911 or 112. The emergency contact for various countries differ and hence those too should be included. Now, to inform the family or friends of the victim or to find out the identity of the victim, dialing to a number on the phone book wouldn’t be possible as the phone is locked. So, when the phone is locked/passcode protected, the users should be able to access and dial a few numbers from the phone book. For instance, when the user taps on the ‘Emergency call’ option in screen 1, screen 3 should be presented instead of screen 2 as it is shown currently. In screen 3, the user should be presented with a list of 3-5 emergency contact numbers. These emergency contact numbers should be pre-selected from the phone book, based on a prompt from the device.

Ex. User should be able to map/assign the contact ‘Mom’ as Emergency 1, ‘Dad’ as Emergency 2, and so on, where ‘Mom’ and ‘Dad’ are contacts stored in the phonebook.

Screen 1

Screen 1

Screen 2

Screen 2

Screen 3

Screen 3

‘Track me’ app

What is this?

This app should help the mobile user to text, send a photograph of any person, place or thing or to send a voicemail, to a Google protected mailbox/application, which can only be accessed by Google and any investigation agencies.

Why is this required?

Case 1: When women in Indian cities travel alone in an auto rickshaw during night times, they are advised to send a message with the name of the driver and the registration number of the auto, to their friends or family members. This helps to track, in case of any unforeseen events.

Case 2: In the movie 127 hrs, Aron Ralston goes on a hike to the Blue John Canyon, without informing his mother. His mother was not aware of his whereabouts and files a missing complaint.

So, when a person is going somewhere without informing anyone, as mentioned in case 2 or if a person is travelling alone as mentioned in case 1, the mobile user should be presented with a track me button in the home screen. The user should be able to open the app and text, capture an image like the auto rickshaw registration number or record a voice on where he is going and for what purpose and click on save. This message should be saved to a Google server, which cannot be deleted by the user and should be auto deleted after 2-4 weeks time. When the person is found missing or does not return home for long, parents can file a complaint and the investigation agencies should be able to trace the whereabouts of the missing person using the message the user left lastly. Though the phone movement can be tracked using signals, this app would give an option for the users to relay his actual intentions of going somewhere or his whereabouts. Ex: Not all people are comfortable to disclose where they intend to go and what they intend to do there. This app would help to track them and at the same time protects their privacy.

PS:

1. The “Emergency Dialler” idea got implemented in Android N, released in Aug 2016.

2. Google has come up with “Trusted Contacts“ app based on my app suggestion “Track me” which was sent to suggestions@google.com. Google’s new Trusted Contacts mobile app lets you connect to friends and family in the event of an emergency.

UnPluggd 2014

Posted in Entrepreneurship by
Ninth edition of the UnPluggd by NextBigWhat was held in May 2014. Like the previous editions this too was insightful. My first ‘Hi’ was to Suresh Sambandam, who was there to deliver a talk on the art of scale. It was a surprise to hear that Suresh haven’t had a formal technical education, studied commerce through distance education, still got hired by HP and later went on to start OrangeScape, a global top 10 Platform as a Service company. All I can understand from the pep talk was, he was passionate about computers and he had put in so much of hard work and dedication. Here is what he spoke about:
5 screw ups
  • Misjudging ramp up of new geography.
  • Engaging experts doesn’t always help.
  • Health equity is more important. Exercise and stay healthy.
  • Putting all the eggs in the startup basket. Have a backup so as to avoid frustration.
  • Telling bad news early.
5 learnings
  • Sales is intuitive.
  • Platforms need an application facade.
  • Money comes in different shades of green.
  • Networking doesn’t help beyond a point.
  • Mentors > Advisors > Board of Directors. Less vested, more value.
5 right things
  • First learn and then delegate. Make them successful.
  • Keeping cool at all times. Live the present.
  • Rolling up the sleeves. Growth changes only the task.
  • Hiring good talent.
  • Having a healthy and happy personal life.
How Suresh classified lead generation,
  • Seeds – blogs, articles, being in the news.
  • Net – programs and road shows.
  • Spear – sharp shooting based on customer profile research.
Insights on scaling up – the common floor story by Vikash Malpani. Humble beginnings. Pivoting. Building a strong team. Building quality. Measure. Learn. Stay frugal. Vikash stressed on the importance of a strong foundation and staying focused. Quoted AAP on how premature scaling can be more dangerous.
Amarpreet of Frrole spoke on cracking traction, the team, Plan B, conviction and stubborn persistence and Ankit from Unicommerce said there is no perfect time to start. So start now. He also advised to build a strong support team before ramping up sales. Success is 1% idea 99% execution.

Ashish, Mukesh and Sachin, discussing the story of Flipkart's Myntra acquisition

Ashish, Mukesh and Sachin, discussing the story of Flipkart’s Myntra acquisition

The product management workshop quoted a few experiments like why people choose pay now option on a travel portal rather than pay at hotel, because travellers felt that paying online while booking, made them feel secured/assured. It is important that we listen to end users to fine tune the product, but in this case when the users were given incentives and called for testing and to study their behaviour, they came prepared and thus were not behaving as natural users. The panel on Cracking the Consumer Code enlightened on how consumers are mysterious and the need to constantly experiment.
The brave talk on failures was an opportunity to learn from others mistakes. What went wrong and what can we learn?
  • Fell in love with the solution and not the problem.
  • Zero business model.
  • Times changed, we didn’t.
  • Too much importance on design. Ship the product quick and fine tune.
  • Market is important.
  • Too involved in daily activities.
  • Hire slow fire fast.
  • Emotional roller coaster drains you drastically.
  • Need to have a very supporting partner.
  • Do research: test to fail, build a user persona, meet real people, loathe researcher’s bias, alternatives research.
  • Fail fast: learn to do a bit of programming (res: code academy, treehouse )
  • Write, Analyse.

Dilemma of an entrepreneur: onlookers wonder "Wow! a courageous man is riding a lion"; the person on the lion (entrepreneur) wonders "How the hell did I get on top of it!" and is in a dilemma to get down or not!

Dilemma of an entrepreneur: onlookers wonder “Wow! Someone courageous is riding a lion”; the person on the lion (entrepreneur) wonders “How the hell did I get on top of it!” and is in a dilemma to get down or not!

While sharing his lessons on failure, Kingsley of TripThirsty quoted “Schadenfreude” – the enjoyment obtained from someone else’s misery. Yes there are some people waiting to take pleasure if an entrepreneur fails and we should learn to survive the aftermath. Bravo! for boldly coming on stage and sharing the lessons from failure.

Construkt Fest – Convergence of the Creators!

Posted in Entrepreneurship by
In Mar 2013, I was excited to be at the Startup Festival, celebrating the rise of Bangalore as the startup capital of India. The insights I gained and the fun I had, made me wait eagerly for the 2014 edition. It did come, however with more creative stuffs and re-branded as the Construkt Festival, to celebrate the convergence of Creators: Artists, Activists, Change Makers, Designers, Entrepreneurs, Engineers, Social Innovators, Restaurateurs, Chefs, Brewmasters, Hackers, Makers and Muscians. 
 
Spread over 4 days, the first 2 days were the Crawls, where we get to visit various startups in tech, social, design and culinary, listening to the founders, seeing their offices, studios, restaurants and brewery and taking insights from their journey as a creator/entrepreneur. The last 2 days marked the actual festival, held at Jayamahal Palace, Bangalore. With multiple stages, studios, flee market, eateries, and a lots of fun, I got to gain a lots of wisdom, meet various creators and make a few friends. In toto, its was an Awesome four days of Crawl! Learning! Creativity! Networking & Great Fun! Pictures would convey the message better.

Image

Sanjay Anandaram, speaking on the Entrepreneurial Mindset

Image

Image

Image

Construkt Collision, an induced networking orchestrated by Jessica Tangelder

Image

Colliding randomly and networking

Image

The crawl at The Egg Factory

Image

The Crawl at Something’s Cooking, where we get to bond over cooking & I learnt to prepare pizza!

Image

Image

Image

Eagerly listening to the journey of Little Eye Labs, which recently got acquired by the Facebook

Image

Rubanomics. Transforming rural lives. They live by their name Head Held High

Image

Cocktail workshop at The Humming Tree

Image

Image

Vishwas Mudagal autographing his book ‘Loosing my religion’. One more added to my collection of books signed by the authors!

Image

Became a fan of these two vibrant, amazing ladies, Shilo Shiv Suleman and Alica Souza

Image

Image

Image
Image
Image

Image

Thanks to Mr. Kappansky 🙂

Image

Jamming with Montry Manuel

Image

Thanks to The Humming Tree, F16’s & Thaalavattam for the musical night

Image

The F16’s

Image

Avril Stromy Unger!

UnPluggd – Winter Edition 2013

Posted in Entrepreneurship by
NextBigWhat came up with the winter edition of the startup conference, Unpluggd. In the last edition, Vishal Gondal’s talk lit the fire in me and this time it was Paras Chopra, Founder & CEO of Wingify, who caught my heart.
Vijay Ram Kumar, Founder of Hoverr @ UnPluggd

Here is the bootstrapped story of Wingify, an A/B testing company built by Paras, who learnt programming early in his life, but chose to major in biotechnology because he wanted to learn something new. Wow! that’s a cool attitude. He got inspired by Paul Graham’s essays, listed all his interests on a piece of paper, picked the top one and went on to startup.

Having done a few failed college projects similar to start ups and starting up Kroomsa, a platform for independent bands/artists, Paras was in his own fantasy world dreaming of Kroomsa’s massive hit. He wanted the world to notice though nobody noticed, he said. He later realised that he was not marketing well and wanted to hone those skills, went on to share the subsequent products with Hacker news took the feedback and was heart broken. In his words, “I wanted to die. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” Paras said, making a comprehensive kichdi confuses users, whose attention span is less and nobody goes through help section. Usability and user on boarding is very important. Focus matters and he focused on just one feature after dumping so many other efforts he had put in. He advised on involving potential user from day one, focusing on customer feedback, being close to them and rapidly iterating on the feedback. Competition can copy the product but not the culture  and customer service. Getting covered on tech crunch, writing in lots of places, blogs, case studies, twitter, reviews and through inbound content marketing, Wingify positioned themselves as thought leader in their area.
There were established players like Google Website Optimizer and Omniture who were competitors of Wingify, but he had priced the product substantially low because his initial humble goal was a simple revenue of Rs. 50,000, which was the salary he was getting that time. Fortunately they got a first month revenue of $4000 and touched one million dollar revenue in 18 months. That’s a quite nice money and Wingify now has 3300 customers across 70 countries. VCs eventually started contacting, but Paras believes that funding is not a milestone. That is a misconception. Funding is like home loan. You don’t celebrate when you take home loan. It can make sense when you have a precise plan. Also realise that investors are not friends but partners. They have some legal clauses that can thwart your way of running a company.
On stressing the importance of a co-founder, Paras said we can’t rely on employees for everything and need someone with whom we can share stuff with and for that matter, a great co-founder is good. We need to figure out someone with whom we share a good relationship with and not sure how people are confident posting something like ‘looking for a co-founder’ on job sites. And before closing, he reiterated that India can build great product companies and Wingify wishes to be one.
Other speakers also left us with some wonderful insights. Manav Garg, who didn’t have a background in the software industry and was a commodities trader took the road not taken and built Eka, a software provider for global commodity market. Here are the insights from his talk:
  • Focus on prototyping instead of pitching.
  • Sales is a serious business and it should be sales, sales and sales in the first year.
  • The first sales person is really important and one simple way to hire him is by looking at his past performance.
  • Talk to potential customers. Persuade. People are always ready for a cup of coffee.
  • Investors are not always right.
  • Focus. You are in the drivers seat and can’t take your eyes off the road ever. There is no room for distractions.
  • Laying emphasis on being very frugal, Manav reflected Warren Buffet’s quote “If you buy things you don’t need, soon you will have to sell things you need.”
  • Your company is only as good as your writing. Take risks.
  • Focus on cash flow. Bring in paying customers without delay.
  • Create a team who can run as fast as you.
  • Scale the product along with continuous improvement.
  • Put all the money back into the product initially. Invest in R&D.
  • Outperform on the promises. Delighted customer is a multi million dollar marketing campaign.
  • Hiring across continent is a biggest leap of faith for an entrepreneur. Get the top notch sales people.
  • You might not win every battle, you ll have to find the perfect fit.

Sanjay Swamy, Managing Partner at AngelPrime while talking on doing business with large companies, said:

  • Research your customer well. Associate with someone who wants to be no. 1.
  • Offer something that the customer can’t get anywhere else.
  • Test the market early. Do not keep the idea an ultra secret. That will not help.
  • One way of approaching a probable partner is to find a rising star in a large company who is ready to take risk to prove himself and proceeding through him.
  • Very soon go for paid pilots, build relationships and establish processes.
  • Sign an NDA as early as possible and be serious about each other.
  • Have a good cop and a bad cop to tackle issues with customers.
  • Maintain the exclusivity and advantage over pricing.

Aprameya said TaxiForSure was a serendipity and I later found that they have even named their company as Serendipity Infolabs. Being hands on has helped them develop the back-end system and he stressed on the importance of being frugal so as to achieve more with less. On being asked on how he had changed to suit the needs of the business, he said he learnt to speak the language of operators, with whom they collaborate with.

Nikil, Co-founder of Tint talked on lessons learnt in making Tint profitable. Here are his pointers:
  • Be a hustler.
  • “When I’m old and dying, I plan to look back on my life and say “wow, that was an adventure,” not “wow, I sure felt safe.” Tom Preston-Werner.
  • Be opportunistic.
  • Be tenacious.
  • “Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish” – Steve Jobs.
  • Be open to partnerships.
  • Charge your customers. Charge you customers higher.
  • Focus on inbound marketing & organic growth. People, Product, Culture.
4 people, 11 months, 40,000 brands, 3000 paying customers and 1+ million dollars revenue. Besides all these, he was humbled by the fact that Sachin & AR Rahman are using his product. What else?
Unpluggd was a platform for Pickle.io, CloudEngine, ZapStitch, Senseforth, DigiCollect, Hoverr.me and MagnetWorks to pitch their offerings and with MagnetWorks, I saw how the Internet of Things is going to evolve. The final discussion by BK Birla and Kunal Shah was on whether founders would be the best CEOs. They stressed the importance of finding a mentor who is harsh with you, who is not a cynic but who gives genuine feedback. It was a day well spent for me. Thanks to NextBigWhat 🙂

UnPluggd 2013

Posted in Entrepreneurship by
Every time I attend workshops or conferences at TiE or Yourstory, I think of doing a write-up  summarizing the insights I have gained, but for some lazy reasons, I never came up with one. Last week I attended UnPluggd 2013, which attracted entrepreneurs, geeks, investors and angels and was also a launchpad for a few startups and it was this talk by Vishal Gondal, the founder of Indiagames, that instilled me to write this time. Vishal didn’t rely on powerpoint and instead conveyed his messages as stories, which were quite cool and here are his 10 commandments for entrepreneurs:
 
  1. Thou shall have balls and not business-plans
  2. Thou shall develop relationships and not transactions
  3. Thou shall focus on real pain-points
  4. Thou shall be number 1 or 2
  5. Thou shall focus on 20%
  6. Thou shall avoid MBAs and spreadsheet-makers
  7. Thou shall celebrate failures and enjoy your journey
  8. Thou shall not want to sell
  9. Thou shall stay fit
  10. Thou shall win with … passion.
Vishal also said that an entrepreneur shouldn’t get intimidated by the bullies, should learn how to achieve speed while riding on empty tank and also learn to  keep the team motivated.
 
Kailash Katkar, cofounder and chairman of Quick Heal narrated his inspirational journey from repairing calculators and radios to encouraging his brother who was studying computer science, to come up with a solution to clean the viruses from computers that came to him for servicing, to eventually starting up Quick Heal Technologies, the renowned Indian software security solutions company, which has presence in close to 50 countries around the world with an expected turnover of Rs.240 crores this year.
 
It was a very humble yet courageous talk by Radhakrishna, founder of iStream, an online video service provider, which they had to shutdown recently. Radha spoke about their problem with raising funds and the reasons like piracy and low level of acceptance for subscription based models in India but was still confident on the potential for online content/video services, the support from his team and his determination to bounce back.
 
Sachin Bansal, cofounder of Flipkart said if he were to start another company, it would definitely be on internet and in India and explained the reason for Flyte MP3 shutdown in simple math. i.e Flipkart’s music CD section gets 1/6th of users but 3x more revenue than it’s Flyte MP3 downloads which means, revenue from sale of physical CDs is 18x that of Flyte MP3. Moreover, he said, their experiment to attract customers by giving limited period of free downloads was not fruitful because customers who purchase music by means of online download do not feel that they own it as much as when they buy CDs. Then, we also have the problem of piracy, very rampant here.
 
The final inspiration came from Lalit Patel, Co-Founder, BASH Gaming, who after 18 failed experiments, zoomed from $0 to $55mn in revenue through his most successful game Bingo Bash. His message: Passion and Persistence.
 
Appreciate the bunch of entrepreneurs who launched their products and for the effort they have put in creating something wonderful. However, most of them lacked the enthusiasm while being on stage. They might have faced some hurdles backstage but as Muhammad Ali once said, “To be a great champion, you have to believe you are the best. If you’re not, pretend you are.”
 
“The perfect pitch must be powerful, potent, polished, and most importantly, practiced!” -Anonymous