Solutions that have worked for Product companies at the 49th session of the NASSCOM Friday’s 2.0

Posted by Paritosh Sharma

at July 14, 2009

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Here I am Live Blogging the second Un-conference session of the NASSSCOM Friday’s 2.0 at the NASSCOM HQ in New Delhi. This session is the second in the series of the initiative by NASSCOM for creating a common ground for the Product companies in India. The topic we are discussing today is: Solutions by Product Companies.

We have Ankur Lal, CEO Infozech Software, leading the session along with Arvind Jha of Movico Technologies. We also have Mr. Sharad Sharma - Chair, NASSCOM Product forum.

Okay so we have Mr. Sharad starting the session with a few laughs. Like many of you Im in the mode of becoming an entrepreneur again! I am also currently an entrepreneur in residence with CANNAN PARTNERS.

Sharad, is now sharing his thoughts on how the community can come together in creating an ecosystem. We as NASSCOM ahould also be looking at the other side of the table. i.e. he demand side and not just the delivery side of the equation. Sharad shares an interesting side story of 3M. In the early days of the CD media becoming popular this man he went to the chair and showed the CD and he was turned down. But the next time he did by positioning it the way that its the surface and not the CD/media that is there. Wallah, the rest is history.

What’s Cooking?

Mr. Sharad is now sharing on how NASSCOM is looking to create possibilities for the industry. interestingly Sharad is sharing some very bright ideas which he and the team at NASSCOM are trying to implement specifically aimed at SME’s and SMB’s. Sharad is surely sharing some really good ideas which if given life, could surely lay down a good path and make the journey smoother.

And since this is an Un-conference session, we now have the participants sharing their thoughts on what Sharad just shared with the community.

Sharad: One of the request that often comes back to NASSCOM from product companies is “Can you help us get buyers”. What we have found is, ther real value that NASSCOM can bring is to really grow the market and hold events where buyers and sellers could meet. What we can do is examine on behalf of these companies we could promote the voice.

Lack of project management and product marketing talent in India is a point shared by one of the participants in the room. Its because of the ecosystem. I definitely dont want NASSCOM to sell my product, I need help in developing the ecosystem.

Sharad: Our buyers are afraid of buying products from the small companies.

“No product that I know of has been successful, that has not been developed in the shadow of friendly sophisticated users”

Sharad: What is happening is that we dont have traction to the products, services are not present like force which could help us reach out.

Arvind: Product management and marketing is going to come out of your domestic customer knowledge. I believe that we will have the largest success for a product in the mobile side as we are the largest user base of mobiles.

Participant: Why not think about launching the next Google/Yahoo from India.

Arvind: There is nothing restrciting us from being there.

Ankur: We are the leaders in terms of these 400 million users. I would not be surprised if we have these small Google(s) coming out of India in another couple of years from now.

Participant: I see more and more companies fading out to the more lucrative services space. The DNA of the Indian industry to reamin/focus into the services domain is something which impacts the product.

Ankur: The challenge is that a small product company has to be dealt with safe hands. In the US there is this small companies fund. the government there supports these small businesses. What you need is a forgiven customer.

Challenges faced by Product Companies

So now we are discussing the challenges faced by product companies which we also did discuss the previous session on the product companies here at NASSCOM. Arvind is leading this part of the session, with the entire room being concentrated to the challenges and surely everyone in the room is agreeing to the same.

Arvind: In the spirit of what has worked, we should look at what companies can look at from these successes.

And now we have companies sharing with the room, their products and experiences

Participant: The planning that we do for the product business cycle is not complete. We dont really understand what to do after we have built the product.

So we have Tarun Anand, CTO, mScriber, its s speech training application. Tarun shares how they have been working on the same for the past 2 years and how they realised that its just the tip of the iceberg. We were lucky to get some early customers, but its harder for us to get the second set of customers.

You just have to wait it out and you have to watch what happens

What we realised, is that even if you have an engine, you still have to go to the customer with the 4 wheels, and the rest so that the customer just plugs in the key and moves on. So we partnered with companies which helped us achieve our objectives, and since we did not have the complete product stack, and hence these partners helped us reach there.

Its really important to see what your route to market is

Our biggest challenge right now is cash flows and we need to address the same.

And now we have RateGain, a company into the Hospitality and Travel Technology Products Company and we have the CEO and Founder sharing his thoughts.

We operate in these niche areas, these products have these niche requirements as a result of which we are pretty successful. And now we have RateGain sharin gthe various offerings they have.

While we were gaining knowlegde, we found that every hotel was published on some website, and we took the intelligent way out, which was more of creating a channel in between for the hotels to reach out with their information.

Sharing the Business Model

We have something called the rate tracking tool, so anybody selling anything online, you would want to know if there are competitive products on competitive prices available? Well, we customized this for the hotels. We found one commercial use of this technology and hence we started with hotels, but now we are launching it for different variants.

Interestingly what we now have is a screen shot of the reports that the product generates for the user. And I must say, is pretty interesting for a good competitive analysis.

How did the product come about?

In the US at a point when I returned from there, there were travel sites emerging, and I wanted to build the technology targeting the US consumer and build a metasearch site. And we flipped the Bmodel and created the product for the hotel industry.

If you are working on something new and innovative, customers in the US are pretty collaborative and understanding

Why did it work?

Emerging market need
Niche area/ No limited competition

Recommendation for others:

MR, Market sizing
Test market the product
Agile in bringing product to the market
Greenfield opportunities
SME on board
Passion

We leverage a great great Channel Strategy. We have identified strong players in the hospitality domain and tied up with them.

Okay and now we have RAWZOR standing at the line

Our’s is a product which is similar to winzip but for photographers. We spoke to all the photo editing softwares, to add support to our format, though there was no money involved, but it helped us gain industry support.

There was a lot of resistance from the market, you cannot go on day 1 to Adobe and expect them to support you.

Why did we try this?

First few friends looking to join a startup.

Where did it fail?

Lack of experience
Lack of discipline

What worked and Why?

Multiple discoveries of the right things to do

I believe we should look inside the team. If you are not good enough in what you are doing, then the level of integrity, honesty and discipline takes a hitm which surely was a challenge for us. People dont know the right things to do and the right things. Its putting people in the right framework to get the right things out of them.

And now we have the founder of Busy Software, Mr, Dinesh, sharing his success story. We have never had big hurdles, though profits have not been huge but somehow things have been moving smoothly.

The problem that we have is that of scaling up. Our challenge is that this market is dominated by Tally which is almost similar to the market and it is available at Zero price.

Now there are benefits to this situation and there are the problems. Such a situation increases the market size, which was good for us. Our pricing strategies is being focused on what Tally has dictated till now. Now the difficult thing is how to sell and how to get into the considerable field of the consumer.

How to get into the consideration set of people - this is our major challenge

Initially we kept the price very low almost 50% of what Tally was. We were not the smartest marketing guys around, but we were sure that we could get the product replicated and we were fool enough to replicate a free software. For us the differentiating factor was getting “Sales Tax” as an inclusive offering.

Our objective was to make people use the software, and we started spreading 90 days free software trial with full functionality on. People tried our software because he has a pain point, thus we pointed on this aspect of the consumer thought process.

Did Tally not include those features?

Well, yes they did, more than 8o% of the features are available, but since we are architectured right from the beginning, and hence that gives us the edge over Tally.

Ankur is now leading the discussion, and we have a request from participants for Ankur to share his story!

What is it that keeps your customer awake at night, if you know this and your product answers the call, well, you have your business
- Ankur Lal

And now we have Ankur Lal, sharing his experience. The big problem is, its ironical, software development costs are cheaper in India, if they were expensive, we would not have been discussing this. If you can replicate and duplicate, that is product business.

Participant: we purely lack strategic planning, you begin with a myopic vision in starting out. Interestingly we have people sharing through product management and project management.

The discussion in the room has now shifted to how the ecosystem is getting shaped and it finds people like us at these platforms. And now we have Ankur concluding the session introducing the EMERGE community, and the NASSCOM EMERGEOUT Conclave which is also the 50th session of the NASSCOM Friday’s 2.0.

I am glad to be LIVE blogging the 49th session of the NASSCOM Friday’s 2.0, as today I complete one complete year, LIVE blogging the NASSCOM Friday’s 2.0, surely all thanks to Avinash, NASSCOM