Redbox rents DVDs, Blu-Ray Discs and family video games in US and Canada. Redbox kiosks are found in 34,600 locations and are fully automated video rental kiosks! More than anything else I love using them because they carry the latest titles, are affordable and make me happy every time I do business with them! In my [...]

Enterprise as well as Consumer Software is moving fast towards a Software As A Service (SaaS) model. Who would not like paying a per user, per month charge as opposed to doling out huge amounts of money for licenses upfront and paying 16 to 20% Annual Maintenance Charges year after year! But the short history [...]

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 companies (especially those focused on the Enterprise) always face pressures, primarily that of cash flow in the earlier years, forcing them to take on more services components. This is especially true in countries like India where angel and venture investments are not as plentiful as in Silicon Valley. This is a trap that product [...]

Jay Conrad Levinson, father of Guerilla Marketing defines it very simply as going after conventional goals with unconventional means! When you are a product startup, trying to build a business on little to zero money, you need plenty of unconventional means. With the rise of social media, viral word-of-mouth options with web and mobile global [...]

Since the time Philip Kotler wrote his valuable tome on Marketing, technology has evolved so much that new pricing models like Freemium pricing are possible for both Consumer-oriented and Enterprise-oriented product startups. In addition, Free Trial pricing models and conversion to paid ones are common in both. In a price-conscious society like India, pricing can [...]

Who said YouTube is a waste of time? It can even teach you on how to come up with a great company or product name! Naming a company or a product is so crucial in a product start-up. You can call your services company – “The Great Maharashtra IT Services and Systems Company”  and your [...]

Lean startups are not about saving money and getting development done on the cheap. They are not about saving money by doing work at home rather than a rented office. That’s not what the word lean means here! Lean is about elimination of waste in development, marketing, selling,  and growing a company. And making course [...]

In a product startup you may need to deal with lots of information about your own product features, your market, your competition, your competition’s product features, results of internal brainstorming sessions you may conduct or information about who you can partner with for various aspects of your business. Mind-maps provide a great way of organizing all the [...]

If I had a Rupee every time I heard the words “If only Venture Capitalists were more active in building the Indian Product Eco-system….”, I would be a rich man! I am guessing that this is because of a lot of mis-conceptions about Venture Capital and how they play in the product space, in India [...]

Total Addressable Market, Technology and Market Adoption Rates are crucial for Product Startups! Ignoring them early on will only cause immense heart ache down the road for you, your family, your company, your employees and their families! It’s all well and good to follow your “passion” and do your startup purely for your passion. It [...]

Networking is not an extracurricular activity when you are building a product startup company! It is one of the most important things that could enable you to line up angel investor, venture or expansion capital for your startup! It can help you recruit excellent people to your startup and excellent people are absolutely essential, especially in [...]

I started writing about Thinking Big and it is turning out to be a serial topic! As Indians, technical stuff comes naturally, business thinking comes naturally, but creativity is a touch-feely subject that many of us are not that comfortable with! We usually give it lip service and move on to more important stuff like [...]

Sometime ago I wrote two posts in this forum: Expect a Microsoft, Google or facebook out of India? Won’t happen unless we THINK BIG! and How to Think Big in Software Products? . This post is a continuation of this thought process. What are the advantages for me in Thinking Big if I am a product [...]

Sometime ago, I wrote another post in this forum - Expect a Microsoft, Google or facebook out of India? Won’t happen unless we THINK BIG! . Thinking Big is a process with definite and specific benefits, about which I will write in a future post. But this post is about How to Think Big? Again, some disclaimers! [...]