Manav Garg’s career exemplifies the statement “where there is big risk, there is big reward”. Throwing up a lucrative, six-figure plus salary and bonus as a commodities trader to start a software company that would build a commodities trading product required guts. Manav took it in his stride and today has built a world-class company [...]

I had the opportunity to attend iSpirit Foundation’s #PNMeetup: Design great products through experiments – Product Leadership Workshop on 20th April 2013 at TLabs in Noida.  Avi from iSPIRT put together a delightful, half-day session that brought together a smattering of product people from Delhi-NCR region.  In addition to product managers, CEOs, and senior executives from a wide range of Delhi startups, [...]

ProGen Business Solutions is a software products company with core focus in the Business Intelligence (BI) & Analytics space. The DNA of ProGen is built around R&D and Innovations, which drives the team to deliver State of the Art & High Quality BI Products that can add value to the customer organizations. Rahul Sharma, Founder & CEO of Progen talks about [...]

Marketplaces are difficult businesses to run. Like all multi-sided platform businesses, they suffer from the classic chicken and egg problem: the technology has no value unless buyers and sellers are present and you can’t get the buyers on board unless you have sellers and you can’t bring in sellers without having buyers. Hence, building a marketplace is [...]

These are exciting times for us in the Indian software products industry. The air is pregnant with cautious, yet very strong optimism that some truly great product companies will emerge out of India in the coming years. There is a significant shift in the mindset of Indian entrepreneurs, with a focus now on building great [...]

There is a growing nervousness among foreign investors putting their money in India. The Global Entrepreneurship and Development Index 2012 revealed that India, Asia’s third-largest economy, ranked 74th out of 79 countries, making it an unviable country to start a business. There is a growing nervousness among foreign investors putting their money in India. Fewer than [...]

Set up in 1999, Jamcracker develops and markets software, services and an ecosystem of cloud services that enable customers to become Cloud Services Brokerages (CSBs). K.B. Chandrasekhar, CEO & Chairman, was also co-founder and Chairman of e4e Inc., a business process outsourcing company. In the mid-1990s, Chandrashekar founded Exodus Communications, which he led to become [...]

In the last 2-3 years there have been well designed products coming out of the NCR startup ecosystem. Mettl, Visual Website Optimizer, Paytm, and Oogwave, especially come to mind where Design Thinking has been an integral part of the product development process, and not an after thought by giving it just a cosmetic veneer. There [...]

Sridhar D. P. Founder & CEO and Dr. Shankar Venugopal, Chief Mentor, Thatva, say their company’s vision is to be a true enabler of innovation. Their strategy is to provide a software framework that could facilitate and enable innovation. Thatva came to be established when Sridhar was pursuing a program on innovation and IP at [...]

A few weeks back I had written a post on entering the US market. It was very gratifying to see the response from so many of you on that post. So following the lead of that article, here is another one.  In this post I talk about some of the basic things Indian companies can [...]

Notes from the  Product Management Roundtable In Bangalore. Having attended the first ever iSPIRT Roundtable on Product Positioning in Bangalore and closely followed the second one held in Delhi, I was eagerly looking forward to the Round table in Bangalore on Product Management by Sridhar Ranganathan. Sridhar is a senior Product Management professional having spent considerable [...]

In this blog post, we discuss ways and means to reach out to prospective clients, position the product, license and price it. However, the question that founders must ask and answer convincingly to themselves is the one posed above. When doing this, they must think like a buyer and question every assumption about the product’s [...]

For sure big fish can get you more meat but there also less number of those in that deep blue sea. Pound for pound, the fisherman still prefers to cast the net with small holes – getting easy food in copious amount.  Unfortunately the fisherman logic is somewhat lost to a vast majority of the [...]

Exotel  Techcom “Cloud telephony product for SME’s which is like many others but we have a different approach in our problem solving.” says Shivakumar(Shivku) Ganesan, its Founder. Currently Exotel focuses on offering an easiest and fastest way to setup a phone number for your business, with smart applications tailored to business needs. He shares insights for other entrepreneurs [...]

India is at a crossroads today. Gloom has replaced what seemed to be an unending boom just a few years ago. After a decade of rapid growth led by the services sector, the Indian economy has hit a plateau. While services exports continue to grow and create a surplus in services trade, they only constitute [...]