I attended my first Startup Saturday Mumbai event today at the SP Jain Management Institute. I must say that overall I was quite pleased by the entire event. By the end of the event (in our true Indian style, people including the speakers and myself arrived late), 35 odd people showed up. This was a good mix of entrepreneurs, would-be entrepreneurs, bloggers and (unfortunately only) one person from the VC community – Hemir Doshi from IDG VC India. Both speakers were good, but I enjoyed listening to Rang De’s founders’ story more than the talk on the ‘importance of monitoring competition’. Read the rest of this entry »

It seems like ClickJobs is at a fork in the road? An excerpt from a post by Nikhil Pahwa from Medianama:

Consim Info (Bharatmatrimony) is looking to raise money for ClickJobs, and is currently on the lookout for a strategic partner with deep pockets; $3 Million is petty change, and CEO Murugavel Janakiraman says that kind of money is not sufficient to be on top.

They might seek a different business model, and Muruga denies rumours that the site is on the verge of being shut down.

Interesting, I wondered when the flow of new job portals would slow down. When I read about Shine, my reaction (which was probably the same reaction as a lot of people) was ‘Oh my god, another one?’.

It will be interesting to see how this one pans out. I’d be keen to see how they spend their $3mn if they get it. I hope its not Read the rest of this entry »

In his book, Seth Godin - the new marketing guru - talks demonstrates a simple concept: In order to win in todays over advertised, over consumed marketplace, where people just don’t trust marketing anymore, your product has to be ‘remarkable’, literally: It has to be so remarkable, that if people see it, they remark about it. ‘Imagine you’re driving down the road’, he tells us. If you see a regular brown, or white or black cow, you probably won’t be very excited. Its even less likely that you’ll tell your fellow passengers about it. Now imagine, all of a sudden you see a purple cow. You’re probably going to shout out ‘Wow! A Purple cow!’ You’re probably then going to pull out your camera, take a dozen pictures about it and mail it to all your friends - naturally spreading the word of mouth.

In order to be remarkable, Godin (rightly) tells us - you have to take risks, you have to push the boundaries. He believes, however, that its riskier not to take risks, than it is to take risks. If you make yet another plain vanilla offering, trying to please everybody, then you’re probably going to end up with a highly compromised, highly boring Read the rest of this entry »

You might be slightly surprised that the title of this post isn’t ‘10 great…’ It’s because I actually use 5 and think that’s more than sufficient to start with. These resources are very much US oriented but so are the rest of resources here. That doesn’t mean that they’re not useful – the lessons are 90% applicable to the Indian market – the remaining 10% is due to the fact that the internet still doesn’t form as central a part of Indian consumers lives.

1. sethgodin.typepad.com/

Seth Godin is universally recognized as the God of New Marketing, and the Author of over 10 books. Read his fantastic blog for all sorts of fantastic advice on how to better market your product to the web. Although an avid reader of his blog, I haven’t bought any of his books yet but plan to buy his book about ‘tribes’ entitled (XXXX) – the central idea being that sometimes, the most powerful ‘tribes’ or ‘groups’ aren’t open to everyone – although a seemingly obvious statement (duh, the UN Security Council), I’m guessing that this is going to be a somewhat antithesis to the open web movement. A clever thing that he’s doing to promote his book is creating an online closed Read the rest of this entry »

In a post in VentureBeat (one of my favourite startup blogs), Chris Morrisson points out how Twitter’s pre-eminence as the microblogging site is being challenged by a number of startups in this space. Because network operators were charging unreasonable rates, sometimes $1000 per account, twitter announced that they would limit the amount of messages posted per day for accounts in certain countries. In fact they recently announced that they will stop sending SMS’ to users in India and Canada. I don’t know about Canada, but I do know that it won’t really be missed here in India - indeed, I’d say that this is yet another ‘win’ as far as SMS GupShup - the number one microblogging service (but they’ve been clever about their marketing, using words to describe their service as ‘Free Group SMS’ rather than a microblog, although these are essentially the same thing). SMS GupShup seems like a fabulous service Read the rest of this entry »

While perusing the Indian Startup blogosphere, I’ve often come across articles (such as this one on WATBlog) related to Twitter. I personally think that Twitter is a great tool and tried to get my friends to sign on but alas, they were more early majority than I had thought. This got me thinking, how popular is Twitter in India? After a few Internet searches, I came across a post indicated that about 9 months ago, the number of Twitter accounts from India was just around 1600! Moreover, of the 1600, over 70% had 4 or fewer followers, and 35% had no followers at all! Now I’m sure that these numbers have increased since then - but to how many?  Certainly not enough to warrant a Twitter campaign. Now if you Read the rest of this entry »

I think that one of the biggest traps that start-ups can fall into is that they become too obsessed with the product itself, and not pay enough attention to marketing it. Startups often easily convince themselves that marketing is a secondary activity, which isn’t core to the success of their product.

‘If you build it, they will come’. This wrong assumption is based on another premise – that if you build a great product, it will market itself. I’m not saying that this is completely untrue – but this statement is almost the same as saying that if you have a bad product, then no amount of marketing can save it – and who can argue with that?

Obviously a great product is the starting point of any new business, and of course the better your product, the more likely people are to talk about it. But I believe that that is not enough. You need to assist the spreading of the word. If you don’t your competitors and you’ll be left behind super-fine-tuning your product while the next guy spends his time shouting about his product Read the rest of this entry »

Crossing the chasm is a classic – and should be on the bookshelves of any high-tech marketer, but has lesson for marketers across other industries as well.

Moore’s starts of by talking about the technology adoption life cycle (apparently fairly standard theory, but I hadn’t heard about it till I read it – shows you how much I know) which says that is that not all customers start using them all at once –the tech savvy / tech enthusiastic early market or the those in the ‘early market’ start using high tech products such as hybrid cars (or social networks) first, and only then (if the high tech company gets everything right) do the mainstream users start using them. Moore calls those that are a part of the early market visionaries and early adopters, and those in the mainstream market ‘pragmatists’. The distribution of types of people that form a bell curve – the visionaries are quite limited Read the rest of this entry »

Prashant from pluggD.in - a fantastic startup blog wrote a very interesting article giving great tips on guerilla marketing, including:

1. Target those seeking jobs in your domain using online job portals using an email campaign - since they’re interested in your industy, they’ll likely be interested in using your product (especially if your product can in someway or the other help get closer to getting a job
2. MBA schools - lots of people here are interested in hearing from a ’seasoned’ entreprenuer. Just weave in your own story in the lecture about entrepreneurship.

To read more tips check out Ashish’s post. I have a few thoughts of my own: I’m sure that at some point in your school or college life you were either a part of a team putting together a student event, or you at least knew somebody that organised such an event. The budget for some of these events were absolutely tiny, but somehow or the other people managed to pull people to attend these events - how?

1. They got their friends to come along. Their friends often brought their friends along. Your startup can do the same. Get in touch with your friends - its easy these days through Read the rest of this entry »