producteering.org » Start-ups

Startup Positioning Roundtable

shankar — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 10:36:08 +0000

I attended Sramana Mitra’s Startup Positioning Roundtable last week. Sramana has been an entrepreneur and strategy consultant in Silicon Valley since 1994, and is currently authoring “Entrepreneur Journeys“, a series of books focused on demystifying entrepreneurship.

The Roundtable was a very well organized and involved session. Quite a few startups pitched their ideas in this session and Sramana shared her views on their ideas/pitches.

Sramana was basically looking at three different aspects for a product idea:

1) Is the idea any different compared to what is available in the market? What is the value proposition?

2) Is the product and business sustainable?

3) Who are the target customers?

Many of the startups asked one common question: Is the product/idea fundable?

Sramana referred to various chapters of her series of books, “Entrepreneur Journeys”, when responding to this question and giving several pointers to budding entrepreneurs. Here are some of the things that Sramana stressed on:

Focus on monetization – how are you going to make money using your product? Consumer oriented products need to think about this a lot more. It is not easy to get consumers to pay for a service as they are spoilt with several free offers on the web. Conversion rate from Free to Premium users is generally low and one should be conscious of this conversion rate. If it is advertisement-supported business model, what is the viability in the long run?
A B2B / SaaS model (with enterprise customers) could be a better business model as there will be paying customers.
Work on your go-to-market strategy
Understand the ecosystem on which you can build your business
When you go for partnerships, having a win-win relationship is very important.
Personalization is the biggest unleveraged opportunity today
Identify the risks of the business early on
It is very important to do Total Available Market Analysis. Don’t go by gut feeling. Get real numbers. Do your homework.
Even the name of the company is important: try to choose the right name. Make sure that it is easy to pronounce and write.

I would recommend entrepreneurs-in-the-making or those who have just started your technology ventures to visit http://www.sramanamitra.com and also register yourselves for one of her upcoming positioning roundtable. The experience will be worth it.

The influence of Web 2.0 on software development

Producteering Digest — Fri, 16 May 2008 11:42:45 +0000

One of the drivers for the changes taking place in new product development is certainly the evolution of the consumer internet or the Web 2.0 world. YouTube, MySpace, Wikipedia, Flickr, Craigslist – the successes of these Web 2.0 products and services have spurred hundreds of competitors who aim to be the next big Web 2.0 success story.

Many of these consumer internet start-ups got started in garages with a fairly small team and had a beta version of the product out in a matter of 6 months – more or less.

While the success of some Web 2.0 start-ups can be attributed to early-mover advantage in identifying and filling an under-served niche, there are some underlying similarities behind the successful companies.

With the limited resources available at their disposal, the key focus areas were: simplicity and usability – the intuitiveness – of the product or site, collaboration and deep involvement with the user community who are more than merely ‘users’ – they are also contributors, participants and co-creators – and constantly incorporating their feedback to make the user experience better; developing viral product features that are valuable to users like blogs and integration with other Web 2.0 tools, and ultra fast development cycles.

What does all this mean for enterprise software companies? While the consumer internet market certainly has a different user base, some of the lessons that can certainly be learnt are the simplicity and usability of software and understanding the end-user’s real needs better. If these lessons are incorporated, enterprise software has enormous potential for growth!

Read the entire digest contents

The Changing Rules of New Product Development

Producteering Digest — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 10:01:45 +0000

There’s been a perceptible change which has been sweeping the VC funding landscape for technology companies for sometime now. This in turn has ground-shaking implications for how new products are built, the timeframe in which they are built, and the way development teams need to respond to this change.

Earlier, software start-ups used to be in the incubation mode for months on end. Business plans and financial projections were made for 5 year periods. Initial seed funding was typically in the $5mn range. But in today’s fast-changing world, companies can no longer be in stealth mode for years.

Hardware is cheaper, web infrastructure and cloud computing rule the roost, software libraries are ubiquitous and new technology/languages have crashed development timeframes. With the advent of Web 2.0 and social media, users have also become less technophobic and are willing to try products in beta mode much more and much earlier than ever before. Start-ups comfortably take a product to the market with seed investments of $100-500K in just a period of 4-6 months today.

The end-result of all this is that the rules for building software are changing. And, software companies have to understand and adapt to these changes before it’s too late!

Read the entire digest contents