You are your brand !

You have to live and love your brand ! You need to eat, sleep, drink and breathe it through the thousands of cells in your body....and thats just a beginning ! your customers will start giving a second look and start recognizing it soon.

To begin with, if you are start up company, the first thing everybody you are trying to sell is gonna do is check if he has "heard" about your "brand". So give a name to your product / service. Take time to make a neat logo that expresses your spirit of business (joyful or professional or whatever the spirit is) This is probably the first thing you must do. Make something that people can easily remember and associate you with.

Then go head over heels to promote it ! Your passion and love for your brand should be the fire that ignites other matchsticks, that is your first few loyal customers. Yep, get them excited about using your product. Give away compliments etched with your brand name. Of course don't do a direct marketing - find the best occasion in their life to do it and give your compliment with even a simple "Best wishes from (Your brand)" written on it.

Take your brand everywhere you go and let the customers do the same.

Wanna know how much we love thiray ? Oh..we go crazy with thiray ! Our team attended the International Film Festival in Goa. There were some computers in the lobby for the delegates to check their emails. We promptly set the default homepage of all the browsers in all the computers to www.thriay.com, so that everybody who stops to check their email sees our landing page first !

Who should be your Beta customer?

Here are a few pointers to choose ( yes you have all the right to ! ) your Beta customers of your product.

1. Beta users are your very first customers, but need not necessarily be your best friends or relatives or even your investors. Your close pal would obviously be very happy and proud to tell the world about your achievement of making an idea into a product, but that might not be just enough to take it to the next level. Carefully select a few among your target users.

2. So now you know that the beta user should be from the relevant target industry. But make sure that he is also somebody who actually needs your product. You might have evaluated your idea at concept stage with industry veterans, but on all probability they might be too big to need your product. Choose somebody who actually has the problem you are trying to solve. Mentors might give you a whole lot of ideas and direction but in the end say that they don't need you !

3. Stay away from people who turned you down in during your initial market research. They might have turned away because either they felt your product is not viable or they might be using an existing alternative (read competitor !). In all right, you would want to prove they are wrong and how your product is better. STOP right there, understand this is not the time for it. The purpose of beta testing is to refine your product, don't get carried away at this stage.

4.  Understand the difference between marketing and beta testing. This is no time to increase user base and market your baby, simply because it is still a baby. Get a small but trusted number of users, respect and respond to them.

5. Make sure your beta users have the time to not only use the product but also to give valuable feedback about it. There are loads of survey methods and software tools to capture user feedback. Give incentives to attract beta users to provide feedback. Take it, refine and fine tune your product.

Quickest test to check if your startup idea will win

I bumped into this article about failed startups whose founders eventually moved on to something else. You wouldn't find such stories very often. It describes why many startups were not able to survive in short and bitter excerpts from the founders.

Your startup would win ONLY if you do at least one or more of the following to your customer

1. Solve a crucial pain they have in a wrong place
2. Help them make them more money
3. Cut their cost
4. Save time


If your customer is aware of the problem and how crucial it is, probably he is already looking for a solution, So selling your product would be pretty straight forward. But hey, you are not the only player in the market so he is going to be looking for alternatives. You will have to prove your durable competitive advantage to him to have a winner.

On the other hand, if your customer is not even aware of the pain area, then making him realise would be a herculean task ! But remember once he perceives it to be crucial problem, then you have an easy winner in your solution or product. If you manage to do this, you've actually managed to create a niche market of your own and have the first mover advantage.

The other 3 need no explanation, you win if your customer wins !

If your startup idea is about doing something else, STOP right there and go back to sleep, dream more !

A piece of you everywhere, for everybody

The other day my wife made a strange observation that she gets promotional messages to her mobile based on what she spoke about in her conversations. For example, in one of her phone calls, if she spoke about having a clean drinking water for us, the next day she got Ads about water purifiers. To say that I was shocked would be an understatement. Being in the contact center industry for many years, I knew this was technically possible using Speech recognizers and caller segmentation. But would TRAI, the regulator in India allow the provider to do anything of that sort?

Much has been written and talked about Facebook's recent changes, the perils of it and how to safeguard yourself against it. Welcome to the next evolution of www, this is where we are heading - what Facebook or any online company wants to know and track is what you are doing everywhere online and offline , not just in their website ! Thanks to social media, wherever online we go, we can Digg it or delicious it, tweet it. Look at this company Blippy, which wants to know what you are buying and suggests it would be easy if you just give them your credit card numbers and they would track the information for you ! Do you know that instead of having various login IDs in various sites, you can be just one unified online avatar with an open ID.

So what happens with all these information about you and why is everybody after it? Well, a whole bunch of data mining companies exist doing things like social monitoring, social media discovery and much more. Considering the fact that every company (online or in general) wants has Social Media Management as a bulk part of their IT budget you realize how this information could be used to sell you anything. I guess the day we sent our first email, we all fell into the trap and trusted a stranger with information about us. And I don't think we are ready to go switch back to postal departments.

Digging further, we figured out my wife's claim was not correct, at least for now. I  and a couple of my friends also got the same SMS Ad the next day in my phone and we had not spoken about water over the phone.

Google - Second for the first time?

Google, with the launch of its new search interface today, has probably come second or third in the search race for the first time. 

The new result interface of google looks very much similar to Yahoo! and Bing . As John Battlle explains in his book "The Search", the way Yahoo and Google handle the search intent of the user has been different historically. Google always tries to give the "objective" answers using a mixture of PageRank, downloading statistics etc. while Yahoo tries to be more "humane" and gives related and relevant results of the searched term based on what other users are searching for. Now with this latest development, is Google taking the Yahoo ! route ? Are we walking towards a consolidation in the search space ?

Funny thing, when you search for "Search" in Google, the top result is Bing and in Bing it is Yahoo ! :-)

Data theft and IP rights violation in India

As an aspiring startup company, I was happy to see the move by the HC to close down operations of askme on charges of data theft from justdial Askme, the infomedia TV 18 venture has been convicted of stealing the vast database that Justdial had built through years of research. One of the things that any startup must ensure is the securing IP rights. You can either apply directly to the patent controller or through the facilitating center here

Justdial (the red line in the graph) has managed to work its way to the top over the years as indicated by Google trends here The other players in the local search are Sulekha, asklaila and getit yellow pages. and of course there is Google

Usability design

When you work single-handed (literally all alone like me) on a startup idea, you need to get your customer's feedback frequently on your product as you do in an agile. This ensures that you don't get carried away by viewing through your lens.

Just when I thought I had the perfect design for my company's website, I realized that it is just my view and not the end user's view. so I was wondering how I could ensure the best experiences for the end user. I bumped on this wonderful article about usability centric design of websites. Also I tested my website in using this cool tool. Guess what, I was not half bad at my estimates. It is quick. Whats more, its free for 5 results and you can earn karma points by doing other's tests which you can use to get more results for your test.