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 !

Will your business really make you rich ?

When these two things happen without any push from your side, you can be assured that your startup / business is moving in the right direction to make you rich !

1. Your customers tell you directly what they don't like about your Product / Service
2. Your customers tell their friends about what they like about your Product / Service

Six myths about customer satisfaction

Customer satisfaction is after sales support - No that is customer retention; one becomes a customer after he is satisfied with your offering or at least trusts so.

He loves "that" feature of your product - No all he cares is his current problem and how soon you solve it.

He might not pay for value of your product - No he is always ready to pay for his "perceived value" of your product.

You don't have to give anything free - No; you have to let a trial version out for free for the potential customer to get a feel of your product

Online business can be done online - No, Sales can be done online, you still have to get out of your home/office to get drive your business to sell.

Competitors might win the fight - No, they have already won, YOU are fighting to win customers (back). Even if there is no competition, you're fighting the fact that customer is OK to live with the problem you're trying to solve.

5 steps to a succesful start up

1. Be formal: Even if you are an IT guy with the next BIG idea and are working out of a garage, don't present yourself that way. Get your start up registered formally and take care of the legal issues first, even if this takes time and money. Get a bunch of decent looking business cards printed and use them when you make contacts. People will take you seriously only if you take yourself seriously.

2. Get bottom dollar: While getting business cards is necessary, don't spend a fortune on the perfect design. Get a good but quick design. Bargain on every penny you spend and maintain books. When we wanted a small number of  T-shirts for Thiray, we figured the cost were sky-rocketing unless we order thousands. We found an artist and got the few painted with fabric paint instead.

3. Build a team: This is probably the most vital and difficult step. You need to find able people and delegate things, you can't do everything by yourself. Get people for their skill and attitude not for experience, references. Every member of the team should feel something very important is at stake for him/her in the startup.

4. Sell first: There is no better way to find out whether your idea will work unless  than taking it directly  to your target customer's scrutiny. Come up with a minimum desirable product at the earliest, give it to beta customers for free trial ( selling doesn't mean making money, sell your idea first ) and get feedback / review.

5. Go Viral: Never forget to ask a satisfied customer to refer your product to his contacts. Building a network of trusted users is probably the single most important thing in business which will eventually make your cash box ring.

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 !

Why Tier II Indian cities struggle to become IT hubs ?

Yesterday, my friend with 3+ years of IT experience went for a job interview in an IT company in Coimbatore. The company whose parent group is into many industries from hospitality to entertainment has ventured into IT also almost a decade ago and has managed to get hold of a bunch of clients all over the world. Yet, the HR first wanted to know if my friend would be willing to "come down to local standards" in her salary expectation. Also, if she would be ready to get into an agreement with the company that she would stick on for 2 years at least. The work culture once you are inside an IT company in tier II cities is also not up to standards. You face a huge hierarchy, not the usual flat IT office.

The attitude of new entrants and biggies from traditional industries who want to venture into IT MUST change. The HR policies need to be overhauled in these organisations. This recent article could be a starting point for learning. Improving infrastructure and building IT parks do not solve the puzzle completely for any city that tries to become the next Bangalore.

My friend asked the HR if the company is willing to "come down to local standards" in her deliverables at work?

Innovation

A recent news about India's Smart Grid Task Force pushed my interest in further probing about Innovation in India.

Taking or Bringing technology to the grass roots to solve problems is a great way to innovate. Business today explains how Indian companies have managed to innovate. Their recent issue also talks about a handful of independent Indians have managed to do it at their level. One hot startup ideas (next to only to social media strategising) is Innovation consulting - helping other startups and companies to innovate. Quoting BT, a few myths about innovation are

1. Innovation is expensive, demanding lots of resources... Failure to innovate is what is costly.
2. Create hundreds of ideas because of high failure rates... Fewer, bolder ideas based on your company's capabilities and unmet customer needs you discover work best.
3. Early financial analysis is key to approving concepts... Nearly always wrong—build prototypes instead.

Surprisingly, it looks like the National Knowledge Commission's (NKC) very definition and viewpoint on the topic is in contrastingly different. According to its report on innovation,

The Innovation ecosystem is a complex environment that requires the coordinated functioning of a number of diverse factors in order to function effectively. Innovation also needs to become as wide spread as possible, spreading across the entire economy, from the grassroots to the large firm level. It is felt that a comprehensive effort to address these issues would act as a critical enabling factor for India to be amongst the global leaders in Innovation.

We will have to wait and see how fast the NKC manages to do the above, considering the fact that the smart grid initiative which was launched recently was suggested years ago by a Stanford University student here

How to beat competition

I can't believe this !

I just took a very short break from working on my start up idea ( to give some time to my other passion - film making) I come back and find yet another competitor to my yet-to-be-launched business idea. And I had thought this was one of its kind, unique business idea when I started working on it. Eventually I did find "similar" ideas already floating around and the latest was the 15th. Competition is something every entrepreneur WILL face today or tomorrow. So how to take advantage of your competitors.

1. Know them first. In and out - read every piece of information you can find about your competitor to understand his strengths and weakness.

2. Know yourself ! Yeah, know your strong and weak points from the customer's perspective, not yours. Remember, perceived value of your product is always going to be different from your cost and effort.

3. Learn from other's mistakes. This is crucial since startups don't have the luxury of making costly mistakes. So learn from your competitors mistakes and work on to avoid them

4. Don't just copy your competitor's features and products. Probably, your absence is a certain space aligns with your company's vision or makes you stand out from the crowd, so think twice before jumping to work on that feature your competitor has in his product.

5. Be his customer, this helps in understanding the benefits and problems your prospective customer faces.

6. Strengthen your strong points than working on your weak ones. Make your USP stronger.

7. In a sales pitch, if a customer brings up the competitor's feature that you don't have, find out the customer's actual business and explain how your product addresses the need rather than getting into a comparison of the features.

8. Make sure you market your advantages loud and clear ! Bang on !

9. Keep a close watch on competitor's products. Competitor analysis is not a one time activity but a hygiene factor.

10. Lastly, may be having a competition is not that bad. As they say it's easier to get a decision from a customer when he has a choice between product A and product B rather than between product A and nothing.

Employee vs Employer

As an employee, right from my hardware engineer days in a very small firm through working in multinationals,  I was always confined to my own work responsibilities and never went bothered to even know about my employer. Forget going that extra mile to contribute to the company's growth. All I was concerned only about my takeaway in anything from training sessions to day-to-day work.

This is the single most important difference between doing business and being employed. As a startupper,(if I can put it that way) you always think about how you can add value to your customers. You think about how every situation and every person you meet gets benefited from you and / or your venture. One person who grew his business exponentially by this way of thinking is Mr. Dhirubhai as Mr Krishnamoothy explains here. We have an excellent ecosystem ostartups in India (TiE, Headstart, Startup saturday, NSRCEL ).But you are not gaining anything out of these forums if you are not contributing by way of sharing in these networks. Information sharing can be a start.

"Money is just a by-product" - well, I'm yet to understand how this works :-)

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.