Sushrut Bidwai

Till about 10 days ago total amount I had spent over ecommerce website in India was = Rs 1,200

In last 10 days it is = Rs 10,000 .

Change - Flipkart dot com.

Before I started using it, for getting books I had to go to Pune as lot of books are not available in Nasik. Now I receive them in about 3-4 days after ordering.

Things to learn -

1. Very simple user interface.

2. Excellent stock.

3. Great consumer experience.

4. Once you have created account you can order books using credit card in around 2 mins max.

If you are an entrepreneur venturing into this space, you have loads to learn from flipkart.com.

Disclosure - I am not at all related to flipkart.com, havent met any of their team members ever and have not received any special gifts for give this shout out. This post comes straight from the fact that I just ordered entire LOTR collection in 2 mins while waiting for a conference call.

Uncategorized

Now this blogpost is not related to topics I generally write about, but anyways.

So some of the things that I would like twitter to do in 2010.

1. Ownership of my twitter page and stream - I should be more in control of my twitter stream. Since lot of people use twitter for professional purposes like getting business, putting up a strong profile to engage with tweple. So I should be able to customize my profile page. And by that I mean not just ability to put up a background page. But a bit more like widgets where I can put up rss feed for my blog. Click-able links to my linkedin profile, company website.

2. More features on conversation - This may not be possible or easy to do from technical standpoint, but what I would really like is to save a multi-part twitter conversation for future reference. Some thing like a favorite button, not for individual tweet but for entire conversations. And ability to play it back.

3. Analytics - If twitter implements my feature request 1, then analytics for all the links I publish. From where people are visiting my profile or my tweets and where they are going from my profile. Analytics related to retweets. Also analytics for links I tweet.

4. Stability - Please twitter, use that 100 milion you got in funding to provide a much much much more stable platform. I know its tough and very challenging but hope you can do it!

5. Spam control - Better way to keep those spammers out. May be implement superior crowd sourced things like if 10 people block a id you review it or something of that sorts. We want a clean followers list and currently burden is on users to keep it clean.

Misc 2010, twitter

I came across a post today and found it very useful from a lead developers stand point. One of the reasons why IT has come to become what it is today is - lot of “managers” or “decision-makers” still think of product development as classical engineering. IT is different. Growth of IT is dependent of productivity of people and not productivity of machines. Most of the other engineering disciplines are centered around making sure that machines are kept busy as much as possible so that manufacturing lines are optimally utilized. This does not hold true for IT.

Productivity of software development is directly proportional to productivity of people developing it under given process and technology environment. I am not saying Lisp, Haskell, Clojure, Python etc are the only way you can make people productive. Nope. But there should be balance between product you are developing, technologies used for them and processes designed for the same. But most important thing is - understand the people you have and structure your processes based on that. Or think about the processes you want to follow and hire people who fit into them. Technology may not be the silver bullet here. How you leverage people and processes might be, in my opinion.

Process Engineering, IT, Process

Search owned most of this decade. Information search, product search, images, news, location based and so on. New decade will mostly be around numbers, statistics. Google is already moving towards it from trends we see this year.  We should expect this market to get really competitive and to come of age in next few years.

Misc Data, google, internet

This is advice I received some time back from my mentor and I am merely passing it along. Views are mostly expressed by my mentor, but I do tend to agree with them.

Quoting (but in my writing style) him from one of his email -

For everybody who wants to be somebody derives inspiration, motivation from some one else. Lot of it comes from with in, but there are things which we are just blindly following from other peoples life. Be it Steve Jobs, Sergy Brin, Roger Fedrer, Alex Ferguson or any body else, who is successful. Many times, journalists create a very romantic picture about life of such people. Now the people I have mentioned here are very well known and popular. But there are cases where that may not be the case. A journalist telling story about how a 15 year kid innovated etc. What these people forget to mention is, what tools were available to this kid.

I am not trying to take away any thing from these success stories. You should read them. But just remember, you are in completely different surroundings. Tools you have available for achieving success (being successful does not necessarily mean achieving success) are very different from some of the people who are trying to emulate on some level. So beware - find the complete story. Don’t believe everything you read about people.  Dont push yourself the wrong way. If a kid all of 15 years old can do this then why cant I? Never ever base your professional (or personal) life on if they I can, then so can I. Thats not a very healthy and persistent motivation. It may give you spike in your motivational levels, but never a continuous thrust of inspiration.

Hope this helps you too, like it helped me.

Update - Dont know why but I felt like sharing this with you after watching 3 Idiots.

philosophy inspiration, mentor, motivation

I have been using google wave for managing few discussions and thought it would be good to share it with every one else.

First a bit of context -

Most of the teams I am part of (tech/sales/business) are distributed. Some people are in different timezones and hence managing a all-hands meeting/discussion is kind of tricky. Off course most of the things are taken care of over emails, but when you are at a particular milestone, its important to organize discussions in more disciplined manner.  So far meeting organizer would publish agenda 2 days ahead of time over email, or publish it on some sort of dashboard. Everybody goes through agenda, prepare their pre-meeting notes and bullet points. Then we conduct a voice conference using conference bridge or multi-party skype call. During meeting, everybody is taking down minutes, notes and publishing them after meeting is over. Meeting organizer will gather such feedback, inputs from every one and publish it as a road-map and follow up items. So far this worked well. But Google wave just helps us to make this a bit better.

How to use Google wave? Or rather how we are using it.

We create one wave and invite all concerned people (participants, observers, boards) to that wave. Meeting organizer will put down agenda as first message. Every body puts down their pre-meeting notes, inputs and organizer will keep on refining agenda taking this feedback. Any documents, links (including links to JIRA/Basecamp/Unfuddle) are posted to this first message. During meeting, we start talking about each bullet point from agenda message one by one. Call is still organized over skype or conf-bridge, but we make sure every body has access to wave during the call, so that minutes, notes are typed right there. So once meeting begins and every body has introduced, we start creating a message for each bullet point. Every body posts their thoughts, notes as we speak to this message as a reply. Once the meeting is completed, organizer will put up a concluding message on the wave with summary. No need to collate all minutes, as they happen in real time as we are speaking.

Benefit -

Typically most of us receive about 70-80 odd emails everyday. It is pain to keep track of all of them and their replies and play them back. Play back feature of wave is just a winner on its own! Second, we can attach various things to email, but we can embed them in wave. A slight difference, but a major benefit to make sure you can put context of the document and the document itself right next to each other. Real time notes sharing reduces time required to go through all of them and summarize. Since our use of wave is still limited, its easy to search through it much faster.

Typically we conduct road-map discussions for existing projects/products we are working on. This includes business discussions + technology. We also use this for preparing for a sales meeting and also for a sales meeting itself, when ever possible.

Hope this helps.

Misc google, Organizing, Wave

Vishal Gondal writes a blogpost about why he thinks that Wipro-TCS-Infy are evil and how they are converting IT talent to “outbots” , term coined by him. Now I understand from where is coming and I also understand that his perception might be very different from my own. I admire him for the kind of success he has achieved but I dont think his views are correct in this debate.  Here are my own view points as a startup entrepreneur myself.

When I started thinking about starting up, I also had similar thinking outlined by him, when I interacted with initially hires, interns I also laid out similar views to fresh grads. But when I started thinking more deeply about it, I realized that everybody does not want same things in life. There are very few people who wants to take up challenges, specially in India, continuously work hard, learn things. Professional satisfaction and personal satisfaction may not have equal importance for everybody. Some people wants to have laid back life, where their dreams are limited to having a healthy, moderately successful and fulfilling life.

This gets interesting based on what a person wants in life. People who are entrepreneurs, like Vishal and I, may derive our satisfaction from successfully taking up challenges. This essentially means sacrifices on personal front. Lesser time with family and friends, lesser vacation. Not much time to pursue a hobby. Off course you can do all this even while starting a business or working in startup. But its very hard and I speak this from personal experience. So is it compulsory that every one should look for these same challenges in life? I would say, no.

Everybody comes different background, has different dreams. Or may some people just dont have dreams. And that is perfectly fine from my point of view. Not everybody wants to become Sachin Tendulkar. Calling these service giants as evil, is similar to calling BCCI evil. That BCCI makes so much money that no kid wants to learn and master hockey and hence BCCI is evil and should stop earning that money!

The way I see it is - IT services sector has given opportunity to lot of professionals to earn a good life style. Off course these companies will keep on evolving as time goes by and may turn into much better organizations and remove the flaws that we see now. I think the credit crunch might be good in that way. These organizations, at least from what I heard from my network, are becoming more value centric and are willing to take a bit more risks, which is definitely a good thing.

Now what we can do as startup entrepreneurs - Most of the time we come to this debate that services companies are evil because they are taking up all our talents. So what I thought is a good way to build talent pool for my company is connect directly to fresh grads, interact with them. Try to open their minds to certain professional goals they can have. Try to give them that spark and motivate to them pursue a career with startup like environment. This takes lot of time and hard work, but I think that is the best way forward. Instead of trying to solve the problem from top-down by saying services companies are evil etc, we should be a bit more constructive and solve it bottom-up by collaborating with educational institutions, students, interns and building at least few people who will understand our views, passions and may be 10 years down the line all startups will have better time in hiring. At least thats what I do by going to colleges and talking about technology, product engineering and career orientation (presentation) .

philosophy Services, Startup, Talent

Been long long time since updated my blog. But as you know, I write only about things which really moves me to write and unfortunately I havent come across any thing in last few months that did the same. As an update - things are progressing well on my side and all is well. Very excited about the next weekends first company outing, hope to understand my team better in the process. Anyways, here are something I want to share my views on.

1. Often I come across various views on Indian startups and lot of BS about it. One thing in particular - Why cant Indian startups build global product companies? This one question is posted by many writers, advisors, mentors and VCs. What I ask is - why should we focus on building global products? Whats wrong in working on local products. Off course if we see an opportunity for global product like dimdim, slideshare, zoho we will work on that. But that does not mean if I am building product from local Indian enterprises or consumers then I am not competent. I just dont have opportunity in sight and hence focusing on something which is in sight irrespective of target market. So if you are a wanna-be-entrepreneur and some one says to you, why you are focused on India market - just ignore them. Its their job to sell you global dreams. They have vested interest for you to dream global.

2. Dream a billion dollar market - well thats good to have. But should I just let go of opportunities which are lets say 10-15 million dollar market? NO. HELL NO. If I can sustain a business with big enough profit margin then isnt that good enough. I think so. Most of the VCs and advisors will tell you otherwise. VCs because they dont need to invest in such business. Advisors typically will also think similar to what VCs think.

Only thing matters while taking decision to pursue an opportunity - do you feel passionate about solving the problem? And if successful can you do that most of your adult life? If yes, go ahead and just ignore this big, global, kick-ass etc BC.

Startup, philosophy entrepreneurship, Startup

Technology android, android basics, gtug

There has been lot of buzz about ZooZoo advertisements by Vodafone during recently concluded IPL 2009. Now I have no experience what so ever in advertising and branding. But something like this made me think that which advertisements/campaigns produce great branding and sales push?

So I started thinking about all advertisements that I liked, which made me at least remember the company when I was looking to buy something they sell. 

Common thread among these all?

They don’t leverage the medium, they add value to it. 

Now I may be completely wrong, or very accurate. But this is just a personal observation. I don’t have tonnes of data to prove it.

But here is what I observed -

TV - Most of the advertisements on TV will entertain you. Be it Zoozoo, or some dental care gum with people’s teeth used for lighting tennis court, or some guy using a adhesive stick to catch fish. They will entertain you, make you laugh. Almost each time. My mom, who is cooking in the kitchen, would come out to see the zoozoo ad and not when Gilchrist was going berserk hitting everything over the fence. TV is mainly entertainment focused and hence if you can entertain people through your ads then you can win them over. Throwing lot of information about your product in their face for 20secs is money not so well spent. This is why I think, ads which are shown on news channels (their hardly news channels any more, but gross entertainment channels) don’t make that big a impact on me. Because I take it as roadblock in consuming information. May be its just me though. But if it was me I will roll out different campaigns for news, sports and entertainment channels.

Newspaper - Well most of the newspapers are meant to provide information, news, analysis. So if you can add value to this then that will be great way to utilize your marketing budget. For example, if you are a training institute which is geared towards providing IT related training. Instead of providing information about you and your products, provide information about your domain. Like jobs created in industry for last couple of years in technologies that you train in. This may add more confidence about your brand to your consumers.

Online - Online is very different in this aspect. Because for online media, there is no categorization at high level. So roll out ads based on the properties that you are buying here. I was engaged in a good discussion with Mahesh other day on twitter. And point he mentioned about performance based branding is, finding out right set of properties to target and rolling out your campaign for it. I would like to add that, choose right set of properties, based on USP of these properties, roll out campaigns geared to add value to their USP.

Whats your take on this?

Ideas, Startup advertising, branding, marketing, performance, zoozoo