In my recent visit to Pune/Mumbai had lively discussion with few people who are planning to get into enterprise applications space. Problem is they dont know what the pain points are! I was just amazed to see how a person can devise a solution sitting at his home for a business he has never had any experience in. Logic presented to me was, we have the technology and problem solving skills so we are going to visit “many” different kinds of SMEs in manufacturing sectors, especially in smaller towns like Nasik/Aurangabad/Kolhapur etc etc and then after doing field research for a month or so we can start prototyping the product. Please dont expect reply from SFS is this is going to be your way of building products.

I have been following startup scene in Indian and comparing it to global startup scene. The measure difference in I have observed is globally (read US) people stumble upon a problem and then try to see if technology can help solve the problem. Here many entrepreneurs (at least 50%) build the technology and then try and search for the problem , where to apply it.

Even in e-governance project. I visited Maharashtra Warehouse Corporation couple of times for consultation and what I saw there was simply stupid way of product engineering. Customer (who is going to use the product) is not even involved in analysing requirements!

Advice is : go to few customers. Work there (moonlighting) in various departments, understand the process problems. See how it is problem for yourself and then come up with strategy to solve it. Its like learning mathematics, when you need do well you need practice. You need stummble upon problems on your own and solve them.