I have this mostly untested BHAG – big, hairy, audacious goal in business lingo. The BHAG is to ideate, build and launch beta products in order to early exit (by sale or spin off).Key assumptions I am making are:
1. In today’s day and age, building simple “need fulfilling” products and getting a read on their performance in the market within 6-9 months is not impossible.
2. Further, with the right team, this can be done for multiple product ideas one after the other.
3. If you are detail oriented and a fast learner, you do not need 10 years experience in a particular domain before building a product for it.
From an initial pool of a dozen ideas, I have chosen 3 concepts to start with based on their business case. These products concepts are in the ecommerce, online payments and mobile VAS spaces; 1 is for the Indian market and 2 for global customers [...]
Recently, an article by Sanjay Goel (of MustSeeIndia, an Indian travel site) on Pluggd.in about Payment Processors in India sparked my interest. The discussion highlighted 2 prominent points for me:
- lack of awareness about existing Indian + global payment options amongst Indian businesses (entrepreneurs, technologists, startups). Some users even suggested that PayPal is illegal in India.
- few merchants discussed real features (that they should demand more of) offered by their payment provider; most (and rightfully so in the Indian context) were concerned with pricing and ease of integration.
I thought it would be great to introduce the key players in the online payments ecosystem (also called e-payments or web payments) so everyone understands the differences between a payment gateway, a payment processor and a 3rd party payment platform……..
10 Aug 2009 at 18:55
Upasana
Entrepreneurship, India
No Comment
Off late there has been a lot of online buzz about female or women entrepreneurs or may be its just my ecosystem connecting me to all things entrepreneurial.
First there was the TechCrunch post “Three Israeli Femme-preneurs To Keep an Eye On” and the outrage and twisted comments on it.
Then there was this article on Harvard Business Review on “How women have changed Norway“.
Then I heard about MIT’s 2nd Annual Photo Contest, the theme for which is Women’s Entrepreneurship: Empowerment through Innovation.
Finally, there was an email invitation to the Delhi chapter of TIE India’s latest initiative a Special Interest Group (SIG) for Women.
I appreciate all of these initatives on one side – they encourage and showcase women in action in their respective fields of work. From the daily wage construction laborer to a small business owner to a CEO – they all should be applauded for their hard work and success.
On the other hand, does sex need to be a part of it? Is a person’s genetical framework relevant to their work? May be entrepreneurs should be applauded regardless of the sex they were born with. We all know there is no such thing as a man or woman entrepreneur. Yet we sometimes qualify professionals like doctors as male or female. Same goes with CTO, CEO, founder, Prime Minister, President, etc. Why do we do this?………….
As per the International Innovation Index – India ranks 15th while US ranks 2nd behind South Korea which leads the world. Read the full Innovation report (the rankings are on page 10 of the pdf document).
Subhash Menon, the MD and CEO of Subex, and Chairman of the Nasscom Product Forum in his article on the status quo of the Indian tech sector hit the nail on its head – “It has been established that overseas venture capitalists are increasingly demanding that product firms in the West should locate as many functions as possible in India to save costs. A recent example is that of a Silicon Valley firm that managed to get through two years of operations with only about $5 million (by depending on India) instead of about $15-20 million that they would have otherwise invested. When overseas start-ups have woken up to this advantage, Indian companies should not be left behind. India is today at an inflection point with advantages eclipsing problems for setting up a software product company here.”
So are Indians rising to the innovation challenge?
Enterprising Indians have always been at it albeit at a smaller scale. A couple examples of Indian innovations with global impact show signs of things to come…….
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