Yesterday, I attended The Smart Techie Startup

City event. It was

intended as a showcase of startups as well as for

learning/sharing/mentoring.

I had taken some notes during the day. As I was expanding it into

a blog post, I realized I was just adding filler words which was

a waste of bits, so here it is as-is:

• Ashish Gupta, Helion VC on “Concept to Success : Milestones forstartups”
  • India is a startup (positive way of looking at things)
    • High energy
    • Lots of growth
    • Small absolute number (relatively)
    • Little infrastructure or process
    • Lack of talent
    • Lots of optimism
    • Need to innovate to survive
    • ⇒ Once in a lifetime opportunity
  • Significant change in dynamics (negative way of looking at it)
    • Whatever can be made efficient will be done so.
      • We can in turn get bangalored and some other country willbenefit.
    • Creative folks will thrive.
    • ⇒ We have no choice.
  • Hardest evolutionary steps
    • Those that requires behavior change
      • For example, starting to think “Become cash flow positive”
      • Next level CEO, process, tech, business model, etc.
  • Put in place metrics to measure everything – will help identifywhether one has already hit an inflection point.
  • Rules of thumb
    1. Focus on customer/issue
    2. Focus on continuous improvement
    3. Intellectual honesty
    4. Results matter – only for MEASURING (measure progress ona larger scale)
    5. ⇒ Same rules for person, family, company

• Application Marketing panel discussion
  • Dr. Y L R Moorthi – IIMB professor of marketing (the moderator)
    • ‘Technology has the shelf life of a banana’
    • Wacky ideas (product) + Marketing (messaging) – the2 challenges
  • Paul Murphy, Director of Innovation, Microsoft India
    • Taking ideas to market is key
    • Time vs Cost in marketing
    • Leverage as many platforms as possible
  • Bharath Chinamanthur,Director – Retail Systems, Amazon IndiaDevelopment Center
    • Great customer experience, wide merchandise, low cost – simplebasics that Amazon has adhered to
    • Free shipping in lieu of marketing program
    • Affiliate program
    • ‘Zara’ – a Spanish retailer, No. 64 in the Inter-Brand survey→ fast moving (short availability) high-fashion availablein regular malls. Their innovation is the supply-chain and themarketing since the fashion is designed by others.
  • Suresh Vedula, Head – Business Mobility, Nokia India
    • Having a good product, be honest about your product’scapabilities, build a customer base.
    • All these are required for startups as well. Brand will bebuilt over time via word of mouth, etc. If you have a productthat’s a dud, things like marketing and brand don’t matter.
    • Nokia Basics
      1. Product innovation
      2. Reach, especially in a country like India
      3. Supply chain management
    • When everything fails, common sense succeeds
  • Y L R Moorthi
    • Marketing tactic – from 9 am to 1 pm say ‘cello’ instead of‘hello’ and if you’re the one they call up, you get a gift→ costs nothing but overnight they built brandrecognition in Tamil Nadu
    • Its essential to think such wacky ideas, only startups can dothat.
  • Paul Murphy
    • Partner ecosystem important
    • 1. Crawl 2) Walk 3) Run
    • Success is a terrible teacher. Failure is a better one.
  • Summary by Y R L Moorthi
    • Start with the market, not the product
    • “I’m expensive now because I learned so much” – a guy who hashad 3 failures who was a hot hire
    • Wacky ideas
      • Anantra, no office, save lot of money
    • How to get Reach is important, various strategies being used
      • “Oh My News” Korean newspaper/blog
      • CambrianHouse.com – crowdsourcing ideas
    • Basically, ideate and monetize.

• Startup stalls
  • The ones I was most impressed with was Mobisy – they have alreadydone a Adobe AIR for Mobile! You can write applications inHTML/JavaScript and deploy as an app on a number of platformslike Symbian, etc. provides native facilities like SMS, phonebook, location.
    • Their pluggd.ininterviewgives a good overview
  • MyDuniya – just SMS for sharing Files, messaging Groups, etc.
  • There were more startups in mobile payment (ngpay, obopay,mchek), services such as payroll outsourcing and companyincorporation help, big companies like Akamai and Amazon thatprovide technology services for startups, etc.
  • The group stalls for Bangalore OCC and KickStart.in were packed.
  • Satishfound QuillPad very good: “It needsguts/passion to say a ‘NO’ when approached by google to acquire!”