Who ever has been watching the WeWork story unfold with the valuation going from 75B at IPO filing to 8B and no IPO or ’sinking IPOs of Uber, Lyft and Peloton’ may be reminded of the dot com bubble in 2000. According to Derek Thompson, staff writer at The Atlantic, host of podcast Crazy/Genius, it is actually ‘The Not-Com bubble’ popping.
I spend a lot of time meeting and talking to startups. Not only because they are a potential target group for our Buyer Seller Engagement platform Pitch.Link, but because as a product startup I naturally spend time continuously in the ecosystem, be it Canada or India. I love to see how people pitch their business ideas and figure solvable pain points. One universal one, Sales.
Alexis Conran hosted the show ‘The Real Hustle’ on BBC where he and his team ran elaborate scams on people. In this hugely entertaining TEDXBerlin talk he presents the 5 tactics used by conmen to fool us. Well the crux is that we mostly fool ourselves. Politicians, businesses and folks who want to sell their story to us routinely use these 5 tactics to get us to do what they want. People believing fake news spread by politicians or got into Bernie Madoff’s elaborate scams – eventually fall prey to the same techniques. When we are building our businesses how many times are we fooling ourselves?
The recent BDO report has pegged the global Martech business at $121Bn (more on this later.). That made me revisit the 2019 Martech Landscape which saw the lowest annual growth rate (3%) vis a vis the previous 7 years when the landscape grew from 150 (2011) to 6800 (2018) products. In the accompanying article Scott Brinker explains the evolution of the space.
At the Nasscom Product Conclave I attended a workshop by Shekhar Kirani, Partner Accel and Prasanna Krishnamoorthy, Partner Upekkha Catalyst, on how to build a ‘Venture Backable Startup’ – the Holy Grail of Startupland!
Privacy is going to be a complex battle ground between citizens one side and businesses, unscrupulous actors and the government. To start with businesses and data analyzers have access to intimate and deep historical data about us – things that we have ourselves long forgotten. We are still not fully aware of the impact and what they know. Even if you do not bother about details of your eating habits that you leave on your digital trail being known, you need to understand what these organisations are analyzing about you based on your data. Could your eating habit bread crumbs left on the digital universe quadruple your medical insurance? Or even worse – Can it be denied?
Product led growth and self selling self serving saas can go only so far – $50 to $100mn but rarely beyond in the same manner. Enterprise sales needs to kick in for hyper growth and this article by Mark Cranney in the A16Z blog of 2014 has some interesting insights. Mark headed OpsWare – a data center automation services company it outlines a model for attempting Enterprise sales. True job of sales people is not to communicate value to customers but to create new value for them.
If you look around enough is being shared about the importance of story telling as part of your communication strategy. As an individual whether we are telling stories to our children, our spouse – our friends or colleagues or to our customers, this is one skill that we need to hone. And so that we are clear, although it is sounds like selling – it is not. Great story telling aids selling but not the other way around.
The NASSCOM Annual Product Conclave and Awards are on in Bangalore, the tech capital of India. I was there.
The SaaS Summit was day long in-depth sessions, starting with ‘Transitioning from IT Services to Product’ (Get a fix on the Mother problem for your ICP) by Amit D Mishra, Founder of Interview Mocha,
As I dig through the net to find wisdom I found this very comprehensive 2015 piece by Joseph Walla the founder of Hellosign (2012) and HelloFax (2010) earlier. He writes about the numerous lessons learned while taking his two ventures from 0 to 1mn ARR.
