During today’s roundtable, we spent a large part of the session working with 1M/1M premium company OrangeScape’s CTO, Mani Doraisamy, and the strategy for the company's new product KiSSFLOW. OrangeScape, by the way, is based in Chennai, India, and has been part of the 1M/1M premium program for almost two years.
The first product is a visual tool to build simple apps on the Google App Engine platform. We have talked about that at length in various previous posts. In particular, let me point you to our Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing series article that points to how enterprises are cutting costs by migrating out of Lotus Notes and into Google Apps. OrangeScape plays a crucial role in that migration.
The new product, KiSSFLOW comes out of OrangeScape's work with a customer, United Biscuits, and is a simple workflow product for Google Apps. Here are some reviews of the product by various industry observers and analysts: Techcrunch, Satya Narayanan (On Software and Stuff), Janakiram MSV (CloudStory.in), Stephanie Watson (GetApp.com), Manan Shah (TechCurry.co), Madhumitha Vishwanathan, and Postnoon.
Satya sums it up: “The value proposition is very clear. Many smaller and medium sized companies use a Google Apps account for their mail and document needs. Most of the organization processes happen over informal means, through emails or paperwork. Providing a platform which allows company owners to set up easy automation flows to manage some of their processes will come in very handy. On top of it, if it utilizes the data already present, nothing like it. KiSSFLOW comes across as one such platform where you can quickly automate some of the organization process without leaving the affordability and the environment of Google.”
I see a couple of interesting opportunities here as OrangeScape pilots the product with over 500 customers. First, there are at least 10 sizeable companies (self-selected) in the pool that would be candidates for the entire OrangeScape + KiSSFLOW portfolio. This tells me that, over time, more customers would self-select themselves and become inbound leads for much larger deals. Secondly, it opens up the SME market for the company with just the KiSSFLOW product. While the exact TAM for the SME market is yet to be determined, this creates two interesting revenue opportunities for the company, as it builds its product portfolio in the Google Apps eco-system.
OrangeScape investors, I am sure, are pleased with this development. I also like the fact that OrangeScape has enough product marketing talent inside the company to sniff out these additional opportunities, and respond to them rapidly.
Civic Card
Then Robert Carpenter from New Jersey pitched Civic Card, a payment card focused on nurturing local communities in various cities with discounts, special offers, etc., across the healthcare, energy and retail needs of their inhabitants. Currently, Robert is working with a city and its merchants and consumers to pilot the business. Lots of questions remain, of course, not the least of which is customer acquisition. As we have seen in companies like Groupon, Yelp and Angie’s List, marketing to small merchants is very expensive. Robert will need to work out compelling and capital efficient strategies for doing so. Also unclear is the business model for the company itself, which would need to be fleshed out through the pilot under way. We look forward to seeing the results of the pilot in a few months.
You can listen to the recording of today’s roundtable here.
As always, I would very much like to hear about your business, so let me invite you to come and pitch at one of our free 1M/1M public roundtables. We will be holding future roundtables at 8:00 a.m. PDT on:
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Sramana Mitra is the founder of the One Million by One Million (1M/1M) initiative, an educational, business development and incubation program that aims to help one million entrepreneurs globally to reach $1 million in revenue and beyond. She is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and strategy consultant, she writes the blog Sramana Mitra On Strategy, and is author of the Entrepreneur Journeys book series and Vision India 2020. From 2008 to 2010, Mitra was a columnist for Forbes. As an entrepreneur CEO, she ran three companies: DAIS, Intarka, and Uuma. Sramana has a master’s degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.