Today’s roundtable focused on India again, and we worked on five startups from various parts of the country. As discussed before, Indian entrepreneurs are trying to make the journey from services and products, and on that road, the biggest roadblock I observe is a lack of product marketing experience. Historically, the industry has been ‘told’ what to develop, and hence the skill-set of defining products that can address the needs of a large set of customers seems to be absent.
Brahmi Wright Technologies
First up, today, Jagadish Suryanarayana from Bangalore, India, pitched Brahmi Wright Technologies, which suffered from precisely this problem. The company claims to be in the Knowledge Management software business. Well, that is a 20+ year old industry that never really became successful. Specific problems that required knowledge management solutions within HR, Operations, Engineering, etc., have found solutions. But having tracked the industry segment for at least 12 years, I can safely say that a company positioned to sell ‘Knowledge Management’ will not succeed. It needs a positioning overhaul to become a scalable product company.
SchemesCentral.com
Then, Manju Nanjaiah, also from Bangalore, India, pitched SchemesCentral.com. The company aims to turn the prevalent practice of investing in jewelry savings / investment schemes into a transparent, online process. Manju wants to get jewelers offering such schemes to use his cloud-based solution, and also bring them new customers. He cited the Redbus analogy multiple times. While I think his business idea is a reasonable one, I am not sold on the Redbus analogy, since the domains have little in common. If the primary value proposition for the company will be to educate 21-35 year old consumers on the value of investing in jewelry schemes, and generate new leads for jewelers, I would follow a different business model than what I would follow if I were offering a SaaS solution for streamlining the customer service for the jewelers.
SIBIA
Next, Angshuman Bhattacharya from Kolkata, India, pitched SIBIA, an analytics solution for Indian brands. Again, true to the Indian heritage, Angshuman lists 10 different segments from retail to banking to credit cards as his target customer segments. My advice is to focus on one segment, because the analytics needs and workflows would be vastly disparate across multiple segments, and without the segment focus, all SIBIA can hope to become is yet another services company.
B-Secure.in
Then, Punit Kamrah, from Gurgaon, India, pitched B-secure.in, a private 911-style subscription service to access security, healthcare and other emergency services. Punit presented everyone from consumers to corporations to the government as his target customer audience. Unfortunately, that is too broad a scope, and without determining which segment is willing to pay, the concept doesn’t have a chance at seeing the light of day.
Ekohealth
Next, Dr. Akash Rajpal from Mumbai, India, pitched Ekohealth.in, a subscription based buying club for affordable healthcare in India. The Indian market has a very low penetration of health insurance coverage. Consequently, millions of consumers have to afford out-of-pocket health treatments. Information is scarce, and consumers end up paying 3x to 4x what they normally should. Akash aims to address this information gap by helping these uninsured consumers afford healthcare at the right price-point. The idea is definitely interesting. However, there are many unanswered questions in the go-to-market strategy area. Would corporations be the right channel? Would corporations prefer to offer health benefits instead? What could be an affordable customer acquisition strategy?
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 a.m. PDT on:
Thursday, April 18, 170th 1M/1M Roundtable, Register Here.
Thursday, April 25, 171st 1M/1M Roundtable, Register Here.
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Sramana Mitra is the founder of the One Million by One Million (1M/1M) initiative, a virtual 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.