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Social Media Customer Service – Use It But Don’t Abuse It

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Frequent readers of this blog and people who otherwise know me would be aware that I’m a big fan of social media customer service. Many years ago, I wrote Customers Of The World Unite, You Have Nothing To Lose But The Call Center Hold Music to explain why I found the channel very effective for reaching out … Read more

Five Ways To Stand Out In A Highly Competitive B2B Market

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This is a slightly edited version of my answer to the following question on Quora: Given below are five things that you, as a seller of a B2B product or service, can do to stand out from your competition in a highly crowded B2B market. Respond to inbound leads received via your info@company.com email address. From personal experience … Read more

Regulated Blockchain – Oxymoron But Killer App

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There are many business relationships where trust is one-sided. Let me give a few examples of such relationships in which the contract between two parties A and B is such that A needs to trust B but B does not need not trust A. #1. METERING Mobile phone subscriber consumes data. The consumption is measured … Read more

How Do You Find Early Customers For A B2B SAAS Startup?

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This is a slightly edited version of my answer to the following question on Quora: This question reminds me of a Patek Philippe ad in which the luxury Swiss watchmaker says, “You never actually own a Patek Philippe. You merely look after it for the next generation”. The tagline of the ad is “Begin your own … Read more

Angels Or Demons Tax?

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In the past few days, several startups in India have received notices from the Income Tax Department threatening penal taxes on the angel investments (“Angel Tax”) raised by them during the past few years. Angel tax demon is back! Number of entrepreneurs have received I-T notices over Angel funding. This even as FM @ArunJaitley & … Read more

Harmless As Tiny Noticeable Thing Or Explosive As TNT

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Here’s another post on the cultural differences across different markets, with specific lessons for sales and marketing. Many years ago, Fortune had used the following lede to introduce the largest company on its prestigious list of 500 largest corporations in the world: Walmart is the #1 company on the GLOBAL FORTUNE 500. As the largest … Read more

Fintechs Shouldn’t Stop Chanting The Disruption Mantra

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Direct-to-Consumer financial technology startups are new age companies that sell bank accounts, loans and other financial products directly to end users. In this post, we’ll use the term “Fintechs” to refer to these D2C firms and “Fintech” to refer to the industry as a whole. Fintechs are different from “Fincumbents”, which is a term I’ve … Read more

To H-1B Or Not To H-1B… Is A Money Question

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Today’s Economic Times published my letter on H-1B and the controversy over surplus or scarcity of STEM talent in the USA. It was in response to the following article on this subject two days ago. The published version of my letter is a highly condensed version of my original letter. As a result, it’s quite cryptic (even … Read more

Teardown Of The VC Investment Playbook

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This is a slightly edited version of my answer to the following question on Quora: “We’ll disrupt uncouth taxi unions.” “We’ll kill greedy banks.” “We’ll upend shady realtors.” Startups with noble mission statements like these get billions of dollars of VC funding and enjoy unicorn – or even decacorn –  valuations. As a result, the average … Read more