Three Ways To Hide Your Secret Sauce

They say every product or service must have a secret sauce. Some startups take the secrecy part of this advice to the extreme by going into stealth mode until they launch. Some others point to today’s open world of startup events, mentoring sessions, Twitter and TED talks and question if it’s even possible to keep … Read more

Why Advertisers Must Pay For Ads Seen By Bots

There’s a raging debate about ad visibility in recent times. Much as I’d like to think it’s triggered by my post Don’t Fall For The ‘Invisible Versus Unseen Ads’ Charade, the real reason doesn’t matter. The crux of the issue is that advertisers are claiming that ~15% of their online ads are seen by bots, … Read more

FORTUNE Is Changing – For The Worse:(

FORTUNE magazine seems to be undergoing a transformation lately. I’ve listed the key changes I’ve observed in the magazine over the past 5-6 months. Disruption. Disruption. Disruption. There’s a spate of articles on disruption of incumbents by newcomers. FORTUNE goes beyond the usual suspects like financial services, media and technology to drag industries like agriculture … Read more

Teardown Of Myntra’s App Mantra

India’s leading online fashion brand Myntra recently shut down its desktop and mobile websites and decided to go mobile app only. As far as I know, this is an unprecedented move by any ecommerce player anywhere in the world and flies in the face of moves by brands to increasingly hop on to the omnichannel … Read more

How To Remove Features And Increase A Product’s Appeal

Yes, you read that right. There are ways to remove features and increase a product’s appeal. This post was sparked off when I heard about GPSVoice, a new mobile app that uses GPS to help parents track their children’s location without draining battery life. More on the app in a bit but lest you think I’m … Read more

Treat Every Pageview As A Conversion Opportunity

Before developing a food discovery startup’s GTM strategy, we recently did a test drive of its mobile app. The app lists dishes of various cuisines from restaurants in the local neighborhood. Like many hyperlocal startups, this one also started operations in one city and then had plans to expand to other cities. As soon as … Read more

Appealing To Millennials – The Challenge For PayZapp Mobile Wallet

Since I wrote HDFC Bank’s PayZapp Ends My Bill Payment Woes, I’ve made a few more bill payments using the mobile wallet. All of them went through successfully (knock on wood!). I’m even more convinced that PayZapp is the best way of paying bills for people who’ve tried out other alternatives. That said, PayZapp faces … Read more

PLG: How To Build Marketing Into Your SAAS Product

Separating product from marketing is never a great idea for any type of software but, for Software-as-a-Service, it can be a recipe for disaster. That’s because SaaS functionality is a double-edged sword: Get it right and it can aid your marketing; but copy it blindly from your onpremise version – or otherwise get it wrong … Read more