Official Blog of GTM360 Marketing Solutions
In his op-ed entitled Tech What One Deserves in The Economic Times dated 17 July 2019, author Swaminathan S Anklesaria Aiyar (@swaminomics) supports the move by governments of various countries to change the basis of corporate tax for tech startups from profits to sales. According to @swaminomics, France has already taken the lead by levying a … Read more
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
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
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
I recently saw the following post on LinkedIn: “95% of banks in the study have created innovation labs.” This figure seemed extremely high to me. I did a quick-and-dirty survey of three banks in my circle. Not one of them has an innovation lab. Nevertheless, I didn’t conclude that the author of the post was … Read more
In How Rideshare Startups Flipped A Switch To Create A Billion Dollar Business Overnight, I shared my thoughts on how rideshare startups have gone against common wisdom in many areas and used digital – aka SMAC (Social-Mobile-Analytics-Cloud) – technologies to create a billion dollar business virtually overnight. But it’s more than just technology. Before I elaborate, let … Read more
In When A Business Is VC Funded, VC Is The Business, we saw how VCs are driven by traditional business metrics like profitability and ROI although their portfolio companies are not. Contrary to common wisdom, the VC industry has a stellar track record on these conventional KPIs. First, let’s take profitability. It’s no secret that many … Read more
A couple of years ago, virtually every driver of my Uber and Ola taxi rides used to praise the two cab aggregators to high heavens for paying them huge incentives. Many of them would ask me how these startups could afford to shell out that kind of money when they were collecting less than half … Read more
Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half. This famous quote is attributed to John Wanamaker (1838-1922), the US businessman who is often considered to be the father of the department store. We use the slide at the bottom to explain the impact of our go … Read more