 In this panel, we have of course, well-known faces, Professor Harinand Dutta, Sushant who just shared his thoughts with you. Ah! Welcome, Poimie. The small lady that you see there, Poimie, but is the heartthrob of our incubator almost ever since its inception. You? Ah! No, I am not on her side, inception of incubator. Yes. Ah! So thank you, Poimie, and welcome here. We will have Professor Dinesh Sharma shortly joining us, but we have one special person, Ajit Chalat. So let me briefly introduce him to you. Ajit, like many of us, was a student from IIT Bombay, and he was also my colleague in the computer centre. Those of you who have heard of a Russian mainframe EDME system, IC-1030, which was essentially a architecture copy of IBM 360, but completely independently developed by Russians, that computer was very hard to maintain. Those few which came to India during the days when imports were not permitted, we had one, and that was the one which was known to have run best. And amongst the team members who made it run best, Ajit Chalat had a stellar contribution. Dubious distinction. Dubious distinction, what? He subsequently joined Godrej R&D. In the days when graphic research in terms of development of graphic terminals was very limited in the country. I think there was only other firm was Vipro which was doing something, and Godrej was doing something. So they were in the Godrej R&D there. Subsequently with the easing out of imports, Godrej like many other companies found that research was not a viable alternative for doing good business. They practically closed down their R&D. But people like Ajit Chalat who were keen to pursue that path set up a company. It happened much before the incubation activity started here. And they were essentially into packet classification, that kind of stuff, high end stuff those days. What is interesting about that company is that the company was in Pune, which was set up in Pune. A lot of joint R&D projects were done together with IIT Bombay. But the major inching and research happened in Pune, and major packaging and marketing happened in United States. So he set up a company in United States, did some reverse acquisition or whatever you call it. And to the best of my knowledge, that was the first product company to be sold out to for PMC Sierra for a considerable amount of money. This was not a known trend then when the IIT industry in the country was evolving primarily as a service industry. Of course there were pockets trying to develop good technologies, but this was a great achievement. Ever since then he has become a serial entrepreneur. He currently leads Navy's networks, another company in very high end network access control kind of stuff, more than 100 people in Pune. Again the engineering and research all is happening there. And I am very glad to have him amongst us. I thought that before the discussion is thrown open by the panel for all of you to interact and ask questions, I would request Ajit to share some of his real life experiences in the context of marketing mantra. So Ajit, all yours. Thank you Professor Fartak. And nice to be here and seeing so many people here in this group here. I mean I am quite impressed by the number of attendees. So yeah I have not come well prepared. I did look at some of the material which was probably presented to you in the last day or two. I saw that that was quite interesting and what might be called you know methodical sort of view of marketing and so on. And frankly I never did any of that stuff myself. I just things just grew and I thought I will tell things as I saw it in my last so many years of being here in India and trying to create products in India and from India. So I hope that's a reasonable thing right. So while I am familiar with the material little bit but I am not sure exactly on what context it was given so please forgive me if I repeat some things or go off track a little bit. I mean the good thing about being in IIT and working and having Professor Fartak and Professor Rao as colleague is that we are always challenged to think up newer and newer things. And right from my IIT days we with Professor Rao and Professor Dhamdeira etc we are always looking at product ideas so at least right from the beginning I was thinking about such things. And when we went into Godrej also while Godrej had its own agenda in terms of products to develop we did have lot of freedom in trying to figure out what we could put together and sell in the market. And it was in from those days where as Professor Suggest mentioned I was constantly involved in trying to generate or create new technology in collaboration with IIT all the time. Every year we used to have anywhere between 6 to 10 projects sponsored and we used to do a lot of interesting things. And as is expected in that process we probably got extremely good results in about 10 percent of the cases, well above average results in about 40 percent of the cases and the rest were washouts mainly because of you know lack of focus from various parties involved. But that is where we kept trying out I mean the good thing about all of this was that I got to know for myself and I thank Godrej for that in the terms in the sense that they allowed me the bandwidth to keep messing around so to speak. And I got to know what are the things which can click and what may or may not click and you know learn by you know failing by trying out things and knowing that this does not work this does not work and so on. And so here are some of the thoughts which I have you know learnt on the way. One of the things which I discovered over the whole period of time is that and I think since all of you are at least most of you are from startup environments you would know that if you know the customer's problem well that is when you can come up with good solutions and at least from my side I understood that I mean in one way or the other I have been associated with interacting with customers in different I mean while we got into a product company finally we became a product company or startup in once I left Godrej was really involved in providing networking protocol and networking software services to companies abroad and here. And of course in Godrej also had created products in the same space so I knew what customers wanted they I could understand their problems. And putting the problems together and trying to extrapolate them into what might be required in the future probably 3 to 5 years down the line that is what really got us on the track of the product the chip product we came out with in switch on networks packet classification engine but it started entirely from the fact that we understood that whole space and the customer requirements extremely well. So I think that is very important the one point is to understand that whole space I mean if you build a product you do not build it for one customer you want to know a spectrum of customers understand the requirements and actually the requirements keep varying from customer to customer you have to put it all together and try to find a sort of common theme in all of that and define a product with that in mind. So I think that was the first important step which I figured out I actually in even in Godrej days we put together a product which I am told was selling as lately as last year. So that was also out of the fact that we saw what people needed projected into the future what they might require and then try to define a product around it. And so the besides knowing what the customer wants the next important thing is project trying to project it because any development activity does take some time and you need to sort of leapfrog existing technologies. So that is important the other thing I discovered was that even as you have defined something it really requires continuous interaction with customers to understand exactly what they will want. So even if you define the core of the product right the peripheral the outer layer what the customer would be interacting with that needs to be defined in close collaboration with customers you got to be interacting with them all the time. And so we have had many in my past life we have had many interactions with customers who actually provided absolutely crucial inputs to us which contributed to the success of the product. It was that critical and I can give you an example our packet classification engine. So we came out with a very high performance deep packet you know analysis engine which will go right into up to layer 7 and so on. And it all was fine we could prove the performance and scalability and etc. And then we went around talking to various customers about this is what we have and they were generally very very impressed. But one thing which came back to us was that how do we plug it into existing hardware you know platforms which they have which customers already have how does it fit how does it work with other network processors that exist. And so the customers put that question to us and we had to find a solution the solution was relatively straightforward now adopted by many many people I regret not having patented it in the past. But idea was that just provide a you know provide the whole packet classification engine and give it a memory mapped interface for all the functionality which I mean now I mean everybody does it but back in those days it was not very clearly thought out. And it was that which made us compatible with almost all the network processors which existed then and that contributed very significantly. The other thing which the another thing we learned was that not all customers know what they want I mean they know what they want now and if you are coming out with new ideas very very sort of something which leapfrogs existing stuff and customers do not necessarily extrapolate to where you are thinking. And it would be important for the person with good knowledge of the technology being developed to be interacting with the customer. And working with the customer to indicate to the customer how it can help now of course one may not know what the customer is really potentially going to like want. So it is a very very interactive process where you sit across the table with the customer and talk and suggest things which can come up and which is possible. And then in that process you really get to the point where you see that okay this is something which the customer will like and the customer actually when told about it resonates with that idea. So I think it is a very interactive process. So these are the things which some of the things which I figured out in the learning process. The whole thing was a learning process for me too and continues even now where you got to think of something projected into the future then work with the customer to figure out exactly how it can be made useful. Very often it is like finding a solution and then looking for the problem it will solve. So I mean that is typically the case with technology people. And I am as prone to that kind of thinking as anyone else. So you can think of nice fancy technologies and then you start trying to figure out where can it be used and I think that is where the customer interaction comes in. So you got to start from both ends and try to get them to meet. So these are some of the thoughts and I guess from marketing side also considering marketing monetize the theme and I think the main point here is what message to convey to the customers once you have done all of this is also very important. How to present the solution or the problem first take the problem and then the solution in a manner which the customer will be able to understand very well. I think that is also an exercise which is important. Very often I have found that if I just go and state what is an obvious problem to me and an obvious solution to that problem customers do not really understand and you have to bridge that gap also and things like that. So I think these are some of the key things which I have figured out for myself and I think it is still an ongoing process I am learning more and more as we go along. Okay thank you Ajit. Let me throw the panel open for all of you to ask questions. Yeah, first one there. It is essentially about breaking the initial eyes when you go to the market. You have a great product and if it has to break the eyes and you first have to create an awareness among your potential customers that there is an option available that people can evaluate on par with other existing solutions or similar solutions available. So how do you break that initial eyes in the marketing and make it one of the options that your potential customers evaluate? So at least in my experience when you start with a new product idea it is often a sort of almost well it is an iterative process and it is a little bit of trial and error. So one thinks of a product idea, one thinks of the positioning and exactly what are the benefits for a customer out of something and one does it with ones or the teams experiences and how it will be perceived by the customer and the fact of the matter is you go and pitch that story to a few of the customers, get feedback, find out and of course each customer has slightly different requirements so you got to fine tune all of those and keep improving your pitch as you go along till you reach a level of 60, 70% acceptability. Then you know that okay the core of your product idea when pitched like this is acceptable and then you are on. So it is not a easy, I mean it's not a single step solution, it's like multiple steps. So it's primarily about you reaching to the customers initially directly rather than trying to have them come back to you, come to you in some sort. So my question, I mean it's about you going to the customers and attracting a lot and trying to convince them upon and then trying to win their confidence and get the initial sales going. Exactly, yes. Is any other platform? Let me emphasize that you should never ever have any doubt about that process. People will come to you only when your brand is well established, when everybody knows of you and they believe they need the product more than what you need to sell. At that stage will come after a lot of maturity and a lot of time. We are talking about techno entrepreneurship, there should be no doubt there is the entrepreneurs who are to reach the customers. The second I would like to add more to what he said is that in that dialogue with the customer that you say, customer is not a single entity, customer is a nomenclature that you give representing a whole lot of people in a company or an organization. And I think it is important to remember the psychology of the different people in that customers. I will give you just a couple of instances, my own younger brother when he was working for AT&T Bell Labs and he was in Lucent, he was doing some marketing thing and he gave me a card. He just said Sunil Phatak, director of marketing. I said, earlier card I had seen was Dr. Sunil Phatak, distinguished member of technical staff AT&T Bell Labs, etc. So he says, yeah, but when I meet the vice president of procurement or whatever, he generally dislikes talking to high-end techies. So he has this card. Of course, he says subsequently when I meet with the technical people for discussion, I produce the other card. Now please understand what he is implicitly doing is he is correctly pitching his statements in the right psychological framework for the person he is talking to. And I think it is very important because know where your customer should feel that whatever you are saying is not being understood or is not being targeted at what he wants. Another example of this I was conducting a senior management technical workshop for LNT in Chennai. Everybody, all top people were there. And at that time LNT, ITL, which is a subsidiary of LNT led by Achyut Kodbole, they are also sitting there and they are discussing technical problems. And one fellow said, you know, your new email service that you have provided, I do not get my mail sometimes for a day and definitely for four hours or something. And then this fellow went into a long diary about how they have converted some of the V-SAT links into the landline links and yet they have to buffer everything. And they have now a batch process and they are optimizing it early as the batch process used to take two days and now it takes one day. Sometimes it, et cetera, et cetera, about ten minutes or something. So I stopped him and I asked this business gentleman saying, he has answered but have you understood? Because I haven't. So he says, I gave up after two sentences that he spoke. And that is because for a business problem, a technical answer was being given. And this could very much happen in your interaction with customers. So even when you are talking to their takeees, the takeees from the customer side are well aware of their problem. And they always want an emphatic yes answer from you saying that this business problem will be resolved by your technology. So unless you put technology in that context, it will not work. That is my small experience from multiple instances. So always keep the, put yourself into customer shoes first. That is rarely done. I had a second question in the same lines. But let's say we are a business to business company. We are trying to reach clients. There are multiple people. For my scenario, there are multiple people who make a decision. Sometimes it's government organizations. Sometimes it is private organizations. There are eight, nine people I have to go convince and what will be a typical early stage sales strategy. Like because we are in an early stage, early stage sales strategy I should adopt to have a maximum impact or maximum sale. The business space is different from what I have been experiencing. But so just to understand, I mean, you have a B2B kind of thing. And you have to start the whole selling process. We have a couple of steps. But we are in still early stage sales. It's not like we have a lot of them. We have only one or two, three, four of them. One of our products, we have multiple products, the mature stage, but some of them are in the early stage. Yeah, so not knowing specifics about your product or your space. Assume it is an enterprise application. But why don't you say what you are doing? Because it will help you. Okay, fine, because we are into mobile products. And some of them are applicable in government organizations also. SMS, per se, as a communication tool is largely as a solution. We work with all the people there. And also in other areas we have worked with mobile, particular mobile applications and mobile products. It could be IVR, it could be anything. It could be SMS, it could be an application. It could be a streaming download of a content onto your mobile phone. These are the suit of products I have. That one particular product is applicable to organizational productivity. And because it is a technology, I don't want to be specific right now, but it is a technology and it will help organizational productivity. That much is the, because it is embedding all these technologies. Sir, okay, so in my experience typically for any new product, there are two, three, or multiple stages at least. So first is to get the initial few customers. And those are very specific, targeted, selling attempts. Beta customers. Beta customers or even otherwise, I mean, point is you select your customers. And you know that they have a specific need. You have a, or somebody in your team has a sort of relationship, maybe into that organization or similar organizations. And that's when you get a sympathetic ear to your new idea. Because mostly, I mean, there are many, many people with many, many ideas and lots of them are not that necessarily that great. Or at least that as seen by potential customers, they just dismiss things out of hand. It's quite, in fact, it's quite a normal thing for people to either disbelieve what you're doing or not understand the benefits, etc., etc. So you need a good listening from your potential customer. You need to catch some of those. And I guess they're finding such people in government organizations is particularly difficult. I don't know what their background is. I can just share some experience at the incubator and so on about dealing with the government. I think one of the issues of dealing with the government is requires a lot. It takes much longer to sell to the government than to any other agency. It also takes much longer to collect your money from the government than any other agency. So I would mean the best strategy to dealing with the government would be to go through an agent or a distributor or a system integrator, depending on what your product category is, rather than going directly. Because I think you will spend a lot of time. And your expectations of revenue, cash flows, actual will be very different. Of course, the only exception being at times such as these, where corporate buying is slowing down, government and education are very good sectors to look at. Because since other sales will slow down, government buying really doesn't depend on these economic cycles. So that's the exception to the rule. But in general, I wouldn't say that you should deal directly with government buyers on your own. I'd like to add to this. Yeah. All right. You know, in business, we all want plug and play. We are not going to pay for something and wait. And having said that, in our times when we came out of college, there was a thing called management trainees. Now no company wants a management trainee. They want the day you get in, you start paying for the job. And you get profits for the company. I don't agree entirely that the only way to approach government and public sector organizations should be strictly done through intermediaries or system integrators and agents. Agents, system integrators, and intermediaries are useful only when they have an established connection with a particular government department or a public sector unit. In the sense of having given proven good service and products earlier in some of the years. Because that means they have the trust of the, at the end of the day, the trust has to be independently obtained by you for you. So initially you might approach through them. So some amount of ultimate interaction will be necessary. The government and public sector procurements are very large cycles, as he correctly said. And the payments are delayed. He's being polite actually. When I represent large number of public sector organizations typically in the finance sector negotiating with vendors, I say that you provide us this service, this product. And we'll occasionally pay. And in general you will find that the government and public sector have used time lags in even coming up with RFP evaluation and so on. But they want the solution to be in place in one month in 15 days, two months. I often say that we as customers have the right to have inordinate delays within our own processes. And we want you as our business partner to take care of all the delays that we have incurred in the past. So there are double pressures of that kind. Talking in a percentage term, in any organization, there is a percentage of people, small percentage, which are proactive, very aggressive, self-driven. It is those people who actually run the organization, including the forward-looking policy of that organization. It is true even for the private sector companies. It is true of the public sector companies also. But in public sector and government, you will find a very peculiar, lopsided distribution of such people. I call it 2060-20 rule in a large organization. Ordinarily in a private sector organization, the rule is 3070 or 3565. That means 30 or 35% people will be self-driven, forward-looking, etc. 65, 70% would be sort of ordinary. In government and public sector organizations, you definitely have 20% people who think differently, who want to take the organization ahead and so on. Frankly, the organization does run because of them as do other organizations. But there are 20% people at the bottom who will not only not deliver anything that the organization decides on, but will be a positive impediment in getting that thing forward. Now these 20% should not be permitted to outwit the top 20%. The remaining 60% are the true fan-sitters. They're good people, but they're watching who is succeeding. If the bottom 20% people succeed, these 60% will sort of significantly reduce their productivity. If the top 20% succeed, the same 60% will move on the other side. The bottom 20% will not change. And unfortunately, public citizen governments have no way of getting rid of these 20%. But that's how life is. Now, coming back to the strategy, you have to find out those individuals who belong to the top 20%. And from amongst those individuals who are internally respected by the leadership for their opinions. That is not an easy part. And you cannot do that solely through agencies and others. You have to actually get in touch with them, know them. And then if you have a right product which solves their problem, I think you'll be through. But it will be a long haul. Once I have a sale from one government organization, like a private sector we were talking about, is it easy to replicate in other sectors? Because I'm assuming that it is easy. Once a government, it's difficult to get through. I understand that. And I am willing to take that chance, because as a three year entrepreneurship into, I should try it at least once or twice. I want to take that risk. After that, let's say I have one sale, one breakthrough I have, is it easy to replicate? That's the second. Not necessarily. But it will give you an additional credential to begin your marketing in other organizations. But it does not guarantee anything. It does not guarantee anything. It will only go as a very important, should I say, element in your product CV, that this organization is using it and they find it. So you have a reference point. But that's about it. It's as good as a good reference point. It will help, yes. Will it solve all the problems? No. OK, let's have some other question. Yeah. Now this question is specifically non-IT product I'm referring to. When you are developing a product, there is a range where the product is ready for the market and where it should be. Actually, you would like to launch or what it should be like. But there is a trade-off. You have to find a balance between the resources you have, the time you have, and the time taking for the product development. Now, how do we reach that point to say that, OK, by this time, this is the product is ready for the market? Good question. Dinesh, would you like to take that? See, there are no hard and fast rules, basically. Thing is, you have to see when your product is ready, first it depends upon your objectives, and second, your competitors' actions. If you have competitors in the market and you know their product is coming in the market, so you have to move as fast as possible. So that competitor's entry is a benchmark. Otherwise, it's your prerogative how fast you can come. See, the highest point is your competition. The lowest point is as fast as you can. Let me translate this theory into some more practical terms, because this I have seen happening at many places. A large part of the blame for not succeeding goes to your product engineering team. As you rightly said, the product evolves. So even when you bring it to the market, the evolution is not going to stop. It's going to continue. So obviously, you're planning, say, some features in phase one, some features in phase two, some features in phase three, and so on. Now, this is a standard dilemma that I have seen in all product companies, where the problem is with the priorities of the product engineering team internally. Let me simplify this by saying that, suppose I have 10 features to be added, and I announce that at least 60% of these features should be in place before I launch the product in stage one. Which 60%, the product team invariably will choose those 60% which are easiest to implement. Whereas which 60% should be implemented are those which are the highest priority of the customer. And there is a gap between these two. And believe me, I have seen this happening again and again and again and again on very large number of startup companies. So the problem is internal, not so much external. So whenever you decide that, okay, these are the features I have to implement, go back and cross check whether the prioritization of those has been dictated by the customer-centric product visualizer or by the internal tech team. Because any technologies being a human being will take an optimal route, minimal effort and maximum gains. And you would like to do it correctly. So that is something that I would like to add. A couple of questions. First one is this. I have a lead, this is a real case I'm facing. So there's Xlacks that I can earn out of that. And then I spoke with the customer. Customer evaluates usability parameter is the highest. So he wants to understand how user-friendly is it? Now user-friendly is, he's got his own definition. I understood differently, but when I conveyed to my development team, they understood, they feel that the user interface is better, it can't be better than that. Now how do I close this loop? But what is the easiest way of closing this? Change your internal, there may be the greatest technologies, there may be the greatest theoretical knowledgeable people about user interface, et cetera, et cetera. But ultimately they're not going to pay for your product. The customer is going to pay. And if customer says this interface is useless, then it is useless. Now there are two ways to convince the customer that look, this interface could be different. That is harder. So your product team has to do that marketing. It's not easy. Talking about human interface, let me tell you an American company that had come here for some collaborative effort. We have a human machine interaction initiative, HMI initiative led by Professor Anirudh Dajoshi of our industrial design center. Finally, for machine interfaces, he was a professional in TCS for many years before he became a faculty member here. And he used to take, he actually offered an elective course under a school of IT as a general elect. So we know how tough that problem is. We also know that how five creative people will think in five different ways about the interface. There's no unanimity. See, it's like any other problem which is so commonly understood that people have definitive opinions which are different. It's like buying furniture at home. Your wife will say something, you will have some idea, your children will have some other idea. And every guest who visits you will have a different time. You have to take a call. This is a very typical scenario. And I think one of the best ways of handling it is when you send your engineering team out to meet the customer. I mean, so it works both ways. The engineering team really sees the customer's problem and the customer's view of what is the right thing. And it's quite possible that the customer has not seen everything. So the engineering guy can convey the engineering point of view to the customer. And then at that point the engineering team fellow can decide whether, I mean, finally customer is always right. But if he's able to convey to the customer the advantages of doing X, Y, Z, then that way you can come to a convergence. I think this is very typical. The engineering guys in a startup have to be in front of the customer. There's no two ways of what it is. Let me just digress and not digress but quote an example at the cost of another minute. A demonstration was going on of the user interface for a R&T organization, registrar and transfer agents who basically capture all the data from forms and so on. And the people I think at that time, this is Mafat Lal. My friend Yusuf Lenwala used to head that. They had developed this software. Graphics was very high priority then. And he demonstrated how by mouse you can click here and you get this, et cetera, et cetera. The leadership of that company was quite impressed. He showed how the data entry, et cetera, could be done. And then after the demonstration ended, as people were moving out, one data entry operator sheepishly asked me, sir, you have to do this every day? So I said, yes, are you not excited? He says, no, sir. I get paid on the number of forms I correctly entered. Now I can either keep moving the mouse or I can do data entry. I can do both. A common sense should have told people that when you are maximizing the productivity of correct data entry of people, it is the keyboard interface optimization that has to be done. If you have looked at the data entry operators, they don't even look at the screen. They don't even look at the keyboard. They are just looking at the form and typing it out. They do it extremely well. You cannot move the mouse by looking at the document. You have to look at the screen. If he looks at the screen, it's productivity is hampered. Just on the basis of that feedback, I told Mahfutlal people to completely change that interface. That interface, I said, is very good for managers for getting their productivity reports and so on, but completely useless for them. Now imagine the product engineers inside who designed that software. They must have been three to best for having given a best GUI or whatever it is, uncalled for. So this is just an example of how wrong your product team would be. I want to add something there. You see, normally, you have to be careful when you send a technical team to your customer, especially in a startup company. Your technical team should not lose their cool there. Then you lost him forever. Very important. Sir, yesterday you spoke about the bread and butter line. So for a young product-based startup company, how should this line be? Should this be established first and then the product development? Or it should run in parallel with product development? It is my experience in these 38 years that any company, startup, non-startup, they would be very happy if on a day-to-day basis, the company gets revenue in cash. It looks very nice on the balance sheet when you have debtors and creditors lined up there, but doesn't look nice to the owners when there is no money in the bank. So it is incumbent that you seriously look into this issue as to how, with your team, you can set up a line which can give you whatever money. You don't think in terms of the volumes you're looking for your core business. Whatever other area, whatever income it can generate, that could save you at the time of a ebb. I would like to add the flip side to this. Particularly from my experience, the IT industry. Typically, Indian IT industry has evolved as a service industry. Many companies, small and big, even those who give services have been trying to develop products, not necessarily successfully. And that is because the internal emphasis tends to shift in favor of that component of the activity which is earning daily revenue. So if you have a large chunk of money coming from services, then the appetite for investing in the development of product decreases even within the top leadership of the same startup company because they're not earning anything. So instead of looking at them as investment center, they suddenly become cost center. It's a mindset issue. So guard against that. Bread and butter is good, but the purpose of that bread and butter is to achieve higher things. The purpose in life should not become bread and butter. Otherwise, the higher things are for us. Yeah, completely agree. Just one minute, I'll add to this. Is it bread and butter? My bread and butter line was, as I said, if you remember, it should be a spin out company. The best bread and butter is the license and AMC cost of the product. That's the best bread and butter. Small variation to this kind of scenario. I mean, I went through the similar thing where we did do services in the beginning, as I said. And then we had to get off a product idea, the chip idea, and we had to actually consciously kill the service business so that we could focus on the product idea. So that is one angle, but the other side is quite a few, at least IT kind of startups. Often they are set up with the aim of getting acquired. So at that point, what you're building really is the best technology, the fastest, this or the biggest, something else. And there you don't have any bread and butter. You have some runway with some funding and you have to just run for it and hope to achieve whatever you had to do. And that's like, if then either you take off or you fall off the cliff, one of them. I will also add that there is a third model possible where your services are built around your products or around that product idea. So it need not be your product initial. You can build services around similar products elsewhere. And then say that this product would do better than that. In fact, that can get you an additional marketing angle for your product when it is ready. So services might still continue to be a major revenue, but let that be services built around your product. So you have a mixed model where license fee earning is something, but the services earning is very low. A case in point, you might have heard of a mercury load runner and such tools. In the early days, these tools, although they were licensed right from the beginning, but the majority of the revenues were services around that. Now, if you see HP has taken over that product and HP sells licenses, they make a reasonable amount of money. What is less known is HP and several other companies build revenues on services around load runner. How to set up performance benchmark test, et cetera. So that is a composite model, which is possible. You were saying something when I interrupted you. I can add my experience here. We were initially into services in open source consulting and that has actually helped us evolve a product idea around it and then work on it. So for some time, we were actually doing services and also trying to concentrate on the product. And from my experience, I can say that being in services can be a lot, lot distracting. As you rightly said, that is your bread and butter earner, so it sort of distracts your vision onto focusing on that aspect. So we were actually conscious enough to change gear and take a decision to and kill the services stream and then focus on the product. So that way you don't have revenues as well. So what we thought was whatever services we do should primarily be on the knowledge that we can apply. And rather than doing some coding, developing something that will involve a lot of time and money expenditure on our front, it has to be something that is coming out of your knowledge that you give to the customer and extract some money out of it. So that way you're reducing the effort that you're putting on the services, but earning something that will just keep you running. So that will optimize the scenario, I guess. I just have a point, in lines with that, but it is a little different. We are talking about product innovation most of the time here. What happens is it's actually the business innovation which takes over an entrepreneur more than the product innovation. Once you're starting revenue points and different points, your business model innovation, should you have multiple business models? Should you focus on one business model? And your business model innovation itself is a task to manage the entire show because you have sales processes and you have to innovate there also. How do you do it at less cost? You have a lot of areas you're working on, not just the product around. So what are your thoughts on that? There is no unique answer. Each situation will demand its own solution. Let me give you one business process innovation that I saw in Reliance, Patal Ganga. This was decades ago. The Patal Ganga plant supplies to a large number of people around it. Their trucks typically leave during a day and reach somewhere next day morning. The plant would offer three days credit after billing. So afterwards, I mean, credit meaning, if they pay within the three days, they actually get some concession. After that, they have to pay the regular amount and after so many days, interest, et cetera. They found out that everybody was enjoying that discount, but the money was coming much later. And the reason, while the material reached the respective factories, users of those chemicals, the bills never reached them in time. The bills reached two days later, three days later, four days later. The problem was that they had an inventory system built around some deck machines and whatever, whatever. How do you make sure that the bill reaches there? So they had this innovation in the days when networking was unheard of. Typically, you connected machines through modems and so on. So they set up these machines in the offices of their distributors in these places. They would download the daily dispatch of all the trucks and all the goods, including to whom it is going, in a separate PC. They will process that. They will process the bills for all the people for whom dispatches have been done. During the night, this PC was automated to connect to each one of these 50 people around and keep trying if necessary, till the file was transferred. The fellow in the office correspondingly in some 100 kilometers away, 200 kilometers away, is only supposed to take a printout. That was the kind of simple user interfacial gear. No programs to be run. Supposed to take a printout. So formatted printout was set. Typically, the fellow will reach the factory with a bill almost around the same time when the truck is reaching there. By reducing the discount which was offered, they recover the cost of this entire setup, which was very costly there. Don't forget that when first PC was introduced, the IBM PC costed 3,28,000 rupees. And an IBM compatible PC which was announced within two months costed 2,95,000 rupees something. Okay, so. The configuration of that PC. Yeah. The configuration was 256 kilobytes of memory and two floppies. So I'm talking of really old. It's important to understand that innovations can come anywhere. And the best people to innovate business processes are those who are doing the business. So you're talking about innovating yourselves processes within. But there is no single answer to it. Look at the situation and have a model. I think it's a non-ID product. Yes. When you are a new company, you are launching a product or you're trying to find some space. There is already existing distribution network which is already, it's full. There is no space for you or there is no space left for you to enter separately. How do you break into? Because for a new product to go through the conventional model, for one product that you say you have to put 10 in the pipeline, which is a big strain on the funding or the money that is available. So how do you tackle this issue? Because new dealers or it's a new product, new company, maybe existing network may not accept you to the existing channel to put through your product. How do you go about it? Larger problem. You are the experience with the large channels and so on. How do you deal with the new? Yeah, you see, big companies try to create a customer pool. So customers come to a retailer. They ask for a product and then retailers ask from where I can get the product. They search, so it's creating a pool basically. So typically consumer company try to create pool. Otherwise, you create a push, right? Now how to create a push, convince few or a key retailer in any region. So that you have to create some, some sales shelf in there. Then convince few customers to go. So create one retailer. See, you have to one key retailer and then make him a reference point for others to create. So no easily, you cannot easily expand and send to all, but start with the one key retailer or one key distributor. That you have to effort to create. Otherwise creating a pool is the other way around. I will add just one practical tip, particularly for non-IT products, which I have seen people doing it. Typically to create this kind of push, people would offer their goods at significantly concessional rate, which is okay. This is what like beta customers or something like that. What I would strongly urge you is never to compromise with your list price. Keep emphasizing the list price of your product is so and so. And that should be comparable to the corresponding competition. In fact, if you are convinced about your product, it should be slightly more than the competitor's product. Because that is one statement about quality of making. However, what you offer to create this push is significant discounts. It is not uncommon to say I'll give you a 90% discount for this first beta retailer or whatever it is. But if the list price gets compromised to begin with, nobody will ever pay you higher than that. This is what I have seen happening at many places. I'll just add to that. You know, yesterday when we were talking about market segmentation from the point of view of startup companies, I said that you identify a geographical area. The reason being that you are conversant about the area, about the people. And then if you do what Professor Sharma does, you'll be more successful rather than going into a new area where you would be likely to try. One question on the IT products. It's a hardware. It's an appliance basically. It's an IT appliance where we embed our software in the hardware itself and then hardware is sold. So we have this hardware ready. We are about to start it. That's the context in which I'm in. Now, what is the best way in which I can sell this? I can't create a pull from the market because I can't market it myself. It's a costly proposition. I can probably... The options I have at this point of time are put in Google ads and things like that, but I'm not sure how would the conversion be in that case. Now, when I speak to my management, we all of us sit together and then say, let's create... There's a value in this product. If you target SMB, SMEs, everyone wants it. Now, how do we ensure that everyone gets to know about this and then probably 50% talk about it and 10% there, 10% conversions? So the situation is... I mean, I didn't get the full picture, but is it that you have a very special hardware software product and how to get it out? For a different target segment, this product is going to be... It's not a costly, it's a cheaper proposition which will solve their problems. It's going to satisfy their basic security need. Businesses need this. Now, we know that this product is a cheaper version. It is one-tenth of what high-end guy costs today. Now, what is the... What do I do? I mean, I can put all Google ads and then I expect people, or I assume people will do a Google search and come to this. But then how do I create? I mean, I'll probably channel partners is one way, but... Well, yeah, it is... I mean, it's a situation-specific, but one of the things which people do is have... You know, go to cities and have workshops, stroke, demos, you know, and depending on the kind of product you call all the people and show them and that way, create pools of people with an interest and then increase that, you know, increase that set of people through various other means. But basically, you need to go to various places where you find there are a good bunch of customers and call them into one place and show them or demonstrate those things. That is a typical way. If it is meant for SMEs, perhaps one of the best possible bets is to go to conglomerate places like Aurangabad, Nasek, go to the industrial estate and get the government people to arrange for this kind of demo workshop. And that is where the marketing buck should go, being able to demonstrate to the end customers what this can do and prepare your presentation, as I mentioned yesterday, in multiple forms, keep it ready. So depending upon how much time you perceive a prospective customer has, should make your pitch in one minute or five minutes or 10 minutes. But there's no other shortcut. The Google advertisement, et cetera, will not help. Particularly if your product is much cheaper, a large number of people will discount it as not very useful product. How can so much functionality be so cheap? Okay, there will be some who will buy it because it is cheap, but it will be only if it is in consumer space. If it is in technology space, people will generally not buy it only because it is cheap. Unless it is, you know, like a consumer, you look at Chinese products. I mean, many people claim they're not good quality or something like that, but if something is selling at one time at their price, they will capture the market. In the consumer space, that is what you see happening. In United States of America, you go to any mall in anything that you purchase. 98% chances are it is manufactured in China. That's because the pricing is so low. But in specialized things, that does not apply. So this is probably the best. So there's one more side which you often is public relations. You know, getting covered in newspapers, magazines, trade journals, it's free. It doesn't cost money to get covered. But the sort of credibility that gives you if you talk about a particular customer using your product, that can really create a pull for your product, that's all. And participate in as many innovation contests, the local level, district level, state level, whatever, whatever. The newspapers will generally be enthusiastic about publishing your names and product information as a news item. That's the cheapest advertisement I agree with. And if by God's grace, you get some innovation award somewhere, that's what you should tum tum. But tum tumming is not done as much as it should be done. People are shy. In this world, you have to blow your own trumpet. Okay, if you don't blow it, people don't even have time to listen to it when you blow it properly. If you don't blow it to begin with, you're not done that. See, we have one product and the product and the concept is entirely new, the technology also. So what problem, it directly addresses the commercial real estate segment. What problem we are facing is to educate the customer or our clients on that. So every time we need to go on show, suppose if we talk about that product, they relate to something which they know and they say we are already. But it is not exactly. But the challenge what we are facing is to educate the customer in a big way because we need to cover the entire country in the shortest possible time so that we can encash on that. What are the ways I can follow to reach the entire commercial real estate segment? This is actually, we are using Google Earth, we are modeling and placing on the location of the earth. It is called your reference model. And it's a very useful marketing tool where a person can see the exact building before it is being constructed by sitting in any part of the globe. The challenge in this application is we are able to prove the file size. Even though we build a township around 2000 acres, we'll see that the file size will not exceed five or six MB. And we give entire details of the buildings, roads and all the details. We have the complete expertise. But the challenge we are facing is educating the customer at the client. I think you have to address individual builders or groups of builders. I don't see any other segment there. And this education will not happen by just distributing templates or even CDs or something like that. I think the best bet is what Ajit Chalat mentioned to begin with. Hold small events, okay? There need not be very costly events, but events which are targeted to these people. And that is where you should spend a lot of time in planning that event. For example, I have seen routinely such events going flop because the date chosen was a date on which something else significant was happening in the city in the same space. In barring sad incidences like what happened in November and here. And therefore a lot of events got canceled. But even the choice of place, choice of location, the choice of invitations, you can't expect people to come in by sending an invitation. You have to follow it up by making phone calls. And if you get 20 people together, even if one of them asked you an important question, the answer will educate all others. This is something that actually should be planned if possible. If it happens naturally, again, let me give an example in a completely different context. I was to conduct an entrance examination for MTech. Those days, gate was not there. And we used to give an objective test for one hour. And there were 1200 students. I was to conduct that exam in the convocation hall. And I was terribly worried about people copying. Because 1200 people, I had lots of invigilators. So I announced very strongly that if we suspect anybody copying anything else, then both the people, or at least the person who is copying will be thrown out summarily from the test. Within five minutes of the start of the test, I saw a gentleman squirming. I announced there that person there, and I asked the invigilator to go to him that fellow was looking here and there. And he started arguing with him. And I told the invigilator, please escort this gentleman outside the room. We'll have an argument with him later. After that incident, there was a pin drop silence. Nothing, absolutely nothing happened. Subsequently, the shortlisted people, when they were being interviewed by the committees, they found that the students, the senior students who were assisting the committees, had this fellow who was thrown out of the room. So I actually planted a second year M. Tech student there, telling him that you do look at the neighbor's thing, do copy, let them see that you're trying to copy and throw them out. Now this is planned. Of course, those 1200 people did not know it. Now if you have a plan, it must not be an obvious plan, of course. So you have to suggest discreetly to one of the things that we would like to answer your questions. You may have a question like this, okay? And then while demonstrating, deliberately suppress the automatic answer of that question, but kindle the curiosity. That fellow is bound to answer. These things can be done certainly. But I'm just emphasizing how you approach the individuals. But there's no shortcut except organizing this. Templates, advertisements, et cetera, will work only after there is a initial, what should I say, awareness of your thing. From zero level, advertisements may not help, except in one of our cases. I'd like to add, you know, in all these B2B, these scenarios, business to business, I just say, can you just display to one builder or one contractor what benefit he will, tangible benefit he will have by displaying a cost-benefit analysis sheet that you invest this much in me, and in turn you will get this much, tangibly. One builder, just convince one builder before you start marketing to others. I'm just saying, you will get so many ideas actually from them, whether what value he will derive from your product, is it really the same which you think is same, you know? Or you need to modify or pitch differently. One builder, just think of others, don't think of. We have just taken the opinion of about 20 builders and done nearly 35 projects for them. Based on their inputs given, and the sample is given, approved, and even they have converted that into an order and given a very fine opinion. So now I have to take it to a large number of builders and projects across the country. That's great, yeah. In some presentations, use that as a reference. References, yeah, absolutely. With that, that was perfect. So these references will help you in building your customer base. Okay, by seeing our profile and all, Google has listed us as a professional model service provider, only Indian company to have such listing. We have such a background and all, but the challenge we are facing is every time we have to go and show him what exactly, and many times we have to do the demo at various levels. One is at the executive level, managerial, and at the end of the day, management level. Then order is coming through. Welcome to the real world. There is a huge amount of legwork to be done. There's nothing, I mean, you see marketing people wearing ties and moving around, but their life is not hunky-dory. They have to earn their ties. In fact, that is easier if people are ready to listen to you and give you order. That is the best thing is possible. I'll tell you, you are in a far better situation than many others. Absolutely. Pidu, I agree with you, but the only thing is, see, we need, at the shortest, because we have spent huge money on research and developing this product in the last 24 months, so to en-cash that, we need to reach the large number of projects in the shortest possible time so that I can en-cash on that. So that is the motive with which we are taking part here, and I want more assistance from you. I mean, you can relatively shorten the period, but shortest possible time could be fairly long in current circumstances. Yes. Shortest possible time can also cost a lot of money. Yeah. You can always reach out to more people by spending a lot more money. So you have to balance that. Yes, balance that, yes. I just want to add one point, you know. I just got this thought. Maybe it'll help you can try it. You're talking about events, and maybe you can conduct multiple events in each city, and you can quickly show them the reference, and that is the easiest way for you, perhaps. I saw an extremely funny marketing exercise in Bangalore when our IIT students had organized an alumni event. I was called as a chief guest, and I was quite surprised that the event was sponsored by a real estate company, which was building high-end sort of townships and flats and so on. And I was wondering what is the relation. So they had just said that you have your two and a half or whatever, they had a huge music night, Monanz and so on, and just give us seven minutes somewhere in between. And I was there during the seven minutes, and they did a very proper marketing spend. And they had flats costing one crore plus, they had flats costing 35 lakhs first, and all, all, all beautiful work. Whom were they addressing? The IIT, Bombay, alumni, over the last 25 years. So very clearly they got for practically free the high-networth individuals of a select society at one place and for seven minutes. They cost four lakh rupees for sponsoring the dinner in the event. And I think on the spot, they had four or five bookings. They recovered much more than four lakhs in about 10 minutes after the event. So if you're talking about builders, maybe you can think of, of course, it's just an example I quote, you have to construct similar scenario there. But yes, I would agree with him. In general, these are costly propositions. Let's have some observations from people who are generally silent elsewhere. So could we have some observations or yeah, please? Just an example about, you know, how positioning the product and understanding what is the biggest motivation of the customer when actually going and pitching to the customer can completely change the way the product is perceived. So we had this product for enterprise retail. It was not selling for enterprise retail, so we decided that we'll build something for Kirana stores. 97% is Kirana market. So we built a system for them and we went to them. And early days, we had a eight people sales team and a couple of MBAs and a very experienced sales guy and absolutely no sales results. And then we kind of realized that we were using almost the same communication material and brochures, et cetera, that we were using for big retail. And we were telling them that automatic customer identification and customized offers and so on. Then we kind of figured out that the whole thing is just not working, right? And eventually, all that we changed, the product was exactly the same, all that we changed is, we used to go and pitch it as a we said, you know, you don't invest anything. You'll provide a lot of services to your customers and every month with zero investment, you make 3000 rupees. And suddenly, you know, the moment you go and tell the customers that it quickly spread within the community, which is, you know, the community which has a lot of Kirana stores in Bombay, around 2500. And, you know, without spending one rupee in advertising, we actually used to have a lot of people come in and we had to book FC Koli auditorium and there's Gulmawai Banquet and, you know, Kiranawala used to come and they automatically used to call in, you know, we want to come, when is your next event? We used to get them and we used to show them. So all that was changed was the communication to what the Kiranawala is interested in. He's not interested in technology. He's interested in what is the business benefit. So maybe, you know, in your case, just pitch it as more business benefit or make a pay for performance model and they would be interested. Since you mentioned FC Koli auditorium, let me add to precisely this Kirana thing where Mr. FC Koli, who has a penchant for creating something for these family stores as he calls them. So there's one fellow pitching exactly in the same way that this machine permits you automatic identification of the customer. And that fellow got so angry, he says, I've been doing business for 20 years, I know every customer and their entire family. So you're doing absolutely zero value added and you want to charge money for that. So, it is nonsense. So in fact he got so angry, he says, Look, this fellow is coming, he is coming alone. Can your machine identify and tell why his dog didn't come with him today? Normally he will come with a dog And he says, today has come without the know. I know it is. So I will naturally ask that fellow when I greet him, that what happened to your dog today? Your machine will not ask. So actually, your functionality is very right. I mean, distinction between the top retailers who have no personalized service ordinarily versus these family stores. So it's very, very important. Yeah. I have got a small story related to this subject. Because the Kiranawala is not at all interested in technology. One time, what happened? Three countries, they have planned to market a product that is the stocks in the very, very backward area. That is, we call it as the Adibasi area. So an American marketing manager, he went there with his product. And he studied that those people are only wearing a Bunyan and Bermuda. That is the only clothes they wear. So he is very disappointed. He told his company that we cannot market our product here because they are only wearing a Bunyan and Bermuda. And nothing, shoe and chappal, nothing is there. And he immediately gave a fax to his company and he left that place. Secondly, the Japanese person came. He also studied what he convinced to his company that though they are living with only Bermuda and Bunyan, we should make them habituated to use shoes. And automatically, we will get market for the stocks. And third person, he was the Indian. He was not at all a technician. But he has experience in the marketing by somehow. And within a period of three to five days, he sold all of his stocks. And he put repeat order to his company. So all the other persons, they are very shocked. How did it came? Then he told that I observed their culture, their clothes. And what I convinced him, our company has launched a new product. And that is the Bunyan to be wear in puts. But on real life, you will find that there was a time when the ordinary washing machines were being used increasingly for making lassi in this country. Sir, can you suggest me which sector is emerging sector for a new startup? Oh my god. Other than ITBT. Participants are using this panel discussion to derive a free consultancy from the panelists. No, not like that, sir. But I am amazed at this question, which is attempting to get a far more general question result. It is not possible to give this kind of advice very easily. Suppose I even list you all the things. They don't mean much to you. I think you must combine the so-called projection of what is important in life with what you and your people can do. That is equally important. So you have to have a matching thing. Not just because, of course, as a general businessman, you say, OK, I want to do a startup. I don't care what. This reminds me of a friend of mine who's an air conditioning expert. He developed expertise, worked with Middle East, and so on. He says, I want to do something here. He came back. And then he was to set up a factory in some area, 100 kilometers from this. And he was negotiating this land, this, that, that. And two months I did not hear of him. Two months later, he called me. I says, what? Did I become a factory? No, I changed the line. What do I do now? I sell chili. Because that makes more money. So I think there are two sides of it. If you talk about pure business and generating wealth out of business, there are multiple opportunities. And whatever you think will work, you can do that. But today here we're talking about techno entrepreneurship. And in the context of techno entrepreneurship, we are specifically focusing on creating new technologies, new products, and creating markets for that. And therefore, it is not adequate to say what we'll sell in the market or what area or what strategy. But it must be combined with your own acumen of technology, your own acumen of technology product development. These two things should be matched according to. Thank you, sir. You know, this question, a lot of people ask me this question that, you know, what should I do? I am from a chemical background. And should I get into IT? Should I learn Java or something like that? So I just tell them one thing. See, JK Rowling earns more than any IT engineer that you know who has come with very innovative technology. OK? So the thing here is you need to pursue your passion. OK? And over a period of time, you will definitely start finding opportunities. Means if you are very passionate about what you are doing and you are into a field of what you want to be, definitely means money has to follow. I agree with you that a chemical engineer need not necessarily do a chemical startup. But what I would add is whatever startup he decides to do, he must provide all his innovative energies into that. Innovations will come independent of people's background. One small incident of an old innovation, 1830, you might have heard of an engine created by a Liverpool engineering company called Rocket. This was the first multi-tubular boiler which was employed there. Stevenson, father and son built that in that company. Earlier, the boilers used to have a single pipe for flue gas and the water surrounding it in the cylinder. This innovation of introducing hot flue gas through multiple pipes in the cylinder, which is the multi-tubular boiler, came out of that company. It did not come out from the minds of either the father or son who were the chief engineers or any other engineer on the team. It came out from the company secretary who was an accountant. The accountant thought of doing this. He says, you are wasting a lot of heat because it is not reaching the water. So why don't you heat so many places inside? And that is where the multi-tubular idea originated, 1836. He was the person who was not an engineer, although he was working in an engineering company. So I would entirely agree with you that innovation is not for anyone. Anybody in any field doing anything can always innovate. You need that innovative streak. You need to recognize those people and do that. But you must have a match with your area of competence with what you want to. So you need not have that competence to begin with. You can develop it. But you have to decide what you want to develop and concentrate. And you will, of course, need strong technical people in that area, otherwise. We will close this panel.