 Namaskar, I'm Professor Devdipur Kaistha from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. Welcome to my course, Business Fundamental for Entrepreneurs Part 1, Internal Operations. As part of my course, I'm very happy to welcome Mr. Ashok Balasubramanian and Mr. K. Kartikyan from OpenWeaver to share a case study about OpenWeaver. Mr. Ashok is the founder and CEO of OpenWeaver. He has a long industry experience in various companies and before joining OpenWeaver, he worked in a global company called ATOS as a global city of the business and platform solution division. Mr. Kartikyan has an equally illustrious history in corporate and before founding OpenWeaver, he was the director automation at Cintel ATOS. With this, I have the pleasure of handing over to Mr. Ashok and Mr. Kartikyan for their module. Hello, my name is Ashok Balasubramanian. I'm co-founder and CEO at OpenWeaver. I worked 23 years of experience in digital technologies, worked across all areas from mainframes to open systems, cloud, AI automation, so on and so forth, worked across different global corporations and different geographies. Very passionate about how these emerging technologies help our lives and help optimize businesses. I have about three patents in the cloud and AI area. And we're very thankful to Professor Devdeep and NPTEL for giving us this forum to share our experience with you all. Hope you find this learning useful and over to you, Kartik. Hello, all. My name is Kartikyan. I am the CTO at OpenWeaver. I have about 23 plus years of experience in the IT industry. Mainly, most of my experience has been on the technology side in the application development, product design and development, research and development, on different areas across multiple technologies of enterprise, AI, enterprise integration, as well as solution design. I have been mainly working on automation and AI earlier and with OpenWeaver, we started out to build the multiple set of products based on open source platforms. Back to you Ashok. Thanks, Kartik. So, you know, it's a great topic for me to be talking about. So the topic that we'll talk about today is the art and science of new product development. It's something that's very close to us. So if you look at it, we ourselves are a three-year-old startup. We started with a vision to change the way the world builds digital. And in these three years, we created multiple products within our platforms. And today, we support about 4 million users on our platform. And we're very grateful that we won NASCom SME-inspired award for outstanding customer experience. We are also a 2022 economic times best tech brand. And as we scale our operations, we also are a great place to work certified organizations. So it's a great set of learnings that we look forward to sharing in terms of how we started up, how we built our products. But what makes it much more exciting is our core mission of existence is around accelerating digital. And that will bring in a lot more learnings, a lot more accelerators that we would love to share with you all in terms of how could you accelerate your new product development. So through these, the way we share our learnings, we'll be referring to Professor Devdeep's innovation model so that it adds a structure to how we are sharing. And it helps kind of, you know, for you to refer how you kind of went through the course and how these learnings fall into place. So the first amazing learning from my perspective is, you know, you need to be part of the problem. So it might sound counterintuitive because we are always told saying it don't be part of the problem. But for you to kind of successfully start a startup and of course take it all the way, you should have gone through the pain. So you should have gone through the pain. You should have looked for solutions. You should have spoken to people who are trying to solve the same problem. You shouldn't have found a solution and then you created certain ideas that help you do it. So that part is extremely critical because it's a long journey for you to start up and scale. And something like this that you're so passionate to solve the problem only comes from deeply, deeply being part of the problem. So you take it from our case, right? So we worked many, many years in the technology space. We created a lot of amazing solutions. We made a lot of revenues. But those were from a context from our enterprise software perspective. Great, right? So there were a lot of good technical solutions. But over the last few years, what you're saying is, and you all would have seen as well in day-to-day life, right? So digital is disintermediating every business. So the way you buy a grocery, the way you book your cab, the way you buy tickets, the way you bank today are completely disintermediated. So now that's something very similar is happening in the technology space as well. So in the legacy model, you had large corporates that came up with ideas. They said, hey, we want to create a platform. And then we had large service providers who would recruit a lot of people, train them and build these solutions over many, many years. So that is what we have seen as IT or technology for the past many decades. So now what's happening? You have hundreds of thousands of startups, young, young professionals who are creating amazing ideas. And you have billions of users across the globe kind of using these platforms. So this is what I call as the whole digital has disintermediated itself, the way digital is being created. And it is also democratized, which means everyone today is a developer, everyone today is a digital consumer. So the ways of building digital in this new, disintermediated and democratized world needs to change significantly. We cannot say, hey, we will do a contract for eight months, two years. We will get a few hundred people. That model is gone. So we need a new model. And that was the mission for us to found OpenWeaver. And that's the path that we are on today. So extremely important. You need to be part of the problem, feel deeply about changing it. Next part of it, this, you might have had a vague idea on what my solution is, what am I trying to solve. But very important for you to take the next set of steps. So you need to look at it and say, hey, this is my idea. But this idea comprises of maybe 10, 12 blocks. And how do these blocks broadly look like and what exists in the market today, what does not exist, what does the competition look like. And very important as you kind of have a core founding team to see if you can balance it with slightly contrasting team members. So you can bring in different ideas and very important to play the devil's advocate. Let's say, say, why would someone buy this from us or why is my idea really unique or why is this building block really required? And if you can, I think, enlist some amazing mentors who can actually give you that critical feedback as well. In our case, we had that vague idea that says, hey, we need to change the way world builds digital in this democratized manner. But then we said, hey, how is that possible? Because there are so many levers at play today. You had agile, you had cloud, you had AI, you have open source, you have reuse, you have low code, no code, open architectures, blah, blah, blah. You have so many different things in place. So it really became for us to say, hey, we will use block A, block B, block C. Why is this unique? And then make sure that we really understood the enormity, the complexity of how all these things come together. So very important for you to get that clarity on what is that journey that you are potentially going to take. So this is still within yourself. So within your founding team, hopefully with a set of neutral mentors who can help you understand it. Next critical step is for you to understand that with a set of potential pilot customers who can actually look at it and say, hey, is this something that they would use? And very important for you to know saying who your potential set of pilot users would be. Because remember the first step, you were part of a problem. You spoke to a lot of people who had that problem and you all were trying to solve it. You need to go back to that route and say, hey, who are these people who are looking for the same set of solutions? Very important to kind of understand their user journey and look at where does your solution fit in? Which steps of the problem does it solve? Again, is it going to be sticky? Because that's very critical for them saying it needs to be sticky. Otherwise, your product might not have returning users. And the next step saying is someone going to pay for it. If you have a solution that broadly isn't an existing market, you may have a rough competition landscape. So you might be able to say, what are their revenues like? What are their pricing models like? So you'll get an idea. But many, many scenarios, we entrepreneurs build something that does not exist today. So they're going back to this user journey. What steps do we solve? What is the value that is generated? How sticky is it? What is the frequency of use? What is the value that they perceive? It is not the value you perceive. It is the value that the user perceives. And hence, what could they pay for you or for your platform is something that is critical. So we kind of created a rough idea. We detailed the concept. We played devil's advocate. We got some sort of an idea in terms of what a customer might get value from it. So next step of the strategic advantage is very, very critical because as in any startup, I think the most scarce resources are bandwidth, right? So we all go through issues right from HR, insurance, recruitment, what is the PF policy? What is an RBI? What statutory requirements do you need to comply to? So on so forth. So your time is probably the toughest thing that you have on your side. So very important for you to understand what is strategic advantage to you. And there again, I know very critical for you to have it as a web of strategic advantages versus two, three different points of differentiation. So now once you identify your strategic advantage, you need to say if there are 20 blocks, like we said for us, right? So we had no code, no code, AI, algorithms, reusability, open source. Then you really have to pick and choose saying, hey, you are going to deeply specialize in one, two, three. And then maybe the remaining 17 or something that you will reuse from the market. So that will kind of help you understand it deeply, right? So you will say in these three, you will invest deeply. You will build core competencies there. You will take your time to build that deep and differentiated and stick with the user. The remaining are time to market. You know how fast can you reuse it, how fast can you model it towards your customer's journey will make you run at a very fast pace while creating a very uniquely differentiated product. And very important, critical for you to make sure that you protect that core IP. So patenting is very critical. Of course, it's a large topic on its own, but please plan for that. Plan for making sure you have patents in place. You have a pipeline of patents, even for solutions that you will deploy maybe one year, two years down the line because that will kind of help you scale. So our case we have about 18 patents filed and many, many more in the pipeline. So very critical. So till now we were more inward focused and we had a little bit of those pilot users telling what value it adds to them. Then comes this critical part of what is your addressable market. And as we all create SaaS solutions, scale is the game, right? Digital is synonymous with scale. So you really need to understand, because all of us are proud of our baby. So we say our solution is great. You might have talked to some people who said it's great, but can that greatness scale? That's very important. So you really need to spend time to understand what is your total addressable market? Is it hundreds of millions? Is it tens of millions, millions, hundreds of thousands? What is the scale that you're looking at? Because at some point earlier we said, hey, what is a rough price point that you have? So that price point plus, you know, the scale will give you an idea in terms of, you know, how your company will scale in the marketplace. Of course, there's a total addressable market. It always is, is buying the ocean, right? So you have hopefully a very large ocean of a marketplace for you. But ocean is difficult to navigate for a small startup. So that's where the segmentation comes in. So you really need to look at it and say, hey, can I slice it based on many levers? So for example, our scenario, right? So we are a tech platform. So the most simplistic, we could slice it by technology, Java developers, Python developers, no code developers, so on and so forth. So and we said that. So the first one, we said a total addressable market for just the tech developers is about 50 million people globally. And the citizen developer is about 200 million people globally. In that, we could have a slice saying, you know, the tech is Python, Java, JavaScript, blah, blah, blah, you know, maybe 20 large languages that are there. No code could be, you know, maybe a HR function, back office function, maybe some domains like insurance or retail or health care. So you could slice it any different ways. And you could slice it maybe based on geography. You could slice it based on, you know, maybe the way of working of people. Maybe are they independent developer? Are they in a very large controlled enterprise scenario? Yeah, you could do it based on are they juniors or are they mid-level? Are they senior developers? So there are many, many ways that are available for you to segment. Very important for you to understand the personas because you created a product with an idea that, you know, this is the value chain and this value chain, it adds value. So make sure you pick personas related to it. Don't go after a market that does not reflect on the value that you defined earlier in the path. So for us, we did, of course, look at all those part, but we said the most simplistic one. Let's look at, can we start, you know, where is the accessibility for us because, right? So we are a startup. And for a startup, the investments bandwidth on the sales side is limited. So we can't go and spend many months chasing one enterprise customer and then, you know, maybe get few license out of it. So we said, let's use accessibility as a critical criteria. So let's say who are the people who are willing to try a product and may not have that constraint of getting maybe 10 levels of approval before using our new technologies. Then we said, hey, let's go after independent developers. Let's go after, you know, people who are graduating and getting into the development industry. Let's go after freelancers because these are the people who are trying to do new things, who really want to show off new things. And these people are not constrained by, you know, maybe a security officer or someone else who will tell them, hey, don't do something new. So very important for you to get such slices in place and then decide saying, hey, what is more accessible to you, what reflects that persona and so on and so forth. So this is probably the most important intersection I would call it, right? So we looked at it. We said, hey, I have an amazing idea. Someone violated it. Some customers really liked it. Maybe they will pay for it. I have a market size of 100 million users that I can scale to. Phenomenal, right? But how will you go through that journey? There are multiple ways, right? You can build something and then wait for those slices to pick it up. But technology does not wait. And digital, you know, the whole disruption happens every minute as we speak. So very important for you to find out how do you navigate that path. And this slicing has helped us significantly and we hope it will help you as well. So what we found is this intersection. So we talked about the different market segments. Say your 100 million users are in. You could slice them on maybe five different dimensions and have those micro markets. And this side, you had your capabilities. You said there are 20 features. You could group them in many different ways. You're going to deep dive into maybe three, four, five features which are critical to you. So now marry the two. Say here is an amazing market that is accessible to me. I can maybe reach out to a few 100,000 users tomorrow. And they have no constraint in trying my product. And this is a feature that they may like or which may add value to this persona. So start with those intersections of features and customer segments. And then you keep adding them. So the idea is that, you know, you have those multiple combinations and then all of them, you know, not just some of parts, but the whole is larger than the sum. That becomes your roadmap. So very critical for you to kind of make sure that you have those graduated steps and create that roadmap that way. And while you do that, right? So these customers who are there, they're not saying, hey, Ashok, I'm waiting for you to create an idea. So they're not. And everyone is busy with their problems. Everyone is searching for solutions in their own ways. And the last thing that they want is to change the way they do things. So very important that we have seen is meet the customer where they are, which means you have an amazing vision and customers have their problems or the user has their problems. They're not going to come and say, hey, Ashok, we want to listen to your vision and then follow you. Of course, once in a blue moon, you have a Steve Jobs who does it. But for the remaining of us, it doesn't happen that way. So think of it saying, hey, what is the customer doing today? And can you create an incremental change for them given that everyone's bandwidth and time is limited? Can you just give them an incremental change in the way they're doing things? So for example, for us, the first step was, if people are building applications in Python, we just introduced reusability into it and said, hey, add this step to the way you're doing things and you will see a step change in what you're doing. So think of it that way, that made customer where they are and give them incremental value and then take them through change 1, 2, 3, 4. And hopefully with that combination of changes, you will take them to a better place. And why is it also important of this slicing concept? The market is not static. Maybe between us starting the session and ending the session, there probably will be 10 more generative AA models that will come in, Apple launched spatial computing. So new technologies will come. So your features and technologies that you had on this side is changing and your addressable market, maybe customers will say, no, no, I need generative AA. I don't need legacy AI. So all those things will come. So market is going to be very dynamic as you go through as well. So this whole idea of slicing and combining will give you that flexibility that is maybe you had something else in step 2. You could say, hey, now this is generative AI and I take that to customers. So very important. And also very important for you to acknowledge that and some things will fail. It is important that some things fail because that's when you know that you're doing something new. And each of these slices that we talked about, so you're going to do multiple features with each of these micro markets, they themselves will present almost like a product innovation cycle for you. So plan for it. Make sure that you deploy to a micro market that becomes successful, then you add, then it becomes successful. It almost becomes like a beautiful virtual cycle in which each one builds on top of the other, thereby kind of aligning with your product roadmap and also aligning a very strong customer success for you. So very important things that we found very useful. Next two areas, we'll talk about proof of concept and prototyping and minimum viable product. So these are very important and we'll do a deep dive in each of these things. And the way we look at proof of concept essentially is that you have an idea, there are many critical building blocks, many algorithms, securities, so on so forth involved in your digital solution. You need to know if that you're understanding that I'll create a new algorithm which is going to change the world is that even feasible, right? Because you cannot create a two year roadmap and then realize in the second year that base premise that you had that certain algorithm will change the way the business is done does not work that way or cannot work that way. So that would be back to happen. So very important for you think of proof of concepts as technical proof of concepts that you can test out maybe even if they are one year, two years, three years down the line for your product but make sure that you make sure that you know all those components that you thought of your roadmap really work. They don't need to work at your end state but you need to know it is possible. So proof of concept is critical that way and prototyping is more for you to get customer feedback. So maybe the way I personally correlate, right? So I look at proof of concept as digital technologies support your platform or digital technologies support your product, right? Technology supports your product is what I call as proof of concept. The whole concept of prototyping and minimum viable product is for you to see does the market kind of react your product. So you could call it does the market support your product. So prototyping is does the market support your product proof of concept is does the technology support your product. So slightly distinct but very critical to do and this is where we spend a lot of hours, lot of so many manners and so many of our patents in this area. So I'll call upon Karthik to kind of deep dive on what it looks to technically to create a product. What are the stumbling blocks that will come and how can you be very successful both in a POC and a minimum viable product perspective. So over to you Karthik. Thank you Ashok. I wanted to talk more about giving an idea of how to go about building this proof of concept. This proof of concept is very important step in the journey for building any startup which is based on the technical SAS type of products. Proof of concept is somewhat you know to satisfy yourself if the technology exists to build out your ideas to realize your ideas. Hence is an important step for us to do this validation before we embark on any kind of larger development activities. So this proof of concept is based on ensuring that technology is able to deliver what your ideas are hoping to build. At the same time this technologies can span across multiple dimensions of AI, you know, big data, machine learning could be anything of that sort but it is important for us to do a quick validation to satisfy ourselves that there is technology can be used to deliver whatever we are trying to build. On some of these aspects it is you know for us to have quick results we need to go through a cycle of reuse which is the most easiest way for us to ensure that we have a working technology demonstration of our idea and as all you know open source is the largest ecosystem that is available for us to find those reusable. So I will walk you through some of these examples where we can find and how we can actually make use of this reusable components to do a quick POC and be satisfied that I am able to understand this technology I am able to assemble this technology into a working prototype which will actually eventually lead me to building my MVP as well. So when we talk about doing a quick POC as I mentioned earlier this technologies can be as varied from AI could be big data could be IOT could be augmented reality virtual reality to name a few but there are at least 20 such hot technologies that are prevalent at any point in time and for us to do research and development on all these topics is going to take a lot of time hence the best way easiest way is to find reusable in the open source ecosystem which will allow us to fast track our demonstration of this POC and validate our idea. So this open source reusable come in different forms I mean you will have the most basic components as core snippets you will also have libraries you can also have frameworks and also have something like a fully built out solution for you to assemble your working POCs. So we have Candy here which is like a gateway for finding all these reusable components right. So it has a very powerful natural language based search engine which you can use to find this reusable solution that are there and as I said earlier these reusable solutions can be compartmentalized into three different types one core snippets the other are libraries the third thing which encompasses making use of all these libraries and core snippets into a working solutions. So in Candy you can see all three of them which is available so you have access to core snippets which allow you to build your custom functions if you're trying to build something like maybe a password less authentication framework in the area of security you can search for that and you will also have fully developed kits that are available to reuse with one click install which you can use to as a base for building your own solution so something on for example you could have a chatbot you could have a deep learning framework that is used to do an object detection so all of the sort of solutions are available as one click kits which you can use to make your solution as a base for this building your solutions. So I will use some of these examples and then show you how you can be able to find these assets as well. So assume that you wanted to do something in the area of password less authentication frameworks which instead of having someone to remember their passwords you go about removing all those different constraints so you can come here and then search for reusable components which are catering to this particular functionality so as I said earlier you will have code snippets, you will have libraries you will have also fully built out kits right so when it comes to libraries for example something that is there on the React which is React framework which is on the UI so how you can actually implement password less on the React or Next.js framework there are a bunch of libraries that gets displayed here these are all again curated based on different parameters that goes into defining their quality their security their usability and ranked accordingly that way you have the best libraries given to you in your search results which you can use to build out your solution likewise there are fully built kits also for example if you want to do something on let us say some kind of you know new encryption that you want to do so you can search for encryption libraries in JavaScript to do something on the front-end side and if you look at there are a bunch of good popular libraries that are listed which you can use at the same time if you scroll down below you can also look at the different kind of kits that are available with them for different solutions for example if you want to do understand what kind of you know popular libraries are available in the JavaScript language you can use any of this guide list and then understand what are the different libraries that are available for doing or implementing encryptions right so it gives a jumpstart for you to analyze what is the spread of such reusable libraries in the open source world you can choose them based on the different dimensions on popularity, quality as well as you know the different license type as well the permissive ones allow you to reuse them in your commercial applications as well and the last type of solution that you could also search is you know for you to have fully built out kits which comes with a one click installer which you can use as a base to fast track your application development for example if you wanted to do something on a federated risk management based on machine learning you can search for that so this is one such example where one of our startup partners were trying to build out a solution and they had used this particular kit to fast track building out a POC to showcase how a federated machine learning could be utilized in a distributed way to secure access to data which is shared across different you know providers for example in this case let us say you want to build a federated risk predictor using this model where different players such as the banking institutions participate in the overall learning but they do not share the data so they keep the data to themselves that way the security is built so this particular kit has a fully built out kit which you can download and install it will have different libraries which are stitched together to give you the solution so there are a bunch of libraries giving the overall framework from federated learning where there is a concept of client and server model that is working here so to summarize back building out a POC is for us to satisfy that the technology exists to solve the problem and the best way to do is that make use of, make reuse of all these open source components and reuse components you can have access in the form of libraries as well as fully built solution kits which you can download and install one of the other solution that I also wanted to talk about was giving an example of how we can use a generative AI as a solution as well so today it is almost impossible to miss this generative AI, this generative AI is becoming all pervasive and one of the use cases for example is to use this to generate images as well so you can give a brief description of what you want, what you are looking for and the machine will generate images these images could be anything from generating a background for your digital website could be something else that you want to create a persona as well so this is one of the kits that we have created which is using voice to image generator using multiple technologies so one of it is to convert your voice to text and then from that text you also generate image using the generative AI technology this kit is also available as a one click solution for you to install and then check it out so only in this case is that these are kits which are slightly technical in nature for you to actually download, play around and then execute, implement it, run it and then see how it performs and whether your idea is getting implemented or using this particular libraries or this technologies okay but going more than this POC is the next step where we want to do a full-fledged prototype so now we have looked at how to go about building the POC but then moving on to the next step where we want to do a real prototype and prototype is slightly a different game all together, prototype is to ensure that whatever ideas that we have are being able to be successfully communicated to the end user in a minimal viable product view so we want to build out a full view of that product which users can actually touch and feel they understand the idea better and this involves actually going more than whatever we did in the POC so we need lot of other components lot of other layers to build out this prototype so typically in a SAS product you will require a fully-fledged digital website which conveys your idea which actually has the different services to deliver the functionality that you had originally imagined for the end user so there is definitely a landing page which describes what your product is all about you will have a product page which lists the features that are available in your product you will have multiple other such elements which is including your core services you will have other elements like which are typically required in a SAS product for example you will need lot of authentication membership management you will require user management you will require subscription management you will also require payment integration so likewise there are a whole host of components that are required to build out this prototype apart from your core idea core technology idea that you wanted to implement so all of this going together in hand and hand is actually slightly daunting because there are multiple technologies at play here you will have front-end technologies which varies from different JavaScript frameworks which are like React, View anything of that sort in today's world but at the same time you will also have a good complex middleware logic that is also built you will also require lot of back-end services starting right from databases to integrating multiple services could be AI services could be integration services across different third-party services so like this you will require end-to-end a full stack starting from your front-end to your back-end you will also require lot of deployment related strategies that way that you will have your application deployed into an environment which is scalable at the same time very much reliable 24 bar 7 so in the earlier days when we wanted to build out such solution we used to have to do R&D on what kind of solution that we solution architecture that we will have to build and then what is the technical architecture we will have to create we will have to assemble all these products do a quick POC and then really build out this product which could take anywhere between many weeks to you know like a 3-4 month cycle for us to get a minimum viable product but today we have studio which is like a no-code platform which will allow you to quickly create this MVP without having to worry about such complexities about technologies and architecture so I will go on show how we can do this in studio how to quickly create your prototype and then get to a stage where you are able to deploy it for customer who can really experience it and then give you that feedback as well so this is the open viewer studio and I have logged into studio and what you are seeing on the screen is the workspace so workspace is your like personal workspace where you assemble logical units of your applications and is easy for you to manage water applications that you create and when you get to creating application there are two ways to go about it so one you might already have already built out template for you to use when you create your applications for example you might already have application template which is built for creating application based on conversational services there could be another which is based for creating a application which is using generative video and images so likewise there are bunch of other templates which are spread across multiple technologies as well as multiple domains as well so you might have a e-commerce template you might have a healthcare application you might have a doctor appointment you might have a general appointment management so like that across different domains as well as technology aspects you will have multiple such templates for you to use that way you will get a head start on actually creating your applications screens as well as the different other components that we spoke earlier about which we can reuse and fast track application development on the studio itself right so in the studio you can create from a template or you can go about creating a fresh application as well which is like a blank application so I will show you different other aspects within the studio which will tell you how you can actually assemble the other layers of the applications for you to ensure that your functionality is getting implemented so earlier I explained to you how an application has different stacks so it has a front end stack it has a middleware where you have most of your business logic and integrations at the same time you have something called as a back end where you will have the database configured you will have different other resources for your applications to consume and this resources could be third party web services could be many apps that you have actually incorporated in the form of either some machine learning models or some other services which are core to your applications so what we see here in the studio as three different designers as the design designer the page designer is the component which allows you to design your front end screens and then the flow part is where you actually configure all of your different business logics connecting your UI with the back end part so you can have multiple flows depicting what kind of business logic what kind of integration that you want to do when any action happens on your UI front end the resources part is the third designer where you configure what kind of resources your applications are requiring access to for example on the resources part some of these examples are like as I talked about earlier the data sources could be different so you could have your data in a simple CSV you could have it in cloud database you could have it in your own you know databases as well so this resources will allow you to integrate with those type of different data sources other than databases or data sources you will also have access to this many apps which are fully built out solutions like the kits that we saw earlier in the candy so these are fully built out solutions that you can integrate if it is an AI solution you can set up your AI related machine learning related parameters you can configure train them with your own data set that way you have the back end service configured as a resource here for you to consume for the front end to consume through the studio you will have access to multiple functions services functions could be AI based non AI based could be third party so all these resources typically help you to finally integrate to multiple functionalities within your applications right on the flow editor part you have access to lot of widgets to configure your action flows and this flows you will have you know like a flow chart you can define what happens one after the other you will have options to configure different type of business conditions business rules integrate different services transform data that way any action that one that has to happen on any interaction from the user will land here and then it can be executed in a way that your business demands with options for you to customize all this logic so you have options to add custom code components you can also integrate services so very highly customizable highly scalable that way it is not that you are limited by all this blocks that you see here there are options where you will be able to integrate the resources your custom code your custom functions anything can be integrated that way it is highly scalable for you to decide what kind of business logic that you want to implement in your application the third designer is a page designer where you have access to whole set of UI widgets right so for me to build a stunning UI you will have access to a lot of this UI widgets which range from display widgets for you to display images information any kind of text logos all of this different visual elements for you to display information you will have access to a lot of form elements to capture information from the user you will have a pre build sections also for you to you know quickly assemble your website pages without you having to actually code so for example this image gallery component you can quickly drag and drop it in here which will allow you to configure it with a set of image resources for you to display in a very gallery format for example you could have carousels so like that there are multiple other sections there could be headers footer there are different sections for testimonials contactors chatbot so a typical SAS product digital product whatever it needs all of this blocks are available for us to drag and drop quickly assemble configure and use and connect it back to the flows and services without having to code if you have to code there is option for that also that way any kind of customization you will have access to so apart from this obviously the solution that we create also has to be delivered in multiple channels it could be on your desktop computer on your laptop on your tablet on your mobile so there is facility built in for you to actually have a responsive website to build and these websites are also like you know a progressive web app which can be installed as a app on your smart phones also right so you have a whole host of responsiveness built into this design designing your frontend now we have let us say you know design your entire application with the UI with the action flows and resources you also have options to deploy it with one click ok so that way you do not have to worry about trying to set up an environment in the cloud with your subscription and then trying to you know deploy this application there but just with one click all of this entire application conference that we actually configured here are package and then deployed into the cloud environment in one click you will be able to immediately access your application will be able to immediately give it out for getting feedback on your idea as well so we saw all the different components that the studio provides in the form of pay designer flow designer as well as resource designer and hopefully it helped you understand how to assemble the different layers of the applications together in a no code manner for you to quickly build out application so a quick example of how one of our other startup group created one application using the studio platform a brief intro about this idea I wanted to tell you is that you know typically you have this e-commerce platforms where you can sell your products for example a fashion designer can you make use of a e-commerce platform to sell his products but actually it does not give a real experience of a boutique fashion designer so if you have let us say some idea as a user that you wanted your fashion dress to address it is not easy for that to happen in a traditional e-commerce platform so let us see how this startup created this red carpet platform using studio with generative technologies to give a very unique boutique experience for the fashion designer based e-commerce platform so what we see here is the workspace on the studio platform this red carpet is the application which was designed by them so what we see here is the UI framework so now let us see how the red carpet was built with studio so the red carpet platform this is how it looks like in the studio platform where it was designed so right now we are in the designer part we are in the page designer part as you can see the entire landing page of this website is getting configured here so there are multiple widgets as we saw earlier which is used to create this landing page so there is a background image all together with a search widget that is integrated here you have different themes also that you can apply we made use of this image gallery as one of the widgets along with the card layout that way whatever they wanted to show as suggestions, recommendations for anyone trying to search for a particular fashion design can get populated over here and this images are actually getting sourced by a flow which is configured over here on the right side if you see trending collection flow so whenever this page loads this particular flow gets executed which is configured in the flow designer and that will actually pull in the most trending designs of this season and then show it as a on the home page so this is a page where you know after searching for a particular design how it is going to actually fill in with the search results or not search results in this case sorry it is fully generated results as I said earlier this is a unique idea which is built out using generative AI technologies so whatever we see we are going to see as results from the description of your fashion desire is actually fully generated at real time and is not actually getting searched or retrieved from our database right so this is a generate screen so assume that the user has typed something here and click search right at the bottom is what we see the entire generated results and for this we also have integrated a flow which is called as the apparel generative flow which is again designed in your flow designer the flow designer we have integrated the resource appropriate for this generative AI technology which actually takes the text input from the user and generates all this images and this images are linked back to this generative image gallery over here again one example of those different resources so in this case this text image is one of the resources that was configured for generating the styles so after you know choosing a particular generative design the next step would be obviously for the user to actually order from his or her cart right so this micro set is nothing equivalent to a e-commerce cart that you see so after having adding your desired fashion you know choices to the cart this is a page which can be used to check out right so you create a option for the user to you know pick the designer who will actually deliver this particular order and also allow them to complete that payment and then book the order and at the time when you actually implement or when you actually you know click on this booking the order this particular flow the micro set flow will get triggered so an example of you know how the flow was designed for this order design flow okay so like that when an order gets received we need to check whether the order is in the database and apart from that there are a bunch of notifications that also happens it also sends the details of the order to the actual you know designer as well as the user and then once everything is successfully logged in the system it will complete the flow it will also send the notification email to the designer for them to have an alert as to such an order has been received so that they can act so once that entire application was designed this is how the actual deployed applications looks like right so what are we designed earlier on the studio page designer the landing page is how this looks like these are the trending collections that was actually retrieved by that execution of that flow and is getting populated the bottom half of this landing page for the user to have an idea of you know what are the trending designs and then he or she can actually use this as an example can show more interest on any of this ideas and then you know generate from this particular variant as well so let us say you know you start with a clean slate and the user is trying to you know understand what kind of fashion options are available and she types in like design me a red dress like Priyanka Chopra from Citadel right so once the user has typed such a descriptive text about her fashion requirement and then clicked on generate the system generates this set of different variations using the generative AI that we had integrated earlier in the studio platform and it creates different images to showcase all this different variations of design options right so now the user can you know choose a particular version and then say maybe I am interested in this type of design and then let me see some more variations from here so using that it actually generates a second set of variations so again multiple options are available you can continue to experiment and then see which interests you and then you can choose the particular dress here so suppose I add one to the cart right this one is what I like and then I added this to the cart and now I can go and then proceed to checking it out so this is how the checkout screen looks like so this is what I added in the cart I have options to set my overall budget which I am looking for to choose my designer and what kind of delivery dates that I am looking at and the system uses this different perspectives on budget expected date location and understands who are the designers who are available to deliver this as per their expected timelines within their budget so I can choose a designer and choose my payment method and then I can complete the order book yeah so this is a quick example of how startup used studio platform and then went about creating this unique boutique experience in a fashion designer in a e-commerce model but it gives them a very unique experience of being able for her to describe what kind of fashion requires and then we have a unique solution which actually generates all these different styles based on generative technologies and not using a typical you know stored catalog of products everything is a unique design the designer will be able to create such a design which obviously gives a very unique advantage to this startup yeah so overall we saw how you know candy helped us in building a technical POC at the same time moving on from a technical POC to a full pledged prototype where we want to do a minimal viable product showcase it to a user minimum available product which has unique features that a user would desire to experience in your startup idea you will be able to quickly build that assemble this different conference in the studio in a no code manner and at the same time this is highly scalable at the same time right so you can actually add your own custom functions you can add your own custom integrations deploy it into a highly scalable environment so you see a quick way to validate your idea with the actual market that way you will have a very early feedback on how your idea is actually playing out with the real users in the market yeah back to you Ashok thank you so much Karthik that was very insightful and you know I'm pretty sure everyone kind of got a good deep perspective on how to actually build you know their technical proof of concepts as well as you know how do they take their minimum viable product or what you'll rightly called as a minimum loud product to their marketplace so thanks so much for that so now kind of you know you said you had an idea you tested with the marketplace you kind of have created these prototypes of course it cannot be in the last moment that you do customer testing right with all digital and with all products very important for you to do customer feedback throughout the journey right so what we essentially call and what we actually felt is the design for customer success so you really need to think through in terms of the customer and say what do they want and what do they want needs to reflect on the journey and what is a typical SAS journey typical SAS journey from a customer adoption perspective is they see this message somewhere so you're marketing somewhere maybe there's a social post there's an ad that says you know X provides Y value for a Z type of customer so they see that they should resonate saying hey this makes sense you know this is my persona and this message okay I have that problem so they recognize that then what happens you ask them to click somewhere they come to a landing page that landing page should again be customized for them I can't say hey customer X solve problem Y here and then as soon as they land I talk about something else cannot happen it has to be superbly personalized for that customer persona so they land in and they see okay you know this is what I thought I was going to get to and yes I came here and I'm seeing what I heard and yes I want to try this so there have some very nice videos that kind of show people say you know and extremely important that's a personal experience for us don't try to make them hyper successful across all their problems make them super successful in the first step so in that landing page show them how to get a great first step done and then nudge them towards you know a trial you know trial is almost omnipresent today in in SAS so give them a trial within the platform again is very critical for customer success make sure they go to the first screen second screen third screen blah blah blah whatever is required for the first set of customer success needs to happen so seamlessly with zero friction so very important and something like crowd testing like I said what did we say we said democratized and disintermediated so you can actually get a few thousand testers on crowd testing platforms you can actually and I can pick them based on those personas and they'll be able to test your software test you know your value proportion and give you feedback so please use crowd testing and very important right so we scale to millions on a digital platform but please scale to thousands of thousands in an analog platform meet customers see them in action get their feedback invest in alpha case studies and invest in alpha for each persona if you have 20 different personas who use a product make sure you have 20 different deep case studies which can again be advocated to those different user groups that you're targeting so that they see ok someone did this somewhere wow I have the same problem why don't I try that as well so it brings a very human element to what someone would try so that's again once a point in time right so you will maybe have n number of releases maybe you'll do a n number of point in time testing but this beautiful digital platform also gives us a dynamic customer feedback you can kind of keep watching what people do on a platform so analytics extremely important you have multiple tools to kind of put on top of your platform to kind of see you know how customers are using it of course you know comply with GDPR comply with consent policies on how you treat your data beyond that you can actually create a structure both using surface level platforms as well as within your platform to kind of look at you know from where are people coming are these people coming by referral are they coming from a social channel are they searching for a problem and finding you how long do they spend you know when do they sign up when do they do a trial what did they do and then they came back like what defines a successful repeat usage same way map the entire customer journey and find out you know what happens in each step what works what does not work and how you can take it forward and sticking to the human element invest in a community you know have a set of you know let's say you have millions of users on your digital platform invest in maybe tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people who will kind of collaborate with you who will have a two-way relationship with you who will kind of you know maybe open a feature roadmap submit issues give you feedback maybe attend some of your training boot camps and so on so they will give you product feedback and as they solve problems give them avenues to be your product champions because users want to hear from users users would love to hear from users then trying to hear from a company is how great their product is so kind of use these levers wisely again given these are digital products these are fairly accessible to all of us and last but not the least I think to scale significantly you need digital marketing this itself is a is a large topic on its own so you know we wouldn't deep dive into all of these things but these are some things that we found useful and you should kind of you know make sure you understand and based on different phases of your product maturity market maturity you could use all of these are some of these so for example search is all the search engines you can advertise if customer is an intent that says I am looking for a solution to a problem then your platform pops up and then you know you can have people with a message who could come to your platform try it social like we talked about very important you could use a lot of creative ways as well you could show some memes you know a softer aspects of a solution you could maybe target very specific groups interest groups that may be there in these platforms look at the physical community this is something that we found very useful because people don't want to buy a product right people are not seeking to buy a product people are seeking to solve their problems right so instead of trying to sell a product create a community and the community is focusing on jointly solving the problem so spend time show your users the best way to solve that problem and of course you are going to solve that problem using your product so it almost is advertising but the message is very different it is saying hey come let's work together to solve the problem rather than saying hey try my product there is a 30 day trial so having a good community framework will take you to a absolutely different level of you know building a market presence video marketing again very critical these days because videos are very strong emerging mechanism today search engine optimization as you scale you know as your business builds you will have a lot of content you will have a lot of solutions so create content around it so that when people are searching for it you don't need to kind of depend on search advertising but naturally organically you will be recommended by some of these chat bots and search engines as well so that's a great summary from a digital marketing perspective and kind of you know take a look back and you know we had an idea we elaborated that idea we kind of got feedback from a small set of customers we looked at an addressable market we looked at how do we scale by you know slotting those slices together we created those POCs we created prototypes using some of the amazing technologies that Karthik showed us and of course you're going to scale significantly through a constant customer feedback and digital marketing so I hope you really found this useful and you know it's been an honor for me to share our learnings with all of you thank you so much and have a wonderful rest of the course and wishing you all the best with your startup journey thank you