We have been covering Indian startup ecosystem for quite sometime and we profile all new products that are launched in India. And ever since we enabled “Submit a startup” link, we have been flooded with tons of new products/ startups emails.
Great.
But why aren’t we talking about all of them?
Honestly, except for a few startups, most of them don’t even seem to be a serious effort at all. Infact, it won’t be wrong to say that most of the startups (or lets call then dotcoms) are like “Look momma! Even-I-can-code” sites and lack the basic thought process that should go inside building a great product.
Thanks to ready made CMS tools, many of these startups don’t care to exercise their creativity and have a half-baked offering (which will eventually die out).
Will we ever see a global consumer product from India? Forget about global, lets get local – Will we ever see a successful “local” consumer product from India (or will it be the same old Google/Yahoo?)
Wondering if you too think the same? (or is it me alone?)
Or it’s time to move beyond the Internet/Mobile startups and talk about the “brick ‘n’ mortar” ones?
What do you think?
tags: indian startups
Dude
I completely agree with you (and understand your plight:). I would rather add that the same old startups are doing the rounds (burrp/guruji/onyomo/ziva/routeguru…and a few others). Nothing beyond these startups.. its more of the free cms tool…
What do VCs think?
Yes , but is it not because all these startup guys are too focused on the technical/coding aspects and do not focus on the business part of it?
I think not many of these people invest time in thinking out their business plan.
Hi Ashish,
I know where you are coming from
. I personally think that good technology doesnt necessarily a good product make. I think there are two conundrums that INdian product companies face today
1) I have (been there done that) good funding. Let me find a idea
2) I have an idea (which in most cases is just a feature) and I need funding.
Both the above are cases when people should NOT start companies. Complete product business value is almost never thought through and therefore half – baked ones are the norm in most Indian startups. I also think many indian companies are driven by development who typically get orgasmic with great technology – IMHO technology is always an enabler to a greater business (user) need.
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@SK: “not many of these people invest time in thinking out their business plan” – I wonder how many of these new launches are serious efforts. How many founders think of ditching their full time job and take their prod as something they are serious about?
@Pratyush: Even Google was a tech idea. Rather pure tech idea (with no sense of biz around it!). But what’s lacking in the Indian startup scenario is lack of building something robust. Google guys attempted to solve the search problem in a diff. way and succeeded. How many Indian startups are trying to solve any problem in any diff way?
maybe its true for consumer internet. mobile vas, network infrastructure, retail has some very good one’s.
Let’s face it: entrepreneurship can be contagious. The current lack of interesting internet startups is not an India-only problem. You just have to subscribe to Tech Crunch and see for yourself. We are in a stage where starting up is cool and cheap (read: low barriers to entry) and everyone wants to be the next del.icio.us. And yet we have companies like Burrp & Redbus which have innovative ways of solving a problem and are making a “real” business out of it.
Given the (low) success ratio of enterprise, we should expect to see a lot of not-so-serious players. A VC I met once told me a litmus test for a startup: If you don’t make a dent in 18 months after you start, you aren’t going to make it even in 5 years after that. Now is there anything wrong in profiling them? I don’t think so. They need all the bouquets and brickbats thrown at them at this stage.
Related: For those who haven’t please read Paul Graham’s Web Startups. It is the most thought provoking piece of work I’ve read in recent times.
In India, some additional dynamics come into play.
1. The cloud in India is not big enough yet. Internet usage is pegged at 15-20M, which is 1/10th of the US market. Big successes in the online consumer space is still some time away, imo.
2. I agree with Rajiv: There are other spaces in India where things are happening, especially mobile & retail. I’ve kicked myself many times over that inspite of being such a large user of sms, we didn’t create a Twitter.
@Prathyush- I totally agree with you that Indian entrepreneurs start-up looking only for those two options.
An extra feature need not be a great idea and most of the start-ups on the net are because of the low entry cost, by techies. I do not blame the techies in India for not coming up with some serious start-ups but i associate them with lack of knowledge of the Indian consumer market and mentality. They first start the company and then figure out how the consumers are; and in the process lose critical time, where you have another 10 guys starting the same thing. Eventually for the user it feels like just another site and if the guy who started it first lands on some funding, he is more than happy to call himself a successful entrepreneur
…..
@Ashish – There ends all the talk about web products from India conquering India(lets leave out the world for now).
The point i want to stress on for budding entrepreneurs is that “the Indian market is very diverse and requires lot of market research and then come up with a business plan which addresses the dire need of a particular segment of the market(it is ok if it is not the majority of the market). Once the business plan is ready, see that you concentrate on the product and not the funding…..funding will always come if you have a good business plan but why do you need funding if your business plan is great.”
A great product & business plan will always create enough viral marketing for you once you sow the seeds of marketing even with a very low budget.
I do agree that there will be more “bad” startups and a selected few good ones. Leaving a few startups in Internet/Mobile space, I don’t see any other even attempting to solve the same problem in a diff. way.
What’s missing is the market insights. Forget about market research, startups don’t even bother to bring in insights about the domain they are in. For eg.. look at RouteGuru/mapunity, awesome products! they are good prods because they are attempting to solve the same old problem in diff. ways using their insights in GIS.
What about other startups?
Have a look at Kreeo.com, I hope you find what you are looking for! a startup with a different approach.
- a scratch up created 100% AJAX technology. We created our own framework.
- we believe we are not a me2 but a we2 startup!
Ashish,
My point is that in initial stages of technology, the technology itself maybe gratifying. E.g. the first few versions of Windows, google etc. I do not agree that google became big squarely on the strength of its technology. The business need was contextual ads which they did very well simultaneously satisfying search needs for a user. In today’s time circa 2007 though I feel the internet has evolved to such an extent that pure technoloigy expertise has to be wedded to a good value proposition to make a change.
@Sowmya – thanks for that link. was a good read.
Most of the successful Web2.0 start-ups around the world are built by graduate students and technology enthusiasts to solve real world problems. I think the main problem holding back Indians is the delay in catching up with the new technologies. Students have very less exposure to the latest technologies. AJAX is one of the great examples. Still we do not see real Web 2.0 products coming up from India for the global markets except the exceptional Zoho.
At least for me, lack of awareness about the new technologies is the primary issue for less innovation. Internet penetration around 2000 to 2003 was very less and it was costly to have a dial up connection at home. Remind you most of the innovation in Web2.0 space took around these years(2003 to 2005). Facebook, YouTube, del.icio.us and so on….
But it seems things have changed a lot as Internet is very affordable for anyone and we started to see some true Indian Internet startups coming out and making real buzz like Burrp and few others.
From my personal experience, lack of Books by international publishers in India is also needs to be addressed. When I decided to develop and Interactive Voice Response system(IVR) for BSNL as my B.Tech project( in 2003) there was only one book available on this topic and was not available in India. I had to ask my bro in the US to buy one and send it to me. I am not sure how many of you agree with me on this point but I really feel this is a serious issue. How can you expect students to do innovative projects when they don’t have access to the required books on those technologies? Fortunately most of the books are available in e-book formats in these days.
Quitting a day job or dropping out of college to start a new company is very rare in India and most successful technological companies in the world are run by such people… MS, Apple, Google… between I have quit my day job at an Indian Software giant to do something on my own -:)
I am pretty sure things are going to change in the coming years and we are going to see some real products from Indian companies.
hope I made some sens here with my very long… comment
good to see these kind of posts.
The focus for all the start-ups has to be on the problem and how to solve it better than the existing solution. It is only in the process of solving that the web enables and the technology plays a role.
There are always problems and ways to solve it. The best solutions are normally the most simple ones which everyone by-passes(everyone knows enough case studies to prove the point). It is only after finding a successful solution that most companies think of monetizing.
I agree with mos of the comments above, But there are certain prerequisites and initial consensus for a Startup to be recognized
> How would you rate a startup to be having a Interesting product, Google wasn’t in the Initial stages either, should we conclude to a point saying it only depends if a VC has a broad view and could ahead of time he is the best judge?
> Well If India to have such ground breaking Kick ass products, it got to be a on a revolution mode, tell me I am ready to work on certain Ideas which could change lives for ever but how would I progress.there are many such glitches for things to move.
> No matter there ar emany such startups would could scale it well, I haven’t seen or come across a startup been self funded and has brilliant revenue model to sustain for long in the scenario, henceforth anyone/everyone would look for some external funding,, once u get the funding on a external mode, the scenario changes, anyone who tends to invest with you, isn’t doing a charity cause, he needs money back and hence Idea would be more on money target and revenue based.
> It easy to raise a voice saying yes, we need Google product, show me one VC who could provide you the capability to run u’r own company and built ground breaking realities and be Next Google without disturbing the flow, eventually guys its more or so to conclude we need to come up with varied opinions on how to make such things workable and to have real good products from INDIA.
> Well I do run my own startup with external funding, the plans we had before the funding requirement and if i could go back into my history pages i would say the plan is 80% changed once we got the funding.
>I disagree totally in stating many startups are just rave ideas who could project to scale it up, but yet we need to judge those products and give them proper guidance and work flow in supporting them to be a good product comapny
here’s something new.
http://www.tringme.com
bangalore based company. got covered by TC the day it launched.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/10/02/tringme-phone-free-click-to-call
send me a mail at rajiv_poddar at yahoo if you need an invite.
Thanks Rajiv for sending the invite! TringMe is an interesting concept. I especially liked the widget implementation
And why talk about product startups? WHy not service companies – there are tons of service firms started by smart guys from IITs/others – why the heck are we talking about only product companies?
I partially disagree. To the extent a product company is viewed as a website, its unlikely to be unsuccessful, ever! The website is a marketing channel, an interface to the customer – but what really drives the business is the back-end, the partnerships and the marketing. To that end, it doesn’t matter whether a product using a lame-ass CSS or a crap-shoot copy of another website. In fact, its good the barriers to developing a website are minimal, since it allows entreprenuers to focus on things that really matter.
The problem is there is hardly been a slam-dunk success among internet product companies so far, making hiring good talent immensely hard, infact impossible. And the ones that have been successful tend to be focussed on boring business models such as classifieds and travel. The so called Web 2.0ish US internet product companies all delve in small niche markets and they can afford to do so since the market is large enough. But with an internet market size of 9MM, its hard to build a niche product and still drive profits from it.
Frankly, when we talk about local products, there is no need to out-innovate the world. The local consumer market has to move fast enough to accept innovation, which is just not happening.
Yeah, lets definitely move on to Retail. Thats where the market and the real potential is. Internet will eventually catch on, but it will take time
Honestly speaking this entry reflects the moody behavior of the writer today!
Wondering how can such thoughtful people like you be so generic so suddenly. We need to learn few basics here!
1. Google/Yahoo etc. are research projects in the first place. Are we trying to compare the research at Indian Univ. with that of MIT/Stanford/ Princeton?
2. In the short span of IT industry boom, Indian definitely has kept the pace with Services. Do we need any examples here?
3. Had it been posted like why entrepreneurs lack the planning? It would have been much more intriguing, However, at the end it is just Funds, funds & funds. Best of the ideas are still struggling.
Not trying to boast but RouteGuru, RedBus kind of efforts are innovative solution by any definition in local as well as global space.
Piyush:: This is quite a lame statement to make. eBay wasn’t a research project..so was amazon..same with twitter..ditto with salesforce..or any successful web product.
- India’s service boom was mainly because of price arbitrage. Now you feel the heat with strong rupee.
- entrepreneurs lack the planning? Why should that be the case? If they lack planning..they should go back to where they started.
Best of ideas still struggling? I dont agree. If they are, that might be founder’s problem (of not being able to articulate to VCs/lack of strategy etc)
Vijay
Success is not only product dependent but also consumtion dependent. eBay was just a plain auction site, an extension to the personal site of a programmer, it did start as “Look momma even I can code”. Amazon – After launch in 95 as just an online bookstore, could see first annual profit after 8 years (2003). There was no killer technology behind when they started. However, point is not to be pigheaded about some particular companies but understanding the dynamics.
Several people like me till today do not use Paypal but it is successful web product. We are talking about a consumable product in India. And India is much more than cities like Bangalore, Delhi, Chennai etc. Even families of Software professionals / Founders / Co-founders of Software companies struggle to understand the basic concepts of internet itself, forget about the people otherwise.
About Services – Business is about making the use of opportunity, if price arbitrage was one, then definitely it was beautifully cashed, however, I don’t deny that it was just one phase for the IT industry.
May be the Founder’s problem! Wondering why is it the problem of all the founders as a whole then?
Struggling Ideas – Two bright students at a tier-2/3 college successfully develop a killer app, they do vision the product roadmap, demonstrate & validate its usefulness. Is it the guarantee of them also being the good articulators to VCs? They may not even know who are VCs. They do approach known people within their circle & the best people around them are none but College faculties. They struggle! They do not know that they are the potential CEOs & Founders of a great company. Unlike today, when a person even opens a small shop in house, happens to calls himself the CEO & Founder.
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@Vikas: I see a problem with your web2.0ish attachment – and the fact that you call “oring business models such as classifieds and travel.”.
And I completely disagree with you on your expectation that local market HAS to “move fast enough to accept innovation”
Candidly speaking, you are expecting everything to fall in place for startups – which IMHO will never happen.
ANd I don’t think Indian market is not ready to try out new concepts! It’s just that someone needs to think through!.
And by saying easy availability of CMS tools, all I am trying to say is that most of the sites that use such tools dont go beyond a certain depth/exploring/harnessing the capability of tech.
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@ a good observation and should rightly say what you have mentioned is not wrong. However, I would like to look at other side . That is development of VC’S and Angel Investment.
Even the government is also planning to come with incubation centers and pooling some Crs to boost such concept of VC and Angel investment. Many people are ready to invest in the new innovative ideas but they are able to reach such people and vice versa.. One such venture that has come up on these guidelines is
http://www.pitchindia.com
If by any chance, you come across any more ventures like this
Do write in..
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Indian startup’s get noticed only when they have a god father.
A proper introduction ensures things fall in place rather than your 18months of efforts to make a dent (exceptions are probably less than 10%).
Without a proper introduction – the startup fails to get a review or even a mention on popular “start-up” directories.
We have observed that ex employees of WIPRO get funding without any difficulty because of their connections with TiE. Probe the background of funded startups – you’ll realise most of them have the common factor – worked with WIPRO – evaluated by a Bangalore based “agency”.
Why blame the startup’s – analyse the past trends to understand how these people are getting funded.
IMO, if product is good or path breaking, media is proactive to cover it. Gving relevant example of small companies, TringMe (we) covered my pluggdin, techcrunch and most major Indian and International media. Yulop was yesterday covered by gigaom. Both are example of small companies with no godfather. So as far as media goes, no complaints.
Mahesh,
Mentor partners is one such similar venture. http://www.mentor-partners.com/
KEY TO INDIAN PRODUCT STARTUP = INITIAL CUSTOMERS SHOULD BE GLOBAL
A product company can be started in India. The key is to first find one or two willing customers. Unfortunately, most customers in India are unwilling to buy a product from a new company. My suggestion is to find one or two non-Indian companies to try out your beta product. Companies in the US are usually more willing to take risks.