Freshworks' Journey to India’s First SaaS IPO
Unicorn is a term in the business world used to indicate a private startup company that valued over USD 1 billion.
Web 3.0 is gaining traction. Here's how decentralized technology will fundamentally alter the music industry's landscape in the near future.
When most people hear the word “chip” in the context of a smart home, they immediately imagine the microchips at the heart of their smart devices. But whereas chips power the brains of an individual smart device, CHIP will power the brains of an entire smart home. CHIP will offer huge conveniences to consumers, but its openness may make it harder for hardware startups to build ecosystems and defend against inexpensive knock-offs.
Startups face many challenges in building up a reputation for themselves in the market. They have to compete with already established businesses, which are not an easy task at all. The marketing strategies play a vital role in their success. Digital marketing will be an essential tool for Startups' success.
In January 2020, we met with about 45 companies. This enabled us to refine our vision (3 pivots in that month), understand our go-to-market, and start to build a list of potential clients. Once we felt confident about the product, we entered into full implementation mode.
Why a PM should care about the particularities of the users? Well, that is the irrelevant part of a product development, as you should know what the users demand.
Public web data unlocks many opportunities for businesses that can harness it. Here’s how to prepare for working with this type of data.
Most of those who succeed in the startup world often talk about the fact that it takes an average of ten failures to find the right idea.
This inspiring video covers Scott’s background story, why he decided to “quit being the worst guy he knew” and start working to serve others through his work at Charity Water.
Newbie startups fly HIGH and then fall hard! Here’s why.
What are common startup design mistakes and how to avoid them to achieve the best performance? Sergey Krasotin, an experienced entrepreneur, outlines some.
Most of you would agree that building a successful business is contingent on hiring the right people. Product, price, and market matter, but without the right team in place, even companies with incredible potential can stall out. However, most startup founders focus heavily on “what” they’re building, without a similar amount of attention being paid to “who” they plan to build it with.
We got accepted into YC on the 9th of December 2019. Originally, we wanted to raise a pre-seed round before starting YC on the 6th of January. But at the same time, we didn’t want to incorporate the company in 2019 so we wouldn’t have to deal with the taxes for 2019. Call us lazy! One would say lazy is not bad, as long as it’s smart lazy!
Today what I want to talk to you about is who should influence your marketing decisions.
Google, now Alphabet, surfed the incredible growth of the web, extremely well, and it then became itself one of the key nodes of the web we know today.
Joseph Woodbury of Neighbor.com shares three pieces of advice on how to raise capital — from integrating yourself into the local ecosystem to being able to change your plans on a moment’s notice.
I don’t know about you but in my view, work culture seems to have taken a 360- degree turn since the time I got into the workforce in 2012. For years before that, I saw people stay in the same job for years.
Virtual reality opens many new opportunities for businesses, but many companies are missing out because they don’t understand VR’s true potential. While some companies are pushing the envelope with VR implementation in their daily processes and gaining a competitive advantage, others are not even aware of what VR can do. This article will highlight five ways that VR projects can help your business.
There is a lot of talk about the Minimum Viable Product — a prototype with just enough features to satisfy early customers, and provide feedback for future development. But feature creep often starts much earlier, in the design & development, if not the ideation stage of a project.
To help soothe the shock of returning to work after the holidays, we've started a new tradition over at Waydev and kick off the year with a good movie or two. Since it had to be something both entertaining and inspiring, we chose to go with a classic: Moneyball, the 2011 film starring Brad Pitt.
In 2015, we started Memoratic, an educational platform that aimed to solve a few of the complex problems of our educational system. By streamlining communication between educational institutions, teachers, parents, and students the platform tried to provide incentives to improve performance at the individual and organizational levels.
Retail as an industry is one that is so core to how we live our lives, but is often ignored when thinking about innovation and disruption. When I set out to start this series on D2C brands, I wanted to figure out why we should care about the evolution of retail, and what the new face of this industry looks like. In part 1, I set out to answer the first part of this fundamental question.
Positioning is one of the most important steps after entrepreneurs finish their market, customer and competitive analysis. Knowing competitors plus their positioning, the target audience, the market trends along with the problems and challenges of the customers it becomes easier to position the product competitively in terms of value, audience and price.
Lean methodology is simple: identify value, and deliver it with as few steps as possible.
Advancements in technology have made it possible for businesses to operate as normal with significantly fewer in-house staff.
I sent the following note to the Sift team today. I’m also sharing it here in case it’s useful to others.
A very concise article with 5 tips for storytelling when fundraising for a startup or pitching at a competition.
DataxPie was nominated as one of the best startups in Sylhet in Startups of the Year hosted by HackerNoon.
This story is a look into the transformation of a promising entrepreneur as well as the technological and social changes she is trying to make.
Start voting for the best startups today! We want to recognize the startups that are changing technology and the world as we know it for the better!
I'm not going to discuss India's most well-known startups. But the ones, driven by women that managed to innovate & upscale excellent B2C products amidst covid
You won't believe how many jerks a person could meet in one day that just being nice is already a marketing advantage for yourself and your product.
This is the story about how an abstract game theory model lead to a revolution in transplantology and thousands of lives saved.
Spreadsheets are the versatile go-to for a wide array of business practices. Companies use them for everything from finance to marketing analytics. "Just use Excel" has even been the go-to battle cry of data scientists who are frustrated by watching companies waste billions of dollars trying to ramp up analytics programs that they're not ready for.
Starting a business is one of the hardest and perhaps meaningful things you can do in life, but not everyone is successful at it.
Here are a couple of useful tips you can find to be helpful for your future startup business partnership.
Josh Ephraim is startup attorney and associate at Gunderson Dettmer, where he specializes in the representation of emerging growth companies throughout the corporate lifecycle.
Ask Josh anything now on Twitter and tune in for LIVE discussion on September 3rd, 9 am PST.
The title itself will invite many feedback and opinion. Nevertheless, I am just sharing my thoughts here.
So you’ve developed your dream application and have been maintaining it for the past couple of months. It’s a good application and you don’t spend too much time on it. Plus, it’s bringing in a hefty income for you so it makes it even harder to let it go. What do you do in this case? Do you just abandon it and start working on a new project, or do you divide your time between making a new app and maintaining the old one?
Starting a tech business in the U.S. can be a challenge and a privilege. While the market is large, the competition is intense and consumer standards are high.
A little more than a month ago, the world officially saw a new entrant to the streaming war. After raising ~$2 billion from the likes of The Walt Disney Company, Alibaba Group, & Greenspring Associates, Quibi, a short-form video streaming platform founded by Silicon Valley veterans Jeffrey Katzenberg, Ken Howery & Meg Whitman officially launched on April 6th, 2020. Quibi has been the subject of a lot of speculation in the tech and VC world and much of VC and tech Twitter has been waiting with bated breath on how it will be received at launch.
Image by Jorge Guillen from Pixabay
An increasing number of indie makers decide to build in public. Some do it via their blog, on Twitter, on an open page or via communities. But it can be incredibly daunting to makers who are used to build their products in a more private fashion.
By researching an analysis on why I got a lot of orders, I figured out an issue with the music industry. It’s called “Copyright”.
You know the feeling, don’t you? You dearly wish to reach some business goal, complete an important project, learn a wanted skill. Finally, perhaps after reading some inspirational articles here on Medium, you decide to get up and go. You’re full of enthusiasm, determined to finally JUST DO IT, and all that stuff.
Nothing has been normal in the year since the world shutdown - but that hasn’t stopped the fintech engine of Singapore from continuing to accelerate.
Eight key takeaways from raising Omnisearch's pre-seed round.
When you hear the phrase “Best Place to Work,” what companies come to mind? Does your company make that list? If not, you may want to reconsider your company culture to attract top talent who are looking to work at Best Place to Work companies.
If you’re the owner of a tech start-up, you’ll know it can be challenging to manage your company. In the initial days, you’ll probably be very conscious about costs and not want to spend your money needlessly.
This is a “how I use Syften to grow Syften” story.
Hi! My name is Oleg Sklyarov, I work as a team leader of kids mobile development at Skyeng. In my free time, I mentor IT students. It’s been a great experience for me, so I want to share my story and insights I got from it.
A crucial success factor for Startups is the skill to manage finances. Almost 80% of startup founders bootstrap their way in. They operate with limited resources, ensuring optimization at every step.
Hundreds of startup founders around the globe choose to incorporate their companies in the US to get access to the flourishing startup ecosystem.
Zuckerberg is in the news lately for his announcement about his plans to take his workforce remote.
What's the catch with all these shiny objects, and why they're proven to be dangerous for startups? Well, when something is shining all day long, you simply can't avoid it and take your eyes off it. That's a completely normal and understandable reaction. So, don't worry, there's nothing wrong with you.
However educated you may think you are, you aren’t doing it enough.
Research and development is something that almost every company, especially in the IT industry, needs these days in order to stay competitive on the market and keep a high customer retention rate. It is a powerful tool that is absolutely necessary for any company regardless of its size - be it a startup or a global enterprise. What makes it so in demand? Basically, research and development is a strategy of doing thorough research on the market, learning about your target audience their needs and preferences and then adjusting your already existing product to those needs or creating a totally new one according to them. R&D management is a sure way to easily improve your business strategy and eventually gain more profits. It is an especially relevant tool to those companies or even startups that are only starting out on the market and need a boost.
Reasons That Will Prompt You To Start Your Startup No. Working in an office as a team member and being the leader of the team are like two sides of the coin.
Growth and learning is the #1 reason to take a job in a startup. The economy of longer life leads to frequent job changes and the unprecedented rate of skills obsolescence, which require new approaches to creating learning experiences.
In this post, I would share about my experience with and without A/B testing on Howuku landing page and how adopting A/B testing has improved my landing page conversion rates by 60%.
Think of a startup as a plane that is flying from New York to Los Angeles. After 6.5 long hours of flying across the states, this plane will have to land. At this point, there are two outcomes:
By now, there's little mystery left in the world of digital website marketing. Long gone are the days when it was still possible to find loopholes in Google's search algorithm to exploit or to rely solely on black-hat SEO techniques to drive traffic. Instead, the field of SEO has settled into a fairly predictable and stable rhythm where content creation, keyword targeting, and old-fashioned hard work now rule.
If you've found yourself binging an embarrassing amount of shows and movies on Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime in the past few weeks, you may want to consider dedicating some time to stream learning. Streaming learning programs, classes and webinars can give you some "brain exercise" during a time when we must social distance and inherently increase screen time.
Have you switched to remote work in the past couple of weeks/days? Well, chances are high you have, or you will. I want to share my words of caution and tips to make pandemic remote work better.
People have the tendency to be lax when it comes to protecting their intellectual property. When you’re in the process of developing and brainstorming for different business ideas, it may be hard to see the value of what you’re making if it isn’t tangible yet.
Now that summer is officially coming to an end, thought it was worth doing a post-mortem on the barrage of S1s that happened over the past month. Looks like the entire analyst community came out swinging this month, and I don't think I have ever read this many founder/ company/ strategy/ technology histories and deep dives. A few takeaways, just reflecting on the froth!
Last month I saw the funniest headline I can recall outside of The Onion. As USA Today put it:
This short briefing note is prepared for founders who are considering, or are in the process of raising seed capital. The last few weeks have seen a significant shift in terms of the fundraising atmosphere, and investors’ appetite for risk.
Key biases, heuristics and cognitive effects that can be used for designing products.
Big money, get paid. Tom Sosnoff, Co-CEO of tastytrade, and Sean Salas, CEO of Camino Financial, join Amy Tom this week to discuss FinTech startups. What is Wal
There are a number of prominent startup examples that have been very successful in the past few decades like Facebook, Instagram, and Airbnb among others. But from these stories of success, quite a number of failure stories are left untouched. According to an estimate 9 out of 10 startups end up failing. Entrepreneurs publish post mortem online and they are quite haunting. The reasons for failure may depend upon various factors like insufficient funding, incompetent team, and lack of motivation. I have compiled a list of 10 reasons which have been the cause of startup failures.
Introduction
According to CIO study, 50% of software projects fail. The Global Project Management Survey conducted by PMI reports that 27% of them run over-budget. Annually, these statistics change but the overall negative trend remains the same, which makes the problem of bringing potential threats to light especially important.
Like most absolute statements, this one simply isn't true:
Whether you’re serving your colleagues with an internal company app or you’re dreaming of topping the charts, some would say the hard work is only just about to start. No matter how much testing and research you’ve done, nothing compares to real world usage.
When it comes to successful new product development, productivity is key. Entrepreneurs seeking to remain relevant, efficacious and profitable must continuously conceive and develop new products that not only make it to the market, but also deliver great value to target audience members.
Hey Hackers,
Everything is easily accessible when your home is in a city.
I’ve been asked many times what is product management in a tech startup and how the job differs from product management at a larger company with a more mature product.
If you can’t answer it, don’t worry, you’re not alone. Many engineering leaders couldn’t tell you without some significant number-crunching. Gaining visibility into performance is only half the battle though. Knowing how to interpret metrics and how to apply them to improving performance is where the magic happens. Many CEOs do not know how to align engineering metrics to business KPIs (revenue, customer retention, etc.). Bringing metrics to your board or non-technical CEO for the first time may be challenging if you are unable to help them bridge the gap.
The earliest phases of a startup’s journey are treacherous. Product market fit is elusive. Opportunities, when they appear, can come from too many directions. Your financial runway grows shorter by the day. Usually in these times, you rightly seek outside advice to ensure you’re moving in the right direction.
2019 was a rough year for the co-working space company WeWork. At the beginning of the year it was valued at a whopping 47 billion dollars, making it the fourth highest valued startup in the world and at the end it was valued at less than 8 billion dollars by its biggest investor.
Perhaps one of the most memorable milestones in the scientific community this year was the release of the first image of a black hole. Like most technological advancements these days, this was made possible in no small part by open source software.
I have around a decade of experience in content and marketing. My first job was in the editorial department of a print publication around ten years ago in Bucharest, Romania, when the digital landscape the way we know it today was almost non-existing. Today, I work as a content marketer for a tech start-up in Singapore, which is often referred to as the Silicon Valley hub of APAC.
When was the last time you saw or heard the adjective innovative? Was it some innovative idea in your work? Innovative product advertised on TV or radio on your way to work? In the news?
Voted by the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) as the Marketing Word of the Year, 2019 personalisation is more than just a passing fad that has captured the imagination (and marketing budgets!) of digital brands across the globe.
Devs have been championing the benefits of the SaaS (software as a service) model of application delivery for years now.
Virtual reality is no longer just about video games: it can offer various solutions to a business from effective employee training to product development. While many mistakenly believe that VR will be effective only for innovative businesses, these technologies also help optimize business processes for companies in more traditional industries. The scope of the company implementing VR can be anything: from medicine to construction and logistics.
After a discussion (that lasted 30 seconds, as it was an obvious decision for us), we decided to share our complete journey with our new startup, Dataline, with as much transparency as possible. Learnings should be shared! Anybody can leverage our journey, and it’s also a good way for us to take a step back and understand what we did right and what we could improve upon. So here is our first story: how we iterated and sorted through 10 ideas in our first month of working on a new startup.
By some estimates, investing in the IPOs of the 75 or so SaaS companies would have netted you 5x in less than 5 years. That’s the kind of math that makes even the world’s best investors drool, and considering the target for most private market investors is 3x, and that do in any liquid security, it makes this all the more interesting.
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”- Margaret Mead
This article is Part 1 of the ongoing series From Zero to Product Manager. A set of articles that help you transition to a Product Management role. In this post I explain what a Product Manager (PM) is and how the role can differ across companies, I describe the best qualities of an excellent PM.
First, we need to talk about user research conducted with interviews.
You’re going to spend more time with your co-founder than with your spouse. This is why finding the right one is the one activity you CANNOT afford to rush. If you’re truly passionate about founding a company, you have only two options: compromise or keep on looking.
TL;DR: All Hacker Noon full time employees and long-term part-time contractors are now eligible to enter our fully-funded Mental Health initiative. Plus a few tips on how to make Remote Work work.
You’re qualified, keen, personable, and have no hygiene issues (that you’re aware of). Your C.V. is a gleaming gem that would almost certainly grab the attention of Elon Musk (if only he’d see it), and to top it off, your mum assures you that not only are you going to land a huge role, but also any company would be lucky to have you.
Another Softbank Portfolio Company That Has Toxic Culture and No Clear Path to Profitability
by Harry Friedberg, partner, BX3 Capital
Before Loki.ai became a financially sustainable venture, I failed with 5 other startups over 5 years. Here is what I learnt.
The marketing automation market is predicted to reach $32.6 Billion by 2024, with a compound annual growth rate of 13.6%.
Common mistakes when starting an affiliate marketing, top trends to account for, and forecast for the future development of this marketing channel.
Modern startup advice is to launch and grow revenue as quickly as possible, as aggressively as possible.
The Art of Teaching Associative Thinking to Machines](https://hackernoon.com/where-can-dreams-take-you-the-art-of-teaching-associative-thinking-to-machines-by6r3yme) The idea of LensAI was born last year sometime in May. If you've missed Part I of my story, you can read it here -> How We Taught Artificial Intelligence to Sell.
It is hard to imagine that one small company can completely transform the way we shop. But that is exactly what Flipkart has done. In 2007, e-commerce was still considered a niche business and most Indians did their shopping offline. Internet was taking over the world and Steve Jobs had just launched the world’s first iPhone in 2007 which was about to disrupt the entire smartphone industry in the years to come.
In a startup ambitions are as big as the risks. The teams of such projects are looking for a business model that will quickly conquer international markets. Actually, the term is defined by Steve Blank, “Silicon Valley godfather”: “A startup is a temporary organization created to find a repeatable and scalable business model.”
When you think about startups, you immediately picture a really smart group of young professionals biting away on their computers with the sole aim of solving complex everyday problems. But when you hear the names of some of these startups, you can literally hear yourself go ‘What the hell?!’
Beware, not all traffic is created equally. If you’re a website owner running advertising and SEO campaigns, the chances are that traffic is important to you. An effective campaign can lead to a healthy increase in visitors, but watch out - statistically speaking, the majority of browsers that navigate onto your pages will not only be uninterested in your product but won’t actually be human at all.
So you’ve decided that a limited liability company (LLC) is the best structure for your new venture. The next biggest challenge is choosing the best state to form your LLC.
COVID-19 has turned the whole world upside down. It’s changed our personal lives, our businesses and the way we spend our days. No matter where we live, what we do, our race, nationality or status, everyone has been impacted in some way. The uncertainty created by this rapidly deepening global crisis has left all of us vulnerable to anxiety, stress and worrying about the future. It’s no wonder that everyone — including technology and blockchain companies — are re-evaluating the way they do business, revisiting their budget and expenses and modifying their operations.
The phone balanced high-end quality with a mid-range price tag, offering a top of the range smartphone on the level of a flagship Samsung Galaxy for half the price. When word got out — through social media and tech sites who marvelled at the quality to price ratio — consumer interest spiked.
?The team has had diverse experiences with OKRs. In this article, we'd like to share our learnings, as well as Airbyte’s OKRs for Q1 2021.
What is a Product Roadmap?
A Proof of Concept (POC) is a small exercise to test the product idea or assumption. The main purpose of developing a POC is to demonstrate the functionality and to verify a certain concept or theory that can be achieved in development.
Even if you’re not a gamer, you’ve probably heard of games like Flappy Bird, Fortnite, PUBG and Candy Crush. With user counts in the tens and hundreds of millions and some grossing over a $100 million in monthly revenue, there’s a lot for companies to learn from the gaming world. Gamers spend an average of an hour and 13 minutes day on video games – imagine if your customers spent that amount of time on your SaaS product every day.
If you ever think about joining YC, be intentional about the value you want to get from it.
Pricing your product or service is one of the hardest things to do. There are so many dimensions to it that it is easy to get lost. Here, I am going to share what I learnt.
A breakdown of the best free resources I've found for developers bootstrapping their own indie SaaS businesses in 2020. 🔥
By Nikolas Vogt Founder, Growth Academy | Ex-Growth Lead, Google Assistant | Guest speaker, Santa Clara University
Every Company will Become a FinTech Company](https://hackernoon.com/fintech-will-eventually-eat-the-banks-every-company-will-become-a-fintech-company-jvjj3204) In today’s world, most of the companies and startups even those that do not have anything to do with financial services, have been increasingly taking the provision of alternative financial services to the individuals as a mission. Therefore, it would not be wrong to claim that every company will be a fintech company in the not-too-distant future.
How Startup Owners Can Boost Their Productivity: Simple Tips That Really Work.
When considering where to launch their startup, many entrepreneurs naturally think of the “Innovation Hubs” of Boston, the San Francisco Bay Area, and New York City. After all, that is where the deals are, right? Well, they’re not the only places where companies are being launched and receiving game-changing investments.
Logan Koshenka is a software engineer who graduated from Ohio University in 2018 and founded AccuFit, a custom workout app.
Over the last twenty years, Saas and Cloud have been the two emerging technology sectors.
This long-form article is an informal introduction to Notion for entrepreneurs, founders and startup executives. It covers the basics and explains what makes this company truly special. It’s a 17 minute read full of film and pop culture references because why not. Also, this is my first blog post on the internet.
It is believed that product managers should help a company do something that makes sense and advise against doing something that doesn’t.
by Anne Szustek Talbot, VP of Content, BX3
Brenden Mulligan, after selling his startup "LaunchKit" to Google, went all-in on his love for building products. He built ten products in 12 months.Just imagine, you have just successfully sold your startup that you worked on for years to a company like Google. What would you do next?
In the current era of the internet, we tend to shop online more often than ever before. We can attribute it to the fact that it’s infinitely easier to compare products from different sellers this way.
Growth hacks, usually not shared, that got us 1K subscribers in one month.
This is part two of a two-part conversation with serial founder and pioneer of “digital identity” Garrett Gafke on how he built and launched his most successful startup, IdentityMind. Click here to read part one.
And how it reduces the odds you frustrate your team to the brink of leaving
Since the Coronavirus breakdown, millions of people are stuck at home; and for those who are still in the job market — are working from home too. The so-called “social distancing” measures have increased the Internet usage all around the world by 50–70%. Streaming has also jumped by at least 12%, according to Forbes.
This article provides a comprehensive behind-the-scenes look at the steps taken to make a company successful.
Building a startup! You have an epiphany and say to yourself:
World Wide Webers, it’s 2019 and the talk of town are topics that so many of us interact with every day: conversational marketing, behavioural science, machine learning, process automation, productivity tools, chatbots, algorithms, artificial intelligence, big data, deep learning, accelerating digital transformation, and so much more.
Visit the /Learn Repo to find the most read stories about any technology.