8th June turned out to be the day of technology with waves of technology related events flowing across Mumbai. While at Startup Saturday, Mumbai chapter we did focus on technology but our audience were the Non-Technology entrepreneurs who wanted to learn from their established counterparts ways to use technology to make their Start ups grow.
Here are the 4 strategies they took home at the end of the #SSMUM full of learning, sharing knowledge and networking.
1. Remove Mental Barrier that “I am a Non tech Entrepreneur!”
2. Right technical partners are what Non-Tech Start-ups need.
3. How to achieve better online user traction and interaction ?
4. Simple online tools makes work very easy
1. Remove Mental Barrier that “I am a Non tech Entrepreneur!”
Mr. Aditya Mishra our most experienced speaker of the day emphasized that entrepreneurs need to remove the mental barrier of being a Non-Technology entrepreneur.
He is non-technology founder of a technology company, SwitchMe, a web service that lets you switch between various service providers.
He said an entrepreneur needs to overcome the fear of technology and stop thinking “I can’t do it”. He mentioned that this mental barrier does not exist in Silicon Valley.
He emphasized on an entrepreneur to focus on their core business to get rid of the fear. He explained this with an example, “If you are selling knowledge, you have to worry about CREATING knowledge, not the technology behind it.”
To explain technology better to a non technology entrepreneur he gave the comparison of web technology vs. making Building. Foundation of the house are like Network, Servers, Hardware while Pillars are like Database (Oracle, DB2, MySql). Walls and windows are like the Functionality (done through Phython, Ruby, PHP, Java etc). And furniture, color of walls, floor tiles etc are the things we interact with and equivalent to User experience, HTML, CSS, Javascript etc in web technologies.
Aditya said as an entrepreneur on the web, one has to look at the user experience no matter what the business is about. It is like setting up the shop and ensuring that customer sees the right things. He pointed to resources like hackdesign.org to learn more. He added gtmetrix.com as a resource to see page load times. More tech businesses need to look into other areas depending upon how tech the business is.
2. Right technical partners are what Non-Tech. Start-ups need.
Mr. Pratik Gandhi gave insights on importance of choosing right technical partners. He is Co- Founder of Edutrotters Pvt Ltd and Edulabs, which is an experiential learning organization in India aiming to bridge the gap between theoretical and practical learning. He explained how developing an ERP system for a start up is very important but also outsourcing right partner is critical.
In the earlier days of his venture, Pratik saw need and importance to build an ERP tool to manage his start up.
Therefore they created a basic version of Salesforce.com. But, he found that it was difficult and expensive to use Salesforce.com being a start up. He hence choose to partner with Ahmedabad based company, Horus which created the system where when in absence of an employee, a reminder sms sent to the senior for that particular task. All interaction with clients is mapped and to analyse sales generation. The software also gives reminders for birthday emails to be sent to clients, various greetings and much more.
He also suggested online availability of the vanilla format of ERP on Microsoft.com for use for free upto 5 users. He mentioned for big data sharing one can use Dropbox
Pratik ended his talk saying “People will look at your website if it has interesting content that solves their problem”.
However, he has not only made interesting content but gained user traction and interactions through innovative ways. One of the ways, is to find if their website is really solving the problem for mass consumers. To do that they use Google analytics. Once they know the keywords they go and search on who is talking about it and make them read and come to their web page.
One of the way they reach interaction + traction is by going to updates on Linkedin and sending them a feedback message. They also Use hash-tags on Twitters to find the right target audience and make sure their team replies to their tweets. This ensured Edulabs are among the top pages for keyword “paid intern-ship in India” from across the globe.
Pratik suggested, if you do not have budget for website at the start and want to test the market online try using Wix
Using right content with right User interface plays a very important role for user traction or interaction.
3. How to achieve better online user traction or interaction ?
Mr. Rajveen Khandelwal, Founder of WYO.in . He spoke on how he achieved better online user traction and interaction using simple techniques.
Rajveen explained that a start up with online presence should focus on User traction first. He experienced that it was difficult to write down software requirement, therefore he used Balsamic to create a workflow with rapid wireframing tool. He explained to achieve the user traction there were 3 things they wanted for website: Basic CMS, Cart and Email. It’s easy to find out if your email campaigns are affecting your website’s traffic, or even generating revenue. MailChimp’s Google Analytics integration gives you stats about that performance.
Using Social media is always a good idea for traction and Pratik Gandhi suggested taking help from Hubspot to gain social media knowledge.
4. Simple online tools make work easy
Mr. Kartik Raichura is the Founder and CEO of ManagementParadise, a website he built while in his teens. ManagementParadise.com is one of the top 10 educational portals in India and among the top 30,000 websites in the world. He talked about simple online tools that make work easy.
Rapportive is one such tools which helps you keep connected to all your contacts i.e. gmail, linkedin, fb etc. You just need to integrate it to your gmail account and you can get details of your contacts while you are writing an email or reading one.
Clip2net helps you easy web publishing
Revresponse : This is a website which gives free magazines. So you can send it to your database and whoever clicks on it, you will be paid for that. He did this for the huge database of management students.
He explained how Getmypeon.com website offers Peon services for collecting payments, documents etc from vendors. He stressed on of Google Analytics and Adwords research to know volumes for keywords. They have a database of 3 to 4 lakh keywords which they analyse, which country uses which term and so on. That’s how they figured that MBA is a Rs.1000/click keyword.
They use Mailmerge technique to compile and send custom emails to a database of over 5000 professors. Asana is a online platform that help in work tracking for smaller teams.
He explained the importance of Twitterfeed for RSS syndication of Twitter, FB and Linkedin. He also suggested Cloudflare.com is for increasing your existing servers efficiency.
The event continued with an open house where many ideas, online tools and applications were discussed live with different perspectives given by entrepreneurs and the audience on their experience using them.
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See the video of the event : 8th June video
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