sahil parikh's work+life stream - Filed under 'saas'

insights on life, technology & SaaS while nurturing a web business

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I love web apps, everything Apple, post-work martinis, good seafood, dark chocolate, coffee, Mumbai city and living well.

I am the founder of DeskAway, a simple yet powerful web-based work tracking tool. DeskAway is ranked in the top 30 hottest startups in India by TataNEN.

Things have worked out kinda well, for instance...recently, I have been named a Paragon 100 Fellow (Asia’s most inspiring young entrepreneurs and social change makers), shortlisted in BusinessWorld's Top 30 Young Entrepreneurs in India, featured on the cover of India Today Aspire (The Young Guns), showcased on CNBC's prestigious TV show 'Young Turk Innovators' and interviewed in VentureBeat and NYTimes by a prominent Silicon Valley journalist.

I am currently working on a book on Web 2.0 & SaaS to be published in late 2010.

I often reminisce about the best 7.5 years spent in Chapel Hill, NC.

When not in front of the computer, I spend my time reading, writing, playing golf, tennis (am a Federer fan), doing yoga thrice a week, and traveling to distant places (love Mykonos and the rest of the Med. coast) with my wife and family.

I believe in doing what you enjoy even if it is different and doesn't pay you well in the beginning. Setting off on your path is more important than following the herd. It is extremely important to be happy at the end of each day.

This is an updated stream of my work+life activities of a life in progress.

Sahil Parikh's profile »

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September 2, 2010

Building the minimum viable SaaS team

Starting a business is somewhat like making a movie. You get the right people on board, and make something cool that people love.

I started out building a lean team for my SaaS company back in 2007 and over the years have learnt a lot from our successes and failures, who to hire and for what role. Today, I see a lot of SaaS companies start out (reminds me the days of when every other company was either a web design studio or a SEO agency) and hence would like to pen my thoughts on the minimum viable SaaS team you should build while starting out. Maybe, just maybe, this information might be useful to you, Mr. Entrepreneur.

At the bare minimum, you need to fill out the following spots - it doesn't matter if someone does multiple things (hey, we are all wearing multiple hats here) but this is really the bare minimum you need to get started and get going...

design/UI/UX

A clean website and web application design is key. This is more important than the number of features you are going to have. In fact, we have noticed no co-relation between increase in number of features and revenue. What matters is a smooth experience users get when they use your product. Frequent A/B testing on website design and content will help improve your conversions.

web content/ analytics

The beauty of a web business is that everything is measurable. Have someone measure your key business indicators on a weekly basis. What is measured can be improved. Otherwise you will be flying blind. Some of the key things we measure on a weekly and monthly basis are website visitors, % converted to trial plans, % converted to paid customers, churn rate, renewal rate, lifetime value of a customer on all our plans, lifetime value of a customer on all our plans, customer breakdown by industry, website bounce rate, how are users finding us, top referring sites with best conversions.

We started measuring these things a little later in the day as we were blinded by fighting the feature war. But, it is just pure bliss when your analytics talk to you and you kind of know where to go next.

developers/architects

Smart, humble and energetic developers that share your company vision is important early on. In India, most developers are from the service background which makes most of them a lousy fit for a product company. These guys need to be self-learners with excellent problem solving skills. Early on, developers can do some database and network administration. Expand this team as your scale increases. Having a few developers is better than having a lot of them.

support/ customer service/ QA

Every product goes through teething issues and so will yours. Make sure someone in your team can tackle these issues and liaison with the development team. Every customer query will help you strengthen your website help faqs and will also give you content for your blog. If this person can double-up as a tester (programmers are sometimes lazy to test their code) then that is an additional brownie point to your business. As you scale, make sure you have a dedicated team managing customer service/relationships and testing. You'll know when that happens.:-)

web marketing/ communications

I am going to assume that you don't have too much cash to burn. What you have is already alloted to hosting charges and paying the core team. The one thing we learnt early on is to take advantage of free techniques like SEO, Blogs, Social media to drive traffic to our site. Even till today, some of the blogs that we were mentioned in in 2008 are driving relevant traffic to the site every month. Someone who can understand SEO, web analytics, get in touch with bloggers, send out email newsletters, prepare press releases, build relatiobships and be a sort of a community manager on social networks will help you get the word out early on. In our case, I took this up early on as I am really interested in web marketing and who better to spread the vision of the company than the entrepreneur himself.

I think that is it. It is best to form your initial team, get started, measure as you go and switch gears as you learn more about your business and customers.

Have you built a team differently or have any other thoughts? Would love to hear your comments below.

Filed under // saas startups team writing

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July 11, 2010

SaaS The Way Forward - The SmartTechie

Synage's DeskAway, a web-based project collaboration service that provides teams a central location to easily organize, manage and track their projects and work is another widely used application. NASSCOM touted SaaS for mobile phones as the future trend as applications are taking over the medium. However, in the present context, Narasimhan (Kishore) Mandyam, CEO, Impel CRM sees it as a distant dream. "Network access is spotty, user experience is ambivalent at best and anyway, people who access Mobile Internet with a fancy phone are too small a group to call it a SaaS market. It will happen, maybe in conjunction with 4G. In the meantime, there is SaaS-via-SMS in non-American markets," he says.
SaaS has often been seen as an alternative to outsourcing. Barnes begs to differ and terms these approaches as alternatives to each other as their primary function is to minimize the cost and effort required to maintain internal IT infrastructure. He foresees the two co-existing to augment more traditional on-premise software deployments and application hosting, particularly in large organizations.
Security concerns run high for this model as often, the service providers belong to a third party. Though he agrees that the concern is justified, Raina feels that it is not an issue technically speaking as even RBI sites get hacked. "Many standards are evolving around Cloud Computing security but essentially data protection is the biggest area," says Sunny Ghosh, CEO, Wolf Frameworks. It is expected that far more emphasis will be given to regulatory compliance considerations and process visibility issues, particularly where a business process cuts across multiple, hybrid Cloud-based platforms that may include some combination of vendor-provided public Clouds, including SaaS solutions and an internally managed private Cloud. Synage's Founder and CEO Sahil Parikh says, "Consumers need to come to terms with the fact that their data is more secure with the SaaS vendor than behind their office walls. Security and data protection are closely tied to the SaaS vendors' business model and hence they take adequate steps to ensure that customer data is secured- both from the infrastructure as well as the application layers."

via thesmarttechie.com

Mention of DeskAway and a quote from me in this article.

Filed under // featured saas

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May 20, 2010

SAASBurst - Daily dose for SaaS entrepreneurs » Is your funnel leaking?

“A small leak can sink a great ship.”
Benjamin Franklin

This post has been inspired by my recent email conversations with David Skok of Matrix Partners. He runs an amazing SaaS blog for entrepreneurs called http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/. A must read!

To have a successful SaaS business, you need to have a leak-proof funnel. As you spend money on marketing (SEM, Banner, Blogs, Social Media) to get more people to your site, you need to also measure how many of them signup to the free trial (or free plan) and how many of those convert to a paid customer. Before you start adding more features to your app, here is what you should be measuring (use Google Analytics):

via saasburst.com

A good read for all SaaS entrepreneurs. Always keep an eye out on your funnel and conversions.

Filed under // entrepreneurship saas saasburst

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April 30, 2010

My Guest Post on Pluggd.in – How to Grow without Spending in IT Infrastructure

Free Tools for Startups – How to Grow without Spending in IT Infrastructure [Cloud 9]

[Guest article by Sahil Parikh, founder of DeskAway– an online project collaboration service for small businesses and teams.]

Startups are a rage in emerging economies. Look at India, China or Brazil, you will find hundreds of startups sprouting all across the country. It just has become so easy to start and market a web business (even in developing countries) – increased broadband penetration, inexpensive computers, smart-phones, easy access to the Internet, free-for-all social networking tools and above all, the availability of software tools that were either out of the reach of a small business or expensive and cumbersome to setup.

via pluggd.in

Filed under // saas writings

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March 22, 2010

Interview on techno-pulse.com on Cloud-based PM

An Indian technology blog Techno Pulse had recently listed DeskAway as one of India's few Cloud service providers. This weekend they published an interview with me about the Cloud/SaaS landscape in India and how DeskAway is gearing up for the future. Read the entire interview here.

Filed under // deskaway india interviews saas

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January 18, 2010

CEO interview: an insider's look at SaaS vs. on-premise software

The first key metric that’s important to a company like Carbonite is “cost of acquisition.” Since the average customer only pays about $50 per year, we must contain costs associated with acquiring new customers. Even small changes in this metric can dramatically change the company’s profitability.

“Retention,” or how many customers renew their subscription from one year to the next, is the other key metric. Managing retention requires a sophisticated stream of communications with the customer to ensure he or she is happy throughout the lifecycle.

via blogs.zdnet.com

Two of the most important metrics in a SaaS company. You keep cost of acquisition low (sell online = self-service) and your customers/users happy.

Filed under // analytics saas

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January 5, 2010

Self-service & SaaS

Running a SaaS business that is 100% self-service has the following benefits:

eliminate meetings = huge time-saver

sucking up to people to buy your service, taking them out for drinks just because you want them to buy your service and then making false promises about features etc. to close the deal - this happens so often that is amazes me!

Having an automated, self-service channel for sales and consumption of software is like bliss. We are able to concentrate on what we do best i.e. build a usable and relevant work tracking app for small business and nothing more.

Go Play!

Filed under // saas

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January 4, 2010

My article in - Management Systems Asia, The Magazine for Managers (ms-asia.org)

Project management has entered a new era in the last few years. It is less about planning and organizing and more about collaborating and communicating. At the heart of this is using sophisticated online tools that will give disparate teams the power to organize, manage, and track their projects from anywhere. Project management tools will behave just like your social network where you communicate, plan events, and collaborate with friends and family through your Web browser. Your project team members are now just a click away!

via ms-asia.org

This is an article on project management and DeskAway I wrote for a magazine in Philippines.

Filed under // author deskaway featured project management saas writings

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November 9, 2009

Common SaaS Myths

Pluggd.in is a blog about startups, entrepreneurship and tech in the Indian sector. I recently contributed a guest post on common SaaS myths and ways to overcome them.

Using online software to increase productivity and grow your business is a no brainer. I can’t imagine why any small business would not readily adopt SaaS. What’s holding them back (besides poor bandwidth penetration in some areas) when they can pay a monthly subscription, not have to worry about installation, upgrades and have access to the same tools that their competitors have? This is close to having ’software utopia’ for the small business! Lets go back in time…. - People might not have been prepared to put their money with other people’s money when banking was established. Banking and online banking is mainstream now. - People were probably afraid to get on an aircraft which weighed a few tones and promised to soar like a bird. Today, air travel is a given. Back to the present. Currently, we are witnessing one of the biggest shifts in enterprise software (software used for business) and as everything else, it comes with it’s own set of myths, mindsets and confusion. Here are a few I have experienced over the last few years from people who are still not ready to adopt online software for their business.
"My data is more secure with me than putting it on someone else’s server"
Your data is more secure at your vendor’s data center than your own internal network. Security is more than just about taking daily backups, maintaining uptime and setting up a firewall. It’s about password policies, encryption, intrusion detection, offsite backups, secure transmission, software updates, patching etc. If hosting or maintaining servers is not your core business then you are better off renting out software from a reputed vendor who understands all these things. This will ensure peace of mind in the long run. Read More.