We evaluated the companies based upon the following criteria:

1. Have they done any work for overseas clients? (must have)
2. Have they designed application-specific websites rather than just corporate/static ones? (desirable)
3. Have they got experience with developing and working with brand? (must have)
4. What sort of standards do they follow in terms of producing front end code? (Ideally they should have produced one – two websites following W3C Standards)
5. Have they developed any website that uses CSS as a layout rather than using tables in HTML? (Ideally they should have produced more than 2 websites in this way)
6. How many designers/ developers do they have in-house? (better than one-man show)
7. We would also like to see their portfolio so if they could forward us their website URL

Finally, here’s the shortlist (in no specific order). If you are a design agency in Pune, please feel free to add your website on this page, by adding a comment just so that this page is more useful to your potential customers.

• Studio March
• Iternia
• Webwingz
• Design Dynamics (Link not available. Message me if you need the contact person’s email.)
• e-Zest
• Panacea Infotech
• Venqcorp
• LKS Technology

Disclaimer: I or my employer do not endorse any of these companies. Nor do we have any partnerships/tie-ups with them. Please contact them at your discretion and risk.

I guess we can say it now: The Bubble has burst, welcome to the year 2000. Tighten your belts, and get real. Revenues are back in fashion.

What qualifies me to write about this

I am not a business or management guru with names of IIM, Stanford, Harvard or Princeton on my Resume. I have also not built any multi-million dollar company by myself. However, in the past few years I have earned some experiences that have allowed me to develop opinions, which for me are like the commandments for starting a new business during the current recession. What kind of experience I am referring to?

1. I started a web hosting/development business a little before Recession 1.0 hit in 2000. I had to sell it within a year incurring a loss. Lessons learnt.

2. I built India’s first full-service online printing shop and an online photo-printing kiosk in 2003, which died away due to the lack of funds for sustaining and marketing the business. Lessons learnt.

3. I revived a nearly dead studio photography division of our family businesses and raised the revenues by 400% within a year, turning it into highly profitable with income from the studio photography division having a noticeable portion in the entire group’s income.

4. Started a B2B photo-printing business which was moderately successful. It could have been enormously successful. Reasons identified – Lessons learnt.

5. I worked with the team at Zimbra, who have been extremely successful entrepreneurs themselves and learnt how mainstream IT product businesses are created and run. Zimbra was eventually acquired by Yahoo! for US $ 350 million.

6. I have been a part of the team that established One Point Consulting in India and have been a witness to the change in the business situation in the past few months.

Yes, that’s it!

OK, so here come the commandments:

1. Technology is a means to an end and not an end by itself (unless you are a geek)

It’s not bad to be a geek. But if you planning to do business, you need to be a businessman, irrespective of whether or not you are a geek.

Re-iterate, you cannot eat, drink, wear and live in technology. You can eat food made from technology, you can drink water processed by a technology, You can wear clothes stitched by technology or live in a house built by technology.

2. People have real problems and they will pay you reasonable money if you help them solve those problems

It doesn’t matter whether you use high-technology or simple hacks. What matters is that the problem should be correctly understood and solved completely. You as a geek may not be happy with the solution. What matters is, the customer should feel happy and satisfied.

3. India is where the customers are! Opportunities within the SME

•    The small scale industry sector provides direct employment to 18 million persons in around 3.2 million registered SSI units in India. (1)

•    The micro, small and medium enterprises sector comprises 50% of India’s total manufactured exports, 45% of India’s industrial employment, and 95% of all industrial units in the country. (2)

•    Nearly 1,000 Personal Computers (PCs) were shipped every hour during January-March 2008, according to an IDC survey. In the first quarter of 2008, computer shipments stood at more than 2.1 million against 1.9 million PCs in the corresponding period last year. (3)

•    The India domestic IT and ITeS market is expected to cross the Rs. 2, 00,000 Crore (US$ 50 Billion) mark in 2012 compared to Rs. 90,014 Crore recorded in 2007. This translates into a CAGR of 18.4% in the five year period. Together with IT and ITeS exports revenue of Rs. 3,20,278 Crore, the total IT and ITeS industry size will grow to Rs. 5,29,976 Crore (US$ 132 Billion) by 2012, representing a CAGR of 16.5%. (3)

•    Indian PC market bounces back to record an impressive y-o-y growth of 24% in 3Q 2006 – SMB segment drives up overall PC shipments, Higher Education segment pushes up buoyant notebook PC market. (3)

•    The Indian retail segment contributes 20 percent to the country’s GDP but remains one of the most unorganised sectors in the country with less than 3 percent IT penetration. This offers huge opportunities for Indian software companies. (4)

•    SAP India, a subsidiary of SAP AG, has reported software revenue growth of 43 percent in the first quarter of 2008. According to a recent validated industry data, SAP India has reported highest growth rates in small and medium enterprise (SME) software revenues of a single region for SAP worldwide. (5)

•    Nearly 60% of IBM India’s revenue comes from SMBs with 15-20% of IBM India’s workforce dedicated to the SMB market (6)

•    The share of Indian Small and Medium Enterprises, in total IT spend has been growing rapidly over the past few years, and now there is evidence that growth in SMB IT spend is set to continue at a robust 24 percent. This growth rate is the fastest amongst all BRIC countries, with Russia, China and Brazil following at 22.9 percent, 20.4 percent and 19.4 percent respectively. (7)
(1)    According to smeindia.com
(2)    According to Institute for Financial Management and Research
(3)    According to IDC India
(4)    Source: http://www.expresscomputeronline.com/20031027/sme03.shtml
(5)    Source: http://www.ciol.com/SMB/News-Reports/SAP-India-catalyses-nations-SME-boom/10608106903/0/
(6)    Source: http://www.nextbillion.net/newsroom/2007/12/06/ibm-extends-presence-to-serve-smes-in-india
(7)    According to Microsoft

5. Indians love mobile

India Ready to Take Second Position in Mobile Subscription

6. The role of CIO/CTO in an SME in India is played by their local hardware vendor

This, by far, is the best way to channelize any service/product successfully within the Indian SME.

7. Focus on local languages, in addition to English

See: English Literacy in India

8. India has all types of customers

Cost-sensitive: Better cost; Quality-sensitive: Better Quality of Product; Service-sensitive: Better Customer Service. No-one is perfect but you need to be exceptional in at least one of these and competitive in the other two.

9. Plan how you will be marketing / selling

Nothing sells by itself. Days of monopoly are gone.

10. 1000-days!

This is how much it takes for any business to settle-down properly. If your business matures faster, it’s great! If it doesn’t, remember not to withdraw before 3 years. I don’t mean to discourage or disillusion anyone, but do have a contingency plan for sustaining yourself for 3 years.

Repeat: It takes 3 years of hard-work and smart-work with a single-focus on your business for it to start giving you good returns.

Got comments / questions? Fire away!

Does anyone know: What “percentage” of Web 2.0 companies are paying back satisfactory ROI to their investors? If you are equally passionate about food and technology, would you rather open a restaurant or a Web 2.0 service, provided the only decisive criteria are: better ROI and business longevity?

I did not get any responses, but continued thinking on this very vehemently. Apparently, I now have an answer to my question and a simple formula. So here goes …

Computers were invented to help humans. But computers weren’t humans, so engineers and scientists worked hard to make them as much like humans as possible by developing hardware and writing software that would allow the computers to resemble personal assistants, accountants, typists, etc.

Then came the Internet, followed by the WWW, the era of static websites and information sharing. This was more like an era of single-sided communication. Every website was like an authority whom you couldn’t question. That wasn’t bad, because humans can be like that sometimes.

Suddenly around the end of the 1900s, things started improving. With a plethora of tools like Linux, Apache, Java, Perl, MySQL, etc. the entire web was transforming into a dynamic web. People could have 2-sided communications and there was Hotmail, Internet Chat, Forums, Dating Sites, eCommerce, and it was all very exciting.

Some very smart people jumped in at the very onset of this transformation, did great work and made a lot of money! But there were also many-many people who were either not smart enough or late, and they didn’t succeed. The .com bubble had burst, bankruptcies filed, jobs lost – the web was dead!! Anyways, when you look back at the time it hadn’t burst, it was much like people wanted to do everything on Internet, what they wanted to do in the real-world.

Life went on. Then sometime in 2005, there was a sudden realization. The web was not dead, it was just more mature, it’s now Web 2.0. Things started improving, again. Smart people came back, not-smart-enough people and late-comers, arrived, too. Now, you know what I am talking about, right?

Anyways, people were wiser this time, and had learnt from the .com bubble! So, they wanted something like Web 2.0 before it was too late so that they could ride another bubble before the previous one fizzed out. And how creative have they been! Now we have Enterprise 2.0, Sales 2.0 and even Health 2.0. Wow! We (ATP…)* are now future-proof and will not be out of business for a very long time. All we need is a 2.0 and hey, presto! – “there’s your multi-million dollar industry!”.

(* ATP… = all the people who make money from the web, directly or indirectly)

If you are still reading, here’s what I think is what we (SOTP…) should do to build a sustainable, profit-making Internet-based business:

(* SOT… = some of the people who make money from the web, directly or indirectly)

• Never forget: all that I mentioned above (there’s more to it behind those words, but the lack of expression …)
• Develop something that the entire population of humans on Internet can use, not just a few people (becomes easier for them – your users/customers)
• Target a few people/companies, not the entire population of humans on Internet (becomes easier for us – SOT …)
• Know that: If they can use, they will
• Don’t repeat what’s been done, if you are targeting humans
• Innovate what’s just been done, if you are targeting companies
• Read the following as many times as it takes for you to incorporate it in your nature:

1. Note to Web 2.0 Companies: Early Adopters are not the Mass Market
2. I Know It When I See It

Hey, Presto!??

A restaurant?