I recently read the biography of Elon Musk, and what an inspiring story, I must say. Elon Musk has surely joined the elite group of other crazies in this world, who have dared to envision a different world – Steve Jobs, Henry Ford, Bill Gates. The tenacity and perseverance that these guys have is unmatched or even unimaginable. But more important, the quality of clearly seeing a world 10-20 or maybe 50 years from now is the quality that distinguishes these crazies from the mere mortals.

I know the naysayers will bring up stories that will show how these people have built companies on others’ ideas, and how I am just drinking the kool-aid or being a blind follower. However, there is a big difference in the people who invented these things, vs. who either envisioned a future or dared to take steps to make this a reality.

• Though the idea of operating systems originated at IBM, they did not have the vision to make personal computing a reality. Who would have given this dream to Bill Gates, if there were someone from IBM who believed that computers will be at every desk at offices and homes?
• While Microsoft made personal computing possible, Apple made it usable. Though Xerox built graphical user interface, Steve Jobs was able to see clearly the future where every person on the earth will be able to use this powerful machine without any technical knowledge. (Note: Microsoft also licensed GUI license from Xerox for building Windows)
• Similarly, I am sure Henry Ford had this crazy dream of putting cars in the hands of every person on this earth.

I personally believe that those who dream and finally dare are the ones that make it possible. At the same time, I believe that there are certain inventions and technological advances that need to happen to make this dream a reality. This is what some of us call ‘timing’ and most of us call ‘luck’. There are some industries where this timing seems right.

1. Transportation: Technology has advanced enough for us to dream about automated cars. Every car company has been adding small features such as automated parking, automated brakes, etc., while Google has taken the giant leap of actually working on fully automated cars. Someone at Google has the vision that automated cars will be a thing in the next 10-15 years. Maybe, driving cars manually will be illegal then, similar to driving under influence.
2. Energy: While it seems like every other energy company is still trying to milk their cash cow, aka coal and oil, it took a few visionaries to step up and build solar companies that might make us independent of oil and coal. I agree that the technology has advanced enough, and the costs have reduced drastically to make electric cars and solar energy viable, but it still takes vision and guts to go out and say – “I believe electric cars and solar energy is the future, and I am going to invest my hard earned money and rest of my life to make this possible.”
3. Space travel: I always fathom how it would be if we get to go back in time and tell someone from 1800s the technological advances that we have had so far. Forget about air travel, they wouldn’t even believe us if we told them that you can get to the next town 100 miles away in less than 2 hours. But there were people who dreamed about cars and airplanes and made it possible to travel long distances. Similarly, space travel for leisure and human colonization on other planets seems like a joke right now, but if we were to be alive in the next century, I won’t be surprised to see a weekend leisure trip to moon. It just takes that one crazy person to make it possible.

Similarly there are other industries, which are showing signs of disruption.

1. Banking: Are traditional banks the right approach for the future? Are they on the brink of extinction in the face of Paypal? Has technology disrupted enough that the next set of companies will just topple traditional banking?
2. Education: Is institutional education too overrated? Companies like Khan Academy, Udemy, Coursera, Udacity have taken the first steps towards democratizing education? Is there a visionary out there who will just make institutional education outdated?

You have to just ask – “what if?”

DREAM. ENVISION. DARE.

I was speaking to a friend of mine one morning and we started discussing about what should Facebook build next. Though we had a good conversation, the thought didn’t leave me. I kept thinking what I would do if I was the head of product at Facebook. I thought about giving a framework to approach this question.

Facebook essentially is a social network and operates in advertising space for its business model. The number of users on its platform and the strength of its network i.e. the amount of time these users spend on Facebook differentiate Facebook.

So if I were a product manager at Facebook, I would see the opportunities in these two areas:

1. Acquire as many users as possible
2. Get them engaged as much as possible on the platform

Let’s discuss each point:

1. Acquiring users:

I wouldn’t spend too much time discussing this, but will talk about a few innovative ways that Facebook is already taking to acquire new users.

Facebook has people from most of the developed countries and parts of developing countries on its platform. It has over 1.3 billion out of 7 billion people on this earth on its platform. The challenge now is getting people who are not online or who don’t have computers.

Facebook has been solving this problem with some innovative ways:

1. Sending low orbit satellites in the space to make internet available to remote areas of the world
2. Creating light apps such as Facebook lite to help users with low bandwidth and not as advanced smartphones get easy access to Facebook. (Note: Phones have higher penetration than computers in developing countries.)

2. Engaging users:

This is an interesting problem to me as a product manager. A lot of new product features are built to get users engaged on Facebook. A few examples are Facebook Messenger (to replace your text messages), Facebook Paper (to replace your news apps), Facebook Pay (to replace your online payment platforms aka PayPal, Venmo) etc.

As I said earlier, Facebook would want their users to use the platform for anything and everything and would want them to visit Facebook every day i.e. increase daily actives. Some of the recent features that they have launched to make this possible are “Memories this day from the past years”, recommending articles/videos in the news feed based on what you view, Facebook Pay etc. The way I see it is, ultimately, Facebook would want to be its users’ digital identity and would like all of its users’ online activities to route through Facebook. If you think about 8-10 years in future, Facebook will be in a strong position if people thought their Facebook profile as their digital identity, basically replacing phone numbers, replacing personal email, integrating with all activities done online etc. Think about it this way – you meet a new person, and instead of exchanging phone numbers, you exchange your limited Facebook profile; instead of asking for email address, now you can communicate with this person directly on Facebook messenger with your limited profile; instead of paying online using your credit card or Paypal, you pay with your Facebook profile. Essentially, you will maintain different profiles on Facebook based on the activities that you do.

I know it’s a big task for one company to do all of these, and hence acquisition might be one of the ways to make it possible.

Some of the immediate features that I can think about to get people more engaged with Facebook are:

1. Video calling
2. Recommending purchases/gifts based on the events that the users are planning to attend
3. Creating limited Facebook profile as a start to creating Facebook online identity for everyone

Some ways to know what to build next will depend on the way the users are using the existing features:

1. Facebook pay: I assume people were already talking on Facebook messenger about exchanging money. Performing quick analytics like word cloud would have given Facebook an idea about other tools that their users use the most outside in a given context.
2. Video calling: Similarly, it will be easy to understand how many people initiate messaging on Facebook Messenger to follow up with a phone call. This will provide some insight into users’ behavior. This can be coupled with user research to hone on the problem that Facebook would want to solve, and if video calling is the right feature to build.
3. Purchases: Again, Facebook can do user research to understand the buying pattern related to the Facebook events that users attend.

Along with running analytics on the existing features and user behavior, understanding the opportunity will be critical to deciding what features to build – either the feature can make the platform more engaging or it can make more money for Facebook.

As a last point, I personally believe making experiences tighter based on users’ online activities will make Facebook a stronger platform with high user engagement. There are a lot of smart people working at Facebook, and I am excited to see new products from Facebook. To start with, I am thrilled about Oculus Rift, and waiting to see their first product.

Update: Facebook has already started building features that will replace your phone numbers. Here’s an article that mentions this – http://www.pcworld.com/article/2998367/software-social/facebook-message-requests-wants-to-replace-your-phone-number.html

I have constantly heard and read online that every entrepreneur should read ‘Crossing the Chasm’ by Geoffrey Moore. I finally got a chance to read it a few weeks back. I think it’s a must-read book, not only for every entrepreneur, but also for every high-tech marketer.

I have attempted to summarize a few points from the book for those who haven’t had a chance to read the book. I will still advise to read the book, as the book has a lot of good examples that relate to today’s world.

To start with, ‘Crossing the chasm’ talks about strategies and frameworks that a high-tech marketer can adopt to make her company’s technology get adopted in the mainstream market. I will explain shortly what mainstream market means.

According to Geoffrey Moore, any new technology goes through a technology adoption curve. It breaks the users into five major categories along this technology adoption curve. I won’t get into too much detail into these categories, as it is pretty obvious from their names. The goal of any marketer is to understand the motivations and concerns of each type of user and develop marketing plan to cater specifically to that user type. The five major categories of users are –

1. Innovators (Technology enthusiasts) – Users who love innovative technology and can do anything to get their hands on it. E.g. users who are ready to pay $1,500 for Google Glass. They represent approximately 3.5% of the market.
2. Early adopters (Visionaries) – Innovators are visionaries and represent customers who want to use the new technology to get a competitive advantage and ready to piece the solution together to make the new technology work. They represent approximately 12.5% of the market
3. Early majority (Pragmatist) – The early majority customers have a pragmatist approach to adopting the technology. They will adopt a new technology if there is enough support in the market for the technology. They are risk averse and usually buy from the market leaders who have a whole product to offer. They represent 34% of the market.
4. Late majority (Conservative) – The late majority are generally afraid of new technology. They usually don’t like to change, and will only change when most of the market has already adopted the technology and the product has become a commodity. They represent approximately 34% of the market.
5. Laggards (Skeptics) – The laggards don’t participate in the technology market, except act as a hindrance to block the adoption. For the skeptics, a marketer needs to think about solutions that won’t give the skeptics a chance to block the adoption of their technology. They represent approximately 16% of the market.

As you can see, between each user category lays a chasm that any company with a new technology needs to cross. The early majority and late majority make up the mainstream market (78% of the market) that I was talking about earlier and the biggest chasm lies between early adopters and this mainstream market. A lot of companies fall through this chasm and never surface again as they don’t understand the differences between these two markets. The strategies that worked brilliantly for the early market would never work for the mainstream market. Companies that fail to understand this are the ones that get lost in the chasm. As mentioned earlier, the book ‘Crossing the chasm’ mentions strategies to cross this chasm.

The author, Geoffrey Moore uses the analogy of England invading France to explain crossing the chasm.

Imagine you are in England (market with early adopters), and want to capture Paris (mainstream market), but there is a big chasm represented by English Channel. It will be foolish to attack Paris directly. A better strategy will be to identify a point where you can start the attack (Normandy). This represents beachhead segment in the mainstream market.

The following are the four steps that Geoffrey lists to cross the chasm.

1. Target the point of attack – In this step you will identify the beachhead segments in the mainstream market (Normandy) that you can target to get your foot in the door.
2. Assemble the Invasion Force – At this stage, you will identify what you need in terms of product to fulfill the promises that you made to the beachhead segment. This might come in terms of partnering with other companies or building it yourself to come up with a whole product.
3. Define the Battle – Here you identify your competition, and take market-centric approach (as against product-centric approach) to market development and position your product for success.
4. Launch the invasion – At this point, you will identify the distribution channels that will help you reach the mainstream market and decide on pricing based on the value you provide to this market.

In the next post, I will talk about the process that will help with the first step mentioned above – targeting the point of attack. I will share the frameworks I built based on the book that you can use to identify the beachhead segments. I will highly recommend this book to every entrepreneur and high-tech marketer.

This is the third and final part of the blog series that details my experience with lean startup methodology. I think this is a great framework (there comes out the MBA in me) for entrepreneurs who wants to quickly test their ideas.

Read example # 1 here and example # 2 here.

Example 3:

My co-founder, Amy Vaduthalakuzhy and I were scouting for business ideas last year. Based on our experience with Jobbertunity, we decided not to put any effort into building a product. Read about the lessons I learned from my previous failed startup.

Last year when we were brainstorming ideas, we read about how startups such as Postmates, Taskrabbit, etc. were disrupting the instant delivery market. We were excited by this opportunity and wanted to see if we can bring something to the market that would be disruptive and still be different from the existing services. We came up with an idea! We thought – why not use taxi drivers to deliver whatever people wanted delivered. Our differentiation was going to be number of taxi drivers that were available for delivery. While other startups built their own army of delivery guys (hiring, training etc.), we had tons of taxi drivers at our disposal.

Since our demand was already proven by companies such as Postmates, we focused on supply side (drivers for delivery) for this idea. Below were our 3 assumptions for a service that used taxi drivers as delivery guys –

1. Taxi drivers have a lot of idle time when they are circling around to find a passenger.
2. Taxi drivers would like to make extra money in their idle time. We based our price at $5 per delivery at par with other delivery services.
3. Trust will be a critical component to our delivery service, as taxi drivers will be apprehensive about accepting packages from strangers.

So instead of building a delivery app prototype and spending time to get a few drivers onboard to start the service, we decided to implement it without a product.

This is how we tested our hypotheses in a day. Amy and I wrapped packages of different sizes and weights, varying from a simple envelope to a big box (this was to test hypothesis # 3 regarding trust) and decided to hand them out physically to taxi drivers. We wanted at least 8 out of 10 taxi drivers to deliver our packages at a flat price of $5.

Amy approached taxis in the Castro area, while I flagged down cabs in the SOMA area. This is what we learned in 4 hours.

1. Taxi drivers drive 9-hour shifts and have tons of idle time. They spent a lot of time looking for passengers. However, we learned that they usually circle around the same area, rather than venturing out to other areas. Our plan was to use this idle time to deliver packages to other areas of the city, but clearly taxi drivers weren’t interested.
2. We had a few taxi drivers who were interested in delivering the package, but only for the fare that their meter would read, rather than a flat $5 per package. We even told them that there is no urgency in delivering the packages, and it was perfectly fine to deliver the package by end of the day. However, the taxi drivers did not know their schedule ahead of time and did not want to take on additional responsibility if they weren’t going to be around the place where the package was to be delivered.
3. Not even a single taxi driver asked about the contents of the package irrespective of its size and weight. The price and the distance were the deal breakers.

Eventually we got only 2 out of 10 taxi drivers to deliver, only because they were heading to the place where the package was supposed to be delivered. We quickly learned that we would get taxi drivers to deliver packages only if the price was higher i.e. at par to the price when they would actually have a passenger. And we wouldn’t get enough demand if we charged that high, especially with the existing services charging $5 per delivery. So we decided to drop the idea, as it was not a viable idea economically.

As you can see, rather than trying to get ourselves buried in developing an app as a MVP, we decided to get out of the building and test our idea. I am sure we saved ourselves tons of hours of work and disappointment by following this quick test.

A friend of mine, Abhas Art Agrawal, did a similar setup for his startup, Your Mechanic, which is a marketplace to bring together car mechanics and people who need mechanics to get their cars repaired. Before he got into Y Combinator, he contracted some mechanics on his own and then placed his service details and a phone number on Craigslist for people to call. When calls started trickling in from people who needed a mechanic, he decided to build a website. Rather than creating a website or a landing page or an app, he was able to quickly validate his idea.

Quick tip: I have recommended this to a bunch of my friends who had a marketplace idea (where two people come together to buy/sell products/services e.g. eBay, Fiverr, etc.). Instead of trying to build a website, you can use Google docs (spreadsheet) to test your idea. Put names of people who need the service and names of those who can provide the service and match them against each other manually. See if you get any traction. Or another option is to arrange one side of the equation by yourself (mechanics in case of yourmechanic.com) and find a way to reach out to your target customer providing this service (craigslist in case of yourmechanic.com). In my opinion, it is easier to arrange for supply (mechanics) and then try to attract the demand (people requiring mechanics).

This is the second post in a 3 part series. The intent of these posts is to give you enough examples where you feel comfortable to start executing your ideas with simple tools that are easily available. I sincerely hope this inspires all of you to execute your ideas and, at the least, start testing your assumptions regarding the problem and the solution.

Please read example #1 here and I will put example # 3 in a later post.

Example 2:

I was in Austin last year to participate in the Lean Startup Weekend. The concept of such workshops is to form a team, come up with an idea and quickly test problem, solution & customer assumptions over the weekend by talking to prospective customers. I decided to team up with a startup that wanted to help busy parents by providing an easy-to-use online calendar for their kids’ activities. This calendar would be an aggregation of their kids’ schedules from schools, after-school activities and weekend games/events.

The startup had already learned a little about lean startup methodology before this workshop and had put up a landing page for parents to sign up for their service. While this works some times, it is very difficult to attract users to your landing page. I recommend talking directly to your customers first and understanding their main pain point. A landing page can be a great tool once you have validated at least your assumptions about the problem and the solution.

We used an online tool named Validation Board, to systematically test our hypotheses regarding the problem, the solution and the target customer.

Quick Tip: You can also use excel to put together a tracking tool for your validated and invalidated assumptions.

We started with validating our customer and problem hypotheses. Without validating these two, we wouldn’t know what our solution would look like. So we decided not to focus too much on the solution. We used the five whys technique to get to the root cause of our customers’ problems. Then we decided to work on our problem hypothesis (our riskiest assumption).

Problem hypothesis # 1: “Parents are wasting time organizing kids event schedules, hence looking for a solution.”

As you can see, we had a strict minimum success criteria that at least 9 out of 10 parents will give us $1 to solve this problem. I have talked about minimum success criteria in my previous post.

So, with this assumption, we set out to find parents that we could talk to. These were our findings –

1. Parents did not have any problem with organizing schedules on paper and then put it up on the fridge.
2. Some parents even said that they loved doing this activity with their kids, with colored pens.
3. Some parents also loved showing off the schedule on a fridge since it was easily accessible and they could share with family members.

While we found that our initial hypothesis was invalidated immediately, we probed more to understand the pain points around kids’ activities. That’s when we hit the jackpot.

Every parent mentioned that they spent a lot of time driving kids from one place to another for activities and would rather have someone do it for them. While the main games/events were important for them to attend, they wanted someone to chauffer their kids for practice games.

Problem hypothesis # 1 invalidated.

That’s when we changed our problem hypothesis. This time we were confident about our problem, so we decided to test out our solution.

Problem hypothesis # 2: “Parents wasted time driving kids to the activities”.

Solution hypothesis # 1:  “Shared van with a driver that will pick up and drop off the kids for games/practice”.

When we went out to test this problem and solution hypothesis, our problem hypothesis was validated with 100% of parents expressing their pain regarding driving kids to activities.

However, our solution was dismissed as parents expressed their concern with trusting the drivers. Our solution of providing a van service to drive kids around would need a lot of work to prove trustworthy. So we killed that solution.

Problem hypothesis # 2 validated & solution hypothesis # 1 invalidated.

We actually stopped our experiments at this stage as the weekend was over, but we identified the next solution based on what we learned from parents during our second run.

Solution hypothesis # 2: Carpooling app as a solution for parents within the same neighborhood to coordinate car-pooling.

For this solution to be viable, we needed to have enough parents in the same vicinity whose kids went to similar events. So we identified the next riskiest assumption to be – “There should be enough kids in the same vicinity/neighborhood that go to same activity to build a car-pooling app for parents”.

As you can see, within 2 days, we were able to validate and invalidate many assumptions. The ones invalidated were thrown out, but they told us what features we need not build in the product. The ones validated gave us a clear picture what we needed to build in the app to make it successful. For example, as you can see in the validated column, the product required kid meals as part of the solution, which meant we would need to create a feature to let parents share dietary requirements for their kids to the parents responsible for carpooling at any given day.

We were selected as winners out of 9 teams at the Lean Startup Weekend. I highly recommend going to a lean startup workshop at a location near you.

This example clearly shows how an initial idea was changed completely based on interactions with target customer and learning from that customer.

Quick tip: If you are in Austin, you have to try the southern style barbeque at Salt Lick.