Author: Mukesh Gupta

Strategy

Building great products

I have been thinking about a lot of great products that have now become an integral part of our life aka Google, iPods, iPads, SAP ERP, Zappos, Facebook, Twitter, Intuit, Amazon, Mitticool, etc..  When I think about what is common across these products and their growth to super-stardom and i found these common traits: Great products are highly focused in solving a particular need of a particular customer. No product ever succeeds if it tries to solve a lot of problems for a lot of people.  Great products are very simple to learn & use. Great user experience can make the difference […]

Entrepreneurship

Understanding startups – Dropmocks.com – Amazing photo sharing tool

The second start-up that I want to talk about in my series of blogs on start-ups is an interesting start-up called http://www.dropmocks.com/. This is a very simple photo sharing application. To share your photos, all you need to do is drag and drop the photos to the webpage and you get a link that you can then share with all your friends for free. All this can be done under 2 minutes! No registration or sign-up required! No advertisements! Now this is simplicity at its best.   Question now is how they will make money. I see the following options […]

Entrepreneurship

3 reasons to start a successful startup

Any start-up which has gone on to become highly successful does fall under one of these criteria:   They found a solution to a problem everyone knew but no one had solved till then. They found a potential problem not known to the market till then and tried to solve it first They found ways to solve a known problem dramatically (5x times) better/faster/cheaper. There are a lot of start-ups which achieve decent success just by adding new functionality to an existing product/service as well. They thrive till the overall market grows and then inevitably stagnate for growth. The one’s […]

Sales

The Art of the Quick Phone Call

I have found the article on the art of the quick phone call by Mark Suster very interesting and helpful. I have had to sell to a lot of people on the phone and I have learnt from experience that the tips that Mark has listed work really well. Few more things that I would like to add to the list are: Summarize the discussion or decision in an email and share it with the caller. This will help clear mis-understandings upfront.  Pls share any pre-read that can help save time and provide back-ground information for the call at least a day ahead if possible or […]