How Do We Market Ourselves ?

We have been asked this question time and again: How do you market yourself?  Our friends, cousins, past colleagues, budding entrepreneurs, people doing surveys have asked us the same question time and again since we started. To which we reply – “We haven’t, yet”.

Maybe they are under the impression that we are a core IT services company who do projects for clients from US, UK and India.  They are half-right, as we do Product Engineering services, providing end-to-end solutions for a business and helping it grow, particularly in the Internet space.

We started ThinkingSpace Technologies in April 2007 with our main goal to become a successful  Software Products Company from India. Hence we started work on ActiveCiti (v2) and launched it on 8th June, 2007. We got  good response for the site from many bloggers and reviewers, and of course, our older Activeciti users. After the launch, one client approached us wanting a tool very similar to ActiveCiti for sending out invitations and RSVP. Thus emerged www.rsvpindia.com – built on ActiveCiti engine. Similarly, one client wanted a professional networking site for TV Professionals with feature sets similar to ActiveCiti. Hence, we created www.imin-tv.com. And so on and so forth.

Did we make ActiveCiti with the intention of growing our Services?  No.
We did the best we could, to the best of our knowledge, to the best of our capabilities and launched ActiveCiti.

We got some projects from networking and some from word of mouth -  Viral Marketing. Updating your company/product blog, getting people to write reviews and blogs on your product, being active on forums and blogs, attending local start-up communities, seminars and conferences – all these help a lot. They go a long way in building your name and credibility. And the best thing is – it doesn’t cost much. You don’t need to allocate a budget for this channel.

Marketing specifically for our products and building traction for the same is a challenging task which we are learning. Will post our experiences in another post.

NASSCOM’s Report on Indian Software Product Businesses

The National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM) has recently released a report NASSCOM Software Product Study: Outlook for Indian Software Product Businesses.

Key highlights of the report:

Indian software product businesses are now approaching an inflection point in their evolution. The next decade will be a period of disruptive growth for this segment, with the annual revenue aggregate of Indian software product businesses forecast to grow from USD 1.4 billion in FY2008 to USD 9.5 to 12 billion by FY2015.

Leading Indian software product firms have strengthened their product portfolio through steady investments in organic growth as well as through overseas acquisitions, and have reached credible business scale

Of the existing 371 software product start-ups since 2001, over two-thirds have been formed in the past three years – of which ~100 companies have started their operations in 2007 alone. As a result, while the top 10 companies still dominate, accounting for 84 per cent of the segment revenues, there are over 200 midsized companies and start-ups that have started generating revenues and are contributing to its growth.

They have recognized our contribution! We (at ThinkingSpace) started  in April-2007 and its been an active 1 and 1/2 years of pursuing our products (Activeciti, Eventazoo), with positive response coming from the domestic and global market. We have also broadened our scope by providing Product Engineering to our clients (ImIn-TV).  NASSCOM-Mckinsey have further identified this area as ‘product-shops’. This comes from a fact sheet related to the report, which can be accessed from their site here.

Opportunity for Indian companies in the product domain

India’s potential to cater to this demand for technology services is demonstrated by the host of global technology majors rushing to establish back-end operations in India. The trend towards offshoring product development services is likely to grow as global ISVs continue to struggle to balance their development priorities and the offshore model proves its effectiveness.

While over 60% of the top global ISVs already leverage India for maintenance services and new product development, the opportunity is further fuelled by entry of focused Indian “product-shops”.

I guess we are ‘product-shops’ then :) Anyways, I am thrilled to read this report. Finally, there has been a detailed study on the Indian software products business. NASSCOM  is taking active steps to identify this business environment in India. I hope this is first of the many steps to come in recognizing the other aspect of Indian Software Companies (other than IT Services and BPO). ThinkingSpace was started with a vision to be a successful Indian Software Product  Company, and this report just fuels our desire to become one.

[How-To] Invite guests who are not registered on Activeciti

We are starting a series of How-To posts of our products for you. These are some cool features which we think can help you in using the product.

On Activeciti, you can invite guests to your event who are not yet members of Activeciti. The cool thing is that there is no compulsion for your guests to register on Activeciti before they can RSVP your event. When you invite a guest who is not registered, he/she will get an email with information about the event. The email will also allow them to respond whether they will be attending the event. Your guest can thus respond with a ‘Yes’, ‘No’, or ‘Maybe’ from their email.

Now, to invite guests who are not on Activeciti, go to the Guest List page of your event. Under ‘Choose Your Invitees’ , there is a drop down which lists all the Friends Group that you have created in your Friends section. From here, to invite non-ActiveCiti guests select the ‘Non-Activeciti Users‘. You can now enter email addresses of your guests and friends and invite them by clicking ‘Send Invitations’.

You can also upload a CSV to invite guests. Once uploaded, you will be able to choose the people you want to invite from the list and invitations will be sent only to them (not the entire list).

Another cool tip – incase you want to invite non-registered people from a previous event and do not want to type all their email addresses again…

When you create a new event, go to the same Guest List page and in the drop-down, select ‘Previously Invited non-Activeciti Users‘. This will show you all the email addresses that you had added or invited to your previous events. You can select emails from there, and send the invitations. Its as simple as that !

You can post comments if you want any additional help.

The Story So Far…

Its been a long time since we have blogged. But we have been updating the Activeciti Reviews page regularly. It seems rest of us were bogged down in our work.

So where were we ? What have we been doing ? Whats kept us busy so far ?

Well, the big news in past months was that we launched a service for professional event management : Eventazoo. Its not open to public; we have kept it on entry-by-request basis. It is our second product in event-management space and first in our plan to launch a series of professional event management services. More details will be put in later posts.

Second, we are now delivering the same quality that goes into our products for our clients. We help them get their product to the launch stage, right from the conceptual stage. It gives us great pleasure to see business value being created for the client, all thanks to the efforts of our team. And in these efforts, it is our constant endeavor to improve our processes and quality of work.

One such client is Im In TV.  Im In TV is the business networking site for the TV industry. Users of this site can showcase their  talents, post and browse listings,  manage their diary, manage contacts  and recommend them, and also share their  views through a forum.

Third, event management space has evolved since the time we launched Activeciti. Our outlook towards the market has also changed with help of surveys and people who have first-hand knowledge of this domain ( Hence the launch of Eventazoo ) . This has led us to deliver more value to our users of Activeciti and our team has started work on providing minor-but-useful features for them.

Also, as usual, we have been constantly working on errors,fixes & invaluable feedback provided by our Activeciti and Eventazoo users.

We are also in the process of hiring and very soon will be updating our corporate site with more details.

Activeciti Private Beta Release

ActiveCiti Private Beta was released on 8th June, 2007. Everything went smoothly as planned ( except that the company blog was not up ). All users of Activeciti V1 were successfully migrated to the new site, and were notified about the new Activeciti by 11 am.

Since then, we have been getting lots of feedback and suggestions related to ActiveCiti. Many of them liked the fresh and clean UI, some found it a bit confusing. Many users gave valuable suggestions for new features which they would have liked on the site. We thank all of them for their support. It really made the purpose of Private Beta Release successful.

After gathering all this information, and lots of brainstorming — we started our work for the Public Beta Release. We are happy to announce that the Public Beta will be released on 16th July 2007, with lots of changes to the existing UI , coupled with many new features.

I won’t say more, keep watching this space for more updates :)

- Rishi