14 Sutras for Startups

1. Have a profound understanding of the market, not necessarily technology.

2. Build a good “Team”, if you can’t find a partner, either there is some problem with “you” or your idea

3. Don’t start a business plan, get to it.

4. Tell me the problem you can solve, not the solution you have developed.

5. While sharing info on your incubate product, tell people what you do and not how you do it.

6. VC’s will always look at three aspects, Is there a market for the idea?, How much money will this make? and most importantly can this people deliver?

7. People don’t leave companies, they leave managers.

8. Always be stubborn about vision, but flexible about execution.

9. Never make a solution that’s looking for a problem.

10. Pretend to be a user of your product, empathise, empathise and empathise.

11. Users might not always be your customers, meaning people who pay for the product may be different from those who use it.

12. The only question that a Business Model needs to answer is “How will you make money?”

13. Positioning is simple – “Help me store you in my brain”

14. Don’t expect the channel to sell, you as a company need to sell and push it to channel partners for execution.

Sharepoint 2007 (MOSS) object model

Implementing Scrum

Scrum in 10 minutes

SaaS Business Model

As SaaS ISVs (Independent Software Vendor) no longer rely upon large software licence payments, ISV has to compensate by repidly building subscription revenue:

SaaS Revenue = NU*PM = NU*(MS*NM)

NU= Number of end users

PM= Pricing model

MS= Monthly subscription

NM= Number of months

Variety of SaaS pricing models:

• Number of users
• Concurrent users
• Fee per company
• per period
• Fee per branch (per business entity)
• Fee per country
• Fee per transaction
• Fee per bandhwidth
• Fee per storeage
• Fee per Data volume
  

Specific functionality that must be present in a SaaS application

• Pricing engine
• Billing engine
• Payment processing
• Tenant management
• Subscription management
• Service provisioning
• Usage monitoring
• Performance monitoring
• Subscriber management

Skill set to build and operating SaaS

Skills for building SaaS:

1) Data Architecture
2) Infrasturcture Architecture
3) Product management
4) Scrum, Agile
5) Web/RAI design
6) Testing

Skills for operating SaaS:

1) Infrastructure management
2) Marketing and sales
3) Performance monitoring
4) Customer service and tech support

Bessemer 5 Cs of SaaS Finance

Bessemer 5 Cs of SaaS Finance

View more OpenOffice presentations from Philippe Botteri.

What is SaaS?

For enduser:

Renting software(s) with very less cost, no maintanance, no depreciation.

Uses:

- Low costs
- No Hardware
- No Software purchase and updates
- No Support staff
- Easy setup
- Access from anywhere
- Unsubscribe anytime
- No Administration


For software companies:

Creating a reusable service model.