Where are the Indian software product startups?
Ever since we organized DelhiBarcamp, I have been asked this question many times over– ‘what made you all think of organizing an event like this, in a place like Delhi?’
Well, the answer to this question is obviously a no-brainer. For, BarCamps (anywhere) are a great way for the tech community to learn from the experience of others in a shared and unrestricted manner.
However speaking for myself, I can say that I was motivated by a selfish self-interest as well. For, I head a small software product development team at Uzanto. I have previously attended events organized by Nasscom & TiE but those events typically are dominated by the mid & large sized tech companies. They don’t capture or reflect the aspirations/concerns of the small tech/startup community. And so, I had hoped that BarCamps would provide me an opportunity to discover and meet lots of other (similar) software product startups.
I have had the opportunity to attend three BarCamps in the last couple of months (Bangalore & Chennai apart from Delhi). Their collective experience makes me feel that such events (given their inherent character) are an excellent platform for startups to showcase their products. Or demo early stage prototypes of their future products (an informal way of getting feedback from the market). They can also be used as an occasion to soft-launch new products (this actually did happen- at DelhiBarCamp with mytoday.com and at ChennaiBarCamp with TaaZZa)
However, what I found about Indian product startups certainly leaves a lot to be desired. For if the BarCamp experience is anything to go by, it reiterates the belief that the software product development community in India is still at a very nascent stage and we have a lonnngggg way to go before, we can boast of a thriving eco-system that churns out innovative world-class software products at a consistent pace.
To substantiate my point, let me throw some numbers at you :
- DelhiBarCamp had about 75 participants. The majority of them were startup entrepreneurs while the other big chunk of participants were software developers (working in mid/large sized software companies). Overall, I can recall 5 presentations that can possibly qualify as coming from software product startups (I’m not including one product from a purely US based company).
- The Chennai event had about 65 participants– again, primarily entrepreneurs apart from a few software developers (there was also some representation from VCs). There were five presentations from software product startups (excluding ones that I have already counted in Delhi).
- The Bangalore event was as expected, the biggest of them all, with about 125 participants. One would expect the largest number of product companies to be based out of Bangalore. However their actual turnout at the event left me quite disappointed (in fact somewhat puzzled). The vast majority of participants were the developer/engineers, working in the big software companies. I can recall just two product presentations (unduplicated from earlier BarCamps at Delhi & Chennai)
- MumbaiBarCamp is scheduled for the 13th of this month; I quickly glanced through the list of the scheduled presentations and was able to spot just one product presentation (unduplicated from the earlier BarCamps at Delhi, Chennai & Bangalore)
So across four cities, we are talking of less than 15 products (actually 13). Even amongst these 13, a few are not strictly software products, rather they are internet based services. This is certainly not a very encouraging picture and doesn’t portend well for India’s aspirations as a future IT/software giant.
A few disclaimers for the above estimate (that could actually make the numbers seem a trifle more respectable)
- Its possible that some startups simply didn’t turn up; either they didn’t know of the event or knew about it but decided against being there. I can think of at least 3-4 startups who I expected to be present at the event but was surprised not to find them there.
- Its entirely possible that some people are either at an early stage or in the stealth mode and hence not unforthcoming with their ventures at this stage. I can recall bumping into some 4-5 such cases that I came across personally.
- Its also possible that my networking skills still need a lot of polishing and I was simply blind to some people who were present but escaped my scrutiny. While I’m not too sure of that but for arguments sake, you can assume this and plug in your own (reasonable) numbers here.
Even with those numbers, we are possibly taking about a figure in the range of 20-30. Surely we need product companies in much larger numbers if we are to create the next Skype or Flickr out of India.
The reason for my lamenting the lack of a healthy eco-system of product startups in India is surely not missed out on tech enthusiasts. Products are a measure of intellectual capability, innovativeness and the entrepreneurial risk taking ability. Unless, we create some big success stories out of Indian software products (specially in the mass market consumer software space), we shall continue to be treated as code monkeys, whose only claim to fame is a time-barred labor cost arbitrage based competitive advantage.
36 comments
Atleast for the delhi barcamp which i attended the focus was mostly Web 2.0 startups. The company that I am affiliated with (an IIT telecom startup) didnt showcase just because we expected it to be mostly Web 2.0 kind of stuff.
However, even if we just consider the Web 2.0 space, I didnt find any ‘real’ big innovation happenning with most of the stuff displayed being ‘1-month’ hacks like mytoday.
I think there is a serious lack of innovation . Most of the talented engineers cabable of spawing leave to the US and either flourish there or simple work for a big company . I think India will never make it as software product hub and will only be a software service provider .
Neeraj,
Don’t recall bumping into you at the Delhi event ..really wished you would had made use of barcamp to showcase your product…your point about 1 month hacks is quite true. While nobody holds anything against them, obviously they are not products in the true sense.
amit
Amit:
Very true. I think the product focus is just starting to emerge, but as you say we have a long way to go.
I am not surprised that telecom, enterprise software and such other startups are not showing up at barcamp. Either they don’t know about the event or don’t see the value. Realistically speaking, if you are selling to, say, the 500 odd GSM carriers globally, the ROI from barcamp or a similar event is not justifiable to a startup for whom time is money. However, if you are working on a web services play then barcamp offers a great venue to introduce your service and get feedback.
With regards to the 1-month hacks comment by Neeraj, I partly agree with him and partly disagree. A 1-month hack without a vision of the market potential and the business model is probably questionable. But Flickr, delicious, craigslist can also qualify as 1-month hacks in their first year. So we should probably view the 2.0 startups in light of this.
We’ll be presenting on “india 2.0: towards better web services and simpler user experiences” at barcamp Mumbai, though I am yet to add to the wiki. We’ll mainly cover our india-centric web services, as that might be most interesting to the audience.
What I was trying to get at was that atleast the Delhi BarCamp was touted as being a web 2.0 focussed event …the theme was “Next Generation Internet: Web 2.0, mobile computing, and other cool stuff” … which is partly why you saw very few new products.
To get a real picture of all the product dev. happenning we need to broaden the theme of barcamps to include all Indian software products and publicise the same…or maybe multiple barcamps targetting different domains.
I would slightly disagree with Vaibhav on the ROI thing. One big value I see in barcamp is getting your cool products vetted by other peers who are in the know of technology. This helps develop the ‘cool’ and ‘high-tech’ image of your company which has a direct impact on hiring. I have been doing a lot of hiring for dev. positions lately and it is increasingly becoming difficult to get the top talent required to make world class products. Barcamp gives you a good oppurtunity to connect to your future employees and demonstrate the stuff that you are building..also I think a good and well received product demo means a lot of publicity in the blogosphere .. which i guess is a lot more ROI.
Neeraj, good point on the hiring aspect. I totally missed that.
Also you can definitely get a good spike with publicity in the blogosphere, but unless the blogosphere is your customers too, that spike/publicity can soon die down as seen from a number of plays here in the Valley.
[..] Amit laments the absence of high quality technology start ups at the recent BarCamps in India. However, I found his post to be an excellent overview of what happened at the various camps and how the various cities fare against each other [..]
Neeraj,
Delhi barcamp might have come across as being web2.0 focussed but that was circumstantial; in fact, before the event, we were unsure of even twenty people turning up at the venue, hence we thought ‘ lets make it as broad based as possible and throw in some buzzwords like web2.0, mobile computing et al’
You’re right in pointing out that many product segments possibly went unrepresented - like mobile, telecom , enterprise software etc. But I feel that whatever be your domain, if your market is in the consumer mass market segment, the barcamp was a good oppurtunity (even for something like enterprise software, since that itself is moving towards the web services oriented SAAS model like salesforce.com)
On the hiring issue, I totally agree - hiring good guys for startups is an absolute pain; and the worst part of it is that you don’t realise this earlier. When you are planning for a startup, you get worried about your product, about business models, about revenue extraction, funding etc. But the ground realities are different. The above problems are much higher level bottlenecks; first you have to contend with the fact that in India, good people don’t want to work for startups and for making a good product, you can’t do without good people.
…I wanna startup…
…But nobody showsup…
…If somebody showsup…
…I can startup…
… and so it goes “good people don’t want to work for startups and for making a good product, you can’t do without good people.”
Nag @
Startups.in
Pardon me for making a generalized point. But I see this more as a pattern - Other factors withstanding, most of us (Indians) dont want to leave our comfort zones and push ourselves to realize our intellect and innovative ideas. Hence not many people come forward to work for start-ups nor the start-ups go all out for product development.
I hope this soon turns out to be a flawed thinking.
Hi
I didnt even know something like this existed, we are working with a few people and startups to get them of the ground, as advisors etc etc, but are looking at holding a seminar in delhi for startups, i.e howto get from 0 to 5 in a day.
If there are other barcamps how do i get to know about them, I have built a few good startups in my life, one even in india, which i am sure a few people know about (Net4india aka net4domains)…hence can provide a few pointers here and there
Iqbal
E: iqbalgandham at yahoo dot co dot uk
Hi Iqbal,
Thanks for stopping by at my blog.
Events like Barcamp are of very recent origin in India. We organised the first barcamp in India (and Asia) in March and it was a big hit; this soon triggered off other events Barcamps in Bangalore, Chennai, Mumbai, Hyderabad; the Pune barcamp is happening tomorrow. While we were planning for the Delhi event, we were quite unsure about the response, but it went off like a bomb ; it left everybody (including us ) very, very surprised.
A event in Delhi for startups sounds interesting ; by now I have built some contacts and references in Delhi, so if I could help in any way , let me know.
I have heard of net4india before though not in detail ….
cheers
amit ranjan
Hi Amit
net4india/net4domains was started way back in 1999, by a couple of people, the rest is a little boring hence wont clog up the board with details.
All in all way back then dotcoms were coming out of the woodwork as they are once again not only in India but also abroad. The cycle repeats itself, these days we have sites like pageflakes, in those days we used cgi scripts with lynx to grep in pages , strip out html and display the news on ur site.
All in all the same things, with the same problems, good /great ideas, bad teams, no money (well its hidden very well). The money usually goes to existing bug name players, I recall we were up against the likes of satyam, wipro etc, all who wanted in on the Internet business.
We went through boom, bust big hires, large layoffs, the complete circle…but innovation was the key backed by awesome sales teams….it always comes down to the people….always
Iqbal
Does anybody have some details of trends among internet surfers?
thanks
Sorry I meant indian internet surfers?
Thanks
Hi Amit,
I am a developer having sme exper in Web development. But I want to be an entrepreneur and take Indian S/W industry to greater heights. I have convinced a couple of my college grads who have a gr8 exper in the industry but its a varied domain exper. I am not sure from where to start at. Pl suggest what domain I can proceed.
Do consider that initially I need to generate revenue from fast-paced projects. 2yrs down the line I intend to migrate to Bangalore with a
top-notch infra and 500+ techies.
Waiting for your reply.
HI ,
Could some list Startups in delhi.. I have 2 yrs of IT exp and wish to join Startups in NCr region ?
Pls mail me at kapil.dalwani123@gmail.com
Dear Amit,
I am a consultant from Manpower Services,Delhi.
I am looking for product based start ups in Delhi/NCR.
Can you help me out with that.
Regards,
Ratesh
9910173830
Hi Guys,
I am from Hyderabad and me and a few of my freinds are on the verge of starting a new software services company. But now after reading this article and a few more i defintiely do believe that there is a lot of scope for product based companies.
Hence would definitely would like to play a role in this field and would request you guys to keep me in loop for any of the future meetings that you have.
Regards,
Deepak
[…] In the end, just to give the Indian context - I would like to point out two posts one by Amit (His experiences from Barcamps in India) and another by Savitri Kini (compares Bangalore and Silicon Valley) […]
hi
I want more and more people to go with services company first and then should trigger them to be a product development company.
Could anyone please tell me why there is lack of creative/Innovative IT work in indian software companies.?I m not saying that Indian service based companies lack skills in creating a quality Product.
But what i am always surprised that having such a large pool of talent why we are not able to create our own Operating system like windows or linux or why we r not able to create search engine like Google,yahoo.. ?
nor even we have created a programming language (Java created by sun micro/ dot net by micorsoft) Instead of working on backoffice work we should create our own brands like Microsoft,Google,Sun Micro,Microsoft..
I really don’t know where we lack exactly. Since India posses such a large pool of talent can we be able to have next Bill Gates here in India ?
Can some one help me on these lines regarding startup in India…
The current scenario in India?
Driving factors behind startups?
Issuse & challenges faced?
The scene is no different than when I started up three years back. I ll tell you what i think is the problem.
A - Most of the talented people you are talking about aren’t necessarily the most creative ones. A product, as you must know, germinates from an idea. An inventor is hardly ever the class topper.
B - An Infosys or such cannot focus on product innovation, they have hired a huge number of people to go into gestation (I feel it is just a man-hr business).
C - Some people who started off as individual / independant solution providers have given up and moved to more “serious careers” at Infosys etc.. (I know a couple of people in this case).
And I wouldn’t consider ‘flickr’ as a product hey but that is just my 35 cents to the above 100$ (rates have come down).
I think the reason behind the indian IT companies not going into the product development space:
1. Most of these companies started of to take advantage of the cost advantage low cost destination like india offered. The idea picked up (may be beyond their expectation) and soon they saw unprecedented growth.
2. They never thought of innovation as a tool for growth partly because they could scale up fast and continue the high growth path without much trouble.
I expect the scene to change in the near future because the growth story is now reaching a plateau and the companies have to look forward to innovation as tool for growth.
In essence indian companies did not get into product development because they could get away with it, with changing times i expect to see more products / innovations coming from india
Hemant
Quick Heal (ant-virus) is a truely successful Indian software product from Quick Heal Technologies (P) Ltd, Pune (www.quickheal.co.in).
.
Amit,
Startup Saturdays (www.startupsaturday.com) have just started happening in Delhi. They have been happening in Bangalore for about an year now.
You guys have grown leaps and bounds since you wrote this article. But if you still this pain point, then Startup Saturdays are a good place to find similar like minded people!
Best,
Amit Singh
Folks,
I share your pains in seeing not enough start-ups in India. Part of blame goes in our culture of having stable job after college. While I was doing my masters in US, I came across entrepreneurial spirit in much greater proportion. Infact, in west colleges its close 100%. Nevertheless, i ideally aspired to work with a indian software company and try to tap US market. The key for product development is knowing your market. With right people across countries, i think this would be possible. Today, software has no boundaries, however, we still depend on trends in US market as the technology is developed here. Also, as a product company you need partners and alliances and most of those companies happen to be in US. We need to keep market in perspective and invest in building satellite offices in US/Europe so that we could globally market the product.
I know that this could be different depend on product / service, but I am just passing a general statement which may not be applicable to every situation.
Well, another thing i came across in business college was teaming with engineering. Well, there are lots of events and competitions held where you get to team with engineering counterparts and help come up with a plan. These events are also carried at professional level in various cities. Also, check out the concept of Y-Combinator which gives seed capital to get you started. Getting started in the key for entrepreneurship. Many people i know just kept on thinking but never took any action.
Hopefully, we will get there someday. Your feedback more than welcome.
Hi Let me know if their are any starup openings in Delhi. I am ccurrently workign as a QC guy(1.5 year) in a Mid-level in Software comopany but now fed-up with it. I am looking for oppurtunities in C++ /Sql startups but ready to go for other languages also.
Please please help me out.
Regards,
Lalit
After working for a sillicon valley startup for 5 years in US, I recently came back to India. Have to say I am really disappointed with lack of activity in startup space here. I cant seems to have the same fun working with a big company now. When I look around, I see few startups and most of them are web 2.0 startups. Web 2.0 startups are fine as they are catalyst in fulfilling the potential of Internet but where are other serious product companies? Where are high availability companies? Where are virtualization companies? Where are cloud infrastructure companies?
There are so many problems remained to be solved in serious tech and I am looking out to be part of such companies. Will keep searching until I find one.
No Risk No gain
so take risk
but Indian big s/w company doesn’t want to take risk like infy and tcs.
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Hi, nice to read this online. However, as an entrepreneur, I would like to say that technology and products are not important for business but only a part of the game. Having said that I understand that your focus is on technology and you did not start this forum for business ideas. I feel India will never become a software giant but Indians certainly will contribute to US becoming a software giant that it already is. The reason for this being Indians are not taught to think in school but are encouraged to mug up stuff. This dulls their powers to innovate and visualise. Even in law class I was told to mug up the answers and reproduce them in the exam. At the same time, I believe when internet penetration will increase to more than 80 per cent in India, we shall suddenly in three months time, become a software giant.
Call it an
Hi Friends ! Call it an INTERESTING IT STARTUP or a Pureplay Sales Driven, Revenue & Number Centric Technology company with a Non VC centric business model..We got started in Chennai on November 11, 2009, 5 weeks & we have managed to get 10 odd US client contracts & Revenue, almost 25 new US client opprotunities in pipeline & working on many more..& We started all this with an Investment of 2500 USD..with practically no Domain Knowledge, a medicore but work centric team in place. We claim to be a domain independent company & so far have managed to get client contracts & attention in Web 2.0 , Cold fusion, EDI, Saas & so on. We are getting ambitious to put up a team of atleast 50 billable developers in first 6 months . Each day we come across a new US client with an innovative product & we help them build those products..All this without even having our website in place becuase we are confused about the content & yes ,direction. What amazes us more is the confidence of these US clients in us wherein they talk more about delivery models, real time working & communication mishaps. My ignorance about prodcut based startups in India ,at times ,makes me feel depressed & We are still trying to solve the puzzle of How a VC validates a business idea for funding . we decided to put a monthly update in this forum about how we are achieving min 100% month to month growth in the first year & will seek your inputs & valubale time to take this to a new level. Thanks
I want to start a company in Services domain and then want to go for product developments. And I am looking for clients , in case you have any good website or idea to get clients then please let me know on donmil75@gmail.com. I am also looking for good team members. Let’s catch up some time.
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