After a stint in product management at a startup helping several Fortune 1000 companies implement its ‘visionary’ SaaS (Software as a Service) on-demand platform, Sachin Saxena decided to redefine his own course – help new startups. His specialty is in launching software products, but he missed the exhilaration of helping young technology companies realize their potential.
Saxena, now 42, had worked at or consulted for several startups. He has seen several entrepreneurs spend virtually all of their time wrestling with the implications of the accelerating pace of work and life. They try to navigate the turbulent waters of the economy with a business plan that is as sustainable as a raft made of popsicle sticks. “So many startups have great technology but no real go-to-market plan or a strategy,” says Saxena, who wanted to reach out to them. They think, ”We’ve got this cool product, so we can’t fail.” But it takes a lot more than a cool product to build a company.
Moreover this is an age of stiff competition and changing business models, where startups are usually faced with a multitude of challenges to build their new enterprises from ideas on a napkin. Some of the common challenges for startup companies include establishing a product development team, lack of financial support, and overcoming the lack of infrastructure and processes for product development, and an inability to rapidly plug into ancillary, yet critical, technology and go-to-market partners. The challenges faced by established technology companies that are trying to launch a new software product or enter a new market are also similar. Although, unlike startup entrepreneurs, established companies often struggle to competitively launch new products due to slower internal processes and structures.
Building software products is not something new to GlobalLogic. With compounded annual revenue growth averaging at over 90 percent in the past four years and nearly 3,000 employees, the company has been providing software product development services to both startup and established technology companies since 2000. The company offers deep experience across the full product development lifecycle for the following technology domains: mobile, telecom, VoIP, Web 2.0, open source, SaaS, financial, business intelligence, and quality assurance. The company has built up significant credibility realized from helping its clients rapidly launch nearly 1,000 innovative software products over the past seven years. Its new initiative, called GlobalLogic Version 1.0(SM), is to help technology companies address unique challenges they face while engineering and launching their version 1.0 products. Companies planning their version 1.0 products can reach out to GlobalLogic: Version1.0@globallogic.com
The time factor
Four months: That’s the narrow window of opportunity that a would-be Web 2.0 entrepreneur has to transform an idea into an actual product that’s available on the Web, insists Saxena. “Shorter time to market is the biggest advantage that startups have over their competitors,” he explains. “Put simply, it’s four months – or the game is over. If you have an idea but ponder over it for half a year, you might as well forget about it. On the Internet, if you can then you must; because if you don’t, someone else will.”
“You can always get more money, but you can never get more time.” It’s a credo that is repeated frequently by the technology entrepreneurs who partner with GlobalLogic – many of whom gladly give up equity in their companies for the chance to slice weeks or months off their product development and product marketing plans.
An ex-CEO of a public company had an idea that could use ‘social tools’ to provide better job matches for both active and passive job seekers. He had even managed to raise funds leveraging his past business success. He engaged a firm in the U.S. to execute his idea and at the end of six months all he had to show for his effort was a 40-page Microsoft Word document detailing the product specs. He had lost a considerable amount of time during which, to his chagrin, a competing product launch took place. He quickly turned to GlobalLogic and, within a month of partnering, had gotten a working system in place that he could use to invite users to give feedback. “Time waits for none,” insists Saxena. “If you don’t do it now, the opportunity will be gone forever.”
People
What does it take to move that fast to launch a software product? The answer is not mountains of cash or cutting-edge technology. To build a fast startup, says Saxena, you first need to hire people fast. More important than ‘time to market’, he says, is ‘time to hire,’ since the latter will determine the former. “An entrepreneur has only one job: to hire,” Saxena explains. “Starting a company is no longer about raising capital; it’s about raising teams. The single biggest challenge for any startup is finding the right people who can execute on all the different dimensions.”
GlobalLogic’s technology professionals specialize in software product development. Many built their career on software product design, development, and support working at product companies before joining GlobalLogic. The company, with professionals based in the U.S., India, Ukraine, and China, offers a large talent pool across multiple software domains. GlobalLogic’s clients can rapidly plug in to that talent, whether the need is in mobile, Web 2.0, SaaS, open source, financial, or embedded.
“Each product development team, called ‘Velocity Pack’, consists of members who have expertise in playing their positions, but at the same time trained to adjust their plays as the demands and requirements change,” says Saxena who continues, “Passion and adaptability are two important traits required to build a startup. Our approach to product development ensures that each team member takes the ownership for his part.”
Infrastructure
Saxena narrates experiences of several entrepreneurs who during the initial days of their startups focus on details such as phone systems and IT installation and office space and furniture and long-distance carriers – practically everything but the actual business. “For the first few months, entrepreneurs spend way more time than they should, or need to, on administrative activities,” says Saxena. “That time is time away from the more value added activities that an entrepreneur should be focused on. Taking that long will put you out of business.”
In addition to the physical infrastructure, brand new companies have to implement common development ‘infrastructure’, systems such as requirements management, nightly build, testing and deployment systems. The Version 1.0 offering provides access to GlobalLogic’s award winning platform from day zero.
San Francisco-based Stowe Boyd, a ‘parallel entrepreneur’, blogs on social media and how the next generation of people will work. Boyd says that in the next generation, public and private persona will come together into a common stream of work. With this idea in mind, he and two other co-founders based In New York and Grenada raised angel money and set out to build Workstreamr. The three co-founders don’t even have an official office. From day one they did not worry about hiring software developers. “As a startup we wanted to ensure the deterministic use of money we had raised. We also wanted to roll out the product in only a few months time. But setting up the development center, hiring the right software R&D talent, and integrating the team could have been time consuming and risky. As a result, we decided to approach GlobalLogic,” explains Boyd.
Phases
But the real magic begins as entrepreneurs working with GlobalLogic’s Version 1.0 offering get initiated into the Agile development process – GlobalLogic’s philosophy of time, which aims to take entrepreneurs and their ideas through a series of JAD sessions and iterations. “GlobalLogic Velocity™ is an attempt to apply Agile software development methodologies to the chaos of the earliest stage of a startup, and thereby gear toward the rapid launch of a quality product,” says Manish Rathi, Head of GlobalLogic Version 1.0 Delivery. Velocity is GlobalLogic’s open-source based method and platform for working with clients to optimize distributed software.
With time to market and quality being critical to the success of the startup, a well-defined engagement model is a key aspect. “The Version 1.0 engagement model involves six distinct development phases that include business plan and vision, storyboard, visualization, architect and release plan, alpha and beta release and version 1.0 product release,” explains Rathi. The engagement model is conceived keeping in mind the often overlooked elements – usability and branding.
In the first stage, GlobalLogic’s product management and usability experts work with the entrepreneur to clarify his or her business model and craft the product strategy. This period of reflection may sound as if you’re slowing down to go faster. But, according to Saxena it is absolutely critical: “It doesn’t matter how fast you run if you’re not heading toward the finish line.”
All of these discussions and decisions are captured in their Velocity Platform which functions as an electronic whiteboard. This provides their clients and partners with continuous visibility and iterative control. The company works collaboratively with the partners to determine the multiple intermediate milestones (iterations) required to meet a realistic product launch date. By creating a virtual extension of a partner’s operations the company delivers a more familiar and consistent work environment that will facilitate a faster and more efficient product release.
“For every iteration, we agree on a pre-defined set of goals for a weekly or monthly release cycle,” says Rathi.
Short design and conceptualization cycles, short development and release cycles, and ongoing reviews and communications ensure that partners have both the right level of control and the opportunity to correct or stay the course for the product launch.
“Besides, there is room for flexibility in the engagement model. Sometimes when a startup lands a customer or receives funding, it would like to move at a faster pace. Alternatively, it would like to stay steady or cool off”, explains Rathi.
“The real characteristic of the GlobalLogic Version 1.0 offering is in aligning to the partner’s goals and working with them toward their next step,” notes Saxena.
When Workstreamr’s Boyd contracted with GlobalLogic to build the social media site, he knew that they needed a Microsoft Windows-based, downloadable application somewhere in the future. As he started demonstrating the product, some of the early customers expressed a keen interest in such an application to accelerate product adoption.
“So the flexibility had to be there in the team, contract, and process,” explains Saxena.
Partners
There is one more core competence requirement for fast startups: They must pick fast partners. Sure, in a world powered by the Web, partnerships are a crucial asset for success. And there’s a strong temptation – especially for startups, which are eager for credentials and credibility – to partner early on with big-name firms that sound impressive to potential customers and the media. “Even if those companies are going to be your best customers, they won’t move fast enough,” Saxena argues.
So what is the alternative? In the last seven years, GlobalLogic has partnered with 140 emerging and established technology companies around a global product development service model supporting the full product development lifecycle. In an attempt to further reduce time to market, Version 1.0 brings in strong technology and marketing partners with expertise in areas such as SEO and SEM, hosting providers, and other common and reusable components. It is this pool of resource that a Version 1.0 client can look to tap into.
Advisor
Such acceleration would be difficult to achieve without the help of GlobalLogic’s Executive Advisor, comprising of C-level business professionals who are experts in an industry, domain, geography, or in launching new ventures.
The Executive Advisor acts as a sounding board on issues identified by the partners or co-founders. As the product is being built and released into the market, it is the Executive Advisor that will help the company think through the issues that can come up post release. These experienced individuals are at a stage in their professional lives where they look forward to mentoring on a volunteer basis to see young entrepreneurs succeed. The entrepreneur benefits by learning from their experiences and mistakes, thus avoiding the same old mistakes.
Capital
Money drives every business, and it is an important parameter for any company, no matter what stage it is in. GlobalLogic has formal arrangements with several venture capitalists like Sequoia Capital, Draper Atlantic (now New Atlantic Ventures), and NEA, all early investors in GlobalLogic. They, along with other principals at VCs that did not invest in GlobalLogic, including Valhalla Partners, Grotech Capital Group, SAI (China), and WI Harper are strong supporters of the GlobalLogic Version 1.0 offering. All these VCs see Version 1.0 as a valuable deal flow mechanism for themselves. VCs understand that these companies have significant leg-up on the technical side and, partnering with GlobalLogic, potentially 20 to 50 percent reduction in go to market times. This makes the investment more attractive from a pure risk reduction perspective. They scan business plans, and on an ongoing basis provide discussions and appropriate levels of funding based on the merit of the business. Startup business is inherently risky. By having these experts review the business plans, GlobalLogic is able to select companies with business plans that have a higher probability to succeed.
GlobalLogic has been at the forefront in recognizing that the changing ‘fabless’ business model of a startup requires a different delivery mechanism. The company made a decision to launch Version 1.0, helping software startups fill in the gaps by acting as head of engineering and, in some cases, as chief technology officer for these companies. They have carefully planned and built the necessary ecosystem, enabling young companies and entrepreneurs to fulfill their dream to create the next big thing.
