Ideas|Products|Startups|VCs

RBI has allowed Paypal to facilitate transactions in India, user can withdraw from Indian banks who uses Paypal to sell products/services. RBI has earlier suspended Paypal operations since Paypal needed specific approvals to allow personal inward remittances to India.

The Payment and Settlement Systems Act, 2007 stipulates that no person other than the RBI, shall commence or operate a payment system, except with an authorization issued by the RBI under the provisions of the Act.

Paypal agreed to RBI rules and regulations and as per new guidelines exporters need to fill out new ‘Export Code’ when they request a withdrawal. An Importer Exporter Code (IEC) is allotted to exporters in India after they provide detailed information on their businesses, including their income tax identification number.

What is an IEC?

IEC Code is unique 10 digit code issued by DGFT – Director General of Foreign Trade , Ministry of Commerce, Government of India to Indian Companies. IEC Code is mandatory. No person or entity shall make any Import or Export without IEC Code Number.

The online IEC application form can be downloaded from here iec-form.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

vcBytes – Congratulates!! Sachin

Well while we talk about money, budgets and economy, there is a start up named Sachin Tendular where Ramakanat Achrekar invested in to groom up and today it’s a multi million dollar single person start up. Congrats to Sachin Tendulkar.
Across all we liked what – Times Magazine has put together, and here is how”

When Sachin Tendulkar travelled to Pakistan to face one of the finest bowling attacks ever assembled in cricket, Michael Schumacher was yet to race a F1 car, Lance Armstrong had never been to the Tour de France, Diego Maradona was still the captain of a world champion Argentina team, Pete Sampras had never won a Grand Slam.

When Tendulkar embarked on a glorious career taming Imran and company, Roger Federer was a name unheard of; Lionel Messi was in his nappies, Usain Bolt was an unknown kid in the Jamaican backwaters. The Berlin Wall was still intact, USSR was one big, big country, Dr Manmohan Singh was yet to “open” the Nehruvian economy.

It seems while Time was having his toll on every individual on the face of this planet, he excused one man. Time stands frozen in front of Sachin Tendulkar. We have had champions, we have had legends, but we have never had another Sachin Tendulkar and we never will.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

Its official – Morpheus Venture Partners is no more.  After two years of successful operations MVP has emerged in a new avatar – The Morpheus (www.themorpheus.com).

Cross selling is an attempt to sell additional products to current customers to whatever they are already buying. It can be as simple as the bar tender asking if you want peanuts masala  to go with your drinks.

How to adopt Cross Selling

• Own its own - Many cross-selling opportunities arise naturally. If you are selling tennis racquets, for example, you can also offer a bag, balls. To gain the extra sale, you might simply have to mention that the other products or services are available.
• Be relevant – If you overload customers with too many unrelated cross-selling suggestions, you may blow it. Offering balls with tennis racquet is certainly a good fit. But if your attempts to cross-sell are not closely related to the original purchase, they are far less likely to succeed. The figure represents a bad cross selling.

Read the rest of this entry »

What are the most important things that investors look for before investing in a start-up? What separates rejects from stars? Here are seven characteristics most venture capital investors look for in a promising venture.

A Proprietary Product, System, Method or Approach

Investors look for surefire indications that the firms they are investing in have a leg up on competitors. While patents, trademarks, copyrights and other trade secrets do not guarantee success, many successful ventures enjoy one or more of these advantages.

A Large Potential Market

What good is a great product or service if the potential market is too limited? In a relatively small market, a venture might have to capture the entire market to be profitable. Most investors look for ventures that operate in markets large enough to result in significant revenues and profits. Large sustainable profits usually lead to greater enterprise value.

Customer Acceptance

Nothing is more convincing than a rapidly growing base of satisfied customers. Well-written business plans, multiple patents and spectacular Power Point presentations are great, but early rapid product acceptance is where the metal meets the road.

Read the rest of this entry »

Do’s:

1. Understand the product through demos, product manual, specs.

2 Understand the clients- why they buy your product, how they use the product, how much they pay for it, list of enhancements they have asked.

3 Interact with product engineering, sales n presales, customer support team to understand what they think about the product.

4 Assess the competitor offering in the same space

Dont’s:

1. Drive any product release within the 1st month.

2. Don’t commit on any new features to the clients.

What have you done in first 30days in new job? share your views here.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

ApnaCircle, social and career networking site has been acquired by French Networking site Viadeo. Interestingly Apnacircle is the 2nd company of Sabeer Bhatia which has been acquired, 1st being the Hotmail which Microsoft acquired at a whopping rate of $400M. ApnaCircle was launched in 2007 and in 2009 Private Treaties, the investment arm of the BCCL Group had picked up a minority stake in ApnaCircle.

Interestingly Apnacircle has 350,000 registered users and traction wasn’t that great. Wondering whats the rationale behind this acquisition and there are much better players in this space.  Right above is the snapshot of traction at Apna Circle.

 -Hitesh, vcBytes.com

SimplyBooks is an online bookstore joining the bandwagon in this crowded market. Simplybooks is a startup based  out of NCR region and currently in Beta stage. It is all set to make a dent in the market share of Flipkart the leader in this space.

Simplybooks have 44 main categories and 638 sub categories and altogether they claim to have 10k books in their(suppliers) inventory. Simplybooks pricing is highly competitive and majority of their books they have priced it lesser than Flipkart. For instance book ” You can sell” by Shiv Khera is priced Rs.134 at Simplybooks, while flipkart charges Rs.146. Just now i ordered a book ” I bought the Monk’s Ferrari” by Ravi Subramanian and i paid Rs.165 to Simplybooks while selling price for the same book at Flipkart is Rs.172

Simplybooks delivery time is 7-10 working days which is quite high and its quite unacceptable to users who are not very price sensitive. Simplybooks checkout process is little tedious and user gets to know the delivery time after the checkout. They need to bring down the delivery time since 3-4 working days has become the benchmark for online bookstores operating in India. They need to improve the Search functionality and make site user friendly. It takes 3 clicks to search the author

Brownie Points – Simplybooks besides books also sells CDs & magazines. They have rewards program in place called e-Points,  I eared 4 points by purchasing 1 book.

Share your views on this startup and do try them out.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

Ticketvala, online bus ticketing playform provider has been acquired by MakeMyTrip (MMT). MMT and Ticketvala both have not disclosed the acquisition amount. Ticketvala started its operation in mid 2006 and raised $2M in 2007 from Bangalore based Footprint Ventures. Ticketvala created a big buzz when it claimed to sold above 1 million tickets in 2008.

Ticketvala, part of Travis Internet Pvt. Ltd besides booking tickets online to end users provides booking terminal to travel agents and significant revenue is generated through their agent terminal, in short its a GDS for bus.  Ticketvala possess huge bus inventory, large number of tie ups with Bus operators and covers thousands of routes in India. Ticketvala users are mainly from north and western region of India.

Redbus is now the sole player left out in the Bus OTA and they have been giving stiff competition to Ticketvala. Anyone eyeing Redbus?

So why MMT acquired ticketvala, possible reasons could be -

• Ticketvala will provide MMT a GDS for bus which was missing in their portfolio.
• Bus tickets is a mass market with huge volume and commission/markup is high when compared to air and train tickets, on an average Bus OTA gets Rs.50 per ticket worth Rs.300
• More penetration for MMT in tier 2 and tier 3 cities through ticketvala agent terminal and it provides an opportunity for them to cross sell their Air ticketing terminal.

Lebooks is one more online bookstore joining the bandwagon in this crowded market. Lebooks started by 2 IIM graduates is based out of Delhi and is a part of LePlaza Retail Pvt. Ltd.  Lebooks is all geared up to challenge the supremacy of Flipkart, currently the undisputed leader in this online bookstore space.

Lebooks prices are very competitive but pricing cannot be only parameter defining the success in this business, user looks for rich content i.e collection of books, delivery time, website usability. If i compare Lebook’s pricing with Flipkart some books are cheap while some are priced marginally high. for e.g “The loudest firecracker” is priced at Rs.174 and flipkart charges Rs.177 for the same book while Chetan Bhagat’s “Five point someone” costs Rs.83 at lebboks, Rs.80 is the selling price at Flipkart. To avail free shipping user needs to buy books worth Rs.150 while Flipkart’s free shipping threshold amount is Rs. 100. Lebooks levies Rs 20 as shipping charge while Flipkart charges Rs 30 if bill value hasn’t met free shipping criteria.

What impressed me is Lebooks follow up, i deliberately dropped out from their checkout page and within 2 hours i got a mail enquiring if i had any trouble with payment gateway or website’s order mechanism. I exercised this flow in other online bookstore including Flipkart but never got any mail.

Let’s wait & watch this space to see the winner in this online bookstore space.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com