Tag Archives: edocr.com

Recruitment II – Early Observations of Sri Lankan IT Market

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Idea Stage

Having made the decision to build our product development centre in Sri Lanka starting with employing the first senior PHP and Drupal Developer, I thought it might be useful in capturing my experience so far, at least for my own reference. In my previous post, I spoke about the challenges we face at edocr.com due to lack of development resources. By March 2011, I decided to park my attempts to bring on board a technical co-founder on equity and concentrate on recruiting a developer from Sri Lanka.

Friendly Recommendations

The process started by inquiring from few Sri Lankan friends whether I could hire a senior developer for the monthly budget I had in mine. Whilst the budget was not high enough to attract the very best, the feedback was, it was sufficient to attract good developers. In April 2011, a Sri Lankan friend highly recommended an ex-employee, and I entered into the interviewing process previously discussed. The interview came to an end, when the applicant refused to work during rain due to the fear of possible lightning strikes.

Unexpected Threat

Now, who would have thought “rain” would be a critical factor in recruitment. At this point, I consulted Guy Fraser, CEO of Techcelerate Member, Adaptavist.com, who has been recruiting staff from across the world successfully to learn few more peculiarities of hiring from abroad. In Sri Lanka, it rains none stop during the monsoon season. I simply cannot have staff not completing their work load every time it rains. Whilst the applicant promised to work extra time on sunny days to cover for lost time due to rain, I knew this would lead to poor employer-employee relationships, and therefore not something I was prepared to go ahead with. At this point, I started to enquire from my Sri Lankan friends to understand whether this is the norm in Sri Lanka. And it seems, quite a number of people who worked from their homes would simply stop working during heavy rains. However, this is not a problem for those who work from offices due to surge protectors installed in high-rise buildings. Those who are brave to work during rain from their homes, already had access to a laptop, a UPS and surge protector. 

Advertising

On 2nd May 2011, I advertised on the most popular job board in Sri Lanka, topjobs.lk for 14-day period. At the mid way point, I have received 30 CVs. All have been rejected due to lack of sufficient experience, except for 2. Most of those rejected were from those with less than 1 year experience or those who will graduate in this Summer. They have also adopted a shotgun approach, i.e. just sending the CV without a single word in the covering email. Not the best way to attract a job. Instead of ignoring, I replied to each one of the CVs I received, in some cases with feedback.

Opportunists

At this point, I realised that I cannot simply rely on topjobs.lk to produce the candidates I require. I started to look for talent through Linkedin with the support of Twitter and Facebook. Soon I realised that Sri Lankan developers are becoming business owners whilst been employed, i.e. most of them work for the local branch of an overseas company, in most cases headed by a Sri Lankan, and then during non working hours, they are either freelancing or running their own web development agency.

The problem this creates for me is that they are contend with their current predicament. The day job gives the security they require whilst the evening projects generate enough revenues to give them a better lifestyle. Of course, not everyone falls into this category. The large recruiters such as Virtusa pays higher salaries and attract the best in the market. They as well as other leading firms recruit direct from the universities, targeting the best raw talent and then mold them into the type of employee that is suited for large Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) contracts. Who wouldn’t want to have their CV littered with names of blue chips, such as BT, etc? Having sucked up the top talent, then the smaller companies compete for the second best.

Building brand awareness

In these circumstances, we almost have no chance of attracting the right talent for us without building brand awareness in the local market. With this in mind, we signed for 12 months co-sponsorship of Refresh Colombo, an initiative similar to early days of GeekUp in the North West of UK.

Tech Startups in Sri Lanka

Whilst we are competing with BPO companies and traditional software houses in Sri Lanka, there is a small number of tech startups that seek similar talent to us. At this end, I have discovered Curdbee.com, Creatly.com and WSO2. Both Curdbee and Creatly CEOs have helped me understand the market bit better.

Educational Institutions

I also discovered during this process that one of the leading education institutions is founded by a business contact I have known for a while. And most of the rookies who applied with a shotgun approach came from this Institution. A quick email resulted in a long conversation with his son who runs their operations from the UK. He was kind enough to further explain how the recruitment process works in Sri Lanka.

Way forward

Based on various advice received, the way forward for us in Sri Lanka might be to recruit a senior developer on part-time basis in addition to recruiting a young graduate on full time basis. Ideally, I am still looking for the right candidate on full time basis. But whilst I look for the ideal, the clock is ticking, which is not something we can take a risk on. I will report back in couple of weeks to share my experiences.

Of course, as usual, love to hear your experience of recruiting overseas labour, and especially from Sri Lanka.

Image taken from http://www.therethink-group.com

Overcoming challenges

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At edocr.com, we never had it easy! I have changed teams many times over the last 4 yrs. At the beginning, I had a great team, but due to various issues, the team under performed. Then there was a period of about 15 months where no real development took place. In 2008, I outsourced complete development to an Indian company. This relationship also came to an end in 2010. Since then I courted with two individuals. These relationships ended well before they got going.

Not ready to give up, once again, outsourcing looked promising. But having to work through project managers and detailed specifications continued to put me off. So I have decided to try a new tact, employment, but with a twist!

So what is the twist? I want to make sure this falls inline with our long term strategy, which is to build a strong in-house team. I also want to ensure this strategy does not result in hire and fire if our finances dry up. With this in mind, I have started to seek a developer from abroad, starting from Sri Lanka.

image from http://www.entrepreneurs-journey.com

Having thought about this in great depth, I cannot wonder why it took me this long to try this out. So how do you proceed with recruiting an overseas developer as your first employee? I was planning to try a job board recommended by a friend, which would have been a long drawn out process. In the meantime, another friend suggested an ex-employee, whom he put me in touch with. But how do you make sure s/he is the right fit for your startup?

This is the process I have devised:

  1. Email interview – questions and answers
  2. Skye interview – strengthen the email discussions
  3. In person interview with a friend who happens to lead a software development company
  4. Develop a mini module and test it for quality of coding and speed of delivery

Then a three months probation period on full salary. What I am not sure at this stage is about the international labour laws. I was not going to blog about this, but my friend, Joel Gascoigne of Buffer twisted my arm, so here I am sharing my current challenges, once again!

I love to hear your experience of hiring overseas developers as employees, to work from their country of residence.

 

What can you do today with edocr.com?

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To help our customers maximise the use of edocr.com, I am in the process of preparing a check list. The key question asked here is what can you do with edocr.com today (not tomorrow!)?

  1. Create your account
  2. Claim and update your company profile – at this point, you become a customer of edocr.com under edocr Essential or edocr Managed pricing plans
  3. Manage employee accounts by adding/removing accounts to company profile
  4. Upload documents
  5. Distribute documents
  6. Interact with documents
  7. Join Groups
  8. Run marketing campaigns
  9. Respond to prospects
  10. Use API for auto publishing where it makes sense
  11. Use support desk in regular basis
  12. Training
  13. Maintenance
  14. Reports and ROI – at present this is limited to total no. of views

Value proposition of edocr.com has two strands, these being:

  1. Exposure through documents across the Internet
  2. Sales lead generation through documents

Currently, sales leads generation occurs when a prospect contacts a publisher. We are in the process of building functionality that will allow greater intelligence for publishers to the extent, where consent is given, sales leads containing email addresses are released.

Forthcoming functionality will provide greater control on how documents are published as well as how they are accessed.

Salesforce.com Integration Options

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Sales leads – new revenues for you!

It probably does not come as a surprise to those who are misfortunate enough to follow my tweets, that we, at edocr.com have embarked on a major programme to deliver real measurable value to an existing asset you have, but probably was never trully aware of its full potential until now. Yes! we are speaking about the documents (pdfs) you produce daily, weekly, monthly and/or annually to communicate with prospects, customers, suppliers, shareholders, government, authorities, and anyone else that you need to communicate with, without dilvulging confidential information.

Among these documents are the traditional sales and marketing collateral, but there are other documents produced for operational and regulatory or any other purpose that could equally be applied in the right environment to generate interest that will lead to new prospects for your products and services.

Ask yourself these few questions:

  1. Do you see sales and marketing collateral, as well as operational and regulatory and similar documents as a cost? What if this could be reversed? Documents becoming a profit centre instead of a cost centre contributor?
  2. Do you know how many documents you have produced over the last 5 years for external consumption? Do you know how many of these are available in your web folders, but no one can trully find them through navigating your website. You might be startled with the true figure!
  3. Any ideas about the cost of above? Any ideas of how much revenues you generated as a result of your spend in documents? You may have never wondered about ROI, but shouldn’t that be an interesting figure to talk about?

Without diverting too much from the topic, we at edocr.com are on a mission to turn your costly documents (I am not referring to print costs, but the costs involved in producing them, mainly human resources) into revenues for your company.

As part of this, we have embarked on a major development programme to provide you sales leads from your existing document inventory. At present, we are preparing edocr.com so that we can provide you a tool kit to extract data out of edocr.com with user consent where required.

Integration Options

We believe our role should end with collecting sales leads and then handing over those leads to organisations which can add significant value further upstream. This is where Salesforce.com and its ecosystem, App Exchange comes into play.

Given that Salesforce.com is not the easiest product to integrate with, mainly due to their pricing strategy, we believe we have three options available for consideration:

  1. Traditional web-to-lead forms
  2. API, especially as edocr.com is based on OAuth and salesforce.com now has OAuth capability
  3. App Exchange

Your Contribution

We must accept we are not experts of salesforce.com, but have the resources to implement the integration once we know damn well which one would work for us. I see two options:

  1. Integration with salesforce.com using our resources
  2. An app which will receive the leads from us, but left open for others to integrate to suit their needs, perhaps incorporating further value addition from salesforce.com partners

This is an exploratory article, asking your help in formalising the right option for us. We believe that there will be significant up sell opportunities for all who will get behind us in this venture. We are truly excited to be working with salesforce.com (especially you, Mr. Barker) and its ecosystem, who are well oiled on generating revenues.

The Wrong Pricing – Missed Opportunities

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As edocr.com continues to grow, it has become essential for us to adopt the right tools that will make our lives operationally little bit easier. Now is the time for us to leave spreadsheets and move on to products that will bring structure to a very chaotic environment. Two tools will be key to this strategy of operational simplification.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

We have adopted Contact Manager from Salesforce.com, which is affordable and versatile enough for our needs. And we know that as edocr.com grows, we have a path for increasing the CRM functionality to match with our future needs. In addition, we see salesforce.com as a strategic partner, so it makes sense for us to also be using their products, vice versa.

Accounts

Having used Winweb for a brief period, we are now trialling Xero, a SaaS product from one of our growing customer base. I love the simplicity and the design and yet to fully test it. My gut feel says this is the right product for us. And these days, I put lot of trust in to my gut feel.

Alignment

Ideally, we love our own database of users and customers to be in sync with CRM and accounts products we have adopted. So integration and free availability of APIs are fundamental to achieve this. I have been a keen advocate to see Xero and Salesforce.com establish the ability to data exchange.

It was good to hear from Tony Rule of Xero yesterday that they have infact gone live with the integration

Pricing Dilemma

Let’s take a brief look at the costs involved for one seat license across both products for one year.

  • Salesforce.com contact manager = £36 (we have subscribed for 2 seats)
  • Xero = £144 to £228 – the more expensive option is suitable for edocr.com

Here is the problem. For me to benefit from having synchronisation of customer data across saleforce.com and Xero, I would need to upgrade my account to either:

  • Salesforce.com enterprise (£1,020) or unlimited edition (£2,040) (where API is part of the licence) or
  • Salesforce.com professional edition (£540 plus more) (where API is not part of the licence but you can add it at extra cost).

Conclusion

The combine cost of subscribing to Xero and Salesforce.com now needs to go up from an affordable £264 to over £1000 to achieve integration. This is clearly not an acceptable situation for us. I love to comment more on this aspect, but as I have a half written post on pricing strategies, I think I should better leave it till then, other than to say, at this stage, we would have to operate without synchronisation. Just to add salt to the wound, products like JavelinCRM and Xero can achieve true synchronisation without any additional spend!

Goodbye Insightory.com – Opportunity for a management consultancy?

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Insightory.com was soft launched two months after edocr.com through TechCrunch. As TechCrunch put it, they wanted to be the Wikipedia for Management Knowledge. I was drawn to Insightory.com as they offered a document publishing, distribution and interactivity platform, albeit focusing on a niche market. Their plan was to approve every publication before displaying on the site. Not the best approach unless you crowd source the approval process similar to wikipedia.

See the email below this post in which Avneet Jolly explains the reasons for the pending shut-down. Instead of arguing about the rights and wrongs of their strategy, I am happy to share my conversation with Avneet and Joao from yesterday.

Lack of strong upside

I reached out to Insightory with two thoughts in mind; explore the possibility of user acquisition, and explore the technology stack. They have adopted a different strategy to edocr.com in terms of displaying documents. They convert each document page to an image before wrapping all the pages in flash. Not something we see value in as an replacement to Flash Paper we use. In terms of user acquisition, it was felt that there were not sufficiently high number of users to make a difference to edocr.com. In addition, it is highly unlikely these users will ever become revenue paying customers.

Opportunity

So what to come out of Insightory.com? Avneet has already received number of offers for the Insightory assets. If you are a management consultancy, Insightory.com might present a nice addition to your website. You would need to think carefully whether you are interested in just the site, or the site and its current user base. If it involves users, what would your strategy be for retaining them and then growing the user base? Do you see it as a permanent financial loss maker, revenue booster for your existing services, or actually making revenues from the user activity? Leave “advertising” out of this as a potential revenue generator. What resources would you allocate to continue maintaining and improving the site? Acquiring and then leaving the site to grow naturally will not work, as there is choice! You need to think this through carefully. If you do decide to bid, it would be great to see Insightory.com continuing, perhaps under a different brand. It’s sad day to see a competitor having to shut down, but I sincerely hope there would be a buyer!

Below is the original email from Avneet, CEO of Insightory.com:

Hi all,
I wanted to let you all know that we have decided to shut down Insightory.com.

Insightory was an experiment in aggregating management-focused content that soon became more-than-a-hobby-but-less-than-a-business. The site itself has grown a lot since we started 2 years ago. We regularly featured content from the best-known business authors, professors, firms and even senior corporate executives. It gave me a huge thrill to host the insights of people whose books I used to read in b-school – Tom Peters, David Maister, Andrew Sobel, Graef Crystal etc. It was also gratifying to help leading global firms like Booz & Co, Watson Wyatt, Nielsen etc – as well as hundreds of smaller firms – promote their thought leadership through Insightory. The range of topics also kept growing – we covered everything from business strategy to generational issues, and from social media to business statistics! This probably sounds immodest, but there aren’t that many sites that give access to such a wide range of quality management content for free.

We logged well over 1,000 page views per day last month. Since the traffic kept growing and the content kept coming in without too much effort from us – we let the site coast for almost a year. Unfortunately, we could never settle on a business model that would let us invest in the technology or content partnerships that could take us to the next level. Every model we looked at seemed to require exponentially more traffic and users than we had – or could reasonably expect in the next few years. The sharp decline in online ad rates didn’t help either.

For a while, we even believed that we could let the site run without any revenue generation at all. But the cost and time required to run such a site with any level of quality & professionalism is not insignificant. At the same time, my other work (I also run a consulting firm) kept growing and taking up an every-increasing % of my time. It has now reached a point where I need to (gasp!) make a significant investment in office space and staff! The writing was on the wall for several months, but I guess it took the end-of-year clarity of vision (should that be hindsight??) to really see it.

We will terminate our hosting contract shortly. The site will no longer be hosted after Jan 31, 2010. That should give you enough time to review your account and migrate your documents to another document/ presentation sharing site. If you need support with your documents after that date, please let me know and I will try to help you as best as I can. Rest assured – your documents, profile and contact information will NEVER be shared with anyone else.

THANK YOU for helping us build the site to this point. You contributed by sharing your documents (even if in response to repeated entreaties from Laurie Smith, Selene Cong, Donna Sacks or me!), commenting on others’ documents and sharing ideas for features and functions that the site should have. I sincerely hope you got something positive out of that experience, and will continue to share your insights on other platforms as well.

It was wonderful getting to know many of you – even if only by email or phone. I hope you will stay in touch.

Please let me know if you have any questions.

Wishing you a great holiday, and a happy & healthy 2010.
Best regards,
Avneet Jolly

avneet.jolly@insightory.com
www.insightory.com

MB1 – Play 8 – Work only on What is Important

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Marc adopted similar principles to me in getting the product to market as quickly as possible. As he says in his book, “do it fast, simple, and right the first time”. Based on my discussions with another tech startup from the north, they have rewritten code number of times to get it right. I do not see this as a problem, as you evolve and your goals change, so should the code, unless you can read the future.

At edocr.com, we had another consideration, how to build without spending money! We achieved this through using open source products as much as possible. In addition, we inherited a technology stack, that each of the team was familiar with, which ensured, low cost and speed to market.

Unfortunately, the “right for the first time”, requires mammoth resource base. I am not talking about 100s! But it require more than one or two developers. In my opinion, your initial customer facing product, should not require the effort of more than couple of developers. Remember, at this stage you are gambling, unless you have a customer who has already paid for your product. Don’t be embarrased to release a product with few known glitches. It’s OK as long as you disclose you are working on them and do have a plan to clear the bugs quickly. By getting a product out to market quickly, you can start validation quickly and your users/customers will not just help you to test and identify bugs, but will also help you validate the product map. But be careful not to build every functionality your userbase asks for. You may end up with a product users like but may not have any chance of ever commercialising it.

Marc speaks about keeping things simple, no fluff as he elegantly put it. He also speaks about their early focus on developing the best possible and easiest to use product; focus on the 20 percent that makes 80 percent of the difference. Whilst I whole heartly agree with this and wish we could have adhered to similar principles, we were constrained in many ways.

Few of the key questions I ask myself before we venture into any further development on edocr.com are:

1. what is the expected return – this is not about putting a scientific figure against an expected ROI, its all about your gut feel. By now you should know your market inside out and know well what could make money and what couldn’t
2. who requested it – if its a customer (better if its more than one) request, and you believe it ought to be provided, yes! but if it was requested by a user that is unlikely to ever pay for you services, think twice before you commit your scarce resources.
3. do you have to do it – perhaps for legislative or any other purpose, including the future failure of your product or its infrastructure. This is no brainer, you got to bite the bullet and commit resources.
4. what about the competition – this should not be a good enough reason. Does it achieve differentiation that will increase value. Be careful in copying your competitors.  The one with the biggest market share and capital will ultimately win. So look for differentiation and try to carve a niche, which may help you discover a short cut that will eventually put you in the no. 1 seat. It does not matter, if the rest of the world does not get this, but make sure you test it over and over.

Couple of areas we are working on at edocr.com right now with comparison to above 4 points:

1. Lead capture – there is a significant revenue opportunity, so this meets the “expected return” test
2. Ability to update documents – requested by customer. Even I within edocr has this need to update our brochures, etc. We have the same requirement from Northern StartUp 2.0, who is edocr.com’s first customer.
3. Limiting “email this” facility – at present, edocr.com allows ability to promote documents by emailing document link to unlimited number of email addresses. Unfortunately, this functionality has been misused, resulting in two hosting companies giving us a warning. All our development time is now diverted this week to fix this problem. Fortunately, this has created another (1) and (4) opportunity for us.
4. We cannot compete with the likes of Scribd ($13 million investment) and Docstoc ($4 million investment), but can carve our own niche. Hence focusing on the enterprise and the benefits we can bring instead of focusing on consumer markets, such as taking Amazon.com head on with book sales.

If you are planning for your first tech startup this festive reason, think about how quickly you can get to market, and the four points I raised in here. If you a startup veteran, please share your experience.

For first timers: I am comparing my experience against Marc Benioff who founded Salesforce.com and grew it to be the first $1 billion revenue SaaS company.

Previous posts:
- Forthcoming knowledge share blog posts against Marc Benioff

Forthcoming knowledge share blog posts against Marc Benioff

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Having met Marc Benioff on 8th Dec 09 in London and having finished reading his book, “Behind the Cloud” recently, I will be sharing my experience against Marc’s through a series of blog posts. In his book, there are 111 plays. I will be picking plays randomly and would like to invite you to do the same by leaving you experience as comments against my posts.

But before I can start, here is a reality check:

Marc was well connected, influential, secure and financially stable before he setup salesforce.com. In addition, he lived in the epic centre of technology, San Francisco and invested $6 million of his own capital before raising $60 million over the next 3 years. Very few in the technology sector has the resources Marc had in bringing a SaaS product to the market. He had a vision to change the industry and he did, but one cannot ignore the fact that he had the best possible start irrespective of the difficulties he has disclosed through his book.

Now I am not going to compare myself against Marc in this respect, but will compare my journey with edocr.com against ebdex (my first startup that I shut down in 2006). When I started ebdex, I had significant startup capital (nothing compared to Marc’s $6 million), years of corporate life and a brand new MBA. I knew nothing about technology, the sector I ventured into and had zero startup experience. I saw the opportunity and did my research to understand the size of it. I also had confidence (self belief) and an ego the size of Paul Walsh.

When I started edocr, I had very little startup capital, plenty of scars from ebdex, a network of tech entrepreneurs and friends, and bunch of others who wanted to be part of edocr. Things have changed, but here are few areas that mattered to me at the time

- Built the product without spending anything – The actual cost when soft launched in Oct 2007 was under £500
- Speed to market – should have taken weeks, but at the end, it took 6 months. We launched a product with bugs under Alpha
- Not to put all my eggs in one basket – now VCs hate this, they believe that if you invest cash, you should just be concentrating on one business, and only they know how to share risk and you do not.

Of course, since 2007, we have spend significant amount of capital, still fully embracing the low cost model. I continue to be a strong believer in sharing risk, so 2010 will see my continuing efforts in driving both edocr and Northern StartUp 2.0 forward.

Now to get to the first post….