‘Starting Up’ Special of Proto.in – Segment 1

‘Starting Up’ Special of Proto.in – Segment 2

‘Starting Up’ Special of Proto.in – Segment 3

with all the new goodies …

By this I mean that this industry would be taken up like storm with the introduction of the very much awaited 3G rollout in India with major telecom players.

I think Asterisk has a clear advantage over here, coz this brings down the entry barrier on the technology front supporting more and more innovation, infact we rolled out our primary service – English Seekho on a heavily customized Asterisk platform – entVoice

We even did a primary showcase at Mobile Monday on 28th April 2008 – Voice based VAS, with Aditya Mhatre from Indicast who wanted to bring his popular Podcasts on normal phone lines in India.

We are again planning to revive Mobile Monday back in action with the new age Value added services using the Futuristic Soft Switching Platform – entVoice.

So keep watching this space, and feed in your ideas which can be collectively put on live networks to bring in a huge impact in the industry overall.

The single biggest after effect of Proto is that if people like what you doing then they shall start copying you, this is a very good state to be in, but also a very challenging stage. I think this is the challenge that every first mover gets into, we are kinda forced to constantly innovate before we fall apart and/or competition take over.

This also constantly reminds me of our Vision which is “To be the leaders in our business. We stand apart from the competition by being the first in market to innovate and change the game, making our customers market leaders.”
We have made our customers market leaders with our innovation and this kinda gives me a very personal drive to keep up the position of maintaining the leadership position.

Any ways coming back to Proto 2009 After Effects, I would first of all thank Vijay, Karthic and Abinash personally to have us introduced to Proto and second but more important is the blogger community over all who are writing about our baby – “English Seekho“, my personal appreciation for some of the very renowned blogger’s – Hemanshu Asolia, Sandeep Gautam, Navin and finally Sudhir Syal from the ET Now and Proto.in Team who covered us well during the Proto Bootcamp on 18th July 2009 and in the final Proto event as Elevator Pitch on 25th July 2009.

This entire year has been a good challenge to me personally.

I had to redo the entire Business and the way we were going around it, we ought to get some more innovation in here, just as I had done over the past few years, moving from classic Linux Consulting Business (thing that I always would love to do) moving on to custom Web Application Development to Telephony using Asterisk to emerging as the market leader in the Education based real Value Added Services player.

This journey has taught me several things, Of them the most important thing it taught me was to leverage the customer to the maximum extent that you can. So far we havent invested in any marketing plans whatsoever, we always found it interesting to spend our marketing dollars directly on to the customer (i.e. by providing free of cost prototypes, provide gyaan which we collected over these years to realising dreams of customers)

The more we did investment on our customers the more I felt amazed that customers do talk about you when they truely benefit from your product or services or both, and I am not saying this is the only way about selling your product, coz this way may not give results like alopathic medicines its more ayurvedic style i.e. it takes some time, but the results are LONG TERM and are sustainable.

So I can collectively say this to startups like mine, please do invest in the right customer the right amount of marketing dollars, they sure are going to be some the best investments for you going forward. Atleast this has been the DNA of how Enterux has evolved over these years (no doubt it took very long, but the after effects are going to be long term and sustainable.)

Shall post more on the findings here.