I attended the NASSCOM Product Conclave 2009 on 27th and 28th October. Here is my trip report and key take-away from the conference.
The only reason why I decided to attend this conference was Guy Kawasaki. I admire him for more than one reason. I like Guy because he paved the way for the new profession in the complex world of IT – Evangelism. He set industry precedence for software evangelism. I heard about Guy way back in 2003 when we were in process of forming the budding evangelism team at Microsoft. One of my managers pointed me to Guy Kawasaki’s blog and that’s what laid a strong foundation for my passion for evangelism. Since then, his books and blogs always inspired me. I follow some of his tips to deliver impacting presentations and compelling demos. Even today when someone argues with me on the value of evangelism, I point them to the book – “Selling the Dream”.
As I expected, Guy Kawasaki did a great job as the keynote speaker at the event. It was quite refreshing to see a keynote speaker in an informal dressing, casual and relaxed body language and finally a keynote that made sense for the audience. Guy’s message was clear – use the current technology trends and economic conditions to your benefit.
Here is a summary of the key points:
- Think like your customer and build a product that you use. This is so obvious yet many startups miss this point. His example of Ice 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0 is very apt. Look at the slides to get some context.
- The OS, development platform and tools are absolutely free and there is no point in spending money on expensive tools and technologies. While my friends at Microsoft will vehemently disagree with this fact, I partially agree with him. LAMP + Eclipse are a great combo to deliver pretty powerful and real world products.
- The next point is huge – Don’t over spend on your marketing! By leveraging the social media and social networking appropriately, you can reach to a customer who wouldn’t care to watch the most expensive ad campaign that you are running on the TV. His AllTop.com is a proof that this model works. All you got to know is the right way of using them.
- Suck Down and Suck across – I had to jump out for a quick call and missed his explanation for this
- Make Twitter and TweetMeme your platform for market survey and analytics. He explained a scenario how TweetMeme can help you get deep insights into the market and customer mindset. Incidentally, I put the TweetMeme button just a day before I attended this keynote.
- Again, this is a well know fact. Some of the college interns are the brightest and have the caliber that can put certified professionals to shame. Hand-pick those interns and enthusiast students who enjoy working for a very nominal salary.
- The next point is my favorite and I had a wicked smile when I saw that – Put everything in the Cloud. He gave my favorite example of the development team at a startup using inexpensive notebook PCs to develop the next killer app for the web. He very clearly articulated the Pay-By-Use model. I was thrilled to hear that!
- Ship then Test – According to Guy, the current generation of users are impatient to wait till you stabilize your product. He advocates the crowd-sourcing model where you treat the world as your beta tester.
- Next point is a clear dig at the VC community. With the free tools, cloud, and a bunch on interns, do you still need a VC?
- The last point is all about niche. You and your startup got to spend enough time to identify what you are good at and how your product is different from competition. Once you figure that out, use all the above tools to conquer the world!
I agree with most of the points that Guy made in his keynote. A disclaimer here – before you debate, argue and flame me, these are not my views and I am only summarizing what I heard from him.
Right after the keynote, I had the opportunity to be a part of the Q&A session with Guy. This was covered by ET Now channel. My question was how do we separate evangelists from fanatics. There were few instances where I was branded as a fanatic rather than an evangelist. Though I toned down my aggression, I still feel sometimes I am more of a fanatic than an evangelist. I absolutely loved his answer – An evangelist puts the customer first and empathizes with him whereas a fanatic is all about I, me, myself and my product. That was a very hard-hitting response!
Right after the Q&A session, I had a photo op with Guy and I got my bible of evangelism, ‘Selling the Dream’ autographed by him.
Guy & Jani - Selling The Dream
I was also a part of the Bangalore TweetUp that few passionate folks like @amnigos and others organized. This was at 7:30 PM and Guy was still as energetic as he was for the keynote.
I went back for his workshop on ‘Evangelism through Social Media’ on the second day. The hall was overflowing but surprisingly most of the attendees were not on Twitter yet. He demonstrated some of the free tools built on Twitter that empowers entrepreneurs to track, monitor and monetize their products.
Apart from the sessions by Guy, I attended the panel discussion on ‘Telecom Innovations for Emerging Markets’ in which my boss, Vishy Poosala, Head, Bell Labs India was a panelist.
Overall, I found the event to be good but my feedback to organizers is to include a track on technology. Though this was meant for startups and entrepreneurs, a dedicated track for technology to discuss the latest trends would have been extremely useful to the attendees.
I want to conclude this post with a great quote by Guy Kawasaki – “An evangelist who cannot give a great demo is an oxymoron….”
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- Guy with Jani
As a Cloud Computing Strategist, Janakiram MSV helps businesses understand and adopt the Cloud Computing paradigm. His core strength is designing and architecting solutions for the Cloud. Janakiram focuses on industry's leading Cloud Computing offerings including Microsoft Windows Azure.
