Here is my first article for the Business Insider. It is on why we chose SaaS (after I moved back from the U.S.) and the 5 things I learnt from my experiences in the last few years.

India is known as the land of outsourcing, so, when I landed here in 2005 to start a software company I was inundated with service and outsourcing  companies all around me - pretty much providing the same web design and  development services and fighting to retain employees. This is something I didn’t want to be a part of. In fact, seeing the dependency on people and the consequent issues that it creates, made me want to have a company that was system-driven, that had the right processes in place to  make it a dynamic, scalable, light and transparent organization, while providing value to others.

I turned to what I believe is the future of computing: Software as a Service (SaaS). Now, I often look back and try to re-learn from my experiences….

Read the 5 lessons…

We will try to cater to all support requests but due to our national Diwali festival our support time might be slower than usual. Any questions related to billing/account management will be resolved on Monday Nov. 8th, 2010.

Diwali is the festival of lights - we light lamps (diyas), visit relatives, feast and display fireworks.  It is something similar to the week of Christmas.

Have a great weekend!

In my recent interview with K. Venkatesh of YourStory.in, I spoke about how I got started,  my journey, marketing SaaS in India, my new book and the challenges I faced in terms of customer acquisition, hiring etc. to get DeskAway off the ground.

Like most youth from India, I left for the US in 1998 in search for a business degree. Along the way, I bumped into a few dozen courses in computer science, and realized that it was my calling. With business acumen, and sound technical background, it wasn’t long before I joined the founding team of an entrepreneurship society in my university, hobnobbing with like-minded individuals, investors and spending a good deal of time around incubators.

Through college and post-graduation, I held multiple jobs in various verticals and industries (see details below) determined to get a feel of many business types, as I knew I would soon start my own Internet business. During the post-9/11 economic crunch, I survived on freelance jobs until I could land on my feet. In 2002, I co-started a web design and development consultancy with my wife, which I ran while holding down a full-time job in an e-healthcare firm. Our consultancy, after a bumpy start, began taking off and we had large publicly traded companies on our retainer in 3 years.

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We recently had a someone ask me how different DeskAway is from Microsoft SharePoint? They are big, known and very very deep-pocketed. We are small, lesser known and don’t have billions in the bank.

My answer has always been simple (and I smile when I type this every time):

Good question! It is in our approach - we are a small company building software for other small companies and teams. We are agile. We move fast. Besides, DeskAway is  much simpler and an easy to use solution. Customer service is personal and timely. Would you get that from a big company?

DeskAway is not about the software as much it is about the service and the overall experience that we can give our users - small businesses and teams. It is about our commitment for building something with care, nurturing it and growing it with the best customer feedback possible. Ultimately, people pay us for the ’service’ - that is something smaller companies like us are really good at.

We love to release early and release often. It makes us and our users happy. But, we sometimes fall into the trap of doing some things so quickly that in hindsight it would have been better off not to release the feature at all. In the race to keep up, thinking about getting the new features out the door seems so tempting, but, if not planned properly, can compromise on the user experience of your overall product - not to mention having grumpy users that might leave!

There is absolutely no point in releasing a feature for the sake of a release and to maintain a track record - if it is not done yet!

Get it working nicely and let the new feature fit well with exiting features within your app. Creating a loose-ended feature that you will improve upon over time is no excuse for just throwing something online and then worrying about the user experience later.

It is ok if this development takes a bit more time. I am not saying you need to get it perfect, but you need to ‘manage’ the user experience part of it really well. Will the user use it and keep using it? Are you solving a real need for the feautre in your app? Is it building upon something that you don’t have currently? Will it help users save time? In the case of DeskAway, the question we often ask is if it will help people work smarter and collaborate effectively?

Recently, we were debating on how we would integrate the Google Docs functionality within a DeskAway project - it is extremely useful (we use Google Docs a lot) when you can access your Google Docs within your projects and even share comments with your team. Everything is so neatly organized. Logically, Google Docs would fit well within DeskAway’s Docs section. Should we have it separate (like another drop-down for gDocs) and run it parallel with our existing Docs functionality? This would definitely be easier to program in and we won’t have to worry about dabbling a lot within the current Docs code. In the name of ‘release fast, release often’, we mocked it up and realized that it is going to be a pain in the $%# for the user to not only navigate an additional menu item but he/she will have to go to 2 seperate pages to see Docs created within DeskAway and Docs created/attached via Google. Definitely not a practical solution when you think about ease of use and the overal workflow of a typical user. We scraped this idea and went ahead with re-engineering our code for the Docs section to also include Google Docs - a little more time consuming but worth it! When complete, this will present the user a one-page summary of all his/her docs - and the Google ones will be labeled with a nice Google Docs icon.

We could have released with the original idea and gotten feedback on how to improve - but we are here to not waste our user’s time. We rather give you something that is functional than something that seems functional but won’t add to the over experience of collaborating in a team.

So, stay tuned untile we release this new feature very soon