iWeekend is an intensive and innovative experience that brings together talented entrepreneurs and professionals of different profiles to select 3 ideas and bring these ideas to reality by collaboratively developing a business plan and a prototype, all in one weekend.

iWeekend is targeted towards technologists, designers, marketers, business and finance professionals, lawyers, etc. with a passion for technology and the intention of founding a startup or working in one.

Yesterday, I spoke about my insights on building a web product company through my experience with starting and growing DeskAway. Hope you like it and put some of these points into practice at your startup.

- Sahil Parikh

GizaPage is a social media application suite that strengthens the relationship between brands and their communities. They have a simple to use social media dashboard to help brands optimize the time, network reach and drive community interactions on their social media initiatives.

Vijay Raypati, Head - Products, GizaPage has shared his views about DeskAway…

How are you using DeskAway and what value is it providing your team?
We use DeskAway to manage all tasks and milestones related to our product roadmap along with the to-do lists. It helps us to get organized and have a clear focus on deliverables.

DeskAway helps us to reduce the communication over-head amongst our team and also helps developers to easily manage there work items. The milestones feature is useful to define and track progress.

Were you using any other tool before DeskAway?
We were using Basecamp before moving to DeskAway.

Was there a learning curve associated with DeskAway? How did your team adapt to a new application?
I would say it takes less than 5 minutes to adapt to DeskAway. We really love the help section for each feature in the product, which helps anyone to get started easily.

What features does your team use the most?
We use Milestones, Task Lists, Email Comments and Work Progress Reports.

Are you emailing (sending tasks, attachments etc.) less because of DeskAway?
Yes, it helped us to cut down back & forth emails on to-do items and follow ups.

How has DeskAway helped in lowering project costs, profitability or improving efficiency?
It certainly helped us to improve the team/delivery efficiency since everybody is on the same page on product goals and milestones. This is very critical for startups and SME’s.

Are there any other thoughts that you would want to share with us regarding our service, product etc.?
Love the simplicity of the to-do lists and the help section. Keep it up!

Thanks!

If you are using DeskAway and would like to get featured, please drop us a note and we will get in touch with you.

Mobicules is an agile web and mobile app development company, working with new technology ventures and some of the biggest brands around, helping them build sophisticated world class products while meeting aggressive go-to-market times required for web and mobile products today. We are a 40 people team and work with some very demanding clients spread all over the world. We have been at the forefront of the technologies we work on, and are very quick to adopt and adapt to technical and methodology changes.

Mobicules was founded by Munish Bansal and Niraj Ranjan Rout, who have a combined experience of more than 15 years in diverse technical areas such as the internet, VLSI design, EDA and mobile technologies.

“Everything in DeskAway works really well for us.”

Munish Bansal and Niraj Ranjan Rout, Mobicules Founder

This is how they use DeskAway,

How are you using DeskAway when growing your business?
In the last six months, we have moved the project management for all the projects running at Mobicules to DeskAway. DeskAway has helped us in communicating with our clients better, in keeping information documented, and in helping large teams collaborate better to achieve project targets.

Were you using any other tool before DeskAway?
We were using a combination of Redmine, Google Sites and BaseCamp before we switched to DeskAway.

Was there a learning curve associated with DeskAway? How did your team adapt to a new application?
It hardly took any time. Not just our team, our clients too switched from whatever we were using to DeskAway in time. The learning videos interspersed throughout the site greatly accelerated the learning process on DeskAway. Messages, Tasks, Files and Issues work in a very intuitive manner. The interface is really zippy, and we feel very comfortable working on DeskAway.

What features does your team use/like the most?
We use Messages, Tasks and Files very heavily. Being able to add comments to just about everything really helps.

Are there any other thoughts that you would want to share with us regarding our service, product etc.?
As for now, everything in DeskAway works really well for us. As a services company, we’d love to see features like time-logging by developers and automated timesheet creation for projects or developers. We find the pricing to be very good. We haven’t had a reason to contact the support team till now, but we have no reason to believe that the support would not be stellar.

Thanks!

If you are using DeskAway and would like to get featured, please drop us a note and we will get in touch with you.

Indus Net Technologies (Rated as #1 IT SME by Dun & Bradstreet in 2008) is one of the fastest growing IT service company in India (Among Top 50 Emerging Companies in 2010 as per NASSCOM) providing web design, web development and Internet marketing services to governments, enterprises and digital agencies since 1997. Indus Net Technologies employs 500 experts in Kolkata, Chennai and Warwick - with plans to open up office in USA in 2010.

Abhishek Rungta, Founder & CEO of Indus Net Technologies shared his views about how his team uses DeskAway…

How are you using DeskAway and what value is it providing your team?
DeskAway helps in tracking the status of our on-going projects and helps us to manage those projects effectively.

Were you using any other tool before before DeskAway?
Yes, Zoho projects.

Was there a learning curve associated with DeskAway? How did your team adapt to a new application?
DeskAway is very user friendly so adapting to it was never an issue.

What features does your team use the most?
Our team uses it mostly for delegation of tasks, creation of documents and maintaining timesheets across projects.

Are you emailing (sending tasks, attachments etc.) less because of DeskAway?
Yes emailing has greatly reduced as the tasks assigned to every person are visible in DeskAway. In addition, the responsible person gets an email notification from the system so the need to send an email is not there anymore.

How has DeskAway helped in lowering project costs, profitability or improving efficiency?
Deskaway saves time by automating project management and task distribution. The document management system is good, providing an effective way of managing our resources.

Thanks!

If you are using DeskAway and would like to get featured, please drop us a note and we will get in touch with you.

No, I am not going away and this is not my farewell speech. Just thought that writing the title in past tense seemed to make sense.

After switching from a service company back in 2006/07, a large chunk of my life revolved around DeskAway. An inspirational article I read made me look at the things that I have learnt in the last 3-4 years growing and scaling a SaaS business.

Quick, rapid decisions: You can easily change things around if something does not work out. Don’t ponder and wonder if something needs to be done. Just do it and if it doesn’t work, switch gears and try something else. Try out different tools, policies, management styles, testing procedures, website design and keep only the ones that work. Move fast.

Measure early and often: Everything on the web is measurable. Initially, we were too engrossed in building software that we completely ignored analytics and measuring the customer acquisition funnel. This was back in early 2008. Once we realized that we could learn so much more about our users and business, we built an internal dashboard to track everything - sales, free signups, conversion funnel, upgrades, downgrades and other important metrics. Today, key business indicators are a click away. This is needed to make quick, rapid decisions.

Hire attitude first, then skill: Hiring the right people is a huge challenge. We learnt our lesson early on when we were doing website design and development. We hired an expensive designer who we had to fire after we found out that he was freelancing from within our office. I am not a fan oft hiring experts - they are generally very expensive for startups. Look for good attitude and a willingness to learn. Get the right people on your bus, the wrong people out.

Make time for play: I enjoy each day. Work does consume a large part of it but I generally take out time to pursue my other passions (like tennis, golf and traveling) and spend a good amount of time with family. I guess the family part is well rooted in our Indian culture. Life is too short to spend it away on all work and no play. Also, make sure you take care of your health - without a healthy mind/body there is no work.

Don’t chase success: In 2008 we concentrated on building good software and listening to our customers. This automatically gave us a decent amount of recognition on international blogs, print and TV. This was huge for our small business. The beauty of it was that everything happened so organically - maybe we were doing the right things and enjoying it while at it each day. Too much greed for success gets in the way.

Manage your time: When you are short on resources and need to wear different hats you better know how to manage your priorities. Be aware of where you spend your time. Learn to say no. Keep a certain alloted time for reading and social networking. These things can so easily consume you that by the time you know it, it is already time to go home.

Think purpose & brand: Features and pricing are not really differentiators. The real differentiator is your purpose and the perceived value within your customer’s mind. They should join you because of the message you are giving out. Do you stand for something important? Your purpose, brand and culture should be bigger than your product. This is something that I think about each day.

I am sure there are several more things that I have learnt and am learning each day. I will pen them down on another post soon. It has been an exiting journey so far and looking forward to some fabulous announcements in the next couple of months…