mojoMeets Kochi – the fifth edition of Instamojo’s very own community-building event for entrepreneurs took place last week at the Kerala Startup Mission (KSUM) in Kochi, Kerala.
mojoMeets Kochi’s theme centred around ‘The Basics of Product Marketing‘ and consisted of speakers from top startups in Kerala.
Contents
- 1 Speakers for mojoMeets Kochi:
- 2 Product Marketing is not a random activity – Krishna Kumar, Green Pepper
- 3 How to arrive at a Minimum Viable Product – Alex Andrews George, ClearIAS
- 4 Find your Product-Market Fit – Rajiv Ambat Menon, Nuvovivo
- 5 A Product should sell itself! – Jofin Joseph, FullContact
- 6 Customer Retention and loyalty in SaaS – Shihab Muhammed, Founder and CEO, Survey Sparrow
Speakers for mojoMeets Kochi:
- Krishna Kumar – CEO, Green Pepper
- Alex Andrews George – Founder, ClearIAS
- Rajiv Ambat Menon – CEO, NuvoVivo
- Jofin Joseph – GM – India, FullContact
- Shihab Muhammad – CEO, SurveySparrow
- Ravikiran Iyengar (Host)- Product Marketing Manager, Instamojo
We're live from #Kochi #mojoMeets.
We're discussing the basics of #ProductMarketing today!#entrepreneurs #startups #startupevents #newtorking pic.twitter.com/bsaaEME9Dv— instamojo (@instamojo) August 27, 2019
Ravikiran Iyengar opened mojoMeets Kochi by introducing the event and its origin to the audience. mojoMeets focuses on building communities to spread business ideas, share business knowledge and help other businesses find their right footing.
mojoMeets is our initiative to give entrepreneurs an opportunity to network, collaborate, share ideas and discuss various topics that focus on scaling startup businesses.
Product Marketing is not a random activity – Krishna Kumar, Green Pepper
mojoMeets Kochi’s first speaker, Krishna Kumar opened his talk with the statement “We are here to understand the roots and basics of product marketing – basically, how can you make a product work for you?”
. @kkaction quotes “#Productmarketing delusion is that we have more features than the other, which may not always be true”#marketing #kerala #entrepreneurs pic.twitter.com/HbiPFNoFzJ
— Instamojo (@instamojo) August 27, 2019
Krishna Kumar took the audience through different product marketing tactics every new business should know about. He states that India has a history of having more service-based organisations and has only slowly made the transition to products.
“ There is no playbook for product marketing” – Krishna Kumar
Krishna Kumar stated the importance of rapid experimentation in product marketing – helping to choose the right product marketing tool when developing your customer base. Therefore, as a business, you need to target your customers and reach out to them with a specific product; a product that can help with their pain points, and offer you solutions too.
Continue to improvise on your product even after its launch and keep talking to your users, see what works for you. Krishna Kumar emphasised on:
- Being empathetic to your customers
- Keeping your brand and products simple
- Studying up on different tools you can use to do product marketing
Krishna Kumar concluded his talk by saying that “Less is good – product marketing will tell you what is optimisable to launch.”
How to arrive at a Minimum Viable Product – Alex Andrews George, ClearIAS
The second speaker for mojoMeets Kochi – Alex Andrews George is the founder and CEO of ClearIAS, a company that focused on one product – IAS coaching for all and gained over 1 lakh visitors on their Facebook page daily!
Alex’s message to the audience before starting his talk was- ” The primary objective of a startup should not be about making money”
Alex took the example of ClearIAS, his company that focuses on 3 core brand values:
- Affordability
- Accessibility
- Availability
Alex identified the problems using his own pain points as a student who found it difficult to attend expensive IAS coaching classes in metros.
.@alex_andrews_g
"He became an expert in #website design. By building his own website for the UPSC exams. His first build was a content website.
We asked how was it different?
To which he said, his website was simple and easy to learn." pic.twitter.com/wFXrSH1kWH— instamojo (@instamojo) August 27, 2019
By starting ClearIAS, his vision focused on merging education with technology and integrating SaaS and B2C business model together – a complete lean startup.
Alex discussed what a Minimum Viable Product is; an important definition all product marketers must know. He stated that in marketing – a product is an object made for consumer use. A minimum viable product (MVP) is a product with just enough features to satisfy early customers and provide feedback for future product development.
“MVP is a version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learnings about customers with the least effort.” – Alex
Find your Product-Market Fit – Rajiv Ambat Menon, Nuvovivo
The food you eat could be the best kind of medicine or the slowest kind of poison – these words spoken by Rajiv Ambat Menon, the founder of fitness and health startup, NuvoVivo, had the audience curious in minutes.
Rajiv’s take on product marketing was on customer retention. According to him, a businesses product marketing motive is to create brand value.
List down a set of 10 things that your customer would need – see if you can make it a revenue viable product from it. – Rajiv
On finding the right product-market fit, Rajiv took his brands’ example and explained his thought process:
- What do you do well
- Who would need that feature/product
- How much will someone pay for it
The other approach is to find your connections. Rajiv did so by connecting his early customers (students) to industry mentors. However, he studied student behaviour on Instagram and found that students were more inclined to look good, fit and getting a stronger following on social media. Hence, he repositioned and repackaged his offerings with the insight that ” looking good is a must-have and being healthy is good to have”
.@rajuambat continues to talk about "finding the right product fit for a brand"#mojoMeets #kerala #entrepreneurship pic.twitter.com/hGeXzc432p
— instamojo (@instamojo) August 27, 2019
A Product should sell itself! – Jofin Joseph, FullContact
How can a B2B company get its first 100 customers?
Jofin Joseph, the General Manager of the Global Brand FullContact opened his talk with this question to the audience. He tackled the core debate of whether product marketers should be marketing-driven or sales driven – and his trick, take both into account.
Jofin discussed short term and long term strategies of product marketing.
“Short term strategies are very important. As a startup, a lot of things are dependant on Short term success, such as early traction and your first 100 users” – Jofin
"#Startups with limited money, seeking traction, create press notes with personalized messages"@jofinjo #Marketing #Instamojo #product #mojoMeets #Kerala #entrepreneurs #networking
— instamojo (@instamojo) August 27, 2019
Why? Because this will help you get investors to believe in your brand in the long run.
According to Jofin, Product Marketing is a deep ocean. You need to be ready to swim, and if you are a B2B product, do not jump right in. Test the waters first. He spoke about low hanging marketing fruits like Public Relations and Product Discovery Platforms that will help you spread the word on your business and your products.
Jofin spoke further on how your potential customers can find you through:
- Third-party blogs
- Directories and listings.
- Social media – find your groups
He closed his talk with important trivia on Inside sales – finding your core sales team and dividing it into seeders and closers, the ones who plant the foundation for a customer base and the one that closes the deal (Founders of early-stage companies).
Customer Retention and loyalty in SaaS – Shihab Muhammed, Founder and CEO, Survey Sparrow
Traffic is your currency – Shihab Muhammed, our final speaker for mojoMeets, spoke about how to analyse how much time your users going to spend on your product in a day; an important metric to measure if your business is at an early stage.
He urged marketers to ask themselves: Are you solving a transactional pain point or a continuous pain point?
Shihab went on to explain churned out revenue – and how to tell if your investors will stop funding you. Check churned out revenue at the beginning and end of the month, because no one will invest in you if your churned revenue out is more than 7%.
” Understand the activation point for your product, reactive customer support is not successful. It is good to have the founder also wear the hat of customer success.” – Shihab
As an example, Shihab spoke about Slack, the project management tool used in office spaces worldwide. He said “Everyone thinks Slack hit the jackpot early, in 3 years. But no, it started in 2009 and rolled out only to a few people who tested it”
Some key points from Shahib’s talk:
- Measure your customer pulse using NPS
- Use a net promoter score to measure your loyalty
- Convert your best customers as promoters
- Get help from existing customers with case studies and make them reference customers and ask them to give you a review.
“ It boils down to how well you are ready to tackle your pain points before rolling out to the public” Shahib
.@shihabmdp quotes "Measure time to value, which is the time taken to deliver your value"#mojoMeets #entrepreneurship #kerala pic.twitter.com/8sfKp8DEr4
— instamojo (@instamojo) August 27, 2019
The riveting mojoMeets Kochi event ended with an interactive Q&A session with the speakers and audience, moderated by Ravikiran.
Wish to be the next inspiring entrepreneur who speaks at mojoMeets? Watch our social media for updates and we might just be in your city next!
