vijayanands

India is the third largest startup hub in the world.

A good metric to measure productivity is the size of the team that it takes to build the company around, and the revenue per employee as a metric.

Skype had a team of 27 when they got acquired. Instagram had 13. Whatsapp had 32 Engineers and 55 employees when they were acquired by Facebook and had a whopping 900mn people using the service (and was doing approx $30mn in revenue). Gmail for eg, is still managed by a team of 100 (engineers).

Salesforce a 6.6$bn revenue company has 19,000 people working for it. Zoho has revenues of approx $300mn and Freshdesk has a revenue of about $60mn.

If we do a Revenue per employee extrapolation, Freshdesk would have approx 90,000 people when it does the revenue that SalesForce does. Zoho will have 100,000 people.

On the Pureplay product front, Hike for eg, has 250+ employees (and aims to double it this year), while its counterpart Whatsapp still has the original approximately 55 strong team. Snapchat is however a 1000+ member team and posts 400mn in revenues (and plan to reach 1bn+ this year). Reports suggest that Hike posted a revenue of 100K USD last year.

Most startups have a target of a million dollars of revenue per employee. The same number in India looks abysmally low - even though the salaries are more or less starting to look the same (with adjustments to PPP).

Q: Is there even a difference between Indian Startups and the Outsourced Servicesof the past era?

Cognizant (which does services) has approx 266,000 employees and posts revenues of 13.49billion - approximately double that of salesforce. Our Indian "product" startups would have approximately the same size of workforce of services companies to attain that revenue numbers.

Bottomline : Something has to change.

PS : We have started a premium newsletter to talk abt and share insights like these on the Indian Startup Ecosystem - http://bit.ly/2pndTdq

Pretext:

The whole world is raving about Minimum viable products and with the advocacy that is going on towards building the bare minimum required and letting the market decide, we see startups and entrepreneurs all around the world launch, bare minimum products.

The problem however is that most of them fail, and then bucket themselves in the category that it was a matter of failing fast, when in reality, if you look at the stats it starts to show that not enough of the market paid attention, gave it a shot and gave the product a chance in the first place. In some cases its a genuine case of a bad product, but in most cases, its also the case of not having an audience to even launch do.

Seth Godin says it better in "When Minimum viable Product doesn't work" : http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2011/11/when-minimal-viable-product-doesnt-work.html

Case in Point: Most Startups and Entrepreneurs lack an audience - a following that they can launch to, who will engage with the product and kickstart the feedback cycle.

Secondly, its fairly obvious for anyone who does an analysis on the posts on HN, that to a fair bit of companies and especially the YC companies, this form serves as that very platform (doubled by Demo day and the press) if the "voting rings" in HN are an indicator, they are trying to rig the system towards their favor to democratize it, and as bad as it is, and this community fights hard to preserve the balance, there is a need.

Here's a framework towards a community based launch platform. Would love to hear your thoughts - All of it - the good, the bad and the ugly.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/1j5vnuyllqxfkg4/Early%20Adopter%20Network%20%28EAN%29%20v1.1.pdf