OfStartups

Author: ofstartups

  • India GDP 2023 for Q2

    We look at the economic growth rate of India i.e. the growth of India’s GDP 2023 which was released by the National Statistical Office of the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation of the Government of India

    Economic growth rate of India

    GDP growth Q2 2023: 7.8%
    Period: April to June 2023

    Past India GDP growth rate figures

    Q1 20236.1%
    Q4 20224.5%
    Q3 20226.2%
    Q2 202213.1%

    Industry-wise breakdown

    Agriculture, Forestry & Fishing3.5%
    Mining & Quarrying5.8%
    Manufacturing4.7%
    Electricity, Gas, Water Supply & Other Utility Services2.9%
    Construction7.9%
    Trade, Hotels, Transport, Communication & Services related to Broadcasting9.2%
    Financial, Real Estate & Professional Services12.2%
    Public Administration, Defence & Other Services7.9%

    Figures for top economies of the world

    United States of America2.5%
    China6.3%
    Japan2.1%
    Germany-0.1%
    United Kingdom0.4%

  • Breaking down problems

    Product problems can often be overwhelming. It is difficult to know where to start and visualize. Breaking down the problem into smaller parts and solving it one by one is the appropriate way to approach it.

    Know the “why”?

    The first step in breaking down is to know the “why” behind the problem which you are solving. Your goals and priorities are clear when you know why something has to be done. This can be identified with qualitative and quantitive research of data.

    Identify the core values for each “why”

    Often there can be multiple answers to why a certain feature has to be built. Identify what each part has to offer to the big picture which you are building. You will now have different blocks of the solution which now have to be prioritized.

    Prioritization

    Once you know the main purpose of why you are solving a particular problem and have broken it down into multiple value-offering blocks, identify the one part that is the most important one for solving the primary problem. It will normally be a dependency for many of the further enhancements in the product. Depending upon how the other blocks are contributing to offer the solution for the customer, the rest of the blocks have to be prioritized accordingly.

    Build-measure-learn

    Product development is all about being better than the previous day’s, rather than being perfect. Once you have identified, broken down, prioritized, and built upon the problems, continuously measure the results and take feedback. Translate the feedback into action items to gradually improve the product.

  • Problem space vs solution space

    The basis of any product is the customer’s pain point. Great products solve scalable problems in an efficient way. This is achieved when the customer needs and product requirements are addressed successfully. And both have to be given their own due respect while building products. The problem space and the solution space must be separated to clearly understand the customer needs and product requirements.

    Problem space – the Why

    Every individuals or group of individuals have a variety of problems. A market is a set of all the individuals or groups having the same problem. This can be further segmented into different groups on the basis of various parameters like industries, age, gender, etc. This is where the problem space is. Learning more about the users and their problems. According to the Lean Product Playbook, you cannot control the market. You cannot change the needs of the people. What you can control is the solutions that you want to provide for one or more problems. The problem space does not involve any designs or mocks or MVPs. A strong problem space is the base of a strong solution space.

    Solution space – the How

    Solution space is the actual implementation to solve a problem of any kind – an MVP, prototype, or wireframe. Unlike the problem space, this is a more controllable unit. For a given pain point, there can be a number of solutions that can be built. It depends upon factors such as cost, quality, time, and resources for which solution to be built.

    Why focus on the problem space?

    What is the significance of the product if it is not solving a crucial pain point? Building a solution is a costly affair. Though a skill of huge patience and takes a lot of time, identifying appropriate pain points and the users, to build a product is relatively less costly as it won’t directly involve material costs. Especially during the early phase of a product, more emphasis has to be given to the problem space.

    Simply put – when you do not get the knowledge of the appropriate problem to solve, it will end up in a solution that no one might want.

  • Twitter vs Threads

    Meta’s Threads became the fastest-growing app of all time. It acquired 100 million users in the first five days of its launch. To compare, its competitor Twitter took five years to reach the same number.

    Social media is a zero-sum game. All the players compete for the limited attention span of the users. Going to the top always comes at the cost of other competitors’ users’ time. Moreover, they are not only essentially competing with other social media for the users’ time span, but for other media like television, OTTs, etc. Everyone is in the race to grab the users’ time.

    Let’s see what are the strengths of both Meta and Twitter.

    Meta has a huge existing user base in Instagram of 2.3B users globally. Threads users do not have to start their content journey from scratch, as they have already following people. Starting from zero is always a difficult job to do.

    Twitter’s biggest strength is the limited but quality users which they have. They have influential figures actively using the platform. Politicians, entrepreneurs, sportsmen, journalists, notably. It has a good reputation of a relatively better source of truth for all the happenings around than other platforms.

    To stay in the game, both Threads and Twitter have to build stronger moats around their existing strengths. This is now a game of successful execution.

    Threads is not the first text-based social media platform. Facebook was not the first social networking site. Google was not the first search engine.

    Long story short – in the tech industry there were always similar products launched prior to the established players. But a common pattern is that there has been only One strong product remaining in a segment, which has dominated the space unequally. It has been a kind of winner-takes-all situation.

    It will be interesting to see how this text-based social media segment shapes up ahead.

  • Startups: The India Opportunity

    The Indian Economy

    The future belongs to India. World Bank projects the Indian economy to grow to $30 Tn by 2050. How will India achieve this number? Well, let’s first understand what factors a country’s economy, or the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of a nation depends upon.

    1. Consumption – This represents the total amount of goods and services purchased by the citizens of a country
    2. Investments – This is the total capital expenditure done by the private sector companies of a nation
    3. Government expenditure – This is the total capital spent by the government on goods and services like defense, infrastructure, education, etc
    4. Net exports – This is the portion of how much surplus exports have been done by a nation as compared to the imports. Simply stating this is exports-imports

    In order for India to achieve this economic growth – businesses, especially new emerging businesses are going to have to contribute hugely.

    Status of the Indian startup ecosystem

    India had 87000 startups as of December 2022. It is the third largest ecosystem after the USA and China. 

    If we consider the 108 unicorns ($1Bn+ valuation) as a very high-level representation of startups, we can roughly see the domain-wise distribution as follows:

    E-commerce: 23
    Fintech: 22
    Enterprise: 20
    Consumer services: 9
    Media & Entertainment: 7
    Rest: 25

    The top 5 domains contribute to 75% of the startups.

    Opportunities 

    Let’s get back to the economic discussion. Following is the sector-wise contribution to the Indian economy as of 2021:

    Tertiary (Services) – 54% 
    Secondary (Manufacturing) – 23%  
    Primary (Agriculture) – 20% 

    The tertiary sector includes services like banking, information technology, software, hospitality, etc. In the secondary sector, we have manufacturing, mining, and construction industries. The primary sector consists of agriculture and related fields.

    So far so good. But when we see the sector-wise employment, we start to see the difference.

    Sector-wise employment

    Tertiary – 27%
    Secondary – 24%
    Primary – 49%

    The primary sector, where 49% workforce is employed in India contributes to 20% economy. On the counterpart, 27% workforce from the tertiary sector contributed to 54% economy. Simply stated, every person working in services contributes five times the money than the person working in the primary sector.

    Tertiary occupations or services are mostly intellectual work and do not require heavy raw materials and machinery. It adds tremendous value and works on huge profit margins compared to its primary and secondary counterparts. Hence, in spite of less workforce, it contributes more than half to the economy.

    According to me, the huge opportunity in India lies in the businesses disrupting this economic equation. As more and more workforce moves towards advanced sectors of secondary and, especially, tertiary occupations, more value adds to the economy. If we today see most of the large economies, it is the tertiary sector that contributes hugely. India has a large population and if this population becomes an asset, it will become an unstoppable growth engine. I feel businesses working on this theme will be the winners. 

    Rooted domains like education, healthcare, agriculture, and clean energy have immense potential to grow in India.