One industry that has benefited the most from "Opening up" of the Indian economy in the 1990s is the IT sector. Although other sectors also saw their share of progress but IT sector has been a definite outlier, for the amount of employment and revenue generated. Owing to this success, the world is looking towards India for growth during the headwinds.
I am Jaspal Rajotiya. I spent 8 Years in the industry, running an IT agency in India and providing service to clients from various industries. Over the years I worked to build upon an USP which helped me not just keep me afloat but flourish in a cut throat industry. I would like to share some thoughts on it for the newcomers.
Fortunately India is blessed with a high quality of talent pool available at an incomparable price. But this merit of India is gradually shifting towards countries like Indonesia which have a younger and english speaking population .
Adding to this India is still not a mature enough market that can lure the investors to spend enormous amounts of money for years on research and development of a new technology before it can make the first penny revenue. Ex SpaceX
So for some more years to come we will continue to see the companies which are building, replicating and maintaining the products of the west as outsource but the change is inevitable. Many will venture to build for local consumers and solve local problems. This trend is evident from the success of the Shark Tank franchise in India.
Keeping these factors in mind, some advices or rather conditions which are non negotiable for success in the IT sector irrespective of the location.
24 * 7 customer support is undeniably the single most important factor to be successful in this industry. In an age where customers reduce ratings on play stores before registering the issue with the company, it becomes all the more important to be instantly reachable with the client in distress call .
There may be situations arise when the customer takes the issue to social media which can adversely affect the brand image in public to the extent that it undoes all the marketing efforts which may extend months before.
It becomes even more difficult to deal with when some social media influencers are involved.
So it goes without saying that prompt reply to the customer / client’s query or issue is the primary condition.
Chinese vendors though cheap but have been notorious for not being able to provide good customer after sale support. Indian agencies are advised to stick to the reputation of providing best service to stay relevant in the market for years more to come.
According to Naval Ravikant, a very useful piece of advice for the budding startups and agencies is to try to implement remote first policy for the team. We have seen in the case of western world, they found it more economical to outsource some tasks to emerging markets so in a way they were more comfortable with implementing remote first wherever possible.
Covid-19 pandemic has greatly pushed the remote work culture. And with the innovative tools in place like Slack and Zoom, implementing remote work is not as difficult as it used to be once.
He counts many benefits for remote first policy. In his words “The idea of remote work as a separate category will be gone within a decade or two. The tools still aren't quite good enough, but they're getting better by the day.”
He went on to predict that remote work is the future. He says “We're going to see an era of everyone employing remote tech workers, and it's not too far away. In fact, now's the time to prepare for it. But I think in the meantime, the companies that are going to do the best job at it are the ones that are remote companies or that have divisions internally that are remote. It's going to be done through lengthy trials. It's going to be done through new forms of evaluating whether someone can work remotely effectively.”
India has seen many of today's unicorn startups that initially drew inspiration from foreign players. But moving forward we will see many newcomers pioneering their respective industries.
But riding on only the Indian market is not a sustainable option and startups have been advised to focus on a global target since the inception. We are seeing quite promising names too here in India. Postman, Zerodha, Zoho, Freshworks and Vernecular.ai were built in India but also kept a global audience in their mind while solving the problems that the founders faced locally.
Challenge is to make the world realise their robustness along with the best customer support that too at a very competitive price.
Role of IT companies becomes all the more important in building a tech ecosystem in India which will allow Indian startups to provide top tier services globally without having to burden themselves heavily with inhouse resources.
A system for skill pooling is going to be a great boost for the development hub for the world. At the moment this factor is taken over freelance marketplace platforms like Upwork and Fiverr.
Many IT agencies take too long before they think to Niche down on a targeted market. They tend to follow the clients requirement at first without thinking much about the industry. This is what Peter Theil exactly means when he says “Competition is for losers”.
He presses on the importance of aligning all your efforts to one single sector/ problem and building a monopoly in that domain. This reasoning also perfectly fits in IT services also. For example if your agency suggests a feature for a client in an interior decoration sector that can be easily integrated to their app and website. (Ex. AI to show the mockups for the interior designs on the pictures uploaded by the user)
Having built the feature for one, you may reach out to potential customers in the domain who will surely benefit. And you may further build and improve on the features.
In a recent chapter of Nikhil Kamath’s podcast with Venture capitalists in India, he enquired about the sectors they were most interested in. Considering the rapid pace at which the global landscape is evolving and building for the globe is a priority, most players were willing to back the startups which are engaged in Climate Change, Renewable Energy, Skilling, AI and Health.
Agency owners should be aware about the funding trends in the tech industry so that your marketing and sales strategy can be more aligned with where actually a need lies.
These were the key points that I advise anyone who is entering this field. I am looking forward to sharing my learnings on linkedin, you may like to follow me there so that you don't miss any of the upcoming posts.
Thanks for reading. I hope you find this information useful.
