We are basically non technical guys and built a product from scratch in CMS by outsourcing the development work. We spent almost about 500,000 in the development during the period of a year.
We breakeven by period of six months, but now we are competing with big guys and have aim to capture larger market in India as coupon Industry leaders are coming into domestic market.
We have future plans, strategies and modification in pipeline. But the development cost, slow speed of development, lack of knowledge in deep technological issues and mostly outsourcing the development work to somewhat not so good team is staggering our plans.
What I think is we need a mentor, VC or investor who can invest in our product and guide us with development issues.
Is there a right way to think, or is there any other way We can grow fast ?
Aji (Digital Marketing)
I am with the same opinion, for some products/services investment is very important. Organic has its own advantage and disadvantages.
Nitin Pulyani
We were also going through the same dilemma. Instead of looking for investment, I suggest you develop in house expertise. If your product is tech based, then no doubt, technology as an expertise has to be in-house. Best case scenario is that the founder himself is the CTO. If not, then I suggest one of the founders should learn coding. Not that there is time to become an expert, but he’ll at least be in a position to hire and understand what’s going on and to understand the complexity involved in each feature.
Mitul Limbani
Hiring inhouse tech expertise would be the biggest technical challenge for non-tech run startups where technology is the basis of building the business.
Get a Co-founder who is CTO for your organization and allocate some funds towards building the in-house team, this is time consuming and challenging job, but well who said building business is easy !!
Prashant Chauhan
Hi ,
if you have your product ready and running, with basic features,
Technology upgrade and Integration can take place Gradualy , now the other problem is to grab a market share.
That is marketing and strategy related problem,how your going to survive in over croweded market and will u be
be able to compete by making healthy profits as Coupen Gaints can sell much more in volumes then what you offer and can pass the benefits to Visitors.
u need to identify what is your USP over competation sites ,and WHY VC would Fund You . whats the diffrentation ?
U need Clarity
Kannu Singh
running a coupon site is good. you are saving a few bucks of people. For the promotion of your coupon site. you need to promote you coupons online on forum and make a few article about it. Coupon market is growing very fast in India and there are lots of coupon websites online on the web. Get some promotion ideas through them.