Feedback is the truest essence of business operations. With all the branding marketing initiatives undertaken by the brands, it becomes imperative for them to garner correct and complete feedback from their consumers. With the vision to build an optimum feedback software out there, Mike Slaats launched Upvoty in 2018.
Upvoty is a user feedback tool with feature voting. With Upvoty you, as a software owner, one can easily collect and manage all of the user feedback such as feature requests, bug reports, or other ideas. Also, one can implement the feedback boards and product roadmap seamlessly into the application. Users can submit new feedback or upvote on existing ones. This way, as the product owner, one is always on top of customer needs.
Upvoty is the solution to an endless feedback loop. The Upvoty team themselves has experienced the hassle of collecting and managing feedback from different channels such as chats, emails, and phone calls. With this platform, the users have a central place for all of your customer feedback. They can create different boards for different purposes. Users can submit new requests and upvote on existing ones. Through Upvoty they can also communicate each step of the way by notifying all the voters that a request has gone ‘in progress’ or set to ‘live’. One can also comment and create discussions with users about why they need certain features and can even create a product roadmap to show your users what’s next. That’s how the platform provides one simple overview.
Upvoty – Target Market Size
Upvoty is focusing on SaaS companies. It launched its product as a general feedback tool for basically everybody. The team that thought every startup needs feedback to build a better version of their product, so they all would want to have software like Upvoty. Wrong. If there’s one thing the team has learned is that one has to narrow down the target audience and focus on one core (smaller) group. And that’s when the Upvoty team started to focus on SaaS specifically and since then has grown tremendously.
“The SaaS market is an amazing community-driven world. We are getting tons of great feedback about our product, which helps us make it better and better.” Says Mike.
Founders of Upvoty and team
Mike Slaats, Founder of Upvoty
Mike Slaats is the sole founder of the company. Currently, Upvoty is a team of five and the team works fully remotely. Upvoty is looking forward to expanding its remote team with people in Europe, the Americas, and Asia because it is managing clients from all over the world. And this would improve customer support if the team can be present in all timezones.
How was Upvoty Started?
Upvoty is not the first startup that this team came up with. Before Upvoty, the team worked on another startup and it grew very quickly and because of the user growth, the amount of feedback quickly grew too. They received feedback on many different channels such as chat, phone, email, and social media. Thus, the team was required to find a way to collect and manage feedback in a better and efficient way.
They researched the existing feedback tools and concluded that there wasn’t any who was either good enough or affordable for a startup. And that’s when they decided to build one.
To validate the idea for a feedback tool like Upvoty, the team launched a landing page with an animation video and explained what Upvoty was all about. “We shipped it into the wild and quickly we received sign-ups from potential customers. After a few weeks, we hit 500+ sign-ups and that’s when we knew we were on to something.” Says Mike
And they started coding the SaaS and after 5 months shipped the first beta product in November 2018. Upvoty offered the product for free to the first few customers in exchange for feedback, which helped the team build a better first version. In February 2019 they finally launched publicly and grew to an MRR of over $1,000 in just a couple of months.
Upvoty – Name, Tagline, and Logo
Upvoty logo
The founder Mike had come up with the name “Upvoty.” He was playing around with some names and eventually stuck with Upvoty because it was playful and would suggest immediately what it does: upvote! The tagline ‘Instant feedback, instantly better products’ really assist in telling the audience what can do with this product.
Upvoty – Startup Launch
Upvoty was launched on the founder’s social media channels, who had a big follower base on both Instagram as his newsletter. He also did a small YouTube series from designing the tool to the launch. Upvoty also launched in beta on Betalist, and later on publicly on Indie Hackers and Product Hunt. This resulted in new signups for the beta type and helped spread the word of the launch.
The founder did a lot of interviews, shared a lot of the progress on his Indie Hackers profile, Twitter, and Instagram, and the team mainly focused on content marketing on the blog. Since they are more focused on their ideal ICP, with everything they do in marketing, they are getting more and more hits on the website. This resulted in more signups and paid clients. “We recently released an eBook which helped us get in front of 10s of thousands of new potential customers.” Said, Mike
Upvoty – Business Model and Revenue Model
Upvoty does not have a free plan or a freemium model. It started with paid plans right from the beginning. Its cheapest plan starts from $15 a month and allows the user to create 2 boards, have 3 team members, and 150 tracked users. Tracked users are users who participated on the boards by either upvoting, commenting, or posting new ideas. If one needs more users, team members, or boards, Upvoty has two other plans: Super Power ($25 a month), or our Unlimited Plan ($99 a month) which has everything included unlimited.
Upvoty – Startup Challenges
Branding is a major challenge in the SaaS world. There are a lot of SaaS competitors and Upvoty is in the constant need to stand out. That’s why the team focuses so much on sharing the progress with the community. They are all very appreciative. Launching the eBook, for example, wasn’t written to target potential customers, but just to share the process and progress on launching SaaS. “Because we gave away free knowledge in a space where our target audience is actively present, it did target some new customers.” Said Mike. Also, Upvoty tried to grow with paid ads, but it has too much competition from bigger software companies.
Upvoty – Growth
Upvoty recently signed its first enterprise company which is a major bank from India. They are coming on board with Upvoty for a great annual revenue plan.
Upvoty – Future Plans
Upvoty is aiming for an MRR of $10,000 before the end of 2020. “We’re hoping to accomplish this by doing more demos, making our product better for bigger teams so we can acquire bigger companies and enterprises. This should boost our MRR.” Said, Mike.
Virtual teams are becoming more and more common across the globe — from virtual assistants at small businesses to teams within big companies such as IBM to digital start-ups with fully remote teams. The benefits are clear. According to Global Workplace Analytics, remote teams increase employee productivity, satisfaction levels, and can save a company more than $10,000 annually. That’s not including the benefit of tapping into a global talent pool.
Team
As it becomes more common for companies to utilize remote workers, these businesses are discovering an influx of unique and new challenges related to managing virtual teams. As with any business, there are definitely hurdles to overcome.
Benefits of Hiring a Remote Team
Access to the best employees
Top talent doesn’t always just come knocking on your door. Significant effort is always required to build a world-class team. Of course, you have to carefully consider candidates during the hiring process. This often involves creating a team member persona, or in the case of a remote hire, a “remote persona” (just like you create buyer personas for your customers).
You should look for people who meet your criteria in the following areas:
Company values
Discipline
Focus
Work/life balance
Decision-making skills, etc.
Criteria for Hiring
One of the benefits of hiring remotely is that it gives you more options than limiting yourself to local employees. If you choose to broaden your horizons and decide to hire remote workers, you will be able to find excellent team members anywhere in the world. The A-players that you hire around the globe will surely help your company grow.
The fact is, employees who are allowed to set flexible schedules are happier than those who have to live under the rule of the clock. They tend to have fewer family conflicts than their colleagues who work at the office.
Flexible work hours
Moreover, employees who work from home say managing balance between work and family is much easier for them. Not surprisingly, the happier your employees are, the more productive you can expect them to be, which leads to faster company growth and good company moral.
Low employee turnover
According to 2017 research, 32% of people would quit their job as they are not allowed to work remotely. Many companies take this fact into account as losing an employee and hiring a new one involves significant expenses. As a result, smart companies embrace the remote work policy to keep their employees’ turnover rate low.
Low overhead
Having a team of remote workers allows you to lower your overhead by cutting office expenses. Recent calculations show that companies would save more than $500 billion a year on office rent, utilities and turnover if they chose remote work schedule. Instead of spending money on maintaining your office, you will be able to invest it in your business.
Challenges of managing a remote team and how to overcome them
Communication problems
If you want to foresee and fix one issue from this list, choose communication. It’s the cause of almost every other management issue. Managers provide direction at every step of a project or business initiative, so they need to be extremely good at communicating the strategy and understanding what’s happening within a team. Communication is the key to success for most teams. It’s critical to gather input from all members and to know what each person is working on.
Communication in remote teams
When teams work remotely, it isn’t always easy to foster open communication. Traditional email marketing often seems like a formal tool that doesn’t enable quick conversations. Efficient, effective communication is the cornerstone of any functioning group, and it is especially crucial for remote teams. Coordinating virtual team members can be challenging, and communication can be a big stumbling block for many companies trying to successfully navigate remote hires.
Potential solutions
Make use of communication-based technological tools. Instant messaging, chat, and other two-way communication channels make sharing problems and potential solutions easier than ever.
Keep these channels open, and consistently monitor them throughout the day. If an employee has a problem, idea, or thought that needs to be shared, you should be as responsive and available to a remote employee as you would to any on-site worker.
Use project management software such as Hubstaff Tasks. Having one central tool for organizing projects and tasks ensures that everyone who needs to be in the loop stays that way. You can assign tasks to team members, add comments, outline the project steps in a checklist, and more.
Generally, it’s a good idea to try and clarify as much as possible about the role: what’s expected, which KPIs to measure, resources that are available and so on. It’s very important to clarify these things with your virtual employees, as they have no other medium to find out such details.
Finally, a more practical yet potentially time-consuming suggestion is to check for understanding after each meeting. Before you end, make sure everyone knows what their next steps are, then check if these matches and if the interpretations are aligned. This is very important in remote teams where you’re relying on emails, chat, and calls. Usually, you’re managing all of them combined. Important details can easily get overseen, skipped or misinterpreted.
Scheduling difficulties
Working with a remote team offers the potential for increased productivity, but managers must also overcome some virtual-related inefficiencies. For example, one of the most difficult challenges is managing workers across several time zones.
Scheduling difficulties
First, there are tools you can use online to help make scheduling a call, video conference, or meeting with remote teams easier. From a simple online poll that lists selected dates and times that team members can choose to calendaring apps and a variety of websites and free hosts that assess participant availability, there are ways that make the process of scheduling a meeting less stressful. It also helps if team members’ schedules are flexible, since some time zones don’t line up well with traditional working hours.
Potential Solutions
Whenever all employees are meeting (via phone, teleconference, or video conference), find a time that falls within everyone’s workday. This might mean first thing for some and end of the day for others.
If the time difference really makes coordinating schedules impossible, get creative. For example, record meetings for employees who can’t attend live. This way, they can view and/or hear what happened.
Collect feedback regarding meetings via e-mail. This gives everyone the opportunity to chime in; even those who couldn’t attend while it was actually happening.
Use email to document big and important announcements such as process changes, company directives, and other important announcements that don’t require a meeting, but are nonetheless important.
Use scheduling software that allows you to schedule shifts for each team member and get alerts if they haven’t started tracking time during that window. You’ll also get email alerts if a shift is abandoned or there are missed shifts altogether, ensuring that teams are working when they say they will and avoiding downtime for your business.
Do you know how much work your remote team accomplishes and at what rate? For many managers, the answer to these questions is unclear. It’s hard to know if someone is being underutilized or is not pulling their own weight without an understanding of their productivity. For this reason, remote managers need to establish ways to track productivity for all employees. This can include setting up metrics for how much work is expected to be completed each day. This might look like:
Creating and maintaining a company blog.
Scheduling 20 social media posts per hour.
Making 150 cold calls per shift.
Tracking work and productivity
The KPI metrics you choose to evaluate the productivity of remote employees should also be the same criteria used for in-office employees. This ensures that there are clear expectations in place, regardless of how and where your team works.
Potential solutions
For customer-facing team members in remote agencies, have a system in place to ensure open channels of communication between you, the customer, and the employee. If a customer doesn’t feel a remote employee is meeting expectations or hitting necessary benchmarks, you, as the manager, need to know this as soon as possible.
When you manage remote workers, you have a lot less insight into how work is getting done. Employees must know what’s expected of them at all times, including if you’re concerned about hours logged or if you’re simply interested in the end product (regardless of time spent).
Even remote teams can implement some rules about how work is done. Some virtual companies insist on employees working from an office or offer to pay for a coworking space if the employee chooses to work from one. This works well to provide a distraction-free work environment.
To avoid problems, it’s helpful to have a quantitative way to evaluate a remote worker’s contributions. This way, if you’re in any way unhappy with the work, you can explain exactly why. This will make it clearer for the worker, and it helps get that employee up to speed about expectations as quickly as possible.
Utilize employee productivity software to get the best sense of what your remote team is up to during the workday. Depending on the system you use, this platform could even provide intermittent screenshots to show you exactly which projects are being worked on, and what the status is. This tool provides invaluable data to you, and it encourages remote employees to stay active and engaged in company priorities.
Building trust
Building trust is difficult for remote managers and team members. Managers worry that workers aren’t completing work, while workers have a range of concerns, including whether they’ll be paid on time. Being transparent can help to build trust for all parties. You can help build trust by being transparent about: Working hours, Project expectations, Pay rate, Payment timelines, and Status updates on projects
In terms of expectations, be honest about the workload you expect to have for your contractors. Many B2B marketing companies tell freelancers they can expect the amount of work to increase substantially over the coming months, even when this isn’t the case. These kinds of statements might be well intentioned, but it may lead some freelancers to believe they’ve been strung along. They may even have negotiated for a lower rate because of the volume and then feel duped when it doesn’t pan out.
Potential solutions
Employees need feedback often in order to correct problems early on and become satisfied, top performers in their role. Be sure that all managers are giving frequent feedback to address any issues, blockers or challenges people are facing. This will help the managers to develop trust with the team members and give them the flexibility needed to make virtual teams work.
Put a premium on video conferences. Seeing each other’s faces is the next best thing to meeting in person.
Trust your employees, but also utilize time-tracking software. It keeps everyone accountable and can help team members feel confident in the hours they put in.
So how can SaaS leaders and companies effectively support and manage employees who aren’t in an office? There is the REMOTE formula to help. Resources, Engagement, Motivation, Objectives, Trust and Expectations are what you need to remember when working with, or developing a team remotely.
REMOTE formula
Resources: Get the right tools. There’s an abundance of online collaboration resources which, in some cases, are specifically designed to ease the struggles of remote working.
Engagement: Engage with your remote workers on a daily basis as you would do if they were based in an office. You must eradicate all feelings of isolation. Communication is key and setting out clear goals and outcomes is important to achieving success.
Motivation: This is exactly the same as in an office environment. You don’t want your team soft pedalling and giving just a small percentage of their full potential. Motivating your team to achieve tasks they may have never done before will better utilize their just discovered skillset, improve productivity and maximize effort.
Objectives: SaaS team leaders should focus on setting direction via goals, not activity. Try not to be overly concerned with details, and when goal achievement confidence is low, know when and how to jump in and find a way to support the area that’s a challenge.
Trust: This is a biggie. You must trust your remote workforce. It starts with whether you’re a high trust company or a low trust company. A high trust organization would have their fair share of multipliers. The company shows empathy, collaboration and recognizes their employees as people who are achieving great things. A low trust organization tends to express toxic cultures and would have diminishers amongst the teams. Most of the time formality takes over friendliness.
Expectations: By introducing a remote working culture you’re leaving your employee more control of their working structure. Expectations of them and the work they produce for the company needs to be made extremely clear.
Conclusion
The debate of remote working is one that will continue to develop. The purpose of this long post is to aid SaaS companies when making a decision to grow and scale, but a work from home culture is not for every organization. Despite the fact that creating and managing a remote team is not easy, it’s definitely worth trying if you have the tools to be successful. So, let’s create your remote team now. Please tell us your views in the comments section below.
Coronavirus outbreak has already affected many sectors of human life right from restaurants, food chains, tourism, airlines, sporting events to film industry also which is eventually leading to economic slowdown in many countries. While the various countries are continuing to prepare and practice social distancing and self-quarantine during this COVID-19 pandemic, companies are looking for workers to help restock empty shelves and deliver orders to home-bound customers. In addition to this, of course, Coronavirus outbreak is also having a significant impact on the jobs market, employers plans to hire and the recruitment industry as a whole, experts have warned. Many industry executives & experts have stated their views towards coronavirus impact on recruitment industry and hiring.
What Experts say about Impact on Recruitment –
Lee Biggins – CEO and the founder of CV-Library Lee Biggins has stated, “No doubt that the Coronavirus outbreak will have significant consequences for the recruitment industry as a whole”. He further added, “We’re already hearing feedback that employers are pausing their hiring plans while they wait for the worst to pass.” Steve Blank – a retired serial entrepreneur-turned-educator Steve has said, “It’s no longer business as usual for the rest of the economy. In fact, shutting down the economy for a pandemic has never happened. Millions of jobs may be lost in the next few months, as entire industries are devastated, something not seen since the Great Depression of 1929-39. I hope I’m very wrong, but the social and economic impacts of this virus are likely to be profound and will change how we shop, travel, and work for years.” Kamal Karanth – Co-founder of staffing solutions provider Xpheno Karanth has said, “Several India entry projects are getting or likely to get postponed. Senior-level hiring, which is considered as critical hiring in any industry and usually remains insulated from various other factors, is likely to be pushed back for some months.” Jamie Dimon – CEO of JPMorgan Chase Jamie Dimon has quoted that it expected the U.S. economy to contract in the first two quarters of the year, which would meet a common definition of a recession.
According to reports, employment in Britain hit a record high in January before the Coronavirus outbreak but now the country is facing for a great wave of job losses. According to official figures, hiring of many firms & companies has been frozen there amid the crisis. Some companies have moved to freeze hiring until the economic impact of the virus is made clear, but many others are continuing to recruit in a bid to prevent a business slowdown. Several companies in India and across the world have already cancelled or postponed interviews. Some of them are turning to video calls, where possible, as they are unable to travel for face-to-face interactions, which is important in senior hires. Many reports state that hiring is likely to be delayed or pushed back by at least a quarter as the COVID-19 pandemic forces companies to suspend projects and find immediate ways to cope with the situation.
Usually, hiring of senior or top executives such as chief executives and operations and finance chiefs is also likely to be delayed by quarter as companies and senior executives are unable to travel. As senior-level hiring needs significant face-to-face interaction to get known about the candidate, interviews are getting pushed and indefinitely postponed. Similarly, the startup are also going to be affected due to coronavirus outbreak. For instance, in the startup ecosystem, hiring has been decided based on the growth plans they have but now many of them are unable to proceed further because They have fewer cash reserves and a smaller margin of error for managing sudden downturns. The ripple and feedback effect of all of these closures will have a major impact on country’s economy as each industry that gets impacted puts people out of work and those laid off workers don’t buy products and services. While according to some experts, the real impact of the COVID-19 outbreak on hiring in India will take 3-4 weeks to gauge.
Many Companies are still Recruiting Candidates
It’s important to note that the candidate market has always been competitive pre-coronavirus and companies have continued to take their time to process candidates and hire the best person for the job. That’s not going to change ever. As the coronavirus pandemic continues to affect economies across the globe, few industries still have been left untouched by the fallout, and that’s having huge implications not only for the workforce but also the recruitment process. Many experts said that there is still hope for the recruitment industry, as many employers would continue to hire for essential roles and some sectors – such as health and social care and logistics were already recruiting more workers.
Lately, online e-commerce giant Amazon made headlines when the company announced it is looking to hire 100,000 workers for warehouse and delivery positions. Meijer, American Supermarket company, is also hiring additional seasonal team members in each of their stores to meet the demands of the business. Cosco says it to is looking for workers to help keep its inventory moving to meet customer demand. Walmart is looking for employees to add to its delivery drivers.
All above information just comes down to the fact that Not every industry slows down in an economic downturn and not every company within an industry slows down. The bottom line is people get hired during layoffs and hires happen even when things slow down. Hiring will speed up or slow down within an organization based on their strategic plans for the year not solely because of a virus.
Coronavirus has now spread to more than 157 countries all over the world and has been declared a pandemic. The number of coronavirus cases have crossed more than 3 million globally. In India, more than 30,000 cases have been registered with 1000+ fatalities. The coronavirus outbreak or COVID-19 has affected various sectors and industries, and many companies have taken the initiative to contain the spread of the pandemic.
Apple shut down its stores in China and other nearby countries for implementing safety measures. The world’s second-biggest fashion retailer H&M has also closed stores Germany and the United States, the biggest markets. It also shuttered stores in Canada, Portugal, and Belgium. In India, the aviation and railway sectors are severely strained under the pandemic with revenues plummeting to record lows. Many airlines in India are unable to generate revenue in spite of lowering ticket prices.
At the same time, the Indian railways has cancelled more than 70 trains for precaution and due to low occupancy. The consequent losses are mind-numbing and severe enough to cause heart attacks. The tourism industry worldwide has taken a severe hit. Many food chains and restaurants are struggling to sustain themselves as people are avoiding going out until and unless it’s an emergency. Not only this, several start-ups are bearing the brunt of the lockdown which is in place. In all, the economy has come to a halt and everything else to a standstill.
On the other hand, the coronavirus outbreak is aiding several countries. The Chinese government gradually shut down public services, schools and several manufacturing plants since the mid of January, giving other countries an opportunity to step up their game in segments like manufacturing . China is the largest consumer and supplier of many products in the world which include spare parts, chemical, toys, lighting, base metals, oil, etc. Many countries, including the US and European Union, import these goods from China.
Economic superpowers and behemoths are now reaching out to other countries to fulfill increasing demand. India is one such country which has seen a surge in exports in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak. Due to China’s temporary lockdown, the chemical sector will be amongst the biggest beneficiaries alongside other sectors like textiles, ceramics, sanitary ware, homeware, and engineering goods.
These companies will benefit tremendously during the pandemic
Although the novel coronavirus outbreak is crashing global markets and affecting everything from air travel and the film industry to local businesses, some companies will benefit from this situation. These include firms that sell deep-cleaning products, remote services like Peloton, Zoho, video conferencing tools like Zoom, and Purell, a popular hand sanitizer brand.
According to a report, sellers of some lesser-known products also view the coronavirus as a unique business opportunity. These companies sell gadgets like air purifiers, robots, and even products like spit-shielding hats that help in combating the virus.
Now, some of these vendors are actively promoting the link between their products and Covid-19. The result is strong brand value, publicity, and booming business. Not only this, the demand for face masks has increased significantly since governments, medical experts, and doctors are advocating the use of face masks to protect oneself from getting exposed to the virus.
Sale of Hand Sanitizers has seen a Boom like Never Before
With people more worried about infection and germs, they are running towards disinfectant products such as hand sanitizers, hand wash, cleaning wipes, etc. People are turning to brands like Purell, Lysol, Clorox, Lifebuoy, and Dettol like never before. Consumer demand for hand sanitizers has grown by 1,400 percent from December to January.
The demand is so high that Walmart stores, retailers, and pharmacies are short on stock, e-commerce platforms such as Amazon and Flipkart are also low on supply, and products are being sold at more than double their market rates. In fact, the black market for sanitizers, disinfectant wipes, gloves, masks, and PPEs is crazy! Manufacturers aren’t shying away from making the most out of the shortage of supplies. Meanwhile, even small firms selling such products are making considerable profits. It’s hard to believe but the shares of Clorox and other drug makers were on the rise in late February despite the economic slowdown.
Even technology companies are reaping massive benefits in these trying times. Many phone and video conference software and tools are in high demand because organizations have chosen to implement work from home across offices and geographies.Famouswork from home software & toolsinclude: Webex – Web conferencing and video conferencing tool. Zoom – Team video conference tool. Skype – Online video calling tool. Slack – Team Communication and collaboration app. Zoho – Web-based business tools. GSuite – Emailing and team communication applications.
There are several other chatting & conference platforms in the fray as well. Due to massive demand, these companies are providing additional features at lower prices. Since a large number of companies are relying on these tools at the moment, this is a golden window for the providers of these tools and software to capitalize on the demand and stand out in the market.
During Lockdown, traffic on Online Streaming platform will see Growth
To no one’s surprise, the demand and traffic on many online streaming platforms like Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney Plus, HBO Max, Hulu, etc. have blown through the roof. With strict lockdown measures in place and nothing to pass time, these streaming platforms have become a necessity. Without them, spending the day becomes arduous!
Conclusion
Every coin has two sides and the coronavirus outbreak is no exception. While a number of organizations and companies are reeling from decline in revenues and market value, others are profiting big time and witnessing a windfall hitherto unseen.
How many of us really like dealing with the nitty-gritty of running the accounting and bookkeeping operations of our companies? Unless you’ve got a passion for numbers (or you’re the founder of an accounting startup), you probably look at accounting as the least engaging, most time-consuming part of your day-to-day as an entrepreneur.
Accounting Software for SaaS
So how do you keep track of your daily business accounting while also gearing up your business for future growth? You pick the best accounting software for SaaS companies. Implementation of the proper systems, processes and technology stack as early as possible is the solution. With the right accounting software for SaaS businesses, you can achieve a seamless flow of data between all financial processes in your business which would ultimately enter your cloud accounting system, ideally automatically.
When you start making your first purchases for your startup, it’s easy to record them in an Excel or a Google Docs spreadsheet. Excel spreadsheets may seem perfect for the first weeks, or even months, as you’re getting your business off the ground, but continuing to manage your books that way — and not using real SaaS accounting software for your startup — is simply the wrong thing to do. This is true especially when you seek investments or venture capital to grow your business; when you show potential backers your financials in a handful of spreadsheets, chances of errors are higher and it looks unprofessional.
Spreadsheets vs. SaaS accounting software
There are certainly people who could maintain their financials for their SaaS startup in this manner. In these cases, they’d have to create very detailed spreadsheets with all the accounts and reporting elements of standard accounting. Spreadsheets like this would look a lot like accounting software, and the amount of time they’d take to set up and verify would be better spent on growing their business. The disadvantages of using Excel for accounting for your SaaS startup is about a lot more than just the way figures look in a spreadsheet. There is so much that can be wrong in a spreadsheet that investors can’t take that sort of financial data seriously.
What SaaS accounting software offers?
SaaS accounting software offers so much more than Excel that it’s really a no-brainer. Here are some of the best features that most accounting software provides:
Contact and project management: Set up your contacts, create projects, and manage your clients, all without having to copy and paste rows and columns.
Time tracking: If you bill your clients by the hour, most accounting software includes the capability to do this automatically. Create time sheets, then add them up when it’s time to issue invoices.
Invoicing: This is one of the most practical features of accounting software. You can easily invoice your clients, according to what you’ve sold them, how much time you’ve spent on their projects, and more. You can also create estimates, which you can then convert to invoices with a few clicks.
Price database: Depending on what your business sells — services, hardware, etc. — you can have a price database and update it as needed. You’ll always be charging your clients the correct prices. And you won’t need multiple calculations for sales tax; the software will handle that too.
Expenses: Accounting software handles expenses very well. Each team member has a role in the accounting software, and you can see, at any time, how much has been spent, and reimburse people accordingly.
Apply purchases and expenses to the appropriate accounts: Some of your expenses are for payroll, others for office equipment, and others for capital assets. Try separating those correctly in an Excel spreadsheet, especially when you need to calculate depreciation. Accounting software does this for you, and helps ensure best practices are followed in recording expenses.
Payroll and benefits: Handle payroll, payroll takes, reporting, and all the related expenses without breaking a sweat.
Bank feeds and reconciliation: With accounting software, you can have your bank transactions update automatically, and apply their expenditures to the correct accounts with a few clicks. Accounting software handles multiple bank accounts easily, and some software handles multiple currencies, so you don’t even have to look up exchange rates.
Cash flow projections: You can do this with Excel, with complicated formulae, but accounting software lets you see the big picture at any time.
Sharing: You may have a number of principals in your startup who need access to your accounts. With an Excel spreadsheet, you won’t all have access at the same time. Plus, you’ll never know if anyone has made a mistake. With accounting software, your accountant or CFO can check your books easily, and you can even give potential investors limited access to view your accounts.
Pretty printouts: Whenever you are seeking investments, you’ll need to show how healthy your business is. Accounting software prints out easy to read, standardized reports: your trial balance, profit & loss account, balance sheet, and more. You’ll look a lot more serious with accounts that investors can understand at a glance.
Audit trail: No one wants to get audited, but if you ever do face the scrutiny of the IRS, accounting software makes the process a lot simpler.
Support: When that person who set up the Excel spreadsheet leaves your startup for a different gig, who will be able to help out when something goes wrong? Accounting software includes support so when you don’t understand something, an answer is just a phone call away.
Why are good accounting systems important for SaaS?
The difficulty with SaaS businesses is that they are typically high transaction volume businesses, especially on the revenue side of things. It’s not uncommon to have thousands of transactions per month happening due to the recurring revenue model. When you have old, archaic accounting software (or even worse, spreadsheets), managing this high transaction load, it means that it’s very manual to reconcile and categorize your financial data on an on-going basis. You would need to enter every single one of these transactions 1 by 1 into your accounting system or spreadsheet in order to handle the accounting properly.
Some SaaS businesses that we encounter even have 1 full time employee at the company just to handle data entry. Using this approach usually ends up with the company wasting time, wasting resources and not getting the data they need when they need it. With the right accounting software for SaaS businesses, much of this manual data entry and categorization process can be greatly alleviated.
Focus on These Features
Ok, you have decided that it is time to find a new accounting solution. Here are a few accounting-specific modules that you should ask about when assessing new software.
Features
Revenue Recognition
Recurring revenue is the heart of your business. The revenue recognition process must be bullet-proof. Ask the vendor if they have specifically addressed ASC 606 or IFRS 15. Reporting is also key. Can you produce a report that shows recognized revenue by month by customer by product? Reports are also needed to prove out your deferred balances by customer. Your auditor will ask for this!
Payment Integration
If you invoice customers and receive a check or ACH in return, payment integration may not be relevant to you. But if your customers pay only by credit card, you’ll want a solid integration to Stripe or PayPal, for example, into your software. It must be able to track the meta data related to these transactions so that revenue recognition can be performed.
This seems to be changing every year, and sales tax treatment on SaaS varies wildly from state to state. An out-of-the box integration that connects your accounting software to sales tax compliance software is necessary.
Fixed Assets
Software companies are typically not capital intensive in fixed assets (servers, expensive laptops, phone systems, etc.), but you do need a module for this. And it is a bonus if it also tracks the multiple “tax books” for GAAP, federal, and state purposes.
Travel and Expense
Does the software offer its own module to track and submit employee expense reports? And a mobile app? If it’s clunky, you may want to consider an outside T&E software vendor that integrates into your accounting system.
CRM Integration
Where does your quote and order begin? Integrating that information into your accounting system removes manual work, reduces errors, and most importantly, allows you to invoice faster so that can you accelerate cash flow. And cash is paramount in running any business.
Conclusion
If you’re going to eliminate the administrative nightmare of your accounting and start getting timely, accurate data, it all revolves in having the right accounting software for SaaS businesses in place, though choosing the right apps is just 50% of the equation to achieving stress-free accounting. The proper system architecture needs to be assembled, processes need to be defined so that everyone knows how data will flow between all apps and the right team has to be in place to maintain the integrity of the data on an on-going basis.
Building a SaaS product introduces a lot of challenges – especially acquiring the right talent for the project, meeting budget and time targets. Outsourcing brings many advantages to SaaS development. The offshore SaaS development process is now smoother than ever with implementation of better development methodology and qualified product developers.
With adequate resources available, one can use simple development methodology to implement a communication and result oriented strategy. With a team-based approach to SaaS product development, you get access to additional benefits of flexibility and speed. The best place to find local developers to collaborate with is to attend local tech meet-ups and start asking around. Find like-minded people you’d trust to collaborate with to develop your idea.
Why Outsource Software Development?
At the most fundamental level, outsourcing can help solve three specific issues: providing access to talent, saving time and lowering costs. In addition, outsourcing can also provide scale and reduce time to market. Many large companies have already turned to outsourcing. Startups and mid-sized technology companies are getting there, but they seem to have a harder time making the decision to try it. Working with an outsourced development team provides a number of benefits to SaaS companies. Both during the MVP stage and growth stage. Besides, outsourcing the development of your SaaS products give you multiple benefits.
Why Outsourcing?
Most software companies build early versions of their software in-house and iterate until they find a product-market fit. Then, they rapidly grow their user bases. But as growth accelerates, so does the pressure to meet aggressive product roadmaps, add new features and fix bugs and usability issues. The weight of this work strains the internal software development team, and they need to expand. At this stage, companies immediately run into the realities of finding and hiring IT talent — the 50-plus days it takes to find, interview and hire (which doesn’t include on-boarding) and the high incremental costs of adding new employees. All while managing sales, marketing and growth processes. If you’re facing similar challenges, outsourcing might be the best answer.
In addition to providing access to talent, outsourcing development affords companies many other benefits, from time and cost savings to process improvements.
Start Software Development Projects Right Away.
Outsourcing can help you manage growth without getting overwhelmed. It can speed up software development by providing quick access to developers and testers. Instead of spending 50 days to hire each developer, you can hire a whole team in one week and get started. And you don’t need to spend 80 hours screening every hire; it’s done by your outsourcing partner.
Lower Costs
Like most other tech companies, SaaS ventures typically operate on a shoestring budget focused on reducing initial development costs and maximizing the return from their finalized software. Because of these limitations and the intensely competitive nature of the SaaS industry, it is incredibly difficult for companies in this arena to have the budget to hire the sort of large, highly skilled internal development teams necessary to produce a minimum viable product (MVP) that can connect with consumers.
Outsourcing lowers cost
That’s why many companies, large and small alike, turn to outsourcing when undertaking a new SaaS development project. Some companies opt to outsource their entire development process to an experienced end-to-end delivery team, capable of translating a rough idea into a polished final product. Whatever your needs, your outsourcing partner should help you create a cost-effective plan of action that allows you to add hyper-specialized developers to your company as soon as you are ready.
Implement Efficient Processes.
Software development requires both skilled developers as well as strong processes. A good outsourcing partner can improve development by leveraging its experience in executing similar projects. It can, for example, apply its framework and practices for managing code quality and protecting intellectual property.
Outsourcing Implement Efficient Processes
With an outsourcing partner, you can meet demand at a reduced cost, allowing you to invest more in key growth drivers, such as marketing, sales and product development. You actually can have your cake and eat it too!
For the modern companies, one of the most harrowing challenges that they face is finding the right talent in a competitive job market. The Annual CIO Survey found that 65% of technology leaders said that the search for tech talent is one of their industry’s biggest challenges. However, thoughtful tech leaders can sidestep this problem through software outsourcing–and by working with outsourcing partners who have a wide network of experienced software engineers ready to begin their next project today. Just as importantly, their recruiting staff can identify which software engineers are best suited for your organization given your internal capabilities, budget, and project goals.
Flexibility After Development
In the midst of a major software development project, most employees don’t have time to think ahead to next month, much less next year. But, one of management’s primary responsibilities during this time period is to make sure that their team is prepared for the next steps once the software is brought to market.
If you outsource SaaS development from the very beginning of your project, you can simply thank your temporary team members for their hard work and contributions and wish them well on their next project. This is an enviable position to be in: managers who followed the old system of hiring a full-time staff are trying to figure out how to reduce their budget and put these employees to work, while those who outsourced development are looking towards the future and reorganizing their augmented staff for the next big project.
Learn from Others
Outsourcing software development allows you to bring in the most sought-after experts in the SaaS development field without the need for a drawn-out hiring process and, even more impressively, allows you to add them to your team almost immediately since your outsourcing partner will have these engineers on-call.
An incredibly difficult aspect of the SaaS process is that management should fully understand the SaaS development cycle, their customer needs, and the challenges that the project will likely bring. However, no matter how experienced your management team is, they can undoubtedly benefit from working with outside advisors who have overcome those very same challenges repeatedly throughout their careers.
Some top SaaS companies that outsourced development and became successful.
Slack
Slack
One of the most popular communication tool used by many businesses. Not everybody is aware that the development of this collaboration application launched in 2013 was in fact outsourced. The four founders of the startup contacted a design company to handle the design of the website, application and Slack’s logo. The MVP was later distributed to beta testers and gained 8k users on the final launch day. As for today, Slack is used by nearly 8 million users per day and is steadily gaining momentum and recognition.
Microsoft
Microsoft
Yes, Microsoft, a giant that does not have to be introduced. Employing more than 131k people, Microsoft is said to have as many remote contractors as its direct employees. In 2010 Microsoft signed an outsourcing deal with a provider in India to manage its internal IT operations. The partner was responsible for managing IT help desk and servicing applications, devices and databases in 450 locations in more than 100 countries. This allowed Microsoft to reduce IT support costs.
Groove
Groove
Groove – an online customer support platform – is yet another amazing example of what outsourcing can give you. Its founder – Alex Turnbull – after selling his previous company, wanted to get back into the game as quickly as possible. Lacking technical knowledge and staff, he decided to outsource the entire development of the product. This allowed him to save money that would have been spent on hiring employees, offices etc. In 2016, Groove gained a total revenue of $5.2 million and is now employing people all around the world.
Conclusion
In the development of any software product or service, the most crucial resources are time, money and energy. SaaS software or products are the applications that will only witness a rise in the coming years. There are various tools and applications available in the market today for efficient project management overseas. With Skype, Google Hangouts, Jira and various others, you can easily manage the offshore development of your SaaS product. Those few stories from SaaS startups that recognized the value of outsourcing their development are truly inspiring. They are proof that outsourcing saves money and allows to quickly create prototypes and shorten time-to-market. So, what do you think about outsourcing software development? Please let us know in the comments section below.
The COVID-19 pandemic has changed every aspect of work and life. Coronavirus spread during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic led many organizations to recommend their staff to work from home full-time; now also being known as WFH, for their safety. As more and more companies implement work-from-home policies due to the spread of COVID-19, employees are now asked for trying to be just as productive without the normal routines and resources that they get in the offices while working. While working from home sounds like a luxury, in theory, it’s certainly no vacation and being productive is not very easy.
But to get the same productivity from work from home, some specific strategies & Goals need to be implemented. Every job is different and the amount of work one can achieve will vary between career types, employers and internal policies, but there are some key strategies to working from home when it comes to getting your tasks done efficiently. Working remotely or the practice of working for an extended period outside the formal office environment is growing steadily in popularity by using various digital tools from Web conferencing, e-mail to mobile collaboration applications and virtual event platforms to connect people and make sure the work-from-home is possible without any difficulty. “Some of the best strategies & Goals to make yourself productive without distractions are”.
As an employee, one needs to create a dedicated work area at home even if it is temporary during this Coronavirus outbreak situation. It can be a separate room or a space at home where you can’t get distracted. Although it’s convenient to stay in bed or on your sofa but to get in that work mode, it is always better to create a dedicated workspace. A separate workspace is healthy as well as keeping to your regular work routine, even though you are not in the office. If you don’t have a desk, one can use the dining room table which can make you feel like you’re at the office. This helps you focus on your work, avoid distractions, and maintain a work-life balance at home.
Creating a Dedicated Workspace
Make sure you have Strong Internet access
Internet access is the most important thing for getting your tasks done at home. When you work at home, having a strong internet connection will be most advised as most of the work or tasks assigned to you will be over the internet. Wifi/Data Card/Hot Spot is used for better network connectivity. Having a robust internet connection is required for video conferencing and chatting will make you an active participant and also helps in finishing your tasks without difficulty.
Strong Internet access
Stay Connected with colleagues
Staying connected with colleagues is very important for a professional. It helps you evaluate your work, perform well in your tasks and also social skills. If you work on a team, it is essential to keep in touch with the other team members. For this purpose, there are many platforms like WhatsApp, Slack so that people get updates for the quick task. One can also stay connected with team members with the help of email communications. Any queries, inputs must be discussed with the other teammates. Messaging programs like Slack is a good idea to set up regular check-ins via phone or video conferencing like Skype, FaceTime, or Zoom.
Get used to Video Calls
Working from home means a lot more video calls. On the tech front, video calls can make a remote workday feel more connected. Video calls are crucial as teams like to see each other when they collaborate for a better understanding of each other’s perspectives. For this, you need a good webcam and headset to have a comfortable and quality experience. Using your built-in webcam and basic headphones should work well enough but if you want to upgrade the experience, investing in a webcam or headset is a good idea if the worker’s base computing device does not have one. In some organizations, 720P is the minimum acceptable resolution for quality results, for which one may need to get a webcam. A high-quality headset or headphones with a mic are a must for phone or web conferencing. Apart from this, using appropriate software for web or video conferencing is important. There are many software available for connecting people on video conferencing like Skype, FaceTime, Zoom, Microsoft TeamsWebex, Zoho & so on. Accounts are free for the basic plan in Zoom if your company does not already have a corporate one. Zoom is packed with features and is fast with clear audio and video. Now, these companies are making many features free and lifting the limitations to cope with coronavirus outbreaks.
Make use of Google Docs and Sheets
Google docs and Sheets are used to interact & update the status or progress of the assigned task. It is advisable to use Google Docs and Sheets to keep the records and store the data. Google Docs and Sheets let teams collaborate making monitoring tasks easier and evaluating the progress without any confusion. There is one more tool named Zapier which is a web service having many features like voice typing which increases productivity and also makes the work easy.
Prepare for Distractions
Needless to say, working at home comes with the high possibility of distractions. Working from home is never as same as working in offices. You must realise that at home we can’t always be as productive as we are in the office with the family being at home.
Conclusion
The Covid-19 pandemic has changed our perspective towards many things. Work-from-home is one of them. Work-from-home can be possible and very effective if you make an effort to make yourself productive by creating your own goals and strategies. Following a strict routine and improving your skills every day can make you a better professional.
Who doesn’t love to stay fit? While everyone wishes to live a healthy and active life free from ailments, owing to the unhealthy and inappropriate lifestyle that most of us follow these days, we become susceptible to many diseases. Knowingly or unknowingly we adopt many unhealthy habits which may prove detrimental to our health in the long run. We lack motivation and guidance required to maintain a healthy lifestyle. While all of us cannot afford the luxury of hiring our own personal nutritionist, wouldn’t you love it if someone is always by your side taking care as you are about to eat? If yes, then there is some good news. PurpleTeal, a startup which is operating both in India and abroad, brings to you ‘Tweak & Eat’ an app that will give you practical and real-time advice on how to tweak your meals to make it healthier. Tweak & Eat ® was launched in 2017 and is designed to help users with weight-loss and management of diet-related health issues.
PurpleTeal is an established mobile Health (mHealth) service provider. It operates an automated, personalized mHealth messaging platform for Telcos and consumers. PurpleTeal’s mHealth platform and apps engage subscribers to take better care of their health and wellness, by educating them and prompting them to take appropriate and timely health actions.
PurpleTeal’s core business is a smartphone app ‘Tweak & Eat’ which offers just-in-time meal advice to subscribers. The company has headquarters in Foremont (California) and Chennai (India).
The company’s vision is to ‘Keep Everyone Healthy, Looking Good & Feeling Great!’ and their Mission is to ‘Transform Health & Wellness across the Globe!.
Even people who are aware that diet is important for good health, find it difficult to remember and follow their diet plans or principles (e.g. eat fewer carbs). They need specific, real-time advice and hand-holding at the ‘point of consumption’. PurpleTeal’s ‘Tweak & Eat’ App, makes it easier for people to make long-term dietary changes through incremental changes to each meal through personalized ‘tweaks’. Each meal is a ‘teachable moment’. ‘Tweak & Eat’ makes it simple by relieving people of the onerous work of remembering, recording, counting, tracking or analyzing their food intake: Users just need to send a picture of the meal in front of them and the nutritionists will tell them how to make that meal healthier for their body profile.
Mr. Narayanan Ram and Mr. Anand Subra are the founders of PurpleTeal.
Mr. Narayanan Ram, is the CEO of PurpleTeal. He is an experienced entrepreneur with deep roots in the information technology industry. By education, he is an electrical engineering graduate. He graduated in 1993 and joined Cirrus Logic. From 1993-1996, he worked in Cirrus Logic holding different posts. In 1996, at the time of leaving Cirrus Logic, Mr. Ram was Director of Video Telecom Products.
In 1997, Mr. Ram founded SeeItFirst Inc., a video software tools company. From conceptualizing, architecting and implementing the first ‘interactive frame-based video streaming technology’ to receiving patents for the same, Mr. Ram has a lot to his credit. Besides, he was also successful in attracting investments from NBC/GE, MKS Ventures, and Deutsche Bank. He launched the first product in 1998 and built up a blue-chip customer base with over 100 implementations in the US, Japan and India. Mr. Ram formed and guided a strong management team and Board of Directors for SeeItFirst. SeeItFirst was acquired by the UB Group in 2001. Mr. Ram continued as CEO of SeeItFirst until 2004.
Dr. Anand Subra, is the Chief Knowledge Officer of PurpleTeal. He is an IIT alumnus and is a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota. He is the co-author of many journal papers and holds US and foreign patents. He is responsible for new product development and providing knowledge support for strategy, marketing and delivery initiatives.
Anand previously worked with IBM for 20 years in various departments like sales, marketing, consulting, and strategy and business development. Anand helped a number of multinational firms in successfully developing and implementing their business strategies and operational initiatives. He led the business development of IBM innovation management services and also spearheaded these services in the healthcare industry.
The founders Narayanan and Anand were always looking for new ways to improve people’s lives and periodically meet in some locatioThe founders Narayanan and Anand were always looking for new ways to improve people’s lives and periodically met in some location to brainstorm new ideas. During one such meeting in Silicon Valley in 2015, they were discussing the obesity and overweight epidemic and looking at various sites and apps that were addressing the fitness/wellness space. They wanted to make a difference to people with weight-related health issues.
Narayanan and Anand were struck by the level of effort required to use some of the other health & wellness apps and felt that these apps appealed more to ‘power users’, who used these apps for record-keeping and validation from other users. Most likely, they had already established a ‘healthy’ diet and exercise habits and were using fitness apps to further hone their habits. Power users were deeply engaged with the quantitative aspects of the app and reveled in data entry, analysis and feedback. In contrast, ‘average users’ would consider these requirements to be very onerous and were likely to stop using the apps in a short while. This made them feel that they could come up with a much easier approach, one that would appeal to the average user, and require far less effort, but also provide useful functionality for power users.
Taking a step further, Narayanan and Anand consulted with their friends and others about what they would want in an ideal weight-loss app, and what they have experienced with other apps. They found out that what most people needed was not just information and actionable tips/instructions, they also needed hand-holding. They felt they were left to their own devices at meal times, especially in certain situations like a buffet, eating out with a group, someone pushing unhealthy food, etc.
They realized that while it is one thing to ‘know’ that curtailing carb intake leads to weight-loss, it is totally another thing to take the appropriate actions when sitting at a meal filled with all sorts of carb-temptations! What would really help was telling them which items to avoid and which to eat, and how much. This would make things far easier.
They also observed that while existing apps placed a lot of emphasis on recording and analyzing every morsel eaten by the user, informing the user to the nth degree of detail, but not really motivating any lasting changes in behavior. Also, these apps coached users ‘after-the-fact’, i.e. the app would tell them what all they ate and how they could do better next time – after they had already eaten their meals. Users would have to remember the instructions and make sure they followed them – all on their own! These made Anand and Narayanan feel that they could do a whole lot better by hand-holding the users as and when they were actually eating their meals. They wanted to design something which would free the users from remembering the instructions from their last meal and from entering any data. Thus the idea behind ‘Tweak & Eat” was formed.
Anand and Narayanan soon started Executing this idea. They analyzed a large number of papers and journal articles as well through which they found some very interesting information. One is that people lost some weight on almost every ‘diet’, but were unable to sustain them; the lost weight invariably came right back! This is a widely recognized phenomenon, aptly summarized by American humorist Erma Bombeck: “In two decades I’ve lost a total of 789 pounds. I should be hanging from a charm bracelet.”
Mark Twain, another American humorist, once said: “Giving up smoking is the easiest thing in the world. I know because I’ve done it thousands of times.” The same can be said for weight-loss!
Another very surprising finding that stood out was that exercise did not play an important enough role in weight-loss! Diet played a far greater role and therein lay the rub because people find it very difficult to sustain drastic changes to their diets over the long term.
The PurpleTeal team started developing the app based upon the various findings. They laid out the technical design and requirements, applied for US and International patents (still pending), and began development. The team came up with an approach that would require very little user effort (most of the work would be done by nutritionists). – it would allow people to eat what they normally did, but with a ‘Tweak’ (meal-modification) under the guidance of nutritionists.
All the user would have to do is to take a picture of their meal and send it to ‘Tweak & Eat’. The rest backend activity would be manned by qualified nutritionists. Within a minute, the nutritionists would send back a tweak. No data entry, no remembering anything… it couldn’t be made any easier than this!
The name Tweak and Eat came from the idea that – the user will eat what he/she would normally eat and just ‘tweak’ (make incremental changes) the meal a bit to suit the user’s body profile and achieve his/her specific goals.
What is PurpleTeal
The Company’s core business is a smartphone app and Service called ‘Tweak & Eat’. ‘Tweak & Eat’ aims to empower health-conscious subscribers with ‘Just-in-time’ meal advice (i.e. ‘Tweaks’) from nutritionists who analyze the nutritive content of each meal and make suggestions for improvement.
‘Tweak & Eat’ helps subscribers make informed food choices and changes for the meal they are just about to eat, based on their individual body parameters and specific health goals. All the subscriber has to do is to take a picture of their food plate and send it to us using the App. Tweak & Eat nutritionists then view the plate and make appropriate portion control, food swapping or eating sequence recommendations in less than a minute. They may also make suggestions for future meals, taking advantage of meal-time ‘teachable moments’ to educate subscribers about healthy eating.
Tweak & Eat also supports integration with devices like Fitbit, iWatch, etc. and enables personalized reminders to be set for breakfast, lunch, dinner and other meal-times.
‘Tweak & Eat’ is training and using Tweakyfai (its proprietary AI platform) to help nutritionists do a better job of giving real-time advice and information to users. Tweakyfai also automates some activities such as generating nutrition labels and escalating exceptions.
Important features of ‘Tweak & Eat’ App are–
My EDR (Electronic Diet Record) – It contains all the current and past tweaks of the user along with the nutritionist’s comments and nutrition labels. It also shows the rating the user gave to each tweak.
Nutrition Labels – It helps users see the macronutrient contents of every meal. These labels are created instantly by Tweakyfai, PrpleTeal’s AI platform.
Recipe Wall– Users can find healthy recipes here.
Tweak Wall – User can share the tweak from My EDR on the Tweak Wall
My Nutrition – Helps users monitor their calorie and micro-nutrient intake trend.
My Fitness – This features allows ‘Tweak & Eat’ to be connected to other health and fitness related devices like fitbit and iWatch.
Some premium services included in the Tweak & Eat app are–
Weight Loss Service– Here the user gets a personalized diet plan from a nutritionist assigned to him/her.
AIDP (AI based Diet Plan) – under this service the user gets personalized diet plans generated by the AI platform tweakify. Besides, the user also gets to chat with nutritionists under this plan.
Twetox– it offers personalized detox plans to the user.
Besides ‘Tweak & Eat’, PurpleTeal has another app named ‘My Health Assistant’, which help people to maintain better health by guiding users to prevent ‘at risk’ conditions and help manage diagnosed conditions better.
Some other mHealth messaging services provided by PurpleTeal are–
Live Well – It provides daily health tips, periodic risk awareness alerts and tips on how to prevent diseases.
Lose Weight – It provides daily tips to lose weight.
Quit Smoke – Provides daily tips to quit smoking based on established behavioral change models.
Be CALM – Provides tips on stress relief and stress handling.
Well Woman – Provides tips on women’s health
Healthy Heart – Provides tips to manage or prevent cardiovascular diseases.
Prevent Diabetes – Provides tips to prevent diabetes. Build awareness of early signs and symptoms of diabetes.
Manage Diabetes– Provides tips for long term diabetes self-management
Pregnancy – Provides daily tips to to-be moms on various aspects of pregnancy
Prevent Cancer– Provides daily tips and information about risk factors and symptoms of cancer. And provides guidance regarding how to prevent cancer.
Food Plate with Nutrition Labels
PurpleTeal – Launching Startup
PurpleTeal’s core product ‘Tweak & Eat’ app was first launched in India, followed by Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines, Kuwait and USA, Besides, it launched the App & Service on Google Play Store and Apple Store in 2017.
Tweak & Eat runs its services on a freemium model. While the base app and services are free, fee is charged for the premium services. Pricing ranges from INR 49 to INR 3,999 in India.
PurpleTeal – User Acquisition
As said by Narayanan, for ‘Tweak &Eat’ PurpleTeal got its first 100 customers just through word of mouth publicity. PurpleTeal also promotes its apps and services through Google Adwords and with the help of its Telco partners.
Google Adwords is very effective in reaching millions of potential subscribers. We have existing relationships with Telcos from our ‘Health Tips’ line of business, and through them, can reach 100’s of millions of potential subscribers. Once we get to that level, it becomes easier to grow because of the heightened visibility.
PurpleTeal – Competitors
Though there are many apps related to health, ‘Tweak & Eat’ is quite unique from the rest. It’s simple, real-time, meal modification advice from nutritionists at the time of consumption is a feature that no other app provides.
We will make it difficult for others to duplicate our app & service by speeding up our response time and making the nutritionist’s advice easy to act upon and instructive for future meals.
PurpleTeal – Growth
‘Tweak & Eat’ has been able to gain popularity among its target audience. The app’s popularity and growth is shown by the following facts-
The app has gained popularity in different countries apart from India like Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines and the USA.
The App caters to the daily meal-time needs of more than 500,000 users.
‘Tweak & Eat’ ranks as the 4th trending App on Google Play Store in the health & wellness category and is one among the top performing health & wellness channels according to Youtube with the engagement increasing 300% month-on-month, over the last three months.
Future plans for the next 2-3 years is to rapidly grow the installed base and increase user engagement. We are now in the testing stages of an AI nutritionist that can reliably (more than 90%) identify a large number of foods. Our AI nutritionist will get better over time, as we continue to train it with ‘real-world’ images of meals sent by our users. This is an important point because training an AI nutritionist using stock images is easier but not very reliable.
Since Coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, China, the coronavirus has spread in many countries all over the world. As the number of infections and deaths from the coronavirus i.e. COVID-19 rise drastically, many governments, schools, and companies around the world are taking more drastic measures to restrain the virus’s spread. At this time, coronavirus has more than 118,000 cases and 4,290 deaths worldwide.
As the number of infections and deaths from the novel coronavirus are still increasing day by day, people are advised to avoid public presence, social gatherings, etc. At present, India has over 60 confirmed cases of coronavirus with employees in IT companies affected and 9.41 Lakh people have been screened at airports. Similarly, there are at least 1,267 cases of the coronavirus with more than 29 deaths in the United States.
Many major companies like Google, Microsoft, Apple & so on are also making sure that their employees do not get affected and stay safe during this outbreak. Google has advised all its employees in Europe, the Middle East and Africa to work from home starting March 12th, expanding a recommendation sent on March 10 to North America-based employees to work from home until at least April 10th.
On Sunday, Apple CEO Tim Cook encouraged employees at several of its global offices to work remotely “if your job allows” from March 9th to 13th. And by the end of last week, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, and many other tech companies asked their employees in the Bay Area and Seattle to work from home. Moreover, Google also confirmed that it would give its hourly workers their regular pay if they had to miss work due to coronavirus. The US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention is urging Americans to ask their schools and workplaces about contingency plans, like working from home, in case they have to shut down over coronavirus. Companies from Wuhan to Silicon Valley have changed how and where they do business as the virus spreads on.
Due to drastic spread of coronavirus lately, many Indian corporations & startups are asking their employees to work from home. This includes Flipkart, Snapdeal, Swiggy, Paytm, Uber & Wipro and so on. Nithin Kamath, founder of stock broking startup Zerodha, stated that the entire team of 1,200 has been asked to work from home. Similarly, other Bengaluru-based startups like fintech startup Instamojo, edtech platform Unacademy, Byju’s, Bounce and Meesho have asked their employees to strictly work from home to avoid any risk. E-commerce companies like Flipkart, Snapdeal, Paytm & also Swiggy are encouraging their employees to work from home by using technologies like videoconferencing to interact with their clients and colleagues. Also ride-hailing companies like Ola & Uber are asking their employees to work remotely especially if one is feeling unwell. Moreover, IT industries like Wipro & Tech Mahindra are taking necessary precautions by keeping employees,who travel overseas for their projects, in quarantine. Telecom major Reliance Jio Infocomm & Coal India have given their employees choice to work from home without any biometric attendance.
Companies adopting work from home due to Corona
Many companies are looking for solutions to enable their employees work from home without compromising the efficiency of work. For this, they are adopting various technologies & software. The Chennai-based office suite provider Zoho also made the announcement that it also implemented a work from home policy for its own employees. The company states that over 8000 employees across more than 10 countries will be working from safety of their homes until the virus is brought under control. Zoho uses Remotely toolkit to run their remote operations. Zoho Corp CEO Sridhar Vembu has been running the company from a remote farm near Tenkasi, a town in southern Tamil Nadu with the help of Remotely — the company’s virtual collaboration and productivity platform. Now, Zoho is also offering the same tools to its business partners and clients for free temporarily. Zoho Remotely includes a selection of apps in advanced software suite which will enable communication and collaboration between colleagues and customers.
Similarly, the networking giant Cisco is offering its remote collaboration tool Webex for free under 90-day licences to businesses who are not its customers. Cisco’s SVP and GM, Sri Srinivasan said that they would also be helping existing customers meet their rapidly changing needs as they enable a much larger number of remote workers by expanding their usage at no additional cost. He further revealed that that after the Covid-19 virus, traffic on the Webex backbone connecting China-based Webex users to their global workplaces has increased as much as 22 times.
At the same time, other companies are relying upon video conferencing and chat software. During this outbreak, the demand for Microsoft, Google, and Zoom’s Video Conferencing Software has increased significantly all over the world. This demand is expected to increase even more as the number of cases rises. As the number of school closures and quarantines increases, video conferencing will become ever more & more important. According to reports, Microsoft’s Teams collaboration platform has seen a 500% increase in usage in China since end of January. This usage is increasing in the U.S. as well, with more employees working from home. While, Zoom CFO, Kelly Steckelberg has said publicly that its usage is up significantly from its 100 billion minutes run rate at the end of January. During the same time period, the company also saw four-five times as many users in Japan, South Korea and Singapore.
Considering the risk and intensity of COVID-19, these companies are offering many services free of cost. All that demand has made the tech companies to make it easier and in some cases free to use their software. Microsoft announced that Teams is now free to anyone with an email address. Google said last week it’s offering access to its Hangouts Meet video conferencing service and all its G-Suite as well as to G Suite for Education collaboration platforms for free of cost. Even, Zoom has also lifted the 40-minute limit on meetings for its users in China. Now, it is being extended to schools and universities in the U.S. upon request. Slack, a messaging platform, already offers a free tier but the company is offering live Q&A and webinars free.
In the middle of worldwide health and safety worries, the company and its team once again shows its agility and tenacity by offering free services. This is really good gesture in tech market.
Food is the basic necessity of the life and now has also become a luxury in many cases. People around the world love to eat delicious food, due to which there is a huge demand for food business ideas with low investment. To run any business successfully, you must have interest in doing that thing. Many people like to eat variety of food, many people like to make different kind of fusion food, many people like to make food for others. So, if you have interest and operate this business properly, it is very rare to find a food business failing to succeed. Here we have made list of startup food business ideas.
1. Catering Services
Catering Service | Food Business Ideas
Catering service is a popular business idea in the food industry. Do you love hosting parties, making food for your friends and family members? Then, this is best food business to start. For every small and big gathering and get together people are always looking for catering services. Apart from that, you will get business through event planners also. Catering business ideas in India is great idea as Indians give lot of importance to food in any sort of program, function, parties.
With moderate investment and proper planning, any individual can initiate a catering service of his own. Moreover, catering services are rising at a rapid rate to cater the need of customers and it is ideally a great food business ideas which can be started with low investment and can give you a high return.
2. Coffee Shop Business Idea
Coffee Shop | Food Business Ideas
Coffee is such a beverage which most of the people need to drink twice or more in day. Many people start their day with Coffee and many people end their day with coffee. Are you expert in making special coffee? Then this is the perfect business idea for you. Over the past decade, the coffee shop business is increasing rapidly. An entrepreneur who is passionate and talented about coffee can initiate coffee shop business with substantial capital investment. Although, the coffee shop is actually treated as a place outside of work and home to relax. Coffee shop business is one of the best ways to turn into a profit making business.
Furthermore, a classic successful coffee shop chain is Cafe Coffee Day which has a significant presence throughout the globe and now the rising coffee house which is much more renowned as Starbucks is expanding its outlet network in India. India with its high population and never-ending demand gives a very good opportunity to start a food business with a coffee shop chain.
3. Baking Business Idea
Bakery | Food Business Ideas
Are you an expert in baking cakes, breads? Do you like to make cake have tempting look with beautiful icing? Then, this idea is perfect for you. A bakery business can be initiated in two ways. You can establish a bakery with a retail location and sell fresh baked items from your store or you can establish a large scale bakery unit and sell product through the retailers. The bakery is one of the proven and most profitable food business ideas that can be initiated with proper planning.
However, some famous bakery which has quickly grown itself from scratch are Cookie Jar, Krazy For Chocolates, French Loaf, etc. They have immensely grown themselves with little investment and a great food business idea to work on.
4. Buffet Restaurant
Buffet Restaurant | Food Business Ideas
Buffet only restaurant is one of the most trending food business ideas. People always love to have the food according to their own choices by selecting from many options. Right location and proper marketing strategy are important in starting a buffet restaurant business idea. As well as one price, all-you-can-eat buffet-style restaurants have become extremely popular with the budget-minded dining crowd. This is a good food business ideas.
Unlike a typical restaurant, a buffet restaurant has one major benefit for the operator–shorter work hours. Typically, buffet restaurants cater to lunch and supper diners and do not open until 11 a.m. and are closed by 9 p.m. Based on volume, a buffet restaurant can be very profitable, as often the operating overheads are much lower than similarly-sized restaurants, simply due to the fact that fewer employees are required to run the business. Additionally, wholesale food items can also be purchased for lower cost based on volume buying, which adds to beefed-up profits.
5. Cooking Classes
Cooking Classes | Food Business Ideas
If you love to cook and enjoy crafting new tasty food recipes then you should consider starting a cooking classes business. This can be initiated as a home-based business with small capital. You can have business tie-ups with the retail store that sell fresh fruits. Many people wish they had skills in the kitchen and are willing to pay to learn. Like other culinary jobs, a cooking instructor can focus on a specific area, such as baking or grilling, or be a generalist.
You can lead cooking instruction in your home, or have someone videotape you and you can sell the videos as part of a home-learning course. Another option is to create your own cooking show posted on YouTube, which can pay you advertising income. Therefore, one opportunity in segment gives you a by-opportunity to generate more and more money by little effort. This is a good food business ideas from home.
6. Food Truck Business Idea
Food Truck | Food Business Ideas
The mobile food truck business is different from the normal restaurant in two major ways. One is you are moving and you don’t have a permanent location. Second is you are going to the customers. A person having minimum experience in the food service industry can initiate this business in the city area. This can be a small food business idea. From food truck, you can sell frozen and packaged items like ice cream, soft drinks, sweets, and snacks or you can go for cooked items with a specific menu including for breakfast, Tiffin, lunch. Food truck business is profitable in India as people opt for outside food more now a days.
There are two types of food carts: the mobile food preparation vehicle (MFPV), where food is prepared as customers wait, and the industrial catering vehicle (ICV), which sells only prepackaged foods. An MFPV costs more than an ICV, and both cost more than a food cart. A used hot dog cart may cost under Rs. 50,000, while a retro-fitted used food truck typically costs Rs. 80,000 or more. A new MFPV could cost upwards of Rs. 120,000. Complying with additional health department rules and regulations can also drive up food truck costs.
7. Juice Business Ideas
Juice Bar | Food Business Ideas
The juice bar is one of the most popular food business ideas from the early days. You can also keep cool drinks including fresh fruit juices. Fresh juice bar can be initiated with low startup capital. Location plays an important role in getting success. A juice bar that serves customers fresh-squeezed fruit juice drinks and smoothies is a fantastic new business enterprise to put into action, as more and more people are striving to lead healthier lifestyles.
Ideal locations to establish a juice bar include busy tourist attractions and beach areas, mall food courts, fitness clubs, and public markets. To boost sales and profits, additional items such as sandwiches, salads, and healthy snacks can also be added to the menu. The profit potential for a juice bar will vary based on factors such as operating overhead and total sales. However, an established and well-run juice bar can easily generate profits in excess of Rs. 50,000, and the profits can go much higher by adding additional menu items and delivery services.
8. Pizza Delivery Business Idea
Pizza Delivery | Food Business Ideas
Now a days, people like fast food more. Pizza Delivery can be good fast food business idea. The main focus area of the pizza delivery business is choosing a right delivery boy and preparing the menu. A lot of the people will likely to have meals at their doorsteps due to their busy work schedule. Pizza is now well known, favorite, tasty dish all over the world. Although, starting a pizza delivery business can be profit making. There are two ways to start a pizza delivery business. You can either learn how to make your own pizza (which you would deliver to your customers on order) or partner with a notable pizza shop and simply buy from them to deliver whenever there is an order.
9. Sea Food Selling
Sea Food Selling | Food Business Ideas
Initiating a specialty seafood selling business is a wonderful and profitable business idea one can start from their home. You will need to source the products as a wholesale purchase and store them in a freezer. Through a delivery vehicle, you can make the delivery at customers door step. Proper product promotion plan is required in this business. This can be a good food business idea with small capital.
10. Tea Bag Making
Tea Bag Making | Food Business Ideas
Tea bag making business requires only two major raw material components tea and paper bags. A tea bag is a small sealed bag containing tea leaves and it is used with a hot cup of water to prepare the drink called tea. An aspiring entrepreneur having good knowledge about tea leaves can start the tea bag making business with moderate capital investment. However, the tea bag has a high sale as leading coffee shops, airlines, hotels, trains, etc, provide tea bags to their customer. Furthermore, you can start with a premium tea bag and set up high-quality tea with different natural flavors to cater to the need for tea lovers.
11. Organic Food Shop
Organic Food | Food Business Ideas
If you health conscious and you really give stress on quality before buying food, then this new food business idea is perfect for you. Now a days people are more conscious about health and what they are eating. People have started understanding the importance of organic food. They are ready to pay little extra and buy organic food. If you like farming, you can also do organic farming and sell products. This can be best food business ideas in India.
India ranks as the single largest producer of organic foods worldwide. You have many options to do organic food business depending upon availability of sources. Like,
Organic Farming
Organic Kitchen Garden
Organic Juice Stall
Organic Fertilizer
Organic Vegetable Seeds
Organic Health Supplements
Organic Body and Skincare Products
Organic Baby Food
Organic Fish Farm
Organic Poultry Farm
Organic Food Export
Organic Recipe Book
Like these, many options are there if you start thinking.
Being an enthusiast for food, these food business ideas with low investment will be great for you, so try them when in need. Also, do let us in the comment if you already have any Food Business which are running successfully.
