Kiran Bulusu’s Blog

You would need to develop a complete eco system to fully and truly offer a product/solution especially if you are entering into newer market segments or you are redefining the way you approach and solve the problem. If you don’t have a good eco system , it doesn’t matter to most customers even if you happen to offer a cutting edge product or cheaper solution. Lets consider entirely different industries: Smart phones and mobile apps and Design automation industry.
If you have a smart phone with latest and greatest HW/SW,but don’t have a apps/other services built around your product either by you or your partners, most likely it will passed by even if you offer for hard to say no prices. On the other hand, if you have decent or not so great product , but you have entire eco system developed around, it will still sell big time. Readers can easily think of Apple Iphone vs Android vs Nokia Symbian ;

Same concepts applies to most of the industries/segments like Electronics Design Automation (EDA) which is key driver for Semiconductor industry. If you have a compelling synthesis solution or a complete implementation solution and you say you don’t have DFT solution, unless you partner with some DFT companies, most semi companies will not even look at you even if you offer compelling soln; You are creating and adding value to the customer not by just your product alone , but by offering the product ecosystem

You need to know the exact criteria why you are considering other tools else its waste of time for you/your team and for vendor as well. Some common pain points are
A.QOR (Quality of Results)
B.Turn Around Time (TAT ) and Stability of the tool
C.Reactive mode type of Support from Vendor/Poor Support/Long resolution to issues
D.Interoperability with other tools
E.Cost of licenses itself.

Single chips have become a commodity and some chips just cost less than a dollar or some
consumer electronics centric chips like wireless/3g/ etc might cost less than 10$ depending
on the volume…a can of coke seems to be more expensive than some components today,
so in what form can the semi vendor can add value and get profits? where is the value chain now?

1. Avoid communication black outs. This is a must. Please always keep the customer in loop. Whether its pre-sales or post-sales. Your customer needs to be aware of the progress you are making and you have to get his acknowledgment. This is tricky at times when the product is not fully matured yet and we need to fine tune before it starts delivering results. Even then , you have to present this “initial” results and then keep showing progress. This is very important.

If the customer doesnt know what you are working on, how much efforts you have made , he might be compelled to look at another company. You have make that “human” connection and keep him in the loop.

2. Stick to the findings of discovery process: If you deviate from this, customer will not agree when you present the results. The intent of whole “discovery process” is defeated. If you have to change for some reason, you need to get clear acknowledgment from customer.

3. Pre-Sales is very different from Post-Sales . Pre-Sales is to prove that product works and solves customers issues identified in “discovery process”. Deployment is real stress test to the product and can open doors to other products or open doors to the same product with other groups or departments . So the same strategies which worked for pre-sales might not work in deployment.

Q1. Why are you creating the new product?
a) Is it because you see a gap in the current industry offerings and trying to fill in.
b) Or if there is a similar product, you see that your product changes the quality of service or life of your customers. For SW companes, comparing and improving run times is not compelling enough to face competetion. Other tools might catch up. Similarly for HW companies, high clock freq (faster speed) etc cannot be the sole distinguishing feature . Unfortunately, this is not at all a viable business plan/strategy .
c) You are creating a hybrid product or creating a entirely new market space and market is ready for this.

It is very important to realize that your product definition needs to be accomadating in a sense, that customer requirements change over time or a competitor has released a product .

Q2. What is your market segment and who are your customers .
Targeting a wrong customer base is very costly . Did you talk to your customers already ? Do you have any beta customers? Choosing a right beta customer is very important and can affect your product sucess/quality.

Q3. Can you clearly justify why the customer has to pay for the “must have” features ? If not, you need to re-consider your product definetion and features.

Q4. Can you clearly distinguish between “should and must have” features? Many make mistakes here as they dont clearly distinguish between “should” and “must” and so the sales cant focus on the value offering.

Q5. Do you have the roadmap ? Having it helps when a customer would like to see what additional (nice to have) features will be coming in future. When you bootstrap, you already have a customer who pays for your development and so they might have already defined to some degree what will be present in the roadmap.

Q6. How are customers doing without your product? How are they surviving? How is your product going to address their issues?

In general, It is not advisable to proceed unless you have answers for all the above questions.