12th November, 2017 — Chronicle 10

The 7 bullets of this week are as follows :

1. Are we seeing the end of information arbitrage - The BIG 2- Facebook and Google are quickly rolling out ‘small features’ which compete with the various internet listing businesses- FB introduced house rentals in its marketplace yesterday, FB is launching a Local app similar to Yelp. Google is continuously launching features showing products, scores, restaurant info on the Google search page itself. This means only one thing- Giving information cannot be a business anymore, If your business is just listing, BIG 2 will kill you with their infinite distribution. You need to build some transactional element in your offering— like Logistics in e-commerce or service guarantee aka Airbnb to these giants off. There is ONE BIG COUNTERPOINT TO ALL THE ABOVE — Craigslist, this company has been successfully fending off Google and FB on their own home turf. How are they able to do it ? Ping me if anybody wants to discuss this.
2. [DEV BULLET OF THE WEEK] Requestb.in- Developers building/integrating API’s often need to check and collect- callback request params and debug web-hooks. Requesb.in lets you do just that without writing a single line of code. Check it here -

RequestBin - Collect, inspect and debug HTTP requests and webhooks

3. [QUESTION] How to validate your India specific SAAS idea- Unlike the west where most business owners are computer literate and seeking solutions to there business problems on the internet, following is the std modus operandi of validating your SAAS biz -

• Put a landing page explaining the problem, collect emails or maybe offer a discounted plan for early signups.
• Blog about it, do content marketing to drive traffic to the page.
• If you get reasonable traction doing the above 2 steps go ahead and build the product.

Most of the Indian business owners (SME’s) are not computer savy and they seek personal advice from peers rather than looking for solutions of business problems on the internet- so how do you validate your India specific SAAS idea?

4. Best of Shark Tank- I accidentally landed on the ‘Best of SharkTank’ playlist while casual browsing and got hooked instantly. What amazed me was how most the products in the show were created by founders trying to solve their own problems- A better way to shave, A better baby carrier, An app to win unclaimed scholarships. Most of these founders come from humble backgrounds, didn’t have a college education, started the product as a side hustle- Not like we do startups these days — raise money first, then build the product and then sell. Most of them had more than 100k dollars in sales. Takeaway- Opportunities of innovation are more evenly distributed than we think, just sit back and analyze your own problems and it is highly likely that a few thousand people (of the 7billion) will have same problem.

Best Of Shark Tank

5. [UX BULLET OF THE WEEK] Uplabs.com - Material design has been a prominent design buzzword since Google introduced this concept for Android in 2014. Uplabs.com offers a great collection of material design UX interactions to take inspiration for your next project. Check it out here -

Uplabs - Uplabs

6. DEEP WORK- Focus and Avoiding distractions- It has become hardest to do focussed work in the smartphone era. I have started reading Cal Newport’s book about how to resist distractions. I have also started using the Rescue Time Chrome plugin to monitor my web usage and hope to get more efficient.

RescueTime : Time management software for staying productive and happy in the modern workplace

7. [SALES BULLET OF THE WEEK]- Steli Efti- Even if your job has got nothing to do with Sales do watch the following talk by Steli Efti about how to hustle and get things done.