Startup Reasons For Establish 'Coopetition'

There are seven reasons in it, and they are smart as important.In business startups there must be growth and it is necessary.

1. It reduces common costs and customer learning curves.

Similar startups, with competing products, almost always have overlapping areas, which cost money to develop and annoy customers with a new learning curve. If these elements are not your core competency or “secret sauce,” why not negotiate a sharing partnership?

2. Complementary advantages can expand both markets.

Every smart startup starts with a focus on a unique advantage, such as owning a distribution channel. A competitor may have complementary strengths. A strategic partnership, sharing common gains, should be a growth opportunity by expanding the market for both.

3. There's an opportunity for follow-on sales to existing customers.

Every business brings a set of existing customers who are great candidates for additional sales from a partner-competitor. That’s the reason why many ecommerce sites feature a house brand, but have partner relationships with logical competitors to attract and cross-sell customers.

Satisfaction Is Your Need 

4. It can create new solutions through integration of competitor features.

In many cases, two competitors are fighting a third one, and both are losing. With a strategic partnership, they can combine their product strengths with minimal cost and time, rather than each funding new development. Both then capitalize on new strengths and bundling for growth.

5. It can establish architecture and industry-interface standards.

Products in the same industry need to talk to each other and share data to facilitate faster customer adoption and faster growth for all players. Competitors can agree on common interfaces without exposing or jeopardizing their intellectual property or customer relationships.

6. It leads to referral agreements and affiliate marketing.

These are simple cooperation agreements, but many entrepreneurs are too proud or busy to consider them as a growth opportunity. Why not improve your customer satisfaction by referring customers you can’t satisfy to someone who can? If they so the same, you both win, along with the customer.

7. Coopetition relationships lead to positive investments and buy outs.

These days, most large companies, such as IBM and Merck, rarely develop new products internally. They invest in complementary startups, through internal venture funds and partnerships, and plan to acquire the best as they show the right traction. Be visible and be proactive.

If you are contemplating a win-lose relationship, hoping to put your competitor at a disadvantage, don’t do it. It's very risky, costs you a lot of time and money and generally backfires, since most competitors are not desperate or stupid. In every case, make sure your intellectual property is protected up front with a two-way non-disclosure agreement. Be cautious, but not paranoid.

Smart entrepreneurs realize that sometimes they have to fight that natural instinct to consider competitors as the enemy. If you keep your customer’s best interest as your first priority, you will know when it’s time to think outside the box. That thinking, including coopetition, will pay big dividends for your own startup's growth, as well as customer relationships.

Disclaimer :- Followingg article is is from Entrepreneur

4 Definitive Ways to Grow Your Startup

1. Understand the difference between traction and growth.

Before their companies start to grow, most entrepreneurs mistake traction for growth. Both come at different stages in the lifecycle of the startup and play very different roles.
Knowing where you are in your journey will help you manage your time and resources efficiently.
Balfour writes on the difference between the two. He mentions that the goal of a startup in the traction phase should be to get product/market fit, get users coming in through the door, and only then, focus on retention. He says, “If your product does not retain users, there is no point in growing the top of the funnel.”
Growth is about focusing on those levers that are pulling in the crowds, then cranking things up. He writes, “A few things happen in the growth stage. One, your growth process should be humming like a machine. Two, you should have more capital and team resources available. Three, you may start to saturate your core channel. At this point, it is time to diversify your channels.”

2. Look for common threads.

At the stage where you’re pulling in the crowds for your product, you need to focus on what’s working and what’s not. This will enable you to identify the particular growth channel or channels to allocate your energies on.
A good strategy is to look for threads or themes that are common to both your top customers and the top industries they represent. That’s where your cue to gain depth lies. For instance, if your top customers (as a factor of engagement) are those with 10 to 15 employees or are from a particular industry segment, go deeper within that segment, rather than going wide at this stage.

Startup or Giveup?

3. Identify what slows you down.

While scaling up, there may be many tasks on a daily or weekly basis that hold you back or slow you down. While scaling up, you want to channel all your focus on just one thing -- growth.
So, delegate to an internal team member tasks that don't contribute directly toward your goals. If necessary, outsource when you don’t want to build bulk internally at the growth stage.
The idea is to identify and rid yourself of all things that slow you down on your path. A good example is to visualize Steve Jobs taking back control of Apple and cutting down on those products that were slowing the company, before focusing on just those that could be leveraged for growth.

4. Don’t shy away from partnerships.

A strategic partnership can be a powerful weapon to fast-track distribution. When Tamara Steffens was in charge of business development at Path, she did a deal with Wordpress which resulted in more people posting content to Path from Wordpress than from other sources.
Balfour says of successful partnerships that, “When you sell to other companies, integrate your product into their product (in some way), in order to reach consumers who are generating the revenue (via ads or some form of payment). Most of these relationships involve a revenue share between the two companies.”
Examples of such partnerships include Uber with NFL, TaskRabbit with Gap and Square with Starbucks.
Whatever is your path to growth, the last thing you want is to run out of cash. Don’t spend on anything that doesn’t drive growth in revenues or efficiency. You should also start bringing in revenues early on in your startup journey. These will help you stay invested so you can go all out on whatever growth channel works for you.

Entrepreneur

HOW AMERICAN INVESTORS BOOST EUROPEAN STARTUPS

European startups who attract the attention of U.S. investors not only raise more money but also have the potential to grow faster than those backed by European firms, The Wall Street Journal reported last week.

Despite the tech boom, European startups still struggle to raise the same levels of funding from European investors as startups in the U.S. are able to secure from American investors. While many point to the complex digital landscape in Europe, which makes cross-border trade and growth difficult, a deeply rooted aversion among Europeans to make the types of risky investments U.S. venture capitalists pursue may also be a factor.

WSJ cited data from Dow Jones VentureSource, which said that in 2013 European startups seeking to raise a second round of funding found an average of $8 million from potential U.S. investors. In comparison, startups that received interest from European investors were only able to raise a median amount of $3 million.

Even for startups in the early stages of raising money, the trend was still evident.

“If you’re based in San Francisco, you can fill up your whole portfolio in a 40-minute car ride. In Europe we have to take planes from one country to another,” Neil Rimer, a Geneva-based managing partner at Index Ventures, told WSJ.

But a rise in the number of viable European startups presents increased opportunities for U.S.

In 2014, the Dow Jones VentureSource found European-backed startups raised $9.2 billion dollars, up from $6.3 billion in 2010, with 40 percent of the money raised by the companies who had at least one American investor, WSJ said.

Ciarán O’Leary, a partner at Berlin-based venture capital fund Earlybird, told WSJ that U.S. investors are now tapping into the increased number and quality of startups Europe has to offer, while avoiding the potential for enormous losses surrounding the sky-high valuations of late in Silicon Valley.

“The deal terms are not as crazy as in the U.S.,” said O’Leary. “In the U.S., investing at a later stage has become a price war.”

CITATION FROM PYMNTS.COM : http://goo.gl/OFdaL9

Blogging Idea of Future

How four avid bloggers from Chennai made fortune by blogging

For most people, blogging serves as a good pastime, a forum to air or read views and opinions. However, for four yuppies from Chennai, harnessing the power of blogs has proved to be a money-minting venture million dollar business, to be precise.

Launched in August 2007, IndiBlogger.in started as a free blogging platform for Indians. However, the founders—Renie Ravin, Karthik DR, Vineet Rajan and Anoop Johnson—had a bigger game plan: to mobilize the blogosphere, a nascent field at the time, so that companies and brands could engage with their customers. The idea was conceptualized by the founders (barring Rajan), all in their 20s, at a party in early August 2007. Convinced that they were on to a good thing, the trio quit their respective jobs shortly afterwards and focused on their start-up. Rajan left his account manager's job with Hewlett Packard, Hyderabad, to join IndiBlogger after a bloggers' meet in Pune, in March 2008.

Luckily for the founders, they found an angel investor who chipped in with the seed capital. The money was spent on building infrastructure and marketing.

Here's how IndiBlogger works: Registering one's blog is free of charge, but members must publish at least five blog posts to continue to be a part of the community. The company's eight-strong team handles support and moderation from Chennai and Bangalore. The revenue comes from connecting brands and bloggers via unique blogging contests and meets, which are organized periodically across the country. The idea stems from the fact that brands see value in connecting with bloggers, who can influence the purchase decisions of their peer groups. In fact, a Neilsen report, Global Trust in Advertising Survey 2011, shows that less than a third of Netizens trust advertisements, while 92% have faith in peer and word-of-mouth recommendations.

Could tech start-ups save UK economy

Can Start Up Save UK

UK Start Ups

Can Tech Start Up Save Germany

A major new programme to support fledgling technology start-ups in the UK is to be launched in the 2013.

Cloud hosting firm Rackspace is to offer £12,000 of hosting and mentoring for start-ups on the programme.
The launch comes as the government continued efforts to encourage successful UK start-ups to float on the stock exchange.
A survey of more than 50,000 entrepreneurs ranked London as the seventh best city to launch a start-up.
The report, by telecoms firm Telefonica, concluded that the UK's offering was "no Silicon Valley" - due mainly to a lack of investment and what is perceived as a risk-averse investment culture.
But Rackspace, whose start-up programme has aided more than 850 US start-ups in their early stages, said they felt the timing was right to launch its push in the UK.
Speaking at Google's Campus building in east London, technology blogger and Rackspace "evangelist" Robert Scoble drew parallels between London today and the early days of California's famous Silicon Valley.
"If you go downstairs [at Google Campus] you can see dozens of start-ups working at tiny little tables," he told the BBC.
"This feels a lot about how I saw Instagram for the first time - two guys sitting at a table coding like mad, two years later they're worth a billion dollars. It has that feel to it."
Rackspace is one of the world's largest cloud hosting firms - second only to Amazon.
The cloud, as it is known, is a term given to storing data on servers in a variety of locations - rather than on a local machine.
Cloud hosting gives small companies flexibility when starting out. Rather than pay for the rental of dedicated servers, which can be expensive, it means start-ups can just pay for what they need.
'Next Facebook' In September, the government announced plans to loosen regulations surrounding companies that wanted to float on the stock market.
The move, which was backed by several of the country's largest investment firms, would provide a "new route" to an initial public offering (IPO), universities minister David Willetts said.
A successful British IPO would be seen as a major success for the government's Tech City initiative - an organisation designed to promote the interests of UK-based start-ups globally.
Companies tipped to be likely IPO candidates in the new year include Mind Candy - creators of children's social network Moshi Monsters - and online loans company Wonga.
Mr Scoble said the key to a successful flotation was in the timing - and that chasing the "next Facebook" may not be the right move.
"Some of it is luck," he told the BBC.
"Some of it is about being at the right market window at the right time. Right now it's a really tough market window.
"In Silicon Valley the venture capitalists are telling me they're moving investment away from consumer and into enterprise because they're seeing that the consumer markets are too risky.
"They're investing less in consumer kinds of things - they're trying to get the kids to focus on the enterprise market."

Ideas and Innovative Products

Acquiring Customers

Virgin Airlines, Expedia, Jet Airways and MakeMyTrip are taking the help of Bangalore-based startup Vizury to analyse massive volumes of digital data on the web and target potential customers.

The four year-old firm is expecting to clock revenue of $ 10 million to $ 12million  this year. However, it has not been an easy journey for the founders—Chetan Kulkarni, Gourav Chindlur and Vikram Nayak—who once worked at US-based Trilogy Software.

It was while chatting over lunch at Trilogy that they decided to quit their jobs and set up Vizury in 2008. They pooled in their savings of $ 2000 and converting Chindlur's bedroom into their office. They ran out of funds after 17 venture capital firms rejected their proposal to develop customer behavior analytics products.

"My wife was expecting and Vikram had to pay a huge lease for the apartment he had bought," says Kulkarni. They almost decided to shut down operations. That is when eight friends and angels came to their rescue, with crowd-sourced funding of $150,000 (Rs 80 lakh now) in 2009, which was used to develop a customer analytics product.

Start Up Your Ideas

Start-ups it is nurturing

At $100 billion-plus, India's IT-BPO industry is large. However, largely focused on the low-end services delivery, it neither has the heft nor the glamour that Silicon Valley in the US enjoys. That may be changing slowly.

 A just-released report by IT consultancy firm Zinnov reveals that IT product start-ups in India have been growing steadily over the years. Since 1990, it is estimated that more than 3,400 product start-ups were seeded in India. Between now and 2015, Zinnov expects about 1,000 new start-ups to join in.

 On many counts, India almost mirrors what is happening in Silicon Valley. A large percentage of founders of start-ups in the US are from pedigreed top-notch IT companies like Google and Apple, who quit their jobs to turn entrepreneurs. This is happening in India too. For example, Pratyush Prasanna, founder of Plustxt, a start-up focusing on mobile messaging, has honed his skills at Microsoft and Xerox.

 Globally, online services occupy a big focus area for product start-ups. In India too, this is the biggest chunk, comprising 34% of start-ups. Further, globally, these start-ups are increasingly looking at having a ubiquitous presence across platforms — from Windows to Android and iOS. In India too this is clearly visible. In fact here, many start-ups are also looking at Java as there is a sizeable population using Java-based phones. Start-ups in India, like their global counterparts, are working on cloud, looking beyond the Web.

 Surprisingly, India does comparatively well on the gender diversity front in these start-ups. In Silicon Valley, around 10% of the start-ups have women as co-founders. In India that stands at about 6%. There is an area where India has some catching up to do, says Kishan M Bhat, engagement manager, Zinnov Consulting: "About 20% of the founders in Silicon Valley are fresher’s straight out of college. In India, that figure stands at 7%."

 Here's a flavor of India's fledgling Silicon Valley, the start-ups it is nurturing and the entrepreneurs who are making it all happen, from Zinnov's report.

The Start-Up Boom

 The Rise: The number of product start-ups being seeded in India every year has been rising steadily. In the next three years, about 1,000 start-ups could get seeded in India:

 Where is the Boom

 There are 3,402 product companies. Bangalore and the National Capital Region remain the hub, accounting for over half of these start-ups. While Bangalore's dominant position is understandable, it is NCR's infrastructure that makes it such an attractive place for incubating product start-ups. The NCR, according to the report, includes Delhi, Gurgaon, Noida, Chandigarh and Mohali. Bangalore includes Bangalore city, Mysore, Belgaum, Gulbarga and Hubli.

Web vs Cloud

While almost half (47%) of the start-ups in India today are working on Web-based platforms, there is a shift to cloud. The latter allows start-ups to get started with very small capital and to scale up quickly.

Fund Fundamentals

Source of Funding: Early-stage funding in India is today looking brighter than ever before. It has gone up from $44 million in 2005 to $1.1 billion in 2011.

Best Cities to Get Funding for Your Start-up

During 2005-12, 446 (19%) of the total 2,407 companies got funded. Of these, 149 were in Bangalore and 117 in NCR — about 58%. About 66% of the companies obtained funding within three years. Interestingly, a sixth got funding in the year of inception.

Sectorial Focus

Online services remain the biggest focus area for these start-ups, mirroring what is happening globally.

Start-Ups And Their Founders:

Experienced vs Freshers: Of the start-ups founded in 2009-12, more than 55% of the founders had less than 10 years of experience. The start-up itch is higher among executives with under 15 years of experience.

Start-up Hubs

VC Funding: US attract about 70% of global VC investment. Canada, Europe and Israel are stagnating or contracting while India shows modest growth, and China is close to emerging as the No. 2 global hub.

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