Over the last few weeks we reviewed over 500 startups and talked (phone, skype, etc.) with over 100 startup founders. This was our shortlisting process to get to 15 companies that will make it to our Spring 2013 batch at the Accelerator.

First, we reviewed a lot of travel startups. Especially the problem of helping travelers with trip planning. A list of things to do, places to see, restaurants to eat, etc. With all the data available from multiple sites including Yelp, Facebook friends recommendations, and other online sources there seems to be enough data to form a more informed trip plan. Unfortunately we picked none of them. Its too hard to see what will differentiate one company from another. Some claim it is their User experience, others their recommendation algorithm and still others their human-powered technology planning.

Second we reviewed many more gaming applications than we did in the previous batch. Zynga’s performance notwithstanding, many folks are jumping on the in-app purchases and social gaming concept. Most start with a web social game though, not mobile. That’s fair, since the number of mobile smartphone early adopters in India is still far and few between. Again, we passed on all of them since the teams did not seem complete and hiring design talent is amazingly hard in India.

Third we reviewed many SaaS applications in the help desk and customer support area. There were 3 teams with excellent experience & background in the space and all had some initial customer traction. Many were gunning for BMC Remedy, but my sense was although the market is fairly large, nothing set one team apart from another. They all pretty much had the same feature set as ZenDesk or FreshDesk.

Bonus trend – we saw many education “ERP” applications. School management, test preparation academy management, College alumni management etc.

We finished collecting applications at the Microsoft Accelerator last week. Since I did not see the applicants from the previous batch I was extremely pleased with the high quality of applications overall. By most measures we exceeded the quality of applicants that we had internally hoped for.

Since there are 4 Microsoft accelerators worldwide – Israel, Beijing, Seattle and Bangalore we get to see trends across a fairly diverse set of companies.

I wanted to focus on 3 metrics that I noticed from our Seattle accelerator compared to the Indian one. I dont want to focus on the entrepreneurs or their background and quality but more on the ideas and markets themselves.

Lets play Venture Capitalist for a day shall we?

Assuming a 5 year investment horizon starting in 2013 in 50 startups and a total of $50 million, what areas (technology categories) would you put money in to get the best return by 2018?

Some rules:

1. You have to put the same amount of money in each company and it cannot exceed $1 Million.

2. You have to put all the money in technology companies alone.

3. You can get “exits” before 2022, but your entire portfolio will be liquidated on Dec 2022 (10 year fund).

A partial list of categories for you to consider. You can put 100% in one or spread them around, or ignore a few categories as you wish.

1. Consumer Internet

2. Mobile applications

3. SaaS applications

4. Cloud infrastructure software

5. Gaming

6. eCommerce

7. Robotics

8. 3D printing

9. Social Networking

10. Storage software

11. Networking (like Cisco, Juniper, etc.)

12. Data Center technology

13. Education technology

14. Healthcare technology

15. Big data

Any other category I missed.

Why I am putting this together?

I will be putting together our investment thesis and our mix of companies so I’d love to crowd source some of the thinking behind startup investing.

If you think its better to do a form or a survey type web page, let me know, else just give me your spread and mix in the comments.

I think this post might be one that generates a lot of discussion and debate, so I want to clarify – that is my intent.

I had an awesome 4 hour session yesterday at the offices of Saif partners in Delhi (Gurgaon actually) yesterday as part of the Microsoft ThinkNext event series. Mukul from Saif has been keen to get more events in the NCR region and he was happy to host us for a Marketing diagnostic clinic in Delhi with 30+ entrepreneurs. The ever charming Avinash Raghava from Product Nation used all  the powers of persuasion to pull together few more entrepreneurs and we had an awesome quorum of people to help understand how to get Go to market right for startups.

We had 6 pitches from companies – yonyx, croak.it, 91mobiles, reviews42, touchtalent and zumbl. The format was simple – you pitch your company and give us the GTM problem you have, and the team (everyone participated) helped diagnose & troubleshoot the problem and offer suggestions.

I wanted to highlight one part of the anatomy of the Indian entrepreneur that I find challenging.

From our Microsoft accelerator database, 45% of entrepreneurs have a full time job and  WONT work on their startup full-time until they get funding.

That’s just unacceptable.

If you are not going to take the risk of going into your startup full time, I dont think anyone else will.

If you are not committed to your startup full time, dont expect an investor to get excited about funding you.

I understand many people have commitments to families, EMI’s to pay, and food to put on the table.

I also understand many people feel their “dead-end job” is stifling their creative juices or their full-time job is just that – “a job” and their passions are with their startup.

I also am aware that many “side projects” lead to full time startups eventually.

BUT.

If you are looking to raise money from an investor and will not commit to your startup full time until the investor puts the money into the company dont expect any investor to sign up.

If you say however that you are working on your startup part-time and dont need funds to move things forward, or that it is a side-project or you will hire people just to experiment, by all means, do that.

I dont think the person is being “sensible” when they say they are seeing if the investor is “committed” to funding them by putting money in before the entrepreneur comes on board full-time.

I’d love to hear both opinions, but yesterday when I heard this from an entrepreneur, I was shocked he even asked me for funding or connections to investors who would put money into his venture before he was on board full-time.

Neil Patel writes a very popular blog Quick Sprout and he was in India a few weeks ago for the NASSCOM product conclave. He wrote a post about his experience at the NASSCOM product conclave as a guest post for this blog.

A few weeks ago I had the privilege of speaking at NASSCOM Product Conclave in Bangalore, India. And boy what can I say other than it was one of the best conferences I’ve ever been to.

The people were friendly, the audience was very receptive to the advice they were receiving, and everyone was helping each other out so they could increase their odds of succeeding as an entrepreneur.

Here are 5 reasons you ought to attend NASSCOM Product Conclave next year.

1.     Knowledge – even as a speaker, I learned a lot from the attendees. I actually sat down with over 30 companies and gave them feedback on their product and business. At the same time they were teaching me some cool tricks on how I could grow my business. One company shared the results of 11 a/b tests they ran on their pricing page and gave me some ideas on what we should do at KISSmetrics.

2.     Giving back – unlike most events NASSCOM is fully put on by volunteers. Every single person there who helped make the event come together, did it all for free. Because of this the conference had a different vibe from the get go, as everyone there was in the giving mood. Attendees gave back by helping other attendees with their business for free.

3.     Actionable insights – NASSCOM doesn’t just let speakers speak on whatever they want. Instead they make sure they are speaking on advice that is actionable. This means you’ll be able to walk away from a session and have key takeaways on what you need to do for your business.

4.     Comfort – it’s very rare that you feel at home when you’re at a conference. At NASSCOM, not only did I feel at home, but people went above and beyond to make me enjoy the NASSCOM experience. From picking me up from the airport to offering to take me around the city, people were always there to help me out.

5.     Food – don’t you hate it when you go to conferences and all they have to eat is boxed lunches? I know I hate box lunches. Well, you won’t experience that here. They have all types of foods and best of all, everything is freshly made and isn’t boxed. You can pick what you want right when the food comes out from the kitchen.

Hopefully you go to NASSCOM Product Conclave next year as it is one of the best events you’ll ever attended… both as a speaker and attendee.

In the early days (<10 customers) of a startup, the founder typically is expected to do most all of the selling to get the early adopters. This helps solve the problem of understanding the customer’s buying process which aids in hiring the right sales person for your startup.

If the startup is founded by several people together, I’d advocate a single person running and managing the entire sales process. While its true that in a startup everyone’s selling and every person is trying to help sales, there should be one person who dreams, sleeps and eats getting customers.

The main reason for having one person for the role is accountability. That person’s sole purpose of being is to get customers and track their progress towards that end. If you are a solo founder, I’d recommend you hiring technical consultants or contract people to develop and architect or build your product, but do the initial sales (or customer development) yourself.

So the question is who is that one person who should be responsible for selling when you have multiple co-founders?

Usually I hear a variation of “My co-founder likes to talk a lot, so he’s taken responsibility for sales”, or “My co-founder is a better developer than I am, so I took responsibility for getting customers”.

For most parts I think that is a sufficient enough filter. If you have an inclination towards selling or are not as good at some other function, you ought to be helping play a critical role and I cannot think of a more critical role than getting early customers.

Even if you are the deemed “sales person” in your startup, you will realize quickly that you need more than 1 person to help you sell.

Sales people are (initially) mistrusted by customers who believe the salesperson’s sole purpose is to a) sell them stuff they dont want to buy and b)lie to overstate the capabilities and value of a product.

So the best situation to be in is to split the roles into 2 – the deal maker and the solution architect. The deal maker is still responsible for the entire process end-to-end. They will have to bring in the solution architect as required to help with the product aspects of the sales process and be responsible for the technical feasibility.

When you are ready to hire your first sales person here are some tips on filtering sales resumes for the right hustlers, process jocks and relationship sales professionals.

Here are some examples of startups that did very well focusing on one marketing technique (and some who are still doing it). While I am not privy to why they chose the technique they did, they are all consistently improving over time.

First is Priceonomics. I am a huge fan of any company using their network data to create content that helps their prospects understand the market better. I am personally not sure why more companies dont do it. Priceonomics essentially uses data about prices for used items that it indexes on the web and shares it both on their blog and with key bloggers. The data that capture is turned into both blog posts and informative content. For example  how to avoid getting your bike stolen or the Used TV price.

Second is Admob (now acquired by Google). For the longest time the only marketing they would do was research reports on how their ad network was being used. The AdMob mobile metrics report was as highly regarded as the quarterly research report put together by investment banks on specific companies or sectors.  These research reports were initially emailed to subscribers quarterly and then they moved to hosting them on Slideshare.

Finally in the initial days of Buzzlogic (now acquired by Twelvefold Media) would put together Vino diaries (video interviews with top influential people in social media). These videos would focus on specific questions and were fairly short.

Bonus tip. How guest blogging propelled one site from 0 to 100,000 users.

Closer to home, I have heard from Krish of Chargbee mentioning that their primary marketing is helping answer questions on key online discussion forums and my own previous company BuzzGain which only focused on guest blogging for large well known marketing influencers as the only technique to gain awareness.