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Author: ManojRanaweera

Founder & CEO of UnifiedVU

How does Sri Lanka compares with Asian countries like India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Philippines and Vietnam when it comes to SEO and social…

Assume Sri Lanka is ranking better on BPO than above categories. Sri Lanka is currently no 35 in terms of traffic on edocr | edocr. India is 2 having overtaken UK, and might even overtake USA, given that most companies in the USA now outsource SEO and Social media to Indian companies, especially those who have sales offices in the USA. Philippines always had a strong BPO presence, but we are seen increasing activity from there. View Question on Quora

What are the best papers posted for the PDF tribute for Aaron Swartz?

Answer by Manoj Ranaweera: I did not know Aaron but have spent significant time reading about him, his contribution to the Internet and technology and how others are feeling about his departure. And then I started to wonder, is there anything I could do to help. Then I discovered this post. I am the founder of edocr | edocr, a leading web application where thousands of professionals and businesses share pdfs. Unlike some of our competitors, we have no intention of ever charging anyone to access public documents on edocr. However, we do not encourage uploading of any copyrighted material…

What is the best CRM for companies experiencing growth?

  Answer by Manoj Ranaweera: If you have two salesmen, I would suggest opting for a simple solution rather than Salesforce, which is quite an over kill for a small company (It’s great for larger salesforce). After paying for Salesforce, we switched to Capsule CRM, which is a simple CRM, which can be configured to manage leads through the nurturing process. It also has a decent integration with Mailchimp, mobile apps and the ability to detect social profiles (not to the same extent as Nimble though but faster than Nimble). We liked it so much, we ended integrating with it…

Are partnerships a good way to scale a SaaS business?

Answer by Manoj Ranaweera: In Q4 2011, we made a strategic decision to take a partner lead approach, as we struggled to connect our product/service with existing business processes. We went live with Buffer (Buffer your documents for increased productivity) in Dec 2011 followed by Zendesk (Enrich Zendesk customer service with centralised documents) in March 2012 and ended 2012 with 14 product integrations, some of which were build by vendors and others by third parties such as Cloud services and software from Cazoomi In most cases, selection of SaaS apps for integrations were based on our use of the complementary…

What happens in the background when a user signs up for a SaaS product?

Answer by Manoj Ranaweera: You might see some services create a subdomain and others will not. But in most cases, everything runs from a single database which may or may not be distributed. We run our service from a single database with x hourly backups. Services which are considered mission critical might have much more stringent criteria both in terms of provisioning and backups. As far as I understand our own infrastructure, we create a number of database entries when a new user sign ups, and start to consume functionality. We also track every action, and provide analytics based on…

What are 10 marketing strategies for a cash-strapped SaaS company?

Answer by Manoj Ranaweera: Its good to notice that you are connecting with existing brands such as CC and Mailchimp. Ask them for co-marketing, e.g. listing you on their partner pages, blog post, social media campaign, etc Explore other products you can integrate with. Unfortunately, I cannot think how you could integrate with us.. mmh there is a long shot opportunity for discussion at a later stage.. Get yourself featured on blogs – they will at least generate twitter noise and if you are lucky some signups Get a press release out – publish on all those free sites, including…

Linkedin looks more and more like a stream of posts – clearly competing with Facebook, Twitter and G+. What would Linkedin looks like by …

Linkedin started with CVs and selling to Recruitment industry. Now focuses on Sales and Marketing in addition to above, and building streams similar to G+, Twitter and Facebook. At the end, all will look similar to Facebook and G+, all having videos, slides and any other content they can think of. What do you think Linkedin will look like by end of 2013? Anyone on edocr | edocr can easily post to the Big 3 through Buffer (Buffer your documents for increased productivity) and manually to G+ at present. I am hoping that Linkedin will not put any restrictions on…

Review of 20 hottest UK tech startups of 2008 #Webmission08

Image Credit: Mike Butcher, taken at Bebo office, San Francisco in Apr 2008 The Tour In April 2008, 20 of the hottest UK techstartups toured San Francisco and the Silicon Valley. These companies have raised a whopping $95 million to date. The Companies were: DotHomes/Byteplay, edocr.com Groupspaces HubDub/Fanduel Huddle Kwiqq Mydeo Rummble/Rummble Labs ShortFuze/Moviestorm Silobreaker Skimbit/Skimlinks SliceThePie TheFilter Trampoline Systems TrustedPlaces WAYN Webjam Zebtab Zogix Current Status 3 have ceased operations (Kwiqq, Zebtab and Zogix). 2 have exited (Trusted Places and DotHomes). 2 have succeeded with major pivots (Skimlinks and Hubdub). 14 are continuing as before. Funding Status No funding…

10-Minute e-Mailers and the grief

We have begun to continuously monitor traffic, as part of providing real-time chat support through Woopra on edocr.com. Woopra is an invaluable service to our operations, and we recommend it highly for any tech startup. Today, we came across a new edocr.com account which was continuously pinged, in fact 556 times today. As a general rule of thumb, we investigate any account that is pinged more than 100 times a day with the same behaviour, which indicates existence of a script created for whatever the reason. In this instance, each time edocr.com was pinged, it goes through the same 3…

5 Stages of a tech startup – Stage 1: Product Development

There are many ways to plan the growth of your tech company. One way is to split start to exit period in to 5 stages, these being: product development, product/market fit, launch, growth and dominance. And each of these stages can be further split into five key components, these being: milestones, team, product, funding and metrics. Product Development This stage runs all the way from the initial idea to setting up of the company, coding of your product, moving the product from alpha to beta and launch, building your initial team and raising the funding to sustain the operations, either…