January 2013
It’s all about the survival of the founding team
All startups start with an idea. Usually, the idea comes from one individual, who has a problem that existing products cannot solve efficiently. In some cases, the “efficiency” is linked to “how you feel about” the existing solutions, e.g. higher price, cumbersome usability, outdated design, limited functionality, etc. What ever the reason, you decide to […]
Refining Intercom – the automated user messaging
Just been playing with Intercom once again and thought of sharing the latest refinements. At edocr, when you sign up, you get a free quota of 5 documents. As you upload documents one by one, we have the opportunity to display an automated message through Intercom. This is our latest configuration: After sign up, a […]
Building thought leadership via Quora
We saw over the last few years how Mark Suster and Fred Wilson became investor celebrities by blogging consistently on startup topics. They have both build a large follower base, and industry wide respect due to openly sharing the knowledge they have. There is nothing more important than consistency of sticking to one core subject and blogging at […]
How or where can I learn more about how lead generation works?
Answer by Manoj Ranaweera: Happy to explain how lead generation works with our product/service. We allow companies of all sizes to publish documents on edocr | edocr. In 2012, we grew by 250% adding over 50,000 user accounts to the 20,000 we had at the beginning of the year. Our process: 1. Upload all your […]
What are the latest lead generation startups worldwide?
Answer by Manoj Ranaweera: Not sure we qualify for the latest, as the company was founded in 2007. After many years of founder and software development issues, we regrouped in mid 2011, which resulted in 250% growth in 2012. We generate leads from documents, and allow easy way to export leads in real-time automatically to […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]