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Author: ManojRanaweera

Founder & CEO of UnifiedVU

Intersection between marketing and sales

Published by ManojRanaweera on August 4, 2011

The intersection between marketing and sales is a fascinating area, which touches almost all organisations, whether they are small or large. At a very simplistic level, marketing is about promotion. It is about letting the world know that you exists, and your products and services can be trusted to solve a problem. Of course there is lot more to marketing than product and service promotion, but that is for discussion on another day. (image from digitalnpo.com) On the other hand, sales is a process you adopt to convert identified targets into revenue paying customers. Without sales, you have no business.…

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Recruitment II – Early Observations of Sri Lankan IT Market

Published by ManojRanaweera on May 8, 2011

Idea Stage Having made the decision to build our product development centre in Sri Lanka starting with employing the first senior PHP and Drupal Developer, I thought it might be useful in capturing my experience so far, at least for my own reference. In my previous post, I spoke about the challenges we face at edocr.com due to lack of development resources. By March 2011, I decided to park my attempts to bring on board a technical co-founder on equity and concentrate on recruiting a developer from Sri Lanka. Friendly Recommendations The process started by inquiring from few Sri Lankan…

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Overcoming challenges

Published by ManojRanaweera on April 11, 2011

At edocr.com, we never had it easy! I have changed teams many times over the last 4 yrs. At the beginning, I had a great team, but due to various issues, the team under performed. Then there was a period of about 15 months where no real development took place. In 2008, I outsourced complete development to an Indian company. This relationship also came to an end in 2010. Since then I courted with two individuals. These relationships ended well before they got going. Not ready to give up, once again, outsourcing looked promising. But having to work through project…

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Ultimate Search Box

Published by ManojRanaweera on February 14, 2011

I have been exploring various search boxes of our competitors to understand the ultimate size and shape for our own search box. Here are few references: Designing The Holy Search Box: Examples And Best Practices 25 Creative Search Bar Designs

Idiot’s guide to switching iphones in the UK

Published by ManojRanaweera on January 21, 2011

I have been wanting to replace my iphone3 with an iphone4 for sometime since my 18 months contract ran out in October 2010. Today, I walked in to Tesco and bought an iPhone4. Before you switch, its worth thinking about the process, and hopefully my experience will help someone. Eventhough my O2 contract has run out months ago, they still need 1 month notice. To issue a PAC code it could take up to 14 days To unlock the phone (as I want to pass my old iphone3 to my daughter), it could take up to 14 days. You should…

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How do you plan to control your destiny in 2011?

Published by ManojRanaweera on January 2, 2011

Just like many of us, I am in the planning mode right now. I believe in creating my own luck, i.e. been at the right place at the right time with the right proposition. I am putting considerable demand on 2011 – This is the year I must deliver, balancing growth of two micro companies whilst ensuring I give enough attention to family and my own life, i.e must enjoy living and not postpone living. I am keen to hear from you how you plan to deliver your objectives, what checklists you are putting in place to achieve the objectives,…

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Business Plan #2 – The Team

Published by ManojRanaweera on December 29, 2010

Many investors will bet on the team than the product or the market opportunity. So what is the ideal startup team? According to Mark Suster, its 5 software engineers and a CEO. But edocr.com is now 3 years old, yet it has no full-time employees. What it has is a team, made up of freelancers and contractors. This arrangement has helped us to bootstrap, but we now need a major rethink on how we can grow as a business, in terms of market share, revenues, product and people. In terms of writing the business plan for edocr.com, I have chosen…

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Business plan #1 – Starting point

Published by ManojRanaweera on December 29, 2010

There are many ways to write a business plan. But how do you start the process? You could start by thinking of: Product – Where would you like to see the product in 18 months? Sales – How much revenues would you like to generate in 5 years time? Market – How much market share can you grab in 5 years? Capital – How much capital would you need to get to traction and subsequent break-even? All of the above, will get you start thinking. The overall plan will cover all of above, as you start developing a detailed plan…

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