edocr.com – Page 8 – Manoj Ranaweera

Review of 20 hottest UK tech startups of 2008 #Webmission08

Review of 20 hottest UK tech startups of 2008 #Webmission08

Published by ManojRanaweera on July 3, 2012

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

10-Minute e-Mailers and the grief

Published by ManojRanaweera on April 28, 2012

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

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

Published by ManojRanaweera on April 27, 2012

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…

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.…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Startups: What would the ideal web technology start-up team be composed of?

Published by ManojRanaweera on December 28, 2010

Startups: What would the ideal web technology start-up team be composed of? 23 answers on Quora What would the ideal web technology start-up team be composed of?

Category: edocr.com