The Smartest Unknown Indian Entrepreneur (2008)

http://www.forbes.com/2008/02/22/mitra-zoho-india-tech-inter-cx_sm_0222mitra.html

by KonaB • 17 years ago

39 8 17 years ago

ibsulon• 17 years ago

I've thought about one of those ideas for a while: promise 6 months to highly motivated high school kids and for an exchange of working for two years at lower wages, you'd train them. Then, you could have them working for 20 hours a week fairly quickly on QA, automated testing, and other positions as they learn your system. Then, place them in a mentorship system with good senior engineers and keep the good ones.

hariis• 17 years ago

Any thoughts on what other products can be done with this model? or in other words, what other SaaS products currently have fat margins that can be undercut?

mtw• 17 years ago

not necessarily SaaS products, but I'm thinking of software for professionals:

- software for lawyers, accountants

- software for the health industry

- graphic software such as photoshop, 3DSMax or Final Cut pro

the overall market is smaller, but you can sell the software for more. Also might need a little bit more topical knowledge, but imho it's the same quantity of work as doing a Microsoft Office clone

another market with fat margins is MMO video games. I'm sure there are lots of niche markets out there wanting their own game

romland• 17 years ago

The page is trying to render something from my LAN in an IFRAME.

It does not look malicious, just a silly mistake. Boy, how I love thee, NoScript!

(the url: http://192.168.0.164:8581/feeds/PopularSciencehtml/PopularSc...)

ivenkys• 17 years ago

Not really unknown - wasn't there a mention by Google of Zoho sometime back and that article was linked here as well.

sganesh• 17 years ago

Sridhar Vembu is a fellow hacker here :)

http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=sridharvembu

sramana• 17 years ago

Folks, Sridhar Vembu was unknown, or certainly lesser known in 2007 when I first interviewed him :-)

Since then, and especially after this Forbes story, he was in the Economist.

So no, he is no longer unknown.

ramanujan• 17 years ago

This article made me give Zoho a try. We use Google Apps/37Signals, but wanted to kick the tires and see what's up at Zoho.

First impression is that they need UI polish, but overall the individual Zoho apps are astonishingly fast. I don't know how they'll hold up after loading data into them, but try out some of the Zoho Business apps in Chrome on OS X (use your OpenID so you don't have to sign in).

Is it just me? Performance seems so amazingly fast for just clicking around that I want to do a side-by-side benchmark with Selenium and some real data just to make sure my eyes aren't deceiving me.

The Smartest Unknown Indian Entrepreneur (2008)

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