Portfolious

After two months of conceptualizing and developing an online health magazine for a Canadian client, we have finally launched beta version of the site – http://strive-magazine.com. The site was developed in Drupal CMS (http://drupal.org). The magazine covers proper nutrition, profiles on local athletes, sports, events & even fitness training around Canada.

Lately the number of enquiries we get for web strategy consulting have increased and I guess its a lot to do with people starting to realise that development / technology is very much secondary compared to coming up with a proper focus, identity and the marketing approach for their brand. For most of them though the realization has come little late and have already spent a lot of money into the development phase and it gets really difficult to go back rework the approach.

Certain minimum things need to be done before you head into the development phase -

1. Clearly identify your target audience - the cliche – but then this is seldom done properly ( some amount of Pshychographic analysis helps a lot in designing and conceptualizing the features )

2. Talk to your target audience – call/email/scrap a minimum of 5 people you know and get an honest feedback.( you will realize that a lot of things you have assumed about your audience is way off the mark )

3. Identify the core values of your brand- helps you in coming up with the features or rather removing unwanted features.

4. HAVE A PLAN! ( identify clearly the features for phase I, phase 2 etc , the marketing plan and put in place mechanisms to communicate with your customers – can be email news letters, launch page, blog etc )

5. Do mockups/wireframes – come up with detailed mockups of key pages in your site. ( these can be done on a piece of paper or on a ppt . This gives you a feel of your site and the workflows)

6. Get the visual design done – you may have to get a designer to do this, acts as an input to your development team.

7. Communicate clearly your vision your product/website with the development team. It helps them to identify a suitable technology framework. Most of the times the decision would be whether to develop the site ground up using a framwork or just go for a CMS.

Doing these minimum things will help you save a lot of money and time . Also this would give you that extra space for the change of mind.

For details Visit- http://network.headstart.in/projects/startup-saturday-hyderabad/project-home

What: Hyderabad Open Coffee Club (OCC)
When: Saturday, 4th of April 2009
Time: 3pm-4:30pm
Where: Ofen (upstairs), Road no 10, Banjara Hills
http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/1502191/

What: Hyderabad Open Coffee Club (OCC)
When: Saturday, 21th of March 2009
Time: 3pm-4:30pm

Where: Ofen (upstairs), Road no 10, Banjara Hills
http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/1502191/

Nice place … good coffee … cool people…

If you haven’t noticed already, we have changed our logo and have come up with a new clean website. The old website had too much text and we felt it did not clearly explain who we are and what we do. The logo was also was a more serious one and which didn’t quite reflect our outlook. The new logo is much more vibrant and fun! Take a look at the new site.

Hope you like our new look. We welcome your feedback and suggestions on this.

OLD

NEW

An interesting and innovative way to create internet awareness to the offiline population in India by Google – or…do they have an hidden agenda…But then its cool and only Google can only come up with something like this.

Check out Amit Agarwal’s post on this :-

http://www.labnol.org/internet/google-internet-bus-in-india/7015/

So we finally rented a new office place, apart from making us feel good about working from a place of truly international standards we also believe that the place will impact our prductivity leves. Roger Dooley explains the science behing this.

*Wishing all of you a Happy Shankranti!!*

Several of the attendees of the previous Open Coffee Club wanted to meet more often at Ofen

We figured we’ll try meeting on the 1st and 3rd Saturday of every
month instead of once a month.

What: Hyderabad Open Coffee
When: Saturday, 17th of January 2009
Time: 3pm-4:30pm
Where: OFEN, Road no 10, Banjara Hills

Please forward onto others in the startup ecosystem.

Brands employ all possible strategies to suck in the consumers, attract them and retain them. Social media is under explored advertisement medium, at least in India. Come future you will see more brands online, engaging and updating their customers. This ranks 10 on Paul Dunay’s marketing predications list for 2009.

Junta42 came with this list of single best marketing predications by their top 42 bloggers.

So as we see we are betting on future (our future product).