Wirkle at Comsware 2007

Yeah, yeah ... I know you folks have already read this on Sunil's Blog and Harsh's Blog. You think this old news now ... well, yes and no. The news is old but what I am writing here will be new information, so read on.

Im writing this on my way from Bangalore to Delhi ... on the way back from Comsware. We are also presenting at Proto.in the coming weekend, Sunil is flying down to Chennai for that. You are also going to hear us speak at Mobile Monday Delhi ... and guess what, we are one of the proud organizers of that event.

You can tell we're upto something here, but the reality is ... we're experimenting. For the most part till now we have been an inwards focused organization. Sometime back we realized how important is the external face to any company, because thats where the business comes from. Again this is something which Im hoping other entrepreneurs realize earlier that we did.

Now lets talk about the external face, every company has multiple avenues via which they publicize themselves to the external world, conferences, the web, articles in magazines ... and the list goes on and on. Now if you have "x" dollars how do you decide which one of these is best for you.

I don't really have an answer to the above and I think it varies from company to company. For Wirkle, we're trying to get business more than anything else, so in our case we publicize ourselves where we think most of our customers will be.

Coming back to comsware, this was our first exhibit ever ... overall I think it went good, we met lots of people. At the same time, I think it could have gone better. Actually, comsware is combination of research/acad and business, comsbiz was the business segment of the conference and thats where our target audience was. Now the bad part was that, comsbiz was on 9th and 10th, while the exhibits were on the 10th and 11th ... I think the exhibits should have been aligned with comsbiz, that would have made more business sense for the companies exhibiting at the conference.

Also, the exhibits should be where the people are, in case of comsware, the exhibit hall was a little off from the mainstream where the segments were taking place. Later on they did address some of that by having the tea/coffee breaks right where the exhibits were, so thanks to them for taking care of that.

The importance of the Web

The other day I was having coffee with Nikhil who's the founder and CTO of a 40-50 people company. I won't disclose other details here but Im sure if he is reading this he'd know. His company is a provider of specific enterprise solutions. They employ sales people who target these enterprises, reach to them and sell them their solution. Some time back they tried out google adwords ... and this will surprise you - today, majority of their business comes via google.

Another friend of mine, Gaurav, who's also the founder of a 40-50 people company and is doing very well indicated how sitting in India they get business from the US and most of their customers find them via the web.

This forced me to re-think some of our strategy, now on one side you would have a sales strategy where you reach out to potential customers, e.g., you send emails to a 100, 5-7 might reply back and you might close a deal with 1 if you are lucky. The other side of this is that you'd publicize yourself at a place on the web where your customers are most likely to come and once you have done that your customers come and find you. Now for a startup with limited funding where you don't have all the sales people you'd need, your web presence might prove to be handy.

So what does this mean, well ... expect lots more about Wirkle on the web in the coming days!!!

Where is Wirkle ...

The other day I was just staring at my blog, I looked at the title of my blog "the inception of wirkle" and then I looked at my posts. Hmmm ... Im writing about mobile, Im writing about the conferences Im going to ... but where the heck is Wirkle?

Well, better sooner than later ... at least I realized this. Not that I am not going to write about mobile or conferences ... just that I am going to also write more about Wirkle and our experiences as we move along.