Product Round - ☕️ Carpe Diem! - The Morning Tea: 25/09/20

Friday, 25th September ’20

Good morning, let’s welcome the weekend with a warm heart and big smiles. In China, bottled water billionaire Zhong Shanshan pips Jack Ma to become China’s richest and Asia’s second-richest after Mukesh Ambani. Bottled water is ubiquitous across China where people avoid tap water due to health reasons. In other news, Harley-Davidson shuts down India operations as 70 employees face the axe. Harley is quitting multiple loss-making international markets to focus on the US markets.

And here are some words of wisdom to kickstart your day,

I create so that I can contribute. If I am successful, others can learn what to do. If I am not successful, let that be an agent for not doing the same.

MARKETS

Markets: The markets continue to be bearish on Thursday, amidst the rising Corona Virus cases, lack of domestic triggers, and international cues. All sectoral indices closed in the red with Bank, Auto, IT, Metal, and Pharma falling in the range of 3-4 percent, while the Nifty Midcap and Smallcap indices declined over 2.5 percent each. This downtrend is expected to continue in the short term. Tech stocks boosted the US stock markets. Global sell-off drives EU to a near 3-month low.

TECHNOLOGY & INNOVATION

Facebook has partnered with venture capital firm Matrix Partners as part of its VC Brand Incubator Program to help scale and support early-stage small and medium businesses. This comes after their $4.3 million grant for small businesses in Delhi, Gurugram, Mumbai, Hyderabad, and Bengaluru.
ShareChat, a Twitter backed Indian social network that focuses entirely on serving users in non-English languages, said on Thursday it has raised $40 million from a clutch of investors after the Indian startup added tens of millions of new users in recent months.
Top app makers including Spotify and EpicGames have banded together to fight against Apple’s control of its App Store and, to a lesser extent, Google’s control of the Play Store, a topic of increased regulatory scrutiny in recent months.

WHAT ELSE IS COOKING

IDFC First Bank to launch contactless debit card transaction facility: IDFC First Bank is set to launch SafePay, a digital facility that allows contactless debit card payments by simply waving one’s smartphone against a Near Field Communication (NFC)-enabled POS terminal. SafePay embeds NFC technology in the IDFC First Mobile App to enable secure payments using a debit card issued by the Bank. A social distancing-friendly way to pay, SafePay completely does away with the need to hand over the card to a merchant or even carry it in the wallet.
China offers covid vaccines to testing countries to boost diplomatic ties: Chinese vaccine developer Sinovac Biotech Ltd. said that countries running its final-stage clinical trials like Brazil, Indonesia and Turkey will get its coronavirus shots at the same time as China, underscoring how vaccine supply agreements could cement diplomatic ties in the Covid-19 era.President Xi Jinping in May promised that China-developed vaccines will be a global “public good” that can be shared by all. Supplying vaccines to other countries could help repair China’s image around the world over how it handled the initial outbreak in Wuhan.
Reliance Jio starts offering mobile services on 22 international flights: Reliance Jio has started offering mobile services on 22 flights on international routes, with plans starting at ₹499 per day. The company’s partner airlines include Cathay Pacific, Singapore Airlines, Emirates, Etihad Airways, Euro Wings, Lufthansa, Malindo Air, Biman Bangladesh Airlines, and Alitalia. With this, Jio has become the second Indian telecom company to offer in-flight service. Tata group firm Nelco has started providing in-flight mobile services in Vistara airlines on the London route.

BUSINESS LOUNGE

Pioneering Fintech in India

This firm doubled its payments thanks to digital payments and aims to target 1.4 million businesses by 2020 end. With humble beginnings, Razorpay was started in 2014 to solve the then fresh Indian problem- digital payments. Back then, digital payment solutions were limited to offerings from big enterprises and Razorpay thought that there had to be a better way.

Harshil Mathur and Shashank Kumar, both IIT Roorkee graduates started working on Razorpay to power startups and disruptors who were reinventing their business domains. Today, they are a full-stack converged payments solution company that aims to revolutionize online payments by providing clean, developer-friendly APIs, and hassle-free integration.

Their big moment came in 2015 when they were accepted into Y Combinator’s accelerator program which had served as an accelerator to global companies like Quora, Reddit, and Airbnb. Razorpay was the only second Indian company to do so after ClearTax. This validation helped them to grow further as they added around 300 businesses to start with. Their first client breakthrough came when, after being rejected by around 100 banks, a leading private bank decided to bet on them. Funding from MasterCard validated their finance solution.

Today, they have around 3.5 lakh merchants on the platform with more than 5000 merchants onboarded every day. They have multiple Indian unicorns like Oyo, Zomato, and Swiggy as their clients along with a few majors like Airtel and IRCTC. They have ascertained their presence in the Indian market which has since then seen an explosion of fintech companies.

TMT VARSITY

Tackle Product Design Problems

Today, we discuss a framework to tackle any product problem that you might face as an entrepreneur, growth hacker, or product person. This framework called CIRCLES was published by Lewis Lin in her book, Decode and Conquer, and is an easy and flexible way to understand your design problem and handle it effectively. CIRCLE is an acronym for,

Comprehend the situation: Understand the problem at hand. We can use the What, Why, Who and How framework to delve deeper here.
Identify the customer: Define personas at this step based on the behavior, demographics, needs, and goals.
Report the customer needs: As a <role>, I want <need/want>, in order to <benefit>.
Cut through prioritization: Now that we have identified the various needs, we need to prioritize on a select need. This can be done on the basis of revenue, customer satisfaction/engagement, and ease of implementation.
List solutions: In this step, we list the solutions to the need we have identified in the above step. Here it is better to think big and list 2-3 unconventional (but innovative, useful, and understandable) solutions.
Evaluate the tradeoffs: It is good to do the pros and cons analysis of our solutions and understand what might be the problems associated with it.
Summarize the solutions: Finally, after brainstorming, summarize whatever end you reached.

Pro-Tip: Keep the sketches handy. Be prepared to sketch out and to create wireframes wherever necessary.

    <p>Written by <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/kumar-sourav-mohanty-38a518166/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Kumar Sourav Mohanty,</a> <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/akansh-bhatt/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Akansh Bhatt</a>, and <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/shashankdobhal/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Shashank Dobhal</a></p><h2>Become Smarter in Just 5 minutes</h2><p><strong>Get a daily mail that makes reading the news enjoyable. Stay informed and entertained for free. (After Sign Up, you'll receive a welcome mail within 5 minutes. If you don't get it, check your promotions tab and move it to primary.)</strong>

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