Focus on things that won’t change

I am not sure whether 10 years from now we would be using Facebook wall to post things, but I’m sure that we would be using a calendar to schedule our days, weeks and months. The form of the calendar might change, but we are going to need it, now and always. For example, in Web and mobile, ‘speed’ is really important. Apps need to work fast, blazingly fast and we know, that 10 years from now, your customer is not going to wake up and say ‘I wish my apps worked slower’. They are going to say this today and 10 years from now the apps should be simple, fast, reliable and useful. Focus on things that won’t change and put your energies into that. The coolness quotient that comes with innovation wears off after some time.

Customers don’t ask for much

When we were at the drawing board for http://gridle.in, the core question we addressed was ‘how do we make a cool product?’ Our pitches talked about the new technology we had used and how the concept was innovative. Our potential customers didn’t understand that. Over a period of time, deducing from the questions they had asked, we realized that their needs were very simple. They have a really simple problem, they see a solution in us and it doesn’t matter what technology we use or how innovatively we do it. If they find it useful, they will pay for it.

Existing thought-processes

This approach is slowly becoming common sense, but applying this in practice is quite a rocket science in some cases. That’s where the Design Thinking as a framework, with defined models like IDEO’s 3I (Identify, Inspire, Implement) and British Design Council’s Double Diamond model work. Moreover, tools like Photo Safari (observe and document), Persona and Empathy Map, Mindmapping (keyword tree ),  Brainwriting ( silent brainstorming, replacing talk with post-its), Sketching, Storyboarding, Prototyping, Storytelling, User Testing definitely would come handy in the journey of creating “usefulness”. Useful things may not be sexy, but they will surely pay off.

If you disagreed with this article, we ought to talk on https://facebook.com/yashparallel .

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With Gridle, you can manage everything on a single platform which helps in saving time and leads to efficient management. The platform targets medium sized enterprises in India with anywhere between 50- 500 employees and 3-4 offices across different locations.

Features:

As far as features are concerned, Gridle has very normal features that can be found on other sites such as File Sharing and commenting on each other’s posts, Messages, Events, Making Groups and assigning tasks, Announcements, Planner, Member dictionary etc. In a way it can be used as a social network for your enterprise which makes it a project and team management tool.

The visual of Gridle sets it apart from its competitors. It’s very intuitive, which makes it easier for a user to grasp how it functions and also provides pleasure to work with the software.

Story behind the Startup…

The father of one of the co-founders Abhishekh has a company that has about 100 employees. “They are facing a lot of problems as far as team and project management is concerned since everything is done on hardcopy of papers. We identified this problem and decided to work on it. However, we later found out that there are already such softwares available in the market. So we started using them but frankly speaking, we weren’t motivated to do so.” said Yash Shah, one of the founders of Gridle. According to him, a software that lacks intuitivity is a major problem. “When we checked the price of other softwares, they were priced around 5-8 $ for an employee per month. A company in U.S. may find such softwares feasible but currency conversion in India leads to problems for many medium sized companies.”

Gridle charges 20% of of what their US based competitors charge and is priced at Rs 50 (less than $1) per user per month.

Meet the Team!

Team Gridle

Gridle has been founded by Yash Shah, Abhishek Doshi and Anupama Panchal. There are 3 developers who are working full time with the team. The team also consists of a business mentor and a technical mentor. Gridle offers a winter and a summer internship every year.

At the initial stage, they wanted people to work with them but didn’t have sufficient money. So they went to local IT colleges and scouted interns. They go to 3-4 colleges and recruit 6-7 interns from each college which gives them 15-20 people to work with. From that batch, they select 1-2 people to work with them on a permanent basis and that’s how they have accumulated 3 developers from the last one and half years.

Feedback and Growth

Yash said that the software isn’t launched yet for public. They have 3 clients in Ahmedabad who are using it as of now. “The first version wasn’t as splendid as the current one and was extremely basic. At that point of time we were just focussing on the price factor. There was this one company where we convinced 20 people to use Yammer, free of cost as all the expenses were covered by us and at the same time we told those 20 people to use Gridle. We realized that people found both the softwares miserable. After that we tried making it visually appealing so that people could connect to the software and came up with some more advanced versions. The third version has received quite favourable feedback but there is still room for some improvement.” 

Before launching it for the general public, they want to make sure that everything is perfect without any flaws.

The Stumbling Block of the Journey

According to Yash, raising funds is the biggest hurdle they have faced. “When you tell an angel investor about your idea, they tell you to find a good team. If you have a good team and a good idea, they say they want to see a demo. After the demo, they tell you that you need to show them a paying customer. We have reached the paying customer part but I don’t know what will happen next as the entire process slows you down.”

Gridle’s advice to Budding Entrepreneurs

Give your best shot but never keep your hopes high. Don’t even think that you’re funded until you get the check in your hands!

Gridle won Rs 2.5 lakh, along with technology support, at the Microsoft BizSpark India Startup Challenge 2013 and that enabled them to speed up product development. They have been incubated at Indian Angel Network and are looking forward to a pitch at CIIE Ahmedabad very soon.

 Do visit their site! Gridle

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