Why is Paytm India's Top Startup?

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Paytm was launched in 2010 as an Indian start up. The original service of Paytm was to help users to make their bill payments and recharge mobile phones, while earning reward point. In this post we will see the reason why Paytm is considerd the top indian startup and get more details about this startup. What is Paytm? Paytm was founded by Vijay Shekhar Sharma, in Noida with an initial investment of $2 million. Paytm's parent company One97 Communications which is also owned by Vijay Shekhar Sharma was started in 2000 and operates into multiple fields. Who owns Paytm? Paytm has been backed by Jack Maa's Alibaba and Ratan Tata of the infamous TATA Group. Although partially owned by Chinese company Alibaba, Paytm remains an Indian company with majority of stake holders being Indians (primarily Ratan Tata and Vijay Shekhar Sharma himself.  What got Paytm the required boost? Paytm added a lot of features in 2013 and moved from a mobile and DTH recharge service to an online payment pl
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Realize Extreme Conditions are Fertile Soil for Extreme Innovation

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Jugaad Innovators seek for adverse conditions to unleash their Jugaad skills. The more extreme condition calls for more extreme innovations. Corporate leaders should view extreme conditions such as massive technology shifts, change in regulations, or competitive threats that come out of blue as an opportunity to develop radical innovations that disrupt industries and shape whole new markets.

Marc Benioff, Chairman & CEO of salesforce.com, is one such innovator. In the year 1999, he founded salesforce.com in his San Francisco apartment with bold vision. He wanted to make business software which enterprises use to manage their customer interactions affordable and accessible to more companies.

The business model was pay as you go and it could be accessed by the browser itself. The software was not installed in the employees’ PCs thus avoiding the expensive license fees and maintenance costs charged by large software vendors like Oracle, Siebel and SAP.

In 2001, when salesforce.com was about to take off, the dotcom bubble burst and the stock market crashed. Large corporations perceived Benioff as yet another dotcom entrepreneur peddling snake oil and refused to buy into his vision of Software as a Service (SaaS).

Benioff persisted even in the face of all the adversity. He saw a silver lining in the dark economic cloud that engulfed corporate America. He realized 2 things about his customers who were themselves struggling in the doomed economy. Firstly, they all were looking for more value from their existing software without pumping in more. And secondly, they wanted their software to rapidly adapt the changing needs of technology and evolving business needs.

Sensing the opportunity, Benioff started evangelizing to the potential customers the merits of the SaaS model rather than touting salesforce.com’s capabilities. He started selling the concept and the idea behind it and not the product itself. Once the market was sold on the idea, sales were generated automatically.

Because of Benioff and his persistent evangelizing of SaaS, a movement was ignited in the tech sector. As more and more software developers realized the advantages of SaaS model, they started making more solutions using the model, making it sustainable.

Salesforce.com was comfortably positioned to lead this SaaS movement. Salesforce.com’s subscriber base grew by 1500 percent in the following seven years. The SaaS movement that Benioff initiated has since evolved and is known today as “Cloud Computing”. Benioff believes that extreme conditions can generate groundbreaking innovations.

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