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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Learn to Improve

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Jugaad Innovators do not reinvent, they improvise. There are some simple methods that can be implemented to enhance improvement at regular stages. Improving on regular basis will ensure that the need never arises of reinventing. Some of these methods are given below and explained briefly.

Break Rules and Shift Values When Necessary
In July 2003, IBM’s then CEO Sam Palmisano organized a ‘Value Jam’. A three day long online brainstorming session in which all employees were invited to renew and update IBM’s century-old value system. This collaborative exercise re-contextualized the very notion of innovation and IBM’s core values. Such activities ensure that there is always innovation happening within the company, not just product ideas but cultural and working environment wise too.

Don’t Let Inflexible Investors and Customers Dictate Your Innovation Agenda
Henry Ford, founder of Ford motors said “If I had asked customers what they wanted, they would have said ‘faster horses’”. More recently Apple didn't do extensive market surveys to come up with the iPad. Many consumers, researchers, analysts and media experts said that there is no market for a product like that. Yet the iPad turned out to a breakthrough innovation.

Create Time and Space for Employees to Improvise and Experiment
Companies can hardly expect employees to think flexibly while they maintain their regular routine and operate in their usual work environment. To be able to think and act flexibly, employees need dedicated time and an inspiring space to experiment with new idea. For instance, Google employs a 70/20/10 model for organizing work. 70% of time has been given for their regular work, 20% time is dedicated to side projects and 10% time has to be given on projects that are not related to the main stream work at all. Two such side projects that became top products for Google were the Google Maps and Gmail.

Get Outside Your Comfort Zone to Gain New Perspectives
To truly think flexible, managers need to be taken out of their comfort zones and exposed to new situations that challenge them to think differently. DuPont sent its senior executives to rural India, where they had humble revelations. None of the expensive technology solutions that were designed for the Western urban market seemed relevant to low-income Indian villagers. This experience forced these DuPont executives to go back to the drawing board and co-create with local communities a whole new set of sustainable solutions.

Partner with Flexible Thinkers
Sometimes the best way to develop a new mindset is to seek inspiration from outside your company. One way to do this is to partner with already flexible and agile. US electronics retail giant Best Buy has deep ties with Silicon Valley start-ups that tend to innovate faster and better than the large electronics vendors that supply Best Buy. As a result, Best Buy is able to bring groundbreaking technologies to market much faster than even its large electronics suppliers can.

Experiment with Multiple Business Models
Often companies become too attached to a successful business model and find it nearly impossible to let go of it. But competition can spring from unexpected corners and disrupt the business model overnight. Amazon.com, aware of the potential for its own online model to be disrupted by digital readers, has been flexible in developing and promoting a new business model around its own e-reader, the Kindle, while maintaining its dominance in online retailing.

Fail Cheap, Fail Fast, Fail Often
A corollary of the willingness of Jugaad Innovators to continually experiment is their willingness to fail cheap, fail fast and fail often. Fernando Fabre, points out that most of the Jugaad Innovators fails cheap, fast and often.

At Google, failure is widely celebrated, especially if you fail fast and cheap. For instance, in 2011, Google pulled plug for on two high profile projects, Google Health and Google PowerMeter. Both were 2 and three years old respectively. The company mentioned its ‘inability to scale’ as the reason to shut down both of these projects.

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