Pathik Shah

IMPS ( Interbank Mobile Payment Service) – How It Works, and Why It’s Awesome!

There hasn’t been any single mobile payments solution in India ever, which just works. Sure, there have been a lot of startups which have tried to crack mobile payments using e-wallet services, but most of them pretty much suck. Some like mChek have been good, but they failed to gain much traction. Even Paypal isn’t an option anymore, after the recent RBI crackdown.

Though I have been a huge fan of NEFT (National Electronic Fund Transfer), it is not as usable as I’d like it to be. There is a significant delay in the completion of the transaction, and to effect a transaction, you need to give out your complete account details, which could make anyone a bit apprehensive about using the service.

IMPS allows you to send and receive money using just your mobile number and an MMID (Mobile Money Identifier) which is allocated to you via your bank. You also use an MPIN (password) in order to verify the transaction.

The best thing about IMPS is the ease of use. Soon, all major banks in India will be offering IMPS as a service. All transactions are real-time, enabling you to send money to any IMPS user within a matter of minutes.

You can use it either via SMS or via a mobile application. Most banks will be launching mobile IMPS apps for all major platforms.

More details: IMPS (Interbank Mobile Payment Service)

With IMPS, we now have a robust mobile payments system in place, and we are inching closer to financial inclusion in India.

What Next?

An awesome Payment Gateway, please.

I really hope that the government also launches a standard payment gateway API in collaboration with NPCI, RBI which supports all major Indian banks and allows users to conduct e-commerce transactions easily and securely. (CCAvenue, EBS, DirecPay all suck from a usability perspective.)

Such a move would address one of the major pain points that all e-commerce startups in India face, thereby encouraging more users to buy stuff online and trigger a massive e-commerce revolution in India which could potentially make Flipkart look undervalued even at the rumored $1 billion valuation.

A Million Dollars Isn’t Cool. You Know What’s Cool? A Billion Dollars!

So You Want To Do a Startup, Eh?

What Makes a Successful Startup? | Dissecting Successful Internet Startups to find the Secret Sauce

No one knows, but here’s a rough answer, thanks to the guys at Startup Genome.

1. Founders that learn are more successful: Startups that have helpful mentors, track metrics effectively, and learn from startup thought leaders raise 7x more money and have 3.5x better user growth.

2. Startups that pivot once or twice times raise 2.5x more money, have 3.6x better user growth, and are 52% less likely to scale prematurely than startups that pivot more than 2 times or not at all.

3. Many investors invest 2-3x more capital than necessary in startups that haven’t reached problem solution fit yet. They also over-invest in solo founders and founding teams without technical cofounders despite indicators that show that these teams have a much lower probability of success.

4. Investors who provide hands-on help have little or no effect on the company’s operational performance. But the right mentors significantly influence a company’s performance and ability to raise money. (However, this does not mean that investors don’t have a significant effect on valuations and M&A)

5. Solo founders take 3.6x longer to reach scale stage compared to a founding team of 2 and they are 2.3x less likely to pivot.

6. Business-heavy founding teams are 6.2x more likely to successfully scale with sales driven startups than with product centric startups.

7. Technical-heavy founding teams are 3.3x more likely to successfully scale with product-centric startups with no network effects than with product-centric startups that have network effects.

8. Balanced teams with one technical founder and one business founder raise 30% more money, have 2.9x more user growth and are 19% less likely to scale prematurely than technical or business-heavy founding teams.

9. Most successful founders are driven by impact rather than experience or money.

10. Founders overestimate the value of IP before product market fit by 255%.

11. Startups need 2-3 times longer to validate their market than most founders expect. This underestimation creates the pressure to scale prematurely.

12. Startups that haven’t raised money over-estimate their market size by 100x and often misinterpret their market as new.

13. Premature scaling is the most common reason for startups to perform worse. They tend to lose the battle early on by getting ahead of themselves.

14. B2C vs. B2B is not a meaningful segmentation of Internet startups anymore because the Internet has changed the rules of business. We found 4 different major groups of startups that all have very different behavior regarding customer acquisition, time, product, market and team.

You can get the full report here: The Startup Genome Report | Direct Link

Startups are Hard

An excellent post on startups and what it means to be an entrepreneur by @jazzychad of Notifo and PicAFight.

Startups are Hard

Startups are hard. No, startups are damn hard.

Contrary to popular belief, there are no clouds of money that float around Silicon Valley and rain on anyone that utters the phrase, “I’m a founder!” Unfortunately, starting a company and raising money is just as hard as ever; it’s just that the investors don’t have as much leverage as they used to, but they still have a lot.

Most reporting on startups suffers from a terrible case of success bias. Nobody wants to report on a dying startup unless it is to highlight another company that has come along to kill them, but that actually turns into a piece about the better company and not the dying one.

Startups that die rarely talk about it publicly because it is frustrating, embarrassing, and most of the time the people involved want to forget the whole mess and move on rather than sit around talking about the fact that they failed.

Most people don’t want to admit that startups are hard, either, because to admit something is hard is to admit that you don’t know everything there is to know about a certain topic and to display weakness. If there’s one thing you do not want to do as a startup, it’s appear weak. Only the strong survive.

But guess what: startups are hard. At times they are soul-crushingly hard. I am not afraid to admit this anymore. I am not afraid to talk openly about it with peers anymore. So, this post serves as a counterpoint to all the recent postings alluding to the fact that anyone can suddenly decide to be a founder and the next week find themselves swimming around in a kiddie-pool full of angel/VC money.

Continue Reading: Startups Are Hard