Category Archives: Digitization

The Tracxn IPO is a playbook for a true global tech play from India!

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Tracxn went public today… congrats to the founders, employees & investors!

It’s a small personal milestone also. First angel –>IPO for me (I angel invested in Tracxn in 2015-16)…. & chose not to sell in the pre-IPO window:) Besides, I’m a regular user of the platform & can vouch for its utility!

But what really makes Tracxn stand out? – It’s a true/rare global tech play from India – IPOed in India, HQ/OPs in India, but main market is US & Europe!

Most folks in the tech ecosystem know Tracxn, but to newcomers – Tracxn is building a “Bloomberg Terminal for Private Markets”. Public markets have all their data, analyses, trends, and reports out in the open, but that’s not the case with private markets (VC/PE/Angel). This report does a good job of explaining the position.

You can’t publicly find hard numbers or verifiable figures to base your decisions on… everyone is trying to guess and make judgments in the absence of data. That’s where companies like Tracxn come in – they collate data from a bunch of diff sources & create a dashboard that they sell.

The Tracxn IPO is significant for the Indian tech ecosystem –

1) Headquartered in India, but 70% of revenues from US & Europe – true global play!
2) It’s a software driven business (think MARGINAL COST = ZERO), hence lightweight & scalable without huge investments
3) Raised VC $$, but not crazy levels (think #Realistic #Valuation)
4) $8-10MN runrate & profitable (or knocking on those doors)
5) First-mover advantage (think #DataIsTheNewOil)

As @MohapatraHemant (from LightSpeed Ventures) points out in his tweet, this isn’t a case where a big chunk of the value discovery has already happened in the private markets (by VCs). It’s a relatively early IPO, where the company will grow & reward investors in the public space.

Indian stock markets have recently witnessed a string of grossly overvalued tech/ecommerce IPOs that make them question the very rationale of the Silicon Valley originated VC playbook/model. IPOs like Tracxn can help soothe such misgivings & help folks internalize how it really works!

Originally posted on Twitter https://twitter.com/amitranjan/status/1582996280443170816

Digital Spring Cleaning Checklist!

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As our lives increasingly go digital, it is useful to periodically run a status check on our online assets and relationships. I recently did my annual online services (subscriptions) spring cleaning. It threw up multiple surprises & uncovered leakages.. sharing a quick checklist here

  • Unused Subs: Found 2 subscriptions I’m paying, but not using.. promptly killed!

  • Broken Subs: Found multiple sububscriptions that got broken by the RBI credit card issue took some time, but painstakingly resurrected each one!

  • Dual Billing Shocker: Turns out my Audible a/c was being billed both by Amazon India (in Rs) & Amazon USA (in $). So weird – emailed customer support, they acknowledged the problem & reversed the US dual billing. What a relief!

  • Android PlayStore Billing: Realized this has ballooned into a sizable, slippery list. Found one paid kids app I was unaware of. Seems like the handiwork of my 10yr old daughter… led to some family drama:)

  • Foreign news sites: Foreign news publication Economist, NYT, WSJ have HORRIBLE a/c settings. Confusing navigation, bad UX & findability. My WSJ account has no record of my invoices of 2yrs! Some of these services have been applauded for overcoming their print legacies and growing online subscriptions strongly… I’d guess that turnaround is largely confined to news consumption interfaces… they still have a long way to go on basic hygiene stuff.

  • Free Subs: But credit where its due – NYT has offered 8 months free subscription (Nov21-Jun22) due to RBI billing issue (in India). Thanks NYT. Guess every cloud has a silver lining… some good finally coming out of the RBI CC mess:)

  • Only Monthly Billing: Not sure why, but some services only have monthly billing (e.g YouTube premium). Hello.. its 2022, the Big G cant do quarterly or annual bills?

  • Unsubscribe Flow UX Dark Patterns: Came across UX dark patterns in unsubscribe flows of multiple services! Customer retention ninjas at work:)

  • Indian Subscriptions: Its heartening to see Indian startups catching up. I am paying for multiple Indian services now… this was zilch 2-3 years back!

Last but not least, replugging my old rant about the need for a meta news subscription service (instead of signing up individually with each). Hasn’t the world made any progress on this?

Recommend everyone does this spring cleaning once in a while… you’ll end up saving some $$, besides getting on top of things!