CIE brings to our Deeptech community,
Fire Up Founder Insights series 2nd edition, hosted by our COO, Mr. Ramesh Loganathan. The series is brought to you as a part of Startup Gyan Blog series by CIE-IIITH where we feature our founders and talk about their Startup status and the journey so far through conversation on specific topics useful for other Deeptech startups and the community at large.
In Conversation with Murali, Cofounder Paymatrix:
Ever had to pay huge rent to your landlord? Like when the landlord ask you rent for the next few months right at that moment? Well, Murali had to. That’s when the initial idea of having a short-term credit to pay rents sprouted in 2015, and since then Paymatrix is offering short-term credits to individuals and Businesses, run by three founders and having over 50,000 customers. The Startup also offers a SaaS product for Co-working spaces and incubators to collect the rent on time.
What has been the product development process and why Agile?
The Startup went with the Waterfall method for standard product development but it was time consuming and the results were not at par.
“Unlike luxury startups, we did not have a long duration of months. We needed to develop and deliver the product faster”
The Startup adopted Scrum methodologies as best practices and Murali went through the training and shared the process with the team to implement it.
“Once you have user needs through surveys and interviews, the product development becomes faster through the agile methodology”
As your focus points and priorities change, you need to accordingly plan the sprints in order to reach the launch or the end goal. Paymatrix had as short as 1 week of sprint sometimes.
Some of the key points to make the sprint more effective
- Adapt and play with the model to fit your Startup dynamics
- Focused and stable team – understand your team velocity
- Training for the team, including you, the founder
- Prioritise your Backlogs and sprint cycles
- Use simple tools fitting your needs, such as Trello, Jira etc., significantly under current circumstances to keep your team in the game
One growth hack for early stage startups:
Keeping it simple and short, Be consistent at every point while keeping clarity of your end goal. Think big, act small
Like all wise women and men know “Big things have small beginnings”. Cheers!
Keep watching this space for more under Fire Up Series.
Stay safe and sound!
– Sunita Kumari, Team CIE
