Time for some great news! A three-year old startup from Hyderabad, Tuplejump, is being acquired by Apple. They were in the big data space building a product that allowed use of nosql databases. This bring us to one question -- when starting up, how does one pick the idea to pursue? Sometimes, there are a lucky few, who in their immediate experiences come across a problem and then find a solution for that. But what about the others?
One common path is to take something that worked elsewhere and pivot it to make it work in a different context or geo or domain. Many startups that have done phenomenally well with such ideas. Amply demonstrating, rarely it is the idea that determines success. It is always the team and execution that determines the success.
And then there are people that have knowledge and experiences which are a bit removed from real world problems or use. Like say a hardcore techie who builds solutions based on specifications given, he obviously overlooks the understanding of the customers domain and empathy of the customer’s problems, focussing only on specifications, to design and build and deliver. Now even here there maybe a startup opportunity that requires building a technology platform. Here no business domain or customer context is needed; only an understanding of how someone builds solutions is required.
This is exactly what the startup Tuplejump did. It built a technology product that other techies and developers will use. It was built it to enable access to new types of data with new ways of storing data that was rapidly coming up as users got more active on the internet and enterprises went more actively to the cloud. Data was now more of my insights into what users are redoing and less about transactions users performed. And this being a solution with a global appeal, caught Apple’s interest. Is this a way to build a product that can grow very quickly or get aquired more easily? Maybe.
The writer is MD and VP — Products and Progress Software and an advisor to Incubator at IIIT Hyderabad.