Desklamp is one of my favourite insti start-ups. Three students were sick of the boring pdfs and they felt that reading pdfs does not give the fun we get when we read a book. They set out to create a fabulous app that equips us with the tools to create notes and save snippets of the book along with the pdf of the e-book itself. They initially named their app Kitab and then renamed it to Desklamp.
Things we can learn from their story:
- All the founders need to empathize with the problem statement and work together from the ideation stage itself. If the founders are not together from this initial stage itself, they may feel not attached to the product they have created.
- Problem identification is more important than the solution. The solution is of course important but the innovation lies in looking around and observing things that others don’t pay heed to. Coming up with the solution is a slower process with a lot of factors we need to take into consideration.
- Always align each feature of the product to the problem. Often the founders and PMs just keep piling on features into an app finally creating many that do not relate to the problem statement or help the users. Eg: the collaboration feature in desklamp is not really used efficiently
- Targeted marketing and effective PR go a long way: introduced the freshies to the app by uploading some previous year’s questions on the app and circulating it
- One to one user interviews to identify the pain points of the user