Deskaway.com: Put your projects on cruise control

Posted by Srini

May 1, 2009

Gone are the days, when managing a team project involved the flexing steps of planning, scheduling and setting up the project. With the blessing of internet, now less planning is done and more of work is executed, with people in the team dispersed far and away even across the globe.

Sahil Parikh, the 29 year old entrepreneur from Mumbai sets in to cool off the vapours which usually rumbles up whenever more people are involved in a project. His SaaS (Software as a service) Daylight divx venture, DeskAway.com is a subscription based collaborative online service which enables business teams to organize, manage & track the progress of their team work from anywhere. This self funded startup is on track to provide simple and powerful tools through the web for people to work in a smarter way and at an affordable cost. Besides the project collaboration features, DeskAway also includes comment threads, RSS feeds, instant email notifications, user profiles and twitter-like social message updates.

In the year 1997, Sahil went to USA for pursuing his higher education at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, wherein he got associated with the founding team of an entrepreneurship society in his university. He had the luck of rubbing shoulders with investors and incubators. Further he got into multiple jobs which gave him the moral strength to co-start his own web design and development consultancy with his wife in March 2002.

The perception then in the USA was that India is a low-cost service destination perfect for off-shoring and that good quality products don’t come out of India that often. Though the number of clients for his service business grew in the successive 3 years, Sahil’s interest to plunge into a product business made him quit his job and shift his web design business to India in early 2005. Later he added up DeskAway, his first ever SaaS product during late 2007.

Though he was trying to phase out his service business, he could not do so since there was no other income to fuel his uphill journey. To earn the money needed for running his product business, he added up a couple of web development projects. Unlike a service business which earns money right from day one, a product business needs much of the time and effort to build and it pays back only at a later stage. The effort needed for steaming up his product business was getting beaten down and his entrepreneurial journey was facing a slippery path. He then took the critical decision to quit all service projects and concentrate 100% on DeskAway

. He quips that it was best decision he had ever made in his life.

Now a team of 12 comprising of developers, online marketers, web/UI designer, business strategy consultants, testers, etc., manage the show. Sahil feels a joy in helping a developer learn new things to create a win-win situation. He is particular on hiring a person who wants to learn, rather than an expert who only wants to earn.

Web-savvy teams and professional small businesses which work in virtual teams are his target users. Though there are more than 11,000 registered users to boast off, getting new customers have been his real juggernaut. In India, people didn’t understand the business model of this online product and why the software was so affordable? He laughs at instances where he was called in by Ad agencies and PR firms for presentations, and they would want to buy and install the DeskAway software in their stand alone PCs. There is an online help & video section to impart knowledge on how to get started with DeskAway

. This has drastically reduced the cost which was otherwise incurred towards customer acquisition and support.

A social network sort of open relationship exists between this company and feedback from their customers are taken in the right spirit to make DeskAway more productive for the user. Their product offer starts with a basic “free” version (supports 5 users) which has almost all aspects of the product to the higher end “$99/month” model (Unlimited users). Poltergeist divx

Sahil votes for promoting his business through the online medium due to lower cost and higher reach. To make their presence known far away, initiatives such as SEO, SEM, online affiliation are often explored in addition to implementing a vibrant FaceBook Fanpage and maintaining an active presence on Twitter.

“At the end of the day software should be fun and easy to use. Just like your social network. Right?” Sahil tells to Startupstory.

Address:

DeskAway.com,

Great Western Bldg, 1st Floor,

130/132, Shahid Bhagat Singh Marg,
Near Lion Gate, Fort, Mumbai, India - 400023,

T: +91-22-22854133

E: info@synage.com

Blogs: DeskAway.com/blog & SahilParikh,com

Micro Blogs: Twitter.com/DeskAway & Twitter.com/SahilParikh

FaceBook Fanpage : http://www.facebook.com/pages/Deskaway/34895509600 November Son buy

product company