Zoho is arguably the ONLY global product to come out of India from ANY company, and its a sweet product. It gives mighty Google Apps a run for their money; and Zoho’s Creator is a path breaking innovative product.
So why is VentureWoods not talking more about Zoho? Is it because of lack of awareness of Zoho? Or is it because of lack of glamor due to being non VC funded?
Questions:
1. Have you used Zoho?
2. Will you consider using any of their products for daily work? Why? Why Not?
3. Do you think Zoho can take on Google Apps or is the Google brand too big and Google quality too good?
4. What is the marketing advise you would give Zoho to gain a fair share of the applications space?
Note: I have nothing to do with Zoho, don’t know anyone there, but do use their products and I think they are brilliant.
21 August: Techcrunch reports Zoho making their services available offline; and check out what poster no. 8 in that thread has to say: http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/08/21/zoho-goes-offline-in-a-good-way/
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RYK,
what you did in this blog is WOM. Since I liked the tools, I recommended it to 10 others I know. This is how it spreads. Social networking is more than web 2.0
Shashank
1. Have you used Zoho?
Yes
2. Will you consider using any of their products for daily work? Why? Why Not?
They are good, cheap and comprehensive.
3. Do you think Zoho can take on Google Apps or is the Google brand too big and Google quality too good?
This question is wrongly phrased… zoho can take on google apps. Google may end up bigger mainly because of their brand size.. not ‘coz their quality is “too good”. Some of their products like google reader, mail, analytics are good… others, not so much or getting bad … check orkut (compare to experience of flickr), blog search (relevance???), search (slowly getting more and more seo spam) etc.
4. What is the marketing advise you would give Zoho to gain a fair share of the applications space?
Do what they are doing and focus on the biggest markets.
Hi,
Maybe a link to zoho in the main blog entry would be a good idea.
Thanks,
Aashu
RYK : Thanks for asking. We are very particular in our marketing spend. Our philosophy has been to spend optimally on marketing and pass on this benefit to our customers – Zoho and AdventNet products are very affordably priced.
Sponsoring of tech blogs and attending/sponsoring related trade shows, conferences (like Office 2.0 – http://o2con.com) are a couple of marketing activities that we do. The biggest challenge I think is marketing the advantages, productivity gains that an ‘office on the web’ offers to users accustomed to desktop applications. And thanks to bloggers, innovators and the WOM, our task has been made easier with Zoho clocking in 310K+ registered users in less than 2 years.
OldHand
Zoho is born, bread and buttered in Chennai (Madras)… see the link Sahad has posted
Arvind
give us an insight into how you guys are going about marketing in the US and what are the challenges you’re facing there; and how you’re overcoming them.