One thing is guaranteed in the Busines is you will have surprises each day. After criticising the vision of the company in my culture article. I started thinking about a solution. Some will be pleasant surprises and yesterday was one of those aha moments that connected dots for me. I discovered How we are different from other businesses? What is that intangible that has kept us going all these years?
The short answer is Cost Innovation
It’s an interesting problem to solve for a small team who have constraints with the budget. Any time you hear of less budget you try to run away. We don’t turn our face away because less budget doesn’t mean less profit. It makes more business sense for us to be 50-60% profitable (currently we are not there yet) than increase the revenue for the sake of hitting some arbitrary number.
Example: Clients came to us with a requirement to create a data portal using our survey tool. Features like single sign-in, different surveys for different groups, central data collection etc. If we had chosen to build multiple instances it would have taken us at least 3 months to do it. We discussed multiple alternatives and decided to go with a filtered view based on the group. it may take us 1 sprint (3 weeks)
I did some research and found that there are several books and articles written on this topic and it has to be worked at the gut of the business.
Costovation is a type of innovation that significantly compresses costs while still wowing customers. It’s about meeting or exceeding customer expectations with less.
Book named Costovation
I strongly believe that this has been our differentiator. The USP. This is not something we set out to do it happen to be something we have been doing all this while. We mostly work with non-profits. They depend on grants and donations to fund their technology. We start with the budget and work backwards towards solving their data problems. Over many years we have applied different business innovations to solve this and bring affordable and valuable solutions to them.
I am so excited about this topic is that I was up till 3 in the night to craft our vision statement. I will talk more about it tomorrow.
Finding radical ways to keep costs low while still delighting customers. Costs go down; customer satisfaction goes up
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Vikram Shetty 
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