Company Strategy - InvestigateAndCreate.com

Mission : Why do we exist?

Provide high quality software development and IT services at low cost. Create products and solutions that solves the customers’ problems.

Objectives

Run matrimony services. Run and maintain an online farmer’s customer relationship management tool to prevent farmer suicides. Develop and market a Predictive Analytics upto decision tree.

Strategic design

Arenas

Product categories

Software development, creating our own products and bringing to the market. Create online portals and market and maintain the online services. Undertaking web designing and software development from third parties.

Market segments

Hindu brides and grooms all over the world.
Indian farmers and farm related businesses as sellers and buyers from all over the world. Specifically targeting the small farmers who are uneducated and do not know how to make a profit.
Manufacturing SCMs, Stock exchanges, big data generating companies, software companies, business analysts, CEOs, CFOs, Managers, IIMs, IITs, Management Schools.

Geographic areas

Matrimony portal – Global
Farmer customer relationship management tool – Indian sellers and global buyers
Predictive Analytics – India and global.

Core Technologies

C, C++, Core Java
html, css, javascript and php

Value creation stages

Online portal – Only as intermediary portal providing marketing and branding.
Matrimony portal – development, marketing and customer service.
Software development, marketing and technical service of the product.

Vehicles

Internal development Licensing , Copyright, IP will be outsourced.

Differentiators

How will we win in the marketplace?
Image? Create a brand through paper advertisements and camps and superb customer service.
Customisation?Yes for software development
Price?Yes
Styling?Yes
Product reliability?Yes

Staging

The matrimony services are launched and running. Farmer CRM tool has begun to collect sellers and buyers through social media and paper advertisements. Predictive Analytics tool development is going on and first licensed version would be available in March 2018. From March 2018, demonstrations of the product have been decided.

Economic logic

Online service would leverage low cost and scale advantages
Software development leverages premium cost with proprietary product features.
Our economic logic would be scale economies and efficiencies of replications for portals.

Firm resources

Capabilities

Management
Software development and testing
Marketing
Customer Service

Competencies

Technology

C, C++, VC++, Core Java – Swing, AWT, JDBC, Java8, JavaFX, Lamdas, Streams
Unix shell scripting
HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP
RDBMS - MySQL, SQL, Derby Embedded, Oracle
Ant, Maven, Artifactory

Domain

Telecom and Datacom
Oil And Gas
Data Analytics

Knowledge

Telecom protocols – 2, 2.5, 3G
Datacom protocols – TCP/IP protocols
Statistics and Mathematics
Programming
General Management

Corporate level strategy

To achieve competitive advantage, we have decided the nature of our businesses.

Scope (Broad/Focussed Cost-Leadership/Differentiator)

We define our marketplaces as,
Matrimony portals are based on Broad Cost Leadership
Farmer CRM based on Broad Differentiator
Predictive Analytics based on Broad Differentiator
Matrimony Portals have broad market with cost below Average Industry cost.
Farmer CRM leverages broad market with lot of features and cost is below Average Industry cost for sellers and cost is above Average Industry cost for Agriculture Ads.
Predictive Analytics – This is in two stage,
For 1 year we concentrate on local SCMs and companies in and around Bengaluru. And because of vast number of features in the product, we charge premium rates.
From 2nd year we concentrate on acquiring customers all over India and abroad with premium rates.
Stage 1 – Focussed Differentiator with cost above/below Average Industry cost.
Stage 2 – Broad Differentiator with cost above/below Average Industry cost.
Matrimony services and Predictive analytics are completely vertically integrated and Farmer CRM tool is partially vertically integrated.

Matrimony services business consists of portal development, matrimony offices and marketing/customer support.

Farmer CRM business consists of portal development, marketing/customer support and data analytics.The IOT sensors are provided by other companies.

Predictive analytics business consists of software development, marketing/customer support and Business Analytics.

There are three portals, http://www.hoysalakarnatakabrahmins.com, http://www.pratyangiradevi-hindu-matrimony.com and http://www.pratyangiradevi-brahmin-matrimony.com
In farmer's CRM business, we incur transaction cost of finding the suppliers and buyers and do not incur any other transaction costs.
Software Development team is not going to be diversified and is involved only in Predictive Analytics tool.
Portals’ technical support is remains with proprietor. Marketing, Customer support is shared between Matrimony services and farmerreach.com. Marketing of Predictive Analytics tool is separate from other two businesses.

Business level strategy

Matrimony portals

Aim to achieve competitive advantage through cost leadership and differentiation. Competitive advantage through differentiation in this domain is difficult to achieve.

Cost Leadership

The proprietor is the only resource and the only cost incurred is the opportunity cost of the resource getting a salary if employed elsewhere. There is an annual cost incurring for buying domains and webhosting services. There is no rent and salary expenses and working from residence of proprietor. Presently the business is virtual and there are no physical offices rented or bought. Advertisement costs and camp costs are the only running costs incurred. Our aim is to maintain very nominal subscription fees. We charge Rs.1000/- with 4 years validity. We collect fees in form of DD or Cheque or ask them to pay online.

Differentiation

Next stage to reach competitive advantage is to establish physical offices so that subscribers can come and register at the office. We provide a form that they fill, we ask them to get a photo and horoscope and have a scanning machine to scan the photo and horoscope and in front of them upload the profiles. We create a value for customer, i.e., try to achieve differentiation by having a screen connected to our computer to display the profiles for the customers. This attracts the customers and they don’t have to sit searching for profiles in heavy hard bound files. We build our brand by conducting matrimony camps every 6 months. First stages open an office in a busy road of Jayanagar 8th block, 7th block or 6th block by June 2018. Second stage open office in Gandhi Bazaar end of 2018. Third stage open offices in Whitefield main road, Malleshwaram and Rajajinagar by mid of 2019. Fourth stage open office in Mysore, Tumkur, Davangere and Mangalore by end of 2019. By end of 2019, we should have acquired 90% of the market share in Karnataka and 0.5% all India basis. 

Farmer CRM tool

The competitive advantage is achieved by cost leadership and differentiation.

Cost leadership

The initial cost leadership has been achieved by the proprietor developing the portal. Paper advertisements and social media are used for marketing. The sellers are charged Rs1000/- annual subscription fees after two months of free registration. The buyers register free of cost.

Differentiation

Sellers can advertise in Agriculture Ads link for yearly fees of Rs.10000/-. We do the marketing and branding for the sellers by visiting people in their local markets and help farmers to know their daily market. The farmers are going to be educated about how to use the internet and create an email id for all farmers we meet. Next we work towards how to improve cell coverage in their taluks by talking to government authorities or private telecom providers. We educate them regarding usage of the CRM tool and how they can know their markets on daily basis.

Predictive Analytics

Differentiation

Competitive advantage is achieved through differentiation by automating entire DCOVA framework with a graphical user interface in order to enable any layman to create dashboards and reports without knowing programming or scripting unlike in other data analytics tool. The dashboards and reports can be edited and stored in pdf, html, image and excel files. Also use-case configuration is stored in xml files and we provide built-in use-cases also. User can create new use-cases and save them in xml files. The configurations are stored in xml files and user can select a use-case file and configuration file once application starts. The product is going to be monetized by copyrights, IP and licensing. The product is available in 1, 5, 10 and 50 users licenses and are going to be floating type. We charge a premium for the product and achieve competitive advantage.

Functional level strategy

The company would align to business-level strategy based on cost leadership

Product and Marketing Strategy

standardised products
price equal or below that of competitors
little or modest advertising and promotion
avoiding less profitable accounts

Focus

Predictive Analytics

Stage 1 – Focussed Differentiator with cost above/below Average Industry cost. We will compete in a well defined segment of the market.
This is found out by marketing calls and demonstration leveraging survey forms that collects contact and industry & domain details of the potential customer. Here we are going to be a differentiator and there is only one product. Also product customisation is possible. We will focus on a buyer group and Karnataka as a geographic market and will a apply niche strategy by selling single product to single market segment.