An Entrepreneur En Route to SXSW

As The Network solutions team took flight to SXSW yesterday we got a chance to sit next to entrepreneur Barg Upender of Mobomo.com.

Mobomo is a company that helps companies go mobile. As we chatted with Upender  he spoke about the need to innovate and solve customer problems or needs. I loved how he recapped the past to where we stand today to:

20 years ago… you had to be tech savvy to succeed

10 years ago… you needed to be web savvy

Now… you have to be social savvy

Using Apple as an example, some thoughts about their success was their ability to think about customer problems that the customers did not even envision themselves. When the iPod came into the market, Apple thought about how the CD or DVD could no longer be the medium for music – after all they are bulky, needed to be carried around and were limited in storage. The problem the iPod solved was to allow you to carry your entire music collection in a small device and at the same time connect a Mac or PC to manage your library. If the iPod was invented today it would probably have come with it’s own cloud storage .

The second important thing that Upender said to me was that companies need to watch the user behavior to see what features, functionality or modifications they needed next instead of sitting in enclosed meeting rooms and trying to visualize what features to give the customer next. Take the example of Twitter, it has grown to over 200 million users from being a tool that the Twitter team used to tell each other what they were doing.

Every company that has seen huge success has been hyper focused on customers and prepared to withdraw or change direction based on user feedback and behavior.

Barg Upender spends sleepless nights thinking of ideas for medium to large enterprises go mobile and develop custom applications for them. He says he has two types of customers – the companies that hire Mobomo to do the work and the customers who use the software Upender creates – so it’s a double duty for him. He sat next to me on this flight to SXSW trying to get some sleep back but I was not giving up on the conversation opportunity with a entrepreneur. Barg showed me a portfolio of his apps right from his iPod Nano, which was strapped around his wrist disguised as his watch! Now, that’s how you stay mobile and stay prepared to pitch at any and every opportunity!