DEV Community: Kiran Capoor

Asking for advice.

Kiran Capoor — Wed, 20 Apr 2022 11:12:15 +0000

Hi all,

Recently, I've been assigned the job to hire software engineers in my team. Absolutely clueless about what software engineers look for when joining a company.

Please feel free to share your thoughts.

Hello to all at Dev.to!

Kiran Capoor — Sat, 29 Aug 2020 10:58:47 +0000

Founder, developer and innovator at Texmith.

Assisted MSCI in saving 400 man hours by designing an automation system, which was then implemented by eClerx at the organisational level.

Python and technology are my passion. Designing, building and implementing solutions is something that I have done since my teenage years.

Pokemon Go was a newly launched game by Google & Niantic, during my teenage years. We had to walk miles to catch a single imaginary/virtual Pokémon, collect items etc. Being the lazy person that I was, to avoid walking to the United States to catch a rare Pokémon, I developed a simple hack using Python. This hack allowed my in-game character to walk a thousand miles a day and catch all the Pokémon, from the comfort of my bedroom.

My passion for technology stems from the concept on which Python is built - “Simple is better”.

My team and I assisted Intelak, an Emirates company, in redesigning and implementing a B2B focused User interface with a fluid and rich User experience. We have assisted Amazingworkplaces, an initiative by BrandRecall, during the early days of launch with their marketing and web based platform.

For many years now, we have designed and implemented solutions ranging from a simple Website to High Complexity Systems like a CRM, and E-commerce Web App, built complete IT ecosystems on AWS, Heroku etc.

Currently we are working to bring a Simple Email Marketing tool into the market. A simple tool to help assist in your daily needs of email marketing, lead generation, customer engagement and much more all under a simple and easy to use Interface.

Check out Texmith

Journey to building a SaaS Product– #1

Kiran Capoor — Fri, 28 Aug 2020 03:03:11 +0000

COVID 19 has been a disaster to almost every business & person, and my startup was not spared. Being a python & a web developer, I can build anything with my skill set. I just needed to find an opportunity.
The next question I had to ask myself was –
How do I find the opportunity?

The opportunity.

What most indie developers like to do is think about their app first, what features to include, what’s the requirements, what is the time to production, etc.

Being a businessman & a Dev, I thought first of the opportunity, it’s pros, it’s cons & lastly the market that I intend to target. As to me, customers come first then the app and then the monetary aspects.

While searching for an opportunity, I stumbled upon ‘Email Marketing’. Email marketing for the most part has been driven by analytics, data, automation, and personalization. It’s one of the most underrated methods in Digital Marketing as it requires in-depth knowledge about your target audience than any other technique, but has the opportunity to become the largest conversion technique in the shortest amount of time.

A great copy, a simple email sending tool, and knowledge about your targets are all you really need to succeed at Email Marketing.
Tools like Mailchimp & Sendgrid provide with everything at an extravagant cost. Upon closer inspection using AWS’s Cost Estimates & bits of Excel data modeling.

I found a few points –

Price to cost ratio was manageable for a small startup like mine.
I can offer ‘core’ features at a really low cost ~$10 for 10,000 to 50,000 emails.
A customer-centric approach is the best way forward.
Automation will be built at a later stage as I will need data as to how much of that solution is beneficial for my customers.
Drag and drop Templates are great to use but have issues with Email Clients. In the first release, I will have to keep this solution aside until I find a complete answer to this problem.

Where to begin?

This question puzzled me for the longest time. The answer was simple. Design a Plan Of Action.

Will be continued in the next part. Thanks for reading 😁