Our Very First Testimonials
We have our very own testimonials – for the first time. Thanks to Emil, Jason and Sanooj. I would like to share the happy occasion with you. Here they are:
“I am very happy with your services, and have no hesitation in recommending you to other businesses. The quality control and communication you provide makes me want to use p2w2 for all outsourcing.“
Emil Pindur
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“I highly recommend p2w2’s service and it’s capability to bring highly skilled global professionals to service small businesses in the US.
I contacted p2w2 for a marketing project to redesign our email newsletter. With a short deadline and an even shorter budget, I was very impressed that the project met all the requirements. The email sent to 30,000 customers worldwide
exceeded performance of the three previous monthly newsletters with a 10% higher click-through rate and driving over 2,000 new visitors.”
Jason D’Mello
Marketing Manager
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“I feel fortunate to work with such a dedicated team. Working with p2w2 helped us improve our project management and soft skills. This in turn helped in offering better deliverables to the client. I could access variety of projects on p2w2 and the website enables customer interaction end to end.”
Sanooj P C
Project Manager
We Have a New Office Now!
p2w2 now has a new office. Till now, we have been working out of my residential apartment. Below are pictures of the old office we have been working out of.
That is Amit (grey shirt) and I (red shirt) working from there. The discussion in the picture was of course made up. 🙂 Ravikiran (picture below) should have been in these old office pictures but for the injury he sustained.
I would really like to thank Sahiti, my wife, for all the support she gave when we worked out of her home. We invaded her kitchen and privacy but she was patient through out. She went out of her way and cooked for us and cleaned the place and innumerable times supplied refreshments, so we could focus on the work. Thank you!
I would also like to thank Vidya Sagar who has helped us in a number of ways including designing our logo, designing and printing business cards etc. He is a great advertisements guy and knows how to network! He is now the most punctual guy around. He took all these pictures! Thank you!
Thanks are due to a number of others who have supported us. Pratibha K, Vikas Arya, Koteswara Rao, Krishna Rao (my father), Jayabharathi Devi (my mother), RK Kalluri (Playgroundonline), Devan Rajashekar, Rohit Kundaji, Vinay Kumar, Will Swayne, Emil Pindur, Raghavendra Prabhu, Anita Campbell, Jason D’mello and Sandeep Shroff who have all supported us in different forms.
We opened our office on 2nd December, 2008. We did a puja (a prayer) and occupied the premises.
Below is me (Chaitanya) and Sahiti preparing to start the puja.
Puja arrangements
Amit, Akhada (Amit’s wife), Chaitanya, and Sahiti busy in the puja. The little girl is Samiksha, Amit’s daughter.
Ravi Kiran, p2w2’s Product Lead. Ravi was injured recently. He got his leg fractured and still attended the puja and has been working out of home. Thanks Ravi! It has been great working with you.
This is little Samikha. She was uncontrollable during the puja. 🙂
Below are pictures of our friends from Investment Yogi and New Energy Finance who share the office with us. That is Mamtha and Deepika.
That’s Madhu, Kiran, Deepika (almost hidden) and Shravan all from Investment Yogi.
View of the office from outside
View of the office from inside
My Guest Posts
I had written two guest posts recently. The first is on Small Business Trends. I wrote on how small businesses have to learn to delegate and to outsource.
As a small business grows, and as the scale at which a task is done increases, you have to find ways to get the time to focus on the bigger picture. If you don’t, you
will get caught up in myriad routine activities, and can’t progress on strategic areas of your business. You have to make time to steer your business in the right direction. And you can do that by delegating work to others, by outsourcing, and at times, it’s as simple as asking other party to visit your office instead of you visiting them!
The post has 35 comments as of now. Thanks to every one who commented. I am hoping to make it 70. It will be great if you can comment on it!
And the second is on SMBCEO. I wrote about smart ways to finance your business.
If you are creative, you will be able to fund your business in a number of ways:
• You could negotiate longer credit period from your suppliers (with a good business plan or sheer perseverance). Preferably, if your customers pay you faster than you have to pay your suppliers (even by narrow margin), then you need much lesser capital
• You could try an alternative pricing structure, say a 10-20% discount to customers who pay upfront, as the woman in our first example did
• You could pay your suppliers in installments
• You could ask your employees to work for stock options for part of their salary
• You may lease your company assets rather than buy them
• You could barter a portion of your service, e.g., you are good at writing/business consulting/marketing or even giving business leads! while a friend is good at graphic design. You could swap those services for each other, (not to mention pitching for common clients)
• You could choose services/products that don’t take too long to build
Hope you like both the posts!
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About the author: Chaitanya Sagar is the Co-Founder and CEO of p2w2, an online marketplace for services like writing, software, graphic design, virtual assistance, business consulting and research. Chaitanya blogs at p2w2 blog (RSS). He is fascinated by entrepreneurship and the difference technology can make in people’s lives.
Communicating In a Flat World
I wish I could just walk across and talk to my team, it would make everything faster!
If you have outsourced work and have had this thought, you are not alone. The spoken word does seem to convey much more in shorter time. Voice inflections, pauses and the enthusiasm you can convey when you speak may not be conveyed through a long document.
One of the coolest features we have on p2w2 was the voice recording widget. You can “speak to” your potential business partners through p2w2.
The voice feature is available for you on p2w2 at all the right places. You can find it in recording project description, providing feedback, discussing issues and also for sending routine voice messages.
Record your project description
The controls are fairly simple. You have the Record, Stop, Pause and Play buttons. And
you have on-screen controls to edit what you recorded! The bars to the right indicate how audible your voice is to the control.
Worried that you might be speaking and your computer might not be hearing you? Well, we alert you if your microphone is not picking up an audible signal for more than 10 seconds.
Leave Voice Feedback
Same controls, different purpose! You can quickly leave a voice feedback, and if needed attach files and also type in text to make everything absolutely clear! Open the document you are providing feedback on, and talk into the microphone as you skim through your document/PPT etc. No more swapping repeatedly between applications, or breaking your chain of thoughts to type comments in.
Send a voice message
Emails are passé! You can “talk” to your p2w2 partner using the voice message feature.
Why not just pick up the phone you ask? Well, it might be 2 AM at where your business partner is!
Soon after your are done sending the message, the person you sent this message to can now play it back.
Delete parts of a recording
Did that pesky marketer call when you were in middle of a lengthy project description? Or did you get an important call you just had to take?
No need to start all over again, of course. You can select the part you want to remove from your recording, right click and delete.
Insert in recording
Finished speaking a whole paragraph and realized you missed out something? No problem! Click on the wave form and you can insert what you missed out in middle of your existing recording! Isn’t that just cool?
Pause and Restart a recording
Need to pause a while to recoup your thoughts? If you did not notice them already, the Pause buttons lets you take a break from recording to gather your thoughts, have a glass of water, open up that 6 pack – whatever helps you get moving again.
A tip: pausing for a shot while every few sentences helps you use these editing features easily. Not to mention you will be easier to follow for the person listening to the recording later!
Finally, some of us just like to talk than type. Overall, speaking your thoughts out into a recording tool is much faster and productive than attempting to type it all out. A document that would have taken you over an hour to type, format and attach could all be perhaps condensed into a half hour voice recording.
That’s all from us at p2w2 for now. If you have any cool features to suggest, write to me at Amit DOT Mullerpattan AT p2w2 DOT com.
About the author: Amit Mullerpattan is VP (Product) at www.p2w2.com, an online marketplace for services like writing, business consulting, research, software, online tutoring etc. He is responsible for the user experience with the p2w2 product and services.