Ask HN: Generally speaking, Do Indians Startups Suck at Marketing

3 points·Chirag··8 comments

I ask this not as a bitter person but as a straight forward questions. These days I am working a lot with lot of multi-location teams and more often I get this remark sometime frankly on my face or behind my back. Is this something of a stereotype like "German engineering" is great or this is actually means something.

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Indians are the backbone of the corporate software industry. They make the products and others do the branding and sales.

This happens with all the mass producing countries where labor is cheap; China has weak brands in every industry, and all their most successful products are sold under foreign brands. Japan, Korea and Taiwan used to be the same way. I say give China and India time, and pretty soon their works will develop their own cachet.

I would say yes, based on my personal experience with a fairly successful Indian startup stealing my logo and 3/4 of my name: http://img.skitch.com/20091014-b93ddncw2197542p9triy9397x.jp...

I might be biased though! :)

But it's a totally different font!

Probably. But you also have to consider the cross-cultural communication gap. You have to spend quite a bit of time in a culture before you can market effectively. No doubt most Americans are pretty lousy at marketing in India.

I dunno. What's the most well known Indian startup out there?

I can't tell. Slideshare comes to mind, but it was founded in CA with offices in Delhi. So maybe they do suck at marketing.

Um... Zoho??? Or maybe it's too big to be considered a startup anymore???

Zoho is big enough for a startup.

redbus.in and makemytrip.com come to mind but again they are just an add-on nothing innovative.

Now I am thinking did we actually do a startup worth marketing?

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