Red Matter Technologies & the principles of survival in a digital first world

This article is about the principles of survival and creating innovative disruption in technology, marketing & creativity with outstanding people at Red Matter Technologies.

The business environment has drastically changed over the last decade. The expanding power of consumers, technology and data has created an environment where the connected world is at the center of business strategy. This environment has led to a substantial need for technology enthusiasts, data analysts, digital marketers & content creators. India is at the forefront of this technological change and the new fathers of our nation are making sure we don’t fall back. On the flip side of this however, lies the dark alleys of failed systems, bureaucratic inefficiencies and age old business methods. To top that, we have an education system that makes chaiwallahs out of graduates and goons out of lawyers. In spite of this, all is not lost. The dawn of information has made exactly the opposite happen. We made technology enthusiasts out of chaiwallahs and data analysts out of lawyers.

Red Matter Technologies was an organisation in this post-information environment and rode the wave of digital disruption. Red Matter Technologies (RMT) met the demand of this digitally active business environment with the supply of ideas and innovations by a young digitally active set of enthusiasts. This young set of enthusiasts, led by its founders, created a post information technology work system which caters to the needs of the digital world through its people, processes and products. This is their story.

In the early 2000’s there was a growing enthusiasm in technology and innovation among the millennials. Large pockets of young technology enthusiasts started to ride a digital wave. Orkut, YouTube, and Incoming Charges became buzzwords and were in regular use among this first generation of digital enthusiasts. A couple of years passed with technology slowly creeping into our day to day lives, after which the inevitable happened. This Orkut (by now Facebook) YouTube set of enthusiasts became active members of our everyday economic and business environment. Technology had finally managed to creep in everywhere.

In 2014, 4 members of this digitally enthusiastic world — a pre IPO Facebook employee, a digital product manager at an alcohol company, a head of operations at a water bottling company and one of the first Android developers in India — came together to create a company where technology would be at the core of their innovation. They called it Red Matter Technologies, partly due to a collective love for science fiction, and partly due to an insistence on the presence of a color in their name. They registered the company and moved on quickly to innovate.

The most obvious area of required improvement in India, seemed to be Education. They brainstormed, hacked and hustled. They managed to release a product that used cutting edge technologies to solve a seemingly obvious problem. The product caught the attention of the Indian student community and reached a sizeable following. The founders even found some celebratory salutations and following during their college visits. Needless to say, the forces of Adam Smith prevailed, and the product lost steam. Apart from a few wrong assumptions, the market didn’t seem to be ready for what they offered. In spite of this failure, the digital enthusiasts trudged on. They had a strong team and had sufficient experience on what it took to survive in a digital first world.

The market for technology products was ripe and the company strengths fit its needs perfectly. RMT quickly pivoted to a services model and created digital and technology (scalable) solutions for clients. The early clients were MSMEs and a few large media houses. The early methods were scrappy and output unsystematic. But the organisation kept themselves agile and kept evolving. A few disruptive innovations gave them the necessary breathing space and they survived the early hiccups of any organisation.

Fast-forward to 2019, Red Matter Software Technologies is valued above 1 Million USD, works with fortune 500 companies, large Indian MNC’s, the Government of India and a large number of MSME’s, added to this — the demand of this digitally enthusiastic world doesn’t seem to be ending anytime soon. Their collective experiences prior and post the digital wave allowed them to understand the digital market at close quarters and create digital solutions at scale for their clients. Today, RMT works with companies across their value chain to provide contemporary digital solutions at different touch-points. In this era of transformation, Red Matter Technologies has created a distinctive proposition and stands as a trusted solution provider.

It would be fair to bring to your notice at this point of time that I am the pre-IPO Facebook employee, I would however, not want to be known only for that.

The (moderate) success of RMT stands on principles of digital survival which have been built, inherited and infused into the DNA of RMT. Our most valued, important and cherished asset — our people, live by these ‘digital’ principles. These digital principles are hard to pin down and exist across business functions. A simple way to look at these digital principles would be to look at them as excerpts from a text book and not as a whole. However, across our most important functions — Technology, Marketing, People and Operations, I’d like to list down our key learnings and our most important digital principles within these functions. This is in the hope that any future technology product teams would implement these learnings for digital survival and scalability.

I) Technology — Evolving & Forward Integrating

A good way of looking at technology would be as an organism and its adopters as its society. The early advances in technology has evolved hugely and is continuously evolving. Software isn’t as complicated as it has always seemed to be. The layers and abstraction from bits, bytes and floppies to SaaS, PaaS and other post-Babbage jargon has led to leaps of innovation and bounds of confusion.

A key digital survival tactic in this ever evolving world is to remain in a continuous state of evolution AND closer to larger technology societies. This would mean to use and learn technologies that are open source in nature, widely used by the developer community and have large online support systems in terms of tutorials and ticket management. The technology should be ever integrating with the community needs and evolving accordingly. JavaScript is a great example of such an ever evolving and forward integrating language.

Keeping this in mind, at RMT we make sure we remain abreast with forward integrating technologies and remain close to its technology communities. This has made evolution our core technology strength. Our technology capabilities currently include most open source technology development platforms, server less computing methods, CMS scaling and building & scaling JavaScript runtime environments which are the most active technology spaces to stay in now, apart from NoSQL database architecture and Unity AR/VR development. A basic check to stay evolved and abreast with technology stacks while building your own, would be to look at technologies which have the largest online communities and the most YouTube tutorial videos.

II) Marketing — Primary, Secondary, Tactical

The internet is in some part a very large number of screens. These screens form the nervous system of the internet and its content — the blood. Marketers have caught on into this wave quick and digital marketing remains a predominant technology requirement in the business world today. Even companies like Accenture & TCS have now set up their own digital marketing wings and offer it as a part of their technology services stack. In this environment of hyper local data and super global content, the dynamics of marketing have become clearer and much more evident.

Data has shown that economics and markets operate in cycles which repeat within themselves. The Elliot Wave theory for markets explained this concept with the Primary Trend, Secondary Trend and Minor Trend principles of free markets. The wave theory goes on to hypothesize that the primary, secondary and minor trends occur within the trends itself. Like an infinite cycle. This theory can be extrapolated from economics and markets to advertising and marketing as well. This is our primary principle at RMT.

At RMT we follow an extrapolation of this wave theory. A key survival tactic in the post digital world would be to look at marketing in this manner i.e. of trends/activities occurring within trends/activites. The Primary marketing trend is always the broad industry dynamic, the Secondary marketing trend is the direction of business within your organisation and the Minor marketing trend is your marketing goal. The wave within the wave of this would be that your broad Minor marketing goal could further be broken into a Primary, Secondary and Minor trend/activity as well. The Primary goal being your Minor marketing goal, the Secondary goal being the broad communication strategy of your marketing plan and the Minor goals being the activities on your website, Facebook, Google and YouTube associated with the communication strategy of your Secondary goal. This approach connects your tactics back to the product strategy and the to the broad objective of the organisation.

The ET Women’s Forum is a great example of a Minor Trend on a large marketing picture (Build Social Brand Value) that was successful because of all the tactical activities (On-Ground Event, Live Broad Cast, Social Media Content etc.) that connected back to a larger goal (The need for gender related forums). The conscious awakening of Indian society in the recent past led to the creation of the Burn The Raavan campaign which garnered deep engagement with users and left evident top of mind recall. The #CheerForYourKing campaign with Burger King also had a similar strategy and garnered unprecedented WoM and RoI for the organisation. All of these campaigns were developed keeping in mind broad industry dynamic, key company marketing activities and then building tactical campaigns.

III) Creativity — Open Ideation & Objective Inclusion

The most evident truth glaring at us from the depths of time is — “Great people lead to great ideas.” However, creativity and work environments are today stuck in a time of Henry Ford where standardisation was the key to market growth. Well, Uncle Sam didn’t see that Uncle Sergey had other ideas. Google and a bunch of other Silicon Valley startups have pioneered broadly three things — (I) Innovative technologies, (II) Economic bubbles and a largely overlooked factor, (III) Great work environments. Pixar, under Ed Catmull and his team, laid the foundations for an open creative work environment and was followed by companies in the Silicon Valley and all over the globe. The two basic principles open work environments are — Open Ideation and Objective Inclusion. These principles have stood the test of time and can be seen repeatedly in successful organisations.

At RMT we have imbibed these principles to create a lean and mean work culture. A set of systems, structures and rituals help us in maintaining these work principles at scale. The first of these principles, Open Ideation may seem to be obvious up front, but when analysed deeply, we see larger implementations. Open Ideation can be seen as a simple extrapolation of brain storming. However, it involves more, it means to always being in an ON mode when it comes to ideating. Ideas need to be discussed, debated and delved upon until decisions can be reached. These can be within meetings, outside meetings and beyond meetings. Teams need to work in tandem at this, and regularly to be able to ideate effectively.

The second of these principles, Objective Inclusion, involves the interconnecting of teams in a seamless & objective manner. This should ideally occur across the vertical length of the organisation. Continuous objective feedback is a must. During an ideation phase it should occur multiple times, during the execution phase, it should be made opposite, it needs to be drastically reduced by giving ownership to the team. This principle also stems in the form of a fearless work culture, where hierarchy isn’t a criteria for giving out feedback.

A good implementation rule with Open Ideation would be — to reject whatever your first 10 ideas on any topic are and only start considering your eleventh idea. The digital world will help you with this. Another rule w.r.t. Objective Inclusion would be to run your ideas and thoughts by at least 5 people before considering any next steps.

IV) People — An agile DNA

The growth of content and technology has allowed access to infinite information. The positive effects of this are astounding. The side effects are for another piece. The proliferation of information has created technology enthusiasts who navigate their way through a myriad of thoughts, choices and opinions at every point of time.

A digital enthusiast is an engineer, a graphic artist, maybe a singer or a baker, all cooked into one person. It is imperative we accept that the talent of the future will be multi-oriented and multi-faceted AND so will their needs. These digital enthusiasts are agile in nature and new age digital systems and organisations need to align themselves accordingly.

The people of RMT form the spirit of our solutions and technology remains at the nucleus of our methods. As explained earlier, to keep the spirit sharp & healthy, RMT creates an environment in which ideas & creativity thrives. To remain this way, we allow agility to flow in our thoughts, systems and processes. This would mean (i) Project Ownership, (ii) Shorter Hierarchical Systems, (iii) Open Ideation, (iv) Objective Inclusivity, (v) Employee Autonomy, (vi) Team & Client collaborations (vii) Short GTM cycles and (viii) Iterative Working to name a few. The key aspect of agility is to remain ever evolving.

Our team of engineers, designers, data scientists, strategists, musicians and writers work hard to keep the ideas flowing and methods fresh. Open brainstorming, peer feedback, agile methodologies, client interactions, open workspaces, creative outlets and flexible work hours are some of the internal initiatives at RMT to keep the growth and agility going. We are currently a 35 member strong team and look to continue to grow our family of agile creatives and innovators.

V) Customer First - Always

At RMT the customer is always at the center of our discussions. The success of our customers has always led to our success which in turn leads to long term customer relations. A customer centric approach means we define the problem and the solution keeping the customer and their goals in mind. Identifying and analyzing the customers problem comes first and then follows the design of the solution. This approach towards problem solving flows from the leadership at RMT up till our entire team. Constant feedback and quick iterations on customer problems also push us to create the perfect solutions for our clients.

These thoughts and opinions are some of RMTs ruminations. We would love to hear your point of view on our opinions.

Read Article on Medium - https://medium.com/@shirish_ghosal/red-matter-technologies-990f69f63757