Is it hard to succeed being a service based tech startup?

When we started, this "startup" buzzword was not much popular in the tech space. However we were indeed a startup, a bunch of people with a lot of tech skills, rich programming background, experience handling large systems development life cycle, industry experience working with clients and solutions from different domains but without any of our own original product idea on which we could base our startup. We do secured some funding but not quite sure on which idea should we spend that on.  

We brainstormed a lot of ideas, had long discussions but somehow those ideas could not created an impact that could get us on the same page. Then we decided to take a hard step to become a service based tech startup. But we never wanted to be a another software company who is just working on webdesigning, trivial projects, fancy stuff and nothing new and doing no engineering. We always focused on solution aspect and only those kind of ideas that solves a big problem fascinated us a lot.

When you work on your own idea and your own product, you have the luxury of choosing your own best team, giving critical responsibility to best people in your team, choose your own timeline, marketing strategy, launch event and so on, after all this is your own product. 

Working on somebody else's idea though do not give you that sorts of luxury but it does not mean that becoming a product based startup is easier, so all my colleagues having product based tech startup please don't get it wrong :).

Being a service based company it is really hard to showcase how you are different in the market? What kind of innovation you can do for other people? What kind of technologies you take up that others are not doing or only a few people are doing. We focused on the aspect of revolutionizing the technology and our approach towards solving the real world problems made us concentrate on some of the major emerging technologies that no tech company can ignore.

We have been majorly focused on Internet of Things (IoT), Connected hardware/BLE Devices integration, Data Science & Analytics, Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) implementation, Identity Device Management (IDM) services, Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, Telecom QoS analysis system development, iBeacon platform development, Cloud transformation and Cloud platform development. Based on what we have experienced in those few years, i would say sticking to innovation and new technologies brings some challenges but it always feels good to overcome them and take a new step towards success.