Winning is 90% about executing with raw energy, discipline and aggression combined with an instinct to kill. But the million dollar question is: where do we derive it from?
I love the way the All Blacks from NZdo it. They perform the Haka dance before every game of Rugby while the opponents sing their National Anthems. Watch the video and you will know how The All Blacks manage to win half the game just with their pre-game performance!
Haka is the traditional dance of the Maoris from NewZealand which they perform before going to a war.
I like the Kapa O Panga version of Haka led by Tana Umaga the best.
If you are a year into your start-up and still clocking 14 hours at work week after week, I bet you are harming your business. Probably it is time for a break. I say one year because the initial excitement of starting-up definitely takes us all very far. We’ll never feel the fatigue. But if you persist on pushing yourself that hard even after the first year, in-spite of the fatigue, it can be hazardous – both for the start-up and your health.
A simple example. I have the habit of playing the Blocks game in my iphone when I wait for buses. The game is pretty easy – few seconds, few moves and you have cracked it. I almost do it instinctively and it is fun because it is easy. I generally don’t solve more than a few in a row. On one occasion I kept at it for more than half an hour. By the 45th minute, I was taking much longer than what I usually need to solve those easy puzzles. By the end of the hour I was convinced that the level was getting harder with every puzzle I solved, so I started working harder at them. Soon, I gave up because it ceased being fun.
When I reopened the same puzzle the next day, I was done in a few seconds. I realised, it wasn’t the puzzle that was getting harder the previous day; it was my head that was getting more tired. But, my fatigued head made me believe the puzzle was a lot harder than what it actually was because of which I worked harder at it, fatiguing my mind even more – a vicious cycle that perpetuated and intensified itself over time.
That is exactly what happens in a start-up too. Probably your threshold is high. But you have to acknowledge that there is a threshold beyond which your time at the same thing is useless. It is easy to over-work yourself to a point where you think the problem at hand is harder than what it actually is.
I generally get snarled at by the devs when I broach the subject of balance in life. The usual argument is that development is not easy, and with technology fast changing nothing gets accomplished without the long hours. I understand tech is hard. But, if you aren’t resting enough, neither are those long hours going to be productive. One simple way to test is to consciously use Pivotal tracker to see how you perform in terms of velocity when you work 8 hours 5 days a week and the weeks that you work 12 – 14 hours ( I am already smiling at the surprise that awaits you!).
Workaholism is an addiction like any other – you need a lot of discipline to break away from it. If you are a workaholic, you will always have smart excuses to justify your addiction – we can’t afford regular lives right now, we love what we do, we are at a point where only speed matters and so on. Well, by doing so not only are you harming yourself but your start-up and its culture too. Can you envision having creative discussions among your team members when everbody is edgy, negative and contentious because of continuous over-work? Isn’t start-ups to a large extent about using your creativity to come up with smarter solutions?
Everytime you over work yourself to clear your inbox, tell yourself that what matters is not zeroing the inbox but how effectivley you communicate; what matters is not writing more code for a complicated solution but giving yourself the rest to come up with a smarter, simpler solution; what matters is not throwing more hours at wrong problems but having the energy to identify the right problems.
Yahoo recently held a get-together for the girl geeks in Bangalore and the topic of discussion for the evening was, ‘Are girls considered geeky enough to climb the corporate ladder?’. Quite frankly, I was appalled at the choice of topic. considered geeky? Considered by whom – women themselves? men? society? Yahoo management? To me, the topic read as: ‘Are girls competent enough to climb the corporate ladder’. I was quite dismayed that such a non-starter of a topic was churned out right under Carol’s nose. As much as Yahoo wanted to help women and their cause, this was a self-defeating attempt
Oddly enough, I was quite convinced that the topic was unanimously chosen by a bunch of women. For one, no man would have the pluck to propose such a topic for the fear of being dismissed as a sexist. And another, I have noticed a curious predilection among many women to blindly believe in the magnificence of the opposite gender yet not of their own.
A woman’s assessment of self is never grand. Rather, it is staggeringly modest; modest to the point of being self-deprecating. And, this is precisely where the rub lies. This is exactly what makes me believe most of women’s problems are self-invented.
Questions about women – their role in corporates and society are not idle; they are very pertinent to the progress of our society. But, if we are to really turn the corner, women should learn to look within; and fight the enemy within. Had the women behind the event fought their enemies within, they would have come up with more relevant topics for discussion like: Advantages of having more women at the top or why there aren’t already more women at the top.
This post will either ring bells for you or it won’t. If it doesn’t, you’ll probably discard this as hogwash; if it does, you will appreciate the fact that you are not alone. So, you ask, what about being an entrepreneur in India? Well, to say the least, it’s soul crushing. I hasten to add that I am not referring to any of the commonly quoted issues – ecosystem, funding, market, angels, VCs, Internet penetration or Telecom policies. It is something more human, more personal – some sort of a moral suffering owing to my existence in this part of the world.
Let me start from the start. A few days back in HN, I came across this article – a pretty prose describing how US educated Indians come back to India for the business potential. Oh, was it well written? If you weren’t in India and if you weren’t considering coming back here to start-up, you would have felt extremely daft about your decision. And, no brownies for guessing the tone of the comments. They genuinely reflected the hope of the Indian dream. Ooops! I probably am offending the author; she calls the American dream, Indian reality.
To put it mildly, all this reading left an odd taste in my mouth. Ideally, I should be drooling over the untapped markets and the rising Indian GDP. Why am I cringing? Because, these numbers and estimations haven’t changed the crappy existence for anybody here. The plummeting standards of living – unprecedented levels of corruption, bureaucracy, red tapism; bomb blasts; filth; poverty; ugly slums; polluting autos (I lovingly call them mobile oxygen bars),
chromium laced water; gaping pot-holes; dust; heat; rubbles; mounting traffic; mounds of garbage at every turn; open sewages; mendicancy – are contributing to my happy existence.
Isn’t happy existence the starting point of a creative journey? Some here might argue that it is necessity that drives invention. Only they don’t realize that the necessities of our society were solved decades back in other parts of the world. Since we don’t need to solve the solved problems, we have acquired the ability to solve the unsolved that we haven’t even experienced! Now, I understand that what I just said is not easy to comprehend. Let me explain: We don’t have roads in India. We have patches of gravel that connect potholes in the name of roads. Juxtapose this image with the Mercedes-Benz R&D offices in India. Do you understand where I am coming from? If you did, I’ll tell you, the irony sickens me.
The problem with the educated mass in India is: They exist at one level, but think at an entirely different level. Consider my own example. We will kick anybody’s ass when it comes to providing a hosted help desk solution. But, in the process of doing so, I am steeling myself against the Indian reality. As this article says, I am one of those Indians that has learnt to insulate herself from India. Long divorced. It is the constant conflict between my plane of existence and my plane of thinking that makes me belittle my own accomplishments; thus leading to my moral suffering.
This post will either ring bells for you or it won’t. If it doesn’t, you’ll probably discard this as hogwash; if it does, you will appreciate the fact that you are not alone. So, you ask, what about being an entrepreneur in India? Well, to say the least, it’s soul crushing. I hasten to add that I am not referring to any of the commonly quoted issues – ecosystem, funding, market, angels, VCs, Internet penetration or Telecom policies. It is something more human, more personal – some sort of a moral suffering owing to my existence in this part of the world.
Let me start from the start. A few days back in HN, I came across this article – a pretty prose describing how US educated Indians come back to India for the business potential. Oh, was it well written? If you weren’t in India and if you weren’t considering coming back here to start-up, you would have felt extremely daft about your decision. And, no brownies for guessing the tone of the comments. They genuinely reflected the hope of the Indian dream. Ooops! I probably am offending the author; she calls the American dream, Indian reality.
To put it mildly, all this reading left an odd taste in my mouth. Ideally, I should be drooling over the untapped markets and the rising Indian GDP. Why am I cringing? Because, these numbers and estimations haven’t changed the crappy existence for anybody here. The plummeting standards of living – unprecedented levels of corruption, bureaucracy, red tapism; bomb blasts; filth; poverty; ugly slums; polluting autos (I lovingly call them mobile oxygen bars), chromium laced water; gaping pot-holes; dust; heat; rubbles; mounting traffic; mounds of garbage at every turn; open sewages; mendicancy – are contributing to my happy existence.
Isn’t happy existence the starting point of a creative journey? Some here might argue that it is necessity that drives invention. Only they don’t realize that the necessities of our society were solved decades back in other parts of the world. Since we don’t need to solve the solved problems, we have acquired the ability to solve the unsolved that we can’t even experience! Now, I understand that what I just said is not easy to comprehend. Let me explain: We don’t have roads in India. We have patches of gravel that connect potholes in the name of roads. Juxtapose this image with the Mercedes-Benz R&D offices in India. Do you understand where I am coming from? If you did, I’ll tell you, the irony sickens me.
The problem with the educated mass in India is: They exist at one level, but think at an entirely different level. Consider my own example. We will kick anybody’s ass when it comes to providing a hosted help desk solution. But, in the process of doing so, I am steeling myself against the Indian reality. As this article says, I am one of those Indians that has learnt to insulate herself from India. Long divorced. It is the constant conflict between my plane of existence and my plane of thinking that makes me belittle my own accomplishments; thus leading to my moral suffering.
The pre-bubble chorus is always pro VC funding. But here’s the question: Are entrepreneurs seeking funding driven by business necessities or as a knee-jerk response to the current climate of entrepreneurship? In my opinion it is pretty glaringly the latter. Dishearteningly, even responses to ‘Bootstrapped and profitable’ stories carry a tone of cheer-leading the under-privileged citizens of the bootstrapped world than considering it as a position to strive for. The thinking behind this attitude is that it takes big bucks to build high growth companies. Yes, sometimes it does. But that doesn’t necessarily mean all funded companies are high growth businesses.
In my opinion, if you can achieve your business goals without any external funding, it is definitely a more enviable position to be in (Read Github, Balsamiq). Not only do you get to own most of the company, it is also only to yourself that you are accountable for the company and its direction. The irony is that most entrepreneurs are only too ready to part with their equity without even giving themselves a fair chance to evaluate the reasons for doing so. A few questions that we asked ourselves before we decided not to seek funding is
Can we launch the product without funding?
Can we gain traction and growth without it?
Is the revenue model clear?
Can we hope to pump in revenues back into the system to accelerate growth?
Does funding justify a few months of halt in product dev and customer dev?
Is there an inherent disadvantage in this business if we are not funded?
The above set of questions helped us take a call. Did you give yourself a chance before making a decision? If yes, what was your decision making framework?
A reasonable question to ask because once you decide to charge your users for your online service, you are straight away confronting a double whammy. One, you are trying to overcome the general consumer mindset of everything on the net is free and two, you aren’t selling a commodity but feel-goodness and convenience. So, does it work?
The answer to this depends largely on the target market and the expectation in terms of revenues. There are three important factors that determine your revenues: % conversion from Free to Paid, Pricing and the Churn rate (for subsequent years).
When it comes to conversion, however sleek the service is, it is tough to expect anything beyond 2-3% conversion from Free to Paid. Even a 2-3% can be a significant sum if you have sufficient traction in a huge market. The other two challenges are partitioning the Free and Premium features and Pricing. (This itself calls for a separate post. What with all the books written on pricing!). The challenge with Pricing is that there are no standard bench marks available in the market and the whole task of finding what your users perceive as value and how much they are willing to pay for it can be a little tricky. User surveys and A/B testing are generally helpful in determining these.
When it comes to partitioning features, one thing to be kept in mind is that it should be done in a way that the premium service lives up to the ‘Premium’ label. And you should be careful enough not to restrict the free service so much that the ability for your free users to spread your name is lost. The more you are able to give for free and keep the conversion unaffected, the better it is for you. Because the free users indirectly help in increasing visibility for your service through their content.
Here are some interesting stats from Muziboo (Muziboo is an online community for music sharing and discussion). This is our pricing page for reference:
2% of our Uploaders convert to Pro
Revenues doubled after changing the price tag from $25/year to $50/year. Which means conversion% was unaffected even after the price hike.
Overall conversion to Pro increased after the introduction of a 3rd slab (Monthly subscription)
Conversion to Pro through Monthly plan increased after the price hike from $5/month to $10/month
Conversion increased when the upload limit for the Free accounts was brought down from 20 – 10
Conversion remained the same when upload limit was brought down from 10 – 5 but had a disappointing slide in the repeat visits and number of total uploads. We almost concluded we had reached the saturation point and 10 was the optimum limit.
At this point we decided to carry out yet another experiment. Open up the platform by giving 5 uploads for free every month. We had expected to see a major slide in the Free to Pro conversion and hoped to offset it with more ads on Free pages. With the already mounting back-up and server costs giving 5 away for free every month with the expectation of the conversion going down was a little unnerving. We wanted to run the experiment nevertheless.
Phew, conversion remained the same! Because of the free cushion number of tweets, FB widgets, page views and SEO traffic increased significantly.
The results above to a large extent beat our common instincts and beliefs. There’s only one thing that I can say: Before concluding Freemium models do not work for your service, get bold enough to run experiments. And remember, once you start charging, the backdrop against which you measure your achievements completely changes.
I am identified as Prateek’s wife most times. The identity of Nithya as ‘Nithya’ and in Muziboo’s context, its Co-Founder is lost in the background of being Prateek’s wife.
As I recall reading somewhere, the general assumption is that a woman’s achievements stem from her value as a domestic, sexual and romantic companion rather than as a skilled worker. Isn’t this an evidence of sexism pervading our society?
In the last post I had concluded that there are a few online marketing strategies that go hand in hand with product development which trump other offline approaches. Any approach that is measurable and can be easily iterated upon is a great initial strategy that can help in validating the product concept against a customer base.
From our personal experience, we have seen that, following a targeted approach offered by online marketing (SEO and SEM) has far better results than following the blanketed approach in offline strategies. The early adopters of your service are most likely the ones that are actively searching for you. And a majority of those solve their problems by searching for solutions online. The good thing about making yourself available to that set of audience is that they are actively looking for you. This without doubt puts them ahead of those who haven’t even realized that they have a need. And that exactly is the risk involved in offline marketing – spending resources on an audience that hasn’t realized there’s a need yet.
Also on the internet, the prospective customers that you reach out to are just a click away from your product unlike an offline approach where the funnel is too deep.
When we launched Muziboo, we busied ourselves with marketing by distributing Muziboo posters and demo-ing in colleges. What better way than marketing our product to the youth which will inturn help us spread like wild fire! Let me hasten to add this: it was all a gross misadventure for all the reasons stated above. And of-course, to make use of the volume discounts, we printed posters in huge numbers. For one, printing in large volumes totally discards the possibility of iterating on the messaging. And another, even if the messaging is right, the cost of distribution is enormous. We have changed our positioning and offering since then (which is inevitable for a startup) and hence couldn’t salvage much from the resources already spent. We still have thousands of them sitting tight in our attic while some of them occasionally get used for brainstorming – thanks to the one blank side!
To come to the point, we pretty much shot ourselves in the foot by spending most of the initial but crucial months on this approach. And worse still, missing the opportunity of having the early entrant advantage with an app when Facebook app platform was launched. Unfortunately we couldn’t keep up our focus on either product development or online marketing with our offline efforts.
Just to give you an idea, we signed up about a hundred users a month during those months. But ever since we realised the power of online marketing we have been growing steadily. And today we sign up around 15k users every month with ZILCH marketing spend. We achieved this rate of growth sitting right in front of our comps from our bedroom office (we have a proper office now though) without having to step out or spend resources.
Well, after this experience would it be terribly wrong to conclude that offline marketing for a consumer internet start-up is a non-starter for a strategy?
A Bootstrapper’s Diary
In the last post I had concluded that there are a few online marketing strategies that go hand in hand with product development which trump other offline approaches. Any approach that is measurable and can be easily iterated upon is a great initial strategy that can help in validating the product concept against a customer base.
From our personal experience, we have seen that, following a targeted approach offered by online marketing (SEO and SEM) has far better results than following the blanketed approach in offline strategies. The early adopters of your service are most likely the ones that are actively searching for you. And a majority of those solve their problems by searching for solutions online. The good thing about making yourself available to that set of audience is that they are actively looking for you. This without doubt puts them ahead of those who haven’t even realized that they have a need. And that exactly is the risk involved in offline marketing – spending resources on an audience that hasn’t realized there’s a need yet.
Also on the internet, the prospective customers that you reach out to are just a click away from your product unlike an offline approach where the funnel is too deep.
When we launched Muziboo, we busied ourselves with marketing by distributing Muziboo posters and demo-ing in colleges. What better way than marketing our product to the youth which will inturn help us spread like wild fire! Let me hasten to add this: it was all a gross misadventure for all the reasons stated above. And of-course, to make use of the volume discounts, we printed posters in huge numbers. For one, printing in large volumes totally discards the possibility of iterating on the messaging. And another, even if the messaging is right, the cost of distribution is enormous. We have changed our positioning and offering since then (which is inevitable for a startup) and hence couldn’t salvage much from the resources already spent. We still have thousands of them sitting tight in our attic while some of them occasionally get used for brainstorming – thanks to the one blank side!
To come to the point, we pretty much shot ourselves in the foot by spending most of the initial but crucial months on this approach. And worse still, missing the opportunity of having the early entrant advantage with an app when Facebook app platform was launched. Unfortunately we couldn’t keep up our focus on either product development or online marketing with our offline efforts.
Just to give you an idea, we signed up about a hundred users a month during those months. But ever since we realised the power of online marketing we have been growing steadily. And today we sign up around 15k users every month with ZILCH marketing spend. We achieved this rate of growth sitting right in front of our comps from our bedroom office (we have a proper office now though) without having to step out or spend resources.
Well, after this experience would it be terribly wrong to conclude that offline marketing for a consumer internet start-up is a non-starter for a strategy?
The big question that awaits us all after we – a 2 or 3 member bootstrapped team – have cranked out enough code to launch a web product is “How do we market it?”. A sensible question to ask considering all the effort that has gone into developing it. And the answer that we most often settle on, though considered somewhat trite, is to go for online advertising, press releases, e-mail campaigns and the like to fetch probably the initial hundred users. In-spite of making a headway in this direction, there is a nagging dissatisfaction that we all experience for the reason that these answers can only go thus far…fetching a few hundred users. It is at this point that we are plagued by the inevitable thought: If there are hundreds ofthem using the platform just a few months from launch, it is only a matter of getting the word out to a million of them and success is all ours to celebrate. Hence, let’s go full hog on the all obvious approach of pumping more resources into mass marketing.
Does this thinking make sense? Intuitively yes. But from personal experience, we have understood that this approach, at this stage, is useless at best and detrimental at worst. Let’s see why.
A few months from launch, most of us are still finding our ground; looking to carve a niche. And the initial traction just indicates a possible need in the market for a product like yours and nothing more. What is pertinent at this stage is to engage with the early users to understand how your product is perceived, how your hypothesis of solving their needs with your product has worked out and what can be done to offer them better value and better experience. This step is extremely crucial for this not only shapes your product but also helps you validate your market. Also, undertaking this step offers the invaluable opportunity to evaluate features based on user needs and stop development efforts in directions that have not been welcomed thus saving precious development time and resource.
Another much overlooked aspect in the user engagement step is how it helps in making evangelists of your early adopters thus setting the ground for Word Of Mouth marketing. Right after launch it is quite possible that you perceive your product to be a bunch of features thrown together to be marketed to millions. However, over the course of your engagement with your users, you will realize that your product is not just about features but an experience in itself that needs to be improved for better adoption and wider consumption.
If you skip this crucial step and spend your time and money on driving mass adoption just months from launch, you will most likely be pumping resources into marketing a half baked product, a solution for a need that is still not validated, a company philosophy that hasn’t fully evolved and a positioning that is fragile. And how does all this prove detrimental? You have cut your existence short by exhausting limited resources. And you have unhappy customers or non-complaining ones at best.
In the process of driving hard the importance of the user engagement step, I do not intend to totally discount the merits of marketing your product in the early stages. But there are definitely a few strategies that go hand in hand with product development that trump other approaches. What they are, how they have helped Muziboo and a comparison of the ROIs on some of these strategies definitely calls for another post!
Stories of successful Internet companies are heart warming fairy-tales – after they have exacted their fair share of efforts, from the founders, to get scripted. Any news of Internet success in the market leaves the self proclaimed ‘gurus’ mouth-watering, with an appetite to use start-up jargons and generous doses of ass-kissing, to give their ‘I told you so’ nuggets for wannbae entrepreneurs. Start-up lessons are a dime a dozen in the WWW, as there are MBAs and weekend hackers. What leaves an odd taste in the mouth is that very few come from people with any experience at all. Most are abstract and aimless cliches feeding illusions of milk, honey and big-money which often work to the reader’s disadvantage.
Disadvantageous because, only entrepreneurs with real experience talk about setbacks and challenges (those everyday realities of business) rather than predictable fluff (build smart products; be committed as founders; stay ahead of competition) . Any straight talk is glaringly missing in today’s discourses. These fake pundits have taught us enough to celebrate success, which may not be a bad idea by itself, as long as we don’t miss out on discussing those practical techniques that help in reaching the goal without quitting.
As an entrepreneur that has sustained the same business for 2 years, without soliciting or even needing an investment, I frequently get asked “How do you do it?” and “What is the journey like?”. Beyond all these plaudits, I sincerely feel, Muziboo could have gotten here faster with some sensible advice – admittedly, this was hard to come by. Hence my decision to take it upon myself, to discuss ( and not teach ) through a series of posts all our experiences and learnings that we (Prateek and I) have gained through Muziboo under the heading ‘A Bootstrapper’s Diary’ in this blog.
