Archive for 'Entrepreneurship'
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.
Some book recommendations below from me on this subject:
The Power of Full Engagement
Your Brain at work – http://www.amazon.com/Your-Brain-Work-Strategies-Distraction/dp/0061771295/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1310383238&sr=1-1
Your Brain at work
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.
A Bootstrapper’s Diary
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?
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?
A Bootstrapper’s Diary
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 of them 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!
A Bootstrapper’s Diary
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.
In my opinion it hardly is. By saying its an alternate career option are we trying to tell the students that they can choose to work with Wipro or Infy or heck, they can do something on their own? Well entrepreneurship is not an alternate choice, its a personal option chosen by a person after having some experience to understand himself and what he wants and how he wants it.
I am immensely puzzled by the sudden trend to promote entrepreneurship in colleges through courses as a part of the syllabus. Well it definitely makes sense to learn how to draw up a business plan but thats just a part of a business course! Entrepreneurship to a large extent is about perseverance, patience, ability to take initiatives, responsibilities and myriad challenges. When such is the case how is anybody gonna teach all this in a classroom. If there was so much logic and science behind entrepreneurship that it can be taught in a classroom why are entrepreneurs still dabbling?
Well, what made me twitch was this . If I am not wrong, its NEN conducting a course for teachers to teach entrepreneurship to students. Is something grossly amiss about my understanding of things?
Is NEN sure about what its goals are? If they are out to create an ecosystem around entrepreneurs and startups, it can have tangible benefits. But pumping resource and energy into spreading and celebrating entrepreneurship at college level when nobody has any clue seems to undermine the true spirit.
The obvious reason for more and more people to try their hand at entrepreneurship with a web venture is because of the significant decline in hardware costs and the availability of Open source Software these days. That apart theres no real need for an office which greatly brings the overheads down. And a few success stories in the industry definitely pep you up to scratch your itch for the ‘big buck’
But the million dollar question here is how would you want to define success for your venture. Is it always about attracting a million eyeballs to your service and heading for an acquisition? Or bet on the hyped up ad sense revenue stream? (The sad realisation now is none of the Social networks of any kinds will ever make money through ad networks cos people come there to stay and not click ads to hop on to the next website.)
Worse still are this bunch of people who consider VC funding as success by itself. What most fail to realise is that one has every chance of going bust and failing in their attempt to impress the world with their service even after all the millions that they bag. Numerous such VC funded startups hit the dust.
In my opinion there are only two kinds of ventures. The ones that make money and the ones that don’t. If you have service used by millions of people but you still havent figured out a way to make money, but banking on acquisition, its pretty lame. Cos if the acquisition exit does not work, you will die.
When can you make money. Only when people find your service great enough that they consider its worth paying.The most often heard advice from everybody in the circle these days is ‘ Dont worry about revenue models. Concentrate on providing value’. And this often comes from people who have never burnt their fingers with anything. All they do is read a few blogs and preach. How long can a bootstrapped web venture go like this. Especially if you are a media site, with increasing user demands, one has to step aside and think “Am I offering enough value that one day when I make it paid, people will care for my service that they pay and use”
Here are a few of my opinions
1) If you believe in an idea and there are enough stats to let you believe that there is a market for it, don’t validate your idea with too many people. Get yourself to build a prototype. Your users are your best critics. Its tough to translate ideas in your head to people around with just words. Even a basic prototype can turn heads.
2)Dont be different just for the heck of it and dont stick to a niche which just serves an elite. As far as possible keep the consumer base wide.
3)As your service takes shape you should concentrate more on what you can offer that people wouldnt mind paying for.
4)Decide ways to get the word out to people. Do not get carried away with every Tom, dick and Harry’s airy-fairy offline marketing suggestions. Offline marketing and brand building comes with a cost and in the initial stages, spend more time on fine-tuning your service than going offline to increase user base.
5)You will always encounter extremes of opinion about your service. No point getting carried away or getting low for either of these
6)Dont spend too much time on refining your UI. Make sure the colours are comfortable and the navigation is intuitive. Most people find it easy to put your service down on the basis of UI. If they are not users of your service, dont even care hearing them out. If they are users, explain as to why you stuck to a particular design. At the end of the day, people come for your service not for those frills that u managed to add
7)Web 2.0 is only associated with ajax, gradient colors, drop shadows and shiny buttons. They all can go only so far in acquiring or retaining users. Concentrate on providing a service where the content generated by the users means something. If you are running a service just to plot the social graph, its a bit too late. All possible combination of graphs that need to be created are already created by the biggies. Its hightime one banked on the value of the generated content.
8)Try not to run a service which has already failed multiple times elsewhere, especially the US. The US market is a good indicator. Unless you really have something in the local context, its not a great idea.
9)If you are the first of the kind to start something, please look around as to why it doesnt already exist. sometimes some services don’t exist for a reason!
10)Last but not the least, it takes some guts to bootstrap and believe in your idea. Web is not the quick buck as most people perceive it to be. Its a long haul if you are aiming to run a sustainable business. Hence stay put!
