Prateek Dayal

I got an email couple of weeks back from NEN asking me if I would want to judge a business plan contest for RVCE Bangalore. I have been hitting the road with NEN for last couple of months, talking to students at various colleges in Bangalore about entrepreneurship and its quite a lot of fun. I agreed and yesterday I was there to judge the event with Harish and Nirmal. There were about 10 business plans (with very few on internet related ideas) and each team was given about 15 minutes for presentation and then we spent about 15 mins questioning the team about their research, assumptions etc. I would not really go into each business plan here for two reasons. One, it can be really boring and two, I am not sure if its a great idea to discuss the plans in public as serveral teams (student teams to be more precise) plan to implement their ideas once they graduate or even before that.

However there were a few things I realized during the presentation and also a couple of things I learned myself. I found a few common assumptions made by the teams that can be questioned very easily. Though I am quite sure that when these people graduate out of college and get some work experience, they would understand these issues better, I wanted to mention them here on the blog.

Focussing only on the technology and underestimating marketing
This was common in most of the startups. While talking about the team needed, expenses, the focus was on technology and marketing was either absent completely or given very little importance. I think in a real world product this is not true. Specially if your idea talks about technology adoption at banks or entertainment houses etc. You need to have a strong marketing team (and budget) to penetrate these markets. I would however like to know what other people feel about this

Over estimating word of mouth
This is something I run  into time and again. Even though word of mouth is a very important factor in making your service successful, more often than not, its slower and smaller in magnitude than you may imagine. In case of Muziboo word of mouth did not take off untill we had reached a critical mass. I think the reason for that is that people don’t want to talk about a  very new service.  Its even worse if you are a bootstrapped  venture. It takes time to achieve that critical mass  and the level of confidence. Its worth the time and effort though . However if you expect a hot or not success, I doubt if most people would see it.

Spending capacity of urban couples, singles …
This came as a revelation to me. It may be a college effect or something like that (and I don’t mean that negatively) but most teams massively overestimated the amount of money people would be willing to pay for their services.

A good product will have adoption
In a way this is true but then not always and not as easily as some people may think. A good product may not sell only on its technical merits. Most often the teams quoted nike or ipod and other such stuff. The products no doubt are brilliant but there is a huge marketing budget for these companies and people tend to overlook that.

Mission Statement v/s Mantra
I am inspired by Guy Kawakasi and I think it shows in my every blog post. If you have watched the art of the start video you would know what a mantra is. Its the three or four word summary of why your companies exist. A mission statement on the other hand is a complex play of words that conveys nothing in the end but looks important (and cliched). Of the 10 presentations yesterday I think only two had a great mantra and almost everyone had a mission statement (I swear). Sitting through that I could not help but appreciate the genius that Guy Kawasaki is and how important it is to have a mantra to have a punch in your pitch.

Now coming to some of the things that I just loved about some of the teams (and some of the learnings for me)

Neat Presentations
Some of the teams had absolutely amazing presentation skills. This includes both their slides and delivery. Other teams had slides with a lot of text which they were reading out to the audience. Its a no brainer which one was better. When I say better I don’t mean the product but a clean presentation goes a long way in delivering your idea. I learnt that very well yesterday.

Energy
I just loved the energy and passion of some of the teams. I think even if they have some flaws in their plan, they can surely fix all that with their energy

Do it v/s plan it
The team that won the first place was Ashwa Racing. Their presentation was crisp, plan solid and they had a punch in the delivery. I was not surprised because they have been working on their projects for years now and for real. Checkout their website and checkout the photo of me in their car below. I went to their workshop with them after the event ended. I think it proves that nothing can bring in the clarity that some real work experience can bring to your plan.

All in all it was great fun and good learning. I have not even mentioned how much I learnt by interacting with Harish and Nirmal.

Tags: entrepreneurship, nen, muziboo, rvce, business plan

Popularity: 5% [?]

Just wanted to shout out here that I will be attending Barcamp Mumbai 3. Details of the event can be found at the wiki

You can spot me very easily in my Muziboo.com t-shirt there. If you would like to meet up  .. .lets plan a little bit in advance :)

See you there!

Tags: barcampmumbai3, barcamp, mumbai, travel

Popularity: 3% [?]

If you like listening to music while you read, checkout the Muziboo.com radio on the sidebar. Some great independent music there on its three channels

The title of this post is inspired by countless articles about statups in the garage that i have read or read for motivation or to feel that I am not mad yet. I have always wanted to write a series of posts about what it is to be bootstrapping in the internet space. What makes you tick, what challenges are there … how we face them and stuff like that. This is the first post in the series.

Nithya and I have been running Muziboo.com for about 8 months now and this has been quite a learning experience for us. We are a bootstrapped venture and have no external funding or any other member in the team. We are working fulltime on our venture out of our home. I wanted to share some of our experience so far as I find very few articles in the blogosphere about non-bootstrapped startups. A non standard disclaimer follows. We don’t consider ourselves successful yet. We are far from there. Everything I write here or express on my blogs are my learnings which have not stood the test of time. That said, I strongly believe in all of them and would be willing to get feedback from people or discuss them further. But I am not preaching a mantra for success and fame there because frankly, I don’t know one … yet!

Constraints … a lot of them
In Muziboo, Nithya handles marketing and I handle technology so obviously we have a lot of limitations in terms of what we can do and what we cannot. This is different from what we want to do. We want to build a great service for musicians (amateurs and professionals) where they can come and find all the help, support, audience that they want. Now that pretty ambitious. Ofcourse we cannot do all of it and certainly cannot do all of it in the next one month or two or may be even a year. So we have to prioritize. That sometimes means turning down feature requests, leads for partnetships and other such stuff. When we have to decide between two features or two plans, we ask ourselves these questions

• How many exisiting users would this affect. 10%, 20% … 80% or 100%
• How many new users can this bring to Muziboo 10, 100, …. 1000, 10000
• Does this fall in the big vision of what we want to do

The first two are obvious and pretty much help you decide. So they can help you decide if you want to add a feature that lets ppl import their RSS feed (may be 50 of our users blog) or if you want to spend some more time improving the site’s usability (affects everyone everyday). 

Focus or die
Everything may look important but when you have limited resource you MUST PRIORITIZE or you will die. You may think you will die if you don’t do all that you have to do but I think you will die faster if you do all that you should do. Think about it. Thats where the third point from above three comes into picture. It would be great to let people blog in muziboo but does it help us be the number one company in audio domain? If it does not, it can wait. Do recommendations on music or tools to spread audio and ones that aid in audio discovery help us in that. They certainly do. So lets do them first. Lets build a facebook or orkut app that makes audio look cool (when was the last time u saw a new startup in audio and not video even though most of us still use audio more in our everyday life). Blogging can wait.

You will not get noticed easily
This can be a full blown blog post actually but that can come later. The basic thing is that will about a million web startups coming up everyday, it will very tough for you to get noticed. There will be some people who would discover you and write about you in their blogs or even a few news articles on you but otherwise it will be very tough. Blogs like techcrunch and many others (quite a few indian blogs too) consider only a venture funded startups as startups. Everything else is just something. Its not a startup for sure. I have been told this even by a few journalists. They would write about you the minute you get a few million dollars in your bank (and when you don’t actually care for such coverage). The thing to learn here is to accept it. You cannot fight it. You have to live with it and live happily with it. Thanks everyone who does discover you early and then keep trying. There is a tipping point for everything .. wait for it (we too are waiting for it). The million venture backed companies creating tiny value have made the job tougher for you. Learn something from them. Create enough value for the money and efforts that you are putting in and hope someday you will get techcrunched :)

Stay Real
Know where you stand. Keep measuring various factors and know how you are growing. Where is the curve linear and where is it exponential. Personally I feel linear growth simply means you are getting older and nothing more than that. If some elements of your company are on a linear growth and others on exponential, try to understand why. Question your growth or the lack of it. Keep experimenting with your site design, landing pages and other stuff untill you know you are on the right growth curve. Don’t believe something that is not happening. You are better off accepting reality and working to improve it than trying to cover it. In case of Muziboo our community growth has been exponential but not the user growth. The interaction between members (comments on music) has constantly been on exponential curve. There are many design decisions that have contributed to that. Our user growth has not been and we are always working on it.

That about sums it up for part 1. I would be writing part 2 in a couple of days. If you want to be notified, please subscribe to the RSS feed. Do leave your thoughts here as comments or questions. If you feel something that I have written is not right or not real please question it in the comments.

Tags: startups, garage, bootstrapping, muziboo

Popularity: 5% [?]

May I request you to checkout the radio on the sidebar while you read this article. Its powered by my startup Muziboo.com. Some amazing music by independent musicians. Am sure you would love the music while reading this long post.

So you want to leverage the social graph :)

I will be finally writing (atleast a basic) Muziboo app on opensocial over the next week or so. I thought of actually documenting the whole process here. I find very little tutorials or documentation other than the official one at google code. Hopefully if I come up with a working app, other people can read this and may be it will help some poor souls. I am assuming I am finding opensocial complicated because I am not a javascript or web architecture guru. I certainly find it more complicated than the facebook api. Anyway lets see how to get started with development here. Lot of what I write may be ruby on rails specifc (atleast in the later posts)

Resources
Ok so lets talk of the resource you need to checkout before you dive into making an opensocial app for orkut. Remember that as of today (March 18th) the orkut container runs opensocial 0.7 so don’t waste your time trying to run examples built on older versions of opensocial.

Orkut Sandbox: To test the app .. ofcourse
Developer Guide:  You will find many more links here to reference, specs etc.
Code Runner (lets you make javascript calls without modifying your source xml file. Great for debugging)
OpenSocial Official Blog : To make sure you know whats coming up. When is the api changing and other critical stuff
Opensocial Forums : Opensocial and other container (such as orkut, ning) container

Setting up a proxy
You will be most likely developing on your local machine. However opensocial needs to access a public url to fetch the gadget xml file. You can find lots of hosting options here. However if you don’t want to checkin and checkout your code everytime you make a change, you need to run a ssh tunnel to let orkut access your local machine and a webserver running on some port there. The process is explained in detail for facebook here but the basics remain the same. The command that finally works for me is

$ ssh -nNT -g -R *:REMOTE_PORT:0.0.0.0:LOCAL_PORT REMOTE_USER@REMOTE_SERVER.COM

Bypassing the orkut cache
Orkut caches your gadget file and refreshes it probably every hour or so but since you are coding away so fast :) you need to make sure your changes are immediately reflected. No problem just append &bpc=1 at the end of the canvas url. This will make sure the cache is bypassed.

Basic app to check the whole setup
Once you have read so far, try a basic app by following the tutorial

Hopefully everything will work fine and you will see a greeting. The gold old hello world!

See ya around! The next topic will cover some basic integration stuff with your existing website (if I am able to figure it out till then)  

Tags: opensocial, rubyonrails, tutorial, orkut sandbox

Popularity: 7% [?]

Btw .. can i request you to play the radio on the sidebar while you read this. You are going to love it and this is a long post

I happened to be at the Open Coffee Club meet yesterday. I as usual arrived late and missed the open commune talk by Venkat from Outsmart 360. When I reached the discussion on internships was in full steam. Shalin (who represents NEN internship initiative currently) was brainstorming with the crowd and without giving out much details on how he is planning to go about the whole thing (to not bias their opinion) was trying to collect information from people about what they think of internships/jobs at startups. There was quite a few people interested in hiring and getting hired so there were opinions from both sides of the table. I myself have been thinking about startup jobs and internships for quite sometime now and wanted to pen down some of my thoughts.

What is a startup and why you should bother working there
After I graduated out of IIT Guwahati I wanted to work in a startup. It was a no brainer because you always learn more at a startup. Or so the legend goes. I disagree. What is a startup and how do you define learning. Is startup a small company with few people or is startup something which is small but has potential to grow big? This debate was raised yesterday too over coffee.

I personally feel you are a startup if you are afraid you may die if you don’t act smart/hard. Thats my simple definition of a startup. May be this applies only to bootstrapping startup but from my experience only when you are bootstrapping do you think everyday if you are adding some real value somewhere, working towards achieving something or just talking about random cool looking stuff or technology. When you are bootstrapping, you cannot make many mistakes. And when that sword is hanging over your head, you learn to respect yours and everyone’s time, money and knowledge. Not just that, you learn to work hard and you learn to work smart. That is the startup learning to me. You are out of college and you suddenly realize its all for one and one for all. You don’t work and it does not get done. Does not matter if you learnt it in college or not. You use that as a defence when your startup dies. You WILL learn it and you WILL do it if you want to see your company live. Its may sound dramatic but its not. Its the reality of a true blue startup. If you can goof up or skip work and nothing gets affected, you are not in a startup. You are in a startup where no two people work on the same thing or save each other’s ass because you don’t have time or money to do that.

Internships (at startups)
We at Muziboo are too small to be offering jobs to people (unless they want to come in on a pure partnership basis) but we can give out some internships. However in the past from a couple of exeriences we have realized that when people come to Muziboo for internships, its mostly because they are not having much elsewhere. They talk to us, realize we are too small, go back, think about it and drop it in a few days. We don’t really mind it but we politely decline any requests for internships now. From what I understand of the whole problem, when people come for an internship, they have a report in mind. They want to put down some numbers, do some analysis and may be a few recommendations to the company. This may work well for a medium sized company but not for something like Muziboo. What we need to Muziboo is someone who would go out and tell us that this is a new avenue for marketing. Or this is an avenue for getting advertising revenues. Now this is not as vague as it may sound. Music advertisers are few (shops, schools, teachers) and it essentially boils down to finding how much they spend on advertising elsewhere, how much return they get and then coming out with a price tag which should essentially be a no brainer for the advertiser. Its about doing some basic maths backed by some solid research (market research). Also when we ask someone to do market research we are willing to refund all the expenses, so even if we are not able to pay, we atleast don’t want the chap to lose his money.
This however does not sell as an internship that excites someone in marketing. I am not sure of venture backed startups but bootstrapping startups have only this kind of work. And this IS work for them. There is nothing fancy or suger coated here. There is no you will learn more than Mc-Kinsey kind sweet talk here. Its simple. We need this to grow as a company so this is all we will do. Nothing fancy just for the heck of it.

Jobs (at startups)
Let me talk from the employee and employer’s perspective here as I have worked in a startup and started up myself two (too but two) :)

Employee’s Perspective
As someone who wants to work in a startup, I understand that startups can’t be paymasters and that there is no job security etc here. I understand all this and most people who are worthy of working in a startup understand this. Lets move on. If you have to teach this to someone, you are talking to the wrong guy. If you think that you can talk someone into working at a startup, you are wrong. If you find yourself telling somone “you will learn more here than infosys/wipro”, remember you are talking to the wrong guy and you are wasting your and his/her time.
Now that I want to work in a startup, I want to work somewhere where I matter as I stated above. Where if I don’t work hard, the company suffers. Only then can you expect me to give my 100%. If I know I can do with my 90% I will give only my 90%. If I can do with 80%, then it will be 80% and so on. I have known several people like that so I don’t think its very uncommon. If someone can get excited to work with you, they can get bored too. So hire someone smart and give them something of great responsibility. Make sure that they realize that if they don’t give their 100%, 100% of the required work does not get done. On the other hand, convince them that if they do deliver well, they will gain (either now or in future). Take out the time to implement a stock option plan and do it right away with the regular vesting cycle. Its your job as a co-founder when you decide to hire someone. You can’t say its not a priority number 1. If hiring smart brains is your priority number 1 then this is too. Don’t find yourself ever telling people “dont work for money” because you are lying. End of the day we all work for the money. Don’t we? Money can come in now or in the future but you are always chasing it. A smart guy would know that work matters more than some difference in money. Don’t teach him all that. Hand him the stock options and tell him how much of the company he/she owns. Make them feel they own a part of this thing. They will work hard. Don’t say work for inner peace and zen!

Employerer’s Perspective
Don’t ever use the word “cheap labour” for your interns. I absolutely hate it and if you can hire someone who does not hate it, they are not worthy of working in a startup. Everyone in a startup is there because they feel they can do things better. You start a company because you feel you can do something better and charge for it. I work in a startup because I know I can deliver more and be paid for it and recognized for it. Hire for talent, not for money. If you don’t have cash, give equity. But reward talent. As guy kawasaki says A players hire A+ players. B players hire C player and C players hire D players. If you hire a B player you will one day wake up with Z players all around you. Hire smart people and pay them now or in future (but not just talk about it, do it)
Know whom you are hiring and for what. Sell your startup but don’t oversell. Understand that when you are young, excitement rules over maturity. Be ready for it and channelize that energy. If you don’t have the time do it, don’t hire freshers. Freshers are over enthusiastic, specially the smart ones. If you don’t like that and want maturity and experience and stuff like that, go hire those guys. Don’t expect freshers to be cheaper experience. It does not work that way. Don’t complain when they leave for better money. If they don’t see value they will leave. Thats why give them good stocks so that they know what they are missing if they leave. In today’s market you cannot say “you are leaving for money!!! Geez”. Money drives us all … lets accept it and work with that knowledge. Again as I wrote before there is money in the present and money in the future. Use future money (potential money)

If you have read this far, I really appreciate your patience. Lot of the view above are personal. I am trying to highlight the gap thats there between employees and employers sometimes. I may make the same mistakes when I decide to hire people (I pray that day comes), but may be I will use this post as a reference then.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Tags: startups, internships, jobs at startups

Popularity: 5% [?]

Its official now. What started as a casual lemme check it out is turning into a more serious affair. I have to say I am almost in love with the flock browser. It totally rocks

Why does flock rock. In the last 2 weeks that I have used flock, I have come to love the fact that it understands that I am a human and I spend a lot of time on my social interaction. It knows that I blog, I upload pictures on flickr, I have friends all over the world (rather cyber world) and makes sure that I don’t spend a lot of time trying to manage all this. Everything is neatly presented to you on your about:myworld page. This is when I still have not spent more than 20 mins configuring it or whatever.

Now comes why I don’t like flock. Flock has safari kind of fonts and right now on my ubunut amd64 nvidia system, they don’t rock as much. They are kinda smudged and I am hoping the flock team will fix it

And oh .. btw .. I am talking about Flock 1.1 beta …   

Tags: flock, rocks

Popularity: 4% [?]

I have to accept it .. rather I always accept it that I am no great designer .. for that matter am not even an ace coder. I am more of a guy who can get things done …

Ok anyways, coming back to design, I started learning this cool thing called openlaszlo a few months back and made a couple of widgets using it for Muziboo. I never released any of them because I pretty much such at doing a skin. However lately, working with Vinod at Elina Networks, I learnt a thing or two about photoshop, layers, basic color manipulation etc etc. I tried to apply some of them on gimp and came up with a skin for the new radio client I had been working on this week.

Man I am excited … it may not be the best design or something, but its just so much joy to skin your product and then put it on your blog (only on old blogspot blog right now). Take a look at it and also checkout some of the cool music from Muziboo. If you want my personal recommendation, try out the instrumental channel.

Tags: muziboo, openlaszlo, gimp, radio

Popularity: 3% [?]

Last few days have been lot of fun. I tried out icecast that lets you run your own online radio station and here you have a beta version of Muziboo Radio. Currently there are three streams, English, Hindi and Instrumentals and as we find more content (rather as more content is uploaded to Muziboo), we will be adding more channels.  We found out that 30 songs is a good number to start off a radio stream. So the next one we would like to see is a classical channel.

I would be writing about how to run an icecast service and integrate it with your ruby on rails website in the next couple of posts. I am just thinking if I really should separate my personal and technical blog or keep it together.

Its been a lot of fun integrating icecast and Muziboo.com. The link for the radio above is default icecast page. In about a week’s time, there will be a Muziboo Radio Page that will have lots of cool stuff. It will be mostly this integration that I plan to talk about.

Also like most Muziboo services, radio also will be embeddable everywhere. We plan to make almost all of muziboo content embeddable on blogs, social networks etc so that our users don’t have to fight hard to spread their content.

Try listening to the streams for now .. you will need winamp, xmms or media player to do that .. but believe me .. worth the effort .. my current favorite is Instrumentals

Tags: muziboo, radio, news, icecast, ruby on rails

Popularity: 4% [?]

The article titled Web 2.0 start-ups together have 15 lakh users in India: IDC at AlooTechie is a great read. What it basically says is “According to a study by IDC, India-focused Web 2.0 start-ups such as MingleBox, Fropper, SirfDosti and BigAdda have a combined user base of around 15 lakh users in the country, after eliminating overlaps.”

Now someone please tell me how these sites have millions of users. How do companies like IBibo justify that they had 1 million users when they went ahead and started advertising and the signups have tripled since then. Where are all these people. Why don’t I ever meet anyone who gives me a minglebox or ibibo url for their blogs or pictures ?

Am I missing something?

Popularity: 3% [?]

I have lately been trying to understand how virality and WOM works. I know that if your service is compelling enough, many users will talk about you. But what I have been discovering in the last few weeks is that you can also structure your application, the flow etc in such a way that users are motivated to invite their friends.

Why would the users invite their friends? There could be a number of reasons

1. The place is more fun with friends around (orkut)
2. You may actually have some monetary benefits (such as makemytrip)
3. It may just help you unlock some features of the website (mostly applicable to facebook/opensocial apps)

There are a couple of interesting articles on the net …. I am trying to dig more information about this stuff … here is what I have found so far.

The Four Viral App Objectives (a.k.a., “Social network application virality 101″)

I was amazed to find out that stanford actually had a class on facebook apps last fall

As I work towards building an opensocial app (followed by a facebook app) for Muziboo.com, I will be posting more stuff on applications, virality etc. If you have some resources, please leave them as comments and I will update the list with them

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