Prateek Dayal

And not just once. Year after year you will miss this event :)

I met a fellow blogger today and we were talking about the big bloggers of India and Kiruba Shankar’s name came up in the discussion. I had not visited his blog in a long time and decided to take a look. I found this interesting post on Cerebrate.in. The post describes the concept behind cerebrate.in

“In simple terms, it’s getting the very best minds from different fields together for three days of togetherness, ideating and sharing knowledge. These are folks from Law, Movies, Technology, Theatre, Sports, Management, Photography, Medicine, Journalism, Music…. The only connecting factor amongst the lot is the excellence. These are folks who are driven and have achieved in their own chosen fields.”

On some googling, I also found this interesting video about it

So basically cerebrate is a get together of the elite crowd who meet in a great resort (the primary sponsor of the event), drink, eat and ideate. What I am surprised at is that I have never ever met any of these people at Barcamp Bangalore. Considering this event was in Goa, I am sure travel is not a problem. So Is Barcamps for commoners only? I never see the venture funded startups or the celebrity bloggers (leaving out the few exceptions) there. I tried to find out about the discussions in cerebrate but unfortunately, the blog and wiki of cerebrate have not been updated with the details. All the discussions there are private knowledge not shared with the commoners yet.

I read some days back about how there is a FooCamp and then people who were not invited created barcamp. I am surprised that cerebrate is an effort to go from Barcamps to FooCamps. Also some of the people attending/organizing cerebrate are advocates of free knowledge and democratization of everything. The video also looks more like a commercial for Club Mahindra (as some people note in the comments to the original post), especially towards the end. In fact I read on this blog post that Kiruba Arun (according to a comment, its Arun and not Kiruba) had also participated in Club Mahindra’s Annual Sales Summit sometime back. May be I am just plain jealous that I could not and would never be able to sit with the best minds of the country and get to discuss stuff with them. I can email them but then I doubt if I would ever get a reply. I swear, I have tried it with a few of them in the past :)

I guess I better wait for BCB 7 :(

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Most entrepreneurs I know started working on their idea on weekends and nights while still holding their day job. This gives them enough time to understand the idea, validate it with a beta launch and then see if they can make it big or not. Once they are reasonably certain that the idea is good (thats impossible btw), they take the plunge and go fulltime into it. I thought of writing about my decision making process in this blog post about working fulltime on Muziboo.

I worked on Muziboo for about 5 months with my day job. When I started out, I had no clue that I would go fulltime into it. Even though I had tried bootstrapping another venture about a year back and I did know that to do something serious, you need to be fulltime into it, I did not realize that the point would come so quickly.

When is a good time to go fulltime ?

I feel a good time to go fulltime is when

• You are limited by the time available in doing things that matter. You can always add mindless features but that should not be your goal
• You have to do some business development and you need to take time out on weekdays to meet people
• You want to grow it quickly to a level where you can take some funding. If your idea is particularly novel, this is more relevant.
• You are so excited about your idea that your day job feels like a drag and you cannot do justice to it. (Not the best reason to go fulltime… everything new is more exciting)
• You feel that going fulltime will show your commitment to the idea and hence give you more credibility. This could help in talking to investors or media or even big bloggers!
• You are working 7 days a week (job+startup) and you want to take a day off or spend time with family

Preparing for the plunge

In my case all of the above except the funding point were true. Still it was not an easy decision to quit my job. In fact I quit my job and did some part time consulting for a couple of months just to make a smooth transition. I took more than a month to quit my job after I started considering it seriously. During that time, I did a few things

• I found a consulting gig to last a couple of months (something that I could work on 3 days a week)
• I talked to a lot of people about freelancing .. the market scene and other implications (tax etc)
• I laid out a small roadmap for Muziboo to make sure I had enough work to justify this move
• I also did ’some’ financial planning

On the last point, I made sure that I had enough money to last me for about 9 months. I think survival for about a year is necessary because in general it would take atleast that much time to start making money back from your venture. You don’t want to put too much pressure on yourself and your startup so make sure you have enough financial planning. Startups are a tough ride and you want to go easy on yourself and your baby. Not having to worry about money for sometime can make the whole experience quite enjoyable. It can let you experiment for sometime too. But more about that later :)

After taking the plunge

Once I quit my job, I took a weekend off before I started on my consulting assignment. It took me sometime to get used to working from home. I certainly did miss the interaction in office and the regular coffee breaks but then in sometime I got used to it (gtalk compensated!). I think there is a lot to write about it but may be some other time. Overall it has been one of the best decisions of last year and has helped me shape muziboo faster and better.

If you have any experience to share please do add it in the comments. I hope this post helps you if you are thinking about the plunge too.

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This is more of a … look at the pictures .. they tell the story … post :)

We went to the much awaited (or rather publicized) startup city today. We reached around noon and found a lot of crowd there. The event looked like a trade fair and there were banners and balloons all over the place.

The event was in Nimhans convention centre and the good thing was that there was tons of parking space available. Once inside, we found the place to be really crowded, which I guess was good for the companies showcasing there.

Open Coffee Club also had a booth there and I found Vaibhav and Amarinder evangelizing OCC. I think these guys are doing an awesome job of spreading the OCC and keeping the meets interesting.

Several OCC companies were also demoing their products/services there. For example LifeBlob

We also met Sameer and Nandhini of Madhouse (now SeventyMM) and had a good discussion with them on Indian startup scene. These guys have great experience building and selling a company and it was fun talking to them.

We did not attend any talks or discussions and spent most of the time catching up with other people. Overall I got more of a trade fair feeling out of Startup City. There were stalls of Amazon, Nokia and HSBC right at the entrance :) The event certainly did not feel like a real startup event. I am not sure how to describe that feel .. I guess it wasn’t boostrapper’s event (except for the OCC booth).

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Disclaimer: The views expressed here are solely mine and not of my company Muziboo. However since I own half of Muziboo ….. :)

You are working hard on your startup and you meet tons of new people every week and tell them about your startup. If you are lucky, probably 1% of them would love your startup and show it. This is certainly true in our case. If I go to a barcamp or OCC or other startup events, less than 1% of the people there are excited to hear about Muziboo. Most people dismiss the concept as yet another social network (about which I wrote here).

Before I go any further, let me accept that I too am very rarely excited about someone’s idea. I guess this barcamp there was only one startup, LifeBlob that truly excited me. Last barcamp, it was flipkart. So what I am trying to say is that the post is not about why people don’t love my startup but about who is the best critique for my startup.

Are Startup Events or B-plan contests best critique?

Honestly, I don’t think so. I have never applied for a B-Plan contest but I have not even seen too many success stories coming out of there. I define success as some company that won in a b-plan contest and then got into business and eventually survived and made a profitable business.

Lets talk about startup events. We applied last year for proto.in and were rejected. In the true startup spirit, I did take some learnings out of it but then I was confused all the more on finding out that Saffron Connect (link won’t work .. the site disappeard) had presented in the first proto.in. Even if I look at the last proto, there are startups that have not even launched and have had a chance to present. I would put HeadStart.in in the same league. We were rejected there too, only that we did not even receive a rejection letter. We had to call and ask the organizers about the results and the guy I called was clueless. Proto and Headstart in my opinion should take out sometime to write to the companies rejected so that they can take some useful learning out of the whole experience. Untill they do that, I dont think they are the best critique for your startup.

These events reminds me of my school that used to kick out every average guy (academically) and keep only the best of the best and then show a great success story in every board exam. How those people have fared in life after school is a different story. I therefore believe a true startup ecosystem should help those who need it. Pruning and showcasing the best is only a part of the story. I love OCC and Startup Saturday for that the help they offer to one and all and I think they will go out to become the most useful startup events in the next few years.

Is it the experts in your domain?

To some extent .. yes .. the experienced people in the domain can offer you some really good insights. We have been fortunate to meet some people who can give us good legal, financial or sometimes even common sense perspective on things. However I feel that there are very very few people in the web space right now in India who can be called experts. This is true all the more in web 2.0 space. User generated content sites are always dismissed by most experts on design, scalability, VCability or similar front. I am sure had I pointed out craigslist or flickr or even a facebook to them in the early days, they would have dismissed them too. If you give point the same examples now, they would still dismiss them terming them as an one off thing. But thats exactly the point, most startups are one off successes. Its very tough to spot trends in successful startups. Still most experts or events are trying to spot the trends when declaring winners or potential winners. They are looking for the coolest technology or the most scalable idea or the most VCable business. How is it then that the deadpool list keeps getting longer?

I guess its a combination of luck, persistence, execution and idea (in that order) that determines success. So then who is the best critique?

Your users are your best critique

Yes .. thats it .. its your users. If people come to your site/product and use it and recommend it, you are doing well. If not, time to improve. Its really as simple as that. If you are onto one of those one off successes, there would be a lot of early adopters who would swear by your service and use it regularly. They would evangelize it like its their baby. If you cannot find many such evangelists, then you are not doing something truly useful. If you look back at the examples I mentioned before, craigslist, flickr, macintosh all had tons of evangelists in the community. I therefore think that if users love you, you have a good chance of succceeding. Everything else is useful but not mandatory. To pick better words, every other review (or the lack of it) about you cannot make or break you.

Feel free to debate my thoughts. Again in no way do I consider Muziboo successful yet. However I do believe that we are onto something and we will hopefully get there if we can survive for that long. I am thankful to a lot of people who did/are helping us on a daily basis and ofcourse to our users.

That said, I feel its time for the startup egosystem to start morphing into an true ecosystem.

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There were days when internet companies used to launch and not enter private alphas, public betas and other such states. Then came the concept of release early release often in the web and sites would not wait forever but release a beta and let the most enthusiastic users in. These users would brave broken functionality and help the developers test their product with some live audience. Then came gmail and orkut with their (fake) betas and redefined the meaning of the word. Suddenly it was uncool to not be beta untill you have a few million users. Kaati zone is suddenly bringing in all the web 2.0 coolness to their food joints. Erasmic ventures has invested in the company and there seems to be a lot of buzz around it mostly for the fact that Kiran Nadkarni, the founder and director has been a VC.

Impressed by all this I tried out the new Kaati Zone in Banashankari last night. We entered the joint full of smoke (not out of fire but cooking smoke). We enquired and found out that they had not (yet) installed exhaust fans. The place was extremely noisy as they had not installed any sound absorption either. The menu looked nice and we finally ordered and the long wait started. After about 30 mins .. two of the three things ordered were done. Surprisingly the parathe Nithya had ordered arrived cold. They certainly did not look like they were cooked in the last 15 minutes or so. Other stuff was average too. When everybody was done, my roll arrived and as I had expected it was quite average. Some tables had chutney and others were offered package sauce. The decor however was cool because they had put some collage with pics from Bangalore street.

I frankly have no motivation to go back to that place when they have completed it because I felt the basic reason for going there (food) is not worth it in itself. On top of that I don’t like the concept of a beta joint. May be when some other people do it and it become a cult, I will follow and appreciate how cool it is. My only suggestion to Kaati Zone would be to make sure they serve awesome food. I have had much better rolls in smaller joints that are considered quite uncool. Growth plans are cool but a chain is no good if you cannot keep up the quality.

Have you ever had a beta experience in any other offline product ?

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Its very interesting to watch the reaction of people when we tell them that we run an online music community. Most people think that we run a social network and dismiss it right away. A few people get curious and ask us to explain the concept. Very few people we meet already understand the difference. I think thats because online communities are still not very popular in India. There are a few popular forums like TeamBHP that have a strong community element, but only a handful of such sites exist. In this post I would try to explain is the difference between a social network and an online community and why the dynamics are completely different.

Who do you know Already

I think this is one of the key difference between an online community and a social network. More often than not a person joins Orkut or Facebook to connect with people she knows already. They could be old classmates, colleagues or friends from college. The main intent here is to reconnect and stay in touch. A few people go to such sites to find new connections but as far as I know, it does not work very well .. specially on a network like facebook that has strong privacy settings.

Contrast this with an online community. You go there because you are interested in the theme of the community. In case of muziboo, that happens to be Music. Music that you create. Most of our users come to Muziboo to showcase their music to people who care about such home made music. When a user joins an online community, chances are she does not know most people there and is looking to form some connections (mostly online) with people who share the same interest. You are not on an online community to talk about your work, personal life, relationship status, your last trip and ten other things. You are there for just one reason only … your interest. Online communities serve a niche and serve it well.

Mindset towards making new connections

In orkut you would find several profiles (mostly of women) who express that they would not accept friendship requests from people they don’t know. In a social network, your profile is a representation of you in the online world. Your connections, communities your join reflect on you and along with your profile information give people an idea of who your are. So most people prefer not to connect with strangers (again more so in case of facebook) because they would be associated with them in someway.

In an online community, your profile is just a part of your real self. So in case of Muziboo your profile is a representation of your musical self. Your connections there are people you admire musically or who like your music. You are open to adding more friends or contacts because all your care is that they would help you in getting better in your passion. Since you know most people are there for a specific reason, you are more likely to talk to them even if you have not known them before. Its the same reason why I think groups in flickr for a certain city (say bangalore) meetup in real life every now and then and orkut meets hardly ever materialize.

Culture or Spirit of the place

Both social networks and online communities try to stay neutral. They don’t have opinions. They don’t dictate what you should do (there are however guidelines as to what not to do). However an online community does have a culture that you can feel once you have spent sometime there. For example, when I started using flickr, it took me very little time to figure out that I can go and comment on anyone’s picture and then request them for a comment. I could quickly find out that groups are a great way to find people who are interested in some specific kind/aspect of photography
and so on. This culture or spirt is defined by the people in the community but the creators of the place initially play a big roll in shaping it. Which brings me to my last point for today’s post

Nurturing the place v/s letting it be

An online community has to be nurtured. Specially in India or similar place where conventionally we have not looked at online world as a place to learn or pursue something serious. Social networks on the other hand don’t really need nurturing. You don’t need to greet new users and tell them they should comment on other people’s stuff. If a social network is all about the number of users and connections they have, an online community is all about the number of comments they make or the number of group discussions users initiate. To achieve that, community managers have to work very hard till the place carries that vibe all by itself. The concept of a community manager is absent in social networks as I know.
I would be very interested in knowing your thoughts on this article. Have you been  part of an online community before? If yes, please do tell us about it and how your experience was. Do you think social network’s groups can serve as online communities?

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For an early stage startup, it is very important to be recognized by the press. Word of mouth is a neat way of spreading but it works well only after you have reached a critical mass. In a country like India, people trust  newspapers and magazines a lot. Once you are on a newspaper, your brand’s credibility goes up. In case of Muziboo we have seen that everytime we are on newspaper, we get a lot of new signups and our traffic generally goes up. We have been covered by Economic Times, Times of India, Mid-Day, Bangalore Mirror amogst few others outside Bangalore.

Last few months, I have talked to a lot of journalists and I thought of writing about how you can try to get noticed by the them. The sad reality is that it is not possible to get noticed by them. If you approach them, they would certainly not write about you. Also if you are a self funded company, the chances of getting on a national daily drops significantly. In general anything that a funded company does (right from closing the first round of funding) is news and everything you do is at best a cheap publicity stunt. Therefore writing to someone is by definition a bad idea. Don’t do it. Its not worth the time and the disappointment.

Now one way to get noticed by the press is to get noticed by a lot of other people. People who are in the game (other startup founders, people higher up in the career path) who would probably know the press. Most of our press mentions have come from such relationships. Our users (yeah!) and friends happened to talk about us to some reporter and they covered us. More often than not, a very big newspaper would not cover you exclusively but thats ok. You would get there (so would we some day)

Now since most of your friends would not really know the press, you need to make sure you attend Open Coffee Club meetings, Barcamps and any other meetup that you can and talk about your startup to every guy you can. Yes .. every guy you can because you don’t know how the universe will conspire to get you a press mention.

Now that you know whom to talk to and where to find these people, it also helps to be prepared with a story. A story thats romantic, believable and easy to communicate. I think you should have a 30 sec pitch (one line about what you do and why you do it) and a 2 min pitch (why its insanely great). I am not telling you to make things up, but if you are not prepared, you will not be able to make the best use of your time. I remember talking to some 100+ people in Barcamp 5 and it was fun. It really helped me refine my pitch.

If you can call what I wrote above techniques, then they have worked very well for us. Like everything else about a startup, its important to be persistent at it. In general, you cannot build contacts when you need them.

Best of luck getting press’d :)

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I had written sometime back about why shared hosting is bad for your startup and recommended VPS hosting for any serious web venture. Today, as promised in that post, I am writing a review of VPSFarm.com. VPSFarm is based out of US and while researching for VPS provieders, I found them to be pretty good. I considered slicehost and other popular VPS choices as well as some cheap dedicated boxes from layeredtech.com etc. This is what I did not like about them

• Most VPS providers take some time to setup your VPS. This should be mostly fine but there is a delay nevertheless
• Providers like Slicehost etc have a waiting time before you can get your VPS. I think after signing up, it took a few weeks before I got an email.
• Cheap dedicated boxes have older processors which may be ok for you but I was not so sure about that. Another thing is that they have a regular hard drive and no RAID protection. Even with backups, I think its good to have RAID so that your server does not go down with a drive failure.
• I found the RAM being offered everywhere else to be almost half for the same price.

I did not find many reviews of VPSFarm when I was trying to signup and I already had not so great experience with two providers before so I was a little concerned. However I went through their docs online and finally ordered. Somethings that I really liked about them then were

• Xen based Virtual Private Servers (from my research I found out that xen is the preferred way)
• No setup time or fees or annual contracts (pay every month by paypal)
• Choice of operating systems (I picked debian as ubuntu was and is still missing)
• You can install/reboot/halt VPS using a web based control panel
• Bandwidth is unmetered (speed depends on your plan) and RAM/price ratio is awesome
• RAID 10 for storage

Something that may be of concern to some people are

• Only one IP address assigned. As far as I know, you cannot currently buy more. This is ok in general but not good if you want to host DNS. I however recommend outsourcing DNS and emai.
• Its not possible to move to a higher or lower plan without some kind of downtime or manually setting up the new VPS. If you are ok with downtime however, they would help you move.

So far (last 8 months) my experience with VPSFarm has been awesome. Only once my VPS went down for some 20 minutes but I got an email from them immediately and the issue was fixed. There was once a network outage but it was automatically restored in a minute. I started out with XEN 1024 plan and I am currently on XEN 2048 plan.

Do give VPSFarm a try and let us all know your experience too.

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I have been working on Muziboo for the last 11 months now. We have done one major design revision and countless small iterations to improve the design (and ofcourse the usability). Things have show a lot of improvement and often even surprised us a lot. Being an engineer by graduation and at heart, its pretty tough for me to do the UI stuff so I thought of writing down my learnings here for other people who are in the same boat. You should (and most likely would) know that i am not a UI or usability expert, so if you wantsome real advice, go hire one. I think they are worth the money.

If you want to learn about usability, Jacob Nielsen’s website and Don’t make me think make an excellent read.

So here is how not do design your UI :)

1. Lets make it look beautiful

This is certainly the worst way to design. Its good to make your pages look nice but that alone should not drive your decision about placing things in your layout. A good way to design is to decide on the purpose of the page and see what makes the most sense. What can make it clear what the page does and help your users in doing it.

2. Lets put more content in this page. Too little right now

This is another mistake that I have personally made too often. For example, putting another tag cloud so that users don’t quit the site on this page and have something to hop on to. Putting stuff thats not related to the theme of the page, dilutes the purpose of the page. Certainly no page should be a dead end but other links on a page should feel like a logical hop rather than some random links thrown in. So while music recommendations for related music is a good idea, a tag cloud probably is not.

3. Giving equal importance to all page elements

If you land on a page and nothing stands out, you will be confused. You would spend some time in figuring out what the pages does. The purpose of your page should be clear. You can use big fonts, graphics etc to make sure you can get the message across before everything grabs user’s attention. A great example of that is Flickr. “Share your photos Watch the world” has big impactful font. Enough to catch your attention before anything else grabs it.

4. Not having a consistent structure across the site

If your pages don’t follow a theme, your users would have to figure out stuff on every page. For example. when you go to orkut or facebook, you generally know where to find the comment box or where to find the apps, where to find fans (in groups/pages) etc. You even know where to find the “Share” link on every page. Once you have learnt a page, you don’t need to spend as much time learning other pages. Define your site’s structure and then follow it.

5. Designing based on user inputs alone

Its great to listen to your users and it really helps, but most likely you will be able to talk to only a few people and that would never give you a clear picture of whats working or not working. I recommend using google analytics or similar software to find out your weak pages. These are pages with highest exit rates or bounce rates. You can also find the entrance sources on the page (keywords that people use to find this page on a search engine). If your entrance keywords are related to the page and the bounce/exit rates are still high, may be people are not getting your message right and its time to redesign the page.

These were some of my personal learnings that I am applying to come out with a new design for Muziboo and I will post the results of my experiments in another blogpost. In the meantime, let me know your feedback.

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This may seem like a funny topic for a blog post. The idea is not to come up with a  title that draws attention (I hope it does) but to write about an inherent dilemma that lot of bootstrappers go through. I go through it and I know a few other people go through it. I am not sure if its true only in the Indian context or globally. I have a feeling that it has to do a lot with India though and you will soon know why I feel that way.

Why is someone not doing it? People Need it!

When I was in IIT Guwahati we were a small campus with about 500 students. Compare this with other IITs that have that kind of intake for undergrad program alone per year. I think the first few batches are really entrepreneurial in the sense that they try to define the culture of an institute. In our case the culture meant a lot of technical and cultural festivals that other IITs hold too. Stuff like Alcheringa, Techniche and having chapters of societies like IEEE, ACM, SPICMACAY etc. Fewer students meant fewer people to attend and even fewer people to organize these festivals (they are almost 99% student initiatives). The first few batches could have easily ignored these things as we were small and not there yet but they did not. They fought hard to get these festivals, chapters going. They wanted IITG to feel what other IITs feel every year. They wanted juniors to come in and feel part of a legacy. They wanted to get there … and they tried to do on their own. I am sure they could have focussed their efforts elsewhere and may be achieved something more for themselves and not cared about this, but they did not.

When I joined there were lots of things in place and lots of things not in place. Like some other classmates, I played a role in SPICMACAY, Technical festivals and the IEEE chapter. It took a lot of time and sometimes I wondered why I am doing that (so did many of my friends). The answer was that I just felt responsible and felt bad for not helping in shaping the culture when I would crib about a lot of missing things. I think thats what it is. Some people just feel responsible for shaping up the culture in a place and feel ashamed in running away from it when they can clearly see something missing.

Aren’t we talking about the web here?

Yes we most certainly are talking about the web here. I feel that web (in India atleast) is no different from what we described above. We know how its in the west and a lot of us crave for those kind of webservices in India too. It could be web-ifying your daily needs (like food, medicine, reading, shopping etc) or building online communities around hobbies (say photography, music, writing etc). Lot of times we feel the need for a service and start building it. No one else would attempt it probably because there is no VCish value creation there (millions –> billions) but there is a lot of value creation in terms of touching a lot of lives.

Once you start building a service that people actually like using, you find out that it takes a lot of time, energy, thought and money. Time is not free as most people think because you can always use that time to pick up another consulting gig and make more money or just plain spend it with family. So in the end you end up asking yourself why you are doing something that may or may not scale up to millions of dollars (or say to the salaries that your peers would draw for the next few years). I think again the answer lies in the fact that most times when you crib, you also feel responsible for fixing things up. You go out and create those missing services creating a lot of value but not value enough. I am quite certain many entrepreneurs around me felt a need (and a business too) and started up. However only later you realize that not all needs are needs enough for VCs and people around you. Ofcourse the lack of any kind of angels (people like you, the dreamers but with more money) makes things very tough along the way.

So what am I trying to say?

May be this is a very personal post but I do know some other people going through this dilemma. I know that in India there is a need for lots of everyday products but once someone builds them they are gonna get into this classic problem of not creating “enough value”. If you talk to the “experienced” people (people who create real value or nothing at all), you will get to know how well they know the broadband penetration numbers, the mobile penetration numbers and how semantic web is the future of the web and nothing else is worth solving. I am quite certain that it happens all the time.

Sorry if you were looking for a solution to all this … as I write .. I am looking for one too.

Thanks for reading so far!

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