Life in the Garage (Part 1)
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
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Comments
Hi Prateek,
As you have mentioned, we all have read a lot about startups that became so successful and big now through books and net, but yours is definitely a good lesson for people planning for bootstrapping.
One thing which really caught my mind was, developing which part of the product is important. we have to manage Scope, rather than time and budget. which is easy and effective.
My best wishes for a successful venture and I would definitely share this my frends.
~Ram
Thanks for the comment and I would sure try the website you have mentioned!! thanks for that.. but I was searching on the net for alternate webistes, I didnt got this name. anyways let me try this one.!!
[…] you will probably have to be very disciplined while doing your startup. If you are living the garage life, you will have limited funds and you would wanna make the best use of your time. Its good because […]
Hey Prateek,
Had heard about you and your site(muziboo.com) some time back in an article published in the Times of India. Today chanced upon your blog. And boy, you are one hell of an inspiration to start up ;o)
It’s impossible to believe muziboo’s run by only 2 ppl!! Hats off to you and your wife. No one can deny you guys success.
I too dream of a start up but haven’t found my ground yet. Hey, there’s this one thing that keeps putting me off from designing my own site. UI. Did you design muziboo all by yourself or employed someone? Would you elaborate a bit on that?
Phew! pretty big comment.. sry if it takes a bit more of ur time.. It’s just that start ups and their founders excite me a lot ;o)
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