Prateek Dayal

Everyone agrees that the hardest part for a startup is to get the early set of enthusiastic users. We got our first set of really enthusiastic users and evangelists from Barcamp Bangalore 5th edition (BCB5). They gave us tons of good feedback, blogged about us, turned into passionate users and got more passionate users. Its not very hard to imagine why this happens. The thing about barcamps is that there are geeks there who are willing to listen to you simply because you have created something yourself. They don’t care whether the whole world is using your service yet or not. If you have something cool and can convince them why its great, they are willing to try it out and even talk to other people or blog about it.  They may sometimes get attracted to your service simply because its built in Ruby on Rails (or their favorite framework) :)

However its very hard to travel to different cities or countries to attend such events and demo your startup and talk to the people about what you do. This is where I feel bootstrappers have a disadvantage compared to the well funded companies.  But we can easily fix this problem by having a Barcamper Exchange Program (lets call it that untill we find a better name) where we have a pool of barcampers who are willing to demo your app in their local barcamps. They won’t do it for the money or as a favour but simply because they are in the same boat and know how hard it is to get the word out there.

In fact such a thing is not too hard to execute. One can simply create a group on linkedin where all the upcoming barcamps can be listed. Startup founders can join the group and show their interest in being demoed at a particular barcamp and tell which barcamps they can demo someone else’s startup. If there is good matche in interest/geography etc, the founders can take if offline and demo each others startups.  It may require some tweaking but you get the idea.

However as wise men say, ideas are worthless. However I wanted to post this on my blog and see what people feel about it. If there is enough interest, we can go ahead and create the linkedin group and take this forward!

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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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Barcamp Bangalore 5 was a pretty interesting experience. I met literally hundreds of interesting people, attended a few interesting sessions and organised a session on “Challenges in building an online community”. On the second day of barcamp, there was a blogging session that Nithya attended. The day before, a few of us (Nithya, I and a friend) were talking over coffee about why for a startup like Muziboo its so tough to get blog mentions whereas for sites like Shelfari even their cheap tricks can get them publicity (negative or positive, as the proverb goes, it is publicity). Nithya raised this point in the session and a big debate followed.

I had the misfortune of missing the debate because a lot of bloggers from the Blogaloreans group were there and they have lots of strong opinions about blogging and I would have loved to discuss it with them. From what I read on some blogs, Nithya’s point was that if we claim to build a network or entrepreneurial ecosystem (we met most of these bloggers at networking events), asking them to review the website and write about it should come only naturally. However most bloggers feel that they want to write about something that “has something for them”. An example I believe was writing about Om Shanti Om v/s Sawariya by about almost all major bloggers and Nithya’s point was that most bloggers claim that they are blogging for a social cause, in which case writing about mundane stuff such as which movie wins the rat race (I add this word) really isn’t a social responsibility. I have a few points to make myself

1. Organizers of Barcamp Bangalore work for no money, no credit as someone said and no real benefits, but they still do it. Hats off to them. Asking a “Whats in it for me” there would not have helped. They do it because they feel our country or our ecosystem needs it and if they don’t do it, it won’t get done. I have had a similar experience volunteering for SPICMACAY and Techniche in IITG and I can relate to that feeling.

2. Open Source people do this all the time. They stick to their cause even when most people use (abuse?) their software and the license and these guys get almost no money back. They wanna do it and they do it and have fun …

3. Services such as blogger were run for years by a guy who went almost broke, had to ask for donations and even break up with his girlfriend on the way. He had a vision and he stuck with it. Sometime, the returns don’t come anytime soon.

Lots of us talk about how so many social networks are mushrooming up with the same functionality and are even getting funded but when there is a new webservice that tries to do something different, the same people never take notice because the scale is too small or the media buzz is not there. I feel we write about what we hear everywhere … not what someone tells us .. thats too small to be mentioned most times.

My disappointment is not that bloggers don’t write about Muziboo, it is that most bloggers write about how great things are not happening or whats wrong with things but sometimes fail to take notice of things at smaller scale trying to do something right or different. Shelfari invites sucked but our invites were always neat, but we never got any press coverage coz of that. Can only a controversy get you publicity?

I don’t say that you have to do anything as charity (you can if you want) or as a favour (never do that). I am not doing Muziboo for free so I don’t expect anyone do do me a favour. However are we all really gonna be doing stuff that can pay us back in terms of money or traffic in the next two days?

Just wanna end this post saying that people who have been talked about in this post are people I know really well and I am taking the liberty of quoting some of them. I am writing this post more to say what I feel than to personally comment on anyone. In the end its a free world and it is our skills too that can compel (in a +ve way) someone to help us.

Thanks to all the Barcamp Organizers … had there been no barcamp .. there would have been no debates :)

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