Prateek Dayal

Here is a mail I received from The Smart Techie magazine, that can help you get there. Remember that this is the same company that organizes the startup city event every year.

Dear Sir/Madam.,

How are you doing?

Greetings from The Smarttechie-SiliconIndia.

The May 2009 edition of The SmartTechie will be on the top 25 Emerging technology companies. We are looking at what exciting technologies companies are working for and prodigy of leadership team and investors of private companies. A few of these companies will be profiled in the magazine. We are talking to several startups to see who are the Best 25 we can feature in the magazine. A panel of analysts, Venture Capitalists and our editorial team will select the companies.

It will be good idea to feature your company as one of the 25 Emerging Companies.  There is a nominal sponsorship cost, which I have indicated below. This package is specially worked out for smaller enterprises. If you can review the same and let me know by end of today, we could plan the next steps.

COST: Rs 30,000 – Top 25 Nomination.

We would be offering you:

1. Inclusion in the Top 25 Emerging Technology Companies list.
2. One page of Company Profile
3. One full page ad in the SmartTechie at a later date.
4. The company Profile will be displayed on the online magazine page too: www.thesmarttechie.com/magazine

COST: Rs 15,000 – Only Advertisement.

We would be offering you:

1. One Page Advertisment in the issue of Top 25 Emerging Technology Companies.
2. Online banner ad on : www.thesmarttechie.com/magazine
3. 1 Page Coverage

Please do let me know how we can take this forward. It will be nice to close this loop asap so that we get things rolling.

We can look at a mutual relationship so that your company gets more visibility. Let me know what you think.

If you have anything else on your mind, I shall be open for ideas.

If you need the contact, contact me and I will pass it on to you :)

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A few days back I received an email from NSRCEL about a talk by Kanwal Rekhi on entrepreneurship. I heard about Dr. Rekhi first when I did my internship in IIT Bombay a few years back. Dr Rekhi is an IITB alumnus and has donated significant amount of money to IIT Bombay and started KReSIT there and also in Michigan Tech. He has a very impressive resume as an entrepreneur and as an investor and I decided to drive down to IIM to listen to his advice to students/entrepreneurs.

Dr Rekhi talked initially about his journey as an entrepreneur and the challenges he faced being an Indian entrepreneur in the valley in the early 80’s. Around that time, Indians were considered to be great engineers but not good CEOs or businessmen and therefore they had some trouble raising money. Dr. Rekhi told that he met over a 100 VCs before they got funded. He finally took Excelan (his startup) public and it was listed on NASDAQ in 1987. They were later acquired by Novell where he stayed till 1995.

I really liked a couple of points that he mentioned during his talk and would like to list them down here

•  Always have your fundas right. What he means by this is that you should always think of revenues, costs etc while making business decisions
•  If you wanna sell to the geeks, let geeks do the customer service and pre sales.
•  Ignore YAFO (yet another f**ing opportunity). Have a single focus and try to learn and solve one pain point well. It takes years to do that and distraction is easy
•  Your first funding should come from friends and family because it comes with more responsibility to be successful and give returns. This is generally good early on

There were some more points he mentioned that I don’t remember now. A lot of points would seem like common sense but it was good to hear it from someone who has such an impressive track record. Its amazing how many of these points are being ignored by companies right now, especially in web. If you get a chance to listen to him, please don’t miss it.

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Nithya and I attended proto.in, the startup event on 18th and 19th July. It was a very interesting experience. A lot of things I loved .. a lot of things that I found very wierd :)

However before I begin, I would like to mention that the organizing team works very hard at making this event a success. A great thing I noticed was that the organizing team was trying to help every presenting company and I could never see/hear them talk about any startup  with any bias (good or bad). I think thats a really difficult but great thing to do.

Day 1

Proto is a two day event. Day 1 is different for presenting startups. After the keynote you spend most of the day in rehearsals fine tuning your presentation with feedback from the panel. This is fun and useful but the downside is that you miss most of the other talks going on in parallel. However as proto allocates 6 mins for presentation, its good to generally get a feel of timing on stage. The stage is pretty massive and can overwhelm noobies (I swear) so its good to go through the rehearsals. We got some feedback on our presentation but mostly it went fine. Unlike some of the other startups, we had a walk through and no ppt. I think eventually turned out to be good as the response to the demo was very encouraging.

There was an alumni dinner at the end of day one in Gourmet Gallery (hosted by proto) where we got  to catch up with some of the earlier presenters. In particular it was greating chatting with Ankit and Nandini of instablogs. They have built an awesome community of citizen journalists from across the world and they told us about their experiences and challenges. Incidentally, they happen to be a couple as well.

Day 2

The second day of proto is the more exciting one. The day started with an introduction to proto and a video on where the companies that presented in previous proto editions stand. I liked the fact that proto mentioned that 3 companies have shut shop. I think its great to see that failure is no longer considered a bad thing. There was also a Proto for Dummies video which was pretty well done. I think the videos will be up on youtube pretty soon.

After the videos, the presentations started. We were the 6th company to present and the presentation was pretty well received in general. I think we were the only company that finished before time, a fact that WatBlog mentioned on their blog in our company profile! After the presentations the companies were given a stall where they could interact with interested customers/investors or press. I think this is where most of the business cards were swapped. At the end of the day there was an invite only networking dinner at Radisson. However I did not find many VCs there and so ended up hanging out other friends. I think a few people were sort of disappointed by the lack of VCs. I could spot the CEO of Indiatimes there but by the time I could get to him, he disappered. I think it was disappointing to see that most of the high profile people were hanging out amongst themselves and it was sort of difficult to approach them. The mindshare that we thought would happen, did not really happen.

General Observations

I did however talk to a couple of investors during the course of the 2nd day and to quite a few entrepreneurs/ CEOs. It was in fact pretty good talking to the investors. I had always heard that talking to investors gives you a good perspective and I think its true. I had also heard that there are quite a few senior startuppy people who give a lot of gyaan and try to pull you down and I think that is true too. In general its not very hard to find a few people in proto who look like they have come down there just to feel important by giving gyaan to clueless entrepreneurs like me. A lot of times having been in the US helps all the more in exuding superiority. There are also people like BharatMatrimony founder who talk quite modestly and sound very encouraging.

Blogosphere is buzzing with blogs about the companies that presented so I would not write about them. The companies I found most impressive were Lipikaar, Blink, PicPorta and Eko. I would add LifeBlob to the list but then I did not discover them in proto.

In general I think proto is a great place to be. You can meet a lot of interesting people/companies and have a great time besides getting some people excited about your product.

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I have written about why do a startup and also about life in the garage and both the posts have a recognizable negative tone. However startups are pretty interesting and generally a great learning experience. I therefore thought of writing a post on what doing a startup can teach you that you cannot easily learn otherwise. Not in a similar timeframe atleast.

So here is a list of ten things I feel a startup can teach you (in no particular order).

1. Discipline and time management
2. Taking complete responsibility for your actions
3. Value and power of money (especially if you are bootstrapping)
4. How to build a great network and make it work for you
5. Wearing multiple hats with reasonable success
6. Great Technical learning
7. ‘I have to do this’ attitude instead of ‘Can I do this?’ or ‘Should I do this?’
8. Great writing skills (Blog, emails, newsletters)
9. Working in constraints (design, technology, marketing budget)
10. An eye for useful stuff, trends and opportunities (reading blogs, docs, logs, listening to people … whatever)

Disclaimer: In no way am I implying that I am a master of the everything mentioned above :) I am just saying that a year or more into a startup, you would have improved in a lot of these areas.

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Getting Real is one of my favorite books on writing software and I love reading it every now and then. However when it comes to real projects, one is very likely to skip the advice given in that book. Its very easy to overbuild a product especially if you love coding. I have seen this in Muziboo and also seen it in a couple of other projects that I have been closely associated with. On the other side, I have seen a lot of examples of release early release often in successful products and have come to believe that it is in general a good idea to write less code initially and write more as and when required.

Its not the features, Its the idea

People should come to your service for the idea or the philosophy of your product and not for fancy features like ajax search. An example that I really like is @ replies were not part of twitter. They were introduced later when people started using twitter that way. Same goes for video response feature in youtube which was introduced when people started responding to a video with another video. Assuming that your service will not take off until there are enough features to wow everyone is a mistake. Delaying launch to add more features is an even bigger mistake.

For wide adoption, build what people want

If people start using your service in ways you did not imagine and you build a feature that facilitates such usage, its gonna have adoption. Both @replies of twitter and video responses of youtube were such features. Its a good idea to not let the geek in you decide what features to implement because the coolest new feature may not be what people want. When your users ask for a feature, they adopt and evangelize it. In case of Muziboo, some features that we built did not have huge adoption but surprisingly features offered as part of pro account had good adoption even though they are paid. These were the features that we rolled out after users asked for it.

Don’t underestimate the cost of a feature

A feature is not just a hundred lines of code that you can hack together in a few hours. When you have a live site, a feature is much more. It is

• Real estate on the page
• Cross browser compatibility work
• Documentation work
• Bug tracking and fixing

Make sure you factor in all of above before you decide to implement something new.

Don’t listen to everyone

Finally don’t listen to everybody. Don’t listen to the geeks and coders who love coding new features or use cool new technologies. Whenever in doubt, ask your users.

If you have not already read, I highly recommend reading the Getting Real book.  By the time you finish the book you will realize that constraints are not such bad things after all :)

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I had been thinking of writing this post for a long time now but never really got around to writing it. Partly, I wanted to know how some other people feel about this. I think it was good to have a discussion with Prof. Suresh yesterday at IIM Bangalore about these issues. So here it is finally :)

These days, Bangalore has atleast one entrepreneurship related event every week. More often, there are more. Some of these are conferences and some unconferences. Most events see a large number of aspiring entrepreneurs and a few people who have already taken the plunge. People who have been there and done that are always in minority. Specially in the unconferences, most people are aspiring entrepreneurs or people who are currently fighting it out to make it big.

If you attend these events and pay some attention, you can almost always catch words like amazon, google, youtube in the discussions. You can often hear about how Google came in when search was already a very competitive market and they revolutionized everything. How they did not make any money for years but focussed on building a great service and eventually reached great heights. People often talk of how the founders of these startups had a vision and they stuck to it untill they made it big. However for some reason the same people find it very hard to relate to the entrepreneurs around them. Entrepreneurs who are more or less like them, who worked with them before and are now on their own, trying to figure things out.

I find this very ironical. I believe there are somethings almost all entrepreneurs have in common. Some phases in life almost every entrepreneur/startup has to go through. Talking of the same phase in the context of successful startup inspires people whereas a startup in the same phase (but not big yet) cannot find many supporters (in the startup circle).

Confusion Rules a Startup

More often than not, people assume that by definition, startups would have it all figured out and only then founders would take a plunge. However if you zoom into the early life of most successful startups, they too took some time to figure out things. Paypal and Blogger are two great examples of startups who took sometime before they finally knew what it is thats gonna make it big for them. Things are never crystal clear right from the start. Zeroing in on something that can become big and can be monetized takes some time. Even in the context of an idea, there are several details that take time of figure out. Most startups do their market research on the way. Founders at Work is a great book to read to understand startups and entrepreneurs.

You don’t start a million dollar company. You grow yours into one

You can at best start a company. You cannot start a million dollar company. Atleast not most times. You identify a need, solve some problems and then scale it up. There are a lot of startups who have grown this way (Craigslist, PlentyofFish, Blogger). In fact there have been several companies in India too. The most popular of the lot would certainly be Naukri.com. All these companies took time to grow. Simply because you have not made a million dollar in the first year or two does not mean you will not make it in the next five.

You will make mistakes

Making mistakes is inevitable. When you are trying to do something new (again relative) and when there are no references/guides available for every step you take, you will go wrong often. Even the big companies have had failed products. Google had to buy youtube despite having Google Videos. Apple has had failed products. Several companies join the Techcrunch Deadpool every month. Mistakes are part of the whole startup experience. So if your next door startup just threw away their last 3 months of work because it did not take off the way they thought, don’t write them off.

Marketing IS a problem

“But how will you market your idea?” is a question I hear too often from the crowd in such events. Trust me when I say that we are all trying to figure it out. I believe all startups are finally an exercise in sales and marketing more than anything. So the companies that figure it out are gonna make it big and you know how long it takes to make it big. So don’t expect to hear in a few lines the answer to this question. Marketing is an ongoing process. Everyone is new in internet marketing. We all know how romantic social media is but very few of us have had a chance to go out with it yet.

Photo Credit: richardmasoner

Monetization takes time

Most companies put monetization last. I think its fair enough considering that no real monetization can happen unless you grow to a critical mass. Since every startup (atleast the bootstrapping ones) have very limited bandwidth, founders prefer to put that into marketing and gaining that critical mass rather than monetizing early on. Give these guys sometime. Google could monetize only after a few years. Facebook and Orkut are still trying to figure it out. Would you write them off?

Its not all romantic

Startups take time and this is doubly true in India, where internet has still not reached every corner of the country. There are not gonna be many quick exits. Most people would have to stick to their ideas for reasonably long and not everything they do during that phase is gonna look romantic. The Dip is gonna take over sooner than later and only perseverance would get startups out of it. During the dip, romantic is the last thing a startup is. However once out of the dip, that phase and the story of how founders could pull the startup out of it looks very romantic. So next time you meet a guy who has been trying to get to the next level for the last one year, don’t write off his startup. If you are concerned, try to analyze his bottlenecks and see if you or your contacts can help.

This post is not about not questioning a startup. Its about taking the right lessons from the successful (or failed) startups and then looking at startups around you in the light of that knowledge. If we want to develop a true ecosystem, we must begin to understand the startups well first. We must understand that they are different from big companies, they have different needs and different priorities. Thats what makes entrepreneurship so differnet and hence fun :)

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I must accept that working out of home is an art and I have been trying to master it ever since I quit my job last year. When you work out of home, you end up saving a lot of travel time and traffic stress but there are a lot more opportunities to waste time or even worse, feel bored and demotivated.

There are some things that have helped me avoid the traps and stay productive. Most of these techniques start having some effect only after a couple of weeks so like everything else, patience helps here too :)

Be Accountable and track your progress

Even though you are your own boss, you need to stay accountable to yourself and your startup. That means setting up milestones and then reviewing the progress weekly (or bi-weekly if you prefer).
Since I responsible for the development work in Muziboo, I use Trac + SVN (at assembla) to keep a track of my tasks and then review the progress every now and then. Your work may be never ending but having measurable tasks helps you get a sense of accomplishment amongst other things.

Don’t let the boring work bring you down

This one took me a little while to get used to. Every entrepreneur has to do a lot of not so exciting stuff too and we generally keep avoiding it for as long as we can. This results in a lot of baggage that can cause you to worry about it every now and then. Keep a track of this work too and finish one off for every one or two exciting things that you do. Boring work could be anything from sending a courier to replying to a few emails or getting your car insured :)

Have an office in home

This one is often talked about in the bootstrapping circle. Don’t work out of your bedroom. Have a separate room that is just for work. Try to get out of it even while you have a tea break. Be there just to code.

Don’t try to be over productive

You can be the most productive if you don’t work 24×7. Its good to compulsorily take a day off every week. Initially this make seem like a crime but over a few weeks this would actually help you stay more productive. A break on a sunday helps you look forward to Monday mornings and also gives your head a well deserved break. Also remember that ideas rarely hit you while you are slogging so a break can actually be more useful than you think.

In the end I feel working out of home is like working out of office. Nothing more nothing less. You need to give yourself breaks just like you did when you had a corporate job and you need to review your progress just like you did back then. Setting up some processes help a lot. Working out of home, you have the luxury of setting up processes that are best for you. Use it :)

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I have been doing Muziboo for about a year now and it has certainly been one of the greatest learning experience of my life. I have learnt a lot, met a lot of interesting people and generally had an exciting time. But still sometimes late in the night when I am done coding something up, I step back and wonder why I am doing this :)

So I decided to write down my thoughts here. Basically these are some of the much talked about reasons people quote in favor of doing your own thing. I have written why I feel these reasons cannot really be the source of motivation for long. Atleast they are no longer a real motivating force for me.

Be Your Own Boss

Unlike how it looks, 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 you will learn to be more productive and value time but that disciplined life is unlike what you would imagine before you get into your startup. Think of your boss or manager who comes on time, works all day and leaves late (and works on weekends too). You will be that guy :)

Make a quick exit and retire

Good luck with that. I personally feel that atleast in India thats not gonna happen. Not in the web 2.0 space for sure. Web 2.0 ecosystem here is still shaping up. Big giants like Reliance and IndiaTimes still prefer to build their itimes and bigaddas than go out and acquire exisitng networks. I suspect that the top tier sitting there looks at exisiting networks and decides to throw 6 man months internally to build something than to acquire. I am pretty sure that this will change but I think its gonna take a few years. Great acquisitions typically happen when the acquiring company knows how to take something and make it a part of their brand and monetize/grow it. Blogger is a great example of that. Google would have never been able to push out so many adsense units so easily otherwise. Same goes for feedburner too. So quick exit cannot keep you motivated for long.

Make something that millions use

You wish! There is a possibility that millions will use your product but that will take some time (few years if you are lucky and more otherwise). Engineering a product and marketing it are very different games altogether. If you believe in “make it and they will come”, you are gonna be surprised soon. Selling your product to millions takes a lot of time and money. You will get a lot of passionate users initially but finding hundreds of thousands of such users is gonna take time.

Great Technical Learning

This is true to a large extent but after about a year, you will have to move fulltime into sales to battle problems mentioned in the point above. I have talked to a lot of startups in the last few months and I believe that eventually almost always all startups become an exercise in sales than technology. This is most certainly true for the co-founders atleast. Your code is no good if enough people don’t use it. In web particularly I feel the most interesting challenges come in only when you have a lot of traffic. Building a website is not really rocket science. Scaling it is.

So then why do a startup. I guess that can be another post :) Sorry to disappoint you if you did not find what you were looking for. If you have any points to add, please do leave them in the comments. I would love to know if its just me (and some people I know) or there are other startups too out there who agree with what I have written.

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mGinger is a well funded startup ($2M) that helps you in freeing up your mobile bills and get exciting deals in on your mobile. From what I understand, they basically pay you to receive ads on your mobile. Whether this is a neat idea or not is debatable and we will debate it later. What has really infuriated me is the fact that mGinger is actually spamming people by email to join their service. So they are basically trying to build a spam free mobile solution (you need to opt in to get ads) and spreading it by email spamming. Quite ironical.

The great thing about their spam is that they are not spamming all that blindly. They have acquired some database of users and their connections (not sure from where) and their invitations look like invitations for friends. I have verified from people that they never sent such invitations. There cannot be a bigger proof than the fact that I got an invitation from a friend who passed away last month (I can prove this if needed). This has seriously infuriated me and I think mGinger is generating massive negative PR by doing so. If well funded startups in the mobile space pull such cheap tricks to spread, I am not sure where the whole bazillion dollar indian mobile market is headed.

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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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