Prateek Dayal

Since I started working on Muziboo, I have been a big fan of release early, release often philosophy. We launched Muziboo one month after getting the idea with very basic functionality and a very simple design. Since then, we have been listening to our users and continuously improving it. However I have to accept that many times in retrospect, I have been embarrassed by what I released. At times, I have also renounced release early release often for a few weeks (in search of design/functionality zen) only to realize later that its a bad idea and that I don’t have much progress to show for those weeks. I recently listened to a Mixergy interview with Eric Ries and started thinking about why we still don’t see that many examples of release early release often and see so many stealth mode startups around us. Here are a few points I think influence people:

A different kind of vacuum

I think everyone agrees that there is nothing worse than building in a vacuum. However I think the second worst thing that you can do is to build with feedback from people that are not your potential users. Most stealth mode startups take feedback from their close friends, family and other people in their network. The problem with this approach is that if someone is not your potential user, he/she is always gonna compare your product with the successful products of the world and not based on ‘that one thing’ that you do really well. You are only gonna get very generic feedback like “design is not that cool” or “you should try to use more ajax and overlay windows”.  In fact its very easy to get wrapped up in refining your product’s interface and delay your launch.

Ideally you should just get the basic functionality right and launch the product. You should not care if a lot of people think  that your product sucks (it does, but thats ok). Get your first few real users and listen to what they say. Solve a small problem first and then grow from there. Sure, you are going to lose some people who are never gonna come back to the site but thats ok. Internet is a large place so won’t run out of users anytime soon and once you have critical mass, most likely they will come back anyway. Find the first set of users who care for the solution that you are offering to them (because it solves one of their pain points) and grow with their feedback. Don’t obsess with UI before launch just because your ex-boss is still not impressed or because that big blogger won’t write about you unless you have a nicer interface (he won’t write about you anway and it does not matter again).

Stealth mode as a marketing technique

Another reason I see a lot of people doing stealth mode startup is to create buzz with the bloggers and potential users. Get over it. Most likely stealth mode strategy won’t create the buzz for you unless you are already very popular. Its just gonna give you too much time to work on stuff that does not matter. Some startups do end up creating some buzz (or curiosity) but in the wrong circle. Your twitter followers and your blog readers will probably get to know that you are working on this next cool thing but thats as far as it goes.  Most likely your target audience will never hear about your stealth mode product and wait for its launch. If people are coming to your site, show them the real thing and not a text box to add their email address to the wait list. Hunch can pull it off but you probably can’t.

Working in stealth mode?

Trying to avoiding rejection (and embarrassment)

More often that not, people are just not comfortable releasing something thats not upto their standard of perfection. They don’t wanna release something they are not extremely proud of on the day of launch. Right from childhood, we are taught to work on our weaknesses and we simply can’t release something that other people can easily point holes at. My advice is that its ok. In my two years of entrepreneurship I have realized that you can’t avoid hearing from some people how your product sucks or you that you have no competitive advantage. You cannot avoid those uncomfortable moments where some people tell you that they would never use your product in the current shape and that it has a long way to go before it gets any where. You cannot avoid that situation by postponing the launch by three more months and working some more on it. As an entrepreneur you have to learn to accept some rejection (atleast early on). You cannot and should not try to please everyone.

In the end most of what I have said is from my personal experience and observation. There are always cases where working in stealth is better and if you have the vision and domain knowledge to pull it off, you should do it. However if you are like most bootstrapped startups, you can benefit a lot from releasing early, talking to your real users and then releasing often with their feedback. As Eric Ries says in the Mixergy interview, understand the difference between your product launch and PR launch.

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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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I have recently made some changes to the blog and my site. I have moved my blog from prateekdayal.net/blog to prateekdayal.net. I had plans of making a real website but I finally accepted that I will never have the time or motivation to do so. I have also installed a new (less jazzier) theme. Even though, I have redirected the links, due to the move, some of the of images be broken. If you find something, just drop me a line or add a comment and I will fix it.

I had already moved my techblog to muziboo dev blog so there is no more a tech tab in the navigation menu. Since I use feedburner (who doesn’t?), the feeds should not be affected.

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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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The most common question that I get when I meet people is “How is Muziboo doing?”. My answer typically reflects reality, which is that Muziboo is doing fine but we still need one more year of solid effort to get ‘there’. If you ask me this question right now, I will also tell you that I am currently doing a couple of consulting gigs to build some cash reserve and that Muziboo has grown to a point where the revenues not only cover the cost of running the service but also a part of our living cost.

Quite surprisingly, there are a lot of rumors currently in the startup circle that we are folding up. I first heard it a month back and tweeted that we are not. But I am hearing it more often lately. I am not sure if it’s because of the realistic picture I paint or the fact that I am doing some consulting currently or simply the fact that Muziboo hasn’t taken off like Twitter or Facebook yet that makes people talk about Muziboo shutting shop.

So, I thought I would quell this rumor once and for all and also throw in some stats to talk about why we think we are doing fine and why we think we need at-least a year more to get ‘there’. Below is our all time traffic graph

As you can see, we have had most of our growth in the last one year. To us its not very surprising because, we believe, it is hard to figure out your business in the very first year and it also takes time to understand where you can add real value and have meaningful growth. When we started back in July 2007, we were focusing on growing only in India and we were trying to grow through a lot of offline channels – going to colleges, putting up posters, organizing an event etc. Around August 2008, we realized that offline efforts cannot help you build a profitable online business and hence we decided to focus on online channels like SEO and social media for growth. At the same time, we decided to have a more global focus. This completely changed our growth curve. Btw, here is what our last month’s visitors map looks like

We currently have traffic from pretty much across the world with US and India being the two biggest sources. This is definitely very exciting, challenging and rewarding. It also answers the question about market size that a lot of people ask us. By default, people assume that our market is only in India and therefore very limited and basically not worth doing. I honestly feel that its not the case and the map proves the point. However, international traffic comes with its own challenges. Its not a very easy task to cater to such diverse traffic and thats what we are gonna be spending next one year of our efforts on. Ofcourse not just that but you get the idea.

Hopefully this will give people some real info about what/how we are doing. So if next time someone mentions to you that Muziboo is shutting down, please do me a favour and point them to this post.

Thanks for reading this post.

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Last few weeks, I have had a few of my relatives call me up and ask me to help them out figure reservations on some travel sites. These are well known (and well funded) sites like cleartrip and makemytrip so one would expect them to be super easy to use and book. However I was amazed at how screwed up the usability of these sites is in general.

On cleartrip for example, there is no help for the credit card field. For most people, transacting for the first time on the internet, its very hard to figure out if they should enter the card number with spaces or without. In fact its very easy to write a small javascript that will just take the credit card number and remove spaces (or dashes) if the user enters them. To top it, the CC field does not allow more than 16 characters so if you type with spaces, you will be stuck at 13 characters with no error/warning message.

I have had a relative struggle with this with this screen and call me up for help last week. In fact, it took me sometime to figure out (over phone) why the site was not accepting his credit card and why he was not able to punch in more than 13 characters. According to him, the number on the credit card was printed with spaces so thats what he expected to punch in there.

There are several other examples and I am sure a lot of these issues can be exposed with some usability testing.

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Just found out this awesome tool called scribfire which lets you add blog posts using firefox and I am making this post using it!

Lately I have been trying out more firefox plugins that help me minimize context switch while working and so far I have found twitter fox quite helpful. Ofcourse its helpful only with notifications turned off. With notifications turned on, its an even bigger distraction :)

What plugins do you use to minimize context switches?

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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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Dear HSBC Credit Card Division,

While I appreciate your attempt to flatter and impress the platinum card holders, I would request you to stop printing those fat booklets that you send with each card. In fact if you can’t do that, atleast don’t reprint the same garbage and send it with add on cards. If you recommend people to go for eStatement, then you should also send them just a one page summary of benefits with a web link when you send them new cards.

In the interest of our dying planet, please consider this. You can donate the money you save in printing costs to Green Peace

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