Prateek Dayal

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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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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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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*This is crossposted from Muziboo.com Blog. The only thing not true anymore is that I am not fulltime into Muziboo (as in no consulting on the side). The original post can found here

Nithya and I started Muziboo.com around July 2007 and have been running it since then. I have been hacking away to keep the service up and running and Nithya has been working on spreading the word about it

After installing this wordpress blog today, I decided to write a bit about our journey so far. The motivation behind muziboo, our vision, people we have met and generally recollect the exciting last 6 months.

The idea for Muziboo came one fine morning over tea when were chatting (literally) with a friend and I told him how I always feel a service like Flickr.com can be really cool for music, specially for a country like ours with so many people passionate about it. Nithya was around and she felt that this can be a real cool idea. We brainstormed for sometime (may be a few days) and decided we will go ahead and implement it. We knew that a service like this has to be very different from youtube .. we wanted to have something more serious about music and therefore decided to go the audio way. I started learning about web technologies and Nithya started researching about user communities etc.

After evaluating lots of technologies, I decided to write the site in Ruby On Rails … I was quite convinced that I do not want to do the site in a CMS .. just to make sure I understand the internals well and can modify/customize the website as much as I want. We worked for about 3 or 4 weeks and started showcasing the site to people around 15th August. By September 2007 we, were about 100 user strong and had about 50 uploads.

Thats the time we got associated with Open Coffee Club (OCC) Bangalore. On the left is a picture from one of the opencoffee club meets where we were chatting about Muziboo.  In general, I feel OCC is a great place to go and hang out if you are trying to start something on your own. Great people and great brainstorming and sometimes you can get some real help for free

So far Muziboo had been a part time venture for us. Around October time frame, I quit my job and started doing Muziboo fulltime (almost). Nithya quit her job one month after that and we are now both completely into Muziboo. I am still working on a few consulting projects because we are bootstrapping Muziboo and that helps us meet our expenses comfortably.

Thats the story of Muziboo till about early November. Personally I feel this is where it turned really exciting for us. I will write more about it in part 2 of this series. Stay tuned!

The second part of this post can be found at Muziboo Blog here

I will soon be writing a post about how and why I transitioned out of my day job into a fulltime startup that still does not pay the bills for me. Please subscribe to my RSS feed to stay tuned.

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