10 things only a startup experience can teach you
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).
- Discipline and time management
- Taking complete responsibility for your actions
- Value and power of money (especially if you are bootstrapping)
- How to build a great network and make it work for you
- Wearing multiple hats with reasonable success
- Great Technical learning
- ‘I have to do this’ attitude instead of ‘Can I do this?’ or ‘Should I do this?’
- Great writing skills (Blog, emails, newsletters)
- Working in constraints (design, technology, marketing budget)
- 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 and avoiding useless features
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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Relating to real life entrepreneurship
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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How to stay productive while working out of home
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 :)
Photo By: Kenya the Duck Toller - James Charron
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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Why are you doing a startup!
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 spams blindly. Sucks!
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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Cerebrate.in : An event not to be missed .. but you will!
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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From Moonlighting to Fulltime on your startup
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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Startup City Bangalore
This is more of a … look at the pictures .. they tell the story … post :)
We went to the much awaited (or rather publicized) startup city today. We reached around noon and found a lot of crowd there. The event looked like a trade fair and there were banners and balloons all over the place.
The event was in Nimhans convention centre and the good thing was that there was tons of parking space available. Once inside, we found the place to be really crowded, which I guess was good for the companies showcasing there.
Open Coffee Club also had a booth there and I found Vaibhav and Amarinder evangelizing OCC. I think these guys are doing an awesome job of spreading the OCC and keeping the meets interesting.
Several OCC companies were also demoing their products/services there. For example LifeBlob
We also met Sameer and Nandhini of Madhouse (now SeventyMM) and had a good discussion with them on Indian startup scene. These guys have great experience building and selling a company and it was fun talking to them.
We did not attend any talks or discussions and spent most of the time catching up with other people. Overall I got more of a trade fair feeling out of Startup City. There were stalls of Amazon, Nokia and HSBC right at the entrance :) The event certainly did not feel like a real startup event. I am not sure how to describe that feel .. I guess it wasn’t boostrapper’s event (except for the OCC booth).
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Who is the best critique for your startup?
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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