Is a million good enough anymore?
I was at barcamp bangalore 6 yesterday and as I wrote, it was a lot of fun. I spent almost the entire day hanging out with people I know and there were lots of discussions on startups in general and muziboo in particular. On e question keeps coming up again and again. What is our long term strategy with Muziboo. Are we planning to take outside investment? Are we planning to *scale up* by hiring people etc etc.
Its actually quite funny because we do have a plan (and a vision) but then it does not convince people. Our plan is simply to make muziboo sustainable in the next one year and then try to make it more profitable over the next couple of years. We would start off with pro accounts and once things are stable and we have grown a little more try to play around with sales. We would call ourselves successful when we can help musicians make money. I feel this is a good plan and I would love to see it successful. It would not make me freakin rich (as in get a villa and park a BMW) but it would help me build a sustainable business and give me enough time to do what I want to do. I certainly would have not been very excited about this a year back but right now after having worked on Muziboo for about 10 months, I think its a pretty good deal.
I think the reason its a good deal is that I love doing technology. I love writing code for my startup. I love making decisions independently (almost) and not have to worry about getting a lot of people on the same plane and get a lot of statistics to prove a point. I can sometimes listen to my gut feeling, make a mistake, learn from it and then move on. I have this luxury because I am not insanely funded (in fact we are self funded) and so I don’t have to necessarily try to run at rocket speed to justify the investment. I can have fun building a very exciting community slowly at a pace its actually possible and have all the fun coding stuff up to make it possible. Certainly this is not a way to make the next youtube but if you think about it, it aligns very well with a lot of reasons people give you to startup
- You can be your own boss (certainly easier for me as I don’t have to report to a board)
- You can make your own decisions (the fewer people, the easier it is)
- You can work in your pyajamas (imagine doing that in an office)
- You work on what you love doing (If you are a hacker, would you love that or love being the CEO planning meetings more?)
But then surprisingly many people don’t really feel that good about this case. They feel more comfortable if I say something like we plan to take venture capital soon, ramp up our team, get an office space etc etc. That sounds more like a real company. However I disagree and so do so many other (influential) people like Joel Spolsky, David Hansson. The problem essentially is that most people (like me) are happier having a better chance at building something sustainable, fun to do than to have a miniscule chance of building the next tube. The reason for that is that by definition, startups are hard. They are extremely hard, time consuming (as in few years per idea), work life balance killing and generally confusing. The last point is very important. May be the most important. When you do a startup, you become opinionated and you make a lot of assumptions. Since you have to focus you have to decide between many equally good looking options and you generally wanna be successful to know if you learnt the right things. So I feel its very important to be successful the first few times than to die trying for something ming boggingly big.
And that brings us back to the title of this post. Is a million (dollar or rupee) good enough anymore. Would you be happy if your startup can make a revenue of say a million rupee a year in second year of existence. I guess I would be. I would be very happy as a first time entrepreneur to see some success coming out of my venture. I would love to see some of my theories about companies, people and market coming true. I would love to know that when I its all dark, there is in fact light at the end of the tunnel. That would help me go and make my billion the next time.
I would leave you with a video that motivated me to finally pen down these thoughts. It was refreshing to hear this from a guy I really admire, DHH
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Comments
Very interesting thought. Every entrepreneur should cool down while judging themselves. They have probably achieved more than most others
Prateek,
You have a great blog. I partly agree with you. I think being an entrepreneur is like having a child. The entrepreneur needs to do what it takes right from the conception to exit (when he/she can be on hos own) to make sure the baby is safe and healthy.
I totally agree with not getting outside funding as long as you can manage without it. However, timing is everything for a startup. As you proceed with the journey, a lot of competitors will emerge. At that time if you don’t accelerate (doesn’t always mean VC funding) they will. IMO while running a startup you need to do whatever it takes to keep your startup healthy and safe or you will be killed or eaten.
PS - I had a couple of UX suggestions, not sure how I can send them to you.
Hi Gaurav and Ishwar
Thanks for the comments
@Gaurav : Send ur questions to prateek AT muziboo DOT com
hear hear… well said… who needs millions when we have to travel 3-4 hrs to reach office. The time saved is worth millions if u spend it fruitfully.
I cant agree more on this. Why is that suddenly anything less than a few million dollars stopped making sense to people? Running a sustaining web business, as DHH says is not like the neighbourhood Mom & Pop store counting pennies. These days unless you talk about a few million dollars or buy-outs you are considered a businessman, not an entrepreneur.