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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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