Heads up: This post deals with the Indian startup space

There is a lot of buzz going on in the Indian startup space – exciting startups coming up, lot of events,discussions, etc. but how much are you contributing ? I am not talking about any kind of funding or an angel investment, something much simpler than that.

An entrepreneur’s life is a fast paced one, sit on a Sunday and look back at the amount of things you have learnt/done, you would know what I am talking about. But what really happens to all those learnings? – it’s either stuck in his head or maybe propagates a little to his co-founder. Bottom-line, it adds little value to the startup ecosystem.

The longevity of a startup depends on the founder’s emotional capacity to continue and not reasons like not enough salary for a long time / I need to get married soon, etc. as perceived by the outside world. This means that before he/she is drained out, at least some of the nice things he wished for in the startup journey should happen to boost the morale – in turn implies he/she needs to make less number of mistakes in execution. How can you reduce the number of mistakes? The best way is to learn from other entrepreneurs. SHARE your learnings! Blog about it, talk it out in conferences / barcamps!

Let’s say there are 100 active startups in India with an average of 2 founders / startup. If each founder writes 2 articles / month, we would have 400 *real* experiences in the startup journey every month! While building a product / website might be a common thing across the world, selling it surely has it’s own geographic limitations and techniques. And obviously everyone wants to sell

Won’t you love to see a blog by the Bansals? They have been hugely successful in the e-commerce space and their insights would surely help upcoming e-commerce websites. We started off with a platform for mock interviews, things didn’t go too well and we had to stop doing it and switch. There are / were other websites which operate in the same domain, maybe we could have shared, learnt the mistakes and corrected them earlier ? There’s a YC startup hirehive which has switched domains so fast because they didn’t find it working well, while PG would have really helped them make the decision, it’s also the learnings from others that helped them identify their mistake.

I should probably give some equity to Dharmesh Shah, most of the stuff on Inbound Marketing / SEO strategies I learnt from him (we cracked 10K visits last week!). I had an e-mail exchange with the grexit team on sharing our learnings last week, should definitely benefit both of us, but it’s still stuck in our inbox – lets get it out!

I can really go on & on. But you get the point right ? Fail fast, identify the product which works and most importantly learn how to sell. From the stories I have read, this is the typical cycle followed by many successful startups and you could definitely contribute your 2 cents to it.

This is more like a wake up call to me. We talk a lot on things like ‘10 things not to do before pitching to a VC‘, ‘How to raise angel investment?‘ but rarely talk about the selling stories. If you are game, leave your blog URL in the comments, I would setup a moonmoon instance (I need at least 20 founders to come forward), we could subscribe to this feed and get insightful content!

Thanks!

The hyphen in “start-up” is on purpose since it acts as a verb here. I get slightly worked up when people refer startup, the company as “start-up”. There is no hyphen in it, refer wikipedia if you don’t believe me. So what’s the best time to start-up a startup?

I have been interacting with a lot of “to-be-entrepreneurs“, majority of them being either college students (or) 1-2 years experience in an MNC. I could easily relate to what they would be going through and here’s my 2 cents on what to do before jumping in.

The best path before starting up is to work in a startup and understand the environment. However, the term “startup” has become a fancy word these days (just like how “entrepreneur” is) and some companies which have grown past 1000 employees still claim themselves to be a startup, nothing wrong in it, but that’s not the kind I am referring to. The ideal one would be…

• Product: An innovative product and a potential to disrupt the existing scheme of things. You should believe in it and have a sense of passion to work on it.
• Work: Be the 3rd (or) 4th employee in the company and work on your forte – if you are primarily a programmer, work on building the framework and not get hired into marketing / sales. There is a common notion that startup is just for marketing / sales, it’s not true. The joy of building a framework from scratch and seeing people use it is unparalleled. In the process you learn a LOT on how to build things.
• Rockstar CEO / founding team: Often this factor, influences the journey & life of the startup. The CEO should have a good domain knowledge and must have done something really impressive in the past. The ideal CEO is one whom you are a big fan of – For eg: if I had received an offer from Joel Spolsky for a tech startup, I would have closed my eyes and grabbed it.
• Cup of coffee: The culture should be transparent with hierarchies,etc. taking the back seat. You should be able to talk to the CEO / CTO over a cup of coffee once/twice a week to understand the plans, the metrics they track,etc.. and understand the business
• Networking & Sales: Accompany the CEO on his sales talks and understand the “how to sell” part in the business. Get to know more people, increase the size of your linkedin connections and network with a lot of top level people.

Well there aren’t any rules to start a startup, but working in one which follows such a culture helps in reducing the number of mistakes (both in technology & sales) you would do when you start off on your own. As Drew Houston once said in a presentation – “Work and try on someone else’s dime initially” – this is not verbatim but pretty much the crux of what he said.

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