Vivek Ravisankar's Web » startup

5 things I do before a demo

bytingme — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 13:18:13 +0000

The beautiful thing about starting a startup is you would love almost anything that you do – sales/marketing/programming/PR/blogging, the feeling of ownership is unmatched. Our product is in it’s stabilized version 1 form and I do a lot of marketing & sales these days – on an average about 1-2 demos/day.

Few things I learnt before demo-ing your product to a client. These are the things I do before I demo and has proved helpful -this is not to be treated like a TODO list,etc. – after all every startupper has his own way of getting a customer.

Research
With the advent of so many social networks, it’s possible to get almost any activity/data of an organization/person. Three things I research on
| The company – read about it’s history, interesting trivia, past techcrunch articles, etc. This gives an idea of what the company is about and goes a long way in understanding their needs and making appropriate customizations to your demo
| Founders – Most likely, it’s going to be an interesting/inspiring story on how they started. If you get an opportunity to meet the founders, nothing like it and it’s extremely obvious that you need to do your homework about them, else it serves as a good read
| Person you are going to meet – Not always would you get a chance to meet the founders, it’s good to know the background, past work experience of the person you meet – Linkedin, twitter, his blogs importantly would help a lot in understanding him.
Getting ready
“Never waste a single second in the meeting” – this has always been my thought before a demo. You hardly get 15-20 minutes with a senior person, try to make the maximum use of it. Before I demo my product,

| Hibernate mode – Booting your laptop before the demo is such a waste of time, you are losing 20s if you are using Ubuntu and anywhere between 2000-3000s if you are running Windows. There shouldn’t be an idle time, put it in hibernate mode when you start.

| Keep your browser/app ready – I have a separate firefox profile for each demo containing 3 tabs – the product, the report & a view of codechecker. Remember you only have 15 minutes and need to explain the pain point and demo the product. This quickens the process if you are already ready.

| Customization – People love it when you make your product/service customized to them. Before each demo, I look at the careers page, check the openings and prepare the questions of the test accordingly.
Why it helps? – the company can start using my product for that role instantly. Only rarely is anyone going to pay at the first attempt, first make him use the product and get him hooked to it.
Punctuality (Too early is bad)
Being punctual is good, but being too early might go against you. When you are going to meet the decision maker, his calendar is going to be full! He/She would have given you a 30 minute slot in the middle of other meetings.

Even if I am a little early (say 20 minutes prior), I tell the receptionist to inform the guy only 5 minutes before the scheduled meeting time – Reason? 90% of the time, he/she is going to ask you to wait in the lounge till it’s time, but sometimes your presence acts as an interruption to their current meeting/work. If this happens, they would like to finish off your meeting quickly and get back to their work – you can be rest assured that he/she isn’t going to listen to your pitch/demo, but just wants to oblige the meeting request. This happened to me once and yes the chances of him getting converted to a customer became slim.
Have a goal – shouldn’t be a coffee meeting
It helps to have some kind of a goal/outcome of the demo – maybe the company should use the product for free, run a pilot program with them for a month, etc. This helps your demo to move in the right way and proceed towards something concrete instead of just getting to know him/her.
Being fresh
This might be clichéd, dressed neat, pressed formals, appear fresh, etc. But as startups, we really can’t afford the luxury of an A/C car daily – even if it’s 30 KM from my place, I still travel by bus, standing in the middle of 50 people. It makes you a little tired and weary before you demo which is obviously a bad sign.
To avoid this and be economical, I travel by bus, get down a couple of stops before the destination and take an auto for 20 bucks. The 10-15 minute drive in auto with a quick deo spray makes you look much better than traveling by bus fully – economical and best.

All the above are small (maybe obvious) stuff but happens in the 1st 5 minutes of the demo which is a very important phase! A lot of my posts mostly originate from conversations, learnings, experiences – I am no expert, but the reason I blog is, if the points make sense it would accelerate the growth of a startup by a good amount which is critical.You have zero money, little resources, no time but still need to beat the biggies – acceleration is key.

Who is your mentor?

bytingme — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 17:16:21 +0000

Who is your mentor? – I honestly didn’t think this question would trigger a blog post. I met this guy X, a couple of days back who is a wannabe entrepreneur (I hate this term, but that’s how he introduced himself). As we were chatting about his idea, he interrupted, asking who were the guys mentoring me and their qualification (NOTE: He was interested in their qualification more than their background).

He was shocked to know that none of them were either an MBA/PhD/Masters/any-other-extra-degree. And he proudly claimed that his mentor was a VP in a top MNC with an MBA from ISB, Hyderabad (with no previous startup experience).

I have been mentored by a group of serial entrepreneurs for almost a year and this led me to tell something about what I feel mentoring to a startup should be about.

Aligning yourself in startup framework
To me, the biggest value add a mentor should bring to the table is to help place the founders in a startup framework. A startup life is tough, very tough,especially in the early stages. Your business model can even take a 180 degree turn, to understand this and provide clean advice is the biggest value add!

Only if your mentor has started a couple of startups, will he/she be able to place you in this kind of a framework since the journey is emotionally tough.

I personally think it would be very tough for the VP to associate with any of the above. He might have never been in a position where there were resource constraints (or) his product being rejected by other companies, after all his MNC is such a big name. And even if that’s the case, he would have pulled up a team of engineers to build one more. Where’s the money in a startup?!
A mentor isn’t going to run your business
He was overjoyed to tell me how his “mentor” frames the B-Plans, the financial charts and even talks to people and converts them to customers.

Firstly, I am not a great believer of writing B-Plans without having a product with a few paying customers – only if you have paying customers, does a B-Plan actually make sense. That aside,a mentor shouldn’t really run your business, he should definitely not be your boss but more like a co-founder to juggle ideas, brainstorm and take inputs.

The basic tenet of an entrepreneur is expecting freedom and if that’s curbed, the startup gets a hit.
The VP has a huge network
Having a big connected network is definitely a huge add-on, but that’s not the only reason why you choose someone as your mentor. It’s good if your mentor is connected with a lot of people – helps in getting introductions, etc. But choosing someone because he has a wide network with top VP’s and isn’t a sufficient condition.

Introductions/networking isn’t costly – most of them would be glad to introduce you to people whom they know closely provided you have a good enough reason, latch onto a couple of big guys, they would definitely do the intros (talking out of experience).

I tried telling him this, but beyond a point I stop talking to people who don’t understand the bigger picture and thankfully because of that I was able to write a blog post.

Bottomline being if he/she hasn’t founded a couple of startups (doesn’t matter even if it’s a failure as long as they hung on to it), I would not bother bringing him/her on the mentoring panel however impressive his qualifications are.

Image courtesy: http://www.flickr.com/photos/chrisandrin/3056695077/

6 obvious things I learnt the hard way

bytingme — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 05:37:59 +0000

I have always cribbed about the fact that a lot of entrepreneurs in India don’t blog much. Only a handful of them actually share their experiences, struggle, etc – a look into your google reader would tell you the number of indi-startup feeds (vs) valley-startup feeds. To contribute a little towards the Indian startup ecosystem, here’s an attempt to share what I have learnt in the startup journey till now.

We started off 10 months back with a portal that would enable candidates to attend mock interviews [skype/telephone] from industry professionals. Some of the things I learnt about online businesses focusing on the Indian market and more so with the student population.

PS: When I mean people, it could be interchangeably used to refer to general indian market (or) student crowd since that’s the segment I interacted with the most.

1. Paying for a service

We have been used to paying for a book, dress, movie ticket that suddenly paying for an online service becomes something totally unheard of. The notion/mind-set amongst people is ‘Anything that’s online is free of cost‘.

People were ready to buy a book containing a list of interview questions & answers priced at Rs.400 rather than for an online personalized 1-1 mock interview priced at Rs.350 since they could hold onto something tangible for the money invested.

Very very very crudely speaking, they paid, for talking to someone over the phone! – unfortunately the value behind this remains in the dark.

2. Offline Model

However web-savvy you are, you need to do a good amount of offline marketing to increase the reach. This is especially true if your product could be consumed offline.For eg: to attend a mock interview on our portal, all you needed to have was a telephone. 70% of interviews that happened were through an offline medium.

| I used to stick posters in colleges saying “If you are interested in mock interview, SMS your dream job to 98408….“. This poster simplified the process to a great extent – the moment you saw the poster, all you needed to do was just send an SMS. A good share of interviews came via this route.

| We had a wonderful set of campus ambassadors who would evangelize our product in their colleges – we got quite a lot of interviews via this channel

| We put up stalls in college fests and students made on-spot payments for interviews – again an offline route.

| We conducted a lot of workshops/ppts in different colleges to market our brand.They loved our workshops and wanted us to conduct more, but rarely did it convert to getting people apply to mock interviews through the online channel.

As much of inbound marketing, SEO techniques you would be implementing, to me, it’s not wise to ignore the offline channel – people still need an SMS confirmation, call on their mobiles, etc

3. Online indulgence

Lets talk about the majority here. 80% of the time you spend online apart from your normal work goes off on this, this & this. Either the problem you are solving has to be the topmost and you need to fare well on the search results (or) you need to hop onto one of the existing channels. Like every early stage startup, it’s wise to do the latter.

We decided to code apps for orkut, GTalk bot wherein you could get random interview questions, puzzles, etc.We missed the basic rule in all these things – it needs to be FUN, it’s okay even if it’s funny, but it can’t be serious.

The golden rule of orkut apps is – at the end, you definitely needed to slap someone, kiss a friend, kick someone’s butt, else it fails to qualify the criteria to get published. So, if you need to get onto those channels to spread the word, fortunately/unfortunately you would need to abide by the above rules.

4. No trial version eh?

This is something that everyone of us inherently are used to – but I realized it only after getting this far, better late than never! Be it buying a t-shirt, book, audio CD, you would always want to have a trial of the *same* product before buying it – trying out the same tee, reading the first 20 pages of the book, watching the trailer of the movie before going, etc. Similar was our case – people wanted a trial of the mock interviews.

We built a few by-products (free obviously) which we thought would get us some conversions to the main product – the logic was spot-on but the numbers were no way related to our expectations. We did give off free interviews which pulled in a lot of students to attend, but there were 2 problems

| We set it up for 30 mins (since it was a trial) and the full effect wasn’t visible in that duration

| We couldn’t have a trial like this all through, since the same student could take this 30 minute free-interview again – we needed to compensate the interviewer for every interview.

Ofcourse, the concept of trying out something before I buy has been prevalent all through, just that I realized the importance only now.

5. ‘Ssshh.. I can’t tell my friends about this website!‘

This one should be the best! This was from a student from a reputed college who took up a mock interview. He was very happy with our service and I thought he would atleast put it up as his GTalk status message if not blog about our service. I was wrong!

He said (verbatim) ‘I need a competitive edge against my friends for tomorrow’s interview and I shall maintain this website as a secret only to me’ OMG! :O I really didn’t know whether to laugh/feel-upset. But, bottom-line, I couldn’t reach out to that college through him.

6. E-mail campaigns don’t work

The information overload is so much these days, that at times even personal e-mails get the stick! You are out of connectivity for 3 days, your GMail/Twitter is spammed! In such a scenario, spending on e-mail marketing is such a waste!

As most of us would do, an e-mail from an unknown source/website is archived without even reading the contents of it. Blog posts dealing with ‘10 Tips to better e-mail marketing‘, etc are absolute nonsense. Those things work only if someone opens the mail, but that itself is a rarity.

However reliable services you use for e-mail marketing to send thousands/lacs of e-mail, there is a *good* chance that your domain would be blacklisted. Now, that’s a very dangerous thing to happen – and it did happen to us, we couldn’t send any e-mail from “interviewstreet.com” for 2 days. We used a “reliable” service for the marketing experiment but still got hit. If at all you have money, you could throw to Google Adwords and get some traffic.

The above are some of my learnings. I am not criticizing/offending anyone, but it’s more like a realization on how the market is and how I should position my product. The reason I wrote this post is in the hope that some guy who is planning to start-off (or) is in the early stages could change his positioning a bit if the points makes sense. Thank you.

Lessons from Dropbox

bytingme — Wed, 05 May 2010 18:12:28 +0000

I am a big fan of Drew Houston, founder of dropbox and here he (along with Xobni) tells their startup story. Very insightful and must-read for product/technology based startups!

From Zero to a Million Users – Dropbox and Xobni lessons learned

View more presentations from Adam Smith.

I mailed Drew on whether his presentation was applicable only to US startups [obviously not expecting a reply back, since I am used to people not getting back to me ] – but thoroughly, totally surprised, he got back to me!! saying….

And definitely needs to be agreed! It’s a great feeling when someone whom you regard as a source of inspiration takes some time off [even a couple of minutes] to get back to you!

Invest in Technology – Start(i)up

bytingme — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 19:55:06 +0000

Being frugal is essential in a startup life, but there is a thin line between being cheap (not spending at all) and being frugal. The thought of a startupper is always to get the best by spending the least. Some of the things I felt startups shouldn’t mind spending on …

Designers are needed, esp if you are a geek:
Hope all geeks dont take me wrong on this, but most of the geeks suck at aesthetic sense and designs. Given a mock-up, there can be none better than them to get it live on the site, but designing a mock-up requires a different (I would even say complementary) skill. If you are running a e-commerce business where most of your transactions and business is going to be online, better get someone to design the pages – even the sign-up button, it’s position, size, everything matters!
Even though, I don’t use wufoo much, I simply love their site, their colors, the dotted underline when you hover over a button, everything is so cutely made that I was forced to use their product!
Interns are costly – hire them
There are tens, no hundreds of internship sites where you could post your description and some of them say ‘Rs. 1 per hour‘ – I understand you are a startup, but come on … If you really need to get your job done perfectly, you need to shell out a little. The ultimate goal should be to get the feature done (or) accomplish the sales target you have set – don’t compromise on quality
Hosting space – get a dedicated one
We initially hosted interviewstreet.com in MediaTemple (shared hosting space) and faced so many issues! Yes, it was cheap, much cheaper than others existing in the market, but not having a dedicated one implied you don’t have root access (you don’t have root access on your own startup?!), limit on memory limit to run django process and many more.
We wasted 2-3 weeks of solid development effort trying to tackle all problems posed by a shared server and finally unable to take it anymore, moved on to linode
It’s so much peaceful when your local development machine and the remote server are of the same configuration & OS – no nasty hacks on the server to get your app running.
Accessories – laptops, netbooks, keyboards, etc
Again, I am sure there would be a team (or 1 person) whose job role is to code. Invest in a good laptop (not netbook!), a comfortable keyboard, good internet connection – never be frugal/cheap in these. It’s extremely frustrating to work on a bad keyboard with slow internet speeds – this frustration can make the developer stop coding!
Stay Connected
Customer service is a key element in a startup – replying to e-mails spontaneously brings so much joy in a customer. A data card (or) a phone with GPRS facility to keep a tab on customer activities and getting back to them tells a lot about your startup. Invest in them

There are so many other ways of saving money (work-from-home), economical travelling, etc – when you are running an e-commerce business, don’t hesitate much to spend on technology if it’s going to improve the productivity of the overall company. To be honest, I didn’t do anything of what I stated above initially , but slowly realized and have almost done everything.

What an Idea

bytingme — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 08:07:22 +0000

Numerous questions have been asked on what’s the most important thing for a startup – team? idea? execution? investors, etc. Most young startuppers (fresh out of college) tend to romanticize the idea they have in their minds. They are on cloud nine when something strikes them and just can’t control their excitement – a belief that they have latched on to something big and the only thing remaining is developing the website and hosting it.

It’s good to aspire big (or) move on with a positive frame of mind, but the value of just an idea is cheap! Most of the startups have been started either because the founder himself has been affected by the lack of something (or) he/she is dedicated to give back something to the community.Everyone of us has an idea and everyone has got another way to simplify the existing processes.

Holding just an idea is equivalent to just seeing a beautiful girl. Everyone in the shopping mall would have had a look,the tougher/main part is not having a glance at the girl but asking her out for a date – in the startup scenario it’s not the idea that counts, but it’s execution.

The misconception that an *idea* is everything leads the startuppers to keep it to themselves (or share with their very very close buddies) and not discuss in public – why? the fear of someone stealing it! I have already mentioned the value of an idea , still lets meet the types of people whom you can possibly bounce the idea with:

Budding entrepreneurs/entrepreneurs: Like how your girl is the most beautiful angel on earth, for each entrepreneur his product/company is *the* thing. He is definitely not going to drop his own project and start with your idea, for all you know he might think your plan is stupid! Infact, it’s a good thing to bounce your idea with like-minded people, they might provide valuable insights
CEO/CXO of a big firm in the same domain: He has 1001 things in his mind and 10001 clients to serve. He is not going to put a team and rip off your idea, there are already many products waiting in the queue. Again, he might provide you good tips and suggestions on how to proceed in your domain. Make good contacts & network, someday he might acquire you
All iz well – the happy MNC guy: No way he is going to start! He is a happy guy with a good salary and a comfortable position. Again, its good to bounce it off with him, he might give some industry perspectives and if he/she has a lot of cash – potential angel
Wannabe entrepreneurs: These guys just want to start-off something – maybe because they are bored of their day jobs, maybe they want their business card to say ‘CEO’, many more reasons. I am not sure whether discussing with them would help, but some of the guys in this category act as a very good devil’s advocate

As Abhishek Bachan in the movie Guru says ‘Gurubhai se ladna, tho Gurubhai banke. Lekin gurubhai eki hai‘ (To have a fair fight with gurubhai, you need to become one. And there is only ONE Gurubhai!). It’s not enough for someone to copy your idea, they need to copy your mind, your execution, but there is only *one* mind like you! Bounce your idea with smart guys and start thinking about how to execute.

All the above are just to emphasize the fact that having an idea is *NOT* a big thing. You can copy the idea, but not the mind, not the execution and that’s the challenge for every startup. The mistake I made was, the idea can mask all other challenges that a startup undergoes – it’s good you have got a nice model, but think and move further.

Race on…

Mythful Money

bytingme — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 17:37:07 +0000

3 months into this startup world has taught me a lot of things – the way I work, the way I talk to people, the way I send e-mails and most importantly the value of money. I haven’t taken any salary (yet) till now, and I travel mostly by buses however long the destination might be [even to Bangalore ].

As I see the odd sticker on the bus which says “Rs.6K/month work just for 4 hrs/day” makes me realize the value of earning 6K/month. If I was so fussy about money, why am I spending hundreds on getting LFY, DARE, Entrepreneur magazines, buying geeky t-shirts at tshirts.in,getting my iPod replaced [not free!] – there is clearly an alternative to all the above I mentioned.

This has made me believe ‘Not having money‘ is a myth unless your bank balance is an absolute zero and the world is doomed with none around you! There are 2 important things I believe to acquire a customer

1. Pitch

I think a lot of people take this for granted. The pitch about your product is a key aspect on how far/deep you reach your potential customer. If you didn’t know, I have started a startup – interviewstreet.com where students can attend mock interviews conducted by working professionals on different domains.

It is generally not easy to make students understand the value of a service. Lot of people discouraged [and still] me saying ‘Abey, students don’t have money!’. A dinner with friends would cost them around Rs.250, a movie at a Multiplex with popcorn, etc would cost them around Rs.300, a night at the Wild West bar would cost them over Rs.400, 10 cigar packets cost Rs. 350 – clearly I won’t agree students don’t have money!

For certain confidential reasons, I can’t list down how my pitch improved, but I slowly realized that you need to put yourself into a student’s shoes and think if the offer is really compelling! My dream job pays me 6lpa, would I like to pay just Rs.350 to attend a mock interview improving my chances of striking the job? – this is not a pitch , I am just trying to analyze!

For eg: if I were to tell you ‘Hey, I saw this headphones which were amazing,costs close to 20K‘, you would probably brush me away. But no, it’s true. The headphones you see below is the BOSE QC3 comfort [pitch: acoustic noise-cancellation, rechargable batteries, almost all the external sound is suppressed, etc..] headphones which costs Rs.21K in India! . Well if you are really thinking these are for the CXO’s, pause, I know two of my friends who have already bought this which is almost half their earnings per month (or) even more!

2. Quality of service

The 2nd important thing is the quality of your service. If your pitch is impressive but lacks quality when users try it out, it’s a bad sign! If not surprising your customers, at least remain true to what you pitched.

So, if people are ready to buy those BOSE headphones (or) take mock interviews , it means that the pitch and the quality of service are both in sync and impressive.

Once you are able to achieve this, I think money would occupy the back seat and people would probably even save up money to consume your product/service. Put yourself in his shoes and see if the pitch, price and the quality-of-service/product is worthy enough. With this, I go back to surprise a few more of my customers who are in the queue! . Bye!

Entrepreneurship in love

bytingme — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 12:14:28 +0000

As I was walking along the beautiful IIT-M campus yesterday evening, I bumped onto this inspiring entrepreneur who currently runs a startup in the education domain. I have met him earlier in a couple of events, but happened to talk to him only then. We kept walking, discussing various challenges in the life-cycle of a startup,how he solved, etc.. We kept walking for almost an hour when I thought it was time for me to get back home. Just before I took leave, (out of curiosity) I asked him about his educational background. He replied ‘I just completed my Masters in Entrepreneurship‘! What?! Is there a course M.S Entrepreneurship?! Sounded weird to me. I just nodded and left.

This thread kept running in my mind, difficult to kill (damn the geekiness!:)). I just questioned myself ‘What is entrepreneurship?‘. Entrepreneurship to me is a feeling – a passionate feeling towards your idea/product. It’s something that can *not* be taught in a classroom or can be studied from a textbook.

When you see a beautiful girl pass by, there is this sudden rush of energy,2 wires standing up,bells ringing on top of your head and nothing else visible to your eye! That’s exactly how an entrepreneur feels when he gets an idea! – can strike him anywhere, anytime, when he is taking a shower, or an evening stroll.

You cannot wait, but to gather more details about the girl. Is she from my college? How old is she? How can I impress her? Does she already have a bf? Is she an FCP? . An entrepreneur does similar things – is a similar offering of my service already present? What is my USP? let me google for similar products like these, can i conduct a survey to see the response?

Once all these cobwebs are cleared out, your phone bills are on the rise! Message more, talk more, dream more, etc.. On the other side, you start off with the prototype, keep improving the design,dream about making the product really big, innovate and add new features, etc..

Now comes the D-day when you say those magical 3 words to your loved one and you are fully committed! On the other front, it’s just 2 words (I quit!) and it’s definitely not to your loved one! . You are fully committed to your startup and its your life! And as the history says, ‘They happily lived ever after’ .

These thoughts occurred to me as I was on my way back home!. Now, don’t ask me an analogy for a serial entrepreneur

Adieu Amazon!

bytingme — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 06:38:56 +0000

Yes, it’s true! Today will be my last working day at Amazon! I never expected it to be so quick (14 months) and never thought I would start something on my own after this! It’s been exciting,fun,happening,interesting,mindblowing – all in the same breath!

Why is it the *best* MNC to work for ?

Amazon has got the right mix of fun and smartness embedded in their employees, you have no other choice but to just admire.
The amount of visibility you get while working on a project is tremendous. I doubt any other company would have freshers directly interacting with top management people and principal engineers
Exposure to the latest technology from a wide variety of streams in Computer Science. You get to work on Distributed Systems, Databases, UI (CSS/HTML,Perl,Ruby), OS (Kindle), etc. At the end of the day you will have such a wide breadth of knowledge
Extremely customer centric and focused – *Never* do you see Amazon doing stuff just for the heck of it. Every project you are involved in, has its own USP and unless and otherwise it’s something novel, Amazon doesn’t put it’s step forward
Fun Atmosphere – Even though you can see a geeky halo at the back, you can talk to anyone about anything – T20, Sachin (vs) Sehwag, many more… There is absolutely no barrier to talk to people. I never imagined I would refer to my manager as Dude(always) and even give bumps on his bday
Startup Flavor – You don’t work on a product for 2 years to see it’s release. The deadlines are little hard making you learn more and deliver more in quick time. C’mon there is a production push almost every week!
I am pretty sure you would have heard about the compensation and perks . Makes you wonder whether you are really worth that much!
Guess how they celebrated recession? – hired a whole bunch of SDE’s and formed a couple of new teams here! Have you ever heard Amazon firing people?

There would have only been 2 reasons why I could have possibly thought of parting from this organization.

To pursue my graduate studies

(OR)

To start my own startup.

After pondering over deeply and consulting with a lot of senior people, I thought I should do justice to both my conscience and to Amazon. Hence, I have taken the bold move of starting on my own with my friends, and time will tell how it works!

Altogether it was an amazing experience to work here. To explain my current position, its a very tough state to be in – you really love the job but still you need to go! At the end of the day, I would really really really miss the people out here and hope to stay in touch!

I still remember when the HR sent me a pre-placement form during my campus recruitment. It said “Amazon is looking to hire superstars!”. I chuckled then, but I now realize, you guys are really superstars! I have worked hard, had fun and should be making history soon ! Good luck with all the projects,keep making Amazon proud and more importantly stay connected! (vivmbbs AT GMail)

A Strange(r) entrepreneur

bytingme — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 06:25:19 +0000

Not many times you get to meet a stranger and strike a conversation that lasts for slightly over 30 minutes and finally derive some inspiration out of it! Well, it did happen to me yesterday. My friend & I had some work on the ECR (East-coast-road). I hopped on to his bike, we would have hardly moved 2 km, when the back tyre got punctured! After walking a few metres, we found this un-puncture shop

He quickly got into his act. Busy fixing the tyre, he shot a question to me “What are you planning to do?”. I was taken aback a little, quite unsure as to what he was exactly asking and hence said “I am planning to start my own business”. He then shot back again “Do you know what business is?“. Little irritated, I wanted to say, it is a Web 2.0 application built on PHP and Java, but I just controlled my temper and thankfully let him speak! He started narrating about how he built his shop….

[Speaking from his perspective]

I started this shop 2 years back. I had no job then and none gave me any too. I decided to start a shop that would just sell tyres. I spent close to 6 months walking down the streets of ECR trying to find a place to start my shop. Everyday, I talked to 10 different people with just a single ray of hope that someone someday would tell me there is a vacant place you can use. Finally, the day came after a loong wait for 6 months.

My family being a little superstitious, wanted me to start the project after 2 months. Hence I paid 2 months rent for nothing. I started it after 2 months, bought all different types of tyres and waited for people. I waited..waited…waited… it was another 6 months and I did not get even a single customer! And I mean it – not a single customer. I was disappointed earlier that I had to pay rent for 2 months without using the place, but just imagine the situation that I was put in after 6 months!

I started analyzing the cause as to why this didn’t kick off. I went and knocked at each door in the ECR to gauge the market for a tyre shop, conducted a survey. Many people just shooed me away. Some even told me that they don’t possess any vehicle with a shining Merc parked in the front! This continued for another 6 months… Hence, I was effectively paying rent to this place for 18 months without earning a single pie. But, somewhere inside my heart, I knew I could fix the problem and come out.

I then decided to start multiple services and not rely on one! It was not just selling tyres, my shop did overhauling, fixed punctured tyres, and I am starting to run a service where I would recommend drivers for people here and ofcourse earn a referral fee, he chuckled! . The business slowly grew. Each customer came for different offerings and my shop became a commonly used word in the town – more to say, it’s almost a landmark here!

The name spread by word-of-mouth. I did my job to perfection and always stuck to my timelines. I would never do stuff that I was not sure about. If I take up, it would be real neat job! People were impressed with my work.Now, I am the Raja (King) of this area. Anyone who has any problem with their vehicle tyre, come to me. I am earning a good sum. I waited for 2 long years to get to this state.

[End of story]

I didn’t know what to say. It was really really inspiring! Never thought, I would bump into someone and be inspired so much. I could just relate a few things what he said to the startup world.

Perseverance and determination are the key factors! Try harder, be patient and you succeed. Never never give up!
Never rely on a single service/offering. If Google had just stuck to Search, I am not sure it would have reached the level it has now!
The 1st guy you approach is not going to be your client. You need to knock at each one’s door and be patient to get your client!
It’s ok to slip the deadline by a few days and give an impressive product rather than sticking to it and making a mess. The service should be of high quality for people to refer!

Phew! Great experience!