This newyork times article compares mukesh ambani to mahtma gandhi. The comparison may be a little far fetched. However I recommend this article as it gives a really detailed view into the life of mr ambani and had a highly inspiring effect on me.
| Topics: Entrepreneurship, News |  Email This
|
 |
Negative questions are too powerful.
What if people upload porn? Youtube dies there
Why will people submit links and vote for them when they don’t get anything in return? death of digg
How will you ever monetize search while microsoft and yahoo have not managed it? google dies there
Do you think there is a market for maybe 10 people for PC? death of microsoft
You see the power of negative questions. It is too easy to think of 10 reasons why a startup will fail. Invariably while starting up, you have not figured out answers to all the questions. That is why you need years to grow up, to solve those questions, to improve your product.
Shoul I avoid discussing an idea with the team at the initial stage?
Not at all. Discussion will help you to look at the ideas from various angles and bring out enhancements. You will need the support of your partners to implement the idea as well.
What is the way out then?
Make the team understand that you have not found answers to all possible questions. There will be questions that will remain unanswered at the end of the discussion. The list above may be helpful as well 
Start with few basic questions only. Do people need the product. Keep the detailed questions for later, once they have reached a certain stage.
| Topics: Entrepreneurship, Futuristic | Email This
|
|
This essay is derived from a talk at the 2006 startup school at Stanford by Ycombinator.
Nice and inspiring lessons if you are serious for starting a startup.
| Topics: Entrepreneurship, Internet, VC | Email This
|
|
Came across this wonderful interview (on Guy Kawasaki’s blog) with Darren Rowse who talks about making money with blogging.
I am sure you gonna get something out of it….
| Topics: Blogs, Entrepreneurship | Email This
|
|
My friend Yathindran came across these links which keep a track of latest postings on some of the famous blogs related to startups and venture capital.
For startup news checkout
http://startups.alltop.com/
and for venture capital news checkout
http://venturecapital.alltop.com/
Even if you are not interested in this stuff, do give it a shot. You will sure find something of interest.
| Topics: Entrepreneurship, Resources, VC | Email This
|
|
I have learned a lot in the last 2 days at Barcamp Bangalore. The most shocking revelation was the fact that twitter is hot in India. I have been aware of the popularity of twitter in US. However somehow I have been 100% confident that people in India do not use twitter that much.
Just in case you have not heard of the service, twitter is a service that allows you to register and create your channel. Then you can send a message from your cell phone or IM or web to that channel. Your friends can subscribe to the channel and will get the updates from you.
I was absolutely surprised by the percentage of people using twitter at Barcamp Bangalore. I have already created a twitter account. Planning to impress my peers with my coolness
I have been researching about twitter for quite sometime now. I have found loads of impressive stuff about it. Here are some of the more interesting stuff about twitter.
Blog on the go Publish an event as soon as you hear about it. No need to wait till you start your laptop and manage to write an insightful lengthy post. You can always follow up your twitter post with a detailed post later on.
Twitter can save lives Just imagine you are stuck somewhere or you are in some trouble. Send a sms to twitter and 100s of people can get your message.
Group Chat It is a great way for a group of people to stay in touch with each other.
| Topics: Entrepreneurship, barcampbangalore6 | Email This
|
|
I am back from my first Barcamp. I had flown from Mumbai to attend the barcamp at bangalore and obviously I had high expectations. I was not disappointed at all as I met some fantabulous people. (I heard of that word for the first time from aditi).
However I was really disappointed to see a lot of sessions on trivial issues like Kamasutra, dating and Palmistry happening at the Barcamp. I totally agree with Mohan that these sessions lead to a degeneration of the idea of Barcamp. Many people were of the view that they allowed people to get a break from the serious sessions. Entrepreneurs are like soldiers. One mistake and you are dead. And barcamps are for entrepreneurs, what military exercises are for soldiers. And the last time I checked there were no entertainment sessions in the middle of military exercise.
The organizers have done a great job. But I request them to take note of the fact that these sessions are trivializing the concept of barcamp and I hope they will something to solve this problem.
| Topics: Entrepreneurship | Email This
|
|
Many a times I feel like an alien in the normal world. I am sure it will be the same for most of other entrepreneurs as well. Hardly anyone understands our thought process. However at Barcamp Bangalore I realized that, I am not the only alien around. There is a world of aliens. The last 2 days at Barcamp bangalore was simply awesome. Talking to the people there, some entrepreneurs and many aspiring entrepreneurs, it felt like entrepreneurship is the normal way of life.
I have hardly ever met so many awesome people in 2 days even during my IIM Days. I shall be writing detailed posts about many of these startups in the coming days. But here is a short description of some of the people who simply amazed me by their courage to put everything at stake to follow the idea that they believe in.
Prateek dayal of Muziboo.com, Aashish Solanki of Yulop.com, Rakesh Rajan of lifeblob and Akash srivastava and Mohan.
| Topics: Entrepreneurship | Email This
|
|
When I talk about entrepreneurship and leaving my job to start something new, nobody seems to understand me. Everyone keeps wondering why the hell I want to leave a secure job and bright future to run after a stupid idea. Hence I could tatally relate to the following para on a blog
“…no matter what your age or experience, entrepreneurship involves such things as obsession, compulsion, creative surges, and a roller coster of emotional highs and lows. All of this can make you appear mad, whether or not it’s true.
The life of an entrepreneur does not resemble normal behavior by most people’s standards. This may explain why many of your friends give you a blank stare when you tell them you’re starting a company, or why you get the sense that family members are talking about you behind your back. Go easy on them. Few of us are fated to be entrepreneurs, or even to understand why anyone else would want to subject himself to all of the risks and hard work. It’s difficult for many people to appreciate the appeal of entrepreneurship versus the perception of stability and a regular paycheck that comes with a “real job.” The best suggestion is to swallow your pride and concentrate on building your new venture. Ultimately, there is nothing more convincing than success.”
| Topics: Entrepreneurship | Email This
|
|
The toughest part in a startup is building the prototype of your idea to prove that it works. You will need angel investment to keep the startup going at this phase. If you have a great idea, and you will like to get some early stage funding, then you should try your luck with mumbai angels
By their own admission, they are focused on seed stage and early stage companies with strong teams, defensible technologies or services and well defined product to market plans.
Mumbai angels has many members with prior Silicon Valley experience. So you can expect some really useful advice and handholding as well. More importantly they invest in indivdual capacity and not as a fund.
| Topics: Entrepreneurship, Resources, VC | Email This
|
|
mKhoj, a mumbai based startup, specializing in mobile advertising has secured $7.1 million funding from Kleiner Perkins, Caufield & Byers and Sherpalo Ventures
mKhoj allows publishers to monetize their mobile traffic. Considering the rapid growth of mobiles in india, this company seems to be moving in the right direction.
| Topics: Entrepreneurship | Email This
|
|
All of us know that incoming link can bring a lot of traffic. However has it ever occured to you that outgoing links can bring substantial traffic?
I had written a post about release of wordpress 2.5. I started getting an unusually high number of visitors on that post. (Unusual by the standard of this blog :)) Most of the traffic was coming from the trackback link on the wordpress blog.
To test the theory I wrote another article about yahoo microsoft story with several links to techcrunch articles. The post has got more than 100 visiors from trackback alone.
So always make sure to link to the sources from which you are picking facts and ideas for your post. It is the right thing to do and additionally it will help you get some additional traffic as well.
| Topics: Entrepreneurship, Internet, Make Money, SEO | Email This
|
|
I had blogged about a step-by-step by guide for writing business plan. To help you understand it better, I am posting a demo business plan for mywalkin.
Business/Problem description: To get all the IT walkin interviews at one place. Walkin interviews get published on thursday or friday and users have only 2 days to identify them. The existing websites like naukri and monster place them along with jobs, making the discovery process much more difficult.
Competitive analysis: There are 2 types of competitors. Existing job sites like naukri and monster. and specialized walkin sites. We shall differentiate ourselves by concentrating on walkins alone. We shall differentiate ourselves from other walkin sites by sourcing interview information from HRs directly. This will help us solve the problem of erroneous walkins. We shall always keep the advertisements absolutely separate from content.
Market strategies: Here is our strategy to get the initial userbase. We shall make use of google adword to get targetted traffic. We shall retain a higher % of users by keeping the advertisements distinct from content. We shall make use of RSS subscriptions to retain traffic. We shall monetize the website through advertisements.
Development and Operations plans We shall make use of open source software to develop the site. We shall use wordpress as the content management system to reduce the requirement of development time.
Financial Factors I am yet to develop the financial plan for the website.
| Topics: Entrepreneurship | Email This
|
|
If you have a good internet idea and you will like to get it funded then http://www.seedfund.in/ is a great place to try your luck. Unlike most of the other funds that do not look at any proposal less than a million dollar, seedfund aims to invest Rs. 1 to 5 crores in a startup company. It comes with a great team that comprises of Pravin Gandhi and Bharati Jacob came from Infinity Venture and Mahesh Murthy from Passionfund.
They are located in Mumbai and Bangalore and will like to work with companies situated closer to these places. They’re looking mostly at internet or media or mobile or telecom or retail or consumer-facing plays – and also for things that aren’t yet “sectors”.
Their existing portfolio consists of carwale, agencyfaq, redbus.in etc. Since they intend to invest in 15-20 companies, we can safely assume that they shall be funding another 10-15 companies soon.
Finf out more details here
| Topics: Entrepreneurship, Internet | Email This
|
|
This post is a part of the series of posts about my experience in growing mywalkin to a more than 1,00,000 unique users a month website. I had previously talked about the strategies that we used to increase the traffic and the importance of retaining the users to the growth of a website. However all these startegies are useful only when you have a minimum level of traffic to start with. Ofcourse if you have a good advertisement budget then you can get this initial user base. Rest everything else will depend upon the strngth of your offering.
However we did not have an advertisement budget. So we had to get a little more innovative. Here are some tricks that you can use to get those users.
Tell your contacts: This is something very obvious. If you are starting something new then you can always try to convince your freinds to spread the word. However my experince is that telling them directly is not the most effective way. Rather put the url as a signature on your emails. Add it to your status message and your orkut profile. Your freinds will get curious, try it out and if they like it then they will definitely talk to you about it. Now if you ask them to help you spread the word, they will be more willing.
Classified sites: If your site is about some topic, that are covered by classifieds, then go ahead and put up a link about your website on the classifieds. click.in, kijiji and sulekha were some of the classified sites, that we had used to get traffic to mywalkin initially. One advantage of this method is most of these pages rank quite high on google and hence pass on significant link-juice to your site.
Forums: Identify active forums in your area and start participating in the discussions. Most of the forums allow you to put your url in the signature. Moreover whenever approporiate, you may place link to one of your webpages for a more detailed answer. Caution: Hold your temptation to spam. My experience says building a solid reputation by meaningful participation pays off much better in the long run, than spamming.
Comments and trackbacks: If you read some blogs then leave your comments with your blog url. I get more than 50 users a day from my comments on techcrunch alone. The trick is to again say something that people will appreciate and not just spam.
Target the long tail: This is one topic that needs to be dealt with in a completely separate post.
The diffcult methods of getting traffic
The methods above were fairly easier methods to get some initial traffic. There are couple of other methods that will get you a much higher traffic but they require a lot more effort.
Get others to link to you Identify people who are complementary to you. If we take mywalkin as the example then any site talking about interview preparation, resume preparations, fresher jobs etc were complementary websites. The advantage of exchanging links with such sites is you have a common userbase but you are not competitors. Hence such people will be more likely to link to you. Though you will need to convince them as to why they should link to you.
Site about sites check webyantra.net to understand what I am talking about. These are sites that talk about other websites. If you can convince at least one of these to link to you, then you can easily solve the entire problem of getting initial users.
| Topics: Blogs, Entrepreneurship | Email This
|
|
