Archive for the ‘Entrepreneurship’ category

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Entrepreneurship and not being understood

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.”

Get Angel Investment for your startup (Mumbai Angels,India

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.

Mumbai based startup (mKhoj) gets 7.1 million funding

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.

Link out to get Traffic !!

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.

A sample business plan for mywalkin

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.

A seedfund for internet startups in India

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

How to get initial userbase for your internet startup

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.

Showcase your company to investors

If you are in bangalore and you have an existing business then you may make use of Startup Saturday to obtain a forum for entrepreneurs to discuss, present, network and learn from peers, prospective customers, adopters and investors. Only entrepreneurs with existing businesses qualify for closed door meetings. All other companies and individuals can attend the Open House sessions. To nominate your company to a closed door meeting, please write to Suresh Bhagavatula at suresh.bhagavatula(AT)iimb.ernet.in.

The next session is to be held at NSRCEL, IIMB, Bannergatta Road, Bangalore on 12th April 2008 from 10:30 a.m to 13:00 p.m. There will be a workshop on Essential of Termsheet by Ms.Dhanaya Menon. Considering that termsheets are an integral part of getting funding from investors, you must make sure that you attend this session.

Importance of retaining traffic

There is just too much of importance given to getting new traffic. Most of the webmasters seem to miss the importance of one of the most critical aspects of growth of a website. Retaining your users and making them repeat users. I have just created an excel spreadsheet to prove the point.

If you play with the spreadsheet a little, you will see that if your website manages to convert 50% of the traffic, then in 3 years you will get less than 1 lakh users. However if you manage to retain 100% of visitors then you shall get more than 7 lakh users. 100% may be a bit unrealistic. However even if you manage to retain only 75% of your users then your site would have recieved close to 3 lakh users.

I hope the data below would manage to convince you that retaining the visitors is the single most important requirement for the growth of a website/blog.

Strategies that we use to get more traffic

It has been more than 3 years since we started mywalkin. With more than 24,000 feedburner subscribers and more than 1,00,000 unique visitors a month, it has been a reasonable success. I had never bothered to understand how we managed to get those users. However recently I did some analysis as I want to use the learnings from mywalkin, to get more traffic for binaryday.

If you are starting a new website or blog, then you have basically 3 different options to get traffic. Direct advertisement, Search engine Optimization and creating a word-of-mouth buzz.

Direct advertisement has the advantage of providing immediate results. If you spend X amount of money then you will get Y number of traffic. If the concept needs some initial userbase to start working like some digg like concept or forum or social network, then this is a must. However direct advertisement makes your website grow in an arithmatic progression. i.e if your advertisement budget allows you to get 200 users per month, then the growth of your site will look like 200,400,600, 800 and so on. CPC and CPM advertisement methods shall fall under this category.

Search engine Optimization looks like the most talked about method. If you are not in a highly competitive domain then it is not very difficult to rank high for target terms. It does need some initial investment both time and money. However once the work is over, much less investment is required for maintaining the position. On the downside, you will be completely at the mercy of all mighty google. It takes some time to take effect. While getting to the top 10 may be possible, moving up from there becomes a really big challenge. So with search engine optimization the traffic graph will look something like 0,0,0,50,70,100,170,300,300,300.

Word of Mouth This is perhaps one of the most important and most difficult strategy to use. And this is what differentates between a good site and a great site. For this strategy to work, you shall need to make your customers to talk about you. You can do that through quality and innovative features. However if you manage to achieve this, then this is effectivly a zero cost method of getting traffic. The importance of this method is that it makes your traffic increase in a geometric progression. assuming you manage to convince 10% of your visitors to talk about your product, your traffic numbers will look like 100,110,121,133,146,161,177,195,214 i.e the traffic will double in 8 months.

How important is an idea for a startup? … There’s something more important than that

I have been working on , rather I should say Thinking on loads of ideas for starting a startup since past more than one year but it’s only now that I realized where I was wrong. I always had many ideas…some of them really good (I can say that because when I did some research after having an idea, I found that someone had already just started a startup based on a similar idea … and most of them are doing good) but my fault was that I never executed any of my ideas… I just thought upon it , discussed with friends, did some research and by then I would have another idea and I thought it better to be what I had started on. So I think it’s not the idea but its execution and completion that is important.
Read this post on ideas vs judgement and execution to get the point in a better way.

Get your idea funded, WITHOUT a business plan :)

Have you ever felt that you have a killer idea, but you are not able to work on it due to lack of funding. And you think that writing business plans is not worth your time. Well here is a good news. You do NOT need a business plan to get funded.

Y Combinator is now accepting applications for the summer 2008 funding cycle. Here is what they say about their way of evaluating investment ideas.

How do we choose who to fund? The people in your group are what matter most to us. We look for brains, motivation, and a sense of design. Experience is helpful but not critical.

Your idea is important too, but mainly as evidence that you can have good ideas. Most successful startups change their idea substantially.

The best part comes towards the end.
We don’t expect you to have a formal business plan yet. All you have to do is fill out our application.

To know why I am so excited about this, look at the past companies they have funded.
Reddit, Loopt, ClickFacts, TextPayMe, Snipshot, Inkling, Flagr, Wufoo, YouOS, LikeBetter, Thinkature, JamGlue, Shoutfit, Scribd, Weebly, Virtualmin, Buxfer, Octopart, Heysan, Justin.TV, I’m In Like With You, SocialMoth, Xobni, Versionate, Adpinion, Anywhere.FM, Fuzzwich, Bountii, Auctomatic, Disqus, Draftmix, Webmynd, RescueTime, Reble, Heroku, Tipjoy, AddHer, and 8AWeek. It can not get better than this.

$17 Million fund for startups from ISB

The foundations of George Soros, eBay Inc. founder Pierre Omidyar and Google Inc., have jointly placed $17 million (Rs68.34 crore) in a fund that will invest in Indian start-ups from Hyderabad’s Indian School of Business (ISB), hoping to boost the growth of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in the country.

Read the full coverage here

Million Dollar Earning through Adsense??

The first step of any journey is the belief that you can reach the destination. Is it possible to earn a million dollar from adsense alone? Well to put that number into perspective a million dollar is what an average software professional in the US earns in more than 10 years. So when I suggested that we can earn that much money in one year simply by running a couple of blogs, none of my partners believed me.I wrote this post primarily to convince my partners that there is serious money that can be made through adsense. Hope it will convince some of my readers about the possibility of earning a million dollar through adsense as well.

So here is the proof.

Markus Frind runs a free online dating site called plentyOfFish.com and he rocked the Internet world when he posted a photo of his latest Google AdSense check for nearly $1 million CAD. You can see it for yourself here

The following is an image of a 1 month cheque for 1.2 Lakh dollars from adsense to the author of shoemoney.com.

Jason Calacanis was making more than $4,000 a day with adsense. He sold Weblogs Inc to AOL for $25 million dollars.

There are even more bloggers who have made more than a million dollar a year from their blogs.

I hope I have made my point. is it possible to make a million dollar from your blog? Hell yes. Is it easy to make a million dollar from your blog? Hell No.

A million dollar is a lot of money. It is not like anyone can start a blog, make some posts, put some adsense units and make a million dollar. Life is not that easy. (I wish it were though). A lot more dedication and descipline is required for that. I am definitely trying to reach there. I shall be posting about every step I take and every progress I make on this blog. If you will like to learn from my experience then go ahead and subscribe to my feed today.

Give yourself a hike

Imagine your boss telling you, you will get a 200$ or 10,000 Rupees per month increament after 6 months if you work for 2 more hours everyday. The best part is you get to choose the work you want to do in these 2 hours. Will you say no?? Then you will be surprised to know that everyday this deal is being offered to you and you keep saying no !!!

Here is a list of things you can do to accept that offer

  • Get paid to Code There are many websites where you can get paid for writing code. Topcoder is one. http://www.getacoder.com/ , http://www.project4hire.com and https://www.getafreelancer.com/ are some of the freelancing sites.
  • Get paid for finding bugs Programmers always had the option of freeleance programming. However the options for testers was rather less. However utest has started compesating the programmers for finding bugs.
  • Start a blog If you are passionate about a topic and do not mind typing, then you will love this option. Write about the topic that you love, do some search engine optimization, paste some adsense ads, get some initial users and voom..you have your raise.
  • Start a forum : If you have lot of knowledge about a topic like some programming language or mba colleges in india etc, then start a forum. The advantage with a forum is that you do not have to think about what to write next. The users will tell you what to write by asking you particulr questions.
  • Start a website If you do not mind a little bit of coding then you should start a website solving some particular problem of users. Look at some of the solutions in US and try to create a similar solution for India.
  • Get paid to contribute Many sites like ximmy and indianpad will pay you for contributing content to their site. This is the least favorite method with me but still check if it may be appealing to you.

    • Trust me earning money through these options are easier than you think. However make sure that you are ready to work for those 2 extra hours everyday. If you are interested in blogging but do not want to handle the problem of marketing it, then please leave a comment with your contact details. We will like to talk to you.

    How Google Became the No 1 Search engine

    Google is perhaps the most inspiring story for most of us davids trying to take on the Goliaths. There is a lot that I have learnt from the rise of Google. Thought of sharing some of those points with you.

    Most of us believe that Google became the no1 search engine because of its superior algorithm. Google did not win because of its superior technology. I know you will not take my word for it. So watch this video. This is a presentation by Seth Godin to the employees of Google. And he tells them that Google did not win because of its algorithm. A study in early 2000 found that users could not distinguish between results of yahoo and that of google, without the branding.

    Then how did Google become the no 1 Search engine. I will say there are 2 important points that made google win and those 2 points apply to every startup trying to become the next Google.

    Take the less obvious and more risky path
    Google won because it concentrated on a solution that was not considered important by the established players. When Google started working on search, search was not hot. Email and instant messengers were the hot themes of that season. Consider this, till February 2004 Yahoo did not have a search engine of its own. Yahoo search was powered by Google search engine. and till end of January 2005, microsoft search was powered by yahoo search. This meant that Google had close to 10 years to develop its product, perfect it and get users addicted to it before yahoo and microsoft started to compete with it. Actually microsoft and yahoo helped google make a better search engine by using it on their search page. Just imagine what would have happened if microsoft had thrown its best engineers onto search way back in 1998. May be google would have won but there is a very good chance that it would not have.

    As a startup the most risky project is the most obvious and least risky one. Because if it is obvious that there is money to make in a particular domain, then all the big guys will be already there. I will rather work on idea that will be a winner 2 years down the line so that when the big guys realize its importance, I will have a headstart to support myself.

    Make it easy for your users to spread the word
    If Google’s search was not significantly better than yahoo (They were powered by the same engine actually), then why did more people use Google? Let us say you are a first time internet user trying to find some material for your project and you do not know either yahoo or google. What do you do? You call up one of your more geeky freind and ask him for help. He tells you that you can easily find the information with the help of a search engine. You ask him which search engine. What will he say? Let us say he likes yahoo and so he suggests yahoo. You go to yahoo.com. There are too many other things on the page apart from search. You being a new user, get completely lost. You call up your freind and start bugging him with 100 questions. So what does he do when another person calls him with the same doubt? He suggests google. Because on google’s page, what the user needs to do is obvious.

    So make it as easy as possible for your users to spread word about you. Put a email this link. ask him to input the bare minimum information necessary to send out the message. (The email id of his freind) Asking him to fill in 10 fields while he is doing a favor to you is too much. Pre fill the body of the mail, with a description of your website. An occasional thank you mail may not be out of the order either. I am yet to start doing the thank you piece though :(

    These 2 points apply to most of the startups that have made it big. Think facebook, youtube, del.ic.ious or flickr. When they started, the domain was not hot. They went ahead and made it hot. What are you doing? Starting another social network?? Do yourself a favor and give it a second thought.

    It is different this time

    Long long time ago (i.e in 2000) there were many websites that spent a lot of money for getting users. They planned to monetize the users through advertisement. However that plan did not work out and most of them had to close shop.In the process they lost a lot of money. I am sure you have heard this famous story about the dotcom bubble and bust.

    Why am I writing about a 8 year old story? Because it seems like the story is being replayed again. There are many starry eyed (including me) kids trying to create websites that will make money from advertisement. And many pundits do not take us or our business seriously because they think if it did not work in 2000 and hence it will not work this time. They are WRONG. This time it is different. It is different because

      We are not creating websites to earn from advertisements. We are creating the websites to solve real life requirements of our users. Advertisement is just a side story and not the story.
      In 2000, the only guys who were advertiseing on the internet were other websites. This time it is the brick and mortar companies that are selling their stuff on the internet. We have realized that internet is just an enabler and not an end in itself.
      The advertisement revenue for 9 months of 2007 has reached more than $15 billion.
      People are buying real stuff on the internet on amazon and ebay

    I believe that monetization through advertisement is a perfectly good business plan to have. So stop listening to the experts who think they know everything. and start working on your idea and on getting users to your website.

    P.S: If you have an India centric website, that you monetize through advertisement then please leave a comment below. I will like to write about you.
    If are new to entrepreneurship then you may want to read about how to select an idea and how you can start your business without leaving your job.

    Miahoo ? Where does the MS-Yahoo deal lead us?

    First of all I was thinking of a name for the MS Yahoo deal. Micro-ahoo doesn’t sound too good. Please suggest some creative names…Will be fun.

    Anyways the Question is where does the deal lead us? How’s it gonna effect the today’s win-win situation of the Internet? Some say that MS has in a way accepted that it can’t beat Google on its own that’s why it needs Yahoo’s support. Now the question arises …even if MS accepts it’s defeat from Google, will it be able to defeat Google after the merger?

    Experts say that the deal will be harmful for MS itself. Most of the employees at Yahoo and MS also are not happy with the deal. Another thing is that Yahoo’s servers mostly run on Linux…(need I say more?)

    We have all seen that in recent times MS has been a failure in most of the things. Vista is a failure. Zune is a failure. MS Office 2007 is a failure. MSN live is a failure. Surface was a hype when launched and is just lost now somewhere in News archives. Also Bill Gates is no more the CEO. All this suggests that
    MS is going to do something wrong again.

    But I have great faith in Steve Ballmer’s abilities. Is he playing some unthinkable game?

    Read the post above by Sita Sir. You will also believe in Ballmer’s abilities.

    Fingers crossed…that’s all I can say.

    Linus says OS X is worse than Windows in some aspects !!!

    Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux Operating System, thinks that OS X Leopard is worse than Windows Vista in some aspects.

    Geek enough to be interested?

    Read on here.

    Venture Capital (VC) Funds in India

    If you are a startup, looking for funding for your company, then it may be a little difficult to find the contact details of venture capital funds. Here is a list of venture capital fund in India.

  • Aavishkar India Micro Capital Fund
  • Adharshila Venture Capital Fund Limited
  • APIDC Venture Capital Limited
  • Auto Ancillary Fund
  • Anand Rathi Realty Fund
  • Aureos India Fund
  • Axis Venture capital Trust
  • Avigo India Private Equity Trust
  • Ativir Venture Capital Trust
  • BTS India Private Equity Fund
  • Canbank Venture Capital Fund Ltd.
  • CIG Realty Fund
  • Dhunn-Carr Management and Research India Private Limited
  • DHFL Venture Capital Fund
  • Eureka Venture Fund
  • Edelweiss Investment Trust
  • FIRE Capital Fund
  • Footprint Ventures India Fund I
  • Gaja Capital India Fund – I
  • Growth Plus Real Estate Fund
  • Gujarat Information Technology Fund
  • Gujarat Venture Capital Fund 1990
  • Gujarat Biotechnology Venture Fund
  • Gujarat Infrastructure Development Fund
  • GVFL Venture Capital Fund
  • HDFC Property Fund
  • HIVE Fund
  • i-Labs Venture Capital Fund
  • ICICI ECONET FUND
  • ICICI EMERGING SECTORS TRUST
  • INDIA ADVANTAGE FUND-1
  • IDFC Infrastructure Fund
  • Information Technology Fund
  • Indian Enterprise Fund
  • Industrial Venture Capital Limited
  • Indian Real Opportunity Venture Capital Fund
  • JM Financial India Fund