BinaryDay

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.