Why did VCs/angels miss investing into Interview Street at an early stage?

Recently Y Combinator selected TapToLearn and Plivio into their program. This is after they selected Interview Street in an earlier batch.

I don't know TopToLearn and Plivio personally, but Vivek from Interview Street was pretty active in the Chennai startup scene for a long time before moving to Bangalore and finally into YC.

He bootstrapped for many years while pivoting on several themes. Apart from Morpheus, who bought into his idea, why didn't any other Indian investor buy into it?

I'm sure a lot of VCs and angel networks would be kicking themselves now. They had a chance to invest early into a global startup that is now going places, and they missed the chance. Instead they will invest millions into the next shaky e-commerce, travel or deal site.

It's embarrassing when they have these companies growing right under their noses, and it takes YC to recognise them.

Minimum Viable Product & the Tour My App roadmap

Recently there has been a lot of noise made about minimum viable products (MVP). MVP was the topic at this month's Chennai Open Coffee Club. Unfortunately I couldn't make it at the last minute, so there are my thoughts on MVP and our approach to building Tour My App.

We recently launched a new product called Tour My App. This is a product through which you can create "tours" to guide users step by step through the actions required to complete tasks in your web application. In this post I'll explain how we are applying the MVP concept in Tour My App.

First some history.

We've always wanted a tour functionality in our other product - Tools For Agile. We searched for various solutions, but didn't find anything that fit our needs. In the meantime, The Startup Center had an event called In 50 Hours. The premise of the event is simple - build a product from scratch in 50 hours. Kausikram went ahead and built an initial prototype of Tour My App over the weekend. The idea was to later on incorporate that into our product. However, during the demo at In 50 Hours, many people expressed interest in having that functionality in their products as well. We then decided to split this functionality into a separate product.

Tour My App was born.

Having decided to build it out into a separate product, we now needed to figure out our release plan. Here is where the MVP concept enters the picture. MVP is a principle to build just enough of the product to validate your assumptions. They may be assumptions on user adoption, pricing model, sales model, technology... anything relating to the product. We have some idea about all these factors when we start, but they are all assumptions. How do we validate it? What we do not want to do is to build a big product and then learn that many of our assumptions are wrong. So, our goal was to build the product piece by piece in order to answer the most important questions up front.

Out of all the questions, the top questions right now were

1. Is Tour My App solving a real problem?
2. Will people pay to have this problem solved?

The idea for Tour My App comes directly from a problem we faced ourselves. We badly wanted this functionality in Tools For Agile. Our analytics showed that many users signed up for Tools For Agile but would leave before they performed a single action. If we could get users started easily, then we could make our users much more productive - and increase the chance they would become heavy users.We were ready to spend money to get this solved, but we couldn't find any other product that we could use. We were desperate to get a solution. That is why after a few months of looking, Kausik decided to just write it himself.

But this is just one data point. Were there other companies like this? And would they pay to have it solved?

These were the questions we wanted to answer.

So we did something unconventional - we charged for the beta. 

Generally beta testers get the product free. So why did we charge for it? In usual terminology, beta testers are testers. This means that they are given a buggy product and are expected to report bugs. In exchange for this service, they get the product free. In our case, the product is not buggy. We even have a demo page showing it in action. We want people, not to test the product, but to solve their problems.

The initial beta pool is a set of companies who really have a serious problem, are willing to pay to get the problem solved and the problem is serious enough that they want to explore solutions right now, rather than wait for the application to go live later.

In other words, we want to filter out the people who signed up for beta expecting a free toy to play with, and focus on those who need Tour My App.

So what does all this have to do with MVP? And if the product is production quality, then why are we in beta?  Simple, the quality is at production level, but the product isn't finished.

You see we only built the bare minimum functionality to run a tour. There is still no UI, no sign up page, no login page. In order to save a tour, we have to go into the database and create user accounts and store the data manually.

Why did we do this? Because building those features now doesn't help us answer the questions we want answered at this point. The MVP is the minimum you need to build to get answers to your questions. So we cut out these features for now. We'll build it later.

We are sitting down with the beta companies, and together figuring out what different kinds of tours they need. Based on that we will add the data to run the tour into the database and the tour can then be deployed live into the app.

The discussions will also highlight whether we need to add more functionality into Tour My App or not. We have thousands of potential features in our minds. We are not going to implement any of them until we come across a beta customer that needs it. Then we will build it. So we are not building features based on assumptions, or coolness, but only when see a need in front of our face.

In this phase we want to answer the question: Can we build the kinds of tours that customers need?

Once we figure out the answer to that question, and are satisfied that we are doing a good job of solving beta customer problems, only then will we build out the frontend, the website, the signup page, login page and all that. All that is simple - there is no unknown risk there.

Then we will open to the public with the live application.

PS: Do you think you are losing customers (and therefore, lots of revenue) because some proportion of users cannot figure out the steps required to complete tasks in your web application? Is the problem so bad that you want a solution right now and are willing to pay to have it solved? Then give us your email and we'll bring you into the beta program.

Why New Ideas Can Be Bad

This is a great post from Tim Kastelle: Why New Ideas Can Be Bad which ties in with my blog post from last year: Too many people are ideating, not enough are executing.

Tim references a talk by Scott Belsky at the 99% conference. Here is what Belsky says:

When ideas are new, we have lots of excitement and energy. However, once we settle into trying to make the idea real, the levels of both excitement and energy go down – it starts to feel more like work. How do we respond to this?

According to Belsky, the natural response is to look for the excitement of a new idea again – and succumbing to this temptation is deadly.

Read the whole thing.

This post is a part of the selected archive.

The Scavenger app from my Chennai Geeks presentation

This weekend I presented at the Chennai Geeks meet on using HTML5 to build mobile applications. As a part of the talk, I showed a sample scavenger application that was built using HTML5.

The application defined a list of scavenger locations, and used the Geolocation API to check you in when you were close to one of the defined locations. The app used Local Storage to save the list of previously visited locations and the timestamp when you last checked in. Finally we used some CSS3 Media Queries to show some additional information when the app was accessed through a desktop browser.

To run the application, just copay and save the code below and open the html file in Firefox 3.6, Google Chrome, iPhone or Android browser.

Here is the source code for the application:

<html>
<head>
  <title>Fivesquare</title>
  <script type="text/javascript" src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.4/jquery.min.js"></script>
  <script type="text/javascript" src="json2.js"></script>
<style>
header {font-size: 11px;}
h1 {font-family: Verdana,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size:25px;}
.error, .notice, .success {padding:.8em;margin-bottom:1em;border:2px solid #ddd;}
.error {background:#FBE3E4;color:#8a1f11;border-color:#FBC2C4;}
.notice {background:#FFF6BF;color:#514721;border-color:#FFD324;}
.success {background:#E6EFC2;color:#264409;border-color:#C6D880;}
.location {background: #eeeeee; border-radius: 15px; -moz-border-radius: 15px; -webkit-border-radius: 15px; margin: 5px 0; padding: 10px;}
.visited {background:#ccff99; font-weight: bold;}
.location-distance {display:block; color: #555555; font-weight:normal; font-size: 0.8em;}
.location-checkin {display:block; font-weight:normal; font-size: 0.9em;}

/* Dont show distance and timestamp on small screens */
@media only screen and (max-width: 480px) {
.location-distance {display:none;}
.location-checkin {display:none;}
}

</style>
<script type="text/javascript">

Number.prototype.toRad = function() {
    return this * Math.PI / 180;
}

// List of locations. Format: ["location name", lat, long]
var LOCATIONS = [
  ["Thoughtworks", 13.01245, 80.201451],
  ["Ashoka Pillar", 13.035028, 80.212512],
  ["Kathipara", 13.007359, 80.20394]
];

// Haversine formula to calculate distance (in km) between two lat/long coordinates
function distance(lat1, lon1, lat2, lon2) {
    var R = 6371; // km
    var dLat = (lat2-lat1).toRad();
    var dLon = (lon2-lon1).toRad(); 
    var a = Math.sin(dLat/2) * Math.sin(dLat/2) +
        Math.cos(lat1.toRad()) * Math.cos(lat2.toRad()) * 
        Math.sin(dLon/2) * Math.sin(dLon/2); 
    var c = 2 * Math.atan2(Math.sqrt(a), Math.sqrt(1-a)); 
    var d = R * c;
    return d;
}

function check_in(index) {
    jQuery("#status-bar").html("<div class='success'>Checked in to " + LOCATIONS[index][0] + "</div>");
    var check_ins_str = localStorage["check_ins"];
    if (!check_ins_str) { check_ins_str = "{}"; }
    var check_ins = JSON.parse(check_ins_str);
    var location = LOCATIONS[index];
    check_ins[location[0]] = new Date();
    localStorage["check_ins"] = JSON.stringify(check_ins);
}

function show_distance(index, d) {
    var container = jQuery("#locations-container").find("#location-"+index);
    container.append("<span class='location-distance'>" + Math.floor(d*100)/100 + " km away</span>");
}

function success(pos) {
    var distance_list = [];
    for (var i=0; i<LOCATIONS.length; i++) {
        var d = distance(pos.coords.latitude, pos.coords.longitude, LOCATIONS[i][1], LOCATIONS[i][2]);
        show_distance(i, d);
        distance_list.push([i, d]);
    }
    distance_list.sort(function(a,b) { return a[1] > b[1]; });
    if (distance_list[0][1] < 2) {
        check_in(distance_list[0][0]);
    } else {
        jQuery("#status-bar").html("<div class='notice'>No checkins</div>");
    }
}

function error() {
    jQuery("#status-bar").html("<div class='error'>Unable to get position</div>");
}

function locate_user() {
    navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition(success);
}

function render_previous_check_in(index, check_in_date) {
    var container = jQuery("#location-" + index);
    container.addClass("visited");
    container.append("<span class='location-checkin'>Last checked in on " + check_in_date + "</span>");
}

function show_checkins() {
    var check_ins_str = localStorage["check_ins"];
    if (!check_ins_str) return;
    var check_ins = JSON.parse(check_ins_str);
    for (var i=0; i<LOCATIONS.length; i++) {
        var previous_check_in = check_ins[LOCATIONS[i][0]];
        if (previous_check_in) {
            render_previous_check_in(i, previous_check_in);
        }
    }
}

function show_locations() {
    var container = jQuery("#locations-container");
    for (var i=0; i<LOCATIONS.length; i++) {
        container.append("<div class='location' id='location-" + i + "'><span class='location-name'>" + LOCATIONS[i][0] + "</span></div>");
    }
}

jQuery().ready(function() {
    show_locations();
    show_checkins();
    locate_user();
});
</script>
</head>
<body>
  <header>
    A HTML5 mobile app demo by <a href="http://siddhi.blogspot.com">Siddhi</a>
    <h1>Fivesquare</h1>
  </header>
  <div id="status-bar"><div class="notice">Checking your location...</div></div>
  <div id="locations-container"></div>
</body>
</html>

Really disappointed with TiE Entrepreneur Awards

I attended TiECon Chennai today. This is the big annual event organized by TiE Chennai for the entrepreneur community here. I'll put down my detailed experience notes elsewhere, in this post I want to talk about the TiE Chennai Entrepreneur of the Year awards.

TiE gives these awards to entrepreneurs every year in a variety of categories - social entrepreneur, start up, family entrepreneur and so on.

This time I had a chance to check out the award winners for the last three years, and to say I was completely disappointed is an understatement.

The entrepreneur awards were all given to huge, well established companies. Most of these people had been running their companies for 15 years or more. Some over 25 years. I can understand giving them an award when they were in the startup phase, but 20 years after they established their company? And we are talking companies that have hundreds of crores in revenue. Many of these are publicly listed companies. See the previous award winners here.

How the heck can you call these startups? Why is TiE giving Entrepreneur of the Year awards to them? Will we see Narayana Murthy and Mukesh Ambani being awarded next year?

There is no way that entrepreneurs in the audience are going to relate to these companies. Far from being an inspiration, it is extremely deflating that a forward thinking organization like TiE chose to ignore actual startups and instead promote the big, well established names :(

3 Oct OCC Meetup Roundup

We had the October 2010 meetup of the Chennai OCC. Tony Aug, VP IT of Sanmina had come down to attend the meet. Once of the big problems startups often have is understanding how large enterprises make decisions. This is really important in the context of B2B enterprise sales. So it was really good to have Tony come down and talk about the executive perspective when purchasing software.

Some points from the meetup -

• The #1 reason for purchase in a recessionary environment right now is to cut costs. If you can show substantial cost reductions, then that is a big win.
• Many cloud/SaaS startups dont understand the security and privacy needs of enterprises. Eg: A company like Sanmina with operations in 20 countries need to run only on certified infrastructure that comply to EU security and privacy regulations, HIPAA, and a host of other regulations. Startups right now cannot guarantee all this
• Pricing: $10/user a month sounds reasonable, but multiply it by 50,000 users and it becomes huge. So you will need to find a way to get it into the team on one pricing model and then switch to another pricing model (possibly a flat price) when rolling out to the whole organization
• Dont forget about switching costs. Once an organization has spent tons of money on training and integration, it is unlikely that they will switch over, even to a superior product, unless there is a really easy path for them to do so
• Subscription pricing is great because it allows organizations to get started without expensive capital expenditure. The old model was to buy expensive servers, install expensive software, training, integration and then you could look to get RoI. The new model is to subscribe and cancel if it doesn't work out
• You can expect a small team to pay by credit card, but larger orders will need a purchase order and go via the purchasing department. Once that happens a lot of other stakeholders will look at it and question the need for the purchase. So you will have to answer to these other stakeholders too.
• Lock-in is important in a subscription service. Most companies will want to be sure that they can get their data out at any time
• Sanmina is a huge believer in open source - cuts costs and there is a community to help. For mission critical systems they pay for commercial support
• Escrow: Larger companies will usually ask startups that the source code be put in escrow. In case the startup closes down, the company gets access to the source.
• Using tools like Linkedin, it is really easy nowadays to find a path to get to a decision maker in any company

The difference between a conference and an unconference

One of the things I really like about unconferences is that there is very little "gyan" and a lot of experience sharing. This came home to me when participating in a session on hiring.

The question was: "What strategies do you follow for hiring and building a team?"

This same topic was discussed in a panel in the NASSCOM Product Conclave last year, with some VCs on the panel. In typical panel style, a lot of gyan was thrown around: "Hire only the best people", "Top people create top teams" etc.

That's stating the obvious. I mean which startup doesn't want to hire the best people? Do these VCs believe startups are intentionally hiring poor people because they believe its a better strategy??

The fact is that there are a lot of on the ground challenges to hiring that these panelists are hand waving away with their gyan:

1. Startups are always short of cash and cannot match the compensation in bigger companies
2. A lot of startups hire good guys only for them to leave in 6-12 months
3. Really good guys are hard to find
4. Most employees are not interested in stock options (a lot of Silicon Valley returned VCs talk about stock options... one wonders if they have actually recruited in India)

At the end of the panel, the audience is usually unsatisfied. The panelists tell them what they already know without a word on tackling ground level challenges that they face.

Now compare that with an unconference. Once more this topic came up at the TiE unconference.

Look at the answers this time:

1. Many top people are around in smaller cities, who are not taken by big companies because of a lack of english skills. They are smart and make good startup employees
2. Find a few people who believe in your vision and then complement them with freshers
3. Look at 6 month internships - lots of smart people available as interns
4. Look at your requirements - not all types of work require the best people. Some types of work are repetetive and may just make good employees bored.
5. Look at the attitude and teach the skills

These are strategies that are coming from the experience of people who actually have to tackle these on-the-ground problems. At the end, the participants feel charged up with ideas to take back and implement the next day.

This is really what makes an unconference different for me. The focus on real solutions to real problems is invaluable.

Interesting Themes for the TiE unconference

I was looking at the position papers for the TiE Unconference. Position papers are topics that participants want to discuss at the unconference.

I've taken some that caught my eye and organized them into themes.(Find these topics interesting? Then register for the TiE Unconference and participate in the discussions)

Product-Market Fit

You may have an initial hypothesis about why your product is useful to enterprises. How do you validate it? There are several factors: which customers to reach out to feedback? How do you identify the *right* person within the org. for feedback? How do you evaluate their response? etc.

How does an entrepreneur determine if his product really has a market fit that can guarantee rapid growth for the enterprise? The question becomes relevant when the product addresses a latent need that is not very explicit in the market place. What are the typical pointers to a 'successful' or an 'unsuccessful' product?

Scaling

there are many good companies which are doing great jobs in their niche. but very few Ideas scale, how can these companies tweak their business model, and focus to become large profitable organization

A good idea and you start enthusiastically by yourself or with friends. The founding team is all excited and there are no 'rules'. Works for sometime, but after a few years, when revenues start happening and the start up has to move to next level....

Marketing/Sales

Bootstrapped startups have very low or nonexistent marketing budgets. If you're making a product for the global market, how can you make sure your product is found by the right people?

We are a young startup with a service offering of online ERP and HR software. We are facing a lot of roadblock in marketing SAAS to our target clientèle (which are mostly old-style brick and mortar firms) and especially with a slim sales force. Would like to see if some inputs could be got on this.

We are a startup with a service offering of Management Consultation and Leadership training. We are facing a lot of roadblock in marketing our Webinar to the right audience inspite of knowing them. Would like to see if some inputs could be got on this.

The idea is to understand the dynamic behind catching customers into a cloud and to retain them by providing continuously improved services.

Building a product that can be consumed online implies that it's location agnostic. How to target companies in the valley being in India ? Is it a necessity to be in the US?

Would like to hear about market entry experiences of product startups with specific reference to early stage high yield marketing techniques.

Direction of TiE

For TiE education, Mentoring and Networking are the pillars. These are delivered through various events in different formats: Talks, My-Story sessions, Panel discussions, Member networking sessions, Unconference (from now) etc..It will be useful to know how our members value these and what additional or alternate delivery formats and activities should we consider to be relevant and aligned with our members' expectations.

To understand better where TiE stands in the entrepreneur ecosystem today, and what role do start ups think TiE can play for them and how?

Innovation

There is no dearth of ideas on solving problems. How can we leverage all the collective intelligence in the high tech industries to foster social innovation. How can we leverage technologies to improve the life of rural folk?

Recruiting

How do we identify great co-workers ? How do we build a team that lasts through the rough years ? How do we build a team that creates great products ?

How Recruiting the right people is the Key to Scale up and Establish your Start up

Services to Products

The difference starts from recruitment, development, environment and also the technology. The things to be taken care for getting the people shift their base from project based working to products.

5th Sep OCC Meetup Roundup

A couple of links from the discussions at yesterdays OCC meetup

- Naeem Zafar's Seven Steps to a Successful Startup - http://www.scribd.com/doc/15245595/7-Steps-to-Successful-Startup
- Steve Blank's blog - http://steveblank.com/

We started out with a theme - How do you find your first customer?

Suresh pointed out that we need to differentiate between customer (who pays) and a user (who uses the software). What we really need in the beginning is a user who can validate our assumptions. Once you have a validated model, then it is a lot easier to find a paying customer.

The conversation went on to How desperate is your customer's need? The more desperate the need is, the easier it is to find and sell. Sometimes entrepreneurs work on products that that are not solving really desperate problems. A company may have a hundred problems, but stakeholders only have time to only solve 5-10 of them a year. Is the problem you are solving in their top-10?

Here is a story from Steve Blank's book The Four Steps to the Epiphany (summarized):

Imagine a bank with a line as customers wait for an hour to cash paychecks. You have a product that could reduce waiting time to ten minutes. You meet the president and tell him you have a product that could solve his problem. What does the president say?

1. "What problem?" - The president doesnt realize they have a problem. They won't become customers anytime soon. They are late adopters
2. "Yes I feel bad about it and give them cups of water" - They know they have a problem but are not motivated to solve it. It's not an important problem to them.
3. "This is a big problem, we are losing $500,000 a year! I'm looking for a a product that will cut processing time by 70%, cost less than $150,000 and integrate with our back end" - Getting warm. Recognize they have a problem and have visualised a solution
4. "I requested our IT department to develop a solution, but it doesn't work and keeps crashing." - Hot. They have a problem and are spending money on solutions, but nothing works.
5. "Boy, if we find a vendor who solves this, we can spend the $500,000 I've budgeted for it!" - Fiery hot. Ready to spend big, but no solution in sight. Perfect first customer

In case we thought the last type of customer doesn't exist, Dorai told a story of how he was talking about his vision to a customer and it was such a desperate problem that they paid him in advance to create a product to solve it. You know you have a market when customers are willing to part with their money even before you have started development. Steve Blank calls these customers "Earlyvangelists".

This tied in with the theme of a track at the upcoming Nasscom Product Conclave, which is Sell, Develop, Market, Sell. In other words, first sell your vision, and get someone to buy into it. Only then start with development. Where most of us think of selling as the last step, it really should be the first one.

From there we went into Steve Blank's Customer Development method and Naeem Zafar's 7 steps (links above). Both methods advocate having a customer to validate assumptions even before you start development.

The discussion also went into 2 common product development strategies

- Find a customer, then develop the product (Customer Development method)
- Create products, launch, and go for customer usage (Web 2.0 VC method?)

and the pros and cons of each method. With that we broke up for networking.

Too many people are ideating, not enough are executing

Here is a pet peeve of mine that is strong enough to actually wake up this blog from hibernation.

I've been seeing this "ideating" word being tossed around as the new cool thing. Every event now seems to have an ideation workshop or innovation workshop. We've been doing innovation jams at Proto.in for ages now. This weekend we had an IdeaCamp event here in Chennai.

These days even organizations like Nasscom and CII are jumping on the ideation bandwagon.

The premise is simple: get a bunch of people together, bounce ideas off the crowd and make it better.

As an entrepreneur, I find these sessions seriously turning off. I used to be excited about them, but not anymore.

Invariably no one brings up the hard questions: Whats the market for this idea? How will you price it? Are there any competitors? How much will it cost to build? How will you fund it?

And finally, when the event is over everyone forgets the idea and gets back to normal work.

Count up all the ideas from all the innovation jams, ideation sessions, BarCamps, IdeaCamps over the last four years... then count out how many have been executed on. My guess is zero.

The ideas are basically dead on arrival.

So why do we have so many ideation sessions?

Its fun. Its collaborative. And everyone likes to escape from the present and imagine the future. Execution is hard, and execution is definitely not-fun. Ideation is instantaneous, and best of all free! I feel sorry for execution - its hard, long, time consuming, and expensive :(

But lets face it: ideas are a dime a dozen. Execution is what counts.

Everyone remembers Edison's quote: Genius is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration.

So, how about we stop ideating and start executing?

Leveraging FOSS for Startups

I've uploaded yesterdays presentation at Anna University on Leveraging FOSS for Startups.

Leveraging Free and Open Source Software for Startups

View more documents from Siddhi.

"Cutting Costs With Agile Software Development" Seminar In Chennai

The Ministry of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (Govt. of India)
(MSME) is organising a 1 day seminar series on "Cutting Costs with Agile
Software Development" on Friday, 20th of March.

Topics that will be covered:

• Business Case for Agile Software Development


• Introduction to Scrum


• Adapting to changing requirements


• Benefits of self organising teams


• Releasing quality software


• Agile metrics

Plus an open discussion where you can bring up the topics you're most
interested in.

Click the image on the left for all the details regarding content and registration.

My Talk at Genesis

I gave a talk last Sunday at Genesis in IIT, Madras. My talk was on planning the operations. Here are the slides for the talk. Since they don't make much sense without the commentary, I have attached a bit of commentary as well.

IIT Business Plan Workshop

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: genesis event)

Why Plan

"Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?"

"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat.

- Alice in wonderland

The first part of the talk was about why you need to plan in the first place. Many students believe that the idea of the operations plan is so that you can show it to venture capitalists and get funded (or perhaps win business plan competitions). The point I tried to emphasise is that the plan is something that helps the entrepreneur with the big picture. Running a startup is not a matter of following a fixed set of steps until you get rich. Rather, you will be fighting fires every day as something or the other goes wrong. When you get consumed with all these small fires, it is easy to lose the big picture, and thats when you need your operations plan to get back on track.

Rules for operations planning
With that I talked about 5 rules of operations planning. Here they are:

1. Know Where You Are
At any point you need to know where you are. If your plan calls for one year of development before you release a product, then you should be able to know if you are on track at any point. For this, you need to have intermediate milestones where you can check your progress and adjust your plan accordingly. For a software startup, I would say you need a milestone at least once a month. This would be a release with a subset of features of the final product.

2.Churn, baby, churn
You may have done a lot of market research, but you cannot gauge the market reaction until you actually get your product or service into the market. Therefore, get it out as soon as possible - even if it is only a small subset of your final vision - and then use market feedback to drive the product. In order to do this, you need to break up your product or service into chunks that are complete and can be released.

3. Be Flexible
Often opportunities arise that could not have been predicted at the start. Maybe users are using your product in ways you did not plan, or perhaps a new opportunity presents itself. A startup needs to be able to take advantage of these opportunities. A small team of generalists will usually trump over a team of specialists, because generalists can change direction quicker.

A story: Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith wanted to start a company to do web based databases. It was entirely an accident which led them to develop the first web based email system - Hotmail.

4. Know What Is Important
You need to know what is important for the product to be developed. Focus on what needs to be done to get your product in the hands of your target customers. Startups will sometimes spend money on a nice office and save money on developer workstations. While this is great for the founder's ego, it's counterproductive for the business. As far as operations go, spend on productivity enhancements rather than ego enhancements.

5. Be Ready To Start Again

"Plans are useless, but planning is invaluable" - Dwight Eisenhower

Operations planning is not something that you do at the start, but it's something you need to be continuously doing. New information keeps coming up which invalidate your old plans. Rather than stick to the old plan, throw it away and plan again. Don't be attached to your operations plan - its essentially useless - but the act of planning is very useful.

Chennai OCC November Meet: New venue - Ascendas Food Court

The November meetup of the Chennai OpenCoffee Club is tomorrow. There is a change in venue this month. We are meeting at the Ascendas food court at 3pm instead of the usual location at Amethyst. If you have never been to this food court, then the website has a handy map with the location of the venue. Basically it at Taramani, behind IIT and Tidel Park.

Now if you are unsure of what the Chennai OpenCoffee Club actually is, its a place for entrepreneurs, would-be entrepreneurs, and everyone else involved with startups to meet informally (that means no need to join a group or pre-register and no entry fees). We have a meet on the first Sunday of the month. The meetups are open to everyone. Join the Chennai OCC website to get an email notification before every meetup.

On the topic of the OCC website, I just wanted to point out the Chennai OCC website has a forum, so do join in the coversations.

Plus a new feature that is available is that all discussions on the website are now available as an RSS feed — Click here for the Chennai OCC forum feed — so its a really good idea to subscribe to the feed in your favourite blog reader. That will allow you to keep track of the Chennai OCC forums and, if you have joined the website, you can then join in the coversation.

Chennai OpenCoffee Club Turns One!

It's hard to believe but the Chennai OpenCoffee Club will soon turn 1 year old. Vaidhy and I started it with the first meetup on the 5th of August, 2007 at Subway (Read about it here). Since then, OCC has spread out to Bangalore, Mumbai, Pune, Hyderabad, Delhi, Noida and Kolkata (See the links at the bottom of this post to join these OCC groups).

What is the Chennai OpenCoffee Club?

Here's the blurb from the website

The Chennai OpenCoffee Club is a place for people involved in the startup ecosystem to meet in an informal setting. Anyone involved with startups - entrepreneurs, developers, lawyers, investors - is invited to come and join the conversation.

Chennai OpenCoffee Club Links

• Chennai OpenCoffee Club Online
• The original announcement
• How to organise an OpenCoffee Club in your city

Media Coverage

• Indian Express covers the first Chennai OCC meet
• Chennai OCC is featured in a Mint article covering the startup scene in Chennai
• April meet of Chennai OCC featured on Mint
• June meet of Chennai OCC featured on Mint
• Chennai OCC featured in Times of India
• Chennai OCC featured in Ergo (PDF version here, Page 2)
• Chennai OCC in Hindu Business Line

OpenCoffee Clubs In Other Cities

If you are from another city or traveling, you might want to catch up with one of these other OpenCoffee Clubs

• Worldwide OCC website
• Bangalore OpenCoffee Club
• Pune OpenCoffee Club
• Mumbai OpenCoffee Club
• Hyderabad OpenCoffee Club
• Delhi OpenCoffee Club
• Noida OpenCoffee Club
• Kolkata OpenCoffee Club

The Chennai Photowalk: April

I've just uploaded some of the photos from the april chennai photowalk here. The route was along OMR from Madhya Kailash to NIFT.

Ultimate Frisbee in India

Anand has created a cool new website for Ultimate Frisbee in India: http://www.ultimatefrisbee.org.in/

Apart from that, here are some regional websites:

• Chennai: http://chennaiultimatefrisbee.com/
• Ahmedabad: http://ultimate.indicorps.org/
• Delhi: http://groups.google.com/group/delhi-ultimate

Plus, there are a couple of groups on Facebook:

• India Ultimate Frisbee
• Ultimate Frisbee India

MoMo is back in 2008

The first Mobile Monday meet in Chennai for 2008 kicks off on the coming Saturday, 16th Feb.

What?

MoMo Chennai Feb 2008

When?

2 PM to 5 PM, 16th Feb (Saturday)

Where?

Gandhi Nagar Club, Adyar, Chennai (Map)

Talks

1. Going to market with Nokia - Find out how - Prakash Sayini , Developers Relations ,Forum Nokia
2. Getting started with WRT (Web Run Time) development on S60 - Balagopal K.S, Technology Expert, Forum Nokia India Team
3. Building Standards compliant mobile sites for free with mobiSitesgalore - Prashanth , Akmin

If you would like to attend, add your name here. Find the official announcement here.

NEN organising E-Week in India

NEN is an organization that promotes entrepreneurship among college students. One of their initiatives is the E-Week (Entrepreneurship week) where colleges conduct activities related to entrepreneurship. This week, 2nd Feb to 9th Feb is E-Week this year and as a part of the E-Week, a few students joined us at the Chennai OpenCoffee Club's Feb meet on Sunday. The idea was to connect students who might be thinking of starting up with entrepreneur groups in Chennai. Also as a part of E-Week, Kausik invited me to give a talk on "Bootstrapping Your Startup" at his college.

Here is a photo of Vaidhy discussing with the students at the chennai opencoffee club:

Day 1 Photos from Proto.in

There are tons of photos from the just concluded Proto.in. Here are a few photos from Day 1 of the event.


Ravi Narayan of Mentor Partners talks about "The Role of a Mentor in a Startup"


Roopa Doraiswamy on legal issues for startups


Vishal Gondal (Indiagames)


Rajiv Dingra of WATBlog and WATShow


Alok Kejriwal (games2win.com)


Bijoy Singhal (Microsoft)


Me :P


Gaurabh Mathure on the role of design


Chintan Mehta (Yahoo!)


Sujai Karampuri of Sloka Telecom (Incidentally, Sloka presented at the very first Proto.in)


Laura Parkin (NEN)


Atul Chitnis


Surojit Niyogi on writing Facebook apps


Mohanjit Jolly of DFJ on bootstrapping a startup


Samir Sood (Google M&A)