Tag Archives: Lean Startup

Product Launch!

1 Jul

It’s easy to have faith in yourself and have discipline when you’re a winner, when you’re number one. What you got to have is faith and discipline when you’re not a winner.
- Vince Lombardi

29. Product Launch (Late April)

Now that we were done testing and tweaking, next steps were to finally get our product into users’ hands.

Figuring out how to get users & content on board had been issue I’d been trying to solve since I started building this thing. Our product unfortunately lies in the “network effect or two sided“ market. Its hard enough launching a start-up in a one-sided market… we were launching a product for which there was no existing market, AND was two sided. We couldn’t have possibly picked a tougher fight.

I knew that users wouldn’t just come once we launched. And I was right, we invited the first group of users who’d signed up through our landing page … and not one person added any content. This went out to about 15 – 20 people and maybe 2-3 even bothered creating an account.

Luckily, this wasn’t something I wasn’t expecting, very few people ever bother creating content. We had roughly 100 people who’d signed up… but I was pretty sure these people just wanted to check out our site, not create any content. And I was right, when we got done sending those invites out, none of those members added any content.

Truth be told, why would they waste their time contributing to a completely new site? After all we didn’t have the branding of say Wikipedia or Quora or Amazon Reviews. We didn’t really have anything to offer to them. Yet.

Unfortunately content was our product and if we didn’t figure out how to get some soon, we would sink. Luckily I had a mental breakthrough of sorts here. I figured the lowest hanging fruit were people who’d already written comparisons. And so we should start by having them to add their content to our site. I was pretty sure that since we were giving them an additional distribution channel for very little work on their part  they would jump at the opportunity, right?

We carefully researched writers & bloggers who’d written such content and personally invited them. We got a whopping < 5% to agree. Even though they didn’t have to create any new content… all they had to do was add their already written content to our site… there weren’t any takers. #FAIL

This was pretty disappointing for us obviously. We then decided to even offer to add the content ourselves, (under their accounts of course). This was when the conversion rate picked up… we were now getting about 25% to agree. #PROGRESS!

Lessons learned: Just because you score a ZERO with one approach doesn’t mean everything you’ve done is wrong. You have to constantly battle to figure out what works for gaining customers. Even something worth Billions had to start somewhere.

Side note – When users use your product for the first time, it’s an an exhilarating experience. When the first user created an account and added their content, we were giddy, we celebrated.

Our Pre-Launch Splash Page is Up!

24 Sep

“You have to be somewhat crazy to be an entrepreneur, but you also have to be a genius.”

–Fred Wilson, venture capitalist, in a video presentation on A VC blog

13. Pre-launch page goes live (Sept 15thst – Sept 24th)

Our landing page is finally up - www.mokabla.com!! I’m very happy with the way it came out. If any of you are Black Keys‘ fans, you might have heard and hopefully seen the cover of their new album - Brothers. Then you’ll know the inspiration for my splash page. I really liked the colors the wit and the simplicity behind the cover. Now that our landing page is up, I realize that this is something I should have done a while ago. In fact it should have been the first thing we should have covered, even before we started with the actual development actually. It makes a big difference when you talk about your venture to others, via email or otherwise, to have something they can go check out, to get a tangible idea of what you’re working on. After all, strong evangelizing is the only way this application is going to get popular. So note to self, if I work on another venture, the landing page is the first thing I will work on. Right now it still doesn’t have the logo up but I’ve also been cranking on it with my logo edsigner and expect it to be completed by next week.

So, I realize I never talked about what my startup really was and what drove me to build it until now. That was pretty stupid of me. My thoughts on the subject of disclosure have fortunately matured. In case you haven’t gone to the landing page yet, my idea is to build a platform for comparisons. Not just product comparisons, but comparisons between anything. This will be powered by user generated content. The reason I came up with this is because this has often been a pain point for me. I’ve often searched for comparisons for decision making purposes and have come up disappointed. I don’t want to do a Google search and run through a number of blogs, forums, sites to cull the information. I want it presented succinctly, neatly & side-by-side so I get an immediate understanding of what I want. A snapshot or summary if you will, like Wikipedia.  We love Wikipedia because it gives you the basic information you need, and after consuming it,  if you so choose, you can dive in and click on other links to find additional information. But first you want a quick understanding. Thats what we’re aiming for, to become the platform on the web for people to get a quick summary of the comparison they are looking for. In fact, I believe we are also the first to do this using the UGC method. We’ve even positioned Mokabla as a sort of Wikipedia for comparisons. I’ll have to see if that sticks.

So apart from the splash page and logo, the other developments have been on the technology side. We’ve decided to go with Rackspace cloud servers for our hosting. I originally was thinking we would go with Amazon’s EC2 servers but after checking out RackSpace and talking with my developers, we decided to try out RS. I’m not an expert on hosting so I don’t want write too much here, I’ll let you read this Rackspace vs Amazon comparison. Since the comparison is hosted on RS, so you might want to take it with a pinch of salt. This type of comparison is exactly what our startup is all about. Providing apples to apples comparison when people want to make a choice between two entities in one place.

We’ve also finalized the email service we want to use to manage all the emails for our app. We’re going to go with postmarkapp. A couple of other good alternatives we considered were SendGrid and Elastic Email. The reason I went with postmarkapp is simple. You pay for what you use. While SendGrid is a great service, their pricing suits the needs of someone who deals with much larger email batches than we expect in the near term. When we do get there, its an alternative we could consider since they are actually a more cost-effective option at scale and they’ve got great reviews. But right now, given that we don’t immediately expect to handle 10,000/50,000 emails, we didn’t want to get locked into a plan. As for Elastic Email, while they are a pay as you use option as well and in fact cheaper than postmarkapp ($1 per 1000 emails vs. $1.5 for postmark) but they seemed to be more geared towards apps hosted on Amazon’s EC2 platform. Plus I don’t believe they configure as easily with the Rails platform as postmarkapp.

Finally there has been some major expenses this month. Postmarkapp as I mentioned earlier is $1.5 per 1,000 emails. With Rackspace, we signed up for the 1 GB RAM, 40GB hard drive option which comes to $44/mo. But my biggest expenditure has been the first payment towards my development team which came to $3K. Since I don’t have to worry about legal fees for the time being, at least I know that this will be the biggest payment I will be making for a while. The next big payment will be another $2K for development in the coming weeks.

Before I close out this post I did want to mention that one service I am starting to love is Quora. If you haven’t checked them out  yet you have to. It is a fantastic community of users where you can find user generated answers to any question you might have. As you can probably tell, one of the reasons I love them (apart from for the awesomeness of the product) is for the reason that their idea is very similar to my startup and they have done a great job of executing this idea into a solid business. I can see myself approaching them down the line to talk about some form of synergy/partnership.

We’ve Been Trying…

20 Aug

“My dear fellow, who will let you?

Thats not the point. the point is, who will stop me?”

- from Ayn Rand’s, The Fountainhead

The wait is over! Hallelujah. The team started giving me delivery of my product in the first week of August. I am finally able to see the project start to come to life. Given that something as basic as a homepage with functional login capability has been eluding me for 2 years, the feeling that I have now is nothing less than what Airbus’ engineers probably felt when the A380 first took flight.

11. Product Development (August 1st – August 20th)

We have been using Pivotal Tracker for Project Management. It is a great tool, completely free to use, developed by Pivotal Labs and is based principles of agile software development. While I originally wanted to use Basecamp, the team preferred Pivotal Tracker. In addition since we’re developing our product using Ruby, we’ve been using Heroku to host the prototype. The process is pretty seamless and I am able to be involved in the development process at a pretty granular level. So far we are done with the user profile creation module.

While working on other parts of the portal I realized we need to start thinking about the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy sections. This brought me back to the issue of incorporation. I had a pretty good conversation with Scott Walker of Walker Corporate Law Group and their services cost roughly $3,000 for incorporation. I believe this is something I will need to tackle sooner rather than later. For now, as a placeholder we are using this Privacy Policy/Terms of Service Generator posted by Ben Nadel to whom I owe many thanks!

Another thing I wanted to mention was Wisestamp. A great add-in for email signatures that I use. It installs your online presence from Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, blogs etc into the signatures of your emails. If you are in involved in any way with the internet/marketing/social media and want to build social proof, I think this is an indispensable tool. Down the line I see this becoming commonplace for almost everyone.

Right now, even though we haven’t finished development of the product yet, another thing I am working is designing a splash page to get the word out . I originally wasn’t on board with the idea but after going through some insightful thoughts on the subject – such as this article from ace product marketer April Dunford (who’s blog I frequently read), I couldn’t see any reason why someone wouldn’t do it. While on that subject, this is probably the best splash page I have ever seen, it was put up before draft was released – its captivating, explains the product intuitively and gets it done in 5 seconds.

 

False Advertising ?

1 Aug

“When we practice failing, it will become less frightening, and we will get better at iterating our way out of it.”

- Whitney Johnson, writing in The Conversation blog at Harvard Business Review online

The team I mentioned in my last post came through. They’re a great team of guys. We established a good enough relationship for me to feel comfortable with them as the developers of my product. We tentatively agreed on $5,000 as the fees for developing the project. The team also agreed to be pretty flexible with pricing. Even though they normally work on an hourly basis, they agreed in principle not increase the fees even if it takes longer than expected to build the product as long as there aren’t too many changes.

So far, my costs are in line with the original projections I made in my first blog post . I am well within my budget of $10,000. But I haven’t explored any legal costs yet which might add another $2,000 – $3000 for incorporation. I have clearly overshot the original deadline of August 15th though. No matter, I am expecting the project to be completed by September 15th, so a month’s delay isn’t too bad.

10. Mockups, Email & URL finalization (July 15 – August 1st)

Last week I started taking delivery of mock-ups of the project. We agreed to having a completed HTML mock-up  in place as the first step so everyone would be on the same page and there would be no surprises down the road regarding expectations. Pretty happy about the way the mock-ups turned out. The mock-ups cost $350 and they were done by the same development team building the product. This cost is separate from the development cost for the prototype fyi.

While corresponding with the development team, I realized that now would be good to have a dedicated email domain in place. But to do this first I would have to finalize my URL. So I finalized the URL last week and registered it with GoDaddy for $14. I have as yet not confirmed the hosting service. One clarification I wanted to point out is regarding our development platform. Previously I had written that we were going to use Drupal but we decided to use Ruby on Rails instead. We felt that it would be easier to build the modules that we needed in Ruby. So right now we are exploring hosting options that support the Ruby platform. I then purchased an email domain through Google Apps for $50/yr, the new venture’s first! I originally thought about outsourcing my email and web hosting to an IT service provider but thankfully quickly changed my mind. While it is a bit of a pain to initially set it up, its well worth the effort – you have your email setup in an hour and don’t have to depend on anyone for it.

I’ve also want to get my logo finalized soon. I have a pretty good idea regarding how the logo should look. After some initial research, I was surprised at how much logos cost to design, good ones’ at least. One would think its reasonable to expect to pay $100 – $200 for a good logo. But I really didn’t like any of the logos that were designed at that price range at 99designs (one of the most commonly used resources by clients looking for a quick inexpensive logo) so I decided to look around. For someone who wants to get a good idea of the space and how to choose the right logo, this is a great article. It also has a lot of resources to dive into. Here is another list I explored that has a bunch of good designers, I expect that everyone on this list would charge anywhere from $500 upwards for a logo.

Anyways, the designer that I am thinking of finalizing is someone that responded to my Tweet for a logo design. I felt like he got what I was trying to convey pretty well and seems to have all the creative talents to make that design a reality. The agreed cost for the logo is going to be $465. While this is higher than my budget, I think this is one battle where I will need to make a compromise if I am to have the kind of distinctive, high-quality art piece I desire. I will probably wait for a few weeks before confirming him. By the way, another firm that responded to my tweet was logobench. They use the picture of Kristen Bell I used in the caption above as their profile picture on Twitter – passing her off as their sales rep. Talk about false advertising ;-)

Speaking of Twitter, I must say that as a recent convert to a “Twitterer” I am thoroughly impressed by it. It is an indispensable tool for entrepreneurs. To me, as an entrepreneur, Twitter’s greatest advantage is that it gives you first hand information on people in your industry and gives you a great feel for their personality. In this regard it provides a service which is thoroughly unique, and short of knowing someone personally, I think Twitter is the next best way to get to know someone’s thought process. Equally importantly, Twitter lets you easily connect with these same industry insiders who otherwise are very hard to reach. And since they have an idea for the kind of person you are through your own Tweets, it acts as a great tool for “introductions”. I don’t know how I would have found the designer for my logo if it hadn’t been for Twitter.

In addition I’ve become a member of Sprouter. It is a Twitter like application purely for entrepreneurs, but provides much more than just tweeting services, such as this really useful question and answer service for entrepreneurs. While I feel like it is a great application, it still has to fully reach its potential. The reason being, most of the entrepreneurial community still maintains most of its presence outside Sprouter, on applications such as Twitter and online blogs. Once they start using Sprouter more… it will truly become a must have tool for an entrepreneur. I think it sill has a ways to go before it gets there though.

The Dream Team

19 Jun

“Picking a co-founder is your most important decision. It’s more important than your product, market, and investors”

– from How to Pick a Co-founder by the Venture Hacks guys

9. Finding the Development Team (May 20th – Current): Part 2

I realized that to move forward, first and foremost, I needed to stop depending on people, especially those in my circle and figure out answers differently. In addition, the previously mentioned Getting Real introduced me to an entirely different world – that of the lean startup, which completely changed my approach to this venture.

So instead of focusing on people, I decided to focus on the technology. I had been hoping to avoid this road (if you’ve read one of my previous posts, you know this is a world I had been trying to steer away from since college), but as a duck or chicken or something in Kung Fu Panda wisely said – “You often meet your destiny on the road you take to avoid it”. I wish I could have felt something profound at this point, like finally being at peace with my calling or something, but that wasn’t the case. I just came to terms with the fact that the universe was enjoying a big fat joke at my expense.

I started researching the software tools used to develop web applications. I looked at applications that were similar to mine and started poking around their technology; such as watching this delightful one hour presentation on Facebook’s software stack. I had become so removed from the software development world after college and had leaned so much on my co-founder during the previous venture to take care of the technical decisions that I realized I literally knew very little about the technology involved. I don’t want to get into the details of every technology I studied, suffice to say, I felt like I had become a geek crossover artist. For someone new to this world, here is a list of sample CMS’s out there. I couldn’t believe that we didn’t even consider using an open-source technology stack when we built our concept the last time!! After copious amounts of research on the best CMS/web application development framework for a project such as mine , I decided to use Drupal. For the first time in my life, I actually joined and posted in a tech forum (an awesome group of people btw) to help me with my research.

Now no one I knew of knew Drupal or even knew of anyone who knew it. So, I started surfing the innumerable Drupal forums and blogs and randomly called and talked to developers who had posted on there. Without going into the mundane details, over the course of a few of weeks I spoke with a handful of teams and was able to get quotes for my “Beta version”. This was progress! Although, I realized that working with such a team might mean working inside the box, or at least on a straight line when what I was trying to build was going to be a living, growing, evolving, experiment. Per the scrum model which I now completely bought into, and espoused by everyone I was following (Guy Kawasaki, 37Signals, YC, Sramana Mitra and Venture Hacks among many others), the first version was going to have plenty of revisions, so how sensible was the idea of using a “vendor”? Well if you don’t have pocket aces, you gotta work with what you have.

On a side note, at this point I was actually starting to believe that the only way to build the application was by coding it myself. As such I decided to start learning the Ruby on Rails framework and in spite of my hatred 0f all things IT, I downloaded the framework and started tinkering with it. Apart from RoR, in the future, I also really want to learn to create PSDs. Apart from the fact that it would make my life much easier in the future by allowing me to design my own concepts and not depend on anyone, I have always enjoyed drawing & painting.

Back to vendors. After talking to 3-4 teams, one of the teams that I talked to actually seemed to “get” my idea. They are young, enthusiastic (which is huge, passion is a big plus!), know Drupal and the Web 2.0 landscape very well and are big fans of the 37Signals philosophy themselves. Nothing is as yet finalized but they we have decided in principle to work together. They agreed to start building the application from August 1st as they are busy with other commitments until then. In the meanwhile, as time permits we decided to get started by building a HTML mockup. So I probably won’t have much to write about until August.

I am really tempted to re-learn & jump back into coding to build this damn thing myself.

“It’s like we’re married, but we’re not fucking”

14 Jun

“It’s worth reemphasizing the one thing that we think is the most important ingredient when it comes to building a successful web app: the people involved. Mantras, epicenter design, less software, and all these other wonderful ideas won’t really matter if you don’t have the right people on board to implement them.

…In the end, the folks on your team will make or break your project — and your company.”- From Getting Real, the awesome book by the team at 37Signals

9. Finding the Development Team (May 1st – May 20th): Part 1

The title of this post is taken from “What Startups are Really Like”, a fantastic essay on everything Startup by Paul Graham.

When I came up with this new concept, I originally thought I would work on it with the same co-founder I had teamed up with the last time. It seems like a foolhardy move after what happened last time around but he is the only person I know who I can approach to be a co-founder.

When I mentioned the concept, he was again very enthusiastic about developing the product. Unfortunately, a week of interaction (the 1st week of May) brought to fore all the problems I faced the last time. This time around I decided to put a stop to this partnership before there were any losses. As Einstein stated: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results is insanity. But this was a big blow to me. I didn’t know if I had any other way to develop the product. So I then decided to speak to a couple of friends who were developers; while they were very encouraging about the idea, they weren’t interested in spending any free time working on it. So for all practical purposes this venture had come to a dead end for me. This was again a huge blow.

At this point I decided I needed to reach a little bit and started talking to 2nd degree contacts. I got introduced to a cousin of my fiancé’s who was a business development manager at a large outsourcing firm, and I explained to him what I wanted. He assured me that he could get me in touch with programmers who would be perfect for the job. Sure enough, a few days later he came back to me with a team that he had worked with in the past, a team that he said were reliable, trustworthy and highly capable.

At at this point I realized I was changing directions, instead of working with a co-founder, I would be managing and paying a team, but I figured at least I was back in business. The team my cousin put together had great credentials; they had worked on projects for Fortune 500 software firms. I was excited, I sent them the materials I put together and waited impatiently for a prompt response; it was around this time that I wrote the first entry in this blog, exactly one month ago on May 14th.

Unfortunately, things didn’t end up the way I expected (again, shocker!). After a couple of weeks of exasperating interaction, I realized that I was in the same situation I had been in with my previous team. Unless willing to massively think outside the box, these teams that work in the procedural and structured environments of large software firms are ill equipped to deal with the unconventional outlook required to write evolving software code. With development teams in India, I think a big part of the problem is communication skills (or the obvious lack thereof). This was again a huge setback, especially after all the time and effort that went into it. I want to add another excerpt from Getting Real which resonates perfectly with what I was going through (I laughed pretty hard when I read the line about everyone having a cousin that was a web designer).

“Everyone can read a book. Everyone can come up with an idea. Everyone has a cousin that’s a web designer. Everyone can write a blog. Everyone can hire someone to hack together some code. The difference between you and everyone else will be how well you execute. Success is all about great execution.”

Just to give an example of the frustrations I faced with this team, A) the team kept arguing that it would be better to develop in ASP.net vs. using something open source B) would not reply on time to my calls/emails, and if they did, they would ignore half of my questions/comments C) quoted me 1500 man hours of work!!! and D) suggested a team of 10 developers (which I cut down to 6 by haggling!)

I couldn’t believe how difficult this was turning out to be. While college kids were building online empire’s from their dorm rooms, I couldn’t find a couple of developers in a country where half the world’s IT professionals churned out a billion lines of code for the world’s largest companies every day.

It was at this point I think that my outlook when through a paradigm shift regarding how I needed to tackle this venture.

Growing Pains

9 Jun

“If you’re not making mistakes, then you’re not doing anything. I’m positive that a doer makes mistakes.”

- John Wooden

Mr. Wooden does provide me with some measure of consolation. Btw, there is WAY too much information out there for entrepreneurs. I usually check out a link which I think is a good read and before I know it, I’ve lost 2 hours surfing potentially useful sites. I don’t know a good way around this problem.

OK, getting back to whats relevant.

I realize that, I have not yet mentioned how I actually plan to build the application. Truth is, by this point I thought I would have the development team locked down, but I don’t. What a shocker that things haven’t progressed according to schedule. Anyways here are the issues I have focused on over the last couple of weeks.

  • Finalizing a development team/partner
  • Legal issues/incorporation

May 15th – May 30th

8. Legal issues: The reason I started thinking about incorporation now, is because of the slightly unusual situation I am in. If all aspects of this business were to be based out of the U.S., I wouldn’t have thought of this issue until the product was close to deployment. But since my development expenses will be in India and the launch market will be in the U.S., I want to be prudent and lock down a legal counsel soon.

So I had a call on May 21st with WSGR – Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, arguably the most prominent law firm in the tech startup space (and a lot of other sectors as well). I got in touch with them through a contact; I sent them a brief about my venture and they were very interested in finding out more. But even if you do not have a personal contact, getting in touch with them should not be an issue, despite their size and reputation, they are pretty accessible. I was very familiar with their reputation from my investment banking days and I was pretty happy that they wanted to hear me out. Their client list is a who’s who of the tech industry. I know the first thing anyways wants to know is how much a law firm/startup incorporation costs. Scroll to the bottom of this article, and read the “Audience Questions” section (it is a bit dated). Since they defer costs, the article also talks about what criteria they use to represent startups. Though I haven’t talked to Scott yet, Walker Corporate Law Group is also another one to consider. Anyway, we are scheduled for a future call once I get a little further with my development.

This entire time I have also been trying to find a development team but I haven’t gotten anywhere. As per my timeline in my first post, I am already behind schedule. So while I one could call my move to look into the legal aspect farsightedness, it should more likely be termed jumping the gun. After all its silly to talk about incorporation when the team required to build it is not yet in place… never mind the actual product itself! Here is a good article that explains why its best to wait until your product is close to launch before worrying about legal issues. In case one needs further proof, if you don’t have to immediately worry about any of these issues, you don’t need to worry about incorporation either. So right now for me, the law is on ice. I will deal with this again when I have good reason to.

Update: I have since come across some more great articles on this subject which will be helpful

How should startups pay their attorney?

9. Finalize the development team for the project: This discussion is going to be the largest component of what I have been doing so far so I will save it for my next blog entry. Hopefully no one’s panties have bunched up in anticipation.

Salmon is Good for the Brain

31 May

“Be tenacious, don’t give up, even when you get the pass. VCs with a healthy deal flow review 300-500 deals per year per partner. Most active VCs typically have the capacity to invest in no more than one or two companies a year. This means that there is a 0.20 percent to 0.67 percent chance of any given company getting funded. Those are odds you wouldn’t want to take to Vegas. Gail Goodman, was rejected by one hundred VCs before she got her company funded. It’s now a public company, Constant Contact, worth half a billion dollars.”

- Excerpt from “How to Pitch Venture Capitalists“

I was watching the Discovery channel the other day (my favorite genre of entertainment) and heard the narrator talking about how Salmon “take on the world” when they return home to their spawning grounds. I realized how true it was. They stop eating, swim thousands of miles, shock their bodies when they move from salt to fresh water, swim upriver, over boulders and waterfalls, through a gauntlet of orcas, bears, birds and other predators, not to mention humans. Basically the fish voluntarily swims up shit creek for 2000 miles. I think entrepreneurs need a similar dose of crazy if they are to successfully reach their goal.

As a founder/entrepreneur one’s knowledge-base & involvement has to be mile wide and 12” deep. One can’t just come up with a brilliant idea, hand it to a developer and expect it to be finished… never mind become successful. One needs to be involved in every aspect, including the technical details, otherwise it will fail. The devil as they say lies in the details.

Now that I had finished with the “my idea is going to change the world” phase (the sexy-stuff), the much less interesting, implementation phase set in. How to turn this idea into a fully functioning product. This is how I envisioned my next few moves. Not in the particular order though.

  • Select URL
  • Put all ideas and diagrams onto paper (basically an idea dump)
  • Create business summary
  • Start writing up product features & specifications
  • Start creating a mock-up/prototype
  • Create a work-flow diagram
  • Figure out how to/who is going to do the software development (basically the heart of the project)

I forgot to mention in my last post, I already started searching for the right URL. Its definitely, the most fun (and probably the least important) of all the activities listed above. I spent all my free time the last few days coming up with cool URLs. A URL that seemed brilliant one second didn’t seem so awesome a couple of hours later. One feels slightly schizophrenic. After a couple of days I had two A4 size sheets (single spaced) full of available URLs . These are the services I used to check for availability -PCNames, Ajax Whois & Go Daddy.

(Update: Since I’ve written this article these are some great resources I’ve come across to help name a site)

After this master list of the most awesome URLs in history was compiled, I couldn’t decide which one to go with so I ended up sending them to my fiancé and close friends for their opinion. Naturally everyone had a different opinion so we actually didn’t come to a consensus. In fact they extended the list by adding their own brilliant ideas. Suffice to say I don’t know if I should just go back to the drawing board or if I should “just pick one”. At least I have the luxury of this not being an urgent issue, so I will revisit this matter when it becomes necessary. As a guiding principal though I love the Go Daddy approach to naming convention; this is an excerpt from an article on the company:

“What is now Go Daddy initially began business about five years ago under the name Jomax Technologies. However, prior to launching our first software application, a Web site building tool, we decided that the name Jomax Technologies was too easily forgotten, so we decided to come up with something that would be both fun and easier to remember. The company changed its name to Go Daddy in 1999 when a group of employees were brainstorming on a more memorable name than Jomax Technologies. Someone said “How about Big Daddy?” A quick check revealed that it was taken. Then Parsons said “How about Go Daddy?” The name was available, so he bought it.CEO Bob Parsons states the company stuck with the name because it made people smile and remember it.”

Before I dive into the rest of my list, I want to mention that since my undergrad degree was in Computer Science, the software world isn’t completely Greek to me. But I still detest it just as much as I did when I was an undergrad. I never enjoyed coding (the only computer science class I loved was algorithms) and never wanted to look at a line of code again after I graduated. In fact I wanted to avoid doing anything with the software industry. It is a different matter altogether that the only job I could find after graduation was as in IT. Painful memories. Having said that, its been a while since I did anything “techie” related so a part-time website developer probably has more software skills than me at this point.

(May 10th – May 25th)

4. Put all ideas and diagrams on paper (basically an idea dump):

Since I had already done a bit of this earlier, I just built on that. I captured all the thoughts and ideas behind my concept. This became the basis of my “Business Summary” document and at times when I get wonder if what I’m creating is really different from what’s already out there, or what the “magic” behind this idea is, or why people will want to use it, I refer back to this document. But then I also keep reminding myself that it’s not just the idea but the way in which it is executed that will really make a difference.

5. Start detailing the product’s features:

I started to simultaneously put flesh and blood around the skeleton. The more formal (and professional) version of this step is known as a “SRS“ (Software Requirements Specifications) document. You can make this as detailed or as minimal as possible, I went for the latter. My first cut at this is about 3 pages long and helped me get some more clarity in what I wanted out of my application. But it’s impossible to write a good specs doc without a mock-up because visualization of the process is key. My work sort of came to a standstill here because I wasn’t sure of the best way to build a mock-up.

6. Start creating a mock-up:

“If I can’t picture it, I can’t understand it.”

- Albert Einstein

I have more in common with Einstein than just my birthday it seems.

I had started with drawing out all my ideas on paper and as I started fleshing out my product’s features and specifications, I had an idea of how it should look but I needed something more accurate/concrete. The mock-up wasn’t something I could leave for the developer. I really wasn’t looking forward to this part as I had an unpleasant experience during my last attempt at prototyping. The only prototype software I knew of and used was MS Visio 2007, but that was because a friend of mine had a license for it and she was good at using it. I had last used it over a year and a half ago. I remembered it being cumbersome, furthermore I didn’t want to spend any money on a mock-up tool so I spent about week researching the various prototyping packages out there. I narrowed down my list to the following “relatively” free ones. The reason I say “relatively free” is because they are either very reasonably priced or have a  free trial period.

After I spent a couple of days trying all the tools, I liked Mockingbird the best. It is ridiculously easy to use and makes prototyping completely effortless. You can have your mock-up completed in a day. The drawback is that its functionality is pretty basic. For that reason I actually chose HotGloo which had the functionality I needed. After about half a day of using it I switched to Mockingbird. All I was going for was a version that would give a developer a good idea of my concept, not a full-blown detailed prototype, I felt HotGloo was taking way too much time and effort to build something simple. Mockingbird lets you get on with the rest of the processes by eliminating the time needed to learn something new. Plus it’s free, vs. $7/mo for HotGloo. That sealed the deal.

7. Create a work-flow diagram: I now realized I needed a flowchart to map out my portal. A site-map (available in most prototyping tools) just didn’t cut it. I was confusing myself with all the possible iterations for users/guest users etc. So it was back to Google to find flow-charting tools. I can’t remember the last time I built a flow-chart. After some more research, I found two free tools - Lovely Charts and Gliffy to be the most useful (read: easiest) tools. I felt Gliffy was a better product but any charts that were created could only be saved as public documents so I decided to go with Lovely Charts instead. My guiding principal in this venture has been to go “free” or ACAP (as cheap as possible). Lovely Charts worked out well for me, I spent just a day or so creating my chart.

While I didn’t create the most detailed prototype or the perfect flow-chart or most complete specs/features document, I did enough work so a developer would fully understand the scope & nature of my project. I did consider using a more detailed software development management tool like Serena Prototype Composer (which follows the Agile Software development methodology) to better help me manage my venture but it didn’t seem to make any sense for a 1 man operation.  I have not gone into detail about the software packages mentioned above because they have already been covered exhaustively elsewhere and plus, that is not the point of this blog.

This was as far as I could go on my own capabilities. Ironically, I’m cursing myself now for not being a programmer. I absolutely need to have a co-founder/development team in place to move forward. I I have been working on this issue for the past few weeks but its been ridiculously futile.  Since I have already clocked close to 1800 words in this post, I will talk about my search in my next entry.

Failure to Launch

15 May

Obadiah: Tony Stark was able to build this in a cave! With a box of scraps!

Scientist: Well, I’m sorry. I’m not Tony Stark.

- From the movie, Ironman

Nor is it sensible to assume that one can replicate the success of Zuckerberg, Frind or even Tew just because their concepts seem simple and obvious; its only when you actually try to build your own venture do you realize that execution is everything.

Circa 2008

I started to work on my concept for a startup in the fall of 2008. The idea was born out of what I saw as a gap in the online advertising space. Without going into too much detail, the concept was similar to Wildfire. I bounced the idea off a few potential end-users, i.e. friends and relatives and they all seemed to like it so… I concluded that was all the market research I needed and decided to work full time on mending this glaring gap. I figured in a few years I would bring the economy out of the funk by IPO’ing at a valuation that would put Google to shame.

I talked to a close relative of mine in India to be my co-founder (the tech-lead) for the project. He was the only person I knew who could work with me on a venture like this. Apart from the fact that we had an established relationship, he also had the perfect experience for the job – he worked as a senior application developer at one of the largest software companies in the world, believed in the idea, was enthusiastic about working on it nights and weekends and most importantly, was trustworthy. When I told him the idea, he became very excited about it and that’s what gave the project legs; after all one can’t build a web application without someone who can build a web application. In my head, the project revolved around him, so I was delighted when he agreed. It was going to be very simple, I was going to take care of product management (concept, strategy, features etc) and the business end of things and he would do the development. We expected to have our application developed in 3 months, i.e. by year end 2008.

We worked via phone and web. I didn’t imagine that there would be any hiccups in building the beta version so didn’t think it was worth diving into the nitty-gritty of the development process. So I let him work on building the application and I worked on the teaser, company/investor presentation, 5 year financial model, a beautiful 50 page business plan, incorporation etc. With my background in investment banking, these tasks seemed to me the best use of my time. I thought that it was only a matter of a couple of months before our application would go live so I focused on raising capital as the means to monetization.

As 2008 drew to a close, we were nowhere close to building even a prototype. At this point my we discussed hiring a team of junior developers to help/supplement the development effort. This wasn’t something I envisaged but since my co-founder was the tech expert, I deferred to his judgement. So I made a trip India and spent a few months there setting up an office, infrastructure, investing in software, hardware etc. The costs started piling up. We weren’t using open-source, all our software was licensed. My co-founder was used to developing on the ASP.net platform and that’s what he recommended for our venture so that’s what we went with. The expenses had already gone above what I had expected. Luckily we were being helped out in this regard, my father had some unused office space he let us use so at least we didn’t have to pay for rent.

By the end of 2008 we had a team of five developers. The team presented new challenges, whilst I hoped that the team would be an immediate impact, they in fact turned out to be a liability. My co-founder ended up having to train the developers and it was taking up a lot more of his time than he expected. So instead of writing code, he said he was teaching. He didn’t want to hire a senior developer because he felt that a senior developer would be set in his/her way and it would be difficult to work with one. In short, hiring a team actually set us back both in time and money. On top of that, when I returned to the U.S., the “online” mode of interaction I had with the team was a disaster. in India, a very high premium is still placed on face to face interaction. My e-mails to the team usually were never fully addressed (if ever read) and the timelines were always missed, all in all they just resulted in added frustration.

Back in DC, I started going to tech startup/entrepreneurial events such those hosted by DC’s TECH cocktail, Twin Tech etc to network with fellow entrepreneurs, promote our venture, talk to investors etc (sadly DC is definitely lacking when it comes to catering to the startup community). While going to these events, I witnessed venture after venture being launched while we were still struggling with our homepage. I eventually stopped going to these events as the first thing anyone asked when I talked to them was for a website or demo of our product… which of course we didn’t have. There’s only so much one can coast on by claiming that the portal is still “under development”.

During these months of futile development I decided to try my luck and apply to tech incubators. I applied to LaunchBox Digital, Y Combinator & Baltimore Angels but none of them worked out. I wasn’t surprised at the rejections. To be honest, with the co-founder in India and neither a demo nor a timeline for completion to show for, it was a spectacularly long shot. I was hoping to be accepted on the strength of my idea but thats when I first realized that it’s the execution that matters. I began to realize why that phrase (“execution”) was so constantly harped on in every startup blog, article and book I read.

By the summer of 2009 we still didn’t have a prototype and I had made another long trip to India in the interim. All we had to show for our efforts over the past year were a few terrible looking pages that didn’t function properly, the “demo” didn’t even have error free login. By this time I had spent around $15,000 – $20,000 and I was fast running out of cash. In an act of desperation I decided to pitch to a few Angels and seed stage VC firms by cold calling them; not surprisingly, there were again no takers. The biggest positive I got out of the experience were a few “we like the concept but need market validation” responses. Add to this the fact that we were officially in the midst of the worst recession since the great depression so my chances of raising capital were negative to begin with.

By the fall of 2009, my budget had disappeared into an ever deepening sink-pool of expenses, salaries, software, hardware etc and the project hadn’t yet come to life. There was always one complication after the other. At this point I was wholly frustrated with the project and was beginning to believe that it would never work. I believed I had done everything possible from my end and followed the best approach to launching my venture so I wasn’t sure where to turn to or who to blame. Before I started my project, I wish I had read more articles such as this one where Don Rainey, a general partner at Grotech Ventures talks from experience about how every project takes much longer than expected, that people will let you down and to avoid the misery of sunk costs. I decided to move to India to see if I could upright the sinking ship but it was too late. Our prototype was out of scope, over budget and delayed beyond belief, as such we ceased developmental operations. I had spent around $25,000 and we had run out of money.

In the meanwhile, as I figured out my next move, I joined Athena Energy, a developer of renewable energy projects in the fast growing Indian energy sector. Fast forward a few months to April 2010 and I decided to get back into the startup game, which pretty much brings me current.

These are my 20/20 insights regarding what went wrong:

  • The BIGGEST mistake I made was not being more involved with every aspect of the project; I assumed that since my partner had more technical expertise, I could leave everything in that domain to him. This attitude meant the project was doomed even before it began. At such an early stage, things will NEVER work as they are supposed to. No one else will execute for you, you need to be involved in and follow through for everything.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             There is a great quote from Giga OM founder OM Malik in an interview he gave Sramana Mitra, published in her book Entrepreneur Journeys Volume 2. He talks about how he hired a team to work on the advertising side of his business so he could concentrate on writing his blog (his core business), but that didn’t mean that he forgot about the advertising part.

“A lot of people mistake that when they outsource, they outsource it all. The reality is you outsource the physical function of it, but not the mental piece. It’s still your core competence. Your core business.”

  • Building on this point, I should have been much more educated about the software development process. I should have enforced the agile development/lean startup process on my team. This would have changed the entire complexion of the development process. I also should have been more educated about the technologies involved, especially open source, so I could have considered alternatives to ASP.net/Microsoft technologies when the project started getting expensive.
  • We started building our application without a clear final product in mind. The technical team assured me that they understood what I wanted whenever I explained the concept to them and gave them a rough mock-up and wrote down some specs. I should have set clear goals. The team did not follow any sort of documentation either. While these may be unnecessary steps for some projects/teams, when working with a team of developers you are not face to face with and who need to be accountable, this was a definite necessity.
  • We started designing a prototype that was too complicated. Especially since our concept was outside our area of industry expertise (i.e., advertising), we should have started with a less ambitious prototype.
  • I was building our solution with the focus on raising money instead of training all sights on revenue generation. Also also we weren’t conservative… which meant our venture was just a ticking time bomb waiting to implode. Like the U.S. govt., we threw money at every problem instead of understanding the source of the problem and figuring out alternatives.
  • Lastly and most importantly, one should be very careful working with family. It is a double edged sword. Go into it knowing what it entails. Know the worst case scenarios, if things don’t go as planned, will you be able to make adjustments?

In parting I think this following quote from Paul Graham very succinctly explains what we did wrong:

“You need three things to create a successful startup: to start with good people, to make something customers actually want, and to spend as little money as possible. Most startups that fail do it because they fail at one of these. A startup that does all three will probably succeed.”

- Paul Graham in “How to Start a Startup“

We clearly failed with the first and third requirements. Since we never launched our product, I didn’t have the pleasure of finding out whether we actually went 0 for 3. Probably a good thing.

Even armed with all this hindsight I am still going through a learning process everyday,but at the very least, I hope I don’t make the same mistakes again. Otherwise I am going to feel like the guy that once said “fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again.”

Second Time’s a Charm

14 May

“My life has been a series of well-orchestrated accidents; I’ve always suffered from hallucinogenic optimism. I was broke for more than 10 years. I remember staying up all night one night at my first company and looking in couch cushions the next morning for some change to buy coffee.”

—Evan Williams, CEO of Twitter

This is a blog chronicling the progress of my online startup

When I first started thinking about working on my own venture back in the summer of 2008, I did a lot of research to see if I could find examples of how some other entrepreneurs successfully built their startups. I was hoping to find a previously trodden road-map that talked about the nuts and bolts of building an online venture through actual experiences and stories. Not articles that described the process from a high level or talked about the course of action after launch. I wanted to know how someone tackled the million little steps that lay between “Eureka!” and launch. Yes, there are terrific websites/books/blogs out there where you get plenty of advice from seasoned entrepreneurs – some of which I will talk about in my blog, but they didn’t’ answer the kind of very early-stage “How To” questions I had. I wanted examples of how entrepreneurs tackled basic things like disclosing ideas with strangers, finding partners/co-founders, how much each step of the process cost, when was the best time to incorporate etc. In short, something that was much more granular and nitty-gritty in nature. I knew I was being too hopeful, a big part of being an entrepreneur after all is figuring out solutions to such issues which didn’t have boxed solutions.

Apart from learning about the process and the actual components involved, two other aspects for which I was hoping to find examples of were how much a similar venture might cost and how long it might take (to supplement the ubiquitous - “it depends” response I usually got). I was hoping to get at least a ballpark estimate against which I could measure my progress. I wanted to get an understanding of the costs incurred at each step – legal services, software developmental, marketing, etc. Unfortunately these two pieces of information were nearly impossible to find. So for this project I’ve decided to provide a timeline with regards to all my activities and a breakdown of the cost for each component as well.

I had started working on my venture in the fall of 2008 and expected it to launch by the end of 2008, instead I spent the next year rapidly burning through $25,000 of my savings and getting nowhere with the business. In case you’re wondering how that’s possible, here’s an article about a guy who ended up spending $23K on an unfinished iPhone app. To say that this left me pretty frustrated and disappointed would be a massive understatement… to me personally it was like the ’76 Tampa Bay Bucs season… nothing went right. I’ll talk about this in detail later.

After having taken a break to take my mind off the letdown of the previous attempt, I decided to start working on my venture again. After all, one of the most important maxim’s/cliché’s in sports and in entrepreneurship is to learn from your mistakes and persevere; as Mr. Forbes put it much more eloquently – “Failure is success if we learn from it”. This time I figured I would maintain a running journal that would provide others the kind of details I was looking for when I started out last time. I also plan to include a breakdown of costs and timelines.

So before I start talking about what I am doing this time around, in my next post I think it would be prudent to talk briefly about what went wrong the last time. If I had known a year ago what I know now, I would have adopted a different approach and I believe I could have launched my venture on time and under budget.

I am not a programmer, nor am in the “startup industry”, nor do I have any mentors to guide me, heck I am not even a big user of the web or of technology; all I have is an idea which I believe will make the world a better place (or at least the internet a better place to surf). So I am pretty much starting from zero and plan to figure out everything as I go along. The one differentiator I do have obviously is that I have tried to do this before. If nothing else, I hope this blog provides sort of a blueprint for what to do and more importantly what not to do. I am also hoping that recording the progress will help me in my own thinking process and perhaps even aid me through feedback I may receive.

Markus Frind, founder of Plenty of Fish and Matt Inman, founder of Mingle2 both launched successful online ventures and (kind of) talked about the progress of their websites. Their blogs came closest to providing the kind of advice I was looking for, and as such mirror my own thoughts on how I want to illustrate what I am doing. Talking numbers, I expect to spend less than $10,000 (I came to this figure based on what I think I can save & borrow) until revenue generation (or funding), as opposed to $25K in my previous attempt, and around 3 months to launch as opposed to 15+ months in my previous attempt. Given that today is May 14th, I expect to launch by August 15th.

Please feel free to throw any questions or comments my way and I will do my best to respond.

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