Tag Archives: Pre-Launch

Product Testing & Validation

22 Jun


If I got really down I would listen to Frank Sinatra’s song ‘That’s Life.’ You know, the lyrics that go ‘as funny as it may seem, some people get their kicks stompin’ on a dream.’

- Aaron Patzer, founder of Mint.com on how he dealt with self-doubt and the skepticism he encountered from almost every investor he pitched to

28. Validation and Outreach (March)

With our Beta starting to shape up for launch, I really wanted to get the product into the market and start getting feedback. I spent most of March validating/testing my product.

Outreach to entrepreneurs

Before the product was ready to test, I reached out to people who’s opinions I respected, i.e. start-up entrepreneurs who’s blogs I read and followed on twitter. Here are a few of the people I reached out to – Andrew Chen, Amir Khella, Ben Yoskowitz, Jason Baptiste, among others. To be honest, I never expected a response from a single one of them. I sent them a personal email telling them how their blogs helped me be a better entrepreneur, talked briefly about what I was working on and attached screen-shots of the product. Being the class acts they were, they all responded. Every one of their reviews was positive and mentioned that they would be interested in checking out the product. Can’t wait to get the final product in their hands.

In addition, I also reached out to do a few guest blog posts. Here’s an article I wrote on Bill Mullins’ Weblog, a Technorati Top 150 blog.

User-Testing

The day finally came when I felt the product was in decent enough shape for users to test. I decided to use UserTesting to get user feedback. This is an awesome service – would recommend it to anyone wanting to get feedback on their product. I can’t explain how big of a step this is. Getting the product into actual users hands…even testers is a big deal! You hold your breath when you ship it out… and exhale of relief when it’s received well.

The overall reactions to the product were very positive, both from a UI & product standpoint. Small (but big) win! They brought up some issues that we hadn’t thought of, so it was great that we did this. We ended up making some critical UI changes based on their feedback.

Lessons Learned: Your product isn’t as bad as you think. Get it out there. As a founder you’re paranoid about your product, but in all likely hood you’ve done a good job and users won’t hate it. You’ll only learn how to make your product better.

Startup Riot & Lean Startup Circle Atlanta

21 Jun

“Let us live so that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.”  -Mark Twain

This post I wrote a while ago but it never ended up seeing the light of day. I think it needs to get back into the story. The terrible picture is me with Andrew Warner @ Start-up riot 2011.

27. Evangelizing my startup

Lean Start-up Circle Atlanta

Last week (mid-January) I talked to my buddy Pete about starting up a Lean Startup Circle here in Atlanta. I guess I was a little surprised that a city this big didn’t have a LSC already. But then again, I think that the biggest participants and drivers in LSCs are consumer internet companies so… guess its not that surprising after all (see my comments later in this post) .

I won’t bore you with the details, but we put it together pretty quickly – here’s the official meetup group, and I’m pretty happy to report that the first meet-up we had on Feb 7th was very productive. I think we had around 15 people attend. Not bad for the first meetup. My personal goal is to at least bring everyone in the consumer internet space in Atlanta together. I won’t talk too much about the LSC stuff here as isn’t the forum for it, unless some crazy shit happens :-)

Start-up Riot

Yesterday (February 16th) I went to Start-up Riot. Arguably Atlanta’s largest and best early stage tech start-up event. I’ve also been told that LessConf is just as great, if not better. Either ways, if you’re an early stage tech start-up, then these are the two premier events in Atlanta that you can’t miss.

Since I moved here, I’ve realized Atlanta isn’t a “consumer internet” town. This was initially just a feeling I had, but later re-enforced by my interactions with various entrepreneurs/investors in the start-up community here. But something that has also been acknowledged by successful Atlanta entrepreneurs like Dave Wright, Dave Payne & Michael Tavani, Dave Cummings (hmm… lot of Dave’s, just realized) etc… On the other hand, Atlanta is a great place for companies in the Enterprise, FinTech, Healthcare & Security sectors.

Anyways, onto the event. The event was awesome. A must go for every entrepreneur. I regretted not pitching though. I will definitely present next year. My original impression was that companies at this event had to be launched and have some validation. Turns out that this wasn’t the case, there were plenty of companies at a similar stage as me. Met a lot of interesting start-ups and heard a lot of great pitches. TripLingo ended up winning the audience choice award… I was happy for them. Always happy to support fellow consumer internet start-ups :-)

The highlights of the event were getting to talk to Andrew Warner, David Houser & Charlie O’Donnel. All of whom I followed on Twitter, so I was able to recognize them and had plenty to talk about. If you don’t know who they are, read up, you should. They were awesome – very approachable & down to earth.

I gotta tell you, its also a weird feeling meeting people whom you read about and follow. It was an important step for me, personally. When you meet them in person, you in a way feel that becoming a successful entrepreneur is a lot more “tangible”.  Meeting and talking to them like any other normal person makes you feel that you can do it too… that they’re not on some distant universe that you can never be part of. Maybe this wouldn’t be a big moment for other entrepreneurs, but for me, in a way, it helped break a glass ceiling.

When I talked to Charlie, one of the first things he said to me was “change your name”, Mokabla will not stick. This re-iterated what was starting to become a pattern. I’m going to be giving this whole name change thing some more serious thought.

Another highlight was getting randomly interviewed by the Start-up Riot video crew. Being my first ever live interview, I’m sure it’ll be a lesson in how not to be in front of the camera.

Lessons learned: Go to as many networking events as you can. You are doing yourself a dis-service by not talking to people at every opportunity possible.  There’s no such thing as you aren’t “ready”. That’s BS. The positives that come out of networking far far outweigh any negatives. I can go into a whole post on how networking has been critical to my start-up move forward.

Live

25 Feb

“Ideas that most people derided as ridiculous have produced the best outcomes. Don’t do the obvious thing.” - Fred Wilson,  Union Square Ventures

26. First public pitch & presentation

Yesterday was a big day for us – Mokabla went live! We didn’t give out membership access yet though, we unveiled it so that people could start checking the site out. Access will probably take a few more days as we complete building out the site and features.
Our so called “launch” occurred at an event hosted by Entrepreneur Society. Michael Tavani, the co-founder of ScoutMob was the main speaker. I was pretty happy to be launching at this event. ScoutMob is one of the few successful B2C consumer internet startups from Atlanta, and I am a huge fan of their product. As such it was great to be sharing the launch platform with their founder. Hopefully their success will rub off on us!
This is how this event came to be. I know the guys who run Entrepreneur society. A week or so before the event, they floated the idea of Mokabla getting a shout-out during the event – as an up and coming consumer internet company from Atlanta. Less than a week before the event, this vague idea morphed into a “30 second presentation” on the stage. Now, I was expecting to launch Mokabla around this time but hadn’t yet locked down a deadline to do so. With the confirmation of the presentation, we now had a de facto deadline, so we started to work towards going live on that day. Seemed pointless to unveil a product and not have a teaser at least for people to look at. Since Mokabla wasn’t ready for launch, I spent most of the week racing with my team to to get the site up. I figured to deal with the presentation later. A couple of days before the event, the 30 seconds got extended 2 min. And on the day of the event, I found out that I was actually getting 3 min on stage. Thankfully, I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted to present and what I wanted in my slide-deck.

This is what the day of the event was like -

6 am – noon: Work on product and intermittently edit slides
12 pm: Finalized slide-deck!
2:30 pm: Site goes live. Told some close friends to check it out
2:45 pm: Site stopped loading. Minor crisis. Realized this is because our server capacity was still at 512kb (since that was all we had needed for our internal testing purposes). Luckily our RackSpace hosting allowed us to increase capacity almost immediately.
3 pm: Went offline to force myself to stop getting sucked into product development and started finalizing script for presentation
3:15 pm: Finalized presentation. Number of times I managed to read the presentation from start to end – 2
3:15 – 3:45pm: Showered and got ready for event. Realized our home printer didn’t work and would need to stop off at Fedex to print
3:45pm: Left for event. Was supposed to have been at the venue by now for dry run
4pm: Got to Fedex. Find out that their printers weren’t working either. Begged the cashier to let me use their system to print. He grudgingly agrees and I get my presentation.
4:15: Get to venue, present once in front of friend
5pm: On stage
5:02:45 pm: Done. End of a hell of a stressful day! First ever presentation in front of around 200 people.

Apparently everyone enjoyed the presentation – got great feedback from everyone I spoke with. More importantly, they really liked the product. Especially Michael; and the other founder of Scoutmob - Dave Payne who wasn’t at the event but had been keeping track of us on Twitter . It was great to talk to Michael, awesome guy, very open, down to earth and encouraging, which was really refreshing. Unfortunately its not what I can say about a lot of people I’ve met in the startup circles here. Given the fact that they haven’t even had a fraction of Scoutmob’s success, it begs the question, where does all that ego and pretentiousness comes from? End of rant.

The most nerve racking thing about this ins’t the actual presentation, or the fact that you’re presenting on stage in front of such a big audience for the first time, but the fact that you’re presenting a completely new concept – a (you’re) wild idea basically (and at this stage, without any user adoption that’s all it still is). So for all you know, people could think you’re daft. If I was making this presentation after we had a ton of users, this presentation would have been cake. But things went well for us, and we went out to celebrate later. Coverage of late night shenanigans is outside the scope of this blog.

Oh yeah, the image is of one of the awesome t-shirt designs we had printed for the event.

Plugging into the Atlanta Startup Ecosystem

21 Jan

“I was not willing to give up because I was born to like taking risks and that is my way of life.”

- Alain Robert, Spiderman

24. Networking, re-designing  & brainstorming launch strategy (still)

I know I’ve dragged the marketing issue on for like 5 posts but its a pretty big issue and I’m still working on it. One way or the other it will have to be finalized before our scheduled launch in February. I’ve mentioned previously that I’ve been on the fence about partnering with a marketing agency (New Marketing Labs). I decided a few weeks ago to go ahead and take the plunge. I’m working with Red Pin Marketing, a division within NML dedicated solely to startups. Unfortunately this is going to set me back by about $5,000, but our engagement lasts 4 months (my rough estimate on the time it will take to start growing from organic traffic) so I’m not too unhappy with the expenditure. The agreement is that they will help through our Beta launch and the buildup of the initial members, until we’re off to the races so to speak. At that point we’ll revisit the deal and see what we need to do.

I’m finally making inroads into the entrepreneurial community here in Atlanta. Its not because I shied away from it before, but between my travel back to and from India, and my wedding, I was unable to drop any roots over the past few months. I had mentioned previously about being recommended to join ATDC. I finally did it and this has led to few good things already; I’ve gotten to know a few other good entrepreneurs. I was also invited to join a course called Customer Connect, the idea behind the course is to help startups define, identify and reach potential customers. While the course is interesting, its the ancillary benefit i.e. connecting with other entrepreneurs and advisors that makes it really beneficial. I’m in a group with the founders of ThundrLizard and DayZipping, and we work with an advisor, all great guys. Looking forward to the other events such as Entrepreneur night, Mentor program etc, will post more feedback as time progresses.

Networking is a pretty core step and I wish I had been able to start this before. It helps hugely to have the world aware of your product even before launch and to to be able to discuss thoughts with people who might be knowledgeable on the subject. Not to mention the numerous peripheral positives that come out such as feedback regarding features you might not have thought of, introduction to people who could be of help to you and vice versa etc. I know the early groundwork I am laying here is going to be extremely beneficial post-launch. Here’s a good excerpt from Gagan  Biyani, founder of Udemy on the topic. His startup, successfully launched and raised 1 Million from some pretty noteworthy seed investors.

“So what I did for the next six months after that, after we had failed and closed down the fundraising process, was I did what I called “tee up the fundraising.” I spent the entire time meeting as many people as possible. So I’d go to tons of Silicon Valley events. At night when I was dead tired from working all day, I would get myself up and get in the car and drive over to San Francisco or drive over to Palo Alto and attend an event and give out my business card and get business cards. And that was super important because I got to know a lot of these investors. Like Dave McClure definitely saw me 15 times before he invested in my company. He met me at conferences, he met me at dinners. I attended his events. I was friends with all of his friends. He knew who I was before I even asked him for money, which was great because it socialized me. Even if he didn’t like me, even if he didn’t know anything about me but he just knew I existed, that makes me a much more familiar face. So when I go to raise money, he’s like, “Oh, I kind of know this guy.” He’s more familiar. Do you know what I mean?”

The other thing that I’m working on is the re-design of the site; i.e. implementation of the awesome new UI design.

Finally, I’ve spent about $4,000 over the past month on design, development, copyright research & filing fees & marketing. Next month, once the beta is released I’ll post a breakdown of all the various expenses it took me to get to the launch point. I’ll also talk about where I think I could have saved money.

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.

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.