A lot of ventures start with a dream, a vision; to solve a problem in a specific way. The dream could be a INR 100 crore product or something as complex as an ERP on the web to a even more complicated, a Hospital Information Systems (.. search engines? they are easier to build these days).

The vision cannot be achieved in 6 months or even 2 years — Takes 5-7 years on an average to build an INR 100 crore company. So you want to start now, and want to start small, chiseling your idea, refining as you go, adding feathers in your cap and changing gears and accelerating as you move.

First, zero in on a handful of customers and a specific problem the customer may have. Do not worry if others mock you for building a feature & not a product. You know your destiny. You know where you want to reach. Validate what you have built. Give the customer something useful so that he can pay for what you have built. Iterate on your product.

There are a lot of examples where the companies started small and began by solving just one small problem and then morphed into gorillas; from companies selling PCs — to cloth merchants now with fully backward integrated perto-products chain.

A large amount of money spoils you, ties you up with your own experiments and forces you to deliver a product which does not have any takers outside your laboratory — You are forced to linger with the experiment because now you have a large amount of an external investor’s money and do not have guts to tell him that it is not working out. There are numerous examples. There are only a few brave entrepreneurs who took $5m only to tell the board in less than a month about change in the business model.

When you are starting out, you are building something and proving your hypothesis. The moment someone starts paying for what you are building, a part of the hypothesis gets proved. You continue to iterate.

Think 6 months, 3 people’s expenses.

Think 6 months, 2 people’s expenses.

Think the amount of first tranche you need to deliver to your first customer.

Think about knowing the sales process yourself before hiring a sales expert.

Think doing zero dollar marketing before doing SEM campaigns.

Think writing the code yourself before hiring a developer.

… start thinking about raising big money after your customer trusts you with his money.

(The thumbnail is of a Ruby-throated hummingbird. These are solitary. Have one of the highest metabolism, and as part of their migration, they fly non-stop across the Gulf of Mexico, a distance of at least 500 miles. Pic courtesy)

1. Tim Bernes-Lee
2. Netscape
3. Amazon.com
4. Vint Cerf
5. Craigslist
6. AOL
7. Cisco
8. eBay
9. James Gosling
10. CNet
11. Yahoo
12. Google
13. eTrade.com
14. Skype
15. CNN.com
16. Paypal
17. Napster
18. Netflix
19. IAC
20. Monster.com
21. Flickr
22. Mapquest
23. Facebook
24. Expedia
25. YouTube
26. ICQ

I followed up with some, called up some, emailed up some. A failed piece of furniture from Home Town (a unit of Kishore Biyani’s Future Group) gets fixed after 15 phone calls only to be broken again. A non-delivery of 1Mbps Internet connection from Tata Indicom leads to only 75% of the subscription amount after several phone calls and 8 months of delays. God knows how much the cellular operators are cheating in billing for short minutes and dropped calls. Every month I get charged for roaming even when I haven’t left the home cellular network. The biggest grief is against some of the large public sector companies operating as corporations who do not even have a ‘tangible’ customer service line. The so called mega retail stores have the shoddiest of services without any accountability from the local Food & Drug or health departments/administration.

Where does the hapless customer go? As usual, there is no recourse except knock the local forums and show frustration at the process. The government of India has left it’s consumers to figure everything out on their own. It burns at least an effort of at least 100 man hours to get things resolved at the local consumer forum. If the amount is few hundred rupees, it is too much a chase.

There is corruption on one side where the government does not provide the service for which the officials are paid for and then there are systemic issues in corporations who dupe the customers.

At the minimum, the government should allow class action lawsuits and give an opportunity to service-deprived individuals to take action against companies and get compensated. The judiciary already has public interest litigation against the inaction of government. Now is the time to litigate against large corporations who do the business on their own terms.

I’m not alone when I get frustrated on inactions from the companies. If you troll through the forums, there are plenty with similar problems — They are fighting for the cause individually, to get their own money back. This needs to be fixed at a much bigger level.

The thumbnail is pic of a tree taken in 1972, wilting due to water and air pollution in Utah.

Kabirdas-ji says:

तारा मंडल वैसि करि, चंद बड़ाई खाई |

उदए भया जब सूर का, स्यूं तारां छिपि जाई ||

Shall update with the translation sometime later. Why don’t you attempt translating this in the comment section?

The Sales 1:1 101 begins with an email you send to someone — be it the pitch about the company, a proposal for partnership, or looking for some help.

So you send an email and then … days pass and the email silently gets buried down under. As an entrepreneur what do you do? You have two choices (a) Assume the recipient is not interested and never follow up and move on (b) Do a soft reminder and follow up.

People are distracted. Your customers are distracted. Your potential investors are distracted. There is an overdose. Marketing messages. Sales pitches. Attention is short. It is okay to remind. It is okay to do 2-3 follow ups before getting an answer or giving it up (for 6 months!). You double the interval between each follow up. 1st contact –> 7 days –> 14 days –> 28 days.

Which option you choose makes the kind of entrepreneur you will become! (a) The entrepreneur who follows up; who tries to get his attention and makes an attempt to close the deal OR (b) someone who makes an assumption that customer is not interested in “buying”.

Update: Updated the title…dunno why I wrote 101 as 1:1. Ha.

Like everybody else, I also get a fair share of daily dose in our inbox; some get labelled, others get instant attention, some are read/unread. I wish if emails followed the sentence strategy. This is the reality of information overload and the reason for change in our normal behavior of answering the phone on few rings.

The bird is the Downy woodpecker. Pic courtesy

After I did my sales pitch of becoming an entrepreneur (slides below); another student asked about finding the information related to venture funding, grants, incentives, seed capital! (Wow, I thought we already talk a lot!) So much so there is a chatter around all of these things, they are mostly targeted around the “grads” and above. We at Morpheus Venture Partners are thinking to do something about it (if you wanna join hands, drop me a note).

So what do you tell a 9th grader to do when he is eager to start and doesn’t have money? “Take the Plunge!”, I said.

Lamp Growth Plan

The visual image conveys the thoughts. The data legends represent a hypothetical configuration using Webservers, Database Master and/or slave or DRBD, Memcached nodes, etc. The size of the circle represents the relative amount of money spent on monthly hardware lease.

How did your web presence grow?

Disclaimer: The above does not include security, disaster recovery, backup and other attachments which are a must.

I hate my mobile email — I check, check, check..but postpone the response ‘coz the form factor is good for reading only — so the email doesn’t get responded or time is wasted to revisit it.

Feels like we have become a Pavlovian dog to the ever increasing distractions on the web. If you are developer on a maker’s schedule, the loss of concentration is busting the efficiency.

We are not going to kick the Pavlovian habit, nor we gonna kick the tools we have — but the tools have to get smarter in their delivery of these small bits of information, which they are falling behind on. I’m still waiting for a combined email, social network tool which prioritizes, filters, reminds, and work as personal crm tool rather than separate units of email client, social client, mobile client, readers, etc.

“When I’m in a deep Java debugging session on eclipse, please do not email me, pause all the tweets except from my wife, cousin and investor” — huh, the desktop anti-virus applies a bit of that intelligence already, why can’t my email do the same?

One of my resolutions of 2010 is to do something or get something done in this area (or aggressively consume a product if someone is already doing it).

A step by step guide to a Happy Holiday season!

Click here for High resolution 1024 x 768 image

Thank you Anish for the great design.

1. A traditional media company or a telco acquires a 3-year young technology start up in the INR 100 crore range
2. A mobile telco launches a domestic anywhere to anywhere unlimited talk time plan (long shot: for INR 3999/month)
3. Indian internet users climbs up to be in the Top 5 spot in their share of online piracy. Positive is the surge in Internet usage.
4. Infosys/TCS/Wipro launch initiatives to align their interest with the startup ecosystem in India (the offering may be on the lines of Microsoft Bizspark, Sun ‘Startup Essentials‘)
5. Amazon CloudFront Content delivery network (CDN) launches an Edge location in India
6. Government of India passes the legislation to legalize Voice Over IP (VOIP) traffic originating within the country and terminating to a local telephone
7. The Indian Advertising community tries to block sales of Tata Sky Plus (DTH Recorder/Indian Tivo) as they realize that people are skipping ads
8. 2 kids from an engineering college launch a brand new search engine and get international investments/coverage
9. Amazon.in starts their online commerce operations, whereas Techcrunch kick-starts their Indian operations with a post on how they acquired their squatted techcrunch.in domain
10. Reserve Bank of India launches a parallel payment network for credit and debit transactions; takes Visa & Mastercard head-on

The thumbnail is of Orion Nebula, favorite amongst amateur astronomers and casual sky watchers. It is one of the closest star formation regions from Earth at a distance of 1,500 light years.