The Bootstrapper’s Dilemma

You have an idea, and you start up. Then you quit your job, and pursue it full-time. What follows next is the quintessential dilemma of a startup founder — “Should I raise money now?” Unless you have a machine that mints money, you will find yourself wondering about it in your startup journey. In mine, I reached stages where I had questions in my mind to which raising money was one of the answers.

You Have An Idea And It Needs Investment

You have an idea which you need to transform into a functional product. You will need resources for that. Times have changed, and nowadays, investors rarely prefer to invest in startups in the idea stage. Having a fabulous idea is not enough; it’s the successful implementation of the idea that eggs the investors on to invest in you. Raising money in the idea stage is not entirely impossible, though. You might still stand a chance if you have graduated from an Ivy league college, have a great work experience, or have built a successful startup previously.

If you have a prototype ready, you can always pitch to the investors. Raising money from your friends and family is also an option, but I’m strongly against it.

My story: I did not have to hire someone to develop the first version of our product, or outsource it as I was a software developer myself. Moreover, my savings came to my aid as I was working part-time to sustain myself. So, I coded the app and launched it in February, 2010 while I was still working.

You Have A Product And A Question: Make Money Or Raise Money?

Pull all your PR strings at the time of your product launch as this is the only thing that will fetch you your first batch of users. If your product exceeds users’ expectations, you will not need to spend money on marketing it. You can take a cue from WhatsApp, Slack or even my own product, Crowdfire. However, you will definitely require money to incur operational and other expenses to keep the product up and running. That’s when you have to either find ways to make money, or raise money.

After 6 months of starting up, Crowdfire had reached a point where the server charges had eaten up almost all of my savings, and we needed to make money somehow in order to survive. I realised that there were only two ways to do it — look for funding or find a way to monetise the product. Back then, I had no connections within the investor community. Besides, raising money is a full-time task, and I was already juggling my day job as well as my startup.

With no other alternative in sight, I decided to go ahead and monetise my product.

Now the thing is, if you’re a consumer product, making money can be difficult in the beginning because charging users before they even use the product might not be the best idea. However, if your target audience is not the consumers, i.e., you have a B2B model, and you want to make a viable business out of it, you should totally monetise it. We monetised Crowdfire and decided to go the freemium way.

Do You Have The Money To Put Together An A-Team?

People are using your product, but you would want to grow it. There will, again, come a point when you (and your teammates or co-founder) will realise that you want more — to level up and build a company. You need people in order to build a company. Finding people of your tribe, people who are willing to take the risk of an early stage startup is tougher than you can ever imagine. In 2012, I quit my job and went full-time with Crowdfire because it was making me more money than my job was. Moreover, I made my co-founder quit his job too, and together the two of us decided that it was time to build a company. We had 600K users back then, and only one thing in mind: To build the best marketing product. We met investors, and even got the term sheet. However, there was a catch: The investors offered us $ 500,000 and in turn set a target in front of us — to reach 5 million users in 24 months. With the amount of money offered, the target seemed almost unachievable. After a lot of discussions, we decided that if we were to go down, we might as well do so without wasting the investors’ money. To us, it was a risk not worth the rewards that it offered. And 15 months later, as a bootstrapped startup we had 7 million users, and a revenue of over million dollars. If not money, we did take a big lesson away with us during our first tryst with the investors: The first step to success is to aim high.

It’s Time To Go All Out And Capture The Market

For some of you, raising money may have been the answer in the third stage itself. Looking back, we realised that we didn’t really need the money back then, and hence, going for funding just for the heck of it would have been disastrous.

After a point, even great traction doesn’t seem good enough. Fast isn’t fast enough. You want greater traction, and faster progress. Even though we were making enough money to sustain ourselves, the revenue wasn’t enough to fuel our growth. On top of it, we wanted to shed our image as a “follow-unfollow feature” as we had surpassed that stage long ago. It was evident that external funding was needed to fuel our product growth as well as help us increase our market share.

In February, 2015, we raised a Series A funding of $ 2.5 million from Kalaari Capital. It’s been a year, and we’ve just released the beta version of Crowdfire 2.0 — your marketing assistant on iOS (you can get early access here), and I’ve never felt prouder of my team. Crowdfire 2.0 is going to help small businesses like e-sellers, cafe owners, bloggers, authors, youtubers, influencers, photographers, freelancers and startups market themselves by being their marketing assistant. These small businesses would not be at a disadvantage anymore for lack of a marketing team compared to big businesses that can afford one.

We’re just getting started. But, there’s one thing that I firmly believe in. Stay bootstrapped for as long as you can. In Paul Graham’s words:

Don’t raise money unless you want it and it wants you.

Guest Post by Nischal Shetty, CrowdFire

Choosing The Right Startup For Yourself!

The startup hype is at its peak and everyone from a fresher to veteran is considering being at a Startup. I come across a story every other day when someone is regretting not joining a startup or starting up him/herself. So if you are someone looking to work for a startup, here are a few things to consider: 

The right problem? Is this a rocket ship?

 People startup for various reasons. Some to solve a personal problem, some because they were bored of working for others, some for lack of opportunities and some purely to make money. At the end of it, of course everyone wants to be rich. But the rewards only come in the long term (~3-5 yrs). So how do you know in year 1 or 2 that this is the right place to work? The right team to join? One simple old school way is to of course evaluate the problem that this startup is solving. If you think this is a worthy problem to solve and the startup you are considering has a fair chance to be one of the key players in this market, sure go ahead and get on the rocketship!

rocket ship sheryl

 The right stage of the company? Money?

 Companies go through different stages of evolution. Starting with broke to barely alive and seed funded to scaling terribly fast. For each stage, the challenge is different. The startup you are looking to join may be fighting for survival or looking to scale. Depending on what your appetite for adventure is, choose wisely 🙂

 Startups often require people to work for low salaries and if you are important enough, some equity too. My mantra has generally been to not give equity in exchange of survival cash. So do not accept a ridiculously low salary just because you are getting equity (unless you are part of founding team or very early).

 Most startups fail and even out of the ones which survive, very few manage to give a rich returns for ESOP that employees hold. So as the company revenue grows, it is not uncommon for the startup to give a raise more than once in a year. So talk to the founders openly about money and ESOP, have clarity. You may not be committed ESOP on day one, and that is fine. But don’t take a vague promise of ESOP, if it is committed, number of shares and its weightage should be told to you immediately.

Founders?

 The startup may be a rocketship in the right sector and you may be in a position to help it thrive. But do you get along well with the founders? Do you trust them? Would you enjoy working with them? A lot of tough times would be spent making this company work, you better be in with people who you can tolerate. Yes I use the word tolerate, because it won’t be smooth sail all across, you just need to have enough to stick along. Read what they write, stalk them on social media and get a feel of who they are. Of course, meet them in person.

 Alignment with what you want to do?

 Just because a startup is going to be big and you get along with the founders, may not be all the reason to join in. What is your inspiration? Do you feel for solving this problem as much? A good reason for not doing something that doesn’t come naturally to you is the fact that it becomes difficult to keep doing it when times are tough. On that note, you would want to read – How Not to Die by Paul Graham. Continue reading “Choosing The Right Startup For Yourself!”

How To Model and Evaluate Your Consumer Web Business

Premise: Wealth creation by humans happens in 2 forms, by making “something desirable” or by helping the maker sell it. Everything else is a support function that brings efficiency to these 2 activities. The Web being a communication medium can only help sell something, which happens through some form of lead generation. One might argue that SaaS tools are “desirable” products on the web but the way to see it is that web or the Internet only acts as a distribution medium for the actual product.

Product-network-transaction-information

There are 3 dimensions or criteria for evaluating a web business.

  1. How far is it from the “something desirable”?
  2. How exhaustive or selective the target audience is?
  3. Is it single power centered or distributed?

1. Distance from Product: Transaction – Information – Network

The representation above will help you visualize the value chain. The transaction layer is the closest to the product and has most control over the chain – in terms of pricing, availability, purchase experience. Though, this is also the most commoditized layer since most factors are internally controllable.

The information layer helps you discover a product and decide about the purchase. The Network layer helps you connect with the information. The outer most layer has little control in terms of purchase but it is the most defensible layer for a web business.

  1. Value in this chain is created when you push a user inwards from an outer layer. Every change in layer is a lead generated. User moving from one destination to another in the same layer leads to more confusion and is a sign of feature gap.
  2. Facebook and Google Search* are network layer that generates traffic for information sites, like FindYogi, TripAdvisor etc., which in turn generates leads for transaction layer.
  3. Most web businesses are generally an overlap of two of these layers. An effective use of these network with information – like Quora or Twitter is powerful. Tripadvisor is probably the best example of marrying the info+network layer. Ecommerce companies are making a decent attempt at marrying transaction with information so that they can influence the value chain better. MakeMyTrip, Cleartrip already enable transactions; with ratings/reviews they are covering the information layer as well.  Since there is nothing like review/rating in flight booking, this business is getting commoditized and the players are looking to move to lesser standardized products like selling hotels, holiday packages.
  4. Sticking to transaction layer only will make you no better than a payment gateway, which has been commoditized. The fulfillment part in the transaction layer is mostly offline. PayZippy from FlipKart and PayUMoney are making small steps to capture the network layer along. PayPal is a great example of transaction+network layer execution.
  5. The success of each layer depends on what bait you can fetch from the inner layer to entice the user and push her inwards for more. A good basic bait does not generally generate revenue but helps you keep your destination alive. A promoted bait generates revenue for you.
  6. Any layer is useless by itself. You have to do a lot of seeding from inner layer initially and develop relations with your adjacent layers to grow (through SEO, Affiliates, SMM, Content marketing, Ads). Networks by itself are not useful unless it has information. The information layer by itself is not useful if it does not push you to a transaction and the transaction layer triggers the end fulfillment.

*Google search is essentially driven by what human networks are referring to, the search result page is an organized way of showing the information. An overlap of network with information layer.

2. How exhaustive or selective the target audience is: Bundling – Unbundling

The bundling-unbundling theory has been well highlighted by Benedict Evans through his examples of Craigslist and Linkedin. Most web business are trying to solve the same problems in more efficient ways. The eCommerce, travel, social networking and classifieds industries have existed for long on the web, yet every day we hear of companies trying to disrupt these spaces.

For any new business the easiest way to get a foothold in a saturated market is by unbundling a very specific feature for a very specific audience and doing it better than the large established players. As the market grows and your business matures, you add more features and start bundling everything in your industry. The cycle continues. The unbundling-bundling evolution will never cease.

Unbundling can be done based on geography, user demography, product category or a particular feature. Whatsapp is a great example of unbundling of chat from social network and only for your phonebook contacts. Ixigo started as price comparison for flights, then bundled all forms of travel comparison and is now bundling reviews, all this while focusing on a single geography and single industry of travel decisions.

In eCommerce in India, unbundling has failed big time. Most vertical commerce players haven’t survived. The basic reason for this might be the fact that when unbundling based on product category, a major component of fixed costs remains same. Since the game is about scale, the economics does not work out if you try execute a single category better than the market leader. Have we seen any vertical ecommerce player adding more value than FlipKart/Amazon/Myntra and not survived? Zivame has done a focused execution and seems to be surviving.

The parameter you choose to unbundle on is very important. A lot of times unbundling can only get you noticed, you have bundle up to justify economics and user behavior.

Paytm is taking a bold step of unbundling based on user interface. Paytm’s marketplace is available only on mobile app. We will have to wait to see how it pans out.

Good part of unbundling is that it lets you keep a smaller audience 100% happy and grow there on, rather than keeping a larger audience partially happy. As Paul Graham says, “it’s easier to expand user-wise than satisfaction-wise”. The way to evaluate the scalability of business is to see how easily can more geography, user, target product be bundled up.

Unbundling lets you get deep into a vertical, the way FlipKart did with books. Though, there is an issue of market positioning when you later try to bundle more target products. MakeMyTrip faced this challenge trying to re-position from a flight booking site to a holiday booking site. You could mean different things to different users but one user is going to remember you for just one thing – you have a choice of how broad or narrow you want that to be. TripAdvisor, as a company, is focused on travel decision making but it maintains 17 websites, each solving a different travel need with minor overlap, to avoid any dilution in individual value proposition.

Examples of successful unbundling that might happen in India –

  1. While some players, like FindYogi, are trying to crack the buying decision problem, Roposo is taking a crack only at the influencing female fashion.
  2. There is Holidify that is trying to crack only the first step of travel planning – “where to go”.
  3. Jaypore is taking a crack at only high end fashion ecommerce and doing quite well.
  4. Zomato was good at unbundling restaurant search from horizontal local search. There is LoyalOye that is unbundling only event venues search.

3. Is it single power centered or distributed – Pipe vs. Platform

This theory is borrowed from Sangeet P. Chaudhary. He professes this theory in detail at his blog, platformed.

A pipe type web business is one in which the atomic unit of value is created by a single source, or the business under-writes the original source. Example – Ecommerce stores, Blogs. This gives you great control over quality and can usually work at all scale.

A platform is when business opens up to let a larger set of audience create value. Example – Marketplaces. This gives you lesser control over quality but is more capital efficient at scale.

The differentiator is more around how the value is created and not how it is consumed. Both Pipe and Platform have their pros/cons.

When you look at scale in a web business, converting from pipe to platform can give you a great leverage in the market. A lot of businesses change their proposition when looking to scale, though a good move from Pipe to Platform is when the end value delivered and the target audience remains unchanged or expands. What you do as a business internally will change tremendously but that should not affect the end product delivered.

  1. The move by FlipKart from Ecommerce to Marketplace is a good example. Though the company is yet to adopt to a pure play marketplace but the slow transition is making sure the end value is intact. If you look internally the company is now doing less of trading and more of technology.
  2. At small scale, FakingNews is a good example of converting Pipe to semi-Platform when they launched my.fakingnews.com – a UGC based satire news destination. Same target audience, same value proposition but more value creators. “Semi-platform” because the decision making around what gets published is highly moderated by editor. A full-fledged platform is more like 9gag, where everything gets published but only the best gets surfaced.

You create ‘entrepreneurs’ by distributing powers, that means more rewards in the whole system as a function of higher risk taking capability. Platform also enables decentralization of power/decision making, thereby creating lesser bottlenecks and higher efficiency.

The Atypical Product Manager – Nishant Pandey, Naukri.com #PNHangout

Every Byte Counts 

Earlier I worked as a field engineer in Schlumberger, providing Drilling Services. Drilling is a very high tech, and arduous task; whether it’s on land, on a river, on deep waters. My job on any rig was to determine the direction of the oil well and properties of the rocks we burst through – its density, its resistivity, its shear strength, its porosity. We did this via real time telemetry of data from sensors placed on the rig as well as from sensors that were sent many kilometres down into the earth. All this data came to our computers in bytes of 1s and 0s. We had to be rigorous in analyzing every bit of this data as any misinterpretation could mean the difference between finding oil or water.

The Atypical Product Manager

After working for Schlumberger for 8 years, I did my MBA from ISB-Hyderabad. There I met Hitesh, then the COO, and he hired me to Infoedge. Having a background in oil drilling and sales, my knowledge of the internet was limited. I wasn’t hired for any specific, well defined role. When I joined, I did  a bunch of assignments related to Online Marketing, TeleSales, Competition Assessment etc. After a few weeks of such ‘consulting type’ assignments, I was asked if I would like to head the Product Management team of Naukri.com.

My understanding of what a Product Manager does was next to nil. I assumed programming was an essential part of this role. However, Hitesh and Vibhore allayed my concerns, explaining what my role would be. I was told, by way of an example in a lighter vein, “If you leave Naukri.com to the Techies, it would look like tables of data, with very little aesthetics to it. If you leave it to the Marketing team, all you would see is banners all over the site”. Although this was clearly exaggerated, they went onto to explain that this means that the Product Management team acts as a pivot, to the Sales, Marketing, Technology and other teams, keeping the many teams’ expectations in consideration while evolving the Product in a way that benefits the users. This sounded interesting and it seemed right down my alley, so I was excited to take this challenge up.

Key Victories

The reason I brought up my experience as an Oilfield engineer is because it built a rigour to pay attention to details of planning and nuances of execution. Whether it is drilling for oil or whether it’s for improving an internet product, making logical, data based decisions and teamwork are key to success. Moreover, in both the jobs when you make a pitch to various stakeholders, the recommendations have to be crisp, strong and  factually correct. So, interestingly, I was able to bring learnings (a lot more than one would imagine) from my previous job and apply them to challenges here.

  1. Communication: The goal for any business is to increase the returning visitors. In our case the only way to achieve this was having relevant jobs for candidates and communicating them to our users in a manner that was effective and didn’t look like spam. Hence, we worked on every email communication to be crisp with a clear call to action. The subject lines, signatures, salutations, the contrast in colours, the font type and font size had to be well thought through. The team also brought about a complete re-vamp to many aspects of the site communication and interfaces, and we have sometimes seen a massive jump in our metrics just because of this.
  2. Transparency in information and no silo’s: Every stake-holder must be privy to the same information, and every one must be spoken to in the same voice with the same data. This has been one of the critical things that the Naukri product team ensures, especially in terms of decision making and dissemination of site metrics.
  3. Improving algorithms: Naukri has over 15 algorithms running on different applications, and sometimes you see 3-4 flavours of the same algorithm depending on which page you are querying from. The challenge of matching a CV to a job is that a CV, which consists of thousands of words needs to be matched with a Job Description, which also consists of thousands of words – and our algorithms have to determine which are the most important of those words that need to be matched, and which words are to be ignored. The search and match algorithms have in recent times changed significantly from the earlier versions of them. We have had fantastic results and this has been thrilling for our team.
  4. Growing the team: The up-curves in advancement in Naukri have been good because of the superior PM’s we have on board. It has reached a stage where the product team has become greater than the sum of its parts. One person cannot know everything about a product especially with a complex product like Naukri. So the only way to achieve effective results is to have a very strong group of 7-8 people amongst whom collectively every piece of knowledge is available, and that they work as a transparent team within and with other teams.

The Power Of The Marginal

I’ll just sum up with something Paul Graham talks about in his essay ‘The Power of the Marginal’. He states that “… outsiders, free from convention and expectations, often generate the most revolutionary of ideas”.” In my personal case I was an outsider to the internet business and that helped me contribute new ideas and ways. In hindsight, my exposure to sketching, photography, reading, writing and an interest in Psychology helped me appreciate the work that goes into the Design and Marketing of our product, and allowed me to contribute to it.  This automatically involves you with the other teams at a whole new level and leaves a lot of room for collaboration. Who knew hobbies and interests developed decades ago would help me shape my job? Hence, I feel a PM with a diverse background, someone who is as good with Divergent Thinking as with Convergent Thinking, someone who is as comfortable with artistic subjectivity as he or she is with logical objectivity, could be more effective than a PM with an only technology background.

#PNHANGOUT is an ongoing series where we talk to Product Managers from various companies to understand what drives them, the products they work on and the role they play in defining the products success.

If you have any feedback or questions that you would like answered in this series feel free to tweet to me: @akashj

Have a plan B to sustain yourself, while you are trying to make it big as a Product Startup says Amarpreet Kalkat, Frrole

Ciafo is a software products startup, based out of Bangalore focused on building consumer products for the web (including the mobile web). Ciafo has three products – Travelomy, Wayr, Frrole. In this interview, Amarpreet Kalkat, Co-Founder, Ciafo discusses aspects of building a B2C product from India and shares some of his learnings with startups. Frrole is an information exchange medium, not a unidirectional news provider. It has a heart and it likes to talk – hear from the people what they want to say, and tell them what they want to know.

What is your Story? What inspired you to be an entrepreneur?

I always had a passion for building intelligent products. If I have adequate resources, I find a way to connect the dots. This is what I have always been good at, and this is what I always wanted to do – use these skills to create intelligent products that could simplify lives.

In a large corporate setup, an individual is constrained in more ways than he can be comfortable with. A typical project manager or a product manager profile in a large company strictly limits one’s degree of freedom, thus affecting his ability to innovate. While some people love to work in a focused, defined way, I believed I needed more freedom than was possible in a normal corporate setup. By the time I realized this, I was already juggling with a few ideas in my mind. So, it was not difficult for me to quit my job and create Frrole, independently.

Why and how did you start your company? Why this Area?

We were working on our first product Travelomy and one of the features we wanted to build in there was ‘real-time social information streams’. We were surprised at not finding any readymade localized streams, so we just decided to build one of our own.

But as we started digging deeper, we could see that real-time, curated social information was missing not only in travel guides, but at a much wider level. The challenge was in separating out that 1% signal from 99% noise, and we thought that we could do it. Slowly, we became sure that this could be an independent product by itself, and that is how Frrole was born.

Why the name?

The name Frrole is a derivative of a word in Punjabi language that roughly translates into ‘to play around, to discover, to explore’. We had always thought that this project was about building a brand new way of exploring around the cities that we live in, hence the name was always there in the shortlist.

The fact that it met 6 of the 7 criteria we had for choosing the name (refer Paul Graham’s essay) and had the .com domain available, finally sealed the deal.

Also, the core of Frrole is to find and present information that is nowhere else available. Justifying its name, the application enables people to discover news from sources totally unknown to them. Just like ‘Googling’ has become a generic term for ‘finding things that are known’, we hope to see a day when ‘Frroling’ becomes a generic term for ‘discovering things that are unknown’.   

What is your product’s differentiator from competitors?

Frrole is a twitter based product. It analyses a million+ tweets every day, posted by individuals, companies and mainstream media and selects 0.5% of the most informational ones among them. These tweets are then displayed to the users as news items. In doing so, Frrole creates an additional source of unbiased news, in the form of individuals like you and me. These million additional news sources are the core strength of Frrole, making it a superior product than its competitors.

The news on Frrole can be sourced from a common man like your friendly neighbor or from a giant publishing house, with complete impartiality. The core philosophy behind Frrole is to create a democratized platform using which any person can spread useful information, making each one of us a citizen journalist.

Like all other news apps and websites, Frrole gives you information collected from various news publications, blogs and your social media acquaintances. But, that is only half of what Frrole is all about. The other half is about news ‘for the people, by the people’. There cannot be any news source faster and more accurate than a common man who has witnessed an event, and this man is where Frrole sources its news from.

Other important differentiator between Frrole and its competitors is Frrole’s ability to generate localized content. Frrole lets its users select a city to enable them to get news relevant only to that city. Thus, Frrole makes you a person more aware of your surroundings, unlike any other news product.

What is the biggest challenge Frrole has faced so far? How did you address the challenge?

Not having a full-fledged, full-time team has been the biggest challenge by far. But we have come past that point and now we have a core team of three people. Nishith Sharma, an IIM Kozhikode grad who has earlier managed marketing for Jaguar Land Rover in India, takes care of marketing and Abhishek Vaid, an IIIT Gwalior grad, is responsible for building our backend analytics engine.

Who is your customer?

  1. We have a prize for everybody who claims he is not our customer.
  2.  We have yet to find a person who doesn’t find value in Frrole.
  3.  A typical customer of Frrole is somebody who can read English, aged 5-100 years old, living in any part of the world, and not totally disinterested in life.

On a more serious note, we define our core user as somebody who is 24-40 years old, socially active, and comfortable with the concept of informal information.

What are your future plans?

The mid-term future plan is to establish Frrole as the ‘world view’ news source. Something that people use to hear what the world around them is really talking about instead of being limited to only what mainstream media has to say.

In the longer term, we see ourselves doing the same thing for social web what Google did for the web – make sense of it. And while Google started with the search as the first application of that technology, we are starting with news as the first application. This technology can be applied to any more use cases as Google has shown, and we hope to emulate the same.

Your moment of Glory

Nothing really that big yet. Maybe a few small things like being called the future of news, having a TV feature on Frrole etc, hitting half million monthly unique visitors mark with only one full-time person etc.

What have been your BIG lessons – personal, professional and otherwise?

See the last response below. Those lessons for others are derived from my personal lessons.

What kind of support would you have liked?

Entrepreneurship requires three kinds of resources – Man, Material, Capital. While ‘Material’ is not very important in the software context and entrepreneurs possess the ‘Manpower’ resource, what they usually lack is ‘Capital’.

India has very few investors who invest in early stages, so the ‘Capital’ is a big constraint for Indian startups. A report comparing funding in US and India says that while more than 60% of US startups manage to secure angel funding, only 15% manage to do that in India.

The situation is especially lackluster for products that are in the consumer web space. I hope that changes soon enough; otherwise there is absolutely no chance of a Google or Twitter coming out of India any time soon.

What would you like to tell someone, who is struggling or planning to start a product company?

  • Have a team. Startups are way too much work for lone founders.
  • Show investors some incoming money. It’ll increase your chances of getting funded manifolds.
  • Start with a founding team, finding co-founders later can be an incredibly tough task.
  • Have a plan B to sustain yourself, while you are trying to make it big.

 The future looks very promising for Frrole and we wish Amarpreet all the best! Don’t forget to download their iPhone or Android app.

The Frrole Team
The Frrole Team