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9 Things that I learnt while bootstrapping in India

Bootstrapping is hard especially in India! It takes a toll on founders as well as people around them. No fancy corporate trips, no room for slack, myriad things that can go wrong and on top of it, no wiggle room financially. Here is what I learnt during past 3.5 years of bootstrapping SocialAppsHQ and now, Shimply.com –

1)     Cash flow is the only thing that matters – I have people who tell me that their ventures are extremely profitable and then few months later, I find that they are closing down. Mostly, it’s their customers not paying their bills on time. Everyone who has ever run a business experiences this! Don’t book the amount as profit until it’s in your bank (note – I hate service tax because we have to pay it when an invoice is created even when money has not been paid to us). Another rule – if you are in services business, ask for some money upfront no matter how urgent that work is.

2)     Keep 3 months reserve ALWAYS – Most internet businesses are becoming more and more dependent on one of the larger businesses like Google, Facebook, Apple and others for survival. Even if they snooze, your revenues will take a nose dive. I will suggest you to keep 6 month reserves but if you really want to live on edge, keep 3 month reserves. It’s crucial for two reasons –

  • Most of the employees depend on their salary to pay their rents, buy food etc. It’s a disservice to them as well as your company, if you fail to pay your team on time.
  • No matter how agile your team is, any major shift in direction/building a completely new product and bringing it to market takes time.

3)     Beware of vultures – As you start a company in India with seemingly bright future, you will realize that you will soon get accosted by wannabes – people who are sitting at high positions in various companies and want to leave their jobs for starting on their own. Nothing is wrong with that  but there are two types of people you definitely want to avoid –

  • People who want to act as commission agents to broker an agreement with their and few other companies. I consider it unethical although I know few who don’t.
  • People who want to provide gyan and want to charge a retainer fee for it. I was introduced to a consultant who wanted to charge Rs. 1.25 lakh per month as retainer.

4)     Murphy’s law applies in startups more than anywhere else in life – Something that you least expect will always go wrong –

  • You decided to take a flight to Mumbai for work, your server will go down exactly at the time when you on board the flight so that you find about it 2.5 hours later!
  • You are in front on 50 army officers giving presentation on social media monitoring and standing on stage, well – server gods know that too (log files filled up space on one of the six front end servers and haproxy kept directing traffic to that server as it was set on leastconn)!
  • You don’t have money in bank and you are waiting for a wire transfer to pay your bills on time (typically, it comes in 3-4 days) – well, too bad it’s going to be late this time for some reason.

5)     Surround yourself with positive people – over past 3.5 years, I have surrounded myself with people of high caliber and utmost integrity. People with whom I can share what we are up to and struggles/successes we are having. I have tried to remain truly transparent on success and failures and sharing our learning with everyone who is willing to hear J. Your journey will be a lot easier with such people on your side.

Many folks however tend not to share and hoard the knowledge as if they are traders in subj mandi (I am sure they will make a lot of money by selling it like tomatoes at the right time). People don’t realize that in knowledge economy, it’s valuable only till someone decides to blog about it!

6)     Fancy offices don’t matter – if you predict that your revenue is going to take a hit, build a contingency plan and act on it.

  • Start downsizing – move to a flat from an office. Your typical saving in 2 years is 50% – rent is Rs. 35 vs 100 per square feet. There is a higher upfront cost if you have to furnish a flat (1.5 -2 lakh for 15 ppl office) but over 2 years, you will end up saving over 50% (figures are relevant to Delhi).
  • Delhi is far better than other regions nearby in terms of electricity and transportation. You can save quite a bit on generator cost and your staff can travel through metro.
  • Get rid of staff that you can do without – keep people who are essential to achieving your vision. Focus on builders, not maintainers. Maintainers can help you sustain your business but not grow it/get out of dungeon.

7)     One bad apple can spoil the entire basket – It’s true for startup as well. If a team member does not act as part of a team, does not help further our shared vision and goals, we need to let him go. I have regretted the decision where I continue to let people stay in the company with a hope that they will focus on learning and understand that they will grow over time with the company. If people are negative, they will stay negative whether it’s in your company or, some other company. It’s not your fault – let them go.

8)     Spend where revenue is directly proportional to your expense  – it’s easier said than done –

  • Be extremely ROI conscious on advertising spends – they can easily get out of control and drive you in negative cash flow territory
  • Don’t take high salaries – You can’t take more than Rs. 50000 as salary if your revenue is 1 crore. 1 crore revenue with 20-30% margin leaves enough for 3-4 people at that salary level and then some for investment in future growth. Don’t compare it to corporate job – if you find yourself doing it repetitively, consider shutting your company and joining it. You deserve to be happy J.
  • Hire only those experienced people who will deliver from day 1, but be ready to invest in training high energy fresher.

9)     Say NO – When you are drowning in a flash flood, it’s easy to get tempted to hold anything that you can lay your hands on. For a startup, you have limited resources and it takes atleast 2-3 years of sustained efforts before customers start to know your company/brand. If you are building a product and a service job comes along, you have to learn to say NO. It’s hard – I know! Here you are selling $25 per month product and then you are getting offered $2500 for 3 week job. Realize that it will distract your entire team and cost of distracting your entire team is probably higher than what you will earn! All said and done, cash flow is still king! Go figure J

Best of luck and bootstrap away!

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Before you innovate, get out of your comfort zone

I had the pleasure of speaking to a batch of about 130 students, startup aspirants, product developers last week at the Innovate Delhi event. I was teamed up with Rajat Garg, of SocialappsHQ, and a heavy-weight with facts, numbers, trends, valley companies and slides. We were to cover “opportunity hypothesis’ broadly – how does a startup get an idea; validate the idea; build a demo/prototype and how the idea evolves into a business. Rajat and I spoke the night before (having him as a co-conspirator for the TIE Indian Internet Day event helped) and we decided to put on a joint session rather than one followed by another. Rajat would put up some slides, covering the theoretical framework and I would lead a workshop type session engaging the audience around their observations.

As I reached the venue a bit early (surprising since I had a long drive from Gurgaon to Okhla) I had some more time to gather my thoughts and think about what/how I would try to communicate. On a hunch, I decided to move around the hall (library converted to a training hall, with cameras, voice recorders and lots of other gizmos that only professors at Stanford can afford to have 🙂 and observe the batch to find some ideas that I could build on.

innovate delhi teams
As I went around the hall, some patterns started to form. Most of the folks were in blue jeans – the de-facto dress for the generation. About 20% of them had Apple laptops and the rest windows (similar to trends in India) but nearly all of them had squeaky clean covers – no personalization, no stickers proclaiming their love for free world! Nearly all of them had their laptop chargers plugged in (though it was an hour prep session and most laptops were fully charged). Though it was a hot day and so many bodies made it a wee bit sticky, all of the attendees were glued to their desk/seats even though the assignment was to think and come up with ideas on “marriage apps”. And the most critical observation of all, nearly all of them were glued into their course workbook; and the FB page setup for the event.

And then it struck me – this was a typical group of young Indian professionals, who love to “conform”. They all had been good students, mostly good kids, folks who would describe themselves as “being different” but would completely fit into a “stereotypical” definition of an IT/tech product persona. They were all living in their comfort zones – not ready to push their own limits, not expressing their yet-to-be-formed personalities, safe in the middle-of-the-road lives they were living. As I looked further to validate these assumptions new patterns emerged. Only 2 out of 130 had brought along tablets as their primary device. Nearly all of them had smartphones but very few were working on the FB page/course app on their phones? Few were taking pictures of the class and tweeting.

innovate delhi 2I had found my core argument for the day – I was going to challenge the group to think of their own personalities, experiences, behaviours. I was going to inspire them to reflect on who they are, and who they want to be and how they would differentiate themselves first before thinking of great, differentiated, innovative products that they would design, develop and bring into the world. I would show them how living (and using) on the edge of technology is almost a pre-requisite to pushing the boundary further; how great ideas evolve from personal needs and small advances which turn into big stories cause as the follower crowd discovers the same challenges when their use graduates and are happy to use the solutions the leaders have created.

And therefore, as Rajat opened his talk with the big concepts around finding an idea; finding a space that has some tailwinds, taking risks etc and set the stage for some curiosity, I found the means to engage with the audience with these questions:

  1. If the fashion trends for the day are colored trousers (yellow, green, orange), why are 90% of you in blue jeans?
  2. Why don’t I see any art, stickers, graffiti, pictures of any laptops?
  3. Why don’t I see folks using tablets when we all know that tablet volumes have crossed laptops this year
  4. Why did folks prefer to sit at their desks than take their laptops out into the terrace with a lovely garden view for the ideating exercise

But most importantly, could they think of pushing the boundary of any tech usage when they were not living on the edge themselves, when their own habits were on the trailing edge?

Needless to say, the rest of the talk was fun, interactive and stimulating. Rajat had some great slides – internet & mobility trends, numbers and wisdom from the trenches. I was able to co-relate those slides into how folks should use that information into their own “opportunity hypothesis”.

innovate delhi3As I look back at the end of the week, I find myself thinking again about the ‘conformity” of our post-independence indian culture; the regimentation of our education system and our social expectations that we need to break first before disruptive, revolutionary innovators and entrepreneurs will emerge. Hope this brief note makes you think a bit about yourself!

 

 

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7th #PNMeetup – Get to millions of visitors without spending money

3 founders, 25 good listeners and a rainy Delhi afternoon. Topic: “Get to millions of visitors without spending money”. It was a perfect setting for sharing of experiences by those 3 doers (Ankur@Akosha, Rajat@Socialappshq, Pallav@Knowlarity) about their own experiences of getting users, when they started. Keeping in its tradition, Avinash and Nakul organized this month’s meet-up in the office of Akosha.

Ankur, started the afternoon with his thoughts on “Zero” cost marketing. He shared many simple things that start-ups can do or shouldn’t do. It is not easy in the beginning to get people to know about your product and/or brand. One would typically need to find innovative ways. He shared some of this tricks that Akosha followed and what worked and what not worked. One of the key takeaway was that one should never outsource SEO. The product is yours, outside people cannot help you out. You have to learn, try and make it perfect. One also need to know about google analytics, if one is launching a web product (or if I think about it, any web connected product. It could be a website or it could be an app). Audience also shared their experiences with SEO and many felt that if done correctly, it can do wonders.

Rajat also shared some neat ways where companies have taken help of SEO. If your product allows (or if you can find ways of doing so), you make others do your SEO work. e.g. you can do content partnerships where your content is shown by other leading websites.

  Many other consumer connect ways were discussed like Twitter, email marketing. Email marketing generated quite a bit of discussion given that different people had different experience. However this is also a fact that email is a very powerful tool. A trick, which I find worth mentioning is, always run your campaign in 2 steps. You always get email databases from market or from “someone”. Run a dummy campaign to exclude bad addresses (you can use a dummy domain as well for this). In Part 2, exclude bad addresses and use your actual domain to send your emails. 


For finding leads, in your early days, one need to think out of the box. e.g. if you are in classifieds business, visiting your competitor sites would give you quite a number of leads. It is also true that finding fist few customers if often way more difficult than getting your next 1000 users. When you start, many a times you believe that world is your playground. Problem is that you keep looking for that first mate to play with. As Pallav (Founder Knowlarity) shared an anecdote about how he got first customer, there were many oohs and aahas I could hear among audience. Getting you first customer also tests one’s persistence as was evident in the anecdote shared by Rajat. 

In startup, we always need people who can hit the ground from day 1. There is no, as they say it, settling in time. This was very well explained by Pallav. An interesting graph shared by Pallav


In a Start-up, you are typically looking for a Maverick sales person.

Overall, an afternoon, from which I could find many practical take-aways. There may not really be Zero cost way to reach million users, however there are many ways to do this in price effective way.

Guest Post Contributed by Ajay Bansal, Director, Product Management at U2opia Mobile

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SaaS #MadeinIndia Products – Social Media

As Batman (or a CEO, Founder, Partner) would want somethings to be done, or not done, and especially with a plethora of multiple social media channels to be on, a marketing guy, or a social media girl, or anyone handling social media for a company will always have a tough time.

So, then what is the solution? Well, a lot of smart made in India products have come out solving this same problem for a bunch of businesses. To manage all their social media accounts in 1 place, be it Youtube, Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin etc.

So we created a list again of SaaS products made from India, specifically focussing on solving this problem around Social Media, this list is not exhaustive, and we hope to get a lot of feedback on more companies and products from you, so please drop in a comment or email us and we will add those companies as well.

Some of them are (in alphabetical order):

1. Crowdnub – Build and launch your rich custom-like Social app in minutes. Re-purpose, re-use, the smarter social app platform.

2. Beevolve – All in one Social Media Monitoring and Measurement Software

3. EaseSocial – EaseSocial automates all your social media campaigns. It allows you to view all the online conversations about your brand and products in real time.

4. Grabinbox – Manage multiple social media accounts like Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin.

5. Konnect Social – Monitor & analyze all brand conversations from one simple tool.

6. Mangoapps – MangoApps uniquely combines Enterprise Social Networking, Team Collaboration tools and Intranet pages into one breakthrough product.

7. Markitty – making online marketing on social media easy.

8. MuHive – Customer Engagement on Steroids

9. SaltSocial – Social Media Monitoring and Engagement Dashboard for agencies and organizations.

10. Simplify360 – World’s first 360′ Social Media Marketing Suite

11. SocialAppsHQ – Social media monitoring, actionable analytics, engagement tools, viral apps and so much more in one easy-to-use platform.

12. Sokrati – Propel engagement and conversations via Social Media Marketing.

13. Unmetric – The Social Media benchmarking company for brands.

14. ViralMint – Viral Marketing and customer acquisition platform around social.

If you have any other suggestions, and we have missed out on any, please help us further, email us or put in a comment.

The next SaaS #madeinIndia products focus will be on business phone systems.