9 Tips For a New Entrepreneur

Recently a few entrepreneurs asked me for some good resources to start with. I was in the same stage a few months ago and was grateful to other entrepreneurs to help me get started. The best thing about the entrepreneur community is its willingness to help and give back. In the same spirit I wrote a few emails about resources and general tips to new entrepreneurs. That’s when I thought of writing this blog. Hope it will be helpful to entrepreneurs in and beyond my network.

Here is what I would recommend:

1. Integrate in the Entrepreneurial Community – The first step is to network with fellow entrepreneurs and startup folks. I can’t stress more the importance of speaking with other entrepreneurs and experienced startup folks. I took every opportunity to talk to such people and learned a ton. It is natural for an entrepreneur to be fully consumed in building product and get isolated from the larger community. Product is important and so is meeting people otherwise no one will know who you are, what you are building, and why they should be interested in you. You are building a product to build a business and business is a highly networked entity. Go out and meet people.

2. Lean Startup Machine (LSM) – If you have an idea and thinking of prototyping it or in the midst of it, you must go to LSM in your local area. They have terrific workshops to help you validate your idea and provide you ways/framework to evaluate, pivot, and scale it. LSM is driven by lean startup methodology, an effective way for entrepreneurs to get to scalable business model. Moreover, LSM is an excellent way to get into local entrepreneur community in case you are looking for a door to get in.

3. MeetUp – I learned a ton about startup resources, how to get to investors, marketplace and best practices by mingling with fellow entrepreneurs and startup community at large. MeetUp is a great source to get information on local area events. I believe 80% of the events I attended were from MeetUp.

4. Mentor – We were lucky to have great mentors who guided us on finance, legal and fundraising. I will strongly encourage finding mentors who can help you in areas you need help. Look into your existing network or else reach out to people you respect and admire in areas you lack expertise. You will be surprised how willing people are to help you when you start a business. Just go talk to them!

5. Startup Incubators – There are hundreds of startup incubators all over the country. YCombinator and Techstars are some great incubator programs. You can search on Internet for incubators in your local area. These programs are excellent places to get your startup off the ground, find great mentors and raise capital. I would suggest going after the better ones and starting networking with them early. The more they know you the better your chances are to get in.

6. Social Media – It is important to plug into digerati to get noticed and get advice on building a tech startup. Twitter is defacto home of digerati so create a twitter account if you don’t have one and start following prominent VCs, entrepreneurs, and tech bloggers. You would find great information in their tweets and at times will get an opportunity to engage with them. Twitter is such a level playing field to connect with people you admire.

7. Blogs – If you don’t write a blog then start one today! In addition to writing your own blog, I will suggest reading blogs of startup folks – VCs, entrepreneurs and tech writers, and leave insightful comments. I would highly recommend reading blogs of VCs like Paul Graham [YCombinator], Fred Wilson [Union Square Venture] and more. I also read tons of blogs from entrepreneurs with Vinicus Vacanti [Yipit co-founder] blog being my favorite. GigaOM, Ash Maurya, BusinessInsider are some of my favorite tech blogs.

8. Technical Resources: There are some great resources both free and cheap to get you started on technical side. I like “Unbounce” to quickly create and host landing pages, “getstatisfaction” for user feedback, and Skype for communication etc. I also look up Quora and ask friends for tips on other technical resources.

9. List your Startup – There are some good places to list your startup to bring it in front of investors and mentors. My favorite is AngelList and recently I listed our startup on Gust. I would suggest being active on these networks to engage with the community.

This list is never ending but I will stop here. The product is core to your startup but it takes a lot more to build a business. Entrepreneurship is an exciting journey and an enriching one too. Go meet great people and learn from their experience.

All the best!

Speed and Design: Key Differentiators for a Startup

We live in a fast-paced startup world. Anything you think is already in the works somewhere with very little whitespace for innovation in a crowded space of social, mobile and cloud startups. My partner and I have been working on ideas for almost six months and were trumped twice in the beginning by Facebook and Google that launched similar products. Having learnt the speed lesson, we didn’t waste time to start working on our next idea. We did some smart things like quickly launching a beta for validation and learning a great deal in the process. Our key learning being–programming is no longer a competitive advantage for a startup; it is speed and design.

The 1990s were heydays for technology startups when it was hard to find programming talent. Finding great programmers was a distinctive competency of any startup then, but not anymore. Don’t get me wrong, programmers still make or break a company but they are not the core anymore. In a fast-paced world where innovation cycles have drastically shortened and consumer expectations are sky high, it is the pace and design that sets an application apart. This is more prevalent in consumer startups but B2B applications are also seeing the same phenomenon. Today, the cost of startups has gone down dramatically and so is the time to market. Many entrepreneurs are embracing a lean startup methodology that promotes validation before scaling and being quick to market to collect valuable user feedback. We launched our recent service in beta in less than four weeks and almost 100 users were using it in less than three weeks of launch. A quick launch not only deters your competition but also helps you validate the problem space. The days of building a perfect and complete product before launch are past us. The mantra now is define a minimal viable product, launch quick, and iterate.

 

Apple has set a high bar for design. With less than 5% market share but almost 50% profits of the mobile phone industry, Apple has proved that design is not only dominating but also a profitable aspect of your product. The iPhone and iPad have set new standards for intuitive design that almost everyone expects from a new application. Today, designers are more expensive [and busier] than programmers and there is a talk in the startup community on how important it is to have a design person as a co-founder. A great usability is the gate to get your users into your service/application. Despite strong revenue streams being core to Web 2.0 companies, it is still eyeballs that define the success of your application. A low tolerance for poor usability sets high bar for an intuitive design for a successful application. Be cool is the new slogan.

 

Don’t wait–move fast and design awesome for success!

Startup Mantra I – Solve Real Problem of Your Customers

How often do you hear a technology startup is a cool place to work because one can unleash her innovative brilliance without much questions asked?  Many successful technology companies, including Google have legitimized this work culture by giving employees a free reign to work on their ideas during office hours. However, I think Google manages their process much better than a regular startup on the street as many of their ideas survive to see a day on the internet. Albeit most fails! Why does innovation fail so often in startups?

A good friend and a budding entrepreneur Pete talked about some reason for it in his blog. He says that a startup is an organization working to deliver a service or product under conditions of extreme uncertainties. The uncertainty is not only in terms of the right solution but also the right problem for a startup’s customers. Pete had a point that many a times the problem itself is not very well defined, which makes the discovery process even more challenging. In my experience, most entrepreneurs can speak at length about their company’s solution but very rarely about the real customer problem they are solving. Why is it?

As a product manager, I am trained to uncover problems our clients face so that we build products that our customers will buy happily. Market research, client interviews and fact base creation are regular tasks for a product manager. The first lesson a product manager learns is to never ask a client about their desired solution but the problem they are facing. Mostly clients cannot articulate the solution but can talk at length about their problem. The question is how many startups go through this discovery route to find real problems of their [potential] customers?

Many of you might be aware of now popular Lean Startup methodology that encourages companies to unearth customer problem cheaply and quickly. Eric Reis, the inventor of Lean Startup term has been marketing his methodology aggressively and many entrepreneurs are embracing it. We also adopted it at our startup and decided to launch our first prototype for less than 1/3 the original cost. The idea is to test our hypothesis with a limited product and a controlled set of users to get an early feedback. These are still early days of our lean startup but we are already seeing the benefits of laser focused minimum viable product and longevity of our budget. We will know our fate soon [hopefully] but either way I will keep you all posted. Go lean budding entrepreneurs and solve your customers’ real problem!