Tuesday: Product development
Wednesday: Marketing, communications and growth
Thursday: Developers and partnerships
Friday: The company and its culture Sahil is doing 12 am to 5 am sleep and rest every minute working marathons.
.NET PaaS (Platform as a service) seems to have 2 major vendors at the time of writing. Microsoft Azure and AppHarbor.
Clearly I have a lot of catching up to do. I hope he did go out to play and exercise.
- Grow startup to reach $1 M in revenues by January 31st 2012. Need to figure out what needs to happen here, but this is the bottom line goal. $1M today is a lot less compared to Bill's time adjusted for inflation.
- Ultimate Frisbee. Get to top 10 players level in Delhi this year by December 31st 2011. Need to run every day for that.
Dear 17 year old,
(who did not get into IIT yesterday)Don't be too hard on yourself. Its one exam, one day of the year. Some folks test well, some don't. All those coaching classes try to control that variable. Sometimes it works, sometimes doesn't. Also its a big country. Acceptance rates are so low that it is embarrassing. There's a chance that you'll write the JEE again and get in. Lot of people I know did that. Some succeeded, some didn't. Maybe you will never go to an IIT. There is no reason to get distraught if you never get in. You'll be just fine. I am not presenting stats. It'll be mostly anecdotes. Folks I met in IITs weren't always the smartest. Many were average students who tested well and/or could bust their butts for long hours. The first is not an important skill in life. The second takes you surprisingly far. (Caveat: Some of the kids were quite brilliant). So you didn't get in. What next? Find the 'best' college for you and go there. You'll find out that many around you will hate engineering after the first year. Maybe even you. Still try to learn. As much as can. Or if you aren't feeling like it, just learn as much Math as you can. Personally, I really like computer science. So I'll say maybe just learn to program really well? Go sit in those CS courses. You can audit any course you feel like. Or like Ranchord Das of 3 idiots, you can go sit there and learn. No professor is going to kick you out. There's MIT open courseware too. If you don't get into a good college, that shouldn't stop you from learning. So I know of extremely intelligent folks who didn't get in. They are pretty successful today. In life, you'll realize success is very subjective. Its also unfortunately relative for many. But a combination of hard work, hustle, patience and ambition get you pretty far. Don't be bitter about not getting in, ever. Don't belittle the guys who got in. Most of them got in when they were 17. It wasn't a conscious decision. Parents made them do it :)If a potential employer/institution overlooks you just because of your degree, its their loss. Work hard though. That will give them less of an excuse. Don't self select yourself out though. Apply, call, try to get in. Hustle. Everybody likes a hustler. (Read Vinod Khosla's story of how he got into Stanford MBA school). Good things about getting in an IIT: A sense of self belief and the "need" to make a mark. You get in, and you "believe" you are destined for bigger things. Ambition grows. So you work hard to get to them. Also there's a lot of precedent of people doing good things. So you can emulate these people. This is very useful. Here the breeding feels institutional. What you can do: Talk to a lot of people in various places and find out their aspirations. Your ambitions will grow too. Dig deeper and figure out what needs to be done to get there. I see many kids not interacting with folks from other institutions (other IITs, arts and commerce colleges). Also take everything with a pinch of salt. Get a lot of data points. Do what makes sense.
Paras (of visualwebsiteoptimizer.com) gave a talk at Triggr (triggr.in) and touched on the following:
There are three types of visitors on a website:
1. Buyer - She'll buy anyway. Will figure out/muddle through the UI and get things done.2. On the fence - This is the person we need to have a conversation with and convert.
3. Browser - This person will not buy today.
This "on-the-fence" person convertion is what I'll work next on in cleartax.in
The feedback is that we need to have a way to get engagement before creating a login. Login creation scares off a lot of people. Rightly and wrongly. This has been pointed out to me by both Pratiroop (of jaamun.in) and Sarvesh (of internshala.com)
But first we are fixing up issues for the "Buyer". Minor issues remain in going from a login to efile to checkout to done flow. I am taking a crack at that right now!
Until it isn't. Without having seen data on either side. It might be something entrepreneurs need to crack open.
I hear this assertion from other struggling entrepreneurs, mostly anecdotal data points. But USA is a value market too in my opinion. It should be true in India too.One key realization (a fairly obvious one) is that human intervention while prohibitively expensive in the US is infinitely cheap in India. I think this is changing due to schemes like NREGA but its a long term trend. (NREGA's future sustainability notwithstanding. Human labor is bound to get expensive considering the insane inflation). Lets do a bit of analysis:
Selling to the US market for a clearly identified pain point has the advantage of selling to a mature market. An example is visualwebsiteoptimizer where corporations in the US whip out their credit cards and sign up. (A Value service compared to Omniture etc). Paras tells me Indian corporations want a in-person demo while he is selling to a global audience from his room over webex. So much clearer and quicker sales cycles. I need to study and quantify Indian corporate IT + Technology spending. Mostly I am trying to figure out which markets to focus my energies on in a potential new future venture.
Since I have a couple of products aimed at the Indian customers already in hand, I need to figure out a sustainable sales and marketing strategy. (An incomplete post. I'll ramble on to distill a few things. Using Paul Graham's mechanism of writing essays to clarify thoughts.)