Cactus Chords

As you move on with your entrepreneurial life, you find yourself facing a plethora of situations. One day you will be basking in the glory of success and the next day you find yourself almost drowning. Post you getting familiar with this constant turmoil, you realize a lot of things, some that were right in front of you and you missed and some that were hidden someplace else and you deciphered them.

One of the lessons I learned with my current venture was when I was faced with a question by one of the angel investors. After a couple of telecons and a few mails we had a face to face meeting. He asked me, “Mithun, from what I have seen and heard, your product has potential which is why we are having this conversation today. But let me ask you one question, does your product solve your  problem or does it solve the customer’s problem?”

I had done my market research and had an answer to this question which luckily he bought. That is when I realized how imperative this question was to a start-up before it went all out for its venture. And for a fact, I hadn’t thought of this. I was just lucky that it worked out and people started using it. But what if I was wrong and people hadn’t used my product? Then this question would have been that one question I could call as the crux of my business case analysis prior to development.

8 out of 10 start-ups come up with a product because it was a solution to the problem they were facing and wanted a solution to it and that is why most of them do not work because they can not find a group of people (prospective customers) who share the same problem. They lack the community that would use their product in other words, their target market.

Every product that is made has a market, there is nothing like a useless product. The key is to find the people who can use the product, once you have that figured out, the next step is to make them use it. Whether it is for free or not. Revenue models will fall in place once you have a modest user-base. Why go far, look at Twitter or Facebook or You Tube. These were products that had a mass appeal whereas another product might just have a state appeal or further restricted to a city or merely a small community. That is enough, trust me.

You do not always have to be the next Google or You Tube or Facebook or Twitter or My Space.

A few things you must check out on the to-do list before getting your product up are;

- Develop a product that has at least one differentiating aspect/feature compared to your competitor

- Do not hesitate because there are other players in the market. It is all about the target market

- Ensure that you have a community around you just before you commence building your product or as you finish

Once you have the product developed;

- Give it to them for free (pilot phase). Let them play around with it. If it does not work out there, it won’t anywhere, stop running behind it

- If it works with them, find a way you can make them pay for it. Even if it is a small amount, generating revenue is always good

- Consult industry experts, friends, mentors on how you can better the product and what would actually make the users pay for it

- Focus on quality, deliverance and most importantly look and feel because 80% of the users of any product are laymen and purely judge a site by its look and feel. If you have a differentiating aspect, you might still lose a credible number of users if your site is not presentable.

All my views pertain to low cost products that do not require heavy investment and resources. A simple yet effective solution to a problem.

Cheers

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I recently had the opportunity to meet up with a few entrepreneur friends of mine in Bangalore and Cochin to discuss the prospects of my upcoming project.  They all greeted me with the same question everyone was asking me, “Hey, what happened to your old company? How come this new company?”. What can I say? I shake my head and respond, “I just chose the wrong team and wrong place. Simple!!!” That itself is self explanatory.

From the little experience I have gained when I indulged myself in the facade I termed “entrepreneurship”, there are a few points that surpass the rest before you start your company or at least call yourself an entrepreneur. I am going back to basics.

1) Have a product
2) Have a product of your own
3) If you are outsourcing or reselling, you are merely a salesman, not an entrepreneur
4) Release your product
5) Make it profitable

You can have other products initially to keep the revenues trickling in while you work on your dream product. But if you do not have one, it is not entrepreneurship, its reselling.

I was a salesman till I left my old firm because we did not have a product thus we lacked a focus. A bunch of guys who did not want to work for anyone but themselves. We did manage to make money, quite a bit of it too. But what is the use when you don’t have a focus. We did not launch one product, though we had 2 fully developed platforms we could have called our own and still do infact, in our cute little server.

Every time, something bigger always came our way or rather we thought it was big and the focus shifted to that. Why did we shift focus to that, because we did not have a focus in the first place. This was the string of events and emotions we went through;

- Excited that we were doing something
- Happy as money was flowing in
- Thirsty for something new
- Frustrated that we couldn’t come up with something new
- We then found something new, developed it and the stage was set
- Something bigger came our way and the old project was shelved
- Something new came our way again
- This time we developed it and launched it
- I reserve my comments on what happened to it but it couldn’t be made profitable one bit
- We later inquire what the problem was, we just f@#$%d up!!!
- Lost faith in the whole team and business
- The firm still stands and money still trickles in
- How?What do we exactly do? Ummmmmm…………..

If you have just read the above list, you might be wondering, “What the hell were you guys doing?”
Frankly, I don’t know, but I would answer that question with, “Probably testing my level of patience”. But now I know what I was doing there. Making mistakes over mistakes over mistakes so I could learn from them once I was out. Now I am surer than ever that, I will not repeat the same mistakes, but probably make new ones.

There comes a time when money flows in to your company but you are not satisfied with it because you know you didn’t set out for this. It was to make a difference in the society, give something back to it. Not just make money. This phase, ladies and gentlemen, is known as REVELATION.

An entrepreneur does not have a debugger where he can just amend his errors. The mistakes you make at your work might cost you your project, promotion or job. Whereas for an entrepreneur, a mistake can turn his life around. For better or for worse.

Entrepreneurship is not a job, its a way of life.

I am not at all proud of the way things have turned out in my life. But this was the time to experiment. It has given me the courage and will to work with a focus. I have found my product, my focus and I am working on it. I will pursue it till its launched. Whether its a success or not is not an issue. Not to prove to anyone, but me. And trust me, it is worth every bit.

But everything in life happens for the good. As long as you are optimistic and take every event in good stride, learn from your mistakes and do not repeat them, you will climb up the ladder of success and that too gracefully, take my word for it. All the best.

Cheers!!!

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