The Entrepreneur Stories

Back to the Drawing Board : Part 2

2011-12-27T04:29:00.000+05:30

With fresh idea in place and fresh perception after the short vacation, i was set to draw a business plan..
Basically to note down a few important aspects :

Capital Required
Targets
Markets
Sales and Marketing Plan to penetrate the market

Searched online for some excel sheets but then finally thought of making one of my own.Spent a lot of time reading online about the markets we are targeting, how to approach them and so on.

Started of with the bare basics such as capital costs

Legal Expenses
Office Space
Hardware - PC, networking
Other Mics Expenses

after my little experience, i think that that point number two should be always kept on priority..coz it fuses a bit of professionalism and a bit of discipline which was very much required for us.

With the list of requirements sorted out, i spent of few really boring days on excel sheets trying to bring out the optimum and not optimistic looking projections and investments required by us.

How much money is required to start a business .. it all depends of how you to start it...scrape through the dirt,save up and then grow or start with a push..a cash injected push and use it as stepping stones..

And trust me on that.. a little cash backing always helps you to walk with a little more courage on that thin line between rational and irrational business decisions.

For funds, the business plan was submitted to few investors for the startup funding..

The as usual impatient me got into action as we werent getting reverts. (It wasnt more than 15 days since i had submitted them.)

The next few days i spent with Mr.M thinking about the names and stuff... The name was shortlisted...(not going too much into it.. i guess naming a child would have been much faster process)..

My POA (plan of action) was to portray a clean, biggish company image so that our inital customers dont get jitters on offering us big valued contracts, because our initial estimates were that only tier 1 companies would be interested in our products.(we were good actors.. that you know)

Mr.M and I used the funds that we got back from Mr.Contractor (still some are remaining) and used it as a primary pool to get the legal aspects cleared.

Important points were, we registered it as an Pvt. Ltd Firm, which was a big step... but keeping the future in mind, it was an essential step..

Step 2 : Registered our firm for a virtual office at one of the most sought after business addresses in India with a facility to use their address for all communications. (big image)

(Paid a huge deposit/retainer...now with the reactions of our clients .. i seriously dont repent it)

Step 3 : Got hold of a good logo designer to get professional looking logos and visiting cards with the address of the virtual office.(clean professional image)

Step 4 : Website domain with multiple countires (.in, .uk etc) were registered and a smart looking landing page with a counter was in place.

We took about a month gettting things up... and it was July 2011.... and guess what..

we were broke again .. but still I was kinda adamant in getting the office space as it was really important for us.

And now comes the dashing entry of our saviour .. god sent a.k.a .. my girlfriend .. Ms."SuperLike" ..

We were falling short of 1000$ (Rs.50000) for the deposit/retainer for the office space..

It was some rainy afternoon of july when i was casually talking to her about finances (worried look on my face) and then without thinking for a moment she immediately agreed to part away with her savings so that we could start again....that was one moment i will never forget.. (i always used to consider her stingy when it comes to giving money.. ) .. well on that note..let me deviate from the drawing board talks to a little bit of my personal life..

Ms.'SuperLike' and I having been going around for....i think almost 6 yrs .. she says its 5.. (when we have a fight, it comes down to 4 too) ..

We done a lot of crazy things together and the best memories from my 24yrs has SuperLike in almost every..Stealing helmets from parking lots, road side sloshed memories, wild motorcycling trips, completely broke stages... a lot of good times together..

She has always been my partner in every victimless crime, (metamorphically)

a trusted friend in time,

abuses me when i act like a swine,

but i know you are mine..

i dont think i can continue this rhyme,

a shi**y rapper i am !

So with that lets quickly get back to the drawing board... Aug 2011 saw us getting into our office.. nice, small,cozy to keep abt 4 people happy (staff in future) ..

We spent the rest of Aug hunting/applying/pleading with various banks for loans.. and with savings almost nil..the banks valuation finally came to ZERO !

without wasting more time.. we starting developing our framework.. went through some online documentation..research papers.. already existing bits so that we dont have to spend time "Reinventing the Wheel"..

In between .. i had to sell my trusted,loved,beautiful,faithful Royal Enfield Motorcycle so that i could repay Superlike the 1000$ we took .. That was in late Sept.

(I had to add that point, the bike meant a lot to me.. :-( ... first bike brought from my own money)

And while this was happening, one of the most reputed B-schools in India shortlisted us for their startup programme with a VC funding of 10,000$.. it was an exciting moment for us .. We finally got the much needed confidence injection....

I kinda tackled the email conversation with the Mission,Vision, Markets, Market Size, 5 yr Targets etc (Thats what i researched on the 10day vacation and business plan preparation) .. we managed to clear the first round.. the next round was the telephonic round with their panel.. No Sweat.. cleared that too ...

Then the D-Day arrived .. of the meeting with the investor and the panel from the B-school .. We barely had a prototype ready to show them ..

Thats when I introduced Mr.M into the picture as i didnt want them to be under any wrong impression.The meeting didnt go well ..We faltered a lot in the presentation and the numbers...

a honest confession here is i thought introducing Mr.M wasnt the best of the idea as i was the person taking care of the targets,markets..Mr.M was more concentrated on the framework .. but as a team it portrayed an image of one partner not knowing the entire business plan .. not a great picture ..

What i feel now,having a few months passed.. it wouldnt have been a bad idea me taking the investors alone .. atleast i wouldnt have had anyone else to blame ..

A lesson learnt : be prepared for any questions thrown at you, prototype would be ready given some time and skills,which isnt a constraint here.. its about the vision,confidence and the deep knowledge about the market accepting the product is what actually impresses the people concerned here.

Thats where i accept my business partner couldnt impress .. not a huge regret .. but a VC backing surely would have helped us a lot .. not just the funds but the experience...

An opportunity was lost..but the when we made it to the top 20 people in India.. we surely knew we had the potential..just a few rough edges to sharpen.. ..

The fun has just started .. .

Back to the Drawing Board : Part 1

2011-12-27T02:18:00.000+05:30

So summing up the last few entries : "Broke, no business plan, no funds and a failed partnership venture.We were back to square one".

After the "star wars" with Mr.Contractor, we were kinda rethinking our strategies should we being getting our contracts back after a few failed promises of delivery.
A few pegs down, high on emotions and spirits.. we werent making much of the sense with any fresh plans.

I quietly took a 10 day break from my regular life, thinking on what we should do.. i wasnt certain of what to do or where to begin from but one thing i was certain was to plan keeping in mind the future, (something my girlfriend would be surprised to read) which wasnt obviously there when we started first.

If i am choosing to invest time and money in a business as a career option, the plan would be to make a sustainable venture that will offer a much higher returns as compared to a blue collared servant, keeping in mind the high amount of risk involved.

For every business to sell, we need something which would be 'sellable', a U.S.P and differenciator that would help us getting the desired customers quickly...and quickly was a very important factor.
The following above factors were obviously not there is our previous venture (i dont consider acting skills as an U.S.P in a software firm) and anyways there are lakhs of software providers in a country of a billion and there are new ones comming up every other day. (I told you, there is never a shortage of cheap brilliant people here)...so why to get into a dirty cut throat fighting..as if we hadnt had enough of that for collage and graduation entrace exams.

The least we would have been able to do was to become an small (50-60 ppl) outsourcing firm after years of hardwork and after putting that kind of efforts one would be way too tired to taste the success of money.
A business that doesnt have the ability or the scalablity to make a million within the third cannot be termed as a great venture, its as good as opening a 'kirane ka dukan' (grocery store) next door. You can money anyways, its how you want to earn that million.

Once you have the U.S.P of the firm ready, the next step is get an rough idea of the market or your first potential customers on their reaction.
Thats a very crucial step which most people fail to realize or have an wrong assumption .. (most cases of failed ventures)..
Customer feedbacks about prototypes gives an God like insight on expectations,improvements,needs and most importantly the pricing.

Comming back to my drawing board stories, Mr.M and i thought we had a fantastic idea of a framework.. a large number of verticals became available, plus the framework had the classic gun-bullet cycle advantage..
There a classic line from a famous hindi movie.

bina goli ke banduk sirf loha hai. hume goli chahiye

(Without bullets this gun is just iron.We need bullets)
So we had this framework which once brought would make the customers come to us for the "bullets" which will obviously result in a retention rate of customers close to 100% (variable factors excluded).

Little market research proved that we were the only company in India providing the "planned" framework and there are a few companies abroad offering the same services at 10X the cost.

The initial outcome of the 10 day break proved to be really nice..
Now starts the real pressure of drawing up the proper business plan ..

What it needs to make money ....

2011-12-23T02:22:00.001+05:30

0ne thing almost all start up firms are short of is Money.. (Not an eye opening or a shocking fact for sure) ...

and especially when you start of as a fresh graduate, probably the only savings you have is enough buy yourself a drink for a week .. (Thats if you like Old Monk...a.k.a cheap Rum)

So 6 months down, now we have two people, more or less no projects and in those desperate attempts to earn ,lost some good contracts.. (Lesson Learnt post)

We realized that we should get into some networking,promoting ourselves so that even small jobs starts to come in REGULAR basis, instead of a big ones once in 3 months..

As usual we prioritized a few things, Mr."M" would take care of the developing front, i would chip in when required, otherwise i would be more or less everywhere hunting for new projects.
It was sometime in late Feb finally we got a medium size project that we really looked forward for.
We realized that even though the application was custom built, we could easily modify it into a product and start selling that too ..
The application sounded simple, easily doable by average skilled .net programmers like us :-D
Then ... Then .. Life had something else planned for us ..

Mr.Contractor (The fellow from the earlier blog) called us all of sudden.. He was shifting his office from his previous location to ours. (A different city) ..
The offer on hand :

Joint Venture Partnership
New Projects ready to be implemented
An office space for us

All looked pretty tempting, anyways we were tired of working at home with no discipline, no standard working hours etc etc. (yes but we had a hell of time.. )

Mr."M" had raised his apprehension about going ahead with Mr.Contractor from the previous experience but i was kinda sure that person is trustable.. (anyways what can go wrong) .. and there the chain started.. Mr."M" trusted my opinion..

We started spending few hours everyday discussing and working on how to go ahead with things, office space etc etc .. and in the process we did loose out on the little bit time on our existing project .. (The only one we had after a lot of effort)..

We pooled in some money.. split in four ways .. (2 of us and 2 of Mr.Contractor) ..

So after some pooling it of money, we borrowed it from our parents we started of in the new office.Initial days were good, we had this initial business plan discussion on what each persons role was .. what projects we had in had .. fund allocation .. few chart diagrams .. rough nights..good nights...sleepless nights just discussing things on how to progress..

Finally some clarity was achieved and we realized that we are some 20 days behind schedule for the project we had on had.So quickly we started working on it.

Then sudden things happen which you dont plan for. Personal Issue's, that i would broadly label it as... So i was irregular at work for couple of weeks.. and then ..............

We have Mr.Contractor asking for reports and daily status and blah blah blah of things that are happening.. and Mr."M" and I were like .. wtf ? we were partners .. we did not have any issues in making someone the head .. (as every company does require one) ... but self proclaimed people .. a big no no ..

Then followed a few days of cold wars, "eye" wars, verbal wars and finally star wars (it had to happen one day) ..

That was the day when i realized Mr."M" quick reflexes, karate skills, and special skills that helps you to pin someone against the wall with one hand ! awesome .. this guy was multi-talented .. but anyways that called the end of our parternership ..

Learnt a few hard hitting lessons in life that day, lost a few thousand rupees and office that we never called ours and importantly we lost the lost the project that we were working on because of the delay.

We had completed 90% of the work !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

That was May 2011 .. Back to square one after 6 months of starting our firm .. and more over now we owed money to our parents !! (That part hurts.. )

Lesson Learnt : A bird in hand is better than two in the bush ..

The Silent Months ..

2011-12-21T03:53:00.000+05:30

The next few months we really agonizing .. We couldnt really get out of the shock and the blunder we committed...

In the mean time, our non secured joblessness resulted in our third partner finding a better source of income i.e A secured Job !

So it was Mr."M" and me.. finding,meeting and convincing customers and developing applications.. A two men Army ...
During our jobless times, we came up with many ideas of applications,portals,hardware and what not ..

The bottomline was : If two fresh graduates with almost no industrial experience, high on confidence and low on finance would ever come out with something .. the end result would be : You create something like Facebook or You would be spending so much time in it that you are broke to the core ..

We had charts,ideas,Interface designs, additional team members requirements etc etc.. we were a bunch of excited chaps ...

Ohh in the mean time, Our ever conversational people friendly Mr."M" found a guy while travelling who in turn was looking for a team to work onsite at an clients office near our location.... pay was good... and there we have another project in Hand !!!!!!!!!!!!!!

We quickly put on our acting shoes.. Mr."M" was our junior developer and i was the Sr.Developer for our company and started working on complex .net application that we would have probably dreamt of .. And an honest confession, we had a tough time faking our .net skills on ground .. we were doing overtimes,nights,sleepless nights,google nights .. all kind of things so that we continued on the project..

Infact the client was happy with our work .. (that was a relief) ..but our contractor .. (The guy Mr.M met) had some tricks of his own .. As the client was happy with our work, he soon awarded some more modules of the application to the contractor...

And then we had this awesome Emmy Award Winning series of Sr.UI designers , Sr.Database proffessionals and Sr.Software Architects walking in and out .. intense discussion on how to go ahead..

I dont know how our Contractor managed to pull it off so two whole months .. but however the clause was that client would pay the contractor at the end of the application development..as more modules got added the deadline got streached and we got a little (understated) impatient ..
Then came the "bubble burst" moment .. we asked our contractor to give us money or we will pull off our staff (That was Mr.M and myself).. that came as the crashing point.. out of sheer ego, we told the client the Mr.Contractor was as fake as us and he didnt have any staff and all the people that came across didnt have any credentials.
Probably another mistake .. but didnt repent it .. we obviously didnt get paid for the work we did as contractors agreement got cancelled.. but on the higher side.. the client and our Company (Now grown to 5) are still in good terms ..

If i evaluate it now, it was not ego that triggered the act but more of integrity that triggered..
.. we always told them what our company was .. Our contractor didnt even have the slightest of the idea of what software development was trying to head the project by bringing in people who had no idea what UI(interface) development involved or Software Architecture designing skills.. Probably that was one thing that didnt go well ... but now its all past and another lesson learnt ..

A lesson Learnt

2011-12-21T03:07:00.001+05:30

So couple of months after "The Beginning".. we started thinking of ourselves as .net programmers (we are good at faking), running a small software firm (just the two of us and my house converted as office) and making enough to scrape through .. but yea it was exciting ..

We realized soon that sales a.k.a marketing activity was really important for us.. and trust me when are fresh out of graduation and least involved in the industry , you barely know any major difference between sales and marketing .. both meant .. "We can make Money"........

That was a tricky task for us, whether sales could act as a marketing tool or marketing could lead us into sales..anyways we were pretty naive about both of them.. for us, if can reach a position of talking to the client.. then the Deal is Ours !

Mr."M" and I searched online for the freelancer jobs and promoted the company name in the same case, we hardly made any money from the online freelancing sites. But still we started getting page hits to our website.

And then, couple of months later, Jan 2011 to be precise we hit upon which could have been our major client and the desperately needed cash injection.
A high end chain of hotel needed an online portal for their employees with basic features..they came to us even though they had their own IT team.

We had this habit of spending a max 2days before the client meeting on creating a rough demo application so that the prospective client has something to see & interact rather than presentation about the company, and trust me on that, a start up service based firm, IT ALWAYS WORKS !!!!!!!!
The client was rather impressed with us, ohh i wasnt there for the meeting (thats an another oscar winning story)...Mr."M" charmed his way through the meeting with our third partner and the prospective client just loved it .. He soon asked for the quotation.They said we would mail it.

And after some time, we worked a bit on the market survey,software lisence costing and we had no idea who's gonna develop it.Well when you are in India thats the last thing to worry, you always have cheap resources in abundance.
Then the quotation was sent .. a few anxious days of waiting .. No Reply.. few more days of waiting and then finally when no reply, we decided to call him up.
The first tone as soon as he heard our name was a giggle.. "Thats an insane quotation" .. that was the answer.. lol .... we inquired a little.. tried to coax him .. and then finally we started digging into our own quotation.. .. did a bit of market research and realized that we overshot the budget he had in mind by almost 80% ..

And we retried sending him a revised quotation, calling, meeting but in vain .. And that was our make or break situation that i still regret. We just inflated the quotation thinking that its a big firm and will take our quotation as its lower that what the Tier1 companies offer.

Excitement and Inexperience doesnt go well.. Thats something we learnt ... We lost an oppertunity to keep ourselves busy for next two months, a very urgently needed cash injection and an association with an brand that we could have utilized to build up our sales... Almost a year has passed and i still regret that moment.. So does my trusted business partner Mr."M"...

Lesson Learnt : Be honest in quoting what your price is ! Big Firm doesnt always mean big money (most of the cases) .. we could have made thousands of $ with just the association.... the eagerness to earn more doesnt always help you make a sensible decision.

The Beginning : Part 2

2011-12-20T05:09:00.000+05:30

So what do we have : 1.Requirement from a customer for a shitty software 2.Money making oppertunity
-- assumption, we have all the requirements.

So what do we need :

Software developers (by the way we are Computer Engineers and people have a notion that we can create software)
A company
A company website
An office

So where do we start from, ok lets start with the prototype. For the prototype we need developers.

Plan A:

We quickly went through our friend list and to our bad luck we realized we dont have anyone that qeeky, bloody 4 years of graduation in computers and we cant create a simple windows based app.Waste of our fees ! dint waste much time calling up more people and digging into the hierarchy of known people.

so Plan B : I came up with the suggestion that we do a prototype using .net framework. Easy to create applications and has an excellent IDE.And the suggestion came up from the fact that we knew "c++" and c# (used in .net) is similar to that. Apart from that we knew s**t about .net or the IDE.

"Excellent Idea !" was the sound in chorus.

Plan B sounded good and as an head start we had Mr."M" library membership which was utilized to get some .net reference books. (Detailed reviews about the books is something i wish to write..or the summarized version .. its s**t).

The other worry was that the manager should not forget the Mr."M" recommendation if we take too long for the prototype, so we mentally set a time frame of two days !

Being optimistic doesnt hurt.

So now we have a two guys,two huge books, a framework to learn, implement a prototype and a dead line of two days.

The next two days were awesome, I kinda packed my stuff for a short stay at Mr."M"'s house for days and we kinda stayed up for two full days,went though 10% of the book, half of google and used almost every "brainy" cell we had ........................and then TADA !!!!! We have a prototype ready !!!!!!!!!!!!!! a shitty loooking prototype ready !!!!!!!!!!!

Now comes Phase 2 of Plan B :

1.The Call : Here Mr."M" calls up the manager and tells him that he has found a company that can develop and has an prototype ready.

2.The Fakester : I call up the manager the next day as an representative of an non existing firm and ask him to for an appointment with our senior representative.

3.The Oscar : Faking as an senior representative of the company in the first sales pitch with an absolute amatureish prototype.

The plan was foolproof, there was an online domain we registered, ripped up the template of an Tier1 company so that our website looks professional, added some testimonials liked to my friends.

And on the D-Day : Things couldnt have been better, almost everything went as per plan and i dont know how they even liked the prototype.

We managed to convince them not to implement the OCR as its too error prone (OCR features were the main reason the manager was intrested in the application in the first place) and got an maintenance contract for the next three years !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! and we have our first paying customer ..................

And our end user was/is one of the biggest municipal corporations of India.

Developing the final applicaition was a challenge in itself, but thats where the fun is..

And there we have a company,customer and some startup money..

The Beginning : Part 1

2011-12-20T04:37:00.000+05:30

It all started with a jobless... hmm.. not jobless but job with less interest in hand...
And that was a year back, just out of my graduation. (Graduation is a different story itself,probably a graduation-stories.blogger.com)........

Gave a couple of interviews , managed to clear most of them..had couple of offer letters but the only people really excited about it were my parents, finally their son managed to get a decent job, i guess that was on the top of the wish list for my mom, as for my wish ... i slept for few days thinking about it, talking to my buddies, hearing their grim and not so grim versions of their ordeal with interviews.

Then came the lousy afternoon of Oct' 10, i got a call from my friend,"M" and with a yawn i was mentally prepared to hear some more boring interview stories.

It was different, Mr."M" went for a job interview with a small firm (desperate attempts of job hunting) and passed the rounds.But the twist in the story is that, Mr."M" convinced the manager that they can probably use a custom developed software to reduce the manual work he has been hired for and also remove the other 10 people already on the payroll ! An awesome deal for the manager of the firm and awkward pitch by an interview candidate.
The catch : Manager asks Mr.M to find a firm who can develop a prototype and show it them.

All sounds exciting.. and thats where i come into the picture. The application looked pretty simple in terms of working .. ohh all they wanted was an OCR for hand written images, store them in the Database, few validations to be done and finally few reports on top of it. SIMPLE !

We didnt think much, Mr."M" and I completely excited about the plan, jobless and have a perfect customer !