[OffBeat] An amazing song – hum na samjhe the

I remember watching Gardish back in 1993-94 on cable (“Disk” as we used to call back), I really loved the movie for some reason specially this song and often listen to it in my free time. It is a real shame that now we don’t make such songs.

List of Sites for Startup Jobs Posting in India

Though we have a dedicated page for WorkMonk Job Openings in our Bangalore office, we keeps on posting our ads on various sites to get more visibility (and because as a startup, you want to be choosy in hiring so you do want to increase the sample space)

I had made this list for our personal use, please feel free to add more names

Best Options –

1. hasgeek job board – easily the best job board for Indian startups, great interface, free and most important, people looking for startup jobs are using it.

2. yourstory job board – we had posted our ad few weeks back and I was surprised so many people tweeted it.

3 OCC Mailing List – worth sending to it (look for OCC group for your city)

4. Headstart Mailing List – worth sending to it

5. You can also post on Hacker Street India

Not Good Experience

1. Startuply – not suitable for Indian startups, Indians looking for startup jobs are certainly not using startuply

2. Linkedin Job Board – Costs money ($35 for one month), our experience has been mixed bag with it and startups are probably better of avoiding it unless you feels it is worth it. I felt, linkedin dilutes the stratup requirement and it very much like naukri/monster with lot of generic resumes floating.

If you know any more good places, please post it as comment and I will add it in the post.

Never hire a Sales guy as your first employee

This is something which I learned by making the mistake – “Never hire a Sales guy as your first employee”

For WorkMonk, we are always looking for sales people who had startup experience so we hired someone who was a sales guy when the platform was not there, now having a sales guy when you have nothing to show to the client or to sell is a very dangerous proposition as by trying to sell non functioning product/services, you can lose early adapters and by the time you will launch it, you may not have anyone to buy your product.

I realized this mistake after few weeks and we asked him to leave and we started focusing on the development and finished the platform in 3 months and now as we are ready, we are again finding more people to join our sales team.

you can look at WorkMonk Jobs page to get the details for our sales and dev openings.

2011 Year Review for me

My 2009 Review Post on 31st Dec 2009
My 2010 Review Post on 31st Dec 2010

Alright, so 2011 is also about to end in next 4 hours and as all the news channls and everyone else do, here is my last blog post of the year reviewing what happened in 2011 and what I will do in 2012.

If I look at the post that I made on 31st Dec 2010, I had ended it with this

I have no intention of putting any bucket list for 2011, no need for making any resolutions, I made my own “live, work, plan, enjoy, think for today and tomorrow only” formula, it has worked really well till now and I will keep on betting on it.

still here is a review of what happened in 2011

1. I Finally took the plunge and Started WorkMonk. Now I will work on it day and night to make a Billion dollar company in next 5 years.
2. Joining TheMorpheus was also a big thing as I have met some of the most amazing people with very different personalities and outlook towards things and life.
3. Financially I did alright, I have almost stopped thinking about personal wealth now.
4. In terms of health, I am doing alright too.

Overall a satisfactory year minus some personal/family problems.

The way 2011 has shaped up, 2012 will certainly be make it or break it year for me. My life is on an inflection point and if things go as per the plan, 31st 2012 will be an amazing day for me to write the review for the year.

WorkMonk is looking for a LAMP Developer as part of Core Team member

WorkMonk is looking for a LAMP developer who can be part of the core team and can take the onus from me to build the WM platform and tech team. You can see the job details at WM hasgeek listing or at WM jobs page

You can know more about WorkMonk at OurStory page. You can also check the non-tech jobs at http://workmonk.in/jobs

If interested, please send a mail to “jobs at workmonk dot in”

If you are not a techie and still passionate about startups and want to join workmonk, go ahead and send us an email, we would love to talk to you.

List of VC firms and Angel Investors in India

Back in June 2011, I had made this list for my reference and thought to share with everyone. I am not giving the email ids for obvious reasons, you can always find the email ids/contact form from their sites anyway (or on linkedin), though if you are indeed serious about raising capital, I will highly advice you to contact the VC firms through some referral connection.

I have added few remarks in front of them, but do your own research. Feel free to drop me an email though, if you have something specific to ask. Please do note that this list is not complete in anyway, this is something which I had created for my own reference.

Feel free to add in the below wiki excel along with your remarks, please avoid removing content unless it is verbose or wrong.

Wiki Style List of VC firms and Angel Investors in India (publicly editable) – Feel free to add names/remarks to it

Original list in case the above list is not accessible

You can also check Angellist India too which has lot of names of early stage investors.

Why Do startups fail ?

There is an excellent thread on quora about why startups fail, I will highly advice everyone to read it. Here are some of the points from it to which I also agree as I have seen them by myself

1. Market is not there – before WorkMonk, I myself have built products/websites which never took off as there was no market for it, infact I think I built them without even checking if the market is there or not.

2. Not enough traction – you can’t run a startup for 3 years without making money specially if you don’t have any money, this is why getting traction is very important for startups specially for B2C

3. Being first time entrepreneurs – This happens a lot in India where the founders fundamentals are right as well as they are building a nice product but just because they are doing it for the first time, they make more mistakes which eventually leads to downfall.

4. Founder Quit/Team split – Happens way too often, specially in India, too much ego involved

5. Lack of adaptation – keep on doing same thing when all signals are saying that it won’t work and you should tweak/change it.

6. Wrong allocation of resources – premature scaling is one of the biggest reason for startups to getting failed. Spending too much on hardware

7. Running out of money/limited resources – normally this happens when “one or more” of the above applies which eventually leads to the closing of startup.

Cost of Educating Customer Plays very Important role in Success of your Startup

Shailendra, MD of Sequoia India is a good friend of TheMorpheus and ours as he has given us some good advices and he is one of the very few VCs who are very reachable and doesn’t have the cockiness which many other Indian VCs have.

So during one conversation, he said iYogi (Sequoia porfolio company which provides remote support, later on they raised money from Cannan Partners too, I am not sure if Sequoia has exited from iYogi or not) has spent 60M in customer acquisition and marketing which to me is a mind blowing number and made me think about the cost of educating the customer/end user about your product ? most of the startups will never think about this when they start their journey (people only think about how to build it, not how to sell it) and most don’t even think about it when they start spending in marketing (by then, it gets too late with no other option).

It is fairly obvious that the businesses which have no overhead of marketing budget of educating the customers will make more profit, will grow faster and are in better position. It is also very difficult to sell to US market from India, specially in B2C domain (I can’t find a single successful example which has become a market leader in US running from India).

So the bottom line is – “Your profits are inversely proportional to how much time/resources you need to spend to educate your customer about why they should buy/use your product“

Take a Print out of this right now

Take a Print out of this right now

You fail because you let things fail. And at the end of the day you’ll blame every person you’ve ever met for your failure. You’ll give 100 reasons why it’s their fault. How that employee didn’t do his job. How that customer screwed you. How that investor didn’t invest when it was really important. How the damn developers just sat on their asses and delivered dog crap to you. Then you’ll wake up one night when it’s just you sitting there alone, and you’ll realize that you’re the entrepreneur and you’re the only one holding the bag of responsibility. That company is yours, even if you’re a 1% equity holder. Employees are as loyal as cats. Investors have lots of other deals going on. Customers always have other options, and they’re pretty good about reminding you of that. So at the end of the day, it’s just you. You and your company. Because, you see, the company is you. You are the company. You are singular zen being. That’s when the lightbulb goes on and you have to be a big boy or big girl and say: “I take absolute and total responsibility for the success or failure of this company. It will succeed in part by me, and I will get partial credit for its success. But it will fail in full by me, and I will take 100% of the responsibility for its failure.” Sorry, you only get partial credit, but 100% responsibility.

From – Quora, a must read thread

Why Choosing the Right Development Platform is so Crucial for startups

I was talking to Abhishek and Amandeep of loremate few weeks back when they were in Bangalore about the issues which they faced (and still facing) because of wrong choice of platform (and the wrong approach their developer had), Rabi/Ashish of idubba also had similar experience with a freelance developer which made me think how important it is to chose the right development platform for a startup as a wrong choice will not only make you lose precious 2 to 4 months, will also void all the time and resources invested in earlier development.

WorkMonk is built purely on PHP/Mysql and though I did thought of considering Django, CodeIgniter (a huge $100M+ site in our domain uses CI) and Yii (everyone was talking about it), eventually I decided to stick with php/mysql.

So to Summarize it from my experience, if you are looking to chose a development platform for your product/service startup, ask yourself these 6 questions -

1. How fast you can develop on it ? – you can’t spend months understanding and learning the language and platform. On web things move fast and things keep on getting outdated in every 18 months.

2. How comfortable you are (and your current core developers) with the development platform ? – if you and your developers can’t code it, don’t expect to hire someone to do it for you. It has never worked and will never work.

3. How mature the development platform is ? – Majority of the Open source project and platform offer basic features for you to build on but after that you are pretty much on your own.

4. How much code/examples are publicly available ? for rapid development, you need lot of code/modules/libraries written by others already

5. How easily you can find 5 developer on that platform in India ? – considering the best developers are already running their own startups, already working for a startup or are havng 12+ lakh jobs. Also remember, no good developer wants to work in a startup which has nothing to show.

6. How easily you can find the help on web/forums/IRC ? – again, you don’t want to reinvent the wheel and solve platform problems which should anyway be solved by core platform developers.

also it is a good idea to discuss this with as many people as possible, specially people who are using the platforms which you are looking to use. One 10 minute conversation can save months later.