Why Indian Startups should avoid Paypal (or have multiple payment options)

This I am writing from our experience of WorkMonk which we had with paypal. Most of the startup founders already know this but for those of you who don’t, there are some serious problems with using paypal as a mode of payment due to continuous change in paypal policies related to Indian accounts. You just can’t run a professional business with all the shenanigans that Paypal pulls but most of the businesses have no other option because of lack of other quality options.

If you are a startup in India who get payment from abroad, you can and should never trust paypal as the only payment option on your site and should move to Credit Card payment as soon as possible. There is heavy integration and maintenance fees involved with Credit Card payment gateways of ICICI and CITIBank but if you can, you should take it as paypal deducts about 8% on every transaction for Indian accounts (regular fees + currency conversion)

Now We have 3 payment options for our clients

1. Paypal (love or hate it, there is no choice to keep it)
2. 2Checkout (had no other option but to use it, charges 5.5% which is very high, also has keeps some money in reserve)
3. Credit Card (direct payment gateway)

all this setup costed us lot of time and money but we had put this as our highest priority as we wanted to make sure in case of any failure of one option, there are others to keep everything running smoothly.

Startup Success Chance vs Level of difficulty of execution

If y axis depicts the success and the x axis depicts level of difficulty of execution, IMO, this graph will accurately signify the success vs level of difficulty really well

If it is very easy to build your product/business, others will also do it in lesser time meaning oversold and overcrowded market. On the other hand, if it is taking you 18 months to build your product/company in stealth mode then the chances are (and there are tons of exceptions too btw) that the market will move to something new or the market size is way too small.

The real success comes in between when it is somewhat difficult to build the product/startup

Why as non tech Founder, you have to (learn to) Code

There are 2 kind of founders, those who can code and those who can’t!

Fortunately I belong to the first category but if you belong to the second category, start to learn to code right now. After seeing hundreds of startups, even those which are not into IT/Product/Platform verticals, I can safely say that the founder(s) who can build things will always have 3X+ advantage over to those who can’t.

The biggest mistake Marketing/MBA founders make is to think that they can find some rockstar developer, pay him good money and he will build things for us. It just don’t work. It hasn’t worked in the past, it will not work in future too.

As a non tech founder, you have to know what is going on with your product/platform so even if you can’t understand the finer details of the work, you have to sit with the developers and ask them explain why we are doing this and how we are doing this. This doesn’t mean that you have to do full time hardcore coding but spend few hours to understand the tech part of your startup, this will help a lot after 6 months, always remember, it is not your developer who will build your company, you will.

Why as an entrepreneur, you want to embrace challenges and difficulties

If you can figure out your whole business model in the weekend and built your product by next Wednesday, you are probably in the wrong market and even if you are in right market, expect two dozen other competitors to be there by month end.

As an entrepreneur, you want to see things getting tough for you, you want to see daily challenges and you want to see uncertainly as these will become entry barriers for everyone and you will be in much stronger position by solving those challenges first.

Why everyone should work in atleast one startup in his lifetime ?

because startup build “Character” and because money is not everything in life and because there has to be difference in the world with you and without you

That is why …

How to lose a Client, the Hyderabad House way

This happened last sunday. For those of you, who are not aware, Hyderabad House is a food chain in south India, mostly based in Hyderabad but has also branches in other cities too.

I tried to order one veg biryani from them (they are about 1 KM from our office) at 7:30 PM and they said, No, we won’t do it. I said, wait, last week you had done it and few weeks before that too but that guy firmly said, No, we won’t do this time unless the minimum order is Rs 150 (my order was of Rs 98 including the delivery charges). It seems, whether they will deliver it or not depends highly on who is attending the call and what mood he is in. The person in charge also failed to figure it out that the delivery boy in any case will pass from our office (it is on main road) to deliver to others so effectively by repeatedly asking me to make a minimum order rather then being flexible, Hyderabad house lost a customer (I am assuming their margins are above 50% so they lost the money too by not taking my order).

Businesses in India, specially non online, needs to understand the importance of converting every call to sale irrespective of profit margins.

[Startup Advice] Why startups should not waste time on Job Consultants and Head hunters

tl;dr version –

Because they are useless, greedy and don’t care about your need and your startup.

Long Version

I know many “top” job consultants and head hunters who are “specialists” in finding executives (read as searching naukri/monster and making few calls, that’s it!) and as a startup, this is the last thing you want, to let someone else build the team for you. These consultants keep their own database and keeps on pushing the same names to all the companies without even looking at what the startup is looking for.

Also their primary focus is only on high end experienced clients from big MNCs, the 12+ lakh jobs so they can pocket commission of 10%. Personally I feels startups should avoid them like plague (speaking from personal experience as we tried to use such consultants for workmonk too), though if you know someone who is working in such consultancy and is your friend, you can ask that person to help you in finding such profiles for referral fees of Rs 5k or 10k.

If you fail to deliver, you deserve to go out of business

I always believed that the zeroth law of business is – “Deliver what you are promising” whose corollary will be “If you fail to deliver, you deserve to go out of business”

I feels, for most of the startups whose fundamentals are right (Right Team + Right Market), they fail to get enough traction and clients because they fail to deliver what they are promising and eventually fail to impress early adopters.

[Infographic] Indian Skilled Workforce Numbers

More information/stats are available on WorkMonk.in Blog Post,

Will b2c part of eBay India survive onslaught of eCommerce sites ?

Each day, a new ecommerce site gets started in India and 2 questions gets posted on OCC/Headstart mailing list about how to start an ecommerce site. There are already many sites in niche verticals like eyeglasses and watches and this is just the beginning. Now the question is, What will happen to India’s oldest B2B/B2C ecommerce site ebay India and how relevant it will be considering almost everything which people on selling now is already there on eCommerce sites. And the single biggest reason that goes in favor of ecommerce sites as compared to ebay is “Ownership”, as a buyer you know with whom you are dealing and that ecommerce store will deliver the product in the time with genuine product, something which is not the case with ebay seller.

I feels eBay India will remain relevant as far as C2C is concerned, people selling their used products on ebay (though there is lot of fraud going on there too, lot of stolen electronics are getting sold on ebay) will be there but the “shops” which are using ebay to sell their products, they are in serious trouble because they can not match the Pricing offered by ecommerce sites.

May be it a good time for eBay to reinvent itself otherwise it may be heading towards Rediff shopping like fate, where the independent sellers gave the bad name to rediff shopping and the shopping experience was never in control of Rediff.