Bootstrapping is addictive!

I am reluctant to get outside money (despite some really good offers). So we were stalling the expansion. This lead to the 4 year window where we neither grew much nor we sank. We made profits, we made new clients, we made new relations, and we enjoyed all of these. Our bootstrapping model was a bit corrupt, instead of sourcing the founders for investments. We made the startup to churn its own money by consulting projects. I now realize this was a mistake. The more we did consulting jobs, the more new projects we got. Since they came with a time tag, we had no other option other than to postpone the development of our flagship products. Well, the situation was kind of ironic; we needed the money from the consulting projects to run the company, while we needed the time to at-least mash up and launch our flagship products.

Launch Fast or Die!

 I am now kind of embarrassed about our products because it’s almost a year since we announced them to be "coming soon". Despite our desperate attempts, we are struggling to make it out in time. We had an awesome set of people and talent but we had to channel them to do client projects. The more we stalled our projects the more we were setting back ourselves. So, now I have nothing to tell people what my company is about since we don’t have much of our services launched.

So, Plan B, Get the things we started done and launch it as soon as it takes shape.

Right People are Hard to find.

Kerala is a really “nasty” place for a startup to grow. We lack the vital elements, the people mainly. I came from a class of 64 IT graduates, and a batch of 180 engineering graduates. Not a single person wanted to work for a startup! There were people with talent, who lacked interest. It’s a sham that none of them want to be something of themselves, rather than getting “placed”. I have heard that majority of the IITians and IIM Graduates went along to start their own ventures. So, what is the matter with our people? The problem is not with the people but it’s with the education. The system is a sham. After almost 4 years of engineering studies there is not a little thing that I learned that could help me in anyway. When people mug up the things and buy ready-made projects they come out not realizing their own potentials and caliber. Such a factory product lacks the most important quality anyone should have in their life, Self-Confidence. 

There were some people who said to me that you could motivate one to be a startup founder.   I differ to that, because the motivation is easy when wind is fair. In a startup environment things get nasty and then that motivation we gave him will not hold together. So it’s not worth the effort to motivate someone without the inborn motivation. Such people can cause a company to sink as a whole. Some people say that the biggest reason for a startup to fail is running out of money. I say, its people. People running out of passion, imagination, creativity, or motivation and leaving can be disastrous to the company.

Pleasing everybody is not possible!

This is very important if you are developing a product. You cannot customize it enough to satisfy everyone. Some people follow systems of their own and you single product cannot be customized to them. This problem has a very easy solution! Simply make a product so awesome that you can persuade such people to your system. Sounds kind of beating the purpose of an automation system, but this really works.