Aditya Kothadiya's Blog

I attended a startup event the other day. As a part of an event, there was a talk by a successful entrepreneur about PR and Marketing. This entrepreneur had recently launched his new startup and had received great buzz in the media within a short span of time. So his talk was mainly focused on – how he launched that startup with such a great buzz in such a short amount of time.

I was interested in this topic, but was disappointed at the end of the talk.

The thing is – this guy talked about how he launched a bare minimum application with some controversial idea and got the press members and tech bloggers to talk about it within few weeks. This controversial introduction apparently helped him to get more buzz from other press members and bloggers, and also from social media community. He showed more than 2 dozens press members and bloggers talked about his idea and new startup – and that helped them to get many users in early days because people were curious to see what it is. He also managed to let influential startup people talk about his startup (because they are his friends).

I’m not against of this approach. If it worked for him, great! As they say, any kind of publicity is a good publicity. But I’m against of advising this approach as a technique to first-time entrepreneurs to launch their startups to get more traction early on.

Using your brand to promote something is not a technique, it’s a leverage. So my request to such successful entrepreneurs is – please do not advice any techniques which were possible because of your successful brand. Not everyone who is just starting has that kind of brand. PR or tech bloggers won’t even entertain the first-time entrepreneurs, and especially if the idea is so controversial or early stage (without any traction). So please, don’t advice it as a technique – it’s not going to work for everyone.

I read this great paragraph from Paul Graham’s essay about why having MBA is not essential to start a technology business. I completely agree with this philosophy, so posting his thoughts again -

I found that business was neither so hard nor so boring as I feared. There are esoteric areas of business that are quite hard, like tax law or the pricing of derivatives, but you don’t need to know about those in a startup. All you need to know about business to run a startup are commonsense things people knew before there were business schools, or even universities.

If you work your way down the Forbes 400 making an x next to the name of each person with an MBA, you’ll learn something important about business school. You don’t even hit an MBA till number 22, Phil Knight, the CEO of Nike. There are only four MBAs in the top 50. What you notice in the Forbes 400 are a lot of people with technical backgrounds. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Michael Dell, Jeff Bezos, Gordon Moore. The rulers of the technology business tend to come from technology, not business. So if you want to invest two years in something that will help you succeed in business, the evidence suggests you’d do better to learn how to hack than get an MBA.

via How to Start a Startup.

Again, the most important piece of advice – learn how to hack than get an MBA.

Fascinating talk by Dan Pink on the surprising science of motivation at TED.

Watch it -

I received a clever pamphlet in the mail today as shown in a picture below. I hope you can read it clearly.

What’s clever about this marketing mail?

1. It has a physical object in it, which you can feel by hand. So you are most likely not going to throw it away without opening it.

Marketer’s first objective is achieved – you opened a junk mail!

2. Then it has above campaign -

“Tech CU has sent one member the winning key. It may be you! If the key in this invitation turns the ignition of the lock box at the car sale, the vehicle is yours.”

Now tell me – will you throw away that key now? Aren’t you thinking – what if that key is really the lucky one? You might think – “I really didn’t have to do anything to receive this lucky key. Now all I have to do is to go there once and confirm if this key is really the lucky one or not.”

Marketer’s second objective is achieved – you are thinking about that offer.

3. Even if I know that I’m not lucky enough to receive the lucky key and even if I know that I will not have time to go to that car sale to check if that key is really lucky one or not, I will be reluctant to throw that key away. I’m thinking – what if I may have time and I may go to that area? Why throw key now? Why not throw afterward when we really can’t go?

Marketer’s third objective is achieved – you got hooked to that offer.

Now marketer’s fourth objective is – you show up at that car sale place. I’m not sure if that objective will be achieved or not. Irrespective of that, I think this was a clever marketing campaign.

What do you think? Do you treat this clever marketing or spam? Or do you think this was a clever spam?

This is a fascinating post – You Can’t Do What You Want By Doing Something Else. Some thoughts from that post are as below -

There are lots of people who wanted to do one thing but then got “practical” and did something else “first.” The idea was that they’d be successful and sock away money doing the practical thing, and after that they could go back to the thing they loved. Bronson was sure that, among the hundreds of people that he interviewed, someone would actually have been successful with this strategy. It sounds so reasonable, after all.

But he encountered exactly zero people who pulled it off. Everyone who tried got sucked into the “practical” career and were never able to extract themselves from it. Too comfortable, too many expectations from friends and family, too easy just to keep doing what you’re doing.

Although we admire when someone can do something unique and creative, society is set up to resist such attempts. Your parents, with all the love and best intentions, will urge you to do something that “makes a good living.” Your friends and coworkers resist behaviors that might take you away from them, and will tell you stories of how this or that person tried and failed. And hardest of all, when you are ready to make your leap of faith, the temptations appear; the tremendous opportunities that for some reason only come out of the woodwork when you are ready to walk out the door.

There’s a quote that appears again and again in various forms: “close one door, another opens.” It seems like magical thinking until you see it happen. And it only happens when you don’t leave the door partially open, but instead firmly close it. For some reason, being certain that you’re ready to move on does cause some kind of magic to happen, and I don’t know why.

I’ve to admit that I’m in the exact same situation and I should be doing something about it. Coming from an Indian background, I can assert that most of the Indians fall into this “practical” and “society pressure” traps. Very few of us actually take a different route and explore their dreams. The rest of us just follow the herd. We’ll typically go for high-salaried jobs in Engineering, Medicine or Management profession. We hardly go for Music, Theatre or Sports career paths. Even in Engineering career, we’ll go for Computer Science and IT jobs – irrespective of if we really love that or not.

We hardly take risks. And we justify (read as give excuse) that we’re taking calculated risks by doing practical things now, and planning to take leap in future once we achieve some stability. On top of other social pressures, we immigrate to other countries for better career opportunities and loose our freedom and risk potential even more. We now also have visa and residency issues and we keep traveling other paths that we really do not want to. Everyday, we keep traveling away from our dreams. But we do it because everybody else is also doing the same. And we just keep doing it. Few days ago I posted a similar thought on Twitter -

But this article is a good eye-opener. I’m not sure even after reading this I’ll be taking corrective actions. You see, I’ve so many practical things to take care of first…

I use Vim Editor every single day and really like it. Few years ago when I started learning Vim editor, I found it very daunting to learn all those commands and tricks, and then remember those commands, and most importantly – apply those commands for day-to-day tasks. Over the past years, I learned a lot, step by step. But I’m still not there yet. I’m not master yet. I’ve seen few my colleagues doing magic with Vim, which I can just appreciate but not understand and apply. I always wanted to learn more tricks and tips and master the editing with Vim. Finally I found some great articles compiled together to master Vim editor on this blog post – Vim is a great text editor.

Following are the useful links that you can peruse to master the Vim Editor -

• Find the appropriate version of Vim for your OS and install.
• Start learning the ropes with these tutorials:
  • Using Vi/Vim: A Brief Tutorial
  • Efficient Editing With vim
  • Splits and multi-file editing
  • The Vim commands cheat sheet – 1.2
  • Graphical cheat sheet
  • Vim Tips wiki
• Vim is very customizable, the settings are stored in the vimrc file which resides in the install’s directory:
  • Select colour scheme and font
  • Secrets of tabs in vim (set indent type and depth)
  • vimrc tips
  • Example .vimrc
  • Vim plugins

I found these links very useful, and I hope you’ll find them useful too. You may not be able to digest this all information at once. You’ll have to learn few things, and then practice it, and then master it. But now you have all the resources to master Vim at one place!

I was always curious to know some stats and today I stumbled on this great blog post “What do I mean, by ‘next four billion’?“. Following are some numbers that I found very interesting -

There are 480 million newspapers printed daily; 800 million automobiles registered on the planet; 1.1 billion personal computers including all desktops, laptops, notebooks and netbooks; 1.2 billion fixed landine phones; 1.4 billion internet users; 1.5 billion TV sets; 1.7 billion unique holders of a credit card of any type; and 2.1 billion unique holders of a banking account of any kind. But 4 billion mobile phone subscriptions.

…

So, that is what was the first four billion. The rapid growth of what has become the most widely adopted technology on the planet. Now, what about the topic of the “next 4 billion”, that does sound a bit strange. The world total human population is only 6.7 billion people. Shouldn’t I be saying, “the next 2.7 billion”.

…

So here is the big news. The next 4 Billion will not be like you and me. They will not be wealthy enough to own a PC and have a broadband connection and read blogs or do any Twittering on a PC. Over 95% of the next 4 billion will be in the Developing World, and while there will be of course an emerging middle class who may aspire to own a netbook, those tend to be wealthy enough to already have a subscription today. Those next four billion will be either those who do not have any connection today, at all, or else are second and third subscriptions to those who already have one today.

Read the entire post if you want to learn more about the mobile phone market potential. The numbers are really interesting!

I think we often confuse efforts and results. Efforts and results are not always proportional. It’s a different story that we expect they should, but in reality, they are not. Why we confuse them?

When we confuse them, we tend to recognize efforts, and reward results. Instead it should be other way around. We should respect and reward people who are putting efforts, and recognize results if those efforts turn into good results.

We need to understand that results are not always guaranteed. They not only depend on amount of efforts put, but also on many other things, which are most of the times not under control of a person putting efforts. Irrespective of the amount of efforts put, results can go wrong because of bad decisions, bad ideas, bad timing, bad market, or bad luck!

Once again, don’t confuse the efforts and results. Reward efforts and recognize results. Not other way around.

I really liked how Rypple.com has implemented movable and actionable signup flow. For most of the web-services, we see these links to make our signup action as an easy process – “Learn More”, “Signup for Free”, or “Take a Tour”. Now a days these links are shown in big boxes or buttons to make them more visible and prominent, such that you can see them very clearly and take the signup action quickly.

But most of the times, these links appear at the top section of the screen when you land up on that page. Generally to learn more about that web-service, you tend to scroll down to see what features they provide, what their existing customers said, etc. When we scroll down, the links to take signup action are lost from our visibility. And the purpose of making them more visible is no longer applicable unless you remember those big buttons and decide to scroll up again to signup.

I liked how Rypple has fixed that problem. They made those signup buttons movable. If you scroll down, those buttons also scroll down. If you scroll up again, they will also scroll up again. Basically they will just stay with you all the time as shown below -

When you land up on front page -

When you scroll down -

It’s a very clever way to make sure those actionable buttons are never lost from your visibility. You see that button all the time so chances might be higher that you’ll not forget to signup. Also, if you’ve scrolled down, Rypple has made your job even easier by removing the need of scrolling up again to just signup. I’m sure they must be seeing some increase in number of signups using this clever signup flow.

Suggest if you have seen such clever signup flows.

I love Facebook’s usability. But I found their email notification implementation highly unusable or rather annoying at some times.

1. Commented on which status?

The common use case is – you post some status update and your friends comment on it. Now, as an average user, I generally post 2-3 updates on my Facebook profile. But when Facebook sends me email notification, it sends me a message something like this -

Facebook Status Comment Notification Email

As shown above, all it says – “<Your friend> commented on your status: <Friend’s comment>”. But I’ve no idea on which status my friend commented on. They deliberately made sure that I’ve no clue about which status it was, and I better login to their site and give them some pageviews. I hate it. All they have to send me -

“<Your friend> commented on <Your status>: <Friends’ comment>” – just fill in the value of your actual status! So simple! I just get it on which status my friend commented on, and that comment starts making sense to me. Otherwise without the context, I’ve no way to understand what that comment means.

2. Follow the link to reply?

Another use case is – if I receive comment, then I can’t reply that comment by sending “Reply” button of my email program. Why I’ve to login to their site just to reply to that comment thread? My comment thread is actually right now in my email inbox. It tells me what comment my friend posted, then if I’ve to reply to it, I’ll just hit the reply button and will send my comment via email. It should get posted directly to the status thread on Facebook.

Though, this not an annoying issue, but sometimes if I receive 3-4 comments during day time, then I read those comments in my email, but generally postpone replying to it on Facebook till evening – and most likely, I’ll forget what was my instant reaction to friend’s comment was and will lose its continuation.

But having this ability will increase the instant communication. And I don’t think it’s that hard to implement this feature – especially when it makes users’ life more convenient.

If you have different observations, then please let me know your views in the comment section!

It’s been few weeks that I haven’t updated on the progress of Shopialize, a part-time project I’m working on. Not to mention, lots of things were happening – and so hardly got some leisure time to write a blog post peacefully. Anyways, here are the things that kept me busy in the last few weeks -

More feedback

I talked to many people – friends, advisors, entrepreneurs, mentors, etc. Got amazing feedback from everybody. Many have raised few concerns about certain aspects of my idea. Luckily, many people identified the same issue, so it was easy to figure out what to fix in the idea. At the same time, everybody seemed to be excited about the idea and its potential given that I’ll execute it brilliantly.

The more I talked to people, the better I started getting at pitching my idea. One of the things I’ve done is – practiced pitching Shopialize in 60 seconds. It was a great experience to come up with a 60 seconds pitch with key bullet points –

• founder’s background explaining his ability to execute the idea
• the idea itself
• it’s market
• it’s monetization strategy

– all in 60 seconds.

Also, talking with more people helped me to clarify my assumptions about particular market, and got few new ideas and suggestions which I was not necessarily focussing initially.

Product plan

Based on the received feedback from these different people, now I’ve more thoughts and ideas about what to build in Shopialize and how to build it. Many thoughts are still juggling in my head. So need to put these thoughts down on to paper. Haven’t done much progress on this front except writing down with few user work-flows, paper-based sketches, database schemas, etc. Need to document these things clearly.

Customer development

This was the best part in last few weeks. I attended one conference and met few customers there. I discussed the Shopialize idea with them and how it would benefit them. I also asked them questions about how they are solving their current problems, and then suggested how I can improve that experience with Shopialize. Also asked their feedback about what do they would like to see additionally in the service. It was one the best experience to validate and get affirmation for your idea by directly talking to customers.

Also had interactions with fellow entrepreneurs and social media gurus there. Got good affirmation about market potential and it’s growth opportunities. This also helped me to do some market research, identify size, market pattern, and its potential growth rate. In short, the conference was worth every penny.

By the way, though it was a paid conference, and wasn’t affordable for me initially, I tried convincing organizers to give me an entry with discounted rates. Thankfully my request worked, and got the tickets at 1/6th price. So lessons learned – don’t hesitate to ask or negotiate.

Technology development

This part was slow compared to what I was expecting. Done reasonable progress, but I was hoping to do more and do faster. But unfortunately couldn’t devote much time due to other tasks at hand. But in next few weeks now this will be the main focus – developing the product prototype. I’m hoping that within a month from now I should have something working. Let’s see how I do on my promise.

Co-founder and advisor search

This was one of the prime tasks I was working on in the last few weeks. I met few entrepreneurial people, talked with them, discussed the opportunities but unfortunately nothing worked out concretely on a co-founder front. Nevertheless, the search is still on, and I’ll be continuing to meet more people to see if they can join me in this venture.

The good news is that I’ve received confirmation from one advisor that he’ll be advising me for this venture. I was extremely happy that day when I learned that the person I highly respect for his entrepreneurial success will be advising me. Now I’ve to give my best to meet his expectations and deliver as promised to him. But it’s a great support mentally to have someone believing in you.

I tried requesting one more advisor, but unfortunately due to his time bandwidth, he denied the request. I’ll be requesting few more advisors in the next few weeks and will see if they are willing to guide me.

Legal stuff

Lot of people gave feedback that Shopialize name represents the meaning perfectly, but is little harder in spelling. And suggested to see if I can have some other brand. I spent lot of time in thinking about it, but couldn’t finalized on anything new primarily due to domain name unavailability or not having catchy or good-sounding name. Email me at <aditya dot kothadiya at gmail dot com> if you happen to think of some good catchy name, or want to sell any domain name that you’ve but not using it now.

Also working on Trademarking few things and identifying if I can patent the idea or not. Yeah, in this Web 2.0 world, it’s really hard to patent anything, but I’m still giving it a thought. It’s good to develope intellectual property driven culture in startup from day one.

Beta Signup

Don’t forget to signup at Shopialize for it’s beta launch. I’ll keep sharing more details on this blog so stay tuned.

I just read very informative and thoughtful article about 7 Great Reasons Not To Take VC Money on Silicon Valley Watcher. It’s one of the best “Why Not To Take VC Money” article I’ve read.

Here are 7 reasons from that article -

- If you start by selling your concept to potential prospects (rather than stock to VCs), you will either end up with initial customers or a conviction that your idea won’t work. Why raise money and then find out which one it will be?

- Raising money takes time away from understanding your market and potential customers. Often more time than it would take to just go sell something to a customer. Let your customers fund your business through product orders.

- Adding VCs to the mix early gives you an additional set of masters you must serve in addition to your customers. It is always hard to serve two masters, especially in a startup.

- With no money you can’t make a fatal mistake. This is a blessing. Without VC money, you are forced to figure out how to extract funds from your customers for value you deliver. Ultimately that is the only thing that really matters.

- Money removes spending discipline. If you have the money you will spend it – whether you have figured out your business model and market or not.

-Raising VC money determines your exit strategy. You will either sell the business or take it public. What if you end up with a very profitable, modest sized business that you want to just run? That is no longer an option once you raise VC money.

- You sell your precious equity very dearly before you have a proven business model. This is the worst time to raise money from a valuation perspective. I know this is a contrarian view. And some of you are saying that might be fine for a small company.

Don’t forget Dell, HP, Microsoft all originally started without VC funding; you can build a big business with bootstrapping and without VC money. At RightNow, we doubled our revenue and employees every 90 days for two years before we took any outside money, and even then the employees retained more than 75% ownership after raising $32m.

Here is the original article: 7 Great Reasons Not To Take VC Money

Let me admit this – I did not backup the Tweeght’s database until today. Somehow I kept procrastinating it for no reason. Since Tweeght is growing consistently, it was crucial for me to backup its database on daily basis and prepare myself from loosing all the crucial data in some sort of catastrophic event.

I use Media Temple’s Grid-Server for Tweeght. MT has good knowledge base article on – How can I Backup and Restore a MySQL database?.

But this article just mentions about how to backup your database for once. I wanted to automate this backup process on daily basis. So I Googled a little-bit, and came across this wonderful script. So I took that script, updated it for MT’s Grid-Server infrastructure, and now I’m all set within 20 minutes to take daily backups of my crucial databases.

Here are the steps I followed:

1. Go to /data directory in your account. I preferred this over /domains directory because this is accessible only by you and not by public. You don’t want the public to accidentally access dump of your database.

2. Create /db_backup directory. Go to /db_backup directory and create three new directories – /scripts , /daily and /recent.

3. Go to /scripts directory and open up your favorite editor. Copy and paste following code -

#!/bin/bash
# Set a value that we can use for a datestamp
DATE=`date +%Y-%m-%d`
# Our Base backup directory
BASEBACKUP="/home/XXXXX/data/db_backup/daily"

for DATABASE in `cat /home/XXXXX/data/db_backup/scripts/db_list.txt`
do
# This is where we throw our backups.
FILEDIR="$BASEBACKUP/$DATABASE"

# Test to see if our backup directory exists.
# If not, create it.
if [ ! -d $FILEDIR ]
then
mkdir -p $FILEDIR
fi

echo -n "Exporting database:  $DATABASE"
mysqldump --add-drop-table -h internal-db.sXXXXX.gridserver.com -udbXXXXX -pPASSWORD $DATABASE | gzip -c -9 > $FILEDIR/$DATABASE-$DATE.sql.gz
echo "      ......[ Done Exporting to local backup, now exporting for remote backup] "
cp $FILEDIR/$DATABASE-$DATE.sql.gz /home/XXXXX/data/db_backup/recent/$DATABASE.sql.gz
echo "      .......[Done]"
done

# AutoPrune our backups.  This will find all files
# that are "MaxFileAge" days old and delete them.
MaxFileAge=4
find $BASEBACKUP -name '*.gz' -type f -mtime +$MaxFileAge -exec rm -f {} \;

4. Change few things in above code -

• Replace all the instances of ‘XXXXX’ with your gridserver account number.
• Replace ‘PASSWORD’ with your SSH password

5. Now save this file as something like ‘db_backup.sh’

6. Open up your editor one more time, and write the names of databases you want to back up on each single line -

dbXXXXX_proj1
dbXXXXX_proj2

7. Now save this file as something like ‘db_list.txt’

8. Basically, the script pulls a list of databases to be backed up from a file called db_list.txt, this file takes 1 database name per line. It then exports the database and compresses, then saves it with a date-stamped filename to a directory called ../daily/<db_name>/.

Then, the script copies a non-date-stamped filename to a directory called ../recent/, thus overwriting the previous file stored there.

Finally it goes through the daily directory structure and deletes any files older than 4 days.

9. Now you can test your backup script by running following command -

./db_backup.sh

10. The script will echo out some progress messages. If no error message, then hopefully your databases should be backed up.

To see if it was successful execution, go to ../daily directory. You will see directories created with <db_name> names. Under these directories, you’ll see compressed version of sql dumps. Similarly, go to ../recent directory, and you’ll see the similar compressed version of sql dump.
To automate this backup process, go to your MediaTemple’s admin section of your primary domain and click the “Cron Jobs” link.

11. Click on the ‘Add a new cron job’ button.

12. Add your email address in the “Notification Email” field. This will send you emails whenever the cron job runs and will let you know if it was successful or not.

13. Also add path of your script in the “Command or script to execute” field. Enter: /home/XXXXX/data/db_backup/scripts/db_backup.sh. Again, replace ‘XXXXX’ with your gridserver account number.

14. On the same page, you can specify how often you’d like your script to run. This entire section is up to you requirements. I’ve set mine to run daily at 3:00 AM when traffic on my site is slower.

15. Click Save and you’re all set to backup your databases on daily basis!

I hope this will be useful to you. If you see any issues, please let me know in the comment section.

I read this fascinating article about what defines a great start-up culture?

Author Greg Gottesman has brilliantly explained following thirteen key characteristics of a great startup culture.

1. No politics.
2. It’s not a job, it’s a mission.
3. Intolerance for mediocrity.
4. Watching pennies.
5. Equity-driven.
6. Perfect alignment.
7. Good Communication, Even in Bad Times.
8. Strong leadership.
9. Mutual respect.
10. Customer-obsessed.
11. High energy level.
12. Fun.
13. Integrity.

Read the original article in detail here: 13 key characteristics of a great startup culture.

Few days ago I mentioned about starting a new journey – building Shopialize application in the part-time. I was busy with following activities in the last week -

Getting feedback

Till last week, it was just an idea in my head and I was the only one who was excited about it. So first step was to share that idea with others and get their feedback. And as you guessed it right, I shared it with my friends and interestingly they also liked the idea very much, and they too are excited about its potential. But as we know, friends are always supportive and always give us positive feedback.

As I wrote in my previous post – what I really need is “loving critic” – someone who care deeply enough about me to give me honest feedback – both positive and negative about what I’m doing. So in next few weeks I’ll be discussing the idea with more friends and advisers (which I need to look for as well) and try to get their feedback and refine the idea as much as possible in early stages itself.

Formalizing the idea

Idea in head is of no use. It’s important to write it down and formalize it more structurally. I tried to write it’s scope, what problem it’s solving, what are its possible solutions. Interestingly, there are many ways to solve the problem I’m trying to solve. So I listed down all different solutions. But some are complex and will take lot of time and resources to build. So finally I prioritized the scope of solutions I’ll be implementing. I’ll start with comparatively simpler solution and then I’ll keep adding complex features as application grows.

Creating product plan

Once I decided which solution approach I’m taking, I’ve started listing down the product features I’ll be implementing. I know, in part-time projects you don’t want to waste time in writing down these things, but instead want to code it. But I’m taking balanced approach – I think it’s the right approach. I’ve followed user stories approach i.e. listing features based on different types of users of your application.

Customer development

I’m also working on identifying potential customers and listing down their contact details. I’m still researching about customers and trying to understand what they use currently and how can I help them by providing better solution. This effort will be ongoing. My plan is once I’ve basic prototype, I’ll contact these potential customers and will validate the idea from them.

Evaluating technology

I’ve also spent some time in evaluating the technology I’ll be using to develop this application. I’ll be using Symfony 1.2 – a PHP MVC framework and MySQL database. I’ve used Symfony 1.0 previously to develop few other applications, but Symfony 1.2 is lot different than Symfony 1.0, so there is some learning curve is involved. I could have dropped the idea of learning Symfony 1.2 and could have started coding the features right away using Symfony 1.0. But Symfony 1.2 is lot faster and better, so decided to invest some time to learn it now rather than investing more time at later stage in migrating Symfony 1.0 code base to Symfony 1.2 platform.

Tools I’m using

I’m using Pbworks application to write down everything, of course its free version. I really like Pbworks. It’s amazingly simple service with great features and usability. I’ve created many sections like – Business Development, Marketing, Product Management, and Engineering and it’s helping me a lot to organize my documentation in early stages. Though wiki might look over-kill for a one-person project, I believe that this will be useful when more team members will join me.

For project planning I’m using free version of Basecamp. I’m fan of 37Signals product and I love Basecamp’s simplicity. I use it to list down milestones and detailed tasks – and it helps me to get things done.

Next week’s action plan

The same activities will continue in the next week. Primarily Customer development and Technology development will be prime tasks. Another important task is to look for teammates and advisers. So I’m going to meet few people and going to pitch my idea to them and get their feedback and opinions. There are lots of things to work on so I’ll get back to work now.

Beta Signup

Don’t forget to signup at Shopialize for it’s beta launch. I’ll keep sharing more details on this blog so stay tuned.