Aditya Kothadiya’s Blog

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