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.

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 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.

I’m very excited to share a new journey with you – Shopialize.com. It’s my journey towards building an innovative, valuable, and fun solution for shopping enthusiasts on the web. To start with, it’s a part-time project. Many of you must have already raised your eye-brows saying can we start something successfully in the part-time? Frankly speaking, I don’t know the answer. And that’s exactly my motive behind sharing this journey with you – to see if we can start a project in the part-time or not? And if yes, how? It’s going to be a long journey and I hope the end is fruitful.

What I’ll be doing?

I plan to share the experiences that I learn, challenges I face, and accomplishments I achieve while building a part-time project with you. Since it’s going to be a part-time project, the challenges that I’ll be facing will be different than working on a full-time project. But I don’t think they will be less in any manner. In fact they could be more as well.

My goal is to write a weekly or bi-weekly update about my progress on different activities involved in running this project. I’ll mainly write about -

• progress on product development front
• progress on business and marketing front
• lessons learned in both technical and business world
• processes I follow to achieve my goals
• and more…

At this moment, I can’t really dive into the details of the idea, but all I can say is it’s going to be in the social shopping space.

For many of you, Shopialize.com is not new. Yes, I had started a social shopping application before with the same name, but unfortunately that idea didn’t quite work well. I had to shut it down before I launched it to the masses. There were some flaws, so I needed to rethink the idea and the business model as well. As they say – the best entrepreneurs know how to fail fast. I hope that was the same reason for me ;-)

After brainstorming on idea and business model for quite some time now, I came up with a very innovative and fun idea into social shopping space. I’m continuing with the same brand – Shopialize for “shop and socialize”, but I’ll be developing a completely new product from the scratch – with the new focus and the new energy.

Why I’ll be doing it?

The main reason behind sharing my journey with you instead of working on it in the stealth mode is – my believe that this information will be useful to potential wanna-be part-time entrepreneurs.

I also wanted to be answerable to someone while I work on this project. Since it’s a part-time activity and there is no boss who will monitor my progress, it’s very likely that I may fall short of my promises and may skip the deadlines. So I thought it’ll be great if I become answerable to my readers. This will help me to stay focused and get things done as promised.

I also hope if I share my day-to-day activities and thought process with you guys and if there is something wrong with it, then you can correct me by discussing it in the comments section or emailing me.

Another reason is that I want to sit down every week, retrospect about the things that I achieved and things I couldn’t, and think about the next action plan based on my progress in last week. Writing things down will help me to streamline my thought process and be more effective.

As of today, I’ve just created a invite sign-up page at Shopialize.com – enter your details for beta invites. I’m just getting started, but I’ll finish soon.

Few things that I’ll be working on in immediate future are – formalizing the idea and product plan, getting legal things on the paper, evaluating and studying necessary technologies and forming a team. So I’ll get back to work and will update you the progress in the next week. Wish me your best luck :)

Their Street Smart Attitude

I read this fascinating article Street Smarts: My First Year on Inc.com. In this article, the author, who has started a business with messenger and courier service, talks about how he has earned a new business by his impromptu and smart attitude of handling a critical situation like a public transportation strike. Here is a part of the story -

I decided I needed advice from someone who’d been through the previous transit strike, in 1966, and could perhaps tell me what to expect. As it happened, one of our clients was a major accounting firm called Oppenheim, Appel, Dixon & Company. The head of the mailroom there was a guy named Sam Revson, who’d been around forever and whom I held in high regard. Because the strike was scheduled for the busiest part of the tax season, I figured Sam might have made some contingency plans, and I wanted to know what they were.

I dropped by his office one day in the middle of March. “Sam,” I asked, “what are you doing for the strike?”

“Why?” he said. “Are you thinking of transporting people during the strike?”

The thought hadn’t occurred to me, but it sounded like a reasonable possibility. “Yeah,” I said.

“That’s a great idea,” he said. “We could really use you. It makes sense, because you have vehicles already.”

“Yeah,” I said. “They’re ready to go.”

“Particularly being located next to Penn Station, like you are,” he said. “Assuming the Long Island Railroad doesn’t go out, people could just walk across the street, and you could take them downtown. But how are you going to handle the pickup at the end of the day? Have everybody meet somewhere?”

“Yeah,” I said. “That’s what I’m thinking.”

“It’s probably the way to go,” Sam said. “What are you going to charge?”

“I figure $20 a person,” I said, picking a number out of the air.

“Each way or round trip?” he asked. He didn’t seem to have any problem with the price.

“Each way,” I said. “So, $40 round trip.”

“How are you going to know which people are coming back with you?” he asked.

“Once we take them downtown, we assume they’re coming back, and so you have to pay for the round trip.”

“OK,” Sam said. “Are you going to issue passes or sell tickets or what?”

“We’re going to issue passes,” I said. “And we’re going to number them. How many people do you think you’ll have?”

“Well, if it’s just a transit strike, not a Long Island Railroad strike, we’ll have about 50 people,” he said. “How often do you plan to run the shuttle?”

Suddenly, it’s a shuttle. “About every half-hour,” I said. “They’ll come up to our place. We’ll have coffee and doughnuts for them, at no charge.”

“What if there’s a Long Island Railroad strike as well?” he asked.

“We’ll have a carpool service,” I said, thinking fast. “We’ll have pickup points on Long Island, one on the North Shore, one on the South Shore, and a couple in Queens.”

“Sounds good,” Sam said. “Do you want a deposit?”

“Yeah, of course,” I said, “and I’ll need a week’s worth, because we have to set up this whole system. You’re the first person I came to, because you’re our best customer. I have only so much capacity. If you want to do this, I’ll need the deposit right now.”

“OK,” he said. “What if the strike doesn’t happen?”

“The deposit is nonrefundable,” I said.

“OK,” he said. I left with a check for $10,000.

When I got back to my office, I told everybody what had happened, and we all had a good laugh. Then we went to work calling our other customers, making laminated strike passes, and figuring out how we were going to accommodate all the people who wanted to take advantage of our new service. The truth was, we had only four vehicles, and we had to get our own people to work as well. “How can we possibly do this?” my employees asked as more and more customers signed up.

“I have no idea,” I said, “but we’d better come up with something.”

We decided to call everyone we knew who worked in Manhattan and owned a car. “Here’s the deal,” we said. “We’re going to pay you to drive into the city, plus we’ll cover your parking, gas, tolls, everything. You’re going to have to drive anyway. With us, you can make money doing it. You just have to agree to take some other people with you.”

We managed to put together a network of about 40 drivers — friends, friends of friends, relatives, friends of relatives, relatives of friends, you name it — and were ready when the strike began on April 1.

One of the important lessons to learn from this article is -

When in doubt, go to your customers. They will tell you what they want and lead you to solutions you’d never come up with on your own.

Handling such situations smartly is one of the keys to entrepreneurial success. Next time when we see such situation, we need to learn how to turn it into a business opportunity even though initially we may not think it as an opportunity.

Note: To read more articles from this series, please visit blog series: What Makes Them Entrepreneurial?

Related Articles:

• What Makes Them Entrepreneurial? #34 – Their Excitement to Make Impact on a Significant Number of People
• What Makes Them Entrepreneurial? #33 – Their temperament for stress craving
• What Makes Them Entrepreneurial? #32 – Their Ability To Work Unsupervised

I learned very insightful list of questions that we should ask to ourselves before we jump to start a new business idea. It’s the list of questions that Kiran Mazumdar Shaw asks herself when she choose one idea over another while starting a new business.

1. Do I have the basic understanding of the area?
2. Do I know something about what is happening in the larger space of that idea?
3. How will I build the differentiation, particularly if the idea is a common product?
4. How do I make it affordable and at the same time deliver high value?
5. Wherever there is a collaborator involved in the ideation process, how do I create larger leverage through the relation beyond just that one idea?
6. Do I know who will be a paying customer and how I will go about marketing my idea?
7. Finally, do I have conviction about the idea?

Hope these questions will help us to find the next big opportunity.

I just read these interesting tips on Rediff, so sharing it with you. My favorite lines are highlighted below -

• It’s customers that made Dell great in the first place, and if we’re smart enough and quick enough to listen to customer needs, we’ll succeed.
• I learned very early to surround myself with talented people who challenge convention, offer new ideas and relentlessly drive for improvement. And to let those people thrive. Try never to be the smartest person in the room. And if you are, I suggest you invite smarter people… or find a different room.
• Don’t spend so much time trying to choose the perfect opportunity that you miss the right opportunity.
• There are a lot of things that go into creating success. I don’t like to do just the things I like to do. I like to do things that cause the company to succeed. I don’t spend a lot of time doing my favorite activities.
• One of the things I benefited from when I started this business was that I didn’t know anything. I was just instinct with no preconceived notions. This enabled me to learn and change quickly without having to worry about maintaining any kind of status quo, like some of my bigger competitors.

I hope you will find this useful.