I remember sitting in a physics class preparing for the highly brutal competitive examinations for entrance in engineering colleges when my teacher closed his mammoth problem book and gave us a small pep talk.
I confess, I don’t remember anything associated to that class even in my remotest memories but the pep talk remains fresh as ever.
He said that in order to do a problem correctly, one has a single way, but there are infinite ways to do it wrong. Even in a ten step problem, one could write the numerals wrong or do a silly mistake in addition, but when the problem is right, it is correct all the way. He said that we belonged to the Homo sapiens species and we are bound to make mistakes, so if we wanted to do the problem right in the examinations, we should practice it so much that the wrongs get eliminated.
What he said that day was of course valid for physics but is all the more valid for startups.
It’s a closely established fact that out of hundred startups only a few survive to breathe in the returns for the sweat behind them. What makes them so vulnerable to failure and what would you call a failure? What goes on in the minds of the college students or undergrads when they decide to take a chance with probability? What is the secret recipe or is there any recipe at all?
After have been associated with two startups, these are a few questions which haunted and intrigued us and I decided to share my two cents with all the entrepreneurs out there waiting and working to strike gold.
CHAPTER ONE: Eggs or the Hen?
What should come first in the order of things for the perfect startup stew? The eggs or the hen? The idea or the search? One might not find any co-relation between the two metaphors that I’ve used, but this is one of the starting dilemmas entrepreneurs face.
How should you startup or rather when do you decide that the time to start your own venture has knocked on your doorstep?
The answer is pretty simple and straight- when you decide to let it go.
You decide to let the fear go for a ride, you decide to let go the external controls which had you by neck and you let go the laxity you had in your day-to-day existence.
I had read it somewhere that entrepreneurship is not something you do; it’s more about something you are! More importantly, there is a difference between an entrepreneur and a person having an entrepreneur-like-tendencies. But we’ll get to this point later. We were discussing about the idea.
When our team decided to start, it wasn’t as if we were born with an action plan or we always knew what would click. So, we sat down together and decided to systematically hunt for ideas. One of the friends in my team made a small notebook, the idea notebook and he meticulously made note of what was working on the internet, what was fetching money and was easy to implement with a few modifications. Looking back, I don’t think I can call it the best strategy to start with, but we, as students did not have much options.
We didn’t want to be one small speck in the million heads but we didn’t know what to do? So, we racked our brains and searched on the internet.
So, did this strategy work?
Yes, it did and here’s why.
The way internet and the users on the internet are growing is faster than any bacteria multiplication. The main disadvantage for startups, especially for young entrepreneurs are the bourgeoning services based startups. Entry barriers being relatively low and the technology required to start a website being relatively commonplace, every one wants to have a website to sell something or claiming to sell you a service. As a result, the internet starts seething with websites who have more-or-less the same product and the same service to offer. Nowadays, there is a wave of fashion-trends on the web too, wherein for every new idea, there are more than ten different versions of it, each one claiming to be better than the rest. Now, as a budding entrepreneur, should you jump in the pool and contribute to these me-too sites? I would say, think before you leap.
