5 Things I learnt from starting Up

1. It takes balls to start up

When I had heard seniors, colleagues and other entrepreneurs to say it I thought they were kidding around. How hard could it be? One month into it and I was convinced that I wasn’t going anywhere with this piece of crap . Sticking in when you are at your lowest is the most difficult of tasks.

2. Million Dollar Ideas don’t necessarily make you a million dollars

Assuming that I had a crazy ass idea of providing a particular service at one fourth of the market cost I along with my fellow co founders hoped we would be making a million dollars in no time. Contrary to that we hadn’t even had our first client till two months were up.

3. Master of One Trade

As a start up and a twenty year old with people your same age you feel - fuck the world, we can do a million things. So we drew up a list that contained nearly twenty offerings. Funny as it may be our core competence was in only five of these. The issue that really cropped up was that the time spent on doing the other fifteen things was so much that we would have made twice the money had we stuck to our core competencies.

4. Innovate or die.

We started out as one idea. Then we realized that our model could be easily replicated by any one and we did not have patents or anything. So we set out to diversify into other areas. The main issue with any thing in India is the me too philosophy. One guy starts a t-shirt business twenty other guys will start a t-shirt business in all likelihood sourcing from the same fucking printer.

5. Always have version 2.0

So version 1.0 did not work out. There were glitches and a lot of them. But going by Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs ideologies I think that’s all right. It’s more important to have a product out there in the market than to not have a product at all.

So here’s to version 2.0 which I hope will be bigger, better and hopefully make me more money.