1. There are not enough good problems that tech startups are working on and there seems to be no shortage of funds, platforms and ecosystem partners willing to help startups. The ecosystem is hungry for successes.
2. Product Management skills are the need of the hour, NOT talks about talks about opportunities in X sector, and so on. When there is no culture of knowing how to execute, rest of the topics are moot points.

⇒ Read more at our event coverage at StartupDunia.com.

Update: This has been cross-posted to the official NASSCOM Emerge blog.

The irony in this world is that “To get somewhere, you already have to be there.”

From an individual perspective:

• If you want to make money, you need to already have money.
• To get a job, you need to be one-year experienced and not a fresher.
• If you’re experienced and want to apply for a job that you really want to work on, you should already have the background of working in that area, and you should already know how to do all that the job entails.
• If you want to write a book, publisher expects you to have already written a book before.
• To be listened to, you need to be an expert, not an amateur, but how do you eventually become an expert if you’re never listened to?

From a startup perspective:

• If you want to get funding, your startup should be in a position to not need funding.
• If you want to stock your product in ezone, you should not be a 1-product company, but a 5-product company.

And on and on.

To get somewhere, you already have to be there.

P.S. I’m not condemning, condoning or approving of the situation. Just making an observation.

Thinking from an entrepreneurial angle, it seems to me that there is almost no mobile app market in India today i.e., it is not a startuppable market.

All the successful apps that are making money are transaction-based. For example, ngpay takes a cut from every movie ticket you buy through it. This is only possible for entertainment-oriented apps. The only other successful ones that I see are, of course, communication apps such as Gmail app. I see almost nobody using utility applications on their phones.

Things can improve only if internet-on-mobile was affordable! I think we need 3G for mobile app market to grow in India, but it is delayed yet again (Apparently, the government is not satisfied with the expected 250 billion rupees).

Let’s take a look at few numbers:

• 93.2% of Vodafone India subscribers are prepaid customers, which means it is unlikely they subscribe to monthly fees for internet-on-mobile. Right?
• 96% of Urban Indian mobile users are not accessing the Internet and 48% of Urban India mobile users accessed the Internet on their mobile only 1-3 times a month, on average!

Of course, there is no denying that there is growth year-over-year, but for an entrepreneur, it is not enough yet. Because you can’t build yet-another-social-network nor can you build content unless you have tie-ups with the big movie/music companies. The top websites in India for internet-on-mobile conform to the core needs list that I wrote about earlier, especially entertainment. The free wallpapers from zedge.net seems to be the hottest thing right now. Or as Rajesh Jain keeps stressing (and practises), focus on SMS and Voice for now.

Let’s hope the IAMAI will help things move forward.

Even when we get affordable internet-on-mobile, I wonder if ad-supported free applications will be the only popular ones always. Where’s the money?

Maybe I completely mistaken or I’m just whiny, because MediaNama paints a much brighter picture, from comics to unlimited music for Rs. 99/month to movie rental and chocolates. Hah! There is a gotcha there — all those announcements are from big guys. Where are the mobile app startups?

I am planning to attend Silicon India’s Mobile Conference this month to gain more perspective on this.

To round things up, here are some rough notes that I jotted down when Karthee Madasamy of Qualcomm Ventures talked about How to make a winning mobile startup at an OCC Meet on Aug 15. It was probably the only time I felt hopeful that a mobile app startup is possible today.

• Understand the status quo. Don’t do the status quo.
• If there are hurdles, that’s your opportunity. Otherwise, others would’ve taken advantage already.
• India 400 million mobile phone users.
• Segment the customer. Otherwise, big companies will be already on it.
• Don’t aim for 1% of ocean. Go for 50% of a small market that you undertand well.
• Don’t do today’s technology. Go for future. Don’t be 10% better, be significantly better.
• Do you have something unique that gives you strengths? Have a honest discussion on the problems and future competitors and your strengths.
• Can you partner with others in the ecosystem, support their weaknesses, and together be more strong.
• Ecosystem problems – operators, heterogenity of platforms and mobile phone capabilities, difficulty in educating customers, no Internet on mobile, etc.
• Only way a startup will succeed is by discovering a latent demand or latent technology.
• If operators are critical to the ecosystem, obviously they will charge more money! Why is that a problem because they are giving value back. Get the first million customers yourself and the operators will put red carpet for you. Startups’ strength is to turn the tables!
• Find a mechanism of educating customer about value of the product and that will obviate the need for operators.
• If only 40 million mobile Internet users, you only need half a million users to break through the barriers! People will come after you.
• Assume cost of building product or app is zero. Only building half a million customers is something.
• 120 million capable phones today. India is a fast market. Imagine 2 years later.
• Startups should change the game to their advantage. At the same time, it is NOT a zero-sum game. Make a win-win partnership. Both people should profit.
• Don’t complain about market research. Ultimately, you HAVE to understand the market better than anybody. Be resourceful. Also, accuracy is not important, the direction of the market growth is more important.
• Don’t go to VCs without 20,000-30,000 users.
• Can you scale up to 20 million dollars revenue? Then you’ll get your pay-off.
• Startups need to think how to beat the big guys.
• Make a state-of-the-art technology or business model and ask people to pay premium for it.
• First step for product management is segmentation.
• Make it clear to yourself about how you’re reaching your target customers. Don’t do it in a haphazard manner.
• Read about Ron Coase economist why companies exist.
• Read about Teece theory on who captures value in technology.

The world is no place for a logical/rational person.

— Swaroop C H

Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the the universe.

— Albert Einstein

A fool may be known by six things: anger, without cause; speech, without profit; change, without progress; inquiry, without object; putting trust in a stranger, and mistaking foes for friends.

— Arabian Proverb

Question for you: How do you distinguish incompetence, laziness and unprofessionalism?

“People are good and trustworthy and generally just concerned with getting through the day,” Newmark says. If most people are good and their needs are simple, all you have to do to serve them well is build a minimal infrastructure allowing them to get together and work things out for themselves. Any additional features are almost certainly superfluous and could even be damaging.”

– Craig Newmark (of CraigsList fame)

So what are there real needs?

I’m trying to (naively?) boil down all the successful software, websites and web applications out there and see if it can be mapped into as few categories as possible:

1. Communication (Social networks, Basecamp, etc.)
2. Organization (Google Docs, Flickr, Backpack, etc.)
3. Information (Content websites, News websites, Search engines, etc.)
4. Entertainment (YouTube, Nautanki.tv, Blogs/Journals/Twitter, etc.)
5. E-Commerce (Amazon, Paypal, etc.) (Category added thanks to Ankesh)

Note that the website that you use may fit into different categories in different circumstances.

The idea is to not search for a comprehensive or accurate classification.

The idea is: If you brainstorm an idea or come across someone else’s idea, can you trace it back to one of these categories? If yes, what does it mean? If no, what does it mean?

Is this a useful angle to evaluate an idea, or not?

1. Everything gets magnified. Whether it is minor differences or personal shortcomings or the multitasking required. What you think of as a small weakness, will become your biggest weakness. What you think of as a small strength, will be a very big strength.
2. It is an emotional rollercoaster ride. You can never be prepared for it. But realize what you’re going through.
3. Expect rejection. Good ideas alter the power balance in relationships, that is why good ideas are always initially resisted.
4. Shut up, make a core working version first. And get people to use it, even if you have to beg or force people. And keep iterating. After the first few iterations, you will figure out what is the interesting part that makes it work for the user. Focus on that, not on the list of features. Otherwise, you’ll end up like Zahdoo.
5. Have a plan in writing. Be clear starting from things like how long you can survive, open understanding of when each individual would want to quit, open understanding of why each person in this, etc. right up to imagining you’re going to be doing this for the next ten years, does your plan still remain the same?
6. Short-term wins are important. Psychological boosts can keep your startup alive. Plan for short-term tangible goals. And keep iterating over your plan with weekly reviews. If you don’t see progress three weeks in a row, the alarm bells should be ringing.
7. Always start with one person fully dedicated to the business side of things, especially a marketing/sales person or a product manager. Working part-time tech and part-time business is a disaster-in-the-making.
8. When you’re making a six-month plan, understand what parts are on the critical path that will make or break your startup. And make sure things on that critical path are in your control. Pay attention to dependencies on outsiders, whether they are web designers or outsourcing companies.
9. If you don’t have enough funds, find people who can fund you before you jump in, or start your own services/consultation business to keep the cash flow going. Otherwise, you’ll end up skydiving.
10. Do not be wrapped inside your own bubble. Go out and talk to interesting people, find mentors, know what is happening in the field that you are working on. You have to know where dangers for your startup lurk, and you never know where unanticipated opportunities for your startup will come from.
11. Bonus: If it’s a problem, it’s always a people problem. Learn to understanding each others’ psyche.

Here is a guy who sells dosas and rice items in his push cart every evening.

I didn’t realize that he was my entrepreneurial benchmark until my friend explained it to me:

• He has at least 100 customers everyday because he is there for 4-5 hours every evening, and we’ve never seen him without customers.
• 100 customers * 40 rupees per customer = 4000 rupees per day
• 4000 rupees per day * 30 days = 1,20,000 rupees per month
• ⇒ A roadside push cart wallah makes more than a lakh a month!

And he doesn’t intend to go to VCs any time soon

It’s only when you get into this entrepreneurship thing that you realize how hard it is to make money.

I hope every wannabe will plan to have at least as good as this guy’s cash flow ASAP for their startup.

I have a guest post up at StartupDunia. Please do read and chip in your thoughts and comments.

Every now and then, I try to build a group of people to talk about specific topics but it quickly dies because of inactivity. Although I really saw the value in having such a community, I just didn’t know how to build one. Even if one person keeps pumping in content, how do you actually get the community to interact with each other?

It is the same kind of problem being faced by, say StartupBuzz.org which, I am guessing, wants to be the Hacker News of India. There are indeed topics that apply only to startups in India, from “Startup Morning”, to India’s first in-taxi magazine. Such interesting events and ideas are worthy of discussion.

There is value in such a community, but again, how to build it? StartupDunia has already put its thoughts on the subject but the question still remains.

Here are some of my thoughts.

Does it require credibility?

• Hacker News has Paul Graham and YCombinator behind it.
• ProBlogger Forums have ProBlogger’s Darren Rowse behind it.
• And the most recent example of StackOverflow.com that has Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood behind it.

So the question is whether there each community should be backed by up by a credible person who has a reasonable authority on the subject?

(more…)

Note: I no longer work with IonLab since Nov 12 of 2009.

Amazon conducted a poll just before the start of the year 2009 asking people on what are their New Year Resolutions. The top two resolutions were (1) Lose Weight and (2) Get Your Finances in Order.

What is strange is that you and I would think these are solved problems, right? But yet these are the top resolutions for the new year!

We all know how to lose weight – eat less and exercise more. But it requires discipline. We all know how to get our finances in order – spend less and earn more. But it requires discipline.

Our vision for the “Track Every Coin” system that we are building is to exactly help you do this – to help you spend less, save more, and in the process help you get your personal finances in order.

So what is the problem again?

We tried out many personal finance websites and software existing in the market, and we faced the same issue again and again – they are either cumbersome or are afterthoughts.

Most of the software that we tried out did not make it easy to make entries such as expenses and made it a boring chore. And yet, this is the starting point to use all their features.

The ones that work automatically with your bank account are afterthoughts – they are good for overviews and for viewing graphs at the end of the month, but do not help in actively managing your money at all.

So we started adding in our own ideas on what we would want to use.

So what is the product?

It consists of two parts:

• The active agent where you make your entries – which is either a hardware device or a mobile phone application, based on your preference.
  • The hardware device is for those who like to have a cool-looking gadget to carry around, and want to make entries within 10 seconds.
  • The mobile phone application is for those who have GPRS connections on their mobile phones.
• The data analyzer – which is a website where you get to slice and dice your data.

I like to think of it as analogous to the “iPod-iTunes” combination – the iPod was designed to do one thing well: play music, and it left the complicated parts of managing music to the iTunes software. We intend to achieve the same effect for personal finance. This is our unique twist.

Features

At its core, the system is an expense tracking system, simply because that is the first step that every personal finance writer recommends. If you don’t know where the money is going, you won’t know how to manage it.

The logic is simple : We need data to improve, whether it is the school score cards for your kids or the mileage for your car or statistics for your favorite cricketers. We bring over the same facility to you for your money!

Now, how is this different from a spreadsheet? Well, the data collection mechanism, obviously, and lots of features, but most of all – this is a specific system that helps you with so many aspects:

1. Expenses
   • Know what you are spending on – categorize, tag and add notes to your expenditure
2. Reimbursements
   • Know how much money you have to get back from your company – save time wasted in filing expense reports
3. Income
   • Plan your money – How much money from your income is budgeted for expenditure and how much money goes to savings and goals
   • Never forget to pay your bills on time again – Reminders will be automatically be saved as expenses
4. Goals
   • Buy that thing you really want – Save money every month towards your goal, whether it is downpayment for a car or that big trip you’ve been dreaming of
5. Budgets
   • Never overspend again – Set limits on how much you want to spend and you will be reminded every time you are about to spend
6. Sharing
   • Never worry again about splitting bills – Keep running counts of expenses shared with your roommate or when you go for dinner with friends, and settle easily
7. Events and Trips
   • Know how much an occasion will cost you – Stay within your trip budget, know how much a weekend trip will cost you, know how much transportation accounts towards your trips, and more.
8. Graphs
   • Analyze where your money is going – Know if you are spending more on fuel, if you are spending too less on your hobbies, or how much money you need on an average day.

To know more, visit our website www.TrackEveryCoin.com

We aim to launch the product in July 2009. Sign up now at the website to get special offers when we launch!

We’ll be writing more about how we have designed and built TrackEveryCoin on our company blog. We look forward to your feedback either here on this blog or via email.