81 people have asked me about “Innovation – ways to make people innovate.”

That’s a hard question. Especially because I’m always wary of using such an ambiguous term. And more so, when there are far more qualified people to answer out there.

Since I have been asked the question, I am jotting down my thoughts on the subject here (the usual disclaimers apply):

I think the question really is about how impactful can a person be, rather than this nebulous word called “innovative.” In fact, I hate the word “innovation”, because the focus should be about problem solving.

Innovation (regardless of its definition) is almost always the by-product of a successfully executed product. You don’t start by wanting to be innovative. You start by looking at interesting hard problems. You only end up being innovative. So, Solve the Problem first.

For example, I always find it amusing to see the feedback on isbn.net.in – people have said “It’s awesome! It’s wonderful!” I replied “It’s just a bunch of regexes!” … But it just goes to show that what matters is how much the user values it, not how it is implemented.

Now, back to topic: If you want to be able to attack interesting hard problems, then my honest opinion is that you need to keep this equation in mind:

Creativity x Organization = Impact – Scott Belsky at the 99% Conference

Regarding Creativity / Ideas:

1. “If you think you don’t have any good ideas, that’s because you don’t really have bad ideas. You get one good idea only after you get a hundred bad ideas.” — paraphrasing Seth Godin in his latest book Linchpin.
2. Frequent Inspiration helps. A lot. Keep reading Springwise, Yanko Design, Quirky everyday and you’ll be inspired to “innovate” as well.
3. Observe. “If you’re looking for problems to solve, you’re better off to be around real people whose problems can be solved via your trade (such as software).” — RWW article
4. Follow the Trends, such as Gartner Identifies the Top 10 Consumer Mobile Applications for 2012 and 10 Tech Trends for 2010 — Time , and more importantly the kinds of technology and products that are being created, follow those “cutting edge” technologies that we love to adore and wonder “Wow, how did they come up with this stuff?“

But you have to be careful when ideating, because it is very easy to get into “analysis paralysis”:

Another important thing is to not get so carried away by the shiny new things that you forget the basics:

Regarding Organization / Discipline

1. There is this guy in Adobe Bangalore office who is a “patent machine.” He files for a patent every two weeks. No kidding. And these weren’t only trivial ones either. What was his trick? He spent a dedicated half hour every single day on thinking up new ideas or solving problems. It’s as simple as that. This is called the Seinfeld “Unbroken Chain” philosophy.
2. Body and Mind need a predictable routine and that’s when it’s optimal. And once it has a routine, it is hard for the body and mind to accept any other way. That’s why smokers find it so hard to get out of their addiction, because body and mind is used to it and is craving for it. Same goes for coffee, same goes for writing code, same goes for creating new ideas. It is so ironic that discipline breeds creativity. It’s a truth that we don’t want to accept, because it makes us sound less “human”.
3. Don’t judge an idea to be good or bad until you have tried to manually solve it yourself once or prototyped it. After your first attempt at solving the problem, if you still feel good about it and feel that some pain point has been relieved, then it is a good idea. Take Jack Dorsey’s simple approach to creating as an example: draw out the idea, gauge the right timing, and iterate like mad.

To summarize:

1. Focus on the problem, not the solution. As Dave McClure says: “problem, not solution. customer, not technology. UX, not code. distribution, not PR. acq cost, not revenue projections.”
2. As Seth Godin would say, “Artists who ship” have the most impact. Read Linchpin to internalize it.
3. What is your impact? Can you qualify it? Can you quantify it? Measure it every month – Within 6 months, you will know whether you are “innovative.”

Update #1: Related Reading, as pointed out by Srikanth in the comments: The Discipline of Innovation by Peter Drucker. Looks like I keep reinventing what Drucker has already said.

Update #2: See 10 Laws of Productivity by Behance team.

My alma mater, PESIT (in Bangalore), has an interesting proposition for startups – mentor students and get office space in return.

The background is that they are working to improve the quality of education in the IS / CS departments. One of the ideas they identified was to work with in-industry programmers who can answer questions from students on the innumerable topics out there, from a practical point of view. Of course, GIYF would be your first response, but students who are just starting out need face time and guidance to make them comfortable, even if the answer is going to be “Check this URL.” Some of the kinds of questions you can expect are:

• How can I use the vi editor to edit my file?
• What is CouchDB?
• How can I compile my program better than typing javac myProgram.java?
• How can I use the Facebook OpenGraph API?

The only way for PESIT to make this happen is to get motivated in-industry programmers to spare some of their time to mentor students. And what better way is there than offer office space to startups who can work out of the PESIT campus and mentor students face-to-face right there!

Startups can also get access to clusters of hundreds of machines in the computer labs and even get interested students to work as interns with you!

If this sounds like an opportunity for your startup and an opportunity for you to improve the quality of CS education, then go ahead and write to Mr. Harihara Vinayakaram (visiting lecturer at PESIT) at nextgenerationbangalore [at] gmail.com with “Startup Student Mentor” in the subject line.

I will be speaking in a panel at the HeadStart Conference, Hyderabad today regarding what is the funding that was granted by the Govt. of India to my ex-startup, and how you can apply.

I converted the content I had prepared into for-web-only slides for your perusal:

Yesterday was my last day at IonLab, the company that I built with a few friends. It has been a wild ride but I could continue no longer. I am leaving due to internal differences on the progress and transparency in the company.

We have been well-supported in our experience, right from a Govt. of India grant to being one of the few to be selected as a TiE Entrepreneurship Acceleration Program mentee. We owe special gratitude for the people who made that happen and supported us.

But as any been-there-done-that startupper would expect, we delivered on technology, but we sorely lacked in maturity of management skills.

Simply put:

“Shipping is a feature. A really important feature. Your product must have it.” — JWZ

I can’t explain more because it would then amount to washing dirty linen in public.

Anyway, time to move on. Hopefully second time will be better!

I have been reflecting on many of the experiences I’ve had. So I thought I’d jot down the biggest lessons I learned as a startupper:

Stop reading. Start doing.

For every hour that you read, you must gain 3 hours of experience.

I read so much about entrepreneurship, although only after jumping into the startup. One and a half year later, we had made all the mistakes that those articles warned us about. The problem is not in the reading or understanding, the problem is in internalizing what you read. Wannabe startuppers read all the Paul Graham essays and say “Nah, that’s not going to happen to me, I’m going to be awesome and successful”, but when I read his latest essay What Startups Are Really Like, it felt like he crept into my head at night, stole my experiences and wrote a letter to me. Yes, really, it felt like that. But, of course, you won’t believe me. Until it happens to you.

What was the most common response from the YCombinator startups to Paul Graham?

When I look at the responses, the common theme is that starting a startup was like I said, but way more so.

Read those last few words repeatedly 6 times.

And I repeat, my warning to you is that simply reading A-Z of books and essays is not important, you have to internalize the learnings by testing it out on the field and realizing the value for yourself instead of saying “that makes sense” and forgetting about it a few minutes later.

Empathy matters

It is funny how most people will discourage you from doing a startup, and, today, perhaps because things have changed now because of all the media hype, most of my friends were discouraging me from leaving it now!

There are two aspects to this. First, read The Dip and you will know why I decided to quit. As Seth Godin says in the book, “The old saying is wrong – winners do quit, and quitters do win. Winners quit fast, quit often, and quit without guilt – until they commit to beating the right Dip for the right reasons.”

Second, as one of my friends observed, I talked to about 7 people (both acquaintances and friends) whose judgment I trusted. 3 of them sympathized and agreed with my decision and 4 of them admonished me and asked me to “hang in there.” You know what was the clincher? The first 3 had done startups themselves and the latter 4 had not. The latter 4 did not really understand the context, even though they meant well and are intelligent folks.

Imagine that a decision like this was so hard for friends-who-know-you to understand. Imagine how much empathy you should have for the motivations and work life of your customers!

Business is not a big deal, it’s only a mindset

The day I realized that I had started to think in terms of business was this conversation:

Friend: Hey, I wanted to talk to you about a gadget idea. Most phones have large storage space and bluetooth facility. Most cameras have small storage space. I have both of them on trips. I usually run out of space on the camera. So can there be a gadget similar to a bluetooth dongle that can move photos from the camera to the phone?

Me: Interesting… there is much to evaluate there (for example, I want to understand how much battery power it would eat up, which is the major concern when on a trip). But if you’re thinking about such a product, I think we should skip bluetooth and talk about peer to peer WiFi^*.

Friend: What? Bluetooth is there on every freakin’ phone out there!

Me: Yes, but by the time you build this new gadget, all the devices would have moved to p2p wifi because it means supporting only one standard. Right now, phones have to support two standards – both wifi and bluetooth which is additional hardware and headache for the manufacturers. Since p2p wifi builds on top of the existing wifi standard, it makes business sense for them to standardize on that. Comparatively, the only advantage of bluetooth, AFAIK, is low power consumption, and that factor will reduce with increasing battery life. So, in 1 or 2 years, bluetooth won’t be the in-thing, and that is when the product will be ready if you start now.

Friend: stunned silence

Me: Did I say something wrong??

Friend: You really are a businessman now.

Me: Heh

See? It’s not a big deal, you just have to learn the right mindset. Note that I didn’t say it was easy, I’m simply pointing out it’s simply a different mode of thinking, and it is doable.

I realized that doing a tech business means you should know both tech and business really well (duh). And since I’m not there yet w.r.t. tech, I’m going to stick to that as my core for the next decade. Or at least, that’s the plan. Coding is still my first love. Update: After some thought and discussions with close friends, perhaps I can contribute in additional responsibilities such as product manager-type responsibilities as well.

^* Also see What’s next for Wi-Fi?

Focus matters

A great advice I got from Muki, an entrepreneur was: “Start focusing on three things from day one – relationships, cash flow, balance sheet. You already know how to handle the rest.”

Notice he doesn’t talk about innovation, technology or all those other things. On the same note, the best explanation I’ve seen is that “Innovation is the by-product of a well-executed product”, which brings me to my next point.

“Focus” in the context of startups can be interpreted as good product management skills, which I strongly referred to in my StartupDunia guest post on the recent NASSCOM Product Conclave.

Maintain good relationships with partners, vendors, mentors, and all other folks that you meet in the course of your business. Don’t look at these relationships as opportunistic, look at it as an opportunity to co-create and learn.

Track your cash flow. Yes, you will earn millions later, but if you don’t have money now, you’ll die. You may not realize that the single highest factor why startups die is because of bad cash flow.

Don’t trivialize any aspect

Anything that is not managed will deteriorate, said Bob Parsons.

And it’s very true in this case, whether it is your legal company paperwork (yes, those stuff that you don’t want to be bothered with) or your project timelines (yes, tracking what’s on the critical path is very important, but you already knew that, didn’t you?) or thinking long-term as well as short-term, or networking with similar folks.

We, as tech people, think technology is everything and other people have it easy. I was like that. I learned it the hard way that “Easy is a term you use to define other people’s jobs.” I have a lot of respect for marketing and sales folks now. They have a really tough job, because it is about tenacity and psychology, compared to tech work which is write-once and scalable. Pop quiz: Did you really understand the signifance of that last sentence? If not, go back to my first point.

Have a sense of urgency

For every decision (and you will have a lot more of them than you realize), make sure that you do due diligence but at the same time, have a sense of urgency.

As Tecumseh Sherman said: “A good plan violently executed today is far and away better than a perfect plan tomorrow.”

Bottom-up always wins

This is the single most important learning, if I had to pick one.

Time and again, I’ve observed that bottom-up always beats top-down approach to problems. Note that I’m not discouraging you from planning, but I’m discouraging you from focusing purely on the plan. The plan is a guide to your actions, you should not spend more time on the plan vs. the actions and results!

And you can observe the power of bottom-up thinking time and again, whether it is in terms of societal change or productivity paradigms like GTD or the reason why Wikipedia and open source software are successful. As Linus Torvalds says “Software is grown, not built.” Mull that!

How does this apply to startups? Let us take one specific example: You have a new idea to solve a problem and you want to test if your idea works. If the prototype takes a couple of weeks, then you should go for the prototype. If it will take longer, how do you know that it is worth investing the time? Simple, use Adwords to assess demand for your new product/service. Same thing for doing market research.

Notice that in this example, we first start top-down by ideating and brainstorming, but then switch to bottom-up thinking once the initial plan is done – immediately jump to action by a real evaluation about the need that you are trying to solve. Then decide the second action based on the results of the first action.

How to define failure

This is how I explained failure to a friend: You walk into a new restaurant, and try the food. It can be good or bad. But you still have to pay the bill! You don’t know whether your effort is going to succeed or not, but you still have to put in the effort.

And the friend replied: The problem with most people is, they don’t want to risk eating bad food, that’s why they keep going to the same restaurant, even if they are bored of it!

When to call yourself an entrepreneur

I have this personal demarcation that I will call myself an entrepreneur when I have (1) created something new (2) made money. Until then, I’m a startupper (someone who has done or been in a startup).

This is the End

Hope these reflections are useful for future startuppers and entrepreneurs. All the best! (also see 10 things I wish I was serious about before starting a startup)

As for me, I’m cash-strapped (Didn’t I say lessons learned?), and hence looking for a job (product manager or senior technical role). Do let me know if there are any interesting opportunities out there.

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.

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.

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.

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

Today is the second birthday of our ION USB Charger and we are happy to announce that it is now available in a new and improved packaging!

We needed some improvements to our packaging because:

1. Our previous packaging did not have the product visible.
2. The packaging needs to have a hook so it can be hung – that is how all accessories are placed in a retail store these days.
3. We had room for improvement on the look of the box.

The new packages arrived in a box:

And we soon formed an assembly line. I removed the ions from the previous packaging:

Vikram filtered out the new packages, including rejecting any damaged ones:

Varun folded the boxes and put the new ions in them:

It doesn’t sound glamorous, isn’t prestigious to talk about, but it sure was a lot fun and exciting. That’s what startups are about!

Here are the newly-packaged ions stacked back in the box:

Just to put things in perspective, here is our packaging and its size compared to the competition:

And here is our previous and new packaging:

Here is the sleek “product photography” version:

You can grab an ION with the new improved packaging at www.ion.co.in

Note: Cross-posted from our company blog

If you want to find out what jobs are available in startups in India, then there are myriad resources to check:

• VentureWoods
• Pluggd.in ‘coffee’ forum
• Pluggd.in ecosystem section
• Hello Intern
• Sutra Jobs
• Indian Jobs board at ‘Joel On Software’
• Barcamp Mumbai Startup Jobs section
• NEN Startup Jobs section
• Startup Lunches, part of proto.in
• Startup Dunia     [added to this list on Mar 17, 2009]
• Talentty     [added to this list on Mar 28, 2009]
• Work For A Startup     [added to this list on May 15, 2009]
• My Special Job     [added to this list on May 15, 2009]
• Workasaur     [added to this list on Nov 18, 2009]

Are there other resources that should be on this list? Please let me know in the comments.

There are other questions I’m wondering as well:

• Which are the popular places followed by the startuppers who are looking to hire interns, freshers and experienced people?
• For passionate students/freshers who want to work in startups, where do they start? Should they just apply via these sites or should they first do in-person networking at OpenCoffeeClub, Startup Saturday and similar meeting grounds first?