When making a website, there are simply so many aspects to consider. I’ve been gathering some useful links and information on the same, right from How to Evaluate a new Product Idea to choosing color schemes.

I’ve put all of these links together into a Website Making Howto on my wiki.

Discussions and contributions are welcome.

I attended the proto.in 4 conference last week (held at the beautiful IIT Delhi campus) and had a very productive and thought-provoking time.

Day 1 was the fastrack “startup school” sessions.

The keynote session was Kiran Karnik, ex-President of NASSCOM, who pointed out that this “recession” is not a bad thing. Just like the BPO and Outsourcing outfits reinvented themselves in the last dotcom bust, this is a great opportunity to reinvent ourselves again during this phase. Why? Because when things are going good, nobody is willing to change or tinker with the processes. And when things are not going well, people are willing to take more chances and bet on newer/different things so that they can survive, such as big companies working with startups or risking new ideas.

The story of BharatMatrimony.com by the founder Murugavel Janakiram was inspiring. The concept maybe so simple and maybe even creating such a website maybe simple, but the kind of business model, customer understanding and outreach, and constant trial of new ideas that they went through was simply amazing. For example, sticking to his gumption that the site should be a paid one and that was the only viable business model, to things like collection of payment at the doorstep. After this talk, I had new-found admiration of his matrimonial site.

The third session was a talk on “Business is a Game” by Bhavin Turakhia, of Directi. I had never known about Bhavin until this day, and after this talk, most of the audience were his new fans, including me. The first audience question was “Do you have an opening in your company? I want to join.”

The talk was about the lessons we should learn from games and sports, and how to apply it to business. And it made so much sense. Sometimes it is the basics that we overlook that make all the difference. This was pretty much in line with my off-late philosophy of “Enough Fundas. Back to Fundamentals.”

Bhavin said that he has read many books and stories about successful companies, and trying to distill why they succeeded, he came down to just two things to run a successful company:

1. Gather the right players
2. Empower them to make the right decisions, most of the time.

He said the first point is fairly obvious but hard to do. In this talk, he concentrated on the second point, and gave 7 principles on how to do achieve this:

1. Teach the Game
   • When you play a game, say cricket, all the team players need to know how to play the game – the rules, the strategies, the howtos. If only few of them know it, and the rest don’t, the team collectively will suffer, right? Same for business.
2. Share the macrovision
   • What is the final objective? Why are you playing this game?
3. Near-term targets.
   • A team usually plays for a season or a championship. That consists of multiple games, which means there are milestones and targets to achieve. Same for business.
4. Keep score
   • Bhavin says he likes games like cricket where every kind of statistic possible is analyzed, right from the average score of the batsman on this particular ground to the average scores of the teams overseas, etc.
   • In a game, the score is always visible on a public scoreboard, which drives the team in achieving real scores.
   • Recommends reading a book by John Hayes called “Open Book Management”
   • Measure everything. Don’t focus on more than 2-3 critical numbers. This reminded me of a quote by Bob Parsons (of GoDaddy fame): “Anything that is measured and watched, improves.”
   • Keep changing critical numbers.
   • Explain why these critical numbers are critical.
   • Statistics are fun, make it a game, have real targets, because no one wants to fail a target.
   • Bhavin explained that most of Directi employees have 3-4 monitors at their desk – 1-2 for work, the other 1-2 for monitoring live statistics. People love to watch scoreboards and feel joy when they achieve their targets whether they are number of downloads or response times.
5. Line of sight
   • Each player should be able to link their actions to the outcome of a game i.e. how they contributed to the outcome directly.
   • This makes the player feel he/she is contributing to the team and feel he/she is a part of the team.
6. Celebrate your victories
   • Celebrate the small milestones, especially achieving targets.
   • Have a Victory Party
   • The act of recognizing > how you recognize

7. Align everyone’s interests

   • To the victor(s), belong the spoils
   • In a game, everyone’s equal and aligned, no separate us vs management, because success of each other is interlinked
   • Linden Labs has an internal website to “give love” to other employees who have done good work
   • How direct is the co-relation?
   • Company performs best when its people see themselves as partners in the business
   • American universities are run mostly by student communities and the knowledge is passed on to each new batch. And there’s this feeling that “I belong to my alma mater” vs “I belong to my organization” which people hardly say.

8. When asked if these ideas put a constraint on the size of the company, Bhavin said this is the only way that you can scale a company. To specifically note, if everybody is not able to take the same decision as you, you become the bottleneck ⇒ size constraint on the company.

(more…)

Working from home full-time is a different experience than we are used to. You make or break things, there’s no one asking about your progress and there are no deadlines. It’s all up to you.

My productivity has varied a lot during this time and I was wondering how to make more days productive than they are as of now.

So I polled some of my friends who also work out of a home-office on how they they maintain productivity / motivation / focus, and I got some interesting replies:

• Manish Jethani says:
  • Make a separate “office room” in your home. You could convert your old study room into your office. You go into this room only for work — fully dressed for work (not in pyjamas!). When you get out of this room, you leave your work behind. In other words, you have a proper office located inside your home.
  • Cut out the distractions. Make your family know that this is your office. No visitors, no phone calls (except work-related), etc.
  • Follow proper timings. Work fixed hours.
  • To stay motivated while working out of your home, I think you basically have to enjoy what you do.
  • Self-discipline is the key.
  • The concept of an office, as we know it, is relatively new in our history. Throughout the ages humans have worked out of their homes. Think about it. It’s the more natural way of things. Thanks to the internet, working from home is likely to become the norm in the 21st century (also because commuting might become prohibitively expensive).

(more…)

Long ago, a wise friend I used to know once told me that humans have
many kinds of needs – physiological, emotional, etc. Along with these,
there is also the need to fight.

I’ve been thinking over and over on how true this is. Or whether it is
just baloney.

The need to fight. And I’m not talking physically. There is something
that you’re always fighting against – whether your focus is challenges
at work, or road rage, or even fighting with your loved ones.

A basic human need is to fight. That’s why we have wars and battles
all the time. Especially in the mind. I know many people who coded
best when they were
angry.
Maybe our genes and body are built for action, for the rush of the
battle.

href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/abusx/2565173933/in/set-72157605523079028/">

Maybe that’s why the milestones in a startup feels more “earned” than
when working in a big company where the same situations are so
shielded.

Maybe that’s why you get things done only when you have a deadline.

Maybe that’s why people do sports, trekking, adventures, long distance
biking, etc.

Maybe that’s why people with rags-to-riches stories are more happier
than kids of rich people.

Maybe that’s why people feel fired up after a debate or a race,
irrespective of whether they win or lose.

Because you’re trying to fight the odds.

And if people don’t have the fight in them, or don’t fight for
anything, that’s when they seem so boring, so bored and so lifeless.

Maybe that was part of the message in the Fight
Club.

P.S. Has there been any organized pillow
fights in India?

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

Last week, we quietly relaunched ion, our USB
charger. The very next day, we shipped ions to
customers in Bangalore, Hyderabad, Kolkata and Mumbai. And an hour
ago, I shipped one to Bhubaneswar. It’s good to be back!

First of all, thanks to all those 96 people who wrote to us in the
past few months who kept asking us when we’ll be back in stock. The
fact that there are people really interested kept us going. And we
really needed that boost.

I’m sure there are a lot more people who would have also visited the
website, saw the ‘Out of stock’ sign but not written to us. We felt
bad in having to turn away so many people for so long. But we are very
conscious of delivering the best goods, hence we ended up taking a lot
of time to do it right.

<shameless plug>

The good news is that the next generation of ion, unimaginatively
called “ion2″ is here and now available.

Not only does ion really solve a pain
point, what sets
it apart from other USB chargers are:

1. Is the smallest USB charger available in the Indian market.
2. Of very high quality. It is CE certified.
3. Works anywhere in the world. No more voltage conversions.
4. Works with almost any device that can be charged via USB, including
   all kinds of mp3 players (the entire iPod family, Zune, iRiver,
   etc.), mobile phones, and so on.
5. Advantage of ion working with so many devices is that you no longer
   need to say “Do you have an iPod charger” or “Do you have a Nokia
   6300 charger?”…

   Just ask "Do you have an ion?" 
   

src="http://www.ion.co.in/files/ion2_buy.png" alt="Buy Ion"
style="border:0;"/>

</shameless plug>

Yesterday, I attended The Smart Techie Startup
City event. It was
intended as a showcase of startups as well as for
learning/sharing/mentoring.

I had taken some notes during the day. As I was expanding it into
a blog post, I realized I was just adding filler words which was
a waste of bits, so here it is as-is:

• Ashish Gupta, Helion VC on “Concept to Success : Milestones for
  startups”
  • India is a startup (positive way of looking at things)
    • High energy
    • Lots of growth
    • Small absolute number (relatively)
    • Little infrastructure or process
    • Lack of talent
    • Lots of optimism
    • Need to innovate to survive
    • ⇒ Once in a lifetime opportunity
  • Significant change in dynamics (negative way of looking at it)
    • Whatever can be made efficient will be done so.
      • We can in turn get bangalored and some other country will
        benefit.
    • Creative folks will thrive.
    • ⇒ We have no choice.
  • Hardest evolutionary steps
    • Those that requires behavior change
      • For example, starting to think “Become cash flow positive”
      • Next level CEO, process, tech, business model, etc.
  • Put in place metrics to measure everything – will help identify
    whether one has already hit an inflection point.
  • Rules of thumb
    1. Focus on customer/issue
    2. Focus on continuous improvement
    3. Intellectual honesty
    4. Results matter – only for MEASURING (measure progress on
       a larger scale)
    5. ⇒ Same rules for person, family, company

(more…)

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

One year ago, on this day, we launched ion, the ipod
charger. The launch was just one blog
post.
That’s it. Within two hours, Atul Chitnis bought the first ion in our
online store. We celebrated.

But hold on, let’s rewind the story a bit.

As people might have heard in our recent running
talk, it all
started when Vikram,
Niara and myself started training
together for the 2006 Bangalore
Marathon.

During one of our runs, Vikram told us that he had created his own
charger circuit and came up with this wacky idea of manufacturing and
selling them. I never took it seriously
but Niara did. She convinced Vikram to take the idea forward. Nearly
six months later, the idea had taken wings.

The prototype looked nothing like something we could sell.

title="Picture 253 by Swaroop C H, on Flickr"> src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/115/267663126_f5b434f713_m.jpg"
width="180" height="240" alt="Picture 253" />
title="Picture 252 by Swaroop C H, on Flickr"> src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/101/267663105_df4dd5b79b_m.jpg"
width="240" height="180" alt="Picture 252" />

Later, I was planning to attend the first
proto.in. Vikram and Niara
joined in and we went together. I was totally floored by the energy of
the people there and the fire in the eyes of these startup guys.
I told those two that they should talk to this guy called Arif
Vakil of “Vakil Housing” fame and how he was
looking to fund interesting ideas. Immediately, Vikram swung into
action, approached Vakil and started explaining the idea.
Surprisingly, he showed interest!

Luckily, Vikram had brought his prototype and went to fetch it from
his bag. Then Vikram started searching for his iPod when Arif said
“Let’s try with my iPod”. Wow. That moment. Imagine if your VC is
a would-be customer and the product solves a problem that he himself
faces. Nothing like it.

We connected Arif’s iPod to the charger and the charger to a power
socket. The blue LED came on. The iPod was showing the charging
symbol. We all had smiles on our faces. Arif was impressed and went on
to even ask us where we live and so on. That means he really was
interested.

After that incident, it was time to head back. Vikram was on an
all-time high. That was when we were all convinced that we were on to
something. And throughout the bus journey from Chennai to Bangalore,
those two convinced me to join ion. I wasn’t so sure. Yeah, it was
a Saturdays-only part-time thing. Yeah, Vikram and me had discussed
about such things endlessly. But still, I wasn’t sure.

I thought about it the next day and thought “Why not?” I don’t lose
much if it bombs and it was a good excuse for us three to keep meeting
up.

For various reasons, we didn’t approach Vakil for funding and put in
the initial investment ourselves. And we went from shopping for
running shoes to shopping for resistors and capacitors and modifying
Drupal code.

title="Picture 053 by Swaroop C H, on Flickr"> src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/112/267659540_91fc1d3d23_m.jpg"
width="240" height="180" alt="Picture 053" />

Then there was the countless decision-making sessions like coming up
with poster ideas and then the stories about how we decided the logo
for ion, how we
landed in trouble with the
cops, and
finally the launch of ion.

We sent an email to friends asking them to forward to their company
internal groups and anybody who would be interested. We also gave
posters to put up on their company notice boards. That was pretty much
our ‘marketing strategy’. The idea was that we marketed it as an iPod
charger and our target audience was the techie crowd.

We marketed it as an iPod charger even though it will work with
anything that can be charged with USB right from mobile phones to
battery chargers. We use the term iPod charger because that’s what
people have most demand for. The second part about targeting techies
was because they will be the ones who will look to finding a solution
that is cheaper than the official charger which costs 2000 rupees but
still is reliable. Ours was one-fifth that price.

The most humbling experience for me was trying to sell ion outside the
Aerosmith concert. That was such a good example of a wrong person (me)
in the right place doing the job not suited for him. But yet Niara and
me did it for ion.

Then came the amazing customer
feedback and our highest
point – getting featured in a half-page article in Economic
Times:

src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3144/2396140984_8444fdd6d4.jpg"
width="500" height="375" alt="ion in economic times" />

And yes, Arif congratulated
us.

But you want to know what’s the craziest part? We made just 200
pieces of ion. Yes, that’s it. 200 ions. Crazy. And see how far it
went.

After that ET article happened, we ran out of stock. That was six
months ago. Many people have asked me why we’re not selling more
ions. So I thought I’ll tell the hidden part of the story today – We
never intended ion to live longer than those 200 pieces. It was just
a business experiment for us, nothing more. Why? To learn what it
takes to convert an idea to a reliable quality product and take it to
market.

We never called ourselves a startup back then. That has happened only
in hindsight. In fact, I was in it because I thought I could help
since I had some experience in maintaining my own websites and maybe
I can learn a thing or two in running an ecommerce store.

After we managed to the finish selling the batch of 200 pieces and
made decent profit, Vikram moved to USA, Niara moved on to other
things in life and so did I.

But the response hasn’t stopped. Even last Thursday (Apr 17), we got
emails from four different people in a single day asking when we’ll be
back in stock. Crazy, I tell you.

I have had so many personal failures and failed projects in the past
few years that it seemed stupid to kill a successful project of ours.
So Vikram and myself have been working on reviving ion. We hope to be
back with a batch of second generation ions in the next month.

The experiment continues.

A while ago, I was asking myself Where are the killer applications on
the web for India?

Today, when I read ReadWriteWeb’s article on The State of Innovation
in India,
a thought struck me about the relationship between innovation and
universities. Everyone knows the story of about how many companies
like Yahoo!, Google, Sun Microsystems all started at Stanford
University, how FreeBSD came out of Berkeley University, and so on.
I hope you also know how the great Nalanda University in the 5th
century was a hotbed of
advancements (more on that in another story).

Is it that a strong ideas culture is instilled only in a good
university environment and the ecosystem around it which includes
startups and businesses? Perhaps this explains why there is such
amazing stuff being incubated at the TeNeT, IITM.

It reminded of an article by Prabhakar Raghavan, Head of Yahoo!
Research
where he says:

India’s real infrastructure problem–with no solution in sight–is
not airports or electricity; it is the virtual nonexistence of
graduate education and research in information and other crucial
technologies. Consider this for starters: The U.S. produces about
1,400 Ph.D.s in computer science annually and China about 3,000. By
stark comparison, India’s annual computer science Ph.D. production
languishes at roughly 40. That number is about the same as that for
Israel, a nation with roughly 5% of India’s population size.

Now you may ask why is this important? That is best explained by
C.N.R. Rao, Science Advisor to India’s Prime Minister speaking about
why money is spent on moon rockets when there is poverty to address:

You cannot be industrially and economically advanced unless you are
technologically advanced, and you cannot be technologically advanced
unless you are scientifically advanced.

Amen.

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

The other day, mom was telling me why she has completely switched from
the traditional neighbourhood HOPCOMS (Horticultural Produce
Cooperative Marketing Societies) outlet to the
fresh@ store to buy the
vegetables. I got curious and asked to explain. She mentioned several
points:

1. HOPCOMS doesn’t allow the customer to choose the vegetables/fruits,
   they can’t pick the good ones. fresh@ allows it and this ensures
   quality.
2. A minimum quantity of 250gm is imposed at HOPCOMS, but no such
   thing at fresh@.
3. fresh@ is open from 7am-11pm compared to HOPCOMS which is open for
   8 hours and is closed during the afternoon.
4. fresh@ provides all kinds of items, like milk, curds, rice compared
   to going to HOPCOMS, neighbourhood shop i.e. different places for
   these items.
5. fresh@ provides separate covers for each item whereas HOPCOMS
   requires customers to carry their own bags.
6. fresh@ stores perishable food in the freezer whereas HOPCOMS keeps
   it in the open.
7. fresh@ has a much better ambience and a more friendly environment
   (don’t underestimate this)
8. They have many offers and a points systems – this is not important
   according to mom, but if you’re anyway going to buy from fresh@,
   people are going to use it.
9. Amazing thing is that the cost is not the differentiator!
10. The important thing is that mom never intends to go back to the
    old way. If fresh@ goes poof one day, it is going to have
    a negative effect. This shows that fresh@ is really making
    a difference.

This brings me to the 2.0 part… consider how fresh@ takes a leap
forward in bettering the customer’s life. Compare that to the latest
mumbo jumbo
startups
out there. Are they really adding value?

I think the first thing a wannabe-entrepreneur should consider is
whether it is a must-have or a nice-to-have utility that they are
creating.

I mean how many more photo sharing sites or video sharing sites do you
really need? And how many more social networking sites?

(Well, on the other hand, if you can sell your me-too social
networking site for Rs. 39.3
crore,
sure why not?)

But seriously, how many people really know all the India-specific
social bookmarking
sites
out there? Ever heard of xoomly.com? Well, neither did I until just
now. And I’m probably never going back again.

I don’t mean to pick on only ‘social’ websites, but I feel many other
hardware and software startups out there are solutions looking for
a problem. (On a lighter note, a christmas
tree that lights up when I connect it to
my laptop via USB can be really handy).

As Paul Graham says:

Let me repeat that recipe: finding the problem intolerable and
feeling it must be possible to solve it. Simple as it seems, that’s
the recipe for a lot of startup ideas.

I can say that this is true because of (yes, you know it was coming)
our experience in ion.

In fact, in one of the interviews we have
given, we were asked the question “Why a product like ion?”, and we
replied:

1. “To scratch an itch.” Vikram didn’t want to spend money on the
   expensive official Apple iPod Charger, and being an electronics
   geek, he designed a circuit himself and started using it to charge
   his iPod.

2. Then, we discussed about many people who are facing the same
   problem. For example, people who are not aware of the official
   charger (or don’t want to purchase such an expensive one) even leave
   their computer switched on overnight just to charge their iPod!
   That’s a lot of unnecessary wastage of electricity.

3. There are many unbranded chargers available in the market, but it
   is sold on the condition that it may or may not work, and there is
   no assurance on the quality, or even that your iPod will be safe
   when using these chargers.

The charger that Vikram built was a perfect fit to solve all these
problems, with reliability, and within a reasonable cost. We got
together to take it to market.

The bad news is that ion ran out of stock sooner than we expected
after the recent Economic Times
article and we apologize for the
several customers who wrote in to us asking when it’ll be available.
We’re working on it and will update you all as soon as possible.

One customer said he desperately needed it before Christmas
because he’s going for a long vacation and he wants to be
able to use his iPod during the trip.

It feels good to know that we are solving a real problem.
It’s not life-changing but it does meet Paul Graham’s criteria.

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

First, there was the Mint financial newspaper’s article on
“casualpreneurs” in the July 8th, 2007 edition which featured
ion. FYI, Mint is a joint collaboration
between the Hindustan Times and the Wall Street Journal.

Then, there was an article in the BTW magazine’s 10th September 2007
edition on “netpreneurs” which featured ion.

And yesterday, there was a huge half-page article on ion in the
Economic Times! (Bangalore
edition)

I can’t help but think on how much hair-pulling, teeth-gnashing and
forehead-slapping happens behind the scenes. But to see all the
response from
customers as
well as an article in the Economic Times dedicated exclusively to us
just six months after launch makes it seem all worthwhile.

So, thank you to all our dear customers for making ion so successful!
And some of you actually like it so much that you spread the word
around for us!

P.S. Yeah, we know we don’t look great in that big photo, but hey, our
excuse is that we were too busy working on ion