The bootstrapped approach:

Whatever idea you have, if you plan to implement it yourself, you need time. Not to say that you cannot moonlight for a couple of months before you dive into the deep end. It’s just that things will be easier and take less time if you’re giving it your full attention. This is obviously assuming that your idea does not require a large sum of money to get things off the ground (read: capital investment).

Here’s how to bootstrap

• Quit your day job, get a small garage or a room as office space, get an internet connection and start implementing (my thoughts here are heavily biased towards internet startups and related products).
• No matter how convinced you are about your idea, write a business plan and think about all possible revenue models. Remember, if your idea isn’t making money then it simply won’t work. There has to be a sustainable revenue model for any idea to be successful.
• Keep your core idea close to your chest, yet talk to as many people as you can to gauge how your product/service shall be received in the market.
• Reserve namespace. If you have already thought of a name for your idea, then reserve the hell out of that name. Reserve domains, reserve twitter handles, facebook pages. They will come in use later when you are promoting.
• Find a mentor – everyone usually has a relative who has his/her own business and have been running it for a while. Advice from experienced people is unmeasurable.
• Recruit known people if you have to, ask friends to help out. Find a good designer or coder who is relatively new to the field and will freelance for a lot less money than people who are experienced. You will need to guide them at every step, but eventually it will be a worthy investment.
• Very importantly, implement as quickly as you possibly can, and release a prototype in 3 months. I remember reading about the Urbanspoon story and it said the very same thing – if you don’t ship quickly, you will not make it.
• Find partners. If there are people you know who are working in a similar field, partner with them. The value of finding the right partners is again unmeasurable. It will save you a lot of time, and help you get your idea implemented quicker.
• Borrow money if required, but only from close relatives and friends as opposed to banks (who may harass you later if you screw up).
• Once you’re implementation is complete, sell sell sell! Wear your brand. Be your brand. Promote the hell out of it! Tell your friends about it, tell your friends to tell theirs. Tell your parents to tell their friends about it. Keep pestering people to spread the word. Remember, word of mouth marketing still requires the right mouth! If you know journos, call them and tell them your story.
• Don’t waste money attending startup conferences and traveling unnecessarily initially. Save all that for later.

Once you do all these things (and do them well) then you may be assured that your product/service is doing well (assuming the idea was solid in the first place!). If you start making money within the first year – awesome! If you don’t – no worries, keep persisting. In the mean time, make sure you have completed all the formalities pertaining to legal activities. Register your company, apply for a patent, copyright your name, register your logo, make sure your financials are in place, repay loans.

There are pros and cons to this method as you may imagine. The biggest pro is that this is a very hands on approach and you will thoroughly enjoy it every step of the way. You will love what you are doing and you will never regret anything (again, assuming the idea is solid in the first place!). On the other hand, the cons are the risk involved. If your idea isn’t as solid as you initially thought it was then you’re in a big mess and you’ve lost 2 years of your life. Hence the importance to write your business plan to iron out all wrinkles relating to revenue at the very outset.

The formal approach:

Onto the second approach. I call this the formal approach because it is not as informal and loose as the first approach. They are differentiated purely at what stage you would approach investors. If you’re bootstrapping, you would convince investors by showing them a prototype in action and in the formal approach, you will try to make an investor look at your idea how you see it. Here’s how:

• Get a mentor to guide you on all the following steps.
• Write a business plan.
• Write an executive summary in one page. Say what pain points your idea solves and how.
• Document your ideas about revenue sources and support it with relevant research.
• Make revenue projections and expenditure forecasts. Calculate how much money you will be making in 3 years or even 5 years if you can think that far ahead. Take everything into consideration when you’re making expenditure forecasts. Keep a 50% margin even if you think you have it all measured out.
• Do some market research. Identify your target audience. Talk to as many family and friends about the idea as you possibly can. Prepare a questionnaire and get random people to fill them. Make online surveys, put out polls, email all your friends. Get as much data as you possibly can.
• Identify your competition. Think about competition in unconventional ways (a newspaper can be a competitor to an online local search engine).
• Analyze your competition. Talk to your competitors if possible, send out emails to their CEOs. Find out how they go about things.
• Compile, document and format. Make a presentation or write a whitepaper.
• Prepare an elevator pitch. If your pitch cannot grab an investor’s attention in the first 10 seconds then there’s no way he’ll pay attention to the rest. Pitch your pitch to as many people as you can before approaching an investor. Constantly keep improving and practising your pitch. Find catchlines and tag phrases that will help push your idea in a more catchy way. Record yourself on your webcam and observe where you can improve yourself. Upload it to youtube to send it to friends who are not nearby.
• And finally, when you’re going in for an investor meeting dress confidently and comfortably. Don’t unnecessarily wear a suit or a tie if you’re not comfortable in it. It’s not going to help you convince the investor any better than your words, actions and documents can.

That’s about it. The second approach requires you to have done your homework.

In this post I will not talk about how to find investors because that is simply out of the scope of this article. Maybe I will write about it when I do discover their secret hiding places. In this day and age there are a lot more people willing to take a detour from the beaten path and do something different. I hope this information will help people who are just entering the pool by themselves and give them a float so that they may learn to swim. Do add your own experiences in the comments. I am @sidv on twitter in case you want to start a conversation with me there.

NOTE: The thoughts above are purely my learnings over the last few years with regard to entrepreneurship. These learnings are put down here merely to help people starting out on their own.

It all started with me wanting to become a product designer quite a while back. When I gave my CEED exam the year I was graduating (2008), I was not aware of the procedure of admission at IDC (Industrial Design Center) and presumed it would begin after the results were declared. To my shock, I find from the day the results are out, I have only a week to prepare my application and send it by post all while I was working at Cisco doing my internship. “What logic is that?” I said to myself and dismissed IDC as a bunch of people who didn’t know logic. I was ignorant, forgive me.

Cut to 2009, I am working at a design studio run by an ex-IDCian. I now know a lot more about it and I consider it to be one of the top design schools in India (or atleast my research told me so). I was more keen on applying abroad – but decided at the last minute to give it a shot. My CEED score from the previous year was valid this year too. So I fill in my application, complete the three “tasks” allotted and send it in. During this application process I discover that the CEED is merely a qualifying exam for IIT Bombay and a host of other colleges. The colleges then conduct their own tests to shortlist candidates for admission. No logic here either, the CEED is a good exam! According to me, it is a pretty good indicator of your aptitude for design. Anyway, I am noone to decide this, so I went along with the process.

One month later, the list comes up on the IDC website with my name on it along with 300 others. I am supposed to receive a call letter confirming my selection for the next round but I get none. A quick phone call to the IDC office and they say it’s ok, come along anyway. So me and my friend (who incidentally also got selected) book flight tickets for Bombay for all the three days of the selection process.

Cut to today – 18th June, 2009. Reached Bombay early in the morning and reached the IIT campus just in the nick of time. Had a tough time finding our way to the Convocation Hall (the venue of the test, considering IDC is part of IIT – they should do something about their wayfinding signage – it’s pretty pathetic!). The test entails designing a vegetable carrier to be mounted on a bicycle. According to me I had a pretty good solution and I had presented it well. I noticed that the table in front of me (bearing roll no IDC-067 – if you’re reading this, congrats you got selected!) was empty – ABSENT!. Results were to be announced at 5 PM.

Off Topic: One warning to people joining IIT Bombay – Hostel 6 is pretty sad. Manipal hostels rock!

Back to the topic: We decided to drop back into the main IDC building to check it out and look at our future department and the kind of work that’s going on. To be frank, I was very very impressed with the Visual Communication dept. Swarna – the design degree show was on all the work done by the grads this year were on show. Again VC was impressive. Most people designing mobile applications seem to be over inspired by the iphone icons though – no originality in that respect. Product design was not too impressive and I shall leave it at that. Outside there were posters of each department (there are 4 – product, visual, animation and interaction) with a one liner tag line for each. Anim said: We not only move lines, we move people. Interaction said: Let the two halves of your brain interact (or something to that effect). VC had a good line too. PD said “Aesthetics with practicality”. Hmmmm, now PD is not only aesthetics is it? and who does copy for things like this! Totally put me off. Back to the main topic, I seem to be straying a lot.

A First List was published with selected candidates and was immediately withdrawn since it contained gross errors – candidate’s name appeared twice etc etc. After another hour long wait, the next list came out and to be frank I was pretty confident that I would clear the test atleast. I didn’t. Neither did my buddy. I went through the list a couple of times, checking each name twice just to make I hadn’t missed out. Surprise! Surprise! Roll 067′s name is on the list! Wow!

Ok now here’s the deal. If the profs who conduct this selection process are reading, then listen up! You don’t call 300 people to Bombay from all over India just to give a test (300 in PD, I’m not sure about the numbers in the other depts). If you’re calling them to your city, atleast give them a chance to talk to you, give them an interview. You don’t send 210 people back on the basis of not clearing a test. This is the design field, you cannot judge somebody’s design capabilities by what they do in a 1.5 hr exam. You need to look through their portfolio, see their work and talk to them about their ideas. If you had to conduct a test to reduce numbers, do it in the major cities, or do it as a part of the application, or do it online!

I am quite relieved that I was not on that list. Because joining such a design school would be quite a waste of 2 years (You may think this is a case of sour grapes, it probably is). If you read my previous post it talked about design education in India and the problems with it. Now the confusion is gone – it is “to go”.

India:
After I complete 2 years of my Master’s, I would work somewhere for a year or two and then I would have a big enough network when I start my own practice. Education is cheap here and most designers do it for the sake of validating their work in the future. People in India don’t usually take you and your work seriously unless you have a degree to prove it. So, I save on time and money but at the same time I probably don’t get a quality education and exposure that I would get abroad.

Abroad:
Here’s where real education happens. Where you are encouraged to explore and go crazy. Spending two years in University will be like a lifetime given the amount of work required, but at the end of it, you emerge a better designer, better manager and a better human. Downside is that I do want to come back to India and settle down. Starting my practice would require a lot more time then – by my calculations atleast 5-6 years more after the degree. I will work abroad to recover my tuition fees for atleast 2 years and by the time I come back to India, I would have lost touch with the people and the places. Hence another 2 years working in India to develop my network all over again.

Arrgghh… dilemma dilemma! Someone have any bright ideas?

[EDIT] There was a mistake with the schedule on 22nd April – Sorry! Here are the updated ones.