Entrepreneurship

Why almost all IT persons want to do a startup?

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Why almost all IT persons want to do a startup and nobody tries it?

This seems more like Quora question let me try and answer it here.

So you have been in IT for past some years ( Varying from 3 yrs to 10+ yrs) and are visiting couple of college friends or colleagues, whats the discussion like girls/travel or starting a IT startup and get big bucks..

I bet startup is one of the main discussion point and everyone seems to have unique ideas that can be converted into million bucks Ah! if we had some money or time we would done it for sure!

It seems the main reason to do a startup is to get crazily rich in much shorter time, and hence everyone gets attracted to it. Grass always seems greener on other side, so when u r in job, it seems the owner of ur company has such an easy job running the company….

Why nobody tries it?

Not a right time and never will be, abhi to muskil hai yaar. Have to pay my new apartment EMIs, buy a car, or getting married thousands of excuses comes in mind.

Is it mainly money constraints or fear factor…

Let me know what u think?

Building brand…

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Dont bounce off looking at the topic, this is one of the most discussed topic and everyone hates it 🙂 . A startup specially internet startup spends most of the time/resource thinking how to build brand ? how to increase direct traffic ? blah blah…..

Here i do not want to get into 10 steps for building brand but rather would like to ask some very obvious questions, so when next time there is a brand / direct traffic meetings with a brand consultant, you know what to look for..

Do you know what user wants? This is the most important question and should be answered completely before even getting into any meetings forget brand/direct. If you do not understand your users, what they want? why are they coming to you? and whether u are able to answer their queries. Go get this first, talk to users/read analytics/understand them.

One example stands out for me: We were suppose to have a consumer call with one of our power sellers, this was in one of the marketplace website where power seller can sell products to users. We were about to release a major enhancement which all the power sellers were aspecting and I was very skeptical about the meeting. I was aspecting a good bashing about the feature not yet released and loses the power seller is incurring because of delay in release etc. Guess what he was waiting for a minor bug fix which was not even added in our release cycle, it was a simple address switch based on country selected by users, so that buyers are comfortable with this seller. Infact he did’nt wanted any of the hi-fi feature we were building and told me upfront in the meeting. Moral of the story is talking to the power sellers (Our user/customer) made me realized the actual user problem and solve it much faster making him happy customers. Now that builds brand!

So next time you walk in to any of the brand meetings ask What does user want? If none is aware, initiate a user interactive session, that will be much more productive rather than brand consultants and these unnerving meetings with no conclusion.

As the saying goes “User is the king”!!

 

Story of a marketer..

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How a story of a marketer can change fortune of an internet company. There was an internet company that was doing its bit of struggling, trying hard reaching traffic numbers, and trying to scale to the next level. It got good funding after struggle, funds was raised for marketing , building brand and increasing direct traffic to the website.

And than came the marketer he was like “pied piper of hamelin” with all sorts of bells and whistles. Guess what would have happened once he is in and started taking marketing. Whole traffic / direct /free dropped because of pied piper, and he still continues to kill the traffic but imagine the traffic still persists.

Everything than started falling and at the end company was no more……

Guess whats the moral of the story ?

 

Its all about people…..

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Being in startup companies from past 10 years, have come to realize success of a company is all about people…

Have you ever wondered why ? I think the single most important reason is how the team tackle failures and that’s why a cohesive team plays significant role. To coup up with failures & pressures etc people and their trust in each other is critical. Skill set / Education/ History etc etc all goes for toss once you see failure, all these might help you stand but what lets you go further and further is ur colleagues ur friends and their trust in you..

Also these are the scenarios which makes or breaks the company and real leaders emerge out of it. A person attitude in this case is single most important criteria, in general seeing a failure people get scared and run away from it including all of us.

Hence hire or get a team with good attitude rest will follow…

 

 

 

 

 

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