Over the past few months a very important side of startup life has been discovered by me. For me and a number of folks around me the journey gets a boost from an Inspirational talk, either in person or YouTube. Yes, the billionaires speaking (or say any large entrepreneur) does give us a push, but the rule I want to put forward for a startup is: 1-10-50 (One Ten Fifty…)

If you are a 1 person company, the best advice and help you will get is from a person running a 10 person company. If you are a 10 person company, your best advice would come from a 50 people company. Go talk to them.

Back in March (2011) I disappeared for a month to UK and while I spent a month there, there are only two significant things I did. The First being a visit to Stone Henge (picture below) and the other being ‘Startup Weekend Cambridge.’

Startup Weekend is this 54 hours madness that brings together business folks, developers, designers and jack of all trades like me to build a startup over a weekend. Ones with an idea pitch it, voting follows and teams are formed organically. These teams have to come back with a product / prototype / demo / whatever by Sunday evening and present to the judging panel. In march, Startup Weekend, which has as of today done over 100 cities and 250 action packed weekends, came to India.

My friend Pankaj Jain was (he still is) passionately spearheading the India leg of SW and I decided to jump in and help organize Delhi and Bangalore. Events were planned, dates final, lots of pre-event work done and then UK happened at the same time as SW Bangalore and Delhi. And right then, Pjain pointed me to Startup Weekend Cambridge and I signed up for it immediately. So as the folks in India were organizing Bangalore, I participated in Cambridge. Left home with a view of seeing startup action in UK, getting a feel of the event, floating around multiple teams and chilling over the weekend.

What happened was crazy. I pitched an idea in UK, got enough votes, failed to make a team. Another interesting fun gaming idea by Fabian got enough votes and I followed Joe to join that team. Before even we got started with the idea on Friday night, the model failed during our discussions and we came up with a new idea: a geo-social network it was. Didn’t go back to London and worked at the awesome St Johns innovation center to make this a reality with a fabulous team. Pitched it on Sunday evening… no we didn’t win. But the madness was an experience of its own.

Fast forward to Hyderabad, September 2011, I am again with Pjain and gang, organizing Startup Weekend Hyderabad. Jumped forward, bought a ticket, participated. Pitched an idea, didn’t get votes, no team. Joined a simple yet determined guy Sundaram for his ideas around Kirana stores and remodeled it to make it a reality. In Cambridge we were 5 geeks sitting on a PC, designing, coding, conceptualizing and making a ppt. In Hyderabad, we were 3 in all, 1 developer and 2 business folks. We spent almost all our time travelling, taking to street vendors, hawkers and trying to understand the ‘grass root’ level of entrepreneurship. Finding easy ways of automating things, understanding how society sustains thousands of these small entrepreneurs everyday.

We made a delicious pitch. Decorated the hall with mosambis, lady fingers and did a live demo of a tool empowering hawkers. Shot a documentary style video and showed it in-between our 5 min pitch. Below is the video, the viability of the project was tough, business model was difficult and not a big surprise that we didn’t win. But yet again I went to a Startup Weekend, expecting to chill-out, sit on the fence and co-ordinate work with my team in Mumbai… well that didn’t happen. Startup Weekend somehow always manages to put me in action, brings the best out of me and I am glad I joined Sundaram and did this with him and Sanghi (our champion dev for the weekend.)

Across Cambridge and Hyderabad, I have met and worked with some amazing folks and at this point it is so very likely that I might not meet a lot of these people every again in my life. Yet they are a part of me, whenever I want a little dose of energy, I just remember the moments spent in Cambridge and Hyderabad. Looking forward to many more such weekends!

Video Link

On a day when I find myself defending two companies who have me as a client since years, I find it so obvious to share this simple lesson on customer service. In any industry it isn’t possible to give 100% satisfaction, something ought to go wrong sometime, somewhere. Specially if you are a bank or a hosting service dealing with large no of users. So I find these two gentlemen one after the other, complaining about their experience with HDFC and Hostgator respectively.

Both HDFC and Hostgator are service providers whom I have been very satisfied with (In fact this site is hosted on Hostgator since inception).  When I saw the first tweet from Ashutosh about HDFC asking for a photo identity for a simple work, I replied and defended HDFC. My defense was partly from my experience and largely in good faith. HDFC has been good to me, not perfect, but generally very good. And I jumped to defend them. Pause.

Take 2. Tanmay tweeted about issues he was having with Hostgator and I jumped to defend Hostgator. Hostgator has been nothing less than fantastic for me and a lot of my small sites including this one is hosted with them. For a long time even Onlygizmos was hosted with Hostgator and we NEVER had any issues. Shared hosting services are known to give poor performance / oversell under the ‘unlimited’ tag, but yet HG found me defending them.

Now, as things turn out to be, in both these cases I was wrong. HDFC acknowledged to Ashutosh a little later that they indeed need a photo ID from him and Tanmay informed me that Hostgator has acknowledged the problem to him. My reply to both of them was within seconds of their tweet going public, way faster than any PR mechanism or online reputation management system would kick-in for them on Twitter.

What does this tell us?

As a service provider / business, your best customer service agents are your existing customers. The best publicity you can get is from word of mouth and who better then your own users to do that? You may not be able to deliver a 100% all the time, but if you have good karma, it will come back!

This is the story of two students in University of Delhi. Happy studying Statistics and Literature with bit monotony was their life. ‘A’ was really passionate about cakes and chocolates. She could bump into any bakers at any hour of the day. It was the only thing she cooked with lots of grace while she was at home. And ‘S’, her dearest friend loved experimenting and encouraging ideas. ‘A’ baptized her virtual Bakers store as “Indulgilicious” with the slightest idea of this coming true. Then comes A’s cousin, the enthusiastic, the illumination and an entrepreneur. ‘A’ blabbered her dreams (Indulgilicious) to him, which would have happened sometime in the future she was not sure about. But her cousin, so like himself, became really serious about the whole thing and they had a long discussion on the same issue. ‘A’ was big time inspired and full on motivated. Then what?

She chucked an internship at a high profile Mathematical institute, lost every chance of recommendation by them, then blown by friends and so on. ‘A’ told ‘S’ about the whole scene and ‘S’ was very supportive, encouraging and even more excited than ‘A’ and promised to be an equal partner in the new business which did not exist. It was 27^th Feb 2011 and the idea commenced.

Guys, I am talking about nobody else but Anchal (myself) and Shagun, from the neighboring hostel and a friend since graduation (we are post graduates nowJ).

Unbelievable it was! I and Shagun sat the next afternoon to plan out things including the recipe, dishes, etc. None of us were aware of business techniques, so please excuse my non technical writing here. Out for shopping, no money, weird plans, nothing on papers…. we bought every ingredient and dishes required. Fortunately my hostel had a microwave, so things seemed to be easier.

PN: We paid extra 12.5% at every store to get the bills. We were loyal to our customers as well as government rules. Second morning of March on the Shiv Ratri, we baked our first cake as a trial. Trust me, I was shit scared but Shagun was optimistic about the taste. And, the taste turned out to be awesome… BUT…. the cake was as hard as a stone. I was very depressed but Shagun was in good spirits and then we realised that the microwave we had used didn’t have the “Convection” mode which is used to bake cakes. Let me list a few more problems we had faced:

1. We planned to buy an OTG, and checked Tata Croma and finalised the model. But we didn’t get permission from the hostel authorities to keep an electrical appliance.
2. Renting a flat was the next idea. Though expensive, we still had to stick to this because there was no other way. Grishma supported with financial help.
3. Getting in touch with property dealers and assuring electricity and water throughout the day was really tough.
4. Meanwhile, our friend Shweta came up with the idea of baking in a cooker. Awesome idea, we bought a cooker too.
5. Hotplates in hostel could have been used but the regulator was not working.
6. We sneaked in a gas cylinder in Shagun’s hostel room finally to carry on with our plan.

We also bought chart papers and colours from Nayi Sadak, Chandni Chowk, sim card, mobile handset (borrowed from a cousin). We made teasers by 10th of March but we had to slow down because of my mid semester exams and my parents trip to delhi and then further delay on account of Anna Hazare’s fast which was supported by Shagun. Came 8th April, when we had put up the teasers on the under graduate hostel boards with the help of Puja and Rashmi. Messages started buzzing in on our new number. People were pepped about the name… then we had put the posters, we covered all undergraduate college hostels of DU in North Campus.

Then happened something which none of us had expected….. Calls started coming for orders. God, calls after calls…. we became too busy overnight. We also made a delivery at 6am for a Stephen’s girl. Amazing time it was, we managed to cover the entire cost we had incurred……From buying stuff to taking calls, baking cakes to washing utensils, managing stock to delivering cakes and to handling finance and so on was done by me and Shagun. In all probability we have put our final semester exams on stake here, we await the results.
Colour code followed by us was PURPLE and SILVER. We made cake boxes using purple-silver handmade papers.

The idea behind Indulgilicious was simple; we aimed at HOSTELERS who wanted homemade cakes to be delivered at their doorsteps @ reasonable price. It was a pain that we ourselves felt being out of home in a hostel world for years. We were successful in delivering the same and feedback from most of them delighted us, this motivated us to continue working.

After the initial stint, constraints like finance, space and an end to college life stopped us from continuing the same. As of today I am working with an analytical company now and saving money every month to come back with a bang. Shagun is likely to start preparation for civil services exams.

Last few months made us learn a lot in terms of organising, planning, time management, firefighting, jugaad etc. Those really were the most adventurous days of our life. We promise to come again and serve the hostellers to re-live our 5 years of hostel life … forever.

Waiting for the dream to come true soon….

Anchal & Shagun
IndulgiliciouS

There are times I wish this was an anonymous blog. There is so much I want to share and yet I fear its too early to share. Today happens to be a day when I decide to unfold a little of past. A little of me. My about page speaks less of who I am and though its meant to be so, here is a little something that I feel necessary to share.

Its not a secret that I started working right out of school at the age of 15 and that partly explains my bonding and feeling for young entrepreneurs (heck, any one who is starting up). When I started as a school kid selling stuff over Baazee (now eBay), there was a good offline connect to it. I had to source the good from the local market, market them online, get the orders and then pack and ship it out myself. I can be certain that I have learnt more being a eBay Power Seller than what I learnt in 5 years of college. Interacting with 000s of online shoppers across India, across different states, speaking different accents, I feel I have also been a mini call center marketer myself. While my LinkedIn profile proudly claims that its passion that drives me and the love for gadgets / technology / silicon chips that pushed me to do things right from retail to media, it really didn’t start that way. It developed over time. The single most influential driver for me to startup was Money. Yes Money. I wanted more money to spend than I would have ever got as pocket money and I wanted to buy small luxuries for myself that I couldn’t have afforded without earning it myself. Add to that a little of love for gizmos that excited me. My journey begins…

Walking down the lanes of Manish market and dealing with the most ‘badnam‘ dealers in Mumbai is a tough training for a 16 yr old kid (in 2003). I always thought that I was lucky to get started with a relation in this market, but then I could see the roots of this in my upbringing. I was brought up in a somewhat pampered environment but at the same time with a lot of discipline (don’t mistake that for organized, I am more messy than an average hostel kid at IIT). Honesty was drilled into me, but then when a 15 year old starts business, you know money pulls you the other way? I see so many people around me start with business today and it at times hurt me to see the kind of manipulation or shortcut they take. I don’t really blame them for that, I have seen hints of these in me, and may be I got lucky with the right people teaching me the right things at the right time. It isn’t hard to stick to values when in business, its just that the other path looks so much easier.

I remember attending a talk by some CXO of Shoppers Stop at Raheja college during my 1st yr of BMS. This is where I picked up a great learning. Something that remains with me still. He spoke about ‘having real feeling for your customer, being there to serve them’. And after that day, perhaps the innocent, little kid in me was clear on what business he wants to do. How he wants to be at business…

Some of my best teachers / friends / inspiration have been people whom I got close to while selling them some thing. I might be a poor business guy when it comes to profit making. Some say I do business to make loss, but when it comes to winning a customer, I rate myself A+. Here my friends I want to highlight the power of true feelings and honesty. At my work I have to deal with a number of dealers, retailers, service providers, institutes and students. I meet all of them with a similar clean approach. This might not always give me a deal that I want, but what it gives me is two very crucial things a) people who value you as an individual b) a silent confidence in your dealings that cannot be challenged.

The path I am encouraging you to walk may not always be easy friends. You got to be unreasonable at times. Last year out of the blue  I received a hate mail from someone who had transacted with me back in 2005. According to him I had cheated him back then  (he hadn’t received the product he ordered) and I could see his emails written to me when I was 18 … they were some of the finest abuses someone has every sent me.  (A mild version of those below.) I had chosen to discontinue a dialogue with him back then, but he came back 4 yrs later and this is the best I could do for him. Send him a digital camera to make up for his loss. The response I receive at the end of it, is something that drives priceless energy into me.

I might not yet be a 100%, but I am still hurt to see young ones around me with this ‘quick money’ thinking. I can smell it in young business men very often. Its not that I want to prove you wrong, its not that I hate you, its just that I feel you are meant to do big things. Create huge empires and make a real difference and all this maintaining your values. The value of being a human, one to another! How about getting into a business conversation next time with an aim to give a honest 100%? Working to meet the needs of the one you serve before you serve yourself?

Also see: My Wish

Many of you would have been receiving mail from me inviting you to something called ‘Startup Saturdays’. Over the past few years I have been associated with a variety of events – from DJ nites (when I was in college) to NGO activities (Nischay). Over the past few months I have come across this amazing group called HeadStart.

So what is HeadStart? What exactly is StartupSaturday? Why is annkur here? How is it relevant to you/me? – I would take this opportunity to answer all these for you today!

What? What we do: In StartupSaturdays we bring together industry veterans to speak in front of  entrepreneurs, aspiring entrepreneurs, students and experts. At the same time give startups a platform to present themselves in front of a very knowledgeable crowd. The atmosphere encourages healthy debate and discussions on various topics ranging from PR, marketing, funding to legal & accounting. The feeling of being present between a 100 aspiring entrepreneurs on a StartupSaturday cannot be described in words.

The HeadStart Network is a not-for-profit organization run by volunteers and full time professionals to create and promote the innovation ecosystem in India. We define the innovation ecosystem as consisting of entrepreneurs and startups, researchers in academia and industry, adopters of new technology and products, and investors.

Why? -  Why am I here: My about page speaks less about things I did (or rather tried). I started working when I was 15 (right out of school); worked all 5 years in college. Without a doubt I can claim that all my learning and knowledge in life has come from my 7 years of work as an entrepreneur. Having faced the toughest of times in business, amongst friends, family – I always missed someone who would stand behind me, correct me, give me directions, feedback, constructive criticism… At the same time there were a few who came from nowhere, became friends, motivated me and kept me going. Did it come too late? Not sure, but here at Startup Saturdays / Headstart – I have this opportunity to give back something to the entire community. Its my turn to contribute to and support the dreams and ambitions of the ones who have decided to step out and face the challenges of being an entrepreneur. Give a backup, a platform to all those who refuse to live as second-handers in the society … to those who would dare to stand up and take that step towards making a difference, realizing their true dreams… In whatever small way I can!

There are so many around me who have that desire to start something, make a beginning of their own and seeing them get motivated after attending any StartupSaturday is a pleasing sight. I haven’t spent too much time here to claim that I have seen any of them excel, but many around me (myself included ) are making a start. I am sure in the coming months I would be writing about how xyz came to SS, got inspired and fulfilled his dream.

How is it relevant to you? – If you are reading my blog chances are dim that you are a Ambani or Biyani. You are very much similar to what I am; filled with dreams and ambitions, dodging day to day problems and planning for the future. Or may be just an careless ignorant butterfly. Either ways if you have that desire to learn new things, meet some great people (myself included ), debate your ideas, plan your startup, present yourself / your thoughts / your startup, get inspired, take home some motivation or just test your knowledge – This is the place for you.

In Mumbai StartupSaturdays are conducted on every 2nd Saturday of the month. Venue is S.P Jain, Andheri.

Also coming up on 2oth June is HEADSTART, which is held twice a year and much larger than StartupSaturday. If you are a startup – waste no time and register yourself here. This would be your opportunity to present in front of industry leaders, investors, incubators … !

We live in a very difficult society. The moment a kid passes out of college you will see all aunties, uncles and any other tom dick and harry asking him and his parents  – So what are you doing? What plans? Job? Mba? Marriage ? What?

hmmm … If you cannot relate to what I am saying, all this creates a sudden environment of pressure. Its a rat race, actually a DOG race. So is it necessary for one to start planning so deeply as soon as he graduates? Not really! IMO

Though I am not sure if you have seen the Steve Jobs video, where he speaks about doing what you love (I would take that as doing whatever you are passionate about) and keep hunting till you find the right thing. The key lesson here is that at the age of 20-22 its not necessary that you would be able to decide accurately what you really love, whats you really want to do (Unless you are one of those second-handers who have been trained since childhood to be something xyz…)

Most people would expect to see you choose a steady progressive and safe career path as you take your first step. The advices would be, you can try this later – first get a little job experience, prepare for your CAT – everything else later, go to dad’s office – help him/learn – everything else later … and so on! You are going to spend a significant (Majority) of your life time working. Its important to do something that you like, something that you are passionate about, and something where you want to be good. You wont be a pro / champ from day 1. No matter where you go in life – Either a startup or a JOB career after a PG. The real learning happens as you do it… The choice you have to make is Where would I invest my learning time and reach the peak?

Its not (Just) about the money: But the one thing that would have struck your mind when you read my words is – MONEY! Yes money is important. That’s a scarce resource, and not everyone is loaded with Vitamin M. This creates a breed of entrepreneurs who work to make some money and fund their passion. Not a bad option; but if you are really confident – Have a little extra stomach to take risks. (Focus & Discipline is the key). Many people are disappointed with their jobs is because it isn’t their ideal career. For me I would accept doing what I am passionate about and enjoy doing as long as I can make the bare minimum to survive.

In all probability young entrepreneurs would relate much better to me here, as this is a common senario they find themselves in — To keep doing it or To give up and become a second-hander ruled by the evil laws of the society

Ps: I am somewhere in the middle, lost in these same scenarios. But I have seen persistent people succeed; regardless of where I land up, I want to believe in these words!

My thoughts and views here come from different places. Though I started writing (This Post) immediately after reading this.

Update: Read here – Why not to be an Entrepreneur!!

The great thing about Silicon Valley has been the entrepreneurial culture, and the acceptance that working for a failed startup is not necessarily a judgement on your character or your ability. But recently there seems to have been a change in attitudes at least amongst some people (trolls?) who are taking joy in the misfortune of others. When a startup closes down, founder’s dreams die. Employees find themselves looking for work, and at least for a period, worrying about paying their bills and supporting their families. This should never be a cause for celebration. [Read Full]

As I always say (Yes Ariginals) – Entrepreneurs are the riders of storm, they venture out in troubled waters …! For any entrepreneur who feels insecured about their ventures these words should set the record straight for you. THERE IS NOTHING WRONG IN TRYING!! Atleast you are giving it a shot – Follow your heart, do it, and if it doesn’t work, accept it without any shame.