Sometime back I happened to listen to this talk given by DHH on ‘Making money online’. Despite a cheesy sounding title the talk is a great primer for web entrepreneurs  starting up or thinking of starting up. DHH touches upon a great point when he says

The odds of you in here making the next Facebook or YouTube or MySpace are tiny, the odds of you just actually just creating a product that few people will like and pay more for, not that shabby.

It’s kinda like reverse terror alerts, the probability of something like this happening, like the probability of you being crashed in the plane, tiny, but the fear you have of it or the desire you have to be the next Facebook, Huge, because it’s been broadcasted over and over again, you are being brainwashed

DHH further goes down to put forward the maths behind making a million dollars in an year by having  2000 customers and charging them 40$/month. Adding decent  conversion rate(5%) to the equation it would take about 40,000 signed up users to get 2000 paid customers. Taking it down one more level to make 200,000$ a year you would need just 400 customers at 40$/month.

The number of problems/niches one can attack trying to get this many customers are a lot, but not surprisingly we still find most web start-ups aiming at building the next Facebook or YouTube. Its not uncommon to find entrepreneurs by the dozen running after VCs and Angels to raise money for the next big thing on the internet despite the fact that most of them can get their venture started without too much money. One of the primary reason for this is the fact that raising million dollars for building(or the mere thought of) a global product that might be used by millions is SEXY however building a web product that’s being used by a few hundred or thousand users while making you some money isn’t.
This frenzy is fueled by media and consumers alike and the entrepreneurs(esp first timers) get unknowingly drawn into this trap and the next thing you know is everyone trying to make it big without even trying to taste success in building a smaller yet useful product.

While I won’t discourage anyone from taking big shots right from the start, I strongly feel its a lot better(and practical) to solve a small problem first before going for the bigger one.

This post is not about Apple’s iPad, it is however about the Irony that I see. In today’s day and age where every Social Media Enthusiast/Evangelist/Consultant/______ in every SEO/SEM/SMM____ company talks about being “Social”, “Listening to conversations and participating in them” and a lot more, here is Apple, a brand that has been in the market for a good amount of time and is conspicuous for not being “Social” as per the standards but it’s still being able to garner ultra hype about a product launch that is capable of bringing many a social networks down and get almost everyone on the ones up talking about it.

All by just making remarkable products that people are passionate about

PS: I can’t think of any Social Brand being a part of any event/campaign of a scale this big, can you?

Though there is an account http://twitter.com/twitter, people using it never talk to Twitter users.

For those of you who might not know, TiE is the world’s biggest formal network of Entrepreneurs and Professionals. The thing I love most about TiE events is the wonderful opportunity they offer of meeting loads of interesting people from various profiles spread across different industries and hailing from different parts of the country and world.

It took me some time to realize and appreciate that the kind of audience TiE events attract is a lot different from what similar events(Startup etc) attract and that’s what sets them apart from other events in the same category. Also, as mentioned previously I strongly feel that TiE events are especially designed to make networking more easy and often, for example this time around(for SmashUP) there was a “Power Breakfast” in which you were asked to choose 3 out of 5 established VC’s/Successful Entrepreneurs and the orgaziners would try to arrange you(and 8-9 other folks) to have breakfast with one of them on a separate table. Having attended a Power Breakfast yesterday I can say it was a simple yet very effective thing. To discuss and network with 8-9 attendees and a VC/Successful Entrepreneur in just an hour couldn’t have been easier and better.

Having said all that I’d like to conclude this post by saying that if you are one of those who like professional networking with people and you haven’t yet attended a TiE event, you should give it a try.

I personally was quite excited about the talk as we generally don’t talk about products much in the regular Twitter, Bloggers and other Social Media related meets and I feel this is something that we should do often to create awareness amongst the attendees and if possible encourage people to build new products.

(Pic courtesy Gaurav Mishra)

Here’s the presentation from the talk

Talking about web products they can be categorized into two categories, “Innovation” (a completely new concept, first of its kind) and “Improvisation” ( a slight modification in an innovative idea and/or a slight modification in its implementation). From what I’ve observed most social web products in India belog to the “Improvisation” category with focus on the Indian market. Be it a social network, a platform to share pictures or microblog.

Though there is nothing wrong in improvising on someone’s concept and building a product for the local market but I guess most of the products in this segment fail to add any substantial value to the concept or it’s localised execution. Also, what  makes me wonder is why there aren’t many popular Indian web products in other categories particularly Global products based on an Innovative concept(from India) and Global products based on Improvisation(from India) of some innovative concept.

I feel there’s a lot of scope in both Made in India, for India and Made in India for World categories and I would keep a close watch for products in these two categories and now that I have moved out of Kwippy(will detail out in a seperate post) maybe work on something myself sometime soon

Yes, that’s an ad by Facebook for the name “Mayank Dhingra”. Out of curiosity I made a random India name search and

Sure enough Facebook is upto something, A couple more random searches on Indian names confirmed it

Looks like Facebook has taken a lot of Indian names(random?) and bought Google ads for them. A SEM trick to get more traffic and signups?

Those must me RT’s I thought and dismissed it but then I saw this tweet,

Refusing at first to admit that it must a bug in Twitter, I thought it just might have got something to do with list feature but on further inquiry, that too turned out to be not the case.

As it turns out there’s a bug in Twitter due to which people are seeing random tweets from people they aren’t following. Let’s see how long does it take people to realize this and for Twitter to fix it

Also, apparently there’s another even more irritating part of this bug in which some people are getting these tweets from people they aren’t following via SMS.

A look around the public timeline confirms the existence of the “Random Tweets” bug.

and a look at this tweet tells us that this has been going on for a couple of days now

Till then, keep talking !!

Building a brand, product or an idea is like raising a child. You need to nurture and protect it during its early days and slowly set it free to grow. Sounds simple and obvious? Trust it me it’s not, at least for most people.

I’ve seen numerous cases of product(primarily web) founders, small businessmen and more falling into the trap of holding their product/business/idea too close to their hearts to let it grow, grow beyond them. Things are quite easy (in this context) during the initial stages with people putting their blood and sweat into their business and helping it stand on its feet and start walking. The real problem occurs in the next stage in which the business needs to start running not just walking.This is the stage where all sorts of conscious and unconscious forces come into play that tend to prevent the owner(s) to from letting their business/idea take the leap.

During the initial phases the business/idea is known more by the people behind it, both are synonymous with each other and that’s all that there is to it because the business is mostly driven by it’s promoters/founders, it’s known mostly in the promoters’ circle of friends  and is yet to grow and have an independent existence of it’s own. Once the business has firm grounding and more people start nurturing it directly or indirectly the pace and scope of its growth depends on how the core group of promoters loosen their strong ties with it.

Essentially it’s all about loosing the tight control and dependency that once the business had on its promoters because these factors now become the limiting force in its growth. The conflict that thus arises is a peculiar one in which the promoters still want to be involved as much as they were some time back in almost everything related to the business, while the business itself strives to outgrow its promoters. This is the stage where like a growing child the business needs to venture out, meet new people, develop new relationships, try new and different things not necessarily within the scope of its founders, in short this is the stage where the business needs to start getting a life of his own.

For some businesses it might mean raising funds, for some it might mean getting more people on board (not necessarily as employees who merely execute the promoters plans/ideas) and outsourcing a part of your business to someone else. The idea of loosing control is what troubles most promoters but the hard fact is that in order to make your business grow beyond you, you need to loose some control and this is what smart people realize.

The goal rather than trying to have your business as integrated as possible with its founders should be to let it loose as early as possible as only then the business can have a life of its own and it can grow into something big, much bigger than its promoters.