Time flies!

It has been a year since I started Jnaapti and it is time to take a step back and reflect on how things have fared during the last one year. I was reading through the mails and the Jnaapti weekly reports and was wondering if there is anything that I have to add to the 6 month report that I wrote back in December or if there is anything that I don’t agree to among the things I mentioned in that list.

So here goes:

• Naming: Somehow, I don’t recall reading this anywhere, or atleast, didn’t think it was important. But, just like you do usability testing of your product, I think it is important to get the name tested with a few people before you christen your company. While choosing an Indian name, also remember to include people from various parts of India and abroad.
  The name Jnaapti is a Sanskrit word which means to “acquire knowledge”. I had a few things in mind when choosing the name:
  1. I wanted an Indian name – because the target segment was Indian to begin with
  2. I didn’t want to have a problem with branding, in acquiring domains etc
  3. Finally, I wanted the name to be generic enough to be used until the vision of the company has been achieved and shouldn’t require a change as I pivot.

  Turns out, people don’t get it.
  
  
  Here are some suggestions to people about naming a company:

  • Make sure the word is such that it can be pronounced by anyone and is easy to spell over the phone. You will loose out on a lot of branding if people search for the wrong keywords.
  • How would people come across your name? Would you expect people to search for it – if not, the logo along with the name should be catchy.
  • What are the closest other names to the name of your company? Is it easy to mis-spell it? If people search for it now, will Google suggest a more popular alternative? Do you expect to override it anytime soon?
  • Is your audience global or local? If global, go for something that is not specific to your geography or atleast easy for people outside your geography to pronounce.
  • Stay with the chosen word for atleast 3-4 days. Imagine yourself using it in conversations and see if you are comfortable with the word even after 3-4 days.

  Personally, I prefer short, single words for company names.

• Pivoting is not free: Don’t get me wrong. I am a big fan of lean principles and I still religiously follow a lot of them. And I do understand that pivoting is not about abandoning one idea and moving onto the other or changing your vision as if caught in a tornado but I guess it is possible that people think pivoting comes without a cost when in fact the reality is not so. In short, pivoting has the same issues as knowing when to shut down your startup – should we persevere or should we rethink?
  When you have validated a part of your business model (eg: the demand, the problem/solution fit or say portions of your product) and decide to pivot another aspect of it, there is a good chance of temporary disruption in the flow (read target segment, getting users, revenue streams etc). It’s quite possible that you had been generating revenues due to your efforts, but now you don’t see it to be sustainable, so you decide to pivot. This may mean, you have to re-design your site/app experience, come up with a new marketing message and start over on the marketing efforts, and you need to be prepared to bear the cost. This may be tough, especially when you are bootstrapping the company. But then, you don’t have a choice because the whole idea of pivoting is to reduce the likelihood of reaching a destination that you didn’t intend to reach in the first place.
  Between validation and scale is an important step – “validating the scale”. As described in the lean stack, there are 4 stages when it comes to building a product – Understand Problem, Define Solution, Validate Qualitatively, Verify Quantitatively. However the MVP that works in Stage 3 need not work in Stage 4 and may require a strategy pivot, so be careful in Stage 3 to ensure that the same solution holds when you get to Stage 4. This is easier said than done.
  Recognize failures early – atleast have a weekly review of how things are going with regard to the company’s directions and make sure you make corrections in your path. Get it validated by people who can guide you.
• Follow the ant philosophy: Learn from the horse’s mouth as he has described it well.
  Perseverance is important. Sometimes it feels like you are putting in a lot of effort, but things don’t seem to work, but sometimes the exact opposite is true. I have seen this with marketing efforts. It takes time for marketing to reach fruition and it is important not to lose your patience when the going gets tough.
• Have a strong social network or add someone to your team who does: I can’t say this enough and this builds on the 2 things I mentioned in my previous post – “Get out of the building” and “The strange story of co-incidences and chance meetings”. It always helps to have a strong social network (both online and offline). The number of new people I have met (online/offline) has crossed 200 since the time I started Jnaapti.
• Self discipline revisited: If you have decided on a rhythm, stick with it. Get good at reducing interruptions and handling unavoidable interruptions well. When meeting clients, time is not under your control, so get good at squeezing tasks into available slots between unavoidable interruptions. Time discipline is extremely important especially when you are working alone. Maintain a log of where you are spending your time and optimize what you can optimize. Get good at continual automation not just with engineering processes but with life! Make a note of key metrics that you want to track on a daily/weekly basis.
• Be prepared to learn: This may seem obvious, but sometimes you may not realize the effort involved. Running a one-person startup has meant that I had to learn how businesses function, understand sales and marketing, negotiation, valuation, funding, recruitment, building and maintaining relationships, understand lead generation, cost of customer acquisition, designing usable products, build a great user experience and a host of other things in addition to engineering. I like it and is one of the reasons I am doing this, but then, not everyone does.

When I started this journey, it was supposed to be a one year stride. The fact that it is Jun 2012 and I haven’t lost confidence means that this is going somewhere and I intend to continue along this path into the near future…

This post is not quite about Jnaapti‘s vision and why I am doing it, but more about things that I have learnt since I founded Jnaapti.

I can’t believe it has been more than 6 months already and what an experience it has been! I can easily blog a few hundred pages about my experiences, but here is the MVP (Minimum Valuable Post) – the key things that other wantrepreneurs and newbie entrepreneurs can learn from:

• The art of self-discipline: If there is one thing that I should pick among the various things that I learnt in the last 6 months, I would pick being self-disciplined and maintaining a rhythm in the face of distractions that are not under your control. Time management is extremely important. When you are handling all aspects of business, there is a good chance that you need to meet someone at their convenience, or you are asked to provide a service (in my case training) and these are not under your control. So you need to get really good at handling these, and getting back to your work as soon as this is complete. For productivity freaks, I use a combination of Pomodoro technique, Hamster, Workrave, this hack and a simple Libreoffice document to manage all my data. I wish it could have been simpler and someday, I hope to continue my efforts in building productivity tools.
• Get out of the building: I can’t stress this enough. Nearly everytime I got out of the building and started speaking to people, there was some new insight or a business deal that happened. A lot of the times, it seems purely co-incidental (read the next point). The initial couple of weeks were very haphazard and it just seemed like a humongous project that was lying in front of me. While I did have a huge list of tasks/ideas to work on, I didn’t know where to begin. What should I build now? No clear answers. As I started hunting for answers, I ran into the Lean Startup concepts and fell in love with Ash Maurya, Eric Ries and Steve Blank‘s philosophies. I followed the lean canvas way of capturing the business model religiously and it has worked out very well. If anything, it helped reduce noise, cut to the chase and build something of value “now”. The idea of prioritizing validation and learning before scale has worked in my favor. The first cut of Jnaapti’s offering didn’t even have a software component and was entirely conducted over email – because I realized that the MVP didn’t need a software component. I concentrated less on the website messaging, since most of my contacts were through my personal network.
• The strange story of co-incidences and chance meetings: Nearly every business contract I got seems like a pure chance meeting and the more this happens the more you believe in what is written here. This kind of also proves that there is a critical mass of startups in Bangalore now, and there is a good chance that you will bump into someone who is a startup founder or early employee when you visit coffee shops or technical events. This has worked out so well that I have made it a point to meet, on an average one or two new people every week. Till date, I have met more than 80 new people (including Jnaapti Learners), and that’s an average of 10 people per month!
• My experiments with pricing: An early learning for me was about how you need to get pricing right and it’s almost always never. The inital couple of months I was demanding way too less for my services and slowly as I found out the value of my services, I tweaked it to a point which seems reasonable both for me and my clients. But that said, every new assignment is a new negotiation.
• Understanding waste reduction: When you are the only person working, and you have the 3 aspects of an organization in front of you – business, product and engineering – every moment you spend, you need to think twice. Is this the best use of my time? It helps a lot to reflect on how you spent your time and look at what you could have rather NOT done. This is the art of waste reduction.
  
  On a similar note, I have started maintaining what are called “Implementation reports” for Jnaapti’s product development phases. An implementation report is an assessment of
  • how a specific phase fared
  • what features we set out to build
  • what was our reasoning about why they should be built
  • how are the features being used now
  • if they are not beng used, why so
  • can its usage be improved
  • should it be chucked
  • how can we ensure that we don’t have such waste in future
• Getting to ramen profitability: There is one thing I can tell you. We, as software engineers in India, don’t value money (I am speaking generally). We get an awesome package (stop cribbing you guys) right out of college, and then we get into this spiral of work-get paid-work harder-get promoted-ask for a raise. And when things don’t work in our favor, we start complaining or switch our jobs looking for a better role or more pay. If you want to value money better, quit your job to know what others go through. In the face of inflation, the rupee v/s dollar prices and rising infrastructure costs it has been tough to keep up, but then you got to pay a price. I am close to achieveing ramen profitability and I hope things will be better next year. And while achieving ramen profitability is important, it is equally important to ensure that you achieve profitability via the business you are in and not via some job that doesn’t help you validate or learn more about your business. And yeah, if you want a piece of advice, to get to ramen profitability soon, just invest your savings in some place that is not easy to suck from!

I have taken enough breaks and I never felt that this was too demanding (although I do put in long hours once in a while). Needless to say, I am loving the freedom and the flexibility that I have and I wish I can continue this forever! Overall, it has been an amazing 6 months!