Start a StartUp / Blog

Coming up with a name can be a time consuming process.

If you manage to go through a few names on Techcrunch, like The Name Inspector did you will find a few patterns:

1. Real Words: Amazon, Apple, Sphere
2. Compounds: CircleSource, Firefox, Wordpress
3. Phrases: StartaStarUp, AllofMP3, MyBlogLog, StumbleUpon
4. Blends: Microsoft (microcomputer + software), Technorati (technology + literati), Wikipedia (wiki + encyclopedia)
5. Tweaked words: ebay, edgeio, iPhone
6. Affixed words: CoComment, Findory, Napster
7. Made up or obscure origin: Bebo, Meebo, Odeo
8. Puns: Farecast (forecast, fore –> fare), Farecast (forecast, fore –> fare)
9. People’s names: Orkut, Ziya, Ning
10. Initials and Acronyms: AOL, ATT, GM

Hope this helps.

StartUps change a lot and they change fast. They rarely look like how they started as they adapt in the business jungle. So is there a point to writing a business plan?

VC Sean Wise offers five reasons to write a business plan:

1. Creates a common starting point.
2. Sets the goals and shares your vision.
3. Sets the path and identifies required resources.
4. Forces analysis.
5. Creates confidence.

In short, the answer is that the business plan itself is not that useful. But the process of writing it helps you think about all the things that can go wrong and plan accordingly. Its a good starting point but don’t stop yourself from changing it radically as you go.

How to Start:

A previous post discusses the process of writing a business plan. I found a couple of good ones since then.
Bill Reichert , another VC has a nice article on the how-tos of writing a business plan.
John Newton has another good one.

Start today and fill the blanks.

A list of proven examples of your previous work might be helpful here. Also, the contract can be made to ensure that complete payment will be upon satisfactory delivery. Something like a staged payment.

Use Ruby on Rails as the development framework. It follows strict conventions to make sure that the quality of code produced is of high quality. Its easier to follow the best practice than not to do it. For example its easier to write unit tests than not to. Most reusable code in rails is available as plugins and and security is taken care of by the community. Its always better to use maintained code from the community, than not to. Rails and subversion make this easier by allowing code in a project to be tied to code developed by the community automatically.

If spec documentation created automatically, that would be the best scenario, right? The project starts of by coming up with initial screens iteratively. Only the most necessary features go in there. The application is deployed to a staging server daily. Once the initial application is built, no more screens. Tasks are raised in Basecamp/Trac and are integrated into the application. Development documentation is written inside the code itself and RDoc is used to create the documentation and diagrams from the code automatically. In all, only work that absolutely adds value to the application is performed. Also, its always better to make the application usable than to create user documentation.

The project manager in the US should take care of the communication and cultural issues between the developers in India and the users in the US.

Use a framework that deploys code on amazons EC2 and takes care of the scalability issue. EC2 is an affordable service that amazon provides, which can deploy servers in minutes when the load on the server increases. The share nothing architecture of Rails makes scaling a lot easier.

Writing a cohesive business plan that explains your idea to someone else is an artform in itself. A few questions to ask your self are:

# What’s your business idea?
# How does your idea address a need?
# What model suits you best?
# What’s so different about what you offer?
# How big is the market and how big will you grow?
# What’s your role going to be?
# Who’s on your team?
# How will customers buy from you, and how much will they pay?
# Where’s the startup money coming from?
# How will you measure success?
# What are your key milestones?

Startup nation has more: http://www.startupnation.com/pages/start/Step3.asp

, originally uploaded by .

“The biggest problem with doing anything entrepreneurial is getting started.”

Procrastination is the bane of man kind. Offers a few tips to getting disciplined.

Start slowly: Pick the smallest task that you can do to get started and do it. That’s it the rest will follow.

Prioritize: Just listing the things to do and prioritizing them is enough to get started. A tiny list all that is needed to start.

Short plan: Make a short plan for the near future. In the next 5 mins, in the next 1 hour, etc and accomplish it.

Talk: Tell as many people/friends as possible about your idea in writing (blog/email/letter) and give them a tentative deadline.

Community: Be around people who are doing entrepreneurial. Subscribe to their blogs. Attend local small business meetings. Buy entrepreneurial magazines line Business 2.0.

Place: Find the right place to work. Good ambiance. No distractions. Comfortable.Attitude: Stay around motivate people. Accept setbacks well and think about contingency plans. The Steve Jobs speech at Stanford is a great place to start.

Click here: (Shameless plug) Click on the link, fill in the details and click on submit. We will do the rest. Also subscribe to this blog, poke posts are on their way to motivate you to start.

Most companies have it all wrong. They don’t have to motivate their employees. They have to stop de-motivating them. Everyone inherently wants to be motivated. Just remove all the barriers on the steps to achievement and keep great work flowing.
The book, “Maverick : The Success Story Behind the World’s Most Unusual Workplace“, has a neat statement we believe is at the core to getting doing great work.

3 stone cutters were asked about their jobs. The first said he was paid to cut stones. The second replied that he used special techniques in a special way, and proceeded to demonstrate his skills. The third stone cutter just smiled and said, “I build cathedrals”.

We wholeheartedly believe in this statement. A great idea has the power to bring out the best in all of us.

Keeping this principle in mind, there are three imp things we ingrained in our process. Motivation, Responsibility, Celebration.
Motivation: Team members are motivated if the problem being solved is a tough problem and we have a great idea that can solve it. Any problem is tough if we try to find new ways to solve it and be the best in the world. Great design and implementation ideas keep the team motivated and wanting to do more. Freedom to input any great idea in to the project always keeps the team members invigorated.

Responsibility with accountability: A team member has responsibility if they pick their own tasks and are evaluated on it. Freedom to design the application in his/her areas of expertise is what fuels motivation. All technical questions are replied by the product manager with a “You tell me!” In our process, the team members are free to choose any task daily from a list of pending tasks and setup their own time to do it. For example we use Basecamp, a project management web application to write the spec on a writeboard, archive daily messages in the messages tab and set broad deadlines for demos and releases in the milestones tab. Team members use the to-do tool in it to list the tasks that they promise for that day. The team member has the freedom set the granularity of the task, but the rule is to complete the tasks that day only. If the team member fails to complete the tasks he promised the team, his name will go up in a list along with the day as a defaulter. Quality of the tasks performed is maintained by raising bug reports which inturn are connected to the tasks. If a certain team member has low quality output, it is shown by the number of bugs a ticket has. In all, freedom to select our work with proper accountability does wonders to motivation and creativity.

Celebration: An internal smile always lights up when the team hears about how their decisions and execution made somebody’s day or work more pleasurable. This information is frequently gathered and shared. The celebration messages are archived with the task list and coming across a previous message is always pleasurable. Celebration provides encouragement to novice team member to crossover to the expert category.
Feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments about our process. We continuously strive to improve on it.