Start a StartUp / Blog

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“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.

The one thing you must do is, talk to as many people as possible about your idea. Talk, talk, talk. Talking is cheap. You will get lots of good and bad feedback. Filter it and adjust accordingly. Wait for the right time and leap.

The best way to talk is to start your own blog, plug-in to the community that you will be catering to and think your idea out loud. Don’t fret over someone copying the idea. Finding problems fast and solving them well is what ultimately matters.

The business pundit has 10 more things to do before you startup.

Sk8 Silueta, originally uploaded by EPIDEMIA_.

Tim O’Reilly has an excellent speech on three things that kick started his company. All the three boil down to one core principle. Predictions are very difficult. IBM couldn’t predict the software revolution. Microsoft couldn’t predict the importance of Search. Google won’t be able to predict the next big thing.

Planning a big master plan and implementing it is impossible. The only thing that works is, finding problems fast and solving them well. Agility! Grand plans are good. But implementing those with your head in the sand is a recipe for failure. Grand plans can be agile too if you have a small team and less things to change.

Onstartups by Dharmesh Shah has some really good practical advice for startups. He recently asked if Less is really what it is made up to be.
On another note, Kathy Sierra says “Don’t give in to User Demands“. I understand her point, but don’t think categorizing comments by user type or paying for feedback is the right way to solve this problem.

I have an article posted that deals with exactly the same topics. Is less really good for you?

Define: Moonlighting - To work at another job, often at night, in addition to one’s full-time job.

Define: Intrapreneur - A person within a large corporation who takes direct responsibility for turning an idea into a profitable finished product through assertive risk-taking and innovation.

Eric Schonfeld of Business 2.0, editor-at-large, has post collecting How-Tos on starting a StartUp with out quitting your day job. An excellent read. Lots for great tips.

I absolute-diddly-doodly love Flickr. A Flickr picture a day keeps you blogging away.

Water drops: fragile and beautiful, just like a StartUp.

I have been waiting to do this for a long time: Start blogging again! So here it is, I’ve done it. I’ve started blogging again after two and a half years! Yay. Feels great.

We develop web applications, using agile development techniques with Ruby on Rails. Other tools like Basecamp, Trac, Subversion, Blogs and Aggregators enhance the joy in development.

Rails is a full-stack framework for developing powerful database-backed web applications according to the Model-View-Control pattern, accessible using any internet browser.

Rails is built on the:

• Interpreted
• Dynamically typed
• Pure object-oriented
• Scripting language, from Japan named Ruby.

It’s Simple, straightforward and extensible.

Scalable, reliable, maintainable and easy to use applications can be developed in weeks instead of months using Ruby on Rails. Some cutting edge Rails features:

• Ajax using RJS
• Object-relational mapping (ORM)
• Convention over configuration promoting simplicity
• Generators to automate repeating tasks
• Integrated test framework
• Automated application deployment promoting frequent releases to production
• Web services integration
• Migrations with the ability to deploy/rollback database schema changes.