I have been getting so much comment spam of late that it is choking my web host server. So i will have to disable the comments for now. Will figure out the issue and enable comments shortly. Meanwhile I can of course be reached at gaurav at tekritisoftware dot com
November 2006 Archives
It has been two years of blogging on New Delhi Times in its present incarnation. I am feeling a little bored and stagnant with the present format. I want to make some changes but not sure what. Some of the things I am thinking of are
1. Inviting guest bloggers to post on the blog so it doesn't remain a monologue (email me - gaurav at tekritisoftware dot come - if you are interested in contributing)
2. Keep the blog as it is but add a couple of "HOWTO" sections (2 most common howto requests I get thru my blog are for return to India and setting up companies in India)
3. It might be even worth it to build some basic community (forums, groups maybe?) around entrepreneurship and/or R2I.
4. Just do some UI changes because I am myself getting tired of the present layout
5. I have briefly contemplated doing product/website reviews because I am getting a lot of requests for that too. This is something I am not very keen on doing on a regular basis because it requires too much time and time is something I am always short on!
6. Anything else?
What do you think? Suggestions are most welcome!
I had a brain wave couple of days back! It was one of those moments when in a flash a new idea dawns upon you. I was reading reviews on a popular Indian B2C portal (name withheld!) on mouthshut.com. The reviewers were absolutely vicious in their condemnation of the web site - especially their customer service. I don't know much about this particular website, but it does appear that they are a marketing driven organization. They have a very recognizable brand and most certainly their marketing budget runs into 10s of crores of Rupees. While reading those customer reviews, the obvious dawned upon me (OK so it wasn't much of a brainwave but I had never thought along these lines!).
Allow me to elaborate. In software development, we have a concept called "test driven development". Essentially what that means is that when a new feature is to be added to a product, the test team first figures out if it is even possible to test this new feature. If not, then the test team can veto the feature even if developing the feature is feasible. I love this approach because building a product or a feature that can't be tested isn't very useful. At Microsoft, we had once shelved a feature that required setting up elaborate networking infrastructure for testing it. It was just way too expensive and unreliable to test. This approach is great because it makes sure you build only something that will work well in the hands of the user. Now lets apply that analogy to any consumer focused business - say an online book retailer (the website mentioned above is not a book retailer!). Imagine they have a budget of (say) $10 million. How do they decide how much to spend on product development, how much on marketing and how much on customer service? More often that not, this decision happens in the same order - first figure out how much money is required for building the product, then set a marketing budget and as the product starts selling ramp up on customer service. I think its a flawed approach. This is precisely the reason why customer service sucks universally.
Now consider the opposite approach - which I will call customer service driven development. In the above example, the book retailer figures out what it will take to provide top notch customer service. That might mean setting up a call center, signing up with courier service, selecting and deploying a CRM system etc. So in effect, there is some cost associated with servicing a customer. Note that there is customer service cost associated with every new feature you add in your product - this could be cost of educating the users or the cost of servicing more customers that buy as a consequence of adding those new features. From this analysis would emerge the amount of volume (in terms of users and sales) that the website's customer service infrastructure (CSI) can handle. Say it comes to handling 300 book sales per day. Now from this should be derived product and marketing budgets. What kind of product do we need to do 300 book sales per day? And how much do we need to spend on marketing to attract enough traffic to reach 300 book sales (and NOT reach 1000 book sales)? Ideally the customer service infrastructure should be redundant so when sales and marketing is targeting 300 book sales, the customer service infrastructure can in reality handle upto (say) 500 book sales. Each time a new feature is considered for the product, the question should be asked if our CSI can handle the consequences. Each time a additional dollar is kept aside for marketing, the question should be asked if CSI can handle the additional sales.
This is obviously the hard way to do business which is why it is rarely followed. This is also why we get to hear "your call is important to us blah blah blah" each time we are forced to call up customer service. But I really hope that we see more businesses follow this model successfully because the state of customer service is the pits today!
Please please please read this post by Kathy Sierra! The only refreshing piece I have found in the blogosphere in the last several weeks! I just loved it! Kathy talks about user passion but passion is most important for every entrepreneur.
Passion is a beautiful thing. Passion is what keeps you awake at night because you are so excited about what you are building. Passion is what makes you work on weekends. Passion is what blinds you to imaginary hurdles. Passion is what makes you deaf to destructive criticism. Passion more than makes up for lack of money. Passion attracts talent. Passion attracts customers. Passion brings pride in what you are doing. Passion sells your product. Passion sells your dreams. Passion makes you think differently. Passion makes you less greedy. Passion is what helps you get up after a bad fall. Passion is what builds great companies. Passion is the only hope for a startup.
My buddy Vishesh's blog post finally got me to write my own thoughts on this issue of life. When I had first read the "Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy", I had not realized the profoundness behind the rather amusing conlusion in the book that the answer to the question of life, universe and everything else is "42". The answer seems funnily absurd and in its own brilliant way shows how futile it is to try and explain life.
Religions were created precisely for the purpose of explaining life. Why things happen the way they do is often linked to ones "Karma". So if you do bad things, then bad things will happen to you and vice versa. While, this is a convenient explanation that everybody likes to believe, the fact is that real life is rarely like that. Obviously bad deeds go unpunished. At the same time, nasty things happen to good people. So while I am a believer, I do not think religion can satisfactorily explain life.
So how does one explain life? Perhaps, the most logical explanation is to think of life as a sequence of unconnected random events. The moment we try to link cause-effect relationship to events in our life, we fail to understand life. If one can truly believe that life is just a bunch of random things happening for no specific reason, you can stop struggling with this question. If you can really think that good things are not a consequence of good deeds and bad things dont happen because of bad deeds, you can stop asking the "why me?" question. Why you? Because it had to happen to some random being - it just happened to be you. If you really follow this philosophy, then you would do your good deeds never expecting anything in return. Similarly, you will not hold yourself accountable for an occasional little sin you might commit. Its truly like "living in the moment". The past doesn't affect the present and the present will not affect the future.
While I may profess the above, I definitely do not follow that. Why? Because its damn hard to follow that philosophy! The human mind tries to rationalize everything. But if you can, then give this approach to life a try. If it really works, then maybe they can religion after me or something......
Can entrepreneurship be taught? That was one of the questions that got discussed at various points at TiECon. Many aspiring entrepreneurs questioned the VCs as to what they are doing for educating them about entrepreneurship. Somebody also asked if it makes sense to have a course on entrepreneurship in schools.
My take is that you can't teach somebody how to become an entrepreneur. You can teach somebody how to become a doctor or an engineer but not an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurship has to come from within. If you ask, most entrepreneurs will tell you that the reason they started out was because the urge to start became so strong that they just had to give up what they were doing and dive into it. Hardly anybody will say that they started a company because they attended a course in entrepreneurship.
That doesn't mean that courses in entrepreneurship are not useful. One can learn a lot about the basics of running a business in such courses. The best way to learn the ropes, however, is to actually work in a startup. The real challenge of doing a startup is dealing with the everyday fires that occur without notice. The real challenge is in building a great team and keeping it motivated. The real challenge is in doing more with less. The real challenge is in not getting burnt out working 16 hours a day, 7 days a week. All of this can't be taught. It needs to be experienced. A startup is a the best on the job training one can get in entrepreneurship. Perhaps that is one reason why so many successful companies led to creation of other successful startups (Microsoft is of course the best example of this).
So if you are serious about entrepreneurship but not yet ready for it, working at a startup might be the next best thing!
