kivanmaharaj.com

Starting a company is exciting and full of fun and adventure. It is probably the steepest learning curve you will ever have. There are days you think why am I doing this or will this ever work or I am sure someone has thought about this in some lab in Google or Yahoo.

There is one thing we need to keep in mind, measure everything. Make sure you have tools to measure everything from website analytics to return on advertising. The truth is that any data is better then no data.

Collect -> Analyse -> Improve -> Collect

The only reason why Google is doing so well is because of the above concept. Simple yet powerful. This is one method I will be following all the time.

With all the turmoil in the markets and bankruptcy of the largest financial houses in the world most people are thinking what happens to my  job, pension, life in general. I as well was thinking about the same thing. The reality is that no one immune to what is happening ,even if you stay far from the US. We are living in a global society and there are rules that impact us all.

People are currently looking to cut costs and pay off debt as wll as manage expenses. Well the best thing to do now is provide people with those services , in a cheap to free effective way so that managingtheir costs become easy without the hassle of learning a new financial application.

There are currently web apps out there that provide this type of service like mint.com. But we need to look at the market again and have an allin one tool that can do it in an easy way as well as provide reports and patterns on expenditure.

This would work really well in the current market place.

Think about it and let me know.

When you are in startup mode you are in most cases cash stapped so you cannot offer those great packages to talented people that companies like Google or Microsoft can. This usually leads to one of many options. you could offer a share incentive scheme to you potential team, a partnership or a mixture of all with a cash portion.

This may seem like a super idea as you get skills at a fraction of the cost that can assist in building you producting or taking it to market. But with a partnership comes the good and the bad. Like with a marriage if you do not work out the finer details at the beginning you are asking for failure.

So what do you need to put in place to safegaurd yourself as much as possible but still make sure the other party is happy with the offer.

The first and most important thing is a contract. This is the basis for the entire partnership. Within that contract you should make sure you have an exit strategy , the value each one brings to the table and what they will be allowed to take when they leave. That could be anything for 50% or the value of the buisness right up to 0% or anything in between. Just be careful to not look like greedy while doing this part as you would then already have created the impression that the person joining is going to be the losing party at the end of the day which in turn could lead to other nasty issues later.

Also make sure that there is one person with operation control as having an equal partnership will lead to stalemates in the business when it comes to making decisions.

As a startup business this is important to keep in mind otherwise you will be asking for issues later.

As a small business, your major costs besides HR is buying technology. After you buy servers , software, licenses and an array of other products you could really be out of pocket. The other option is to lease the equipment but then you are locked into a long term contract which might fit into your current budget.

So what is the best option ? That is always a difficult question as there are so many options in the market place. I think the first thing to consider is cost versus uptime of the service you are receiving as wel as flexiblility of the solution to fit your business needs.

With all the buzz on cloud computing and everything online it might make sense to have have all your apps hosted online and managed with you being able to access everyhting via a browser, not via a VPN solution which you will need if everything is hosted from your office.

I think in many countries people just dont look at the hosted option as a possible cheap solution to keeping your team mobile and keeping your costs down.

There are many options to out there from Microsoft, Google, Zoho, Zimbra, Salesforce. Unfortunately at the moment there is probably none that can give an all in one solution, so you might have to buy from different online providers to get all you need.

With the release of my first product soon, I was pondering whether I release the product fully to the public or a private beta so that I could get feedback from a select audience and fix the bugs then and there.

On the one hand I see the market moving so fast that if I delay a full release I could be losing valuable traction and revenue. It is a tricky situation. the other thing is what if there is a person already out there that has a similar offering and about to release it to the public. That could really slow my effort to gorw in the market.

I am still pondering on this and hopefully come up with an answer soon.

So you have an idea and now need to make it a reality. If it is a web app , you could do it these days on a relatively low budget. The main concern is not how cheap you do it ,but the quality of the product.

In the web space there are so many me too products you really have to have an outstanding product to get the required attention. It should be so easy to use that people don’t have to think. That is really how easy it should be use.

Consumers want ease of use and seeing that most of us don’t read the manual ,the product has to be consumer friendly. A perfect example is the Apple Ipod. You don’t have to get a degree to use it. It is so simple that is become so popular. Believe me , if it was built like a mainframe app, Apple might have sold only 100.

The same goes for web apps. So simple that I don’t have to think. If we start building more apps like that we are sure to be one step above our competitors.

So you have a startup and now you need to build a passionate user base as well as get that userbase to generate revenue for you and you startup.

One small glitch, you need to make people aware that you have a product. Marketing comes into play here. Where and how do you market ? Well that is a difficult one as marketing no matter how well you think you know your audience is a hit and miss game. So how do work around having many misses. Well I think the shotgun approach is probably the best one. Put your brand anywhere and everywhere. It should be in your face all the time and everywhere you look.

So does a target audience reall matter. I personally think not as these days people can consume the same product but live totally seperate lives. So you need to look at the entire consumer base as possible users including all age groups. These days even older people use products marketed towards a younger age demographic.

For my startup I intend following the market everywhere and anywhere approach.

With so many startups currently in the web space fighting for users and revenue , one important factor comes into play, do you build your own ad network or partner and split the profits. It is easy to say hey I am small so let me partner up and not worry where the money is coming from as I have to focus on technology and building a userbase. Well that is all good and well , but keep this in mind, especially if you are a funded entity, if Google thought the same way would they be the king of the hill at the moment ? The obvious answer is no. So  I was thinking as part of my strategy , I would look at methods and means to build my own ad network and take it to market while I build apps and take that to market. I think it is much harder but the long term benefits and spinoffs could be greater then you think.One of the most obvious is the fact that you retain 100% of the revenue as many ad networks would only give you between 30 and 70 percent of the revenue depending on your site demographics and traction.It sounds crazy but that is what they said about personal computing and mobile phones a short while back and look at how those turned out. 

With the announcement of Google’s Chrome web browser , most people are worndering why we need another web browser. Well it is not the case of why we the consumer need another web browser but more a case of why Google needs to give us the browser.

Even though the new browser is built from the ground up and seems fairly impressive from a technology point of view , the real action is actually from the fact that our friendly neigbourhood software company Microsoft is releasing IE8 with portn mode filters that delete cookies and other annoying tracking tools. This will hurt Google in the long run as they will be unable to effectively sell those targeted ads to consumers.

So the only option really was to create their own browser and hope it gains traction in the market. I think it will but Microsoft is still king in this space and Firefox is second so they have a tough fight on their hands as well as not souring the realtionship with Firefox.

At the end of the day Google needs to keep its shareholders happy and generate huge profits to do that. So I think the “Don’t be evil” slogan is really starting to wear thin. Very soon we will not really see a difference between Google and Microsoft. Just another company we love to hate but need to use.

But I am sure as consumers we can decide what is best for our privacy, not a huge company like Microsoft or Google.

We read everywhere that content is king. If you have good content then you will drive traffic to your site. But is really ? How is content defined ? Who sets the guidelines for content ? Content is really only needed in certain circumstances such as a help site or infomation site.

If you look at most social networks they don’t permit search engines to get access to user generated content as that is essentially private to the user who created it and his or her connections.

Multiply.com is a perfect example of a closed network that keeps search engine bots out of of its network. But people still come and sign up.

I believe that content is only king because search engines require it to rank you site or display your site in the top ten. That is it. There are so many sites with just ads on it that get cached and land in the top ten, but actually have very little content.

So if we all closed our content to search engines and only allowed linking from site to site , then would we really need search engines ? I guess not.