kapilbharati.com

I am finally wrapping up with my first money making startup this October. This post reflects upon some of the lessons learnt / challenges / issues that I encountered during the past year and half or so

• Alignment between founders - Although there were only two of us, but our approach to problems was very different. This can be constructive or destructive and the founder relationship should be mature enough to know when to agree to disagree
• Attracting technical talent  - Initial months, money was an issue and paying big salaries was not an option ... so it was assumed that once we raise the salary, it would be easier to find people. Now we had the money, it was still difficult to find the right person. I was looking for someone with a min of 3-5years of hands on experience ... If the # of years is more, then the hands on exp goes away, if the # of years is less - the exposure goes down ... in short finding a sr developer was very difficult
• In a start-up you first need to define the problem, then find best options to solve the problem and in the process find a sustainable business model. Once our syndication was up and running, defining the problem statement for next piece of work was a challenge - initial customer identification and identifying the minimum viable product. This is where I guess an in-depth knowledge of product is required, if not, the idea is to hire a SME and then start iterating to find the right fit for identified customers
• Too much distraction - the whole financial side - payments from US, co-ordination with banks, taxes, audits, payroll, royalties, the ministry of commerce rules and regulations are a big pain in the ass. Investing in the right bank, CA, legal etc is a must - even if they cost more - they end up saving you money by saving your precious time.

• Knowingly or unknowingly the customer acquisition process for the basic syndication model was executed very well. The reason it went well because my partner had good relationships with the key people at some of the respected / big publication houses. Once you get them on-board, others don't mind giving you a try
• For the basic syndication - the competition was limited. How many content aggregators do you know working out of India who would syndicate Indian content?
• Building the application to support and automate the aggregation and syndication was technically not that challenging. There was nothing "new" that had to be built. The trick was to choose the right technical stack that could integrate very well with publication feeds. The framework that was built could be customized for every publication or a bunch of publications that followed a standard format (RSS, XML, PDF etc) - it could scale horizontal and vertical