my notes, thoughts, learnings etc.
I recently came across this video by Sir Arthur C Clarke and was simply mesmerized by his prediction of how the future will look like. Here is the clip of the 1964 BBC video on youtube: First Part: Second Part (sounded like Star Trek script, reminded of Genesis (Wrath of Khan)):
I have been following MongoDB for over an year. The intention was to use MongoDB to store data related to logging, transmission, reporting etc at Contify, with document database / denormalized data it would be easier to do aggregation, custom views, reporting etc on top of it as compared to RDBMS like Postgres or MySql. Although I never got close to taking it to production ... but did manage to get my hands dirty. At that time I also looked at CouchDB, but preferred MongoDB for the following reasons:
Recently picked up a new scanner that could scan my 35mm film negatives into full blown digital pics!!! I wanted to pick up Epson 300, but that was not available at Nehru Place, the next best option was HP G3110 - so far it has been pretty good, a bit slow, hangs couple of times ... well there is so much you can get for less than $150
So here are some of my first pics that I had captured using my Canon Rebel 2000GS (some listed below), they were scanned from the original negatives!
If you like these pics you might enjoy my flickr pics too: my top flickr tags
During my discussions with various entrepreneurs / investors during last couple of weeks, one of the things that came out was this question - why do you want to do a startup? When I did my first startup, I really did not have much idea of what I was getting into. But there was a rush, energy and feeling of being innovative and creative. At last I get to do what I really want to do ... it did not last long, my aspirations / passion somewhere got squeezed between stakeholder requirements ... be it the investor, developers, partners etc ... I soon gave up When I did my second startup, I wanted to run away from my then employer. I did get the freedom of picking up my technical stack, experimenting with the cloud etc but soon found myself constrained. If I just need to build a product to a certain spec then how is it different for working for any other IT company? In both the situations, I think I found myself in a startup for the sake of being in a startup, which was wrong. What is most valuable to me is to be creative and innovative. I do wish to make usable products for a customer but do want to dictate my features and my way of doing things on it. The product needs to have my "flavor" to it ... Working (trying) as a single founder I learnt that if you are a technical guy, there is often an urge to build it and do it for yourself. I think one needs to have a lot of discipline - especially if you are a single founder - you don't build for yourself, you always build for your customer. Your sales team are your ears on the ground and unless your product does not drive their effort, you might end up developing to your sales team specifications. You need to have the ability to filter out the meaningful features from customer's feedback, add your flavor to it and update your product. Lessons Learned:
On my quest to find the next thing to keep myself entertained and busy, I have been focusing on SaaS offerings for SMBs. I feel that this area has not received enough attention in India and lots can be done. Something I need to validate. I am pretty confident that I will be able to pull out a decent product, scale it and take it to a level where it is meaningful to the end customer. The place where I have been struggling was how do I go about customer acquisition. Most of the answers seemed to point to Marketing channels, SEO / SEM etc etc, the problem of how to identify the customer, what steps need to be followed were still not clear. This is when I came across a post by Eric Ries on the book "Entrepreneurs guide to Customer Development". This book is based on Steve Blank's Four Steps to Epiphany. I highly recommend Steve's blog, an excellent resource for entrepreneurs, there are lot of things that I have learned from his posts. Listed below is one of his presentations on Customer Development: