4 Mistakes Made And Lessons Learnt by Vijay of SMSnoodle

As an entrepreneur, you might have read many tips on starting up (check out why you should eat your dog food), but when it actually comes down to your own startup, you might be tempted to make the same mistakes you were warned about. Here, founder of failed startup SMSnoodle, Vijay Ganesan, contributes his thoughts on a few of his mistakes made and lessons to be learnt.

Vijay writes…

SMSnoodle was an outcome of our (my friend Arun and my) stint at iAccelerator2008 camp, which is an Indian Ycombinator version conducted by IIM-A (Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad). SMSnoodle is an SMS based entertainment channel for the Singapore region.

The mistakes we did with SMSnoodle taught us a lot of things that we could have done better. You must have heard most of them before, but you can flush your brain and refill it again.

1) Validate Your Startup Idea

Discuss your startup idea not only with friends, but also other people who are strangers to you. I promise that you will definitely learn a lot here. The concept of your idea getting stolen is 99.99% impossible. Visit barcamps, hackerspace, geek terminals and bounce your ideas to different people.

We failed to do this step and hence overestimated the Singapore market. We found that the Singapore market for such a service turned out to be very small. People are SMS crazy in Singapore, but that does not mean that they were ready to pay for the service.

Looking back I would say this is the most important step which we could have done to save a lot of disappointment later.

Here is another method to valiate your idea. Get a “landing page” for your startup and buy some google ads as well [Google ads worth 75$ is free with most hosting services]. In your landing page request people to subscribe to your newsletter to get notified on when you would startup. Look at the Click through rate and you would get some good statistics for your startup idea.

Here you can find some examples to design your landing page.

2) Get To Market Soon

I have been hearing this advice from the time I have been in my mother’s womb. If you are a techie, there is a high chance that you will not follow this piece of advice. In your heart, you are probably not satisfied with any level of development and always want to make further improvements.