9 things to consider before starting up

Starting a startup or a business venture requires long-term technical, functional, financial and emotional commitment. We work with startup founders and entrepreneurs everyday, listen to the problems that they want to solve, and see them passionately wanting to start their dream project.

While doing this, we have created a list of do’s and don’ts, a sort of knowledge base, for startups. We are now able to understand why some of them succeed and why most fail. They often lack one thing or another that they could not address, resolve or manage which eventually forces them to shut down, many times even before they could gain traction.

Here are the nine most important factors that I’ve personally experienced, and believe that a founder or entrepreneur should keep in mind before getting started with their startup journey.

1. Ideas are easy to come by. Implementation is everything.

I remember when I went to Bangalore to study IT engineering, my dad once told me it would be a lot more convenient if they could see me daily from home. The idea came some seven to eight years early to be implemented into a viable product for the Indian market. Chatting was already quite the phenomenon then, but here, we were talking about mobile telephones with live video streaming capabilities!

Back in those days in 2000-2001, the cellular revolution was yet to heat up in India. Internet broadband and 3G were not yet used commercially in a big way. My dad’s idea was simply to come up with an application like Skype, though Skype itself had not yet come into existence back then. While the idea was terrific and addressed a real problem, solving it was not practical in those days. The market was not yet mature, and implementing something like that would be too far ahead of the times, even if I had tried.

I later started a community website called itprofiles.net in 2002, when I was 20 years old. It now redirects to NCrypted’s products and platform store front (NCrypted.net).

It started off as a resource forum for my friends and colleagues, and later pivoted into a community where students, from not just my college but from other colleges as well, could register, connect and get in touch with each other to discuss assignments. It had features like sending friend requests, managing your network of friends, and a forum where anybody could share files, start posts/threads, like and comment on posts. In a few months, we had more than 5,000 members from all over Bangalore, mostly comprising of college students and faculty members.

I didn’t even know back then that I had created a social network startup, almost two years before Facebook’s inception. The startup ecosystem was absent in India back then, and there was almost no encouragement from the industry or college for something like it in those days.

I had no idea back then how it could make money or even survive in long run, and what the future held for the industry. Online social networking was a new concept back then, with only a handful of sites such as Myspace, Friendster (both launched after 2003) in the US. It was entirely unexplored in India.

The social networking bug had not even hit the US market at that time. There were a few startups, but they were more than dating platforms, instead of a social network.

I didn’t even know back then that I could approach investors to raise money for expansion.

2. Solve a problem close to heart

3. Perfection is a myth. Getting started is key.

4. Build the prototype, validate the product, listen to users

5. Don’t fall in love with your design. Customers don’t want your design. They want a solution.

6. Don’t fret about your features or product launch, think first about the problem you want to solve.

7. Don’t fall in love with your product. First, love your customers, and let them love your product.

8. Trust your guts, but verify with validation.

9. Is your site/app converting users or is it simply your visiting card?