You’ve shaped up your business idea to flag off. You have a pool of talent believing in that idea and lined up with working prototype with feedback. Now, it’s time for funding to take your idea to concept to design to product to a successful business. Depending on the idea, startup projects can be particularly expensive and often incur new, unforeseen costs. That is particularly true of...
If I say “the startup scene in India has taken off in a big way”, it’s probably the biggest understatement of this year! Startups are sprouting from every corner of this country fueled by big success stories. An eager online and print media are doing their best to fan the flames of entrepreneurship. That’s why India has now the third largest base of Startups in the world. The glamour of starting...
Valuefy was started in 2010 to empower fund houses to make informed decisions better and faster. Vivek Singal, a B.Tech from IIT Bombay and Sharad Singh, an MBA from IIM Ahmedabad worked together at Fractal Analytics, an analytics firm, before starting Valuefy. On choosing to build a product like this, Vivek shares, “When we chose our niche, which was a B2B product for such a specific market, at...
You have an idea, and you start up. Then you quit your job, and pursue it full-time. What follows next is the quintessential dilemma of a startup founder — “Should I raise money now?” Unless you have a machine that mints money, you will find yourself wondering about it in your startup journey. In mine, I reached stages where I had questions in my mind to which raising money was one of the answers...
To me, entrepreneurship is a dynamic manifestation of creating connected values with compassion; so I focus on creating connected values without worrying for my funding orientation. When I started, after coming out of Sun Microsystems, I was not thinking about money as I was able to get some money by helping people who were using the product that I built at Sun. I did not know what it takes to...
I had started InBoundio in Jan 2013. After doing lot of freelancing, services and building casual hobby products, this was my first serious attempt in building a web product and business. This also made me took a dive into core technology as earlier I only had surface knowledge of technology. It did well and got reasonable success. We did plenty of iterations with product feature and pricing and...
The Bootstrap Ride There are many paths to successfully bootstrapping a start-up. The trick is finding the way that works best for you. Now more than two years into my journey, I want to share a few lessons I wish I had learned earlier. I would like to share a few tips from my experiences of bootstrapping an international startup. I want to speak the reality I experienced, my personal opinions...
“Pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps” refers to 19th century high-top boots that were pulled on by tugging at the ankle strap. It generally means doing something on your own, without any outside help. In the present day context, bootstrapping is a commonly used term used to describe startups that rather than seeking help from external investors, an entrepreneur fund the development of their...
In last 4 years, I have built 3 startups and multiple products, some did well, some didn’t. Currently I am building AeroLeads which is a prospect generation software, before this, I built InBoundio and before it WorkMonk (now shut down). In between, I took few short and one long break (of one year). With all this experience, I have learnt a lot about how to build a business, about technology...
I am bootstrapping AeroLeads and InBoundio, 2 product based startups and strongly feels before raising money, everyone should bootstrap as you want to learn how to manage resources and money before you actually raise money to have more resources. Here is what I can suggest from my learning, experience and what I have seen from other bootstrapped startups 1. Start from your own home – some...
