It’s a darn good time to be an entrepreneur in India – but only if you know whats available to you. I have been coming across a whole lot of resources that are available to an entrepreneur today, that you perhaps are not aware of.

The beauty about growing a startup or an SME is that the right set of tools really can make a whole lot of difference. Here are some tools that are sure to make your day.

Indian SME Toolkit: This is perhaps the holy grail of everything that you ever need. The initiative launched by ICICI, IFC and IBM has a host of templates for everything you need for running a startup or SME. Let me give you an example. There are close to a hundred plus templates on just invoices. Yep, you are going to need that to bill your customer, and when it does happen *fingers crossed* you wouldn’t have to ask around as to what all needs to go into it.

Zoho Apps: This is still the one stop place for most things that you ever need when it comes to tools for CRM, Project management, Collaborative work process, etc etc.

DimDim: I am sure that you notice all those high-flying corporates to be doing videoconferencing, desktop sharing and all those snazzy stuff. DimDim gives it to you at a price you can afford – for free. There were some minor reliability issues when I last tried it, from the revamp of the site and the positioning, I expect that that should be fixed by now.

TeamViewer: If you are collaborating remotely, and want to take over the computer of your counterpart to whiff up a rapid prototype for the UI, or show something, Teamviewer is an option. It pretty much looks like a desktop sharing app, but am hearing good reviews about it. Alternative Option: Citrix GotoMeeting

Weebly: While you are scrambling to put together your team, setup appointments with your auditors, and do those lineup of interviews and run around in unconferences, you probably dont want your website and domain looking dull. Weebly is one quick way to cough up a website which will keep the plate warm, till you have the time to get there.

Basecamp: Project Management, and the first name you ever and only need to utter is Basecamp. ActivCollab is a similar downloadable version which you can host in your own server. FogBugz is another option.

Skype: When it comes to interacting within the team, and at times even with outsiders, Skype wins hands down. Get some of those Skypeout minutes and I am told that the audio quality improves – not sure how much of it is true though.

Google Talk: For times when you dont want to hear the other person’s voice, but just want to touch base on and off, Gtalk is your friend. You dont want to rely on Skype for its messaging – at times the message gets lost in oblivion and comes back.

Financial Planning: I am told that TurboCash – Free Accounting Software (Though all that you need initially are some well done excel workbooks, and Wesabe are good options to look into to setup the financial processes quickly. You might want to run the final list through your local auditor though. Things change so fast in this scene that you dont want to take a chance in being wrong.

Shopify: You need to setup an ecommerce site and the going rate to build one with any freelancing community can be quite high. The even worse part is that you still don’t know whether what you are building will work, and you want to iterate quickly keeping your costs low. Shopify is a step towards that. It seems that most folks there have permanently stuck on to that, since the platform does give you a great commercial feel.

Freshbooks: Do you know the pain of sending invoices to your clients and keeping track of it? Most of all, the time when the lack of professionalism shows is when you are trying to keep that time of your interaction where money is involved as clean as possible. Freshbooks is an awesome tool and service for that. Highly recommended and I’ve gotten a few of my startups on it, and they are loving it. Blinksale is another option.

Campaign Monitor: Most of you guys are on the webspace. Which also mean that you send out a lot of mailers asking people to sign up for stuff. Let me be honest: Most of them look darn ugly that my first impression plummets, never to sign up for that service. Campaign Monitor is one good way to get such snobby customers onboard. Plus, I believe it offers a nice way to track responses.

FaxitNice: For those of you whoever are, or when your customers insist to live in the 90s day and age of faxes.

More to Follow…

Relevant Read: The Absolute Startup Essentials Series.

Credits:
Tools for Bootstrappers – Anjana Vivek
Setting up a Low-cost conference Room – Amit Ranjan

During a recent flight trip, I was mulling over what it would possibly take to build a company that lasts. I donno, call me weird or plan simple narcissistic, but I’d like to build a company that is around till I am, or even beyond. I meet plenty of folks, especially within the entrepreneurial community who keep saying that they bootstrapped three, four, five ventures and all and if you do ask them what their last ventures are upto, there is the two second silence that follows.

I am not blaming them.

It seems to be the case even with Skype. They made the sale, and though Skype as a service goes on (atleast as long as ebay goes on), there is nothing dramatic or new that I’m hearing from that camp. Its almost sad, given how they had captured people’s imaginations and support by the storm.

Now given the Deccan-Kingfisher deal as a backdrop, most would argue that once a company is sold, there is nothing much the promoter can do. That is something I said about the Deccan Brand issue that was coming up. But if your company is built with values and notions that are inherently the brand, and its so engrossed in its operations, I don’t think you’d be able to separate it out – not out of the founder, not out of the people who work for the company, nor out of the minds of the people who are customers. I don’t think Deccan had much of values, or notion, apart from the Low Cost affordability – which kingfisher is more than providing and at much better service. Suddenly no one has a reason to complain.

So here are some pointers which I had jotted down, and I hope to put to practice someday.

Building a Business the Old fashioned way Strategies:

Seems pretty basic so far. But most of it translates into pretty complex and a anti-trend to what is happening with startups around. Try it. See if you can genuinely qualify for building a business that is going to last.

Hardware: Buy, Don’t lease.

Most folks who are starting up in the valley would ask you to lease and not buy. But with most hardware and computers, it would actually work out to be cheaper to just buy them, since you can. The Depreciation factor actually helps you out.

For God’s sakes, find a mentor.
I dont know what you will do. But if your industry, vertical and idea is frozen and you have started working on the prototype, you need to find yourself a mentor before its too late. It would be ideal to find someone who knows the industry and its painpoints quite well so that he can provide some insight into the industry that you are trying to tap into.

Keep a safety cash stash.
Don’t run from hand to mouth. Its good habit and practice to always keep a month or twos expenses as a secret stash (hopefully in a bank account) and try not to touch it unless absolutely essential.

Don’t be stupid and finance your venture using a credit card.
It’s simple as that. Credit cards are just money sucking systems and if you are planning on financing your venture using a credit card, lets just say that I have no faith in your financial planning or business sense anymore.

Use the Social Media platform Effectively.
Build the buzz from the beginning. Keep them curious, but satisfy them a little once a while. Manage your marketing, and balance your hype. Keep them swarming, but let them peek once a while. Given the low entry barriers to marketing and being in a connected world, you do not have an excuse to wait till you grow big so that you can hire a PR firm to do your marketing.

Plan your first hire.
The first hire of the company essentially is the royal diadem, if I may say so. The attitude that he or she posses will make a lot of difference. It is perfectly okay to reject 99 people to hire the 100th right candidate. Be picky, choosy and you can even afford to be a jerk, but not to make a bad hire.

Get back quickly.
One of the things that I get oooh-ed and aaah-ed running Proto.in is as to how quickly I do get back to them. I rarely let 10 hours – let alone a few hours get by before I get to anyone. I make sure that I respond to even the silliest queries in the nicest manner possible. Considering that you are just starting out and someone has actually taken the time to write, its the least you could do. Given that most of the guys from the startup sector are the ones who are in awe, I am actually a little scared. But learn, and remember. Get back to them as soon as possible. Do not let your customers hanging.

Get a sensible lady onboard.
I’d totally go with Guy Kawasaki on this one. There is a major difference between a venture that is run by all-men and one where there is a lady who is an equal partner and has a say in things. Women do have a way of looking at details and trust me, the perspective will definitely help. Also, considering that you will have a higher chance of women who will join startups – they are more daring than men, and will possibly spend long hours in the office, a lady around provides a safe and comfortable environment.

Exploit every opportunity you get to talk.
As Sanjeev Gadre of Subex Azure said in a talk, there is nothing that builds a brand building excercise than the opportunity given, to talk to a targetted and focused audience.

Create a work culture.
startups are a lot of work. But it can also be fun.

Invest in smart and cool ambience.
Get a bean bag. It is ergonomic. It is stylish. And its a statement that this startup is cooler than the other one. Enough said.

More to Follow…

Part I: The Absolute Startup Essentials

When you do start off, you most certainly want to make sure that you start off on the right foot. So here’s a list of things you definitely don’t want to cut corners on, or make compromises on:

The Name.
There are times when I just an amazed at the identity of a corporation. A corporation, essentially is an entity which even without the people has a life and identity on its own. As far as a corporation, or if you prefer the term “company”, is concerned, everybody is working to raise its valuation in one way or another. If the company benefits, eventually and in some cases quite directly the employees benefit.

Individuals cannot grow and make a large impact. It is said that the power of the chair that you sit on is always much more than the person who sits on it. I’d even dare say that the brand of apple, is bigger than steve jobs – though that’s probably the one example in technology history where we’d have a second guess about it.

The point. An identity unites people towards a cause. Start with the name, and a name that means something to you.

[Guy Kawasaki: The Name Game]

The Website, Logo and blog.

You need a website, to ensure that you get the domain name that your name goes with. You can come up with a very basic site that doesnt say much, but says enough or very little to catch people’s curiosity. You’d also require a logo that goes with the name to put together the site.

During your development period the one most crucial aspect that you need is your blog. And get your developers and yourself to religiously blog atleast one a week with an update and something that you guys are fascinated with. Brands are built over time, and building a brand takes more time than building rome. It all starts with one brick at a time, and a blog is a spring board in that direction.

The Gmail enterprise account.

You wouldnt believe how easy it is these days to not delete mails and quickly search by a person’s name to pull out all the conversations i’ve had with that person. And all that for free.

If a startup needs to pinch money, this is the golden pinch. Apply for one of those accounts and get it setup.

Setup a Central Server.

The code has to be in one place. I’d say that it should run a well maintained version of linux or some server-grade OS, and patched with the latest releases to ensure that there are no security issues. Get SVN or a revisioning tool running on it, at the earliest. You could also create a smaller partition to dump all your music collection to share from.

VPN your server.
Set up a VPN account so that you could connect to your server from outside. it will help to check out and check in code wherever you are working from.

Use Skype and Gtalk for Calls.
Every dollar counts. The popularity of skype is slowly weaning, or atleast their marketing efforts have slowed down, but last I checked, the number of skype users have gone up to close to 12 million online, compared to the 7 million, about an year ago. So yep, trust skype and get an account on it.

Visit a Barcamp or two.
The best place to learn how to pitch is in a barcamp. People will throw all sorts of questions at you, but its the place where you can learn to evade the questions you dont want to answer and answer what you want people to hear. You gotta love the brutality of the barcamp audience. It’s the best place to get some validation, and if you are two cool founders, you’d even manage to attract a talent or two to come work for you when you are ready for it.

If you can afford it, get a desktop, and two monitors.
Jason Calacanis says that an extra monitor can significantly improve your work productivity. The one thing you cannot afford to deprive yourself of, is the ability to dream and get those creative juices flowing. Productivity and “feeling good” are inherently connected.

Go with Airtel Broadband, and keep an aircard handy.
For the days when you would travelling, or even maybe walk into a coffee shop, find a corner and start working an aircard comes in handy to be online and perhaps pull out the latest production release code from your server to show off to someone.

Print some visiting cards.
Nothing snazzy, but anything different would be great. I’ll let your creative juices flowing on that one. Don’t print more than a 100 cards. Use them sparingly, and make it last till your beta is out. Imagine every card is a INR 50 currency. It makes giving away cards a little tougher. Hold on to them as sacred identities of someone’s affiliation with you. Be miserly about giving it to everyone.

Chuck out your titles.
In an organization there are three levels of people. There are the top level management, the middle level and the implementing level folks. In a startup, the top level does not exist. There is a rule said and unsaid about working your way up by finding a replacement. When you can eventually afford to – economically and in terms of time and energy – hire someone to manage the team internally, you can move up to the top level. But I can bet ya that it wont be anytime before five years. So Until then, I dont want to hear you calling yourself CEO, CTO, etc. Chuck those titles and get back to work.

Make time to go play, socially.
We know that half the world doesnt accept your lifestyle, but why are you adding more to their ammunition by denying your social life? I’d say you need to set apart time for family and for yourself on a regular basis. It goes without saying that you need to eat well, and take care of yourself. Honor it, at whatever cost.

Stop wasting time and energy on too many tech conferences.
You need all these meets and barcamps and etc, till you figure out what you are doing. After that, you need to get out of the play pen and start racing in the real world, where bigger mammoths are eyeing for the same market that you are aiming for. Cut loose your distractions and focus. Focus or die. It’s quite as simple as that.

Stop reading blogs that are coming out of the Valley.

Most of the stuff that are spoken about day-to-day operations dont work here in India. Even the post by Jason, apart from the second monitor, everything else seemed pretty pointless and unworkable here in India. The key is to read, but also know what to take and what not and keep context at the back of your mind.

“Every act of creation is first of all an act of destruction.” — Pablo Picasso

What is it that makes a great startup? It’s a question that I have been pondering over for sometime now actually and I thought I’d start a conversation around the same. So What makes a startup great? Is it It’s rate of growth? The team? The market? or the amount of funds that its able to raise? Hmm.. Possibly none of the above.

Let me cite you a couple of great examples and let’s draw the parallels from there.

Case #1: The telecom world has been known for skimming the market. While technically the cost of landing a call across the globe was quite insignificant, most operators have charged ridiculous prices for one simple reason – there were no other options. With having no options came the fact that they can price calls at the tags that they want to, and the public innocently was willing to pay for it. All went on as normal till the internet boomed and high speed internet became a reality, and Voice over IP (VoIP) was born. As much as there were a lot of initial attempts (even microsoft and yahoo tried internet telephony and discontinued), the fact that most of the world was yet not on broadband didn’t help the cause at all. Then along came skype with its compression codec which worked on narrowband connections, the way they democratized (decentralized) access and limitations, and the rules of the game were forever changed.

As the story goes, the founders didn’t start with skype, but with Kazaa, which did the same thing for internet file sharing. Kazzaa did for file sharing what Napster started with for music sharing within intranets

Case #2: Before the telecom revolution happened in India, the cost of a telephone line was close to Rs. 10,000. There was a man who had the vision, the drive and the determination to make sure that that cost was sub Rs. 500. Sounds very crazy doesnt it? But it happened, and thats how the TeNeT Group was formed, and thats one of the greatest momentum on which it rides till this day.

Case #3: There was once a time when searching for anything on the internet meant a lot of pain. The closest you will get to anything will be loads and loads of adult websites, which had covered just about every meta tag under the sun and were the default results no matter what you were looking for. Search for your mother’s favorite dessert recipe and you know what you’d get. Then came dogpile, and within the undercurrents came a company which just blew your mind away with the accuracy of information it got to you. Just when most of us, had given up hope of digging out anything useful out of the internet, Google helped make sense of the oodles of information that the cyberworld was churning up.

Case #4: There was once a time when people thought that four wheeler drives were meant only for the highly rich. Ratan Tata took to new levels what Henry Ford started off, with his vision and in delivering on his word, the Tata Nano.

I think we have enough to start with. Can you see the commonality that runs between all these cases. If I have to pick a word for it, I’d choose “controversy”. These are all essentially and rightly so, companies, teams and ideas that challenged the norm.

There was once a wise man who advised me that it was okay to be considered controversial. It’s not a crime, actually a compliment and a pride for an entrepreneur to be controversial. If you are an entrepreneur and you are not controversial, it just means you are just another one of the same – nothing more than wasting everyone’s breathe in the ecosystem. In other words, there is a remote chance that you are actually breaking new ground, when you are controversial.

There is also another reason why I think this makes a lot of sense. When you are starting off with a new company, and with a revolutionary mission in mind (assuming that you do want to break some new ground), it is absolutely essential that you polarize people. There will always be people who will love you and those who hate you no matter what. But the only choice you have is to ensure that there are not many people who are indifferent about what you do. You want to make sure that people choose a side, whether loving or hating your idea for whatever reason it is, and from time to time even swing sides. That’s what a “Buzz” really is all about. If you have that going for you, you are going to have no problems in having people spinning around you, in your new world.

So coming back to our original question, What makes a great Startup? I think it starts off with the vision itself. And the vision of course is something that is grown on the fertile soil of the founders’ imaginations. A great startup is one that changes the rules of the game – and what most refer to as disrupting markets. Not all technology disruptions necessarily disrupt markets and lifestyle as well. But there’s the magic that an entrepreneur brings in and one that differentiates him from a pure scientist.

As per the new economy, free is no longer controversial. It’s actually the norm these days. Discounts and free are words that people have heard and demand for no apparent reason. “Free” has cheapened a lot of services. It is also made possible by the various other laws and economic conditions that make it happen, but might not be something that will go on for long. The “Free” marketing strategy (started off by Gillette) is one of the several marketing strategies, not THE only marketing strategy.

Let me ask. If there is something that everybody keeps saying cant be done, there is probably a good chance that it can be proven otherwise. Does it come close to the where you are standing and aiming for right now?