Hello Reddit,
I am sharing my story; please be kind:P
Have you ever secretly or not so secretly wished for starting a startup?
Do names and stories like facebook, whatsapp, uber, etc fascinate you?
So what is it actually like being an entrepreneur?
It is tough undoubtedly but it does add an additional flavour to your life. People raise their eyebrows as soon as you tell them what you do because it is not common.
Here is my experience or story whatever you prefer. I am sharing with you my mistakes from which I learnt from to make an arbitrary list of things to do and things not to do. Honestly I don’t have any success mantra as I am still struggling but I have hope.(hope to edit the last line someday)
Just as a pointer I am from India and am pretty close to my family. Also a spiritual person and try to be nice to everyone and help whenever I can.
So when I got into a prestigious college, my parents and family were pretty happy that my life was on right track, little did they know that they will be utterly disappointed with my choices to follow in life.
Word about Indians is that we become engineers first and then figure out what to do in life and sometimes don't even do that.
So I was quite young when I started out my adventures. I was just 19 and out of freshman year when I partnered with two friends in college and started working on my first start-up with hopes to get rich quick. It was a Pay-to-Click website which offered incentives to customers to watch ads. We got 5000 registrations in two months but failed miserably with the advertisers. Nobody invested to advertise maybe because even with 5000 subscribers I had no target audience or maybe was just not with the right network.
We concluded that we need some pretty serious marketing but had no budget. So it became important for us generate some revenues. For which we made a niche blog called Celebrities Surgery which covered latest news about celebrities getting plastic surgeries done. Traffic started coming in approx 15k-25k per month for 3 straight months and generated a small revenue as a reward for efforts but that was not enough to keep our heads afloat. Though I still own the domain but eventually we gave it up as we had to keep up with all the latest news to maintain our rankings in google which we thought was not worth it. Maybe the wrong niche or maybe we gave it up too soon.
But something was working for us as while we were doing this an uncle of mine offered me a small amount to build him a business website. We were flabbergasted by the offer and delivered it as fast as we could. Must say smell of those first earned bucks was great and thus decided to take our services forward. All partners loaned small amounts from their sources to list ourselves in all major service directories to find new clients for our IT services.
We did quite well to bag some impressive projects like a web portal for a tours and travels company and even built a CRM for a trader firm. Grew our team by hiring freshers. (as obviously we were on a tight budget) Had our first major success to get our biggest project that was to develop a fully functional ERP for an ecommerce logistics company and hire them a team to operate it. But as they say bigger the project bigger the pressure. Pressure which can bring personal differences into professional relations and then break them. Which in our case lead to ending our partnership. We still managed to deliver our commitments for the project and decided to move on.
Now alone I had a chance to rebuild my dreams. I always wanted to develop some good new products to offer to a wider audience with my start-up but realised soon enough that I will need really deep pockets to successfully develop and market anything i make as there is simply no short-cut. It's only in last 2-3 years the startup scene India has taken up speed. I still have doc files on my laptop with ideas like uber, tinder, and many more (well not exactly but roughly) timestamped to dates like 2009-2013. I am not trying to claim them here, I know that “an Idea is worthless without innovation” a quote I read in book open the windows by sukant ratnakar. Just saying that my Ideas had potential and that I was greedy to think that I can do everything by myself. Anyhow, that being said I decided to establish services startup again only to establish a team which can deliver on my client’s requirements and simultaneously work with me on my dream projects (I had more than a few). Maybe I expected too much here, Big mistake.
Moving forward I did start my second startup as a consultancy agency. I moved to a new location for better IT opportunities and talent. Did branding and what not to start it with a bang. Started hiring new people mostly freshers to keep the expenses down. As a result got to work with some major corporates like Deloitte, Vi-john, News channels, etc. Did election campaigns, helped in making of countless e commerce websites and guided many to become successful online sellers.
You must have come across articles about the awesome work environments at companies like google and facebook. Well I did too, and it inspired me. It made a lot of sense to me to build a co-working space to bring out best from your team and increase productivity. Challange for me was to build this without big bucks that the above stated companies have.
Scopes of my projects used to be very diverse which required a wide variety of technical skills which meant some back breaking labor for me to teach additional skills to the team when many times honestly didn’t knew myself, read, referred and learnt with them. Though it became a reason for low productivity but I always thought that it cannot harm us as new skills acquired can only help us in future since we can meet the deadlines by putting in a few extra hours.
Still couldn't make ends meet.
As my team members acquired new skills they got offered new jobs really quick on exponential packages I couldn’t compete with. I had to let some very good ones go. Thought I should not waste my time on teaching newbies and hire some people with professional experience. Immediately costs went up.
Laying spotlight on market, it was not good either. India has just seen rise of internet and the age of IT in the past decade, even with a strong network I had to convince people in power for hours to choose my services. I tried hiring sales executives as well, but that didn’t turned out well either so thought I should stick to myself as a solesaleforce till we are a small business. I always tried to give something extra and deliver the highest quality of work i can to my clients to earn goodwill and reputation which I shouldn’t have. To add to that most of time I had to be on client-site.
As a result I was away from office for long hours even then I tried to co-ordinate. I tried hiring managers to look after the performance of my technical team. Turns out it is even a bigger task to look over your management team.
Nothing seemed to go on my way there. Started working to push things rather than trying to grow. Salaries, rent and other operational liabilities every month started becoming my daily nightmare.
It was a just matter of time that everything collapses and eventually it did.
It took me about an year to start again, I started selling apparels online and am still doing the same, however due to my background I was offered to open a branch office of an official channel partner in my home city; which I have grasped. So far just started with it, I can see lot of work but am not backing away from it.
I also worked on an India Mobile Game called Red Runner for Android and IOS.(if interested follow link http://ift.tt/2oInKKT) I have soft launched it about a week and a half ago. Have not got more than 70+ downloads but m happy that I completed it as I had to do every task for launch one including graphics, programming, sound, design , marketing, etc. (I have to get back to it now:P)
Anyhow, the struggle is not over yet but so is my determination to make it big.
I know I did not have best of experience and have probably made more than a few mistakes but the bottom line for me is to get rich or die trying.
Also please do not compare my experience with other enterprenuers, they might have a better or worse experience.
[link] [comments]
from Entrepreneur http://ift.tt/2pxhaXH
via IFTTT
add adsense to blogger
how much money do bloggers make? can blogs make money? make money off ads how to get money from blogging? best websites to make money blog adsense income earn from blogging website ideas to make money how websites make money?
No hay comentarios.:
Publicar un comentario