sahil parikh on startups, SaaS & his journey growing DeskAway the filament of my imagination

While sending my answers to yourstory.in today, I came across a question - “Do you have any tips to share with budding entrepreneurs?”. I thought this might be helpful to you. These are 3 important things (out of like a dozen) I have learnt being an entrepreneur:

a. Focus on The Core - In early 2005/06 we were doing a bit of everything like most web design/development firms. What I learned was that you should focus on one thing and do it well. That’s when we phased out the service side and concentrated completely on building, growing and scaling DeskAway, even if it meant taking a risk and plugging our immediate source of income.

b. Talk to yourself - Ask yourself as to why you want to start a new venture? Is it only money or is there a higher purpose attached to it? Are you solving a need or just following a fad? Its important to answer these questions before you jump full time into starting out.

c. Do not Hire Experts - I have had better luck hiring people who want to learn than people who already come with “expert” skills. Its a joy in helping a developer learn new things - to create a win-win situation. Things change so quickly that you require people who are willing to learn, unlearn and re-learn.

In a nutshell - build a small, motivated team, keep things simple, stay focused, use less capital-intensive methods, outsource what is not core, and monitor and measure everything on a daily basis.

I am coming across more and more people who are just working for the sake of working - whether the work is paying them well or keeping them busy. It’s the same blah blah routine day in and day out. Mechanical, if you might call that.

And then all of a sudden they seem to be burnt out and come a whole circle finding something else to do - wasted time that they could have put to better use.

The solution actually is very simple - just find something that excites you and that you love doing and do that everyday! If you have something you want to accomplish start working towards it today - there is no point in delaying something that you love doing. That’s illogical and doesn’t make sense!

Here is an interesting article (The Most Powerful Ways to Get Unstuck) on finding meaning in your work and getting the most out of your day. Pesonally, my worst nightmare is looking back and finding out that I wasted my time doing things that I really didn’t care about!

If you are in the startup and technology circle, you must have definitely heard of Y Combinator’s Paul Graham. I came across this really good article about him and his company - some history, starting YC, what they do, selection process etc.

The Start-up Guru: Y Combinator’s Paul Graham

Some of the interesting snippets from the article:

Why is Graham, an avowed start-up hater, doing this? Because for all the pain, he believes that founding a company is the most efficient way to create wealth — for investors, for founders, for society at large — and because he thinks he can make starting a company a lot less painful.

(A “y combinator” is a mathematical function that makes other functions, just as Y Combinator is a company that makes other companies.)

Cheap meals are, in a strange way, part of Y Combinator’s formula for start-up success. Graham wants founders to spend as little money as possible. Live cheaply enough, he believes, and you can become cash-flow positive without going on a lot of sales calls or spending too much time talking to investors. Graham calls this “ramen profitability” and says it allows companies to say no to bad investment terms and forces them to think about long-term viability.

The one word that popped in my head after I watched Star Trek yesterday was ‘Teamwork’. Each and every one on USS Enterprise worked towards a common goal of destroying the enemy, surviving and saving planet Earth. It was a story of “us” rather than I. It was “you” before “me”. It was about looking at the bigger picture (of saving humanity) rather than what will happen to me?

I found these insights and hidden meaning crucial and important to all of us working with teams. Many times we don’t work as a team, go our different paths and fail to understand the purpose of our project; which ultimately leads to failure. This movie clearly demonstrates that working in a coherent team is the only way to survival or in our terms, completion of a successful project.

If you haven’t watched the movie then go watch it. It’s super!

A very interesting story from Inc.com - Street Smarts: My First Year

When in doubt, go to your customers. They will tell you what they want and lead you to solutions you’d never come up with on your own.

We have been doing this all along with our customers. The model is pretty simple - customer’s tell us what features they would like in DeskAway. We keep a track of the features  and develop them based on popularity. The more votes a feature gets, the higher it gets pushed into our development pipeline. Soon, the product becomes something that your customer’s want and not what you think they want!