sahil parikh’s work+life stream

The other day I was introduced to a guy who was just out of college. He should have been around 22 yrs. We were generally talking about technology and web apps then he mentioned that he was leaving his current position in a cool web startup. FYI, he had just started a couple of months back. Concerned, I probed a bit and found out that he was not happy with what he was doing. He wanted to work on the "cool" and "good" stuff. The high level stuff. The stuff that he could boast to his college friends. He detested the grunt work that was given to him occasionally. To me, thats' the stuff that sometimes goes into building a great business. He then told me that in a few months he was looking to start his own business.

What!!!!

Wait a second. This is not happening. I was speechless.

How does that work? Starting a business and being entrepreneurial is awesome but if you can't get past Level 1, then how are you going to reach Level 4? Aren't all businesses built on the stuff that we don't like doing sometimes? Isn't pain the part of the process that helps us reach the top?

I hope this is not the attitude of our young generation - 'get rich quick and I don't want to work' kind of attitude. Wanting everything on a silver platter but not wanting to go through the pain. 

I wanted to wish him good luck. We parted ways in different directions.

These experiences helps me with hiring people for DeskAway. I look for one thing -  a good attitude. It's worked almost all the time. Attitude will tell you a lot about the person, where he has been and where he will be a few years down the road.

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Besides having a good idea mixed with some passion, these are a few things an entrepreneur needs to keep in mind while growing his business...

Think large-scale - can you handle more than just a few clients with the same process? You should be able to replicate your process with many clients without too much customization. Think the concept of 'assembly lines'.

Your business should work with a few people. That's why I am not a big fan of outsourcing shops. They always need more headcount when a new project comes in. If you look closely, they are more of a HR company trying to keep people on-board. Instead, try to run a small ship with big engines.

Know when to pass - when you say 'no' you really know what you are working towards. When we were a design agency, at one point we started taking up all kinds of projects - web, development, print, logo etc. We had forgotten what we stood for and running the business was not fun.

Make your customers say "wow". At DeskAway we are focusing our efforts on the 'wow' factor this year. It's simple - if people are happy, they buy from you and tell others to buy from you. Try to get people to say "wow" - about your product, website, service, support...

These are the things that I keep in mind while running this small ship...Have a great weekend!

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Another great video from FOWA London by Alex Hunter on building your startup brand. What do you stand for? Each one of us should be emotionally invested in the business and should participate in representing our products and services. Check it out... Branding and Marketing Essentials for Your Web App by Alex Hunter from Carsonified on Vimeo.

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A great video of Dave McClure at the FOWA London about what web startups should measure and do while growing their business. I like to go over these startup videos to make sure we are not missing out on something or that we could do something better. Also, it is great to see how others are running their businesses and what particular metrics they look at. I want to re-iterate a couple of points made in the video, especially using DeskAway as an example:

Keeping things simple - end users could be non-technical people so make sure you keep features simple. Even if you have a large feature set, make sure they don't come in the way of the user and don't distract them on the main interface. Additionally, have comprehensive help sections and video tutorials to take the user through your app. Better yet, have help videos embedded within the interface of your app.

Measure - We might be guilty of not rigorous measuring, but I can vouch for the fact that the best thing about running a web business is the ability to measure everything - right from how many people came to the site, how many are returning visitors, how many converted to a free plan, how many upgraded and what features do they use the most! Besides Google Analytics (that's what we use) you should create your own internal analytics dashboards to measure other activity related to your business and app. Basically, track everything and see what increases or decreases if you have taken an important decision - like a new marketing initiative or a new feature release.

Remove Features - In order to keep things simple it is important to remove features occasionally (you will know which one to remove if you measure!). We haven't removed a lot of feature yet but if you notice we haven't added a new feature in over a month. That has not affected anything - number of signups, client dropouts etc. So, bottomline, as long as you have your core features intact, you don't need to go ballistic over feature releases. There are a lot of things that you can still improvise on within your current feature-set.

Anyways, if you have read through this much, it's time to checkout this video: Start-up Metrics that Matter by Dave McClure from Carsonified on Vimeo.

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Taking your Site from One to One Million Users by Kevin Rose from Carsonified on Vimeo.

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Within the last year we have been fortunate to get really good PR/Buzz for DeskAway and me. This led to increase in traffic on the site, more signups and eventually more conversion to paid accounts i.e. customers. Somehow, one thing led to another and as more people heard about what we were doing (and I believe we are building a SaaS business at the right time) it snowballed into more interviews and blog reviews. Somehow, there was/is no magic formula to get PR (definitely don't hire a PR agency early on) though this article (10 reasons why journalists will write about your website) lays down some important points to keep in mind. I think we just participated - in blogs, social media tools, content creation, industry events, seminars, barcamps, etc.

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