The beginning of an entrepreneurship journey

Back in 2011, within a very few months of joining IBM, I was feeling restless and unworthy. Somehow, the people around me, the pace at which the organization moved, felt too alien for me. I was looking for a way out.

So in March 2011, as I was glancing through the Indian startup news, I came across this StartupWeekend. Read through the particulars at the website and I thought to myself that this is just a weekend event. There are little or no entry barriers, so why not try it out. I didn't have any ideas to pitch but I thought of joining another team. With this, I registered for the event.

The event started off with two electrifying talks by Sharad Sharma and Bharat Goenka. When you remember a talk after 2 years, that says something about the speakers. I saw all the guys pitching their ideas, and half heartedly made up some idea and I also pitched. One idea that caught my attention was from Gaurav Lochan about crowd sourcing traffic information. I asked him shamelessly if I could join his team and voila there I was in a team of 5 guys building a crowd sourced traffic application.

We came up with the name - MakeMyTripFast just as a pun on MakeMyTrip.com. We started brainstorming about how to build this app, what the revenue potential will be, and if at all we can take this app forward. What surprised me was the energy and cohesion in our team. Very rarely will you meet 4 strangers and 'feel at home' while developing a product. Heck, even at my day job I hadn't experienced this kind of camaraderie. We built an Android app, a Heroku backend and put together our demo videos for the presentation on Sunday.

Our presentation went well and by some stroke of luck, the panel picked us as one of the the top 3 winners. I think we were placed third. We were very excited and the panel gave us very encouraging words to take our idea forward. This was the beginning of my entrepreneurship journey. What started as a casual drop in, resulted in an eventful turn in my life.  It took me another 6 months to quit IBM and join Gaurav to launch Beetroute. Since then I have pivoted and now building SocialEyez. But for Startup Weekend, I'd perhaps never have taken the plunge to do a startup. What the future holds I don't know.  I might fail or I might get back to a job, but the experience at SW has definitely etched a memory that I will cherish for a really long time.

EDIT - We were placed second at SW and not third. Thanks Avinash

Startup monetization strategy

If I'm really stumped doing my startup, it's because I haven't been able to figure out a monetization strategy. Yes, I do know that advertising is a straight forward option and so is charging customers directly. However, I don't find anything creative about these approaches. Let's talk about advertising. I personally hate ads. I don't believe in the advertising model, mostly because, how badly the plethora of ads have killed the actual experience that they supposedly support. Be it, web, TV or even mobile. Plus, everyone does advertising. It's a well refined process followed by millions. I am also ignorant of the advertising model, since I don't like it, I haven't explored the field much. 

So, what are the alternatives. One straight forward approach is to charge customers. That's again direct selling and nothing to brag about. For a mobile app, it's pretty straight forward - you really have a couple of price points to play around with. A basic knowledge of statistics and a bit of playing around will help you hone in the price point and sell your product. I'm not belittling this approach, but implying that it's a well trodden path and it's not that hard to figure out a price point.

Another alternative is the Kickstarter model. Demonstrate that your product will have value, ask for people to financially back the process of creation rather than pay for what's created. Definitely innovative and disruptive.  There are a lot of successes stemming out of the Kicstarter model, app.net being the latest. I personally like this model. For one, it breaks almost all existing norms of monetization. Two, it let's you be open and vocal about almost all of your policies and decisions. Three,  it's the most effective way to engage users with your product. 

Yet another alternative, mostly for products built around the social theme is to enable selling within the group. Something like an ebay just for your group. While selling on ebay is feasible and it works, selling within a known group has the greatest advantage of trust.  There is practically no need for a third party to 'guarantee' any transaction. It's a true democratic way of doing commerce, within the trusted group, and with some thoughts and guidelines,this can be made to scale as well. 

While I'm still stumped figuring out what's a better monetization strategy, I'm almost certain not to follow the advertising path. Sometimes knowing what not to do is more valuable than knowing what to do.