Confessions of a College Entrepreneur – II

Continued from the previous post…

So how did you build your team?

I’d outsourced the implementation to a company, figuring out much later that it wasn’t a sustainable idea.

A. your learning of the lifecycle doesn’t happen if you’re not spending enough time with the programming team.

B. The partner company has their own priorities and compulsions.

C. It’s an expensive affair!

I did manage to convince my outsourcing partner to become a stakeholder – but it didn’t quite yield the right results. After a point, I could neither go on with that team – nor was the knowledge transfer easy – for me to hire my own team.

Also, I got one of my seniors from college, with a 5 year experience with an FMCG major – he had as little an idea about internet space as I did. So while lilling away – romancing our entrepreneurial pride – we had little clue about what needed to be done. We had similar strengths and weaknesses and no knowledge or focus on how to build the business.

We’d play with a new idea every day – make some pursuits – but not really persist with it to reach a conclusion.

You didn’t have any advisers to fill the gap?

When you’re 23 years old, just out of a nice institute, do you really take advise all that seriously? Sometimes I didn’t have advisers and some times I didn’ t know how to use the advice. And some cases, I just added a handful of salt to the advise- whenever I didn’t find it encouraging. Entrepreneurs defy conventional wisdom, or so I thought then!

In hindsight, I know I should’ve had some sort of a Board / someone to be accountable to, and some personal mentors who ask the right questions and help clarify the vision. Still don’t think advisors help. You have to figure out your own answers

You were clear about what you wanted to do, weren’t you?

When you start thinking of a concept, you naturally end up imagining a wide variety of possibilities and these manifest as additional features in the product. We couldn’t really focus on the key value proposition -  and for a while deluded ourselves into believing that people will come if we add this feature or that.  With the homepage content, or the invite emailers – we weren’t adequately clear about what we wanted people to do on our site. We were to afraid to exclude an important TG, so didn’t focus too much on any specific TG either. We were trying to solve too many problems – so again, the sharpness in communication was missing.

Fundamentally, we didn’t know if we wanted to run a niche personal diary or a social network. Part of our failure was perhaps in being driven by network effects – someone told me that ‘conversations are the only thing that sell on the net’ and rather whimsically, I took that direction.  We needed virality and organic growth for a web 2.0 system! But as a nemesis, that brought us together with the plethora of social networks of that time – and diluted the personal diary positioning.

I don’t know today, if personal diary positioning would’ve been a better approach – but it’s definitely a better experiment – than the social net or the confusion.

You got to be able to articulate the concept in a single line. I couldn’t help describing features in this single line!

So we had a huge spike in traffic when rediff wrote about us – but the people didn’t come back. Partly usability, partly confused positioning.

But one of your advisors, did tell you to build use cases – long before you started?

When he told me that – I didn’t know what “use case”  meant. Did some google and wiki – but it ended at that. Even as we launched, usability was an unfamiliar concept to me – the first part of LiL was done when I was attending classes – thanks to my obsession with launching alpha on convocation day – so I was able to give limited time to the way I wanted things to look like. I learned the principles of usability by reading blogs and it was reasonably understood only much later – when I made the new lil – which, thanks to technical delays – never saw the light of the day.

Besides, like a bunch of other things, I was totally dependent on someone else to work on the performance – and completely handicapped myself- despite knowing that it was seriously hampering user experience. I think I should’ve learnt coding – if I didn’t have a techie co-founder and still wanted to do it.

What do you know about product lifecycles today that you didn’t know then?

That you have to keep the releases really simple. That the first release doesn’t have to be the perfect one. That you ought to have consumer feedback while building the product and not after having built a whole lot of features. That in a consumer platform – development never ends. You can’t get something made by someone and be done with it. That the main thing is to let the main thing be the main thing. Build the core first, sell it, get user feedback and THEN think of bells and whistles.

LiL had better privacy systems than Facebook, and smarter content organization / calendars /search than twitter. It had become too complex a product for an alpha.

You did have some revenues via consulting assignments – wasn’t that sustainable?

I did some assignments and got some things done here and there to generate revenues – but LiL was nowhere on the road to making money. The financial markets were crashing through the second half of 2008, and despite knowing it in advance – we weren’t able to raise funds from professional sources.  I did have relatively easy access to funds from personal sources – but in retrospect – that added to the indiscipline – as I was hardly accountable to anyone – and we didn’t really keep a serious cap, on the funds we were ok to spend on it. I never drew a line. Not having the money creates  a desperation that opens doors. We never reached that stage, and took the easy way to get the money.

Are you more Hands-on with things now?

I still somehow feel I bank too much on people – I just tell them things to do and take it to  be end of my responsibility – by just banking on them to do it. It’s somewhat of an escapist behavior. I didn’t naturally get into details – or get my hands dirty – or do a thorough run through of anything. Now, I’m consciously particular about articulating expectations. Vagueness wastes a lot of time and effort. I get my hands dirty more often now – with the boring detail.

So what were you doing all this while?

I was too intimidated by the idea of making a CV, of applying to companies – appearing for interviews – being rejected. The transition from being full time on LiL, to being part time, to leaving it behind – was a consulting assignment with a small mobile vas company – where I was working directly with the CEO – on myriad things. Despite the learning curve, this was somewhat of a reckless decision – a tad more reckless than doing LiL perhaps – not the best utilization of my time with the lack of focus and crunch of resources. I was working from Bombay for a company based in Kolkata – with no clearly defined targets. I was too inexperienced to really contribute in the manner the company needed – and drew excitement in all the new technologies I was playing with – only to realize with time – that the play isn’t resulting in real business.

So do you regret having opted out of the campus placements?

Do you regret having fallen in love – the first time you did? Even if that gave you a heartbreak?  Not really. It was an amazing experience. I still think LiL’s a good idea. Might just redo it sometime with all the gyan I have now. It’s been two and a half years since the alpha was launched, and as you can see – the memories are still fresh! The post LiL time – could’ve been better utilized though!

 

Is there more to say..? maybe.. will do it in part III sometime!

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