Lack of a boss. Period. The lack of a higher authority to give you your next todo item is the single most-important factor that makes entrepreneurship so hard. In school, you have a clearly defined schedule and you have teachers who give you homework which provides something concrete to do everyday. Then they have exams, a definite end point of the whole yearly effort. In college, you have required classes, projects and exams that keep you sane and provide a safety net from being direction less.

In corporate world, your boss sets your todo list. Most likely, every day when arrive at your desk and check your email you have something definite to do, failure of which is likely to annoy your boss. Day after day, the todo list keeps you busy, happy and gives a clear indication of progress.

But entrepreneurship is different. You have NO boss. Nobody would care if you are slacking a bit, nobody would care if you failed to meet your targets, no body would care if your performance is falling month after month. Being self-motivated over a period of years non-stop is hard. Unlike corporate world, you have to set your own agenda for every single day and you have to meet self-defined targets. What makes it even more dangerous that there is no-one (expect you) to notice that you failed to meet targets. There is no-one to do a review meeting or feedback session. It is just you!

That is what makes entrepreneurship so hard.

1. Having an idea is easy (not a problem at all)
2. Creating a product is hard (development problem)
3. Creating an awesome product is even harder (execution problem)
4. Having people notice it is real hard (marketing problem)
5. Making people use it is very, very difficult (credibility problem)
6. Generating cash out of it is simply not doable (sales problem)
7. Generating money and being profitable consistently is impossible (business creation problem)
8. Having successful multiple product lines is you-must-be-out-of-your-mind (successful business creation problem)
9. Rejecting acquisition offers is way, way harder (because it is tempting and odds are that you will never reach till that stage)
10. Doing an IPO is the ultimate hardest but simply awesome

I just thought of sharing a technique I have been using lately for collecting knowledge on target industry or a new tool/startup idea

For example, you have been trying to something in online backups (a purely hypothetical example).

First, come up with top 3 relevant keywords that people search for while thinking of online backups. You may use Google insights for search.

Here are the relevant keywords I found: “online backups”, “data backups”, “server backups”

Now here is the juicy part. Go to Twitter search and for each of your keyword, search on following themes:

• What people like: search combination of keyword with words “like”, “love”, “great”, “cool”, “:)”. Example – “online backup” “love”
• What people dislike: search for “hate”, “sucks”, “:(”, “bad”, “worst”
• What people want: search for “want”, “wish”, “if only”, “lacking”

This will give you a pretty good idea of what people like, dislike and want in this particular industry. And if you spot patterns, you could have tremendous insight.

Further exploration:

• Expand your set of keywords
• Do the same three sets of searches for competitors/leaders in that industry
• Don’t just limit till Twitter, do Google blog search also

Any more ideas? More terms for searching likes, dislikes and wants? Now if someone could just make an app for simplifying this. Anyone?

The single biggest problem with entrepreneurs is that they have a very tightly knitted community. Yes, you read that right: being part of a tight community around entrepreneurship (especially Internet and technology startups) could be a barrier to moving ahead towards success. This might sound bit controversial but allow me to explain.

Most likely, entrepreneurs visit discussion forums dedicated to entrepreneurship. They have entrepreneurial friends. They consume entrepreneurship gyan day and night on how to succeed, what to do and what not to do. When they have difficulty, they take advice from like minded entrepreneurs who understand them. In short, lives of entrepreneurs revolve around experiences of other entrepreneurs only.

But, my friend, entrepreneurship circle is a very tiny part of this world and probably mutually exclusive from your target customer segment. Your customers don’t frequent the blogs, you do. They don’t participate in the discussions you like talking about. Moreover, your entrepreneur friends know no better about your target market than you do. All they can do is to provide their point of view, which may or may not apply to you because there are so many variables when it comes to startups, customers and target market.

While, if done in sensible limits, participating in entrepreneur community can be very fruitful. You get to learn from other’s mistakes and successes. But, more often that not, entrepreneurship circles become echo chambers where same point of view keeps repeating again and again and takes a life of its own. And the entrepreneurship circle is so small and tightly knit, that you might mistake it as truth. Reality is that your customers are not even aware that such circles exist. How many of your potential customers might be aware and frequently visit forums such as Hacker News, Techcrunch, Mashable, Reddit or (in India) Pluggd.in? They don’t hold the same opinions that get reinforced in such circles.

So take a dose of reality and understand that these entrepreneurship communities exist for a different purpose and the advice, tips, feedback you get should be seen in the context that all people there probably think like you do, have low budget and represent a tiny fraction of this world. Don’t take all of what is said as reality. Reality is what your customers tell. Every second spent in such circles can be spent talking to your customers and finding their circles.

Do you agree with my point of view? Do entrepreneurship circles help or hurt?

PS: I understand the irony of automatically generated related posts below. But my point is that the entrepreneurship community participation should be done in right context and the advice there should be seen in proper light of where the person is coming from.

What do you do if you feel you are born unlucky? What do you do if you feel that the whole world is conspiring against you to make you not succeed? And, what do you do if you feel you have less intellect, less resources and less everything to succeed?

The short and sweet answer is to work harder. You cannot control luck. You cannot control amount of financial resources you have. But what you can definitely control is the amount of effort. Your competitior or neighbour might be advantaged in all respects but you can compensate all that just by working harder.

Really, putting in a lot of effort gives you a lot of chances to make mistakes, try out things and fail. What you have to loose here is your effort, which of course you must have unlimited supply of.

If your nearest competitor or neighbour works X hours, you must work for X+1 hours. If he pitches to Y bloggers, you must pitch to Y+1 bloggers. Of course, you cannot match him in his $5 million funding and a huge team of sales guys. But what you can match (and even exceed) is your persistence and sheer drive to succeed.

Yep, I know it is sounding a bit like self-help bookish type, but I have observed and realized that success is an equation with a lot of variables. Most of the variables you have little or no control on but one variable which has a lot of influence on the result is effort and persistence. Controlling the value of this variable is entirely upto you and hence affecting chances of being successful is your will.

What are your thoughts on this? Does hard work really increases the probability of success?

ReadWriteWeb had a nice, long article written on Wingify’s ContextSense. Read the article titled Identify Any Website’s Sentiment with ContextSense.

To quote:

To test out ContextSense’s accuracy, we put in the URL for ReadWriteWeb.com (but of course). The end result was mostly on target, identifying our main concepts as a top ten list including things like software, Google, iPhone, news and media, commenting, semantic web, and more. The last three items in the list – AJAX, class libraries, and JavaScript – were off base. Perhaps that’s why they were greyed out while the rest of the list was in black, though. There isn’t any explanation as to what the shading means, but that’s a logical leap.

The categories list was similar to the concepts list except it showed more of a drill-down as to what broader topics the concepts came from. For example, for “Semantic Web,” the associated category was “Reference > Knowledge Management > Knowledge Representation > Semantic Web.”

The tool also ranked our site as “slightly positive,” which makes sense since we’re passionate about technology and don’t (often) post negative reviews – we tend to just skip product reviews for those sites and services we don’t think much of.

HT Mint ran an article on Pluggd.in and Wingify was featured as one of the few startups that the blog helped (which was very true). To quote:

Meanwhile, some very young firms have gained from Pluggd.In’s coverage. For six-month-old Wingify, a New Delhi-based firm that offers website optimization software, the biggest challenge was in getting early adopters. The firm is yet to launch its product, but was pleasantly surprised when, within three weeks of being featured on Pluggd.In, it got 10 early users and possibly its first customer. Pluggd.In had profiled the firm in July, says Paras Chopra, chief executive, Wingify. The start-up had approached Sinha for using its optimization software on his website.

He used it, liked it and profiled it, says Chopra, adding that Sinha continues to use the software. The firm is now in talks with a Bangalore-based venture capital firm, which has a portfolio company looking for the kind of technology Wingify offers, said Chopra, adding that the talks are at an advanced stage.

“Having early adopters is crucial for a firm like ours. We need validation, some early users, before we make an announcement to the world. A lot of positive things have happened to us since the coverage,” says Chopra.

Really, does it matter at all if you make up small lies while doing sales? If you convince yourself that it is sort of true but deep inside you know it is fundamentally a lie, are you okay with that?

I’ve known sales people going to extremes: promising benefits which never were, projecting products with made up facts and use other tricks of the trade just to get that sale. They are desperate to make a sale. This is quite common in finance industry. But, in this post, I am not concerned about blatant lies made up to trick innocent people.

I am really split whether it is fine to get involved with the oh-so-common sales gimmicks, little lies, subtle hints, etc. that do not harm the customer but add just a little boost to your business objectives. My right half of brain says that a lie, no matter how small it is, is fundamentally a lie. My left half of brain says it is okay to use industry standard tricks, business is brutal and so should you be.

Many of the iconic companies did this in the past. For example, Bill Gates told IBM that he had an OS when he never had. And I wouldn’t be surprised if the rumor that Facebook created fake profiles to boost membership at the start is really true. Moreover, highly admired companies on Internet do what I would classify as grey-to-black hat SEO. Is it all RIGHT? Aren’t they compromising their integrity with all such practices?

What is your opinion on this matter?

Suppose you win a lottery or get a successful exit for your startup. You suddenly find yourself with a million dollars to play with. It is like what you always dreamt for has become a reality. At this point, what would you do? What would your future look like?

It is hard to imagine not having fun with a million dollars in bank. But that is precisely what I (sadly) concluded after thinking deeply over this issue. There are multiple reasons why I think a million dollars won’t bring me the freedom, happiness and euphoria that I had thought were main motivators for me.

One of most the reasons concern with the social circle. Even if you get lots of money to spend, with whom would you go shopping? Who would be able to afford accompanying you to your always-dreamt-of-visiting Morocco? Is your friend equally fond of I-would-go-bungee-jumping-one-day? Chances are that most of your friends or relative would not have time to be there with you all the time, would not be able to afford hanging out with you while you are indulging, and would politely decline your sponsorship. So, my friend, what would you do with your million dollars?

How many movies per week can you watch? How many books can you read? Can you eat at fine-dine restaurants three times a day for a whole month? To be realistic, I find it hard having a tremendous amount of joy from a million dollars. I don’t think I would be more happy then than I am at this moment. Maybe the kick of having money far more strong than the actual pleasure in it.

If you are like most of the entrepreneurs, you want to find a business idea which can change the world and make you a famous millionaire. Plus you want an idea which is not hard to execute so that you may have best of all worlds. There is nothing wrong with this thought, except that either it is impossible or you need heavy doses of luck to make it a reality.

Easy to start and execute businesses rarely make it big. If you are thinking of writing an application which will revolutionize the web overnight, forget it. If you are thinking of coming up with a business model which will rock the world and make you arrive on the scene instantly, forget it.

Look around yourself and you will find that most of the successful businesses didn’t happen in a day or a month or (heck!) even a year. All things in life take their sweet time, success takes a little longer. By working hard, day by day, a successful business creates a huge barrier to entry for other players; while at the same time creating value for the customer.

Imagine for a moment that a particular business is lucrative and easy to start. If you want to enter that business, you are not alone; why wouldn’t everyone want to do that. So many players in an area create intense amount of clutter, competition and a crack in your profitability. Eventually, the business becomes a commodity business and you don’t want that to happen, do you?

So you don’t really want to start an easy business at the first place. Instead, given your skills, time and money investment and other constraints, you must choose the hardest possible business. This is the golden rule for startups. Harder a business to start, better will be its eventual returns.

If you persevere, while building a tough business, you will make a moat around your business (as Warren Buffet puts it). This moat will make it harder for your potential competitors to enter your area, while allowing you to focus exclusively on value creation for the customer. Five or ten years down the line, you could then be the leading business in your area. (See related concept of The Dip by Seth Godin.)

Repeat after me. More operational the business, the better it is. More impossible-looking the business is, better it is. More technology-intensive the business, the better it is. More web 2.0 the business is, (chances are) the worse it is.

Now Good.