Birth and Death of Product Startups

All of us say its fun, exciting, challenging etc to work in a start up but not everyone understand the effort of running a start up till it becomes big.

Usually start ups get their initial funding to start off an office and build out a team and this funding lasts only till everyone starts warming up to the job and soon then founders will have the job of getting more funds.

Product companies need at least about 3-4 years to start making money, its quite understandable, build on an idea, recruit a team, develop, churn out the revenue model, market.

So its the duty of founders to rope in funds but how? that is when most of the products die!!
The options usually people take are :

• VC Funding - Ideal scenario, once this is done. ALL IS WELL
• Partial Services - They start taking on small projects and then it becomes big , funds starts flowing in, new people get recruited and it grows.
• Kill the product and start services - People tend to lose patience when success doesn't come soon, it usually so happens that if a product start is started by one person its certainly going to end up being a services company, makes it big.

This is where many great products get killed. Its sad but its true.

Must have collaborative tools for a start up in the tech world

The startup is a challenge in many ways..No experience..no branding..no exposure..no people to maintain your systems..software..more importantly not much money..But still having some core processes is a must and to have those processes it is essential to have the right tools but these tools are costly as they are all proven entities and a must for many companies.

Let me just put down the list

• email - First choice is definitely Microsoft Exchange Server but for most of the start ups it will just be a dream for some years, there are some alternatives but the best being Google Apps. Trust me its really good and i vaguely remember it reading somewhere that google apps themselves run on exchange servers.
• Document, presentation, spreadsheet editor - Yes MS office is the best but it comes at a price and a heavy one so there are some very neat alternate solutions, open office is really good and powerful and has excellent portability to MS office files. There are some online tools like google docs and zoho docs which could cut the queue as well. The google docs and zoho docs come with collaborative editing. How cool is that!!
• International Calls - Suppose you have international clients, this is a major major one. VOIP is the best but voip phones are really costly cisco phones cost around 27k INR. Skype just rocks. You get unlimited calls to anywhere is the world for a monthly price of about 18$. Nothing can beat the price.
• Storage - There is no standard for this, there is sharepoint which has been doing good and some companies use basecamp. I know some of them using salesforce as well. These just provide storage for documents and files with very minimal operations. There are some excellent solutions in injoos teamware and box which give excellent collaborative functions like file locking, assigning the files to people. I have been using Injoos and i also use it to manage my projects thats how powerful the document library in Injoos is.

These are some of the very very essential tools for a company to have.
I write this post with an intention it helps startup get the right tools at the right price and then they can focus right and march in the right direction.
Alright. Cheers

Zoho and Google Docs have a long way to go

Recently i read an article about Microsoft being wary about Zoho getting into the MS office space but after being on excel an user for sometime now and harnessing some of its versatile abilities i feel neither zoho or Google docs which is in the market for sometime now can be a replacement for Office tools..
Just to state a few of powerful tools of excel are pivot tables, macros, data validations, charts and many more are very very useful for people who build status reports and stuff.
I know for sure that these are lacking in Google docs but am not so sure about these in zoho docs..
The advantages of google and zoho docs is cost and no install and always available on the web..but i don't think people who use the above mentioned features will compromise for these advantages..
All in all good step by zoho but sorry you guys still have a long long way to go before thinking of giving competition to MS office..