Category Archives: Wishberg

Few Things I Learned As A Entrepreneur in Last One Year

About this time last year, I wrote about my experiences as an entrepreneur. Another year has passed and also that Wishberg completes a year, I am sharing some notes I scribbled thinking about the time that has passed.

  1. Having your own product roadmap is one thing. Building what users ask is another. Choose what the user wants.
  2. Most successful products have very similar characteristics. Here are 15 Steps towards building a Great Product.
  3. Scaling up is much simpler problem to solve. Concentrate on initial growth and traction. When you come to a stage where you want to scale, there will be enough money in the bank.
  4. Ship Fast. Let things break. Often.
  5. A bug is bug only when its noticed.
  6. Focus on doing one thing right. That is enough. We decided to drop everything we did and focus on ‘wish’ for Wishberg.
  7. Chase a vision, not an idea. When you have a vision, you will get 100 ideas to achieve that.
  8. For success you need to try 100 things, one at a time. Make sure you have enough runway to try those. One of that will work. If you are lucky, that would be your first; if not then start-up life will test your perseverance.
  9. Break your long term strategy in to multiple short term targets.
  10. Spend over 30 minutes in shower everyday. You will never run out of ideas.
  11. Concentrate on doing one thing right. You may still fail, but its far more better than getting distracted by trying 10 different things.
  12. Growth hacks that have worked for other startups will not work for yours. Startups can’t be so easy. Find your own hacks.
  13. Success is not easy. Don’t expect it to be.
  14. Every week try to use your product as a new user who has not used it earlier and knows nothing about it.
  15. Doing a startup has a huge personal opportunity cost, no one talks about. This too shall pass, I tell that to myself. Everyday.
  16. Entrepreneurship is not sexy. I personally discourage people from taking it up. Specially the ones with a family to support.
  17. Anyone can take decisions with data. And data may not be available always. Nothing new or ground breaking was ever built based only on data available. Trust your instincts / guts to do build something new. 
  18. Try and fail, don’t fail to try.
  19. Luck is important factor. Wishberg got funded the same month I was about to run out of money. I already ran out of my funds and savings long time back, I refer to the personal loans I took up to keep it going.
  20. Startup as early as possible in your life. Debts, Loans kill your ambitions. Everyday.
  21. Everyday will give you 100 reasons to close down. You need to have that one strong reason to keep it going.
  22. Delegate. But be hands-on. You should know more about your business than anyone else.
  23. Team is your family. Choose wisely whom you want to add. Genuinely love your team and be concerned about them and their well being.
  24. Fight. Argue. Debate. Discuss. Don’t carry things outside office. It all should get over by the day.
  25. Ignore 99% advice you get. The 1% that comes up again and again – think about it.
  26. Funding does not make you rich. No matter how much you make others understand it, they will not. Stop wasting your time.
  27. Everyone struggles. Even a start up without funding. Even a start up with millions of dollars of funding.
  28. Funding just gives you a little more runway. To try out multiple things. Its just a little more runway.
  29. Unfortunately funding is perceived as success. I received invitations to speak at conferences just cause we got funded. Damn! And no one ever called me for any discussion or debate while I predicted Indian startup scene so accurately. tl;dr – I’m not going.
  30. Investors who take over a week to come back to you; who say keep us posted; who say lets keep in touch and so on – will never invest in you. Don’t waste time on it.
  31. Investors who really want to invest in your startup will not take much time to do it. One of our investors committed to us over a Twitter DM in less than a minute. Another one on WhatsApp again in about 1 minute.
  32. Investors fund / invest in you. You. And your ability to grow the product / company.
  33. Don’t say no to money when it comes knocking your door. I said no to it twice (rather my ego said no it). Cash in hand is much better than perceived valuations.
  34. Don’t choose investors based on the valuations. The best investors bring in value. The worst investors bring in just cash.
  35. Build feature products (unlike what investors / advisors say). But build that simple feature as a freaking awesome product that everyone wants to use.
  36. Check the history of acquisitions by Facebook or Google. Your feature product is more likely to be acquired if you build it right.
  37. Choose team, advisors & investors with whom you can talk about life over couple of drinks.
  38. Build something that you understand and believe in. Don’t build what will get funded or is generally considered hot.
  39. Never understood why using foul words in startup ecosystem is considered cool. I don’t think its cool.
  40. Let go of ego.
  41. Anyone who says they will disrupt are just talkers. Just be willing to change and adapt.
  42. Disrupt slowly. Unannounced. Feature by Feature. Before anyone realizes what happened.
  43. Competition will exists, don’t be afraid of that.
  44. One fine day Facebook, Amazon or Google will try to build what you are building. Its sounds scary, but its fun. Btw, I almost cried when Facebook launched a ‘Want’ button or Amazon started Collections or Pinterest tried to position itself as wishlist from a online pin board.
  45. Meet lot of users, lots of people. Get their ideas on your business, product. Some simple things will amaze you.
  46. Be Humble. Be Genuine. Its not very difficult.
  47. Smile. Have fun. As many times as you can.
  48. Build relationships. Specially with other startup founders. Some of them might be at the lowest phase in life, be there. At times they just need someone to talk with whom they can relate.
  49. With more power, comes more responsibility. With more responsibility, comes more stress.
  50. Do something to de-stress you. I try blogging, driving, and observing people when I travel by Mumbai Locals.
  51. Spend at least 1 hour reading up everyday.
  52. Spend one day of every month with your family and friends. Try to be away from the Internet on that day.
  53. Every mistake should be made only once. You don’t have time to repeat it.
  54. ‘Fail Fast’ is a buzz word. Failure comes with cost – money, time and spirits. So you can’t really fail fast.
  55. Value money. Think 100 times before you spend even a single dollar. Negotiate hard. Every dollar saved adds up to your runway.
  56. Don’t do anything or spend time behind anything (feature, update, task, product, or anything) that does not personally excites you.
  57. The single most difficult task of a startup founder is setting priorities. If you get it right, your job is done. 9 out of 10 times you will go wrong. Don’t regret, keep moving.
  58. Simple, short and sweet updates to your product bring the best results. Don’t over think or focus on too many big features.
  59. Focus is about saying No. Stop agreeing too everyone and everything.
  60. You learn most not from blogs or advisors or investors. You learn most from other founders. Connect and share your learnings with each other. We organized a #FoundersMeet in Mumbai.
  61. People around you are smarter than you think. Learn from them.
  62. The most important thing in life is not knowing everything, its having the phone number of somebody who does.
  63. Stay away from events, conferences and pitching events. It takes up a lot of time and energy. Both are precious.
  64. Be passionate. Be enthusiastic. About every new day.
  65. Not just your startup, even you as a person should grow yourself every day. Learn at least one new thing everyday.
  66. Have a bucket list for life, here is mine. Check it every morning, if you see things / wishes that are yet to be achieved, get back to work. Wishberg helps you build and manage your bucket list.
  67. Plug-in your startup in every possible way. I just did that in above point. But no kidding, having a bucket list is actually very inspiring, I have one since last 6 years.
  68. Every morning make a list of things / tasks you plan to finish in that day.
  69. If you are out to achieve something, achieve something big. Don’t set mediocre goals.
  70. Content or Commerce doesn’t go hand in hand. Most startups trying to do both get confused on what they really want to achieve. They really do. Focus on one.
  71. MVP is More Valuable Product. Everyone wants a more valuable product, no one wants a minimum viable product.
  72. Build your startup for growth. Not for exit.
  73. Ask questions. Lots of them. No matter how silly they are to you or the person you are asking for.
  74. Execution is everything. All ideas are equally great on paper.
  75. Startups are not easy. Neither is life.
  76. Build something awesome. Something that people will love to use.
  77. Be thankful to everyone you has helped you in this journey. Make sure you help others in their journey so that they can say thank-you to you. It feels great!
Done. Let’s get back to work.

Rethinking Facebook Connect

As startups we need to continuously experiment and question the status quo; and for now we experimented with the Facebook Connect implementation. We started by removing it as default option to sign-in on Wishberg. As expected we got multiple forgot password requests (we built this feature in anticipation of same).  

Many folks questioned about this on Twitter, and I also had conversations with other startups founders who suggested this could be a bad move. So far we are happy with the results. We may / may not revert back (its still not clear) – but since many people asked me why we even thought of experimenting – here are the reasons.

a. Facebook is no longer a powerful distribution platform 

Let me sum up Facebook as a distribution platform for you:
Early days -> 1 + 1 = 11
Later ->  1 + 1 = 2
Now -> 1 + 1 = 1.1
Next -> 1 + 1 = 1.01

Face this, it is true. Facebook is no longer a powerful distribution platform or user acquisition channel for application developers. If the expectation is one user registration through Facebook connect will lead to at least one more., its not happening. 

Zynga achieved its distribution on Facebook through News Feeds; Branchout through notifications and others like Pinterest / Spotify through Open Graph. When more and more applications tried to ‘abuse’ each of these mechanisms Facebook put more restrictions & controls in place (which is correct since Facebook wants to maintain a clean experience for its users). Open Graph is currently the only way to get some effective distribution, Facebook has replaced few custom actions and asked developers to use built-in actions for Like & Follow, they are also merged in Open Graph. It also placed restrictions for applications that abused few actions like ‘read a article’ & ‘viewed a video’ with more controls / validations in place.

Personally I am against spam and to build a clean product we do not aim to spam our users through Facebook (even in name of user acquisition). Also because of the fact that few applications have abused Facebook to acquire users, users are smart and know how to differentiate between a possible spam and genuine link. Good for consumers and bad for developers, Facebook has made it ‘ridiculously easy’ for users to get rid of applications; so if your are spamming – do that at your own risk! 


b. Facebook engagement principles – P2P v/s A2P

You must have read this in news over and again – Facebook is trying hard to appeal to the current youth generation (as the earlier one has grown up!). While Facebook is trying to appeal to younger generation, it is also trying to improve engagement of its current user base. Current reports suggests that a Facebook update reaches approximately (just) 12% of your friends. 

If people stops engaging with other people on Facebook, it will be dead. While Facebook connect is a good way to keep social interactions that happen outside of Facebook discoverable through feeds on Facebook – its natural that Facebook will always be more inclined to have P2P (People to People) interactions featured over A2P (Application to People). 

On a personal note – I don’t think Facebook will have anything great to announce for some time ahead that will excite the developers. For now, FB will focus on improving user-to-user engagement, appeal to youth and its monetization products. So I don’t see the situation improving for developers. 


c. Inconsistent Discovery Experience for feeds

Facebook is not Twitter. Unlike the experience where every tweet is visible to your followers, every feed / status update is not visible to your friends. Its complex and depends on multiple factors – whom you interact with most, which group of friends are you a part of, has the feed gone viral to be showcased to more people outside that network and so on. If P2P feeds are discovered by only 12% of friends, chances for discovery of application feeds will be even lower.

And then there are innumerable pages that a user has liked, there are updates from them which also ask for a mind-share of user in his activity stream. One of Facebook’s monetization product that allows pages (and users) to pay and increase reach of their posts will also work against discovery of application feeds.

Facebook recently announced a new newsfeed which is rolled out to few users but not to all. It has also did a nice little revamp on Timeline view of profile putting all updates on the right side block – and also bringing up user’s likes and interests upfront and pushing open graph updates further down to an blind spot.

Don’t get me wrong here, I am supporting Facebook here as most of these changes are done to improve user experience and engagement for its own users. But in that attempt – the discovery of feeds for applications has got bit inconsistent. There is no science here – and most of the times for application developers it will mean shooting in the dark. 


d. Every user has his/her own identity on every platform

Each user has a different identity on every platform – Facebook, Twitter, Quora, Foursquare, LinkedIn and so on. Its incorrect to assume that the way a user behaves on Facebook will be essentially the way he will on your product or that he wants his friends to know he is using a particular product or service.

There is also a trend that users do not want to register on a product because it only allows only Facebook Sign-up. We did that with Wishberg earlier, but now have opened up email registrations; key here is – ‘Be valuable first, social later.’

The ideal way is to allow users to register and let them connect their Facebook account as a option – which they will if your product is valuable to them. You can prompt users to connect their Facebook account, but not force them to do so!


e. Psychology of Forced Distribution

As a developer once you implement Facebook Connect, unconsciously you get thinking and start relying completely on Facebook for distribution. You want every action that has happened on your product to be ‘forced shared’ on Facebook – even though a user would want it or not. Its time to stop that as the sharing economy has changed.

Since Facebook distribution is not controlled by you, it gets increasingly frustrating when your product does not go as viral as you thought it would. Instead build some sort of distribution / discovery mechanism on your own product which you control completely – we built couple of them on Wishberg and they have worked remarkably better. Remember – a small number of highly engaged users are much better than a large user base with zero or near zero engagement. 


f. Sharing economy has changed

The sharing economy on Facebook as changed over years. It is no more driven by features or applications, its completely user driven. Users have got smart enough to know what has to be shared and with whom.

Don’t build applications / features that will trick users to forcefully share something on their wall without their consent or knowledge. Focus on your product – users will figure out what they have to share and what they don’t have to. Users are now smarter than most developers think! 


g. Breaking changes that break your plans

While doing a startup / building your product – the one thing you don’t want to lose is time. Startups operate with small teams and any deviations from the product roadmap costs them dear.

And while they are on to it – Facebook wants you to constantly be updated with its latest ‘breaking changes‘ and there is no option but to comply. It sucks out time / bandwidth big time and knowing the diminishing returns from Facebook – it gets frustrating here!

 

Concluding Notes:

Most product managers integrate with Facebook Platform for three reasons – 1. One-click sign-in 2. Social Graph. 3. Distribution (Viral acquisition of users).

It is possible to achieve that without Facebook too.

  1. One Click Sign-in: Create a perpetual logged-in experience for users till he explicitly logs out!
  2. Social Graph: Most successful products like Quora, Twitter, Instagram, etc have build their own network / graph. Remember that same user will have a different identity on every different network.
  3. Distribution: 1 + 1 = 2 is no longer true. Think of discovery and distribution on your own product, you have complete control there.

The aim of this post is not to put negative remarks against Facebook, but to make fellow entrepreneurs know of this when they are building on top of Facebook platform and so that they set right expectations for growth. Happy building!

Update:  We got Facebook Connect back on Wishberg after 30 days of experiment. The main reason was not distribution, but authentication – users do not have to remember one more password! As far as distribution is concerned, Facebook adds little value.

 

Forget coding. Startup founders should focus on Product & Design.

Last year (2011) learning coding was hot, may be it still is. Sites like Code for America came up; startups like Codecademy, Learnstreet, Udacity, etc came up that were focusing on building products that enabled others to learn coding in an interactive way. Then it looked like a kind of movement, a revolution in making.

Being a startup founder some of those effects trickled down to India – that made me seriously consider coding. And there were some other reasons as well. We started Wishberg by outsourcing product development to another company. As deadlines were missed repeatedly, this whole ‘founders should be coders’ effect started growing on me.

During this phase I did two things a.) started hiring our own engineering team b.) learn coding inspired by this noise. I started learning very enthusiastically to an extent that my bio read that I was learning to code. Going through multiple forums, registering on these websites, taking lessons on LAMP stack and so on. A bit of background, being a engineering student (though Mechanical) – I had some basic coding background. Few years back, I even built some basic websites, did a bit of javascripts, etc.

As we started hiring engineering talent I asked myself two questions –

  • Will I ever come up to the level of proficiency that matches our engineering team?
    No. I was no where close to them.. while I was doing ABC of coding, our team was super involved in deploying code, implementing Redis / Node.js, building scalable architecture, mobile infrastructure and so on. I didn’t want my team to tell me I suck on programming (which I knew I did anyway). More importantly, I wanted the team to focus on building our product and not spend timing teaching me code or correcting my code.
  • Will I ever hire anyone who has learned programming through online sites?
    No

I also checked with few technical founders who raised investments; few agreed that being a tech founder was probably a added advantage while raising money. But many of them also mentioned that post investment they spent more time finding product-market fit, doing business, improving their product, user experience, managing investors (many a times!) and eventually spending lesser and lesser time on coding themselves.

Eventually all startup founders end up focusing only on consumption side of product (front end user experience, improving funnels and conversion metrics) than the one under the hood. This is when I gave up my decision to learn coding and started focusing on learning design (user design and user experience) which is as core to product as technology is. I started spending more time understanding design tools, design patterns and implementing them on Wishberg. I am no where saying underlying technology, architecture, speed, and scalabilty are not important.

For online businesses, there is no doubt scarcity of good engineering talent; but there is more scarcity of product designers and even much more scarcity of product managers. Startup founders knowingly / or unknowingly start getting into product management role.

I have been a product guy for about 7 years and now feel that I should have learned design long back. Our team not just gets product documentation from me, but also product designs including all scenarios and exceptions. There is a certain clarity of thought which engineers appreciate and exactly know what is to be built – which save lot of time while shipping code / features. Every month, we look at data, un-design by removing clutter, remove additional clicks and aim to improve conversions on every step.

Geek Example – The 2012 Formula 1 Season had 12 teams of which 4 had the winning Renault RS27-2012 engine on their cars. Yet there was only one winner – The Red Bull Racing team. The original Renault team (now Lotus Renault GP) which manufactured and supplied the RS27-2012 engine to Red Bull team stood fourth in overall 2012 championship. In fact Red Bull won the championship for last 3 seasons with the Renault engine. What really mattered – the product RB8 chassis. More importantly the people driving the product, its team – drivers Sebastian Vettel & Mark Webber, Team Principal and Chief Technical Officer.

Concluding Notes:
What engine you have under the hood (technology) matters. What car / chasis the engine drives (the product) matters more. But what matters most is who is driving / leading it. Don’t get over obsessed with technology, focus on product & design.

So all those who complimented us on Wishberg‘s product design & usability… need a hint on who was the person behind it? Yours truly.

Naming your startup right!

Agree there are many articles on the topic – ‘Naming your startup!’. The only reason I am writing yet another post is because I’ve suffered the pains of naming our startup wrong.

The earlier version of Wishberg was Tyche’d. Tyche is the greek goddess of fortune. It meant luck in Roman. I came up with a new word – Tyche’d, which according to us meant getting lucky or getting fortune. My initial reaction – this was the most brilliant word, only next to Google or Twitter. We were so convinced with this name – we just went ahead and registered domain, company and other identities. We pronounced it as “Tai-Kee”.

There were signs all over that we’re wrong!

  • Early signs: Our accountant, hiring consultants, candidates we were interviewing always had this question to ask – “Sorry, but how do we pronounce this?”. We thought they would get used to it.
  • Next signs: Investors reached out to us – “Hey Pravin, heard you’re building a product called Tiched. Tell us more about it.” We thought they would get used to it.
  • Next signs: We announced the product in Dec 2011. Our friends and users started asking us – “How to pronounce this name? How to spell this name?.” We thought they would get used to it.
  • The bad signs – Post launch, we started reaching out to users and friends how their product experience was. Answers – “Oh, yes. What is the name of your product. It is called ‘touched’ something right?”

And there was a time we got used to this question – “What is your startup called? How do you pronounce name of your start-up?” Unfortunately we ignored all the early signs. This was a big lesson we learned – spotting signals when things are going wrong or are not according to the plan. As a startup founder, one needs to be open to change always – business name or even the business itself (pivoting).

By April, we were already setting up our team and working on the revamped product. We decided to rebrand from Tyche’d to something simpler, something people would find easy to recall, relate with our product and its core proposition of ‘wish’. It took us many days to choose with from multiple combinations. The last set of 50 choices included –

Wishmatcher, Wishpug, Wishbull, Wishberg, Wishkite, Wishrite, Wishfold, Wishtro, Wishhawk, Wishbyte, Wishsome, Wishjini, Wishtake, Wishpair, Wishtiles, Wishting, Wishnix, Wishmile, Wishred, Wishmatch, Wishport, Wishe, Wishper, Wishboard, Wishbud, Wishbuddy, Wishbuds, Wishpix, Wishtown, Wishcity, Wishworld, Wishtree, Wishspot, Wishon, Gowish, Wishkart, Wishspace, Wishhunt, Wishhunter, Wishpal, Wishmate, Wishmates, Wishgrid, Wishgram, Wishhub, Wishwall, Wishpage, Wishweb, Wishrank, Wishsurfer, Wishybee, Wishling, Wishpool

We called every friend of ours asking them whats the best choice! The final two were Wishpug v/s Wishberg. (Btw, now I own many of the above domain names)

Wishberg was selected for two reasons:

  • Many of our friends related with Wishberg cause of other similar brand names – Carlsberg (Beer), Zuckerberg (Facebook founder), Bloomberg (News), Iceberg (Titanic), Goldberg (WWE Wrestler)
  • Wishberg ~ Iceberg. Wishing is just the tip of our platform, there is more to come.

Today almost everyone from our accountant, employees, partners, friends, family and most importantly our users know ‘Wishberg‘.

Feedback / Advice –

Of simple startup names that work –

  • Single letter words – Path, Square, Fab, Uber
  • Twisted Spellings – Lyft, Digg, Disqus
  • Tongue Twisters – Quora, Twitter, Bitly
  • Double letter words – Instagram, Foursquare, SendGrid, Facebook, AngelList, TechCrunch, PostMates (Wishberg goes here).

I did a bit of research, and found following excellent articles about ‘Naming your Startup’. If you are at a similar stage of naming your product / startup – make sure you read all of them –

Talk to as many people as you can to cross check if your startup/product has the right name. Spend over a month just to make sure you have got it right. This is the identity you are building and it will be with you for rest of your life.

Another good way to collect User Feedback

As a product guy for many years I have used multiple methods / tools to collect user feedback. Some analytic tools that are under the hood like Google Analytics, Omniture, Kissmetrics, etc and others that are on the face of user like WebEngage, UserVoice, etc. If you love your product, any amount of feedback that you receive will be less.

For Wishberg, we wanted to hear more and so we introduced a feedback screen on the logout page. When any user logs out of his Wishberg account, its right there for users to share how their product experience was. Try out how this works on Wishberg, alternatively below is the screenshot of same.

Wishberg Feedback

The rational behind doing this is simple. If you have noticed, few years back when you logged out of web email services like Yahoo or others, they placed a huge banner advertisement on the subsequent page. Many of these advt banners had a CTR of 3% to 6% making it the most prime properties for advertisers. We replaced that advt spot with feedback.

Users have been very vocal in telling us what the love/hate about Wishberg and also pointing out what they want in the product. For a product owner it is probably the best way to collect feedback, equivalent to talking to your users. I hope to see many more product owners doing something similar to this.