I am sure, people were expecting a lot more than this, especially after 3 teaser posts. But lets call this as “desistartups 1.1″. 2.0 vision is coming along nicely and you can expect lot of interesting updates on that soon.

Here you go – http://www.desistartups.in is going to be the new address for all Indian Startups related stuffs, which includes reviews, interviews, blah blah blah. If you are a RSS subscriber via feedburner, you should not see any difference.

But traditional readers, who used to type in my blog address, well you can type few characters less now to come in.

See you soon in the new location.

-Prabhu

Probably the last of the teaser series before we launch soon!

Is funding a startup alone sufficient enough for making it a big success?

Keep your guesses coming in. Curious ones, can of course email me and ask straight.

desistartups 2.0 will not be just a blog!

P.S: Few people already know what I am upto and few have guessed and shown interest already via email. Do feel free to email me at prabhu [at] desistartups [dot] in, for clues.

First teaser post.  Do try to guess, what I am upto.

Happened to see this post from The Startup Guy. Some of my thoughts on this. (Of course not to hurt anyone)

To begin with, lets categorize the different kinds of techies in India.

• People who have been working in Indian services/product companies all along.
• People who moved abroad (so called onsite) through an Indian company.
• People who returned back from abroad, after working as just another employee oversees.
• People who returned back after achieving or wanting to achieve something .
• People involved with a startup in India.

I dont find any problem with any of these categories. Why blame someone just because he is/was abroad, just for the sake of it?

Now lets assume Kumar belonging to one of these five categories is interested in starting up on his own. Lets discuss some of the problems, Kumar would be facing during his entrepreneurship journey in India.

• Impossible to hire people

Ask any Indian startup how much effort they have to put in to hire a single employee, you will understand what I am trying to convey. A number of startups are continuing to show their frustration on this. Number of fresh engineers willing to join IT biggies is still very high compared to number of freshers willing to join startups. This is something to do with the mentality of the people. Startups in US/UK doesn’t seem to have this problem at all. Either, they get sufficient funding very early to afford costlier resources or to outsource to some desi company in Bangalore or manage to hire people directly, because the startup ecosystem is very matured that people don’t seem to differentiate a small garage startup Vs Google. Infact, this blog post of mine is based entirely on my personal experience in trying to hire people in India.

Any person – Indian or non Indian trying to change this situation is definitely on my wanted list. Having said that, events like “Startup Lunch” are more than welcome. Kudos to Team Proto, for coming up with this idea. Lets hope for more such ideas from other similar groups too.

• VCs are still without V

Yet to come across a VC who has taken the absolute risk by investing in an Indian Startup very early.

Any person – Indian or non Indian who can cause significant impact to this issue to the best of the ecosystem, stands second on my wanted list.

• Not much support from fellow people!

Which is the most popular Social network in India? Orkut. Which is the most hot topic related to social networks in India? Launch of Myspace India. Which is the popular search engine in India? Google. Which is the popular website in India? Yahoo! Should I mention that in china – Baidu and other native ones are the most popular and are giving other companies a run for their name and fame?

500-600 startups starting up every year and eventually only a handful of startups remain. Others exist either for some adsense money or just because their hosting service has not expired?

What is the reason? Very simple … When was the last time you used Guruji to search for some India specific site instead of Google? When was the last time you accessed your rediff or indiatimes mail account instead of Yahoo/Gmail? Well to be honest, even I am not doing any of these. But at some point in time, people should show their support right? Best place to start is to check the Startups Directory page in this blog and tryout the different startups in each category.

Now if an American blogging about our Indian Startup, can increase the visibility and hence convince a significant number of people to try out our startups, then he is most welcome to do that. He is the third guy on my wanted list.

• Global approach

How many Indian startups which target the entire world are known outside of India? If these startups are really serious about the global audience, then they should either showcase their startup to the global audience or encourage foreigners to visit them and tell the world on their behalf. Instead of this, making noise from a closed room doesn’t make any sense.

So the fourth person on my wanted list is someone who can take the startups to this international level. I don’t mind what nationality he belongs to.

Thus I conclude that we do need everyone on my wanted list. Sorry if this post appears to be emotional and feel free to correct me if I am wrong.

UPDATE: Interesting discussion in the comments section.

Dear Scoble,

We happened to see this post of yours. We agree that Israel is far from the US. But India unfortunately is on the other side of the US and literally not many bloggers really care about the startup ecosystem over here. The number of VCs investing are just handful and the number of investors really taking risks by investing in early stage startups is meagre.

How about a trip to India to meet the startups over here? It would be ideal if you can attend an event like proto or headstart during your trip. Given that the next edition of proto is on July 18th and 19th in our capital (Delhi), we believe there could not be a better time than this.

We promise that you will get to know about a number of interesting/promising startups that You or Mike or Sarah, have never heard about! Of course, more QIK videos for your collection too

Feel free to bring along other blogger friends of yours too!

Regards,

Prabhu

(On behalf of Indian startups)

Quick facts about Indian e-tailing market.

• Market was worth Rs. 1,105 crore in 2007-08 (Report – Internet and Mobile Association of India)
• Industry experts feel that Indian Consumers’ confidence in Online shopping is improving thanks to e-ticketing and online bill payment services.
• For major players like Indiaplaza, Rediff – consumer electronics segment is the biggest.

Now lets take a look at how this ecosystem appears from Indian context.

At the centre, we have the core players or the typical e-tailers that people talk about/use often. We have quite a number of startups like flipkart, storrz, autsun, MyKidsArena in this space.

Lets quickly run through other contributors in this ecosystem.

• Meta search engines – oxyshopping. Typically these players bombard you with a number of search results for any category and makes you get confused totally during your shopping research!
• Comparison Shopping – Players like Spoteazy, who allow you to compare and choose the product you want by showing things like Ratings, Aggregated reviews (some nlp stuff). Few target the US market too.
• Online Deals – No side by side comparison, features nothing. Just pure price. You should have done your research using the players on top and keep watching these sites for the lowest price. Get alerts by email, sms, phone, parrot etc.
• Community based – At last, share your research with others. Ask questions and figure out the best product suiting your needs using sites like MyProdoktSpace, ShoppingShouts

It is very essential that each of these categories co-exist for the core e-tailing market to expand.

In this post, we will focus on the Indian Startups in the Online deals space alone.

Having gone through these sites, here are some of my thoughts.

• Google Adsense all the way – Appears to me like major source of income is from adsense and banner ads. Not very convincing for affiliates. Can Nidhi and others correct me, if I am wrong?
• What about our startups? – Excepting few like dealmaadi, not many provide deals in our e-tailer startups like flipkart. Why is that? Please crawl our desi startups (Indian startups) as well.
• Widgets and RSS – Widgets to embed in our blog and get points for referral. Later can reimburse those points. RSS for any search result. How about adding these two?
• Make good use of the data – Did you know that some of the data you collect might be very crucial for major e-tailers. Data like what category people search for in a month, what brand they visit often apart from competitors data are highly used in deciding the exact pricing + bundling for a product. Just make it easy for enterprises to access this data. Simple.

Have I missed something here? Suggest me via the comments.

Within minutes of announcing the availability of slot 2, I got a number of ping for sponsorships. This is a very encouraging moment and I will try to maintain this throughout. Slot 2 goes to a cool blog about mobiles in chennai – chennaimobiles. I spoke to Varun, the owner of this blog. Varun is well known for organizing events like momochennai (Related : My talk at the recent momochennai). He seems to have bigger plans around mobiles, definitely a guy worth watching.

We wish both our sponsors – pringoo and chennaimobiles all the very best in their endeavour.

Couple of quick announcements.

• First our revenue model – banner ads on the sidebar. Thanks to Jai of Pringoo, for being the first sponsor. For readers new to Pringoo, they allow you to “create customized gifts, personalized t-shirt, teddy bear and so on“. You can learn more about pringoo from here, about their competitors and how they compare against them from here and about the management team here. There is space for one more startup to showcase. Hurry, before it gets used up!
• Secondly guest posts. I am sure every reader wants more quality posts over here. If you feel that you can write something related to indian startups – comparison posts, review of a feature, technical ones like when to use s3/slicehost, feel free to send across your post to prabhu [at] desistartups [dot] in.

More interesting announcements to follow; time to keep your RSS readers alive!

Remember my “7 things that Indian Startups Miss out” post? This is a continuation of that.

8. Big names in Board of Directors/Advisory Panel

Take a moment to check out the about us section of all successful startups. You will find a number of big names in their panel. While me not arguing that you can be successful only with Big names on board, at the same time, being able to convince someone to become a advisory itself, is definitely a great start. Something, a number of startups have to think about.

9. International Focus

I was wondering how many Indian Startups registered to the “Under the Radar” conference.  If you refer to my Interview with Lalit of Mobisy, for the question “Any changes after MoMo Barcelona. More calls from VCs? More Job Applications?“, his response was

Surely, last few months have been extremely hectic for Management team thanks to MoMo Barcelona. For me , biggest takeaway from Barcelona was more customer interest rather than anything else. Obviously customer interest helps a lot also to get more attention from VCs or prospective employees.

Out of ‘n’ number of startups in India, only few are really looking for the international reach, while a number of them are quite content with the Adsense money that they get from their site. My point is simple. If your target market is just India, then continue to participate in India specific conferences alone. But on the other hand, if you are thinking of a Global audience, then you definitely need to have a global approach. Plan your investment accordingly.

10. Willingness to listen to comments

When Meebo was a startup, I used to email some of my comments (over enthu guy).  And I used to get replies to all my emails; whether they are going to consider them or not is a different issue and this is one of the reason I liked Meebo. I find it really strange to see few Indian Startups not caring to reply to emails at all. Are you guys too busy and hence not able to reply for ages? A few of them will not thank/appreciate the comments. They are so keen on their image that the moment, a blogger mentions something negative, he doesn’t deserve any respect at all. Well I may be a little partial here, due to some recent unpleasant experiences. But in simple terms, listen to what others say. They might have something valuable too!

And finally, what do my readers miss out? Comments! 100+ visitors reading and yet only 2 or 3 leaving comments is not appearing fair. Expecting more comments from now on.