3 things I learnt from my extremely different startups

Recently I met a couple of friends at a Tapri (roadside tea vendor not to be confused with Tapori). Both had just started their own separate businesses. Both had one thing in common. They bled from their noses to get an office.

This also made them the ideal target audience to get feedback on our concept of My Cute Office. For a couple of months we had been brainstorming on coming up with something to help new businesses set up their first offices without any upfront costs. (I had also written this post about it). We had just managed to develop a better model, which looked practical. As we had expected, my friends also had trouble getting an office. And they loved what we were doing.

The next 5 days we put our heads down and decided to put My Cute Office live with the bare minimum features required. The response has been stunning and managed to come close to closing a couple of deals.

But, more importantly what I wanted to highlight that this was our second start-up and had taken just 10 days to become close to profitable. This was after Qpeka which had taken us over a year to conceptualise, a year to develop and even longer to monetise.

So why did this happen and what did we learn?

1. The first thing we learnt was that people relate the internet and technology to information, comfort, entertainment and communication. Any of these can act as a foundation for you to build your market.

Features are not very important when it comes to building a market. They are only relevant to defend or scale your market. Nor is cost, since most things on the internet are free.

Qpeka wasn’t an information based product, so that was not something we could focus on.

We weren’t a social network either, so we weren’t focusing on the communication aspect.

We did not have a good native app for reading hence we did not provide users additional comfort either.

Qpeka did have entertainment aspect attached, but for that to become apparent we required a lot of content and more importantly popular content, in addition to a rating and recommendation systems. Plus when we started we did not have image support which didn’t help (now we support images).

My Cute Office provided information which was unique and that itself was enough for us to build the market around it.

2. The second thing we learnt was to use available technologies to reduce the development time to as less as possible and avoid building from scratch as much as possible. Most CMS have plugins can cover almost every aspect you need.

With Qpeka however, we had to create a per page tracking system which meant that we could not use any existing CMS solution and had to build everything from scratch, which meant it was extremely time consuming and much slower than building a normal content based website. It has been a massive struggle (but we feel it will be worth it).

Just that, I would not recommend others to start building stuff from scratch and instead use available systems to get their products ready ASAP.

3. The last and the most important thing is to calculate the revenue per user (also known as lifetime value). The lesser it is, the harder you have to work to build and sustain, because the users required to earn enough money is much higher.

Also, from marketing perspective, your product has to be more amazing and engaging enough to create referral and share value, or else it will become impractical to continue.

So it’s a safer bet to start something which generates higher revenue per user. It ensures long term sustainability.

With Qpeka the recovery per user was pretty low, the audience distributed and hence it was very difficult for us on a lower scale. On a larger scale however Qpeka has much more potential, since the effect of the features we have created started kicking in.

With My Cute Office our recovery per user is extremely high and the target audience is focussed and well connected. This eases the marketing effort.

So that’s mostly about it. We have been lucky to be part of two very different but equally exciting journeys and just thought of sharing we learnt with fellow entrepreneurs. We will be really happy if our learnings help you launch your businesses faster and successfully.

If you want to brainstorm about an idea, feel free to write to me at abhishekbarari@gmail.com.