redBus acquisition by Naspers group feels almost like my own. It is so heartening to see a big success story come out of India.
It is a great milestone for the Indian startup ecosystem. Complaints about the lack of exits here both from entrepreneurs (that includes some of us) and investors are pretty common. We need more optimism in our system and this is just the perfect dose.
Congratulations redBus team and Thank You for opening the gates. To my fellow entrepreneurs, let’s roll!
Just one of those posts where you write about a person you admire and relate it to some startup gyaan. So, here are the 7 ( a hat tip to the jersey number) things:
1. Always be preparing:
There’s a brilliant scene in the movie Glengary Glen Ross where Alec Baldwin brings out the term ‘Always Be Closing’. In startups and so in football, it is Always Be Preparing. Mind you, it is not always be working because we all need some time off to cool our heels. But being prepared is what we should always be. Cristiano Ronaldo is known to always stay in shape and fit even while not in training. He also ab-crunches as he watches TV. He knows his goal is to, well, score goals. And he is always preparing himself for it.
This article was originally published as a guest post on YourStory
India’s biggest e-commerce player, Flipkart shutdown its digital music store Flyte. This comes as a surprise to me given the fact that Flipkart had invested so much in building it. They bought a company navigating a can of worms, built the technology, made licensing deals with the labels which can take ages to close and of course built a whole team to do that. Then why did this happen?
As a digital music entrepreneur, here are my thoughts on this:
1. iTunes: This could be the single biggest reason on why Flyte didn’t work out. A lot of people I know preferred iTunes over Flyte, I do too. The ease of buying and having it downloaded automatically into your Apple devices is one of the biggest reason to do this. This convenience even overrides the lower costs that Flipkart had for some albums.
A few days back, one of my posts made it to the Hacker News front page. Here is a brief background to what had happened before that:
Behance tweeted about Musicfellas to its 500000+ followers but sent out a wrong link. I responded by tweeting them and writing a post on how it affected us and posted it on Hacker News. A lot of my friends retweeted, personally emailed Behance and some even raised a ticket. Behance responded, emailed us an apology, deleted the incorrect tweet and sent out a new tweet with the correct link.
As the story goes, one day, Justin Bieber tweeted an Instagram picture to his followers. As a direct result of that, Instagram got about 25000 new users. That is pretty amazing - promotion by celebrities always helps. Now, Musicfellas is no Instagram (yet) and Behance is no Justin Bieber. But, we have a similar story, albeit with a cruel turn.
1. Eat That Frog
Do the most difficult or the task you hate the most first. I guess this is against popular advice but this truly works. Your mind is the most fresh when you are starting out, and getting that one tough thing out of the way leaves you with much more motivation to carry forward with the other simpler ones. The frog analogy comes from the assumption, that people hate eating frogs.
This post first appeared as a guest post on WATBlog.com.
It is a free world we live in with free access to information (read Internet) and cheap ways that make our lives better. It is now easier and cheaper to start a company from scratch. Open-source tools, free information over the internet (Coursera, Khan Academy) make it super-reasonable for usually near broke entrepreneurs that we become. And we at Musicfellas have taken full advantage of such tools to help build a scalable business without breaking our piggy bank too much.
Rome was not built in a day. Our logo was built in one (month). There’s been some talk about our website design and the logo. And we are glad you all liked it. We have spent a lot of time working on it and it feels good to see some appreciation.
Today, we give you an inside view of how our logo…
It is about the extremes. Not holding back. It is about putting all what you’ve got at stake. Going all in.
Do it as if your life depends on it. Because it does. Life is not just one moment in the future. It is every single moment. It is now as you read this. This second.
Be crazy. Do something stupid. And do it again.
Race. Crash and burn. But, don’t spend your life sitting in the stands and just watching the action. Be a part of it.
