BLOG OF MAYANK JAIN
How an acquisition feels like
The story of your life is covered in the many books that stand upon the bookshelf of a beautiful young woman. She has read some, some she wants to but hasn’t found the right moment to. And then there are some which are still to come to her but she doesn’t know it yet.
She has read many books in her life, mostly the classics or the popular ones which everyone should read, as she has been told. And she enjoyed them but nothing touched her, nothing called out to her soul. Maybe it was because they’ve been read and recommended by everyone around her. The novelty in those novels is lost on her.
Then one mysterious night, when the creatures of the dark come out, she finds a book which she finds calls out to her. It is a rare one which she hasn’t seen too many people reading. She doesn’t know how this is going to turn out because she hasn’t heard too many of her friends telling her how it goes. It is one which she knows a little about but she couldn’t help but open and start reading it, one page at a time.
She takes her time to read through every single page. Every single page is a different story. It feels to her as if each page was written just for her. That if there was any life she wanted to live, that story would be it. And it happens again and again, at every single page, every sentence, even every word. Every grammatical error adds to the beauty of the book. Every misprint feels like it was meant to be that way.
The books goes on and she finds herself engrossed in it. Detached from her world which she thought she belonged to until then and attached to the new one she has discovered, but always longed for, in the book. She feels different emotions - love, surprise, disgust, delight.
And then it ends.
When the book ends, she reminisces about how the book was. She, like most other people, has a bias of remembering only good things about the past and even the bad bits with a fondness. She has forgotten the agony of some really painful chapters in the book. There is only the lingering on sensation of a story well told.
She doesn’t know what comes next. She wonders if anything she picks up again is going to be as beautiful, as amazing. She doesn’t know yet.
She has too many options from which to pick the next one up.
Reaching the end feels like an accomplishment. There is a sense of closure. She wants to tell her friends how the book was because she loved it so much. But, she’s not sure about it because not a lot of her friends would connect to it, atleast she feels that way.
There is a sense of ending to it. A relief comes over her which engulfs her almost ready to perish her. Fulfillment. Satisfaction. Completeness.
That’s how I feel. Reference
As a sidenote: What if, the story was about you. How would you like it to be? If you could watch your whole life unfold from a distance afar, would you prefer it to end quickly so that you could find out what happens at the end or would you prefer to savor each and every moment slowly in the constant fear that the story might end too soon.
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Appreciate your time. Thanks!
Discouragement for future entrepreneurs
For those of you who are thinking of starting up your own company, know one thing — startups are incredibly difficult. Entrepreneurship is not exactly as romantic as it looks from the outside. Here are some of the things I have learnt from experiences of my own and of my entrepreneur friends.
1. Building a startup is a lot of hard work, much more than you would have ever imagined.
2. Your friends will get tired of asking you to come hang out with them and getting a ‘no’ all the time. Your ‘social’ circle will consist mostly of entrepreneurs.
3. Your conversations would revolve mostly around startups. Anything else would seem trivial to you. This will irritate you and your non-entrepreneur friends.
4. There’ll be times when you will feel lonely and disheartened. There’ll be days when it would get difficult for you to get out of bed. Here’s a great interview with AirBnB founder on this.
5. Your relationships with your loved ones will suffer. You will find much less time and put in much less effort to make them feel special.
6. Your parents won’t understand what you do. And when they ask you how much money you make or how much you save, you wouldn’t know what or how to answer it.
7. You will become very ambitious but you will get rejected over and over again.
8. After a point of time, your account balance will be low perennially.
9. Every press that your competitor gets will make you feel as if someone punched you in the stomach.
10. There’ll be doubters — a lot of them, even your friends, family and your loved ones.
11. At some point, the realities of life, like marriage, sickness, emergencies will come up and you will have to deal with it.
12. Your health and general fitness will deteriorate. You will stop taking care of yourself. You will eat shit food.
13. Those who believe in you will expect the world from you and when you fail, it is going to hurt.
14. You would wonder where the next month’s rent is going to come from. You will have to borrow money from friends and family.
15. You will go to a lot of meetings which you’d be excited about but they’d eventually come to nothing.
16. Your lifestyle will change - there’ll be much lesser drinking out or travelling out of station. Going out to watch movies would be a rare event.
17. You will spend your weekends at work.
18. You won’t get good sleep. Sometimes, you will lie awake in bed, thinking of all the stuff you have to do. One of my friends actually speaks Android code in his sleep.
19. There will be disputes between you and your co-founders, sometimes ugly ones.
I don’t want to tone down this post by saying that it is easy to handle these problems because these are very real things that might happen to you, so be prepared. This is not to discourage anyone but to warn people who are getting into it because they have a romantic notion of entrepreneurship in their head and are unaware of the challenges that come up.
Get into it only if you enjoy solving the problem you’ve taken up. Don’t do it unless you enjoy the whole drill, the extremes of emotions, the roller-coaster journey. Do it because you’d rather not do anything else.
I do it because this is what puts my heart at rest.
Additional reading:
How we found our designer
And almost did not hire her:
One of my mentors once told me: “Good design is no longer a USP for internet products. It is table stakes”. We’ve believed in this all along and have wanted to build the best possible experience at Musicfellas. A major role in that has been of our designer, Sneha Patel. This is the story of how we found our designer and almost did not hire her.
It was a Saturday, the day of the monthly Startup Saturday meet. As a newly turned entrepreneur, I thought it would be wise to meet some of the people from the startup community. So, I went for what would be my first and only SS meet.
But before that, let’s turn the clock back a few hours: In the morning, I get a call from a newly opened Dentist chain called MyDentist. They offer me a free consultation. I decide to go because it happens to be close to the venue of the SS event as well.
Back to the SS. I got late at the dentist’s and thus reached the event a little late. Sweating and panting, I signed up and paid the fees. Suddenly, someone asked for people who were going to make a presentation about their startups. I had no idea why, but I raised my hand.
The presentations began, and they were full blown powerpoint presentations. And I obviously didn’t have one. I just didn’t know that you were supposed to actually bring a proper presentation. So, I decided to just swing it.
I tore up two pieces of paper and wrote MUSICFELLAS across them. Holding it up in front of the audience, I spoke. I spoke about music. I spoke about the independent artists industry. And I spoke about design. I must have spoken a lot about design because at tea break, a girl I just said hello to said she was looking for me. I had no idea why. So, we just spoke a little bit about what we do, exchanged cards and bid goodbye. I did tell her that we were looking for a designer and she happened to be one. She was a self taught designer, who had just recently started out on her own and we would have probably been one of her first few clients.
A few days later, I got an email from her saying she would like to discuss where we left off. I checked her portfolio and honestly, I wasn’t impressed with the website designs she had done. What we were looking for at the time was a website designer but her expertise seemed to be in identity design, which by the way was pretty damn good. So, I told her so. And, that was that.
A few days later I got an email from her with an attachment — Musicfellas — website design. And I was completely blown away.
Musicfellas - Original website proposal
The rest, as they say is history.
Key Takeaway: Never discount first timers. Never take things at their face value. And most importantly, talk about your startup. And I mean really talk, communicate. Let your passion reach out and touch others. Because the best people see a good fit when they see one. You are the biggest evangelist of your startup, behave like one.
Oh and why the dentist story, later I got to know, that our designer was also the identity designer for my Dentist chain. Happy coincidences.
One year
Today, I complete 1 full year of quitting my first job. The ride since then has been adventurous to say the least. It has been a, *cliche alert*, roller-coaster year.
Before quitting my job, I had certain fears. Not being able to maintain my lifestyle was the biggest one. While at work, I had gotten used to spending money whenever and wherever I wanted to. And I was afraid that I might not be able to handle losing that freedom.
That lifestyle did go away. But, I managed to pull through. Eating out now means roadside aloo paranthas, and rolls or eating in Dhabas rather than Pasta Arrabiata and Fondues in fancy restaurants. Maggi has become a staple part of the diet. Exploring new pubs and sports bars is replaced by drinking beer at home or scouting for happy hours in cheap watering holes. The waiter no longer remembers our usual drink.
Honestly, it is scary at times. There have been times of immense lows, some which I had never experienced before. But the highs more than make up for it. The past one year has made me a better and wiser person, and I hope that the people whom I care about feel the same.
If I had a choice, I’d do it all over again because you know what, chilled beer still tastes the same at home.
The gates have opened - redBus acquired by Naspers
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!
On Flyte Shutdown
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.
2. High content acquisition cost: The record label-online store partnerships work in a way where the store has to pay a minimum setup/guarantee fees at the beginning which could be in the tunes of crores depending upon the catalogue size. This is to hedge the label’s risk in case the store shuts down (like Flyte). After the minimum fees is recovered, revenue share on the sales begin. So, even if the store makes huge revenue, it might end up paying most of it to the labels.
3. Few paying users: India is among the countries which pirate the most and it is not without reason. There are just not enough people buying music here. The funny thing is that a lot of people who are just getting into the music scene don’t even know the concept of buying music. They think that torrents is a genuine way of doing it. That is tough to change.
4. Changing patterns for paying music: World over, people are increasingly paying for access to music rather than for its ownership. Spotify, Rdio, Pandora give the users access to a huge library on the fingertips without giving them the ownership of the content. And users have responded fairly well to that. Thus, digital downloads are also probably going to become lesser as the cost of music access comes down.
What this means for the digital music scene in India:
From our experiments in the Indian market with Musicfellas, we’ve learnt that, there are just not enough paying users to make it a big sustainable business. Sure, you can probably make it a decent lifestyle business. But, that’s not what Flipkat would want, right? They would probably want to focus their efforts in some other directions instead - would say it was a commendable move. To build a big business solely on digital downloads in India is super difficult. At Musicfellas, we entered the business thinking of India as a test market and with plans to expand into international markets. Our assumptions that there are just not enough paying users was kind of validated.
Sure, there are some among us who would disagree with me and tell me that they pay so much for music. I know, I am one of you. But, there are very few of us - few enough to not make good business sense.
What I see as the future:
The future of digital music according to me is going to be more and more about being able to listen to any song whenever you want at the exact moment. Not 5 minutes later after you download it but right when your heart desires it. So, models like Spotify, Rdio or in India - Gaana, Saavn and Dhingana are probably the way forward. But, then again, these services have to be careful as to what happens to them once Spotify comes to India (which should be sooner rather than later, given its entry into Asian markets via Singapore). Because honestly, these services are not even half as good as Spotify when it comes to the product.
As to what happens to services like us - we will continue serving niche yet large enough markets of independent content. We are not Gaana’s/Spotify’s competitor but are complementary to them. We are not fighting for the same listening time - we want to help you discover new independent music (which you probably don’t find on these services). We operate at lower content acquisition costs (since we don’t work with the major labels). And, our users are passionate music fans, usually willing to pay for the music they love. We will always find space in that hipster heart of yours wanting to find good new music and break the usual clutter of overplayed commercialised music.
We are rolling out a mobile app pretty soon and would offer it on subscription only, hoping that a combination of downloads and subscription in the international markets should do it.
Disclosure: Times Internet Limited, the parent company of Gaana.com is an investor in Musicfellas via TLabs. The opinions in this article are my own and do not represent TIL.
Observations from a post’s 2 minute stay on Hacker News
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.
The Hacker News post got a lot of hits. And based on Google Analytics, I was able to make some interesting observations. Also included are stats from the following 5 days:
- After direct traffic from HN, the top three sources were: Feedly, Inbound.org and Hckrnews.
- 80% of traffic was from US, India, Canada and UK.
- In US, San Francisco gave twice the traffic from New York.
- Germans stayed on for more time than anyone else.
- Chrome was the most popular browser at 70% .
- In the first hour, hits were way higher from Mac as compared to Windows. As time progressed, things got evened out and they are now almost equal.
- iPad brought more than 80% of the mobile traffic.
Quick Note: HN shows up as direct traffic on GA instead of referral. More on it here.
An Elegy To Storylane
This morning, I woke up to this email from Storylane’s CEO Jonathan Gheller which said:
Dear Mayank,
I am excited to inform you that the Storylane team will be joining forces with Facebook. You can read more about it in my story here.
Best!
First things first - What is Storylane?
Storylane is a place where you can share stories about your life that are more thoughtful and serious in tone. And of course it’s social to the core. Launched in October 2012, it falls in the same league of Tumblr, Blogger or even Quora. But, the difference is that Storylane focuses on more personal stories - it asks you questions like “What do you know now that you didn’t when you were 18?" and even casual writers share stories about their lives like this one or this. But, what really interested me was the fact that it is such a beautifully designed product. Every experience interacting with Storylane is so fresh yet comfortable. Everything, right from the beautiful animation while the page loads or the way an image moves when you hover over a summary of the story is very well thought of. And their recently launched iOS app is also groundbreaking since it brings a very new interaction to reading apps. They truly delight their users with the experience.
What has happened?
Storylane is “now joining forces” with Facebook. What this means I do not know - but what I assume is that Storylane is acqui-hired to ramp up Facebook’s attempt to capture the longform writing market. So, it’s more about the team rather than the product. This has a weirdly same connotation to what happened with Posterous joining Twitter. The CEO had then mentioned that Posterous would continue running as an independent service but we all know how that turned out. I was a Posterous user back then but had a foresight to move to Tumblr. I have a bad feeling about Storylane too. Not that I am a heavy user but I do visit it quite often if only to check out the design and new stuff they’ve done. Heck, I have evangelised it to as many people as I could.
Why this rant?
It is because it hurts to see good products die. They add value to our lives and as someone really famous said “They move the human race forward”. I don’t know what the future holds for Storylane (the product) but I just hope it’s not a bad one. We need good products in the system. Also, I am sure, there are many out there who have invested their time and energy into Storylane. Because of its serious nature, Storylane was never just a fad but an attempt from a lot of people to start sharing their feelings. Even at Musicfellas, we took inspiration from Storylane for some our features - most notably the bell icon and some other minute details. And always looked up to the Storylane team for doing such a great job.
Having said all this, I’d like to congratulate the Storylane team for joining Facebook and wish them luck. And here’s hoping (and requesting) that they keep the service up for many of us whose lives have been touched by them in some way or the other.
9 Free Tools To Help Your Startup Off The Ground
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.
1. Google Apps
This includes the full rainbow of Google products for your business – Gmail, Google Docs, Calendar, Drive. These tools are quite simply some of THE most important tools you would get around to using. And until some time back it used to be free but they have now stopped free signups.
2. Asana
Asana is a project and task management tool which is free upto 30 members – which obviously works well for young startups like ours. Founded by Ex-Co-Founder of Facebook, Asana is super easy to use, very crisp and makes collaboration very easy. And the instant gratification that you see on checking off a task is superb. It has an iOS app as well but it leaves much to be desired.
3. Trello
Trello is our workhorse. It is a completely free project management tool which looks a bit like Kanban Board. It is a great tool to see what tasks are assigned to whom and are in what stage of the development. Best part is that it is transparent and gives you snapshot of your project status in a view. Here’s a look at the Trello team’s board.
4. Dropbox
I am sure that most of you use it already. If you are not, then you are missing out on a great and free (to an extent) way to share files. Instead of sending out email attachments to everyone, we use it to sync design files between everyone so that everyone knows what is the next thing we are building.
5. Tweetdeck
According to a recent study, twitter is much better than facebook for music marketing. And we use twitter quite extensively to seek feature requests from users, inviting new artists on platform and sharing new releases to our fans. But doing it from within the twitter app is a little painful. Hence we use a free tool Tweetdeck which is also owned by twitter. Although there are other tools also available in the market like Hootsuite, Tweetbot, etc. we find Tweetdeck to be most easy to use and good at whatever little things it does.
6. BufferApp
For the same reason as above, we use Buffer App to stay connected with people. Buffer App is a great free way to schedule your FB/Twitter/etc posts. You can add upto 10 items in each network before which it asks you to pay. This is a great way to share good content with your users without spending too much time worrying about the timing of the post.
7. Skype
I am sure you all use or have used Skype in some form or the other. Nothing much to say here except that for a team like ours, which is spread across different cities, a few skype calls always help – after all emails can only take you so far.
8. Tumblr
Having a blog presence for your business never hurt anybody. There is no better marketing than sharing your story with your audience. A startup is an interesting journey and there are people who would always be interested in a good honest story told well. And we use tumblr – a free tool to setup our blog. With absolutely zero coding, we have setup a blog and keep sharing good content it.
9. Mixpanel
Building a startup is as much science as it is intuition. And building a company which also takes decisions based on data is the mark of a good entrepreneur. So, apart from google analytics (which is a free tool as well), we use Mixpanel. It gives you information about events on your site very deeply and is free till 25000 data points a month – which can be extended after you put a logo on your site (which we have).
Building a startup is a time, energy and money consuming process. I hope that this post helped you in saving some of the money bit.
The crazy, twisted story of a logo
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 was designed chronologically. None of the earlier versions was perfect but we learnt from each one of them. Apart from the ones mentioned below, there were loads which were discussed, created and scrapped. But, for the sake of this discussion, we’d like to share just these few.
1. The Pacman lookalike
This was the first one we came up with. The idea was to resemble ‘fellas’ as some character. This looked cool to us especially since we could do a lot of avatars of it - like one wearing a headphone or a hat or even one which looked like a girl. But, the music element was missing. And of course it looked a bit too much like pacman which was the reason we eventually had to scrap it.
Key Takeaway: Avatars could work if done well with a unique, well conceptualised base character.
2. The elegant circle
Simplicity, minimalism and elegance were always at the top in our list of words we wanted to associate with our brand. We’ve been fans of clean design and this appealed a lot to our senses. But the restrictive little that could be done with this design led it to be passed over as well.
Key Takeaway: The green to blue gradient which could be seen in our website design. Typography, which was retained for the final logo.
3. The cliched music tones
This was an attempt to make a play on the initials M and F. The element of music was of course front and center but we wanted to go for something more subtle.
Key takeaway: Retain the element of music in the logo but make it more subtle.
4. Complicated headphone + moustache
For some reason, we were very impressed with that crazy #LikeaSir moustache and wanted to put in the design resembling ‘fellas’. The music element was there with the play on the name resembling the headphone. But, we felt it was a little tacky and hence scrapped it.
Key takeaway: The moustache was a good way to resemble ‘fellas’.
5. Giraffe + Elephant
This was the one on which we spent the most hours on. How could you say no to a cute little fat elephant hanging out with his buddy giraffe and listening to music :)
Endless hours in a coffee shop were spent making the elephant’s bum a little broader, giraffe’s neck taller and the tails together. It was hard to let go of this logo. But eventually, common sense prevailed and we scrapped this.
Key Takeaway: Nothing - this logo was perfect. *Sob Sob*
But seriously, don’t get too attached to your designs. You lose the sense of what’s right and what’s wrong.
6. The final one
The final version looked perfect to us - of course not at first. Lot of different versions were tried, eyes were inverted, mole was added, borders removed etc. But, as time went by - it started growing on us and we are so glad we decided to stick with it.
