4. Overview
• About me
• Sharing Personal Experience
• Learning
• Obstacles
• Ideas
5. About Me
• HashCube
• 3 rounds of angel funding
• Multiple failures & pivots
• 8 People team
6. College days
• Pirates of Silicon Valley, The Code Linux
• Hobby websites
• Passionate about programming
• Frequent to LUGs
• Biotech major – bunked mostly
• Gene predictor
7. Before Dec 2007
• Spike Source, BioAsk
• No work satisfaction
• No motivation to work
• Fought with my manager
• End result – Quit my job
8. 2008 Jan - Apr
• Moved to Blr
• Started working on online games
• Target $100/month
• Keywords trick – iphonevssudoku
• Got blocked by adsense at $500/month
9. 2008 Apr - Dec
• My cofounder joins - how?
• Motorola
• Online games
• Desktop Sudoku (14.99 vs 1.99)
• Facebook
10. 2009 Jan to Apr
• Facebook Dotgame
• 100k users for Dotgame
• Allfacebook.com features our game
• God sent investor
• Offers from other investors
11. 2009 May - Dec
• iAcc
• Good & Bad
• 10 start ups – now part of a new family
• Half a million users
• Wasted 6 months trying to raise money
12. 2010
• 1 million users
• New game that flopped – 6 months x 3 devs
effort gone waste
• De GhumaKe
• MAU goes down
• Third Cofounder – episodes
13. 2011
• New round of investment
• Salaries for founders!
• New Game – Sudoku Quest
• Analytics tools – 12 dev months gone waste
• Pivot
15. Before Starting
• Preparation
– Savings
– Angel funding from Husband/Wife
– Mindset: be prepared to spend 24 months
without any returns
– Mentors & Support groups
– Work life balance goes for a toss
17. Incubators
• The new B-Schools
• YC, Angelpad, Morpheus, iAccelerator, TSC
Chennai
• 3L to 5L for 3 to 12%
• Share and learn from other startups
18. Cofounders
• Mostly colleagues or classmates
• Complementary skills
• Agree to disagree
• Two is ok, Three is better
• Four or more – Strong leadership
19. Ideas
• Solve a problem
– Renting a house/office
– E-Commerce – unexplored categories
• Printer cartridges
• Hardware shops – paint, plumbing items etc
• Gardening items
• Birthday cakes
– Dating for Indians
– Jobs/hiring market place
– Farmers
20. Mistakes
• Take Legal, Accounts & Compliances seriously
• Take salaries as soon as possible
• Bad hires
• Raising too less money
• Founders agreements – vesting in place
22. Fundraising
• Takes 6 months
• Huge distraction
• Raise more than you need – 2 years runway
• Don’t talk to investors before traction or
building the product
• Revenues are important
• Angel.co
23. Hiring
• First few employees are very important
• 6 months interns – hard to find good
candidates again
• Hire from LUGs, tech groups
24. Starting Early
• Start as early as possible
• Drop out of college & start
• Enough time to learn things
• Low expenses – easy to survive