If you ever tried to use social media to get more visits and hits to your startup, you must know how powerful is twitter and how powerful are twitter trends. When I was looking into the social media thing to spread word about our social web app, I studied twitter trends very closely, to find out how trends work, who are these people who actually start these trends and how it all goes. This was very interesting thing.

To understand how twitter and it’s trends can help you in spreading the word about your startup, I have some advice to give. First, here are some tools, which would be useful in understanding twitter and it’s trending topics,

1. Topsy.com – topsy.com is search engine for twitter, it has  nice advance search tool, which has a nice set of search operators that you can use to refine your search. I would suggest you to play with some terms related to your startup, and get idea about what people are tweeting and how much volume it has.
Topsy also has a nice analytics tool, which you can use, to find out when a keyword was most tweeted, this may even lead you to find the origin of a twitter trend, this one is a worth try.

2. Whatthetrend.com – The site let’s you know, why a particular term is trending on twitter. This is, I supposed done by users of website, curated by moderators. This website will help you in understanding twitter trends better.

3. Twitter.com Search – This is pretty decent search, worth a try, for real time search. We all know it well.

When I was looking at something, where we can try getting into the trend and lead some visits to our startup, I realized that, the trends generally started by those people, who actually don’t care much about their online identity or are not much tech savvy. So, don’t think that these people will mind you sending them something, they don’t want, you got what I mean.

At around 6am in morning, when I switched on my monitor, I found that Justin Bieber had reached 10million followers on twitter and hence #10Million Beliebers  was trending on twitter. Justin Bieber fans are young kids, who don’t care much about anything else, loves to click whatever comes their way, I was studying them from a while, I also talked with some of them over some fan chat rooms, I was amazed about how blindly they follow everything Justin.

I saw some opportunity in there, but didn’t know how to capture this, was searching something which we could plug in to our web app quickly, so that we could relate it to Justin Bieber, in some way and see what happens.

At around 7 I got this idea, we created a fan page of Justin Bieber in our web app. The idea was to spread that profile among the fans and see, if it goes viral. Obviously, there are 1000s of Justin Bieber fan pages, there had to be something unique about it.

I created an app, for Justin Bieber fans to send kisses to Justin’s twitter account, using their twitter account. Along that tweet, we would send Justin’s fan page url on our web app. So, fans would come on Justin’s fan page, login with their twitter account, kiss justin, with some nice animation, and send tweet to Justin. And if that catch up, more and more people would do it, that was the whole idea.

Some django twitter library, some jquery goodies and within 30 mins, it was ready to plug into our app, Justin was still trending.

Within 2 hours of getting the idea, we had everything ready and live. The final result can be seen here. http://closest.in/justinbieber

Then I made a tweet from a new twitter account I made for this purpose, along with the hash tag which was trending, I wrote something to tell Justin’s fan to kiss justin, with the url of our app.

As soon as I sent that tweet, hits started coming on the Justin’s fan page. Remember these were hits, because it was a trending topic, many people where searching it, clicking on websites and reaching on our web app. But we wanted people to try the kissing app. And yes, someone did it.

We gained some momentum. More hits, but what we wanted was, people trying the app and retweeting our url.

In my next post, I will write about how it all went, in the end.

When I was jumping into my first startup, I read a lot on HN, I read lots of essays of PG, I read lots of blogs. I understood that real men don’t write business plan. It’s just not what geeks do. Convinced by that, I never wrote a real business plan. And that was biggest mistake I made. But I took this advice the wrong way. When these big people say that you should not write a business plan, they mean you should not write it on a paper, or you should not write it for others, but the point I missed was, you should write a business plan in your head, in your mind, you should have that in your mind, you should write it for yourself. Damn, that’s where I missed the whole point.

Write your business plan, for yourself. Give yourself a favour. Keep everything clear in your head, make it clear that how are you going to make money, what would happen if things go well, how much traction you expect, who are you targeting, how are you going to acquire your first customer, write everything, make everything clear in your head, that’s how it should be done. Not writing a business plan is ok, but not knowing your business plan is a blender. Do it right now, if you haven’t

Yesterday, I was talking with one of my friend, who is also working on a startup idea. I asked him these basic questions and he was answering them, as I would have answered them, 10 months back. Yes, I could feel that, that’s how I was thinking. No clear business plan, not thinking about money, loving the coding part, haven’t given enough thought about who he’s targeting and what will happen after 10 months. I kept asking him all these basic questions, we brainstormed about his idea, tried to find out what and how it should be done and other things. At the end of long conversation, I convinced him in giving a proper thought on everything that is missing in his plan.

One thing that I also realized that, if you only love coding cool things and not the other things of a business, you better take a well paying programming job. Startups are different games altogether. You should be thinking more about how to convince others about what you are doing, rather than trying to make something which no one wants.

So, the conclusion is, write down your business plan right now. For  yourself. There is no harm in this. One thing that you can do is, make a list of all the incubators you can find, download their applications form, and fill them. Even if you are not going to apply to anyone of them or not, but answering all those questions will make you understand your own idea even better. It’s an exercise that I think every startup should do.

There are all these market size figures, product description, goal, business model etc. in a business plan. But there is something that no one tells you, it’s that how much strong you need to be both mentally and physically to be able to start a business. It’s always 10x of what you would have imagined. Startups are emotional roller coasters. More than being technically strong, you would need to be mentally strong.

At times, we faced so many situations, when we broke. Listening to your criticism, things not working, bloggers writing about you the way you never wanted, strong reaction from your users, your family, you friends and what not.You will meet people who would downright decline your efforts saying things you would never like to listen. It can go all wrong. You need to be prepared for all these.

You may face breakup, you laptops may get stolen, your house owner may want to you vacate immediately, your investors may refuse to back you at the last moment, you product may get copied by big G, your twitter follower may start unfollowing you, all these and even worse can happen, so be prepared.

And yes, you need to by physically strong as well. Trust me, this is highly underrated requirement for a startup founder, but this is one of the most important. You will loose at least 3-5kgs of weight during 10months, you would be working 20hours a day, you may skip breakfast, sometimes lunch, sometimes dinner and sometimes all three of them. Not just this, because you are going to spend whole lot of time focusing on one single thing, you are going to miss lots of other things which are very important to keep you physically fit. So, your physical strength is equally important with all other things, if you want to do a startup.

So, next time you write a business plan, do think about these two things as well. Good luck.