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.

 

 

 

I want to make this feature request to twitter – Sticky tweets.

I would like to have an ability to mark some of my tweets as sticky and making them visible in the top of my timeline in my profile, all of the time.

I can see a lot of use cases for such tweets, suppose I am available for some freelancing job, I am out on a vacation, I have a portfolio to share, I have donation request, I could make those tweets sticky and hence my twitter profile would become more useful and my single point of online identity.

This will finally kill my need of having a blog or about.me profile or anything like that. Such a simple solution. Isn’t it ?

Twitter, We want sticky tweets, please! If you think this could be really useful, please help spread this post and let someone from twitter, notice this.

I think more than facebook, it’s twitter who need to copy the circle feature from Google+.  Posting different things to different people is much more required on twitter than on facebook. I’ve my professional contacts and personal friends on twitter, I would like to share different things with them, without them knowing it.

Twitter could do it by modifying twitter lists to some bit. If I could make private lists and put people in them and share different things with different lists, that’s what I want. The problem I see, in implementing this is, everything is public on twitter, so eventually everyone can see all you updates. But then, that’s ok. Only that I don’t want to spam my follower’s timeline with tweets he might not be interested in and there’s no problem if he explicitly come on my profile to see all of the tweets I made.

I think sooner or later, twitter would need to implement this feature. It’s a much needed one. Google+ is a big threat to them, I believe.

Unpluggd Startup event by pluggd.in happened last Saturday, here in Bangalore. I attended it and I am writing down, what I got from it.

First thing that I realized was, Why do startups love these events, meetups so much ? Because, it’s so much lonely, fear, uncertainty in their life that it feels so good to know and meet people who are going through all the same and are fools enough to believe that they can change the world and live in their own dream world.

It was exactly like any typical startup event or tech conference. Talks, networking, demos and bye bye. Greatest part was the speakers and the demos. The quality was really excellent by any means.

Listenig to Deap Ubhi, the founder of Burrp was most inspiring. The guy talked right from heart, about his experiences, mistakes he made during the early days of Burrp and about his current startup HopScout.com

Talk by ksrikrishna was also very insightful and made me feel like he was giving words to what I have experienced in last few months of startup life.

There were also Angels roaming around, people from Sequoia, Mumbai Angles and couple of others too.

Among the demos, I enjoyed Recruiter Box, Freshdesk, Interview Street and unbxd, these guys are really killing it.

People were trying their best to network with as many people as possible, it’s kind of fun to see people exchanging business cards and flattering about each others startup, seeing wannabes pitching to Angels, listening to veterans spraying gyan. There were rockstar founders, who had done well, everyone was trying to talk with them, there were people like me, sitting in the corner, there were people of all sorts.

There wasn’t any after party or there may be, but I didn’t see anything being discussed.

Surely, the Indian startup ecosystem is evolving, slowly, slowly, bit by bit.

 

For the technically-inclined, coding is the perfect form of procrastination” via a comment on HN

I’ve spend lots of time over computers, web, email, IM, twitter during last 5 years of my life.  When you don’t have enough resources to learn what you want to learn in your surroundings, Internet is one of the biggest source and help  for you.  Internet as a source of information is great, connected, liberal, free, always available, it’s exactly the way information access should be.

Five years back, I used to get internet access for around 3-4 hours a day, I would copy useful information, websites and burn them in CDs, go back home and read them for hours. It was all great. Internet as a source of information is perfect, still it’s same.

The other aspect of Internet is, Internet as a way of communication. Email, forums, IM, twitter, facebook are among them. But, the Internet as a way of communication, is broken.

You know this if you use it for more than 10+ hours a day.  For professional communication, it’s good. But I am talking about the personal communication. The problem with IM, twitter etc is, they are single dimensional, text. Communication between two people can happen only when there are multiple dimensions are involved, your voice, gestures, eye contact, body language.

From my personal experience, I’ve found that, talking a lot over IM has made me arrogant. I would tell people things I would never say them in a face to face conversation, I would talk too much straight forward, I would not answer people for a long, I would get frustrated if people don’t answer me and what not.

In person, I am a different person, over internet, I am bit different, I am arrogant, thanks to Internet.

I’ve got lots of misconception about world, because of Internet, I am connected with people from US, UK etc over internet more than people from India. Because of that, my understanding about society, culture is somewhat screwed, it’s a real disconnect from your surroundings. It’s painful at times.

Internet has made me arrogant.

First thing first. Let me tell you all the non-reasons. It’s not about technology. It’s not about ability. It’s not about resources. It’s not about funding. It’s nothing that you think.

And now let me clarify that how I qualify to answer this question. I am founder of http://closest.in it’s now a 11 month old web startup. We started working on it right after college, so I am a young startup founder, with very radical ideas, inspired by silicon valley culture and what not. So I have 11 months of experience in this arena to back my answer.

Now, why there are no web startups from India, because there are no early adopters. That’s not in our blood. Web startups come out of USA because Americans love to try new things and we Indians don’t. This is a problem which can’t be solved by technology. This is a psychological problem.  There is not a single web product which came out of India, that I use daily. Yes, not a single.

What are early adopters? Early adopters are those people who actually use new services and accept them or reject them. I am not saying that early adopters always accept new products, they actually give their opinion. So if a product is doomed to fail, it fails early. That’s how it works.

And I know the root of problem, it’s the faulty education system which is brainwashing innocent children and putting a belief in them that “your ideas are useless”, it’s such a small line and has such a vast impact on the whole nation. Students are literally discouraged to take forward their ideas, especially in the average engineering colleges, I can only talk about them because I was a part of them.

Only solution to fix this problem is to destroy all the engineering colleges right now and convert them into “idea factories” let young people work on what they want. I cry seeing so huge human potential wasting. If anyone wants to fix something in startups ecosystem, fix the education system, that’s the root.

</rant>