Ambition is the side-effect of a finite (limited) mind

Since we have a finite (limited) mind we cannot possibly "see" things in their entirety. So we aggregate and summarize. Instead of seeing the journey that is someone's life, we focus on the destinations they're reached. It's little wonder then that we aspire to reach destinations instead of paying attention to the journey and price we pay to get to our destinations.

This post was inspired by Clayton Christensen's How Will You Measure Your Life? TEDxBoston talk from 2010 :

Designing Your Startup

This is the video of my talk at Agile India 2012 (it's missing about 5-10 minutes from the beginning). I'm totally winging it, so I've goofed up a lot, but in the spirit of shipping, here it is:

Starting up

Starting Jan 1, 2011, I switched to consulting part-time (3 days a week) at my regular gig Directi (which IMO, is one of the best companies to work for in India) to spend some quality time with my then pregnant wife and focus on building products that scratched my own itch.

So far, I've become a dad (it's a girl!), shipped Owe.to, shipped OboxApps, almost shipped Rewritepad and saw bombay evolve in the process.

Along the way I also stumbled upon what looks like an interesting problem to solve, with a sizable market that I'm very excited about.

Overall, its been a great year so far and I'm looking forward to the rest of it.

Business 101

1. Find a pressing problem faced by enough (depending on how much money you want to make) customers* .
2. Come up with a solution to the problem and offer it to customers. The price is a part of the solution.
3. If enough customers are not willing to pay for your solution, then either the problem was not pressing enough (go to step 1) or faced by enough customers (go to step 1)  or you don't have the right solution yet (go to step 2).
4. Rinse and repeat till you have enough paying customers.

* Customers are people with a problem that they are willing to pay to solve. Your users are not always your customers. For example, users of a site/product might just be people that your customers can advertise to.

Big Companies

• Big companies have greater entropy and therefore increased inefficiencies.
• Increased inefficiencies result in greater viscosity; you need to put in a lot more effort to get something done.
• Dealing with these inefficiencies (processes) generates a lot of busy work, work that is time consuming but not valuable.
• Busy work dilutes focus and results in even further inefficiencies and the vicious cycle continuous till you end up with individual goals that are orthogonal to the companies goals.
• Everyone in the company has a different context and is dealing with a different level of abstraction. Assuming that transparency is the key to keeping people aligned misses the point that the goals need to be communicated differently to different individuals within the company. This is a very hard problem to solve.

The Freegrade Business Model

Provide free accounts with limits (on the number of things like photos, emails, users, etc. or on storage) with an option to upgrade to a paid monthly subscription account without or relaxed limits and maybe even additional features. Once you upgrade to the paid account, you must either pay to continue or stop using the application.

Works best if you have a product that users get hooked to and will pay to continue using once they have exhausted the limits. Interestingly, the exhausted limits are a good indicator that the user is hooked.

This is different from the Freemium Business Model, in that the differences between the free and paid accounts are in the limits and not necessarily in features alone. It is also different from the Free Trial Period Model that usually has a limit on time, which might result in prompting the user to upgrade to a paid account before they are hooked. I coined this term primarily to differentiate it from these models.

Examples: Wufoo, Flickr, Basecamp

The word freegrade is a portmanteau created by combining the two aspects of the business model: free and upgrade.