I had written below article after beta release of my startups online platform in Oct-2016
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A month had passed, since I arrived in Finland for a pre-study and it was presentation time. But there was one problem. Our lead architect had gone cross country skiing the previous day. By the end of the grueling 4 hour race, his girlfriend had beat him to the finish line, and so did the cold. He was down with a fever.
The delivery head looked at me. I was going to give the presentation. It was the very first time, my one dimensional existence, my non-interest in any kind of outgoing activity, like even visiting tourists spots, leave alone skiing, had come in use.
Now at the client site, I was on the slide titled "Lessons Learnt". Halfway through it and the client interrupted stating "Well.. its good that you learnt your lessons, but lets move on.." I moved onto other stuff like a demo, which conveyed, we had not spent the customer money on only learning's, which we definitely had not. The lesson learnt from the lessons learnt slide was that output is far more important, as it any way, includes the lessons learnt. This was a couple of years back.
Hence, now too, a year into a startup, I shall go easy on the lessons learnt and focus what we ended up doing and using. Here are few recommendations for a bootstrapped technology startup
Email: Sign up for Zoho mail and get up-to 25 free accounts. These accounts can be used for internal communication and also for the send email functionality inside the app
Version Control: Bitbucket is the best and also comes with five free accounts.
Hosting: Amazon web services (AWS) or Microsoft Azure
Free software: When an initial version of application is in production, sign up for Microsoft Bizspark, and leverage Microsoft software for scaling.
Stick to whatever you know in some cases and learn new stuff when needed. We found sticking to Microsoft Windows so much more productive, that we ended up using it on the server side as well, although I like using Linux too. With 15 years of windows experience, dabbling with MacOS for development was a costly misadventure. We ended up using trustworthy Java and Mysql on server side and had to learn flashy new(for me) Bootstrap + Angular on the client side.
Remote working: I like the concept of remote work, office not required, and so i tried it, but with my limited open source experience could not make it work in the initial phase. A combination of remote and co-working space work, though worked fine.
Interns: I got to interact with many capable interns doing post graduation - from Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham - and realized there is lot of talent, which can be tapped to do some great ground breaking research.
That's it for now. If you have any recommendations for startups or questions do let me know. Also when you have the time, request you to check out beta release of CoProduce.com, our platform for digital content creators and publishers in India and provide your feedback !
Note: The startup work was stopped and CoProduce.com domain name sold to a third party; the platform developed by us is no longer online.
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A month had passed, since I arrived in Finland for a pre-study and it was presentation time. But there was one problem. Our lead architect had gone cross country skiing the previous day. By the end of the grueling 4 hour race, his girlfriend had beat him to the finish line, and so did the cold. He was down with a fever.
The delivery head looked at me. I was going to give the presentation. It was the very first time, my one dimensional existence, my non-interest in any kind of outgoing activity, like even visiting tourists spots, leave alone skiing, had come in use.
Now at the client site, I was on the slide titled "Lessons Learnt". Halfway through it and the client interrupted stating "Well.. its good that you learnt your lessons, but lets move on.." I moved onto other stuff like a demo, which conveyed, we had not spent the customer money on only learning's, which we definitely had not. The lesson learnt from the lessons learnt slide was that output is far more important, as it any way, includes the lessons learnt. This was a couple of years back.
Hence, now too, a year into a startup, I shall go easy on the lessons learnt and focus what we ended up doing and using. Here are few recommendations for a bootstrapped technology startup
Email: Sign up for Zoho mail and get up-to 25 free accounts. These accounts can be used for internal communication and also for the send email functionality inside the app
Version Control: Bitbucket is the best and also comes with five free accounts.
Hosting: Amazon web services (AWS) or Microsoft Azure
Free software: When an initial version of application is in production, sign up for Microsoft Bizspark, and leverage Microsoft software for scaling.
Stick to whatever you know in some cases and learn new stuff when needed. We found sticking to Microsoft Windows so much more productive, that we ended up using it on the server side as well, although I like using Linux too. With 15 years of windows experience, dabbling with MacOS for development was a costly misadventure. We ended up using trustworthy Java and Mysql on server side and had to learn flashy new(for me) Bootstrap + Angular on the client side.
Remote working: I like the concept of remote work, office not required, and so i tried it, but with my limited open source experience could not make it work in the initial phase. A combination of remote and co-working space work, though worked fine.
Interns: I got to interact with many capable interns doing post graduation - from Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham - and realized there is lot of talent, which can be tapped to do some great ground breaking research.
That's it for now. If you have any recommendations for startups or questions do let me know. Also when you have the time, request you to check out beta release of CoProduce.com, our platform for digital content creators and publishers in India and provide your feedback !
Note: The startup work was stopped and CoProduce.com domain name sold to a third party; the platform developed by us is no longer online.
