Starting a Business: Research before jumping in

By Pachi | Jul 29, 2008

The common reason why startups die early is because they didn’t do enough research. Most of them straight away start working, form a company, develop a product etc without doing proper market research. Doing ground work is a must before jump into forming a company and taking the next step. For instance, if you’re of planning of establishing a rental car company that will rival car hire galway and other top notch companies, you should first decide if it will be located near airports, bus stations, and rail stations among others. With this, you can also determine your target market and analyze the impact of the product or service in the market.

By doing ground work you get a clearer picture of the market. You will get to know about:

Demand in market for your product
Competitive products in the market
Market Size
Helps you know more about your potential customers

Most importantly, you will know if there is a need for your product in the market.

Knowing the above parameters helps you minimize the risk and must be a part of your “Should I, Should I not” decision making process.

So next time you get an idea, instead of straight away jumping into forming a team, company, taking the next BIG step, do market research, and know more about what you are getting into.

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Free Accounting Software for a startup

By Pachi | Jul 28, 2008

Entrepreneurship, Technology | 11 Comments

With 2 hands doing 100 things in a startup, we can get pretty disorganized and mess things up if we don’t take care of it early.

One area which requires atmost attention is finance. To keep track of expenditure, payroll etc. Unforeseen expenditure is a common thing in a startup. You will need to keep track of where the money is going and from where the money is coming in a systematic way.

But the money being tight, its difficult for any startup to hire an accountant or buy costly accounting software such as tally.

Most of us resort to excel to maintain cash-flow balance. But this is tedious, and most of time mess it up.

GNU Cash, an open source free accounting software answers all these problems.It has necessary features to solve day to day accounting. Moreover, it is free, easy to learn, easy to use and available for almost all the platforms.
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Talk freely about your ideas

By Pachi | Jul 27, 2008

Entrepreneurship | 5 Comments

I remember the times when I would hesitate to discuss my ideas with others. Most of the time hesitating, thinking, people would laugh at it and sometimes fearing that they may copy it. This is one of the most common mistakes we, wannabe entrepreneurs do early in our career.

We tend to get over protective about our ideas and never talk about it. This gives way for ideas to rot and die.

Even logic supports this, we want to discuss the idea with someone who knows more than us, but, as he knows more than us, we think he may copy the idea and execute it faster than us. Correct right? WRONG!

It is very difficult to identify good ideas. Can also go to an extent of saying, “An idea becomes good only after it has tasted success“.
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Difference between Wikipedia and Google Knol

By Pachi | Jul 25, 2008

Technology | 5 Comments

Google launched “Google Knol” in an attempt to take on media companies. Wikipedia might be the most hit. In this post, I compare Wikipedia and Google Knol, in more in terms of features than concepts.