madhouse musings!

A little over a year ago, when Sameer & I quit our jobs (again!) & set out on our journey called Morpheus Venture Partners, I could hear whispers in the sidelines…. Some shouted out loud on our face (I love the sorts who are upfront!) Many of them supported us of this decision and thought early stage eco-system in India badly needed something like this.  A few thought we were fraud & just trying to take advantage of innocent entrepreneurs; some thought that there was not much value in what we were doing, a lot of them thought entrepreneurs need money not advice… and so on…

I’ve always done what i have strongly believed in & so was the case with MVP. Not that we had the entire thing  planned out in our heads. We started with a loose model; something that could be of value to start-up entrepreneurs, we were open to learning, tweaking as we learned and executed. But our focus was and will continue to be to give the best and excel in what we do!

And now, one year later, we’ve just announced 10 start-ups as part of our Third Batch and expanded our team. Read Release Here What does it mean to me, as a Partner and one of the founding members of MVP? A whole freakin’ lot!

Indus is a super cool dude, who has entrepreneurship in his blood. The match in attitude, wave length between the team is superb! [Picture this - Indus lives in Bangalore, travels in the local bus, walks some distances to get to a meeting and yet he has all the energy to deliver!]

Thanks to Ankit of Instablogs via whom met Indus & engaged him as a pro-bono Subject Matter Expert for MVP companies. At MVP we had no plans or thoughts of expanding the team in any which way, partly because we ourselves operate like a frugal start-up & partly also because we were unsure about the role of a new team member. But, the guy he is Indus – we just could not, not have him on board! Superb human being, great attitude, exceptional humility! With him on board MVP has grown stronger by bounds and leaps! Indus, Thank you!

We were 10 companies strong till June 2009 and the learning with them was immense. Each one of them – Ankit, Nandini, Sumit, Lalit, Sahil, Siva, Rajnish, Varun, Namit, Himanshu, Rakesh, Waqar, Riz, Jay, Sarab, Vaneet & Ishu – are rockstars in their own right. Thinking big, executing fast, fearing not to fail, fighting and fighting through! Thanks guys for giving me an opportunity to associate with you. (okay this does not mean you’ll not see anymore of me!)

Collage Courtesy: S P Hari

The Current Batch now has 10 companies and I personally believe each one of the founders is exceptional. They have a passion, they’ve dared to dream, they are focused.

Adscoot’s Suyash, stands for hours in the major junctions at mumbai to learn traffic patterns and measure footfalls!

EasySquareFeet’s Ashu & Snehesh are the most positive people i’ve seen! I can see their smiles through the phone when i talk to them (serious!)

Viv & Hari of InterviewStreet are two rockstar techies who are consciously & fast learning other skills to take their product to market. They have the passion & drive to make things work!

Shashank & Abhinav started on Naabo right out of college – the freshness in approach & the passion they bring with them is infectious.

Arjun of Picsean is an engineer, but his passion towards photography is amazing! He’s a good friend & i’ve seen his focus and smart work in his past ventures. His attitude to learn is commendable!

Robin of ReachTax is a star CA, but i love his humility and the motivational skill he has to make his entire team perform month after month!

Pankaj & Gaurav quit their fancy paying jobs to work on Retail Vector. Focus, quick work and frugality of life is what they are committed towards as they scale this venture!

The first thing that stood out when i met Abheek first was such an young guy and such maturity & humility. (Often age and humility dont go too well). This guy was 7 years old when he started putting Lego pieces into perfect ensemble & several years later, he’s using them at RobotsAlive!

I loved their designs and the quality of tees – Rahul & Mohit of Scopial have their focus completely on “Quality” “Design” “Niche”! They sell tees one could die for! Check a sample out here

I read about these guys in a print article & the next time we were in Mumbai, we met Jayesh & Karthik of VeriCAR. Two guys crazily passionate about automobiles & trying to solve a problem i was once a victim of! I love their attitude and their approach to things. They love getting down to basics and doing things themselves.

I am already having a lot of fun interacting with the current batch and looking forward to more fun, chaos, fights, fails, wins & whole lot of late nights!

Now, with all this happening – a whole lot of learning, association with the best of the lot, new challenges, lots of sense of humor & innovation. I don’t really have the time to think if MVP is a success or failure. But what i do know and will continue to focus on is “work harder”, “create more value”, “excel and achieve mastery”. And for evaluations of where we stand – let that be for the skeptics to comment on, while i play on….  & spread the madness!

Taglines traditionally are defined as a part of the brand building exercise that sums up the mission, intent and image of the business. When I studied brand, logo elements and the importance of the “tagline” in theory, as a student, I was fascinated about the fact that if the tagline copy was written intelligently – it can work wonders. I admired “Just do It” and still do! I did use some of the do’s and don’ts while designing logos and creating brand identity documents in my career.

When I was creating the logo element for  Madhouse, my first startup, I religiously spent sometime figuring out what the tagline should be. I dint even think of my logo without a tagline. The belief was that, we should be able to use the tagline without the company /brand name eventually to create the same recall and recognition in users minds. Inspired by the Nike Swoosh!

As time went by, I noticed that most new generation internet companies were emerging without the tagline! What mattered the most was the brand name or the name of the business and not so much the tagline. I remember the likes of ebay, amazon, yahoo, google, apple, rediff, indiatimes, etc. not having a tagline. And as we move on, many more established companies are dropping their taglines.

I guess, the way things have changed in branding, building companies, communicating the value of the business – brand recall is a great challenge and consuming, now imagine adding a tagline to it and trying to push the whole branding. Its too much to ask!

The reality for today is that Taglines are redundant! They are nothing but noise in the business scheme of things. Having said that, I think for statrups / new companies having a tagline is a personal choice. Thought, its important to get that darn tagline right – if not it’s a disaster of sorts before your company has started!

To quote relevant examples from my real-life experience: While working with LifeMojo as part of the MVP business acceleration program in 2008, we discussed at length to have a tag-line and when we launched the site we did have a tag-line too. But soon we realized that the tagline was not adding too much value, if anything, the logo was looking clunky and bad trying to accommodate the tag-line. And so, we just knocked it out! On the contrary,  the tagline Deskaway is Simplify Teamwork and this for me is the perfect summation of what Deskaway stands for as a business.

And so… Contemplate real hard if you’d like to have a tagline for your company or not. And if you’d still like to have a tagline for your business / startup here’s some insight that I’ve garnered through some years of experience:

• Taglines can be of two major kinds:
  • Ones that have a direct reference to the business – company, service or the product, Deskaway’s tagline for example or Kingfisher Airlines’ Fly the Good Times or United’s Fly the friendly skies
  • Ones that reflect the philosophy of the company – Nike, Just Do it! Or Nokia, Connecting People.
• So when you are contemplating having a tagline for your business. There are few things you may want to think about:
  • What’s the purpose the tagline is going to actually serve? “I’m lovin’ it” has become synonyms with the golden arch and McD’s burgers now. But to achieve this they’ve been at it for years now.
  • The tagline should actually add value to your brand, the business offering and enhance the perceived value of your business.
  • What do you want to say as part of the tagline? Do you want it to reflect your mission? Connecting People; Your business philosophy Always low prices, always or talk about the product offering directly? Utterly Butterly Delicious!
  • A tagline must reflect the feeling / emotions of the customer and not what the people behind the business want customers to perceive.
  • Ensure that the tagline is short enough to fit with your logo unit and to be reprinted anywhere – from a visiting card to a huge sky-drop size hoarding
  • The tagline must be well written to gel with your business ideology and should convey something.
  • The tagline should be simple in language, no buzz or jargon usage
  • A tagline should serve its purpose at least for a few years for the business.
  • A tagline has to be direct to appeal to the larger customer base, so that they can identify it and recall it when required.
  • Intellectual taglines are recipe for disaster
  • A tagline that has no recall is a tagline worth removing
  • A bad tagline is as good as a ruined brand. Better not to have a tagline, than have a bad one

In all, I frankly don’t remember many taglines of companies that are doing well. I remember an one off “Just Do it!” or “I’m lovin’ it!” coz these are the rare gems that have risen out of a lot of crappy taglines by established companies.

So, as a last tip – if you’re not sure what you want the tagline to be, if it hasn’t come naturally to you – then don’t waste your time on thinking up one – its not worth the time spent. Not at all for a startup!