madhouse musings!

All of us want that “best” Logo designed for our startup. That Logo, which will differentiate our brand from the clutter, something that will uniquely represent our USPs & one that will aesthetically appeal to all sensibilities!

So, what is that Good Logo or what all should it have?

I’m not a researched authority on Logo Designs, but practical experience coupled with some practical design sense has me listing the following:

• A good logo should look memorable and describe something. This is very important as Logo is an integral part of any business / brand. It is important to get the philosophy of what the company stands for represented in the logo unit.
• It should be memorable and be remembered even after the logo is out of one’s sight – what’s the point of not recognizing or recalling a brand after? (its a failed effort, if so)
• For a new brand, logos should favor – Simplicity & Directness Over Style & Subtlety You know the KISS rule, right?
• A logo should be effective without color (I mean black & white). The true test of a good logo is that it conveys what it does even without color.
• A logo that’s designed around a particular color is seldom a huge failure. Reminds me of the Nike “Swoosh” – I remember the thick strong swoosh – without Nike written anywhere around it and surprisingly without any color association.
• Though, you can definitely use color to your advantage, but only over and above the main logo element (the main parts of the logo) – say, the Mcdonald Golden arch. Good designers usually design in black or grey and then add the color element to it
• A logo should be scalable (ironically, the scalable term applys to logos too LOL). A logo should be such that it can be used in any shape, size, form, texture, context and it should convey the same meaning, should retain its effect and should have the capacity to replicate itself well.
• In short, the details in the logo should as clear while its 10feet as it will when it’s an inch in size. Think various use cases of the logo in its lifetime from website to button buddies
• A logo should be appropriate for the business it identifies. It should have a stand out effect over its competitors.
• Using an element for a logo just because it needs to be there is a bad design – the element should make sense and should be in context.
• Always use a simple, readable font for your logo – No fancy or remotely fancy font! A quick check on Logo’s of the most popular / big brands reveals that their font type is Solid & Simple
• Design of the logo should surround around “Readablity” of the brand / logo
• We want to load our first logo with all possible decorations – emboss effect / drop shadow / gradient / etc – Keep Away from all that temptation! KISS rule, remember?
• The most important aspect of any logo designing effort is that the end result should clearly break away from clutter and stand out screaming its identity.
• It is NOT always necessary for you logo to have a tagline. Read my post on taglines here.

It is important for you to take ownership of the logo design. Outsourcing it to a designer is the thing to do, but it is important that you know what you want and convey the same to the designer. You can try and draft a short design specification document which will list out mainly, but not inclusive:

• Brief description of the product / service / business for which the logo is being generated
• Purpose of the Logo
• Mission / Philosophy of the design / company
• Logo design concept – If you want to follow a particular style, if there is a story that the logo should convey, etc.
• Colors
• Any other important detail you may want the designer to remember

The above will not only let you convey your thoughts to the designer, but will help the designer understand what is required and estimate efforts.

Once the initial version of the logo design is out, its is important that you quickly go around and take customer / general user feedback by way some random sampling.  This you can do by asking directed questions to your friends & family, your team / employees, &  some select customers of yours. You can even get feedback from some perfect strangers by walking into a cafe and asking people for their feedback. You can always thank them for their time by buying them coffee!

Logo design is an iterative process and it changes with time. What is important to achieve is a clean design, easy to read and remember font & a simple representation of the same – such a design can be everlastingly relevant.

Here’s a site that has listed logo design trends and some interesting tips:
http://www.logolounge.com/articles/default.asp?Archive=True&ArticleID=680

There was a recent discussion on MVP gang about a particular “wrong-hire” which prompted me to write this longish experience-based note. For more on the discussion Robin of ReachTax has a blog post off it here.

Do not sell or glorify your start-up to the candidate. Be matter of fact, undersell the growth opportunity to the candidate. It may sound a little crazy for a tip, but in my experience, initial employees for a start-up should join the team for the work the start-up does and believe in the concept and the founding team. Joining a start-up for its “The Thing To Do”; For a great salary package, to help their resumes’ or to make their application to MBA look better are all not the right reasons from the start-up’s perspective.
1. Be Candid and Straight Forward in explaining the Job Description. List out the various things that the person will have to do when hired. Be explicit in listing out obvious things. When I hired for Madhouse in the initial days – we had a small 600 Sq Ft Basement Office – and we insisted that we interview candidates at our little basement office and explained to them what they had to do. “The What” had everything from – Major Responsibilities, Back-up functions and other things one would do as being a part of the team. If i were hiring a customer care person, for example – his/ her core responsibility was to answer request calls, make intelligent movie recommendations, confirm order and send it out for processing. Their back-up functions were – Doing sales calls, packing DVDs. The other things expected were – opening of the office if they were the first ones to come, closing the office if they were the last to leave (We had a solid iron shutter at the entrance), helping in promotions – if necessary – which meant participating in roadshows and interacting with potential customers at Malls and Promo stalls. We explained most of these and gave them real life examples of things to display we mean what we say. If you have to multi-task and do anything that’s required for the start-up or for the benefit of the customer, we all do it – that message was conveyed strongly.
We’d have written Job Descriptions. These JDs not only helped us get clarity on what was expected from the position we were hiring but most importantly, “set expectations right” at the candidates end. The JD would have main responsibilities and secondary responsibilities – listed as one line items. It would also have the main purpose of the position which were usually linked to key items like – customer acquisition and customer service.
Do a trial. In a start-up scenario, one wrong hire would cost us dearly. I’ve made a few wrong hiring decisions – this was not just a bad thing for my start-up, but was a bad  thing for the candidate too. There is no point trying to make the hire work to make it a good hire or convince yourself that its a good hire. Similarly, the candidate will be trying hard to ensure to himself and you that he’s a worthy candidate. This is a pain for the person as well as a loss for the start-up as each day does count and no point investing too much time in damage control or maintenance. As well invest that time in increasing value for customers and productively. And so, a trail period has always helped us. We infact follow it to this day @ MVP and “live-in” with companies before we official induct them as part of our portfolio. This trail period will help set expectations at both ends, get to know the candidate and him/her, the start-up culture better. So, at the end of the trial even if we have to let go of the candidate or the candidate chooses not to continue – it’s fair and not ugly. Only, ensure that the trial period test the candidates in various situations to find out how he performs. This helps evaluate not just his domain expertise and capability; but also his attitude, capacity to stretch & passion toward the start-up.
Another key aspect is to identify a wrong hire quickly and made a fast decision to let go! The longer you postpone a firing decision, the more painful it will get. Be logical and make a fast decision – all of us are humans and we learn out of our mistakes – so acknowledge it and rectify it. By making a fast firing decision -you not only do you and your start-up a favor, you will also be doing the candidate a favor! And ya, the first firing act will be the most painful
Once the person is in the team, treat them well, make them a part of the group and shower them with care, training and feedback helping him perform!
Finally, lead by example! If you expect someone to do an odd job that is typically not expected from that position outside of this startup – then, to make them comfortable and get on to doing it – the best motivation is to exhibit acts that display the founding team, CXOs doing similar things with ease. At Madhouse, Sameer and I sat on the worst possible seats giving the new ones to new hires. Soon we found that, team mates were happily sitting on a not so good chair, if they had to and do work without complaining! Their funda was, if Nandini and Sameer can we will too.

Longish thoughts, but hope it helps. Of course, these are based on my startup experiences in India, where i have seen unprofessional behavior exhibited by some experienced, top management guys; as well as experienced amazing professional behavior displayed by entry-level candidates!

Last year, on World Diabetes Day I wrote a post on LifeMojo and their test site. You can read that post here.

One year down the lane, i have more than one reason to be compelled to write about LifeMojo!

I started to track my diet and activities on the LifeMojo platform and soon i realized that i had started to watch what i eat unconsciously!

I have also got onto the habit of checking for calorie content of the food i consume on LifeMojo and these guys have made it really easy to access that information – all that i need to do is ping the “Calories” buddy on my gtalk, input the food i am consuming and voila it gives me the calorie content of the same and more!

I set goals, mainly weight reduction goals and i have lost 8 kgs in all till date. All this, with no crash diets or rigorous exercises, but a well planned diet and some simple activity goals on LifeMojo.

I also tried their Diet Consultation and was on one of their diet plans for a while, but my travel schedule often made it difficult for me to follow the diet plan. But, what i do like about their diet plans are, they do not make you change your food habits, they work around things you like to consume and plan a diet for you!

I subscribe to their daily tip, it comes to me via SMS exactly @ 8 am each day! I kinda look forward to it right now, coz its a new insight each day. Tips that helps me in my daily life.

Something else i like about LifeMojo is their articles section on the website. It’s a melting pot of knowledge related to health and fitness – and not the run of the mill sorts, but features that add real value with tips that are very possible

The LifeMojo guys have constantly kept their product alive by introducing interesting features and kept the interest of users like me alive! Most recently they’ve added a bunch of diet consultation packages to their offering. The diet consultation is not online only, its a great mix of over the phone and online which makes the whole consultation and getting results out of it all the more real. There is someone following up with you!

Just a couple of days back they have launched their Forums – a new feature that brings in more interactivity and exchange of knowledge among the users of LifeMojo and people interested in health and fitness.

What’s more, a little bird also tells me that these guys are almost on the verge of hitting that break-even point and perhaps even go cash flow positive. Looking forward to that LifeMojo guys!

Meanwhile, now that i have a 8 month old at home, i am looking forward for LifeMojo to introduce something to track diet of infants and kids, say JuniorMojo or ChildMojo? What say guys?!

When i wrote to Himanshu of LifeMojo asking him for a few recent updates @ their end for this post, he offered this to all reader of my blog:

One time FREE Diet consultation for Diabetes Diet Plan on LifeMojo. Exclusive for the readers of madhouse musings!

Here is what you need to do:

Call +91 9008 999 189 and mention the coupon code NH14
and you can avail a one time free consultation for this

So, here’s to good health & a diabetes controlled world!

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!

“Start-up Morning/Evening” events are organized with the support and help from a lot of friends in the startup community. Previous editions of the event have been held Mumbai, Bangalore, Chandigarh and Pune. In all events we were more than houseful on the capacity, participation was intense and interesting discussions took place. Read coverage here.

Recently, these events are organized under the Xtreme Startups banner. Xtreme Startups is a Non-Profit initiative to support /promote entrepreneurship. This edition of Xtreme Startups is supported by NSRCEL – IIMB, Chitkara University , Morpheus Venture Partners (MVP) and Startupnews.in.

The first Xtreme Startup event was organized in Chandigarh a couple of weeks back, details

Date: 24 May, 2009 (Sunday)

Time: 10:00 am – 01:00 pm

Speakers: Three start-up founders will share their experiences of starting a venture, sustaining it and taking it to the next level.

Phanindra Sama, Founder & CEO www.redbus.in

Phanindra is the co-founder and CEO of redBus, India’s largest bus tickets aggregator in just over 2 years of operations! He has a honors from BITS Pilani, and worked with Texas Instruments before he co-founded redBus. redBus was born out of a personal need and a market failure. Today redBus’s distribution spans across 75000+ outlets in the country! More…

Prateek & Nithya Dayal, Founders www.muziboo.com

Nithya and Prateek Dayal, a husband and wife duo run Muziboo. Prateek, a B.Tech graduate from IIT Guwahati takes care of technology and Nithya, the community. Both the founders believe in bootstrapping and harnessing the online medium to grow an internet business. Muziboo’s success lies in its emphasis on building a “community” for musicians & music lovers, as against being another file sharing platform. Professional & non-professional musicians ranging from free lancers & audio-engineers to enthusiastic hobbyists use the muziboo platform extensively! Prateek blogs at www.prateekdayal.net/blog and Nithya at www.nithyadayal.com/blog.

Himanshu Khurana, Co-founder & CMO www.lifemojo.com

Himanshu Khurana graduated from NSIT Delhi and worked at Trilogy for 3 years. He later went on to experience the startup world at ngpay(JiGrahak). After 2 years, he founded iStrait with two of his friends, Namit Nangia and Varun Gupta.  LifeMojo provides easy access to preventive health care experts and necessary tracking tools. It also has a platform that helps preventive  health care providers to run and scale-up their existing operations. Launched in November of 2009, they are adding users at a fast pace. Himanshu blogs at hkhurana.wordpress.com. Lifemojo is a MVP portfolio

Audience: Start-up founders / entrepreneurs

Format

• Event will be attended by 30-40 start-up founders / entrepreneurs
• The event brings together Startup Founders to share experiences and interact with other start-ups in an informal manner
• The other guests, like you, will typically be experienced entrepreneur / investor / a person from the start-up ecosystem
• Participation is “invite only”, concentrated group of Startup Founders and others in the startup ecosystem
• There is no fee for attending the event
• Refreshments will be provided at the event

What will you gain from the event?

• Opportunity to interact with others in the startup ecosystem
• Share and learn from each others experiences in running businesses
• Potential to meet a business partner, investor, employee, etc.
• Opportunity to build a strong startup community

Invite Only: It’s an invite only event. In case would like to attend write to indus AT morpheusventure DOT com OR info AT startupnews DOT in, with your full name and a brief introduction of your startup / venture.

See you on Sunday!

The Entrepreneurship Development Cell (EDC), IIT Roorkee is organising a Startup Fair’09, in association with CSI, NSIT Delhi, to facilitate Startups to recruit.

Date:      Saturday, 25th April’09
Venue: Netaji Subhas Institute of Technology (NSIT), Delhi

The  Startup Fair will be a platform for established startups, looking  to expand their team, to hire interested talent from IIT Roorkee and NSIT Delhi as fresh recruits (final yr students) and internees (pre-final yr students).

An excellent opportunity for Startups to reach out to the active student community. 15 startups and 150 student candidates are expected to participate in the event.

Spread the word!

RSVP:
Sudhir Manchanda
Entrepreneurship Development Cell,
IIT Roorkee
startupfair@edciitr.com
+91-9719451595

CHANDIGARH

Chitkara University, one of the most popular educational institutes in the Punjab/ Chandigarh region, are initiating the First Open Cofee Club in Chandigarh.

The inauguration and and first OCC Chandigarh meetup is backed by Chitkara E-Cell (Entrepreneurial Development Cell).

Details below:

Date:       17 April, 2009

Time:      3pm to 5pm

Venue: Chitkara Corp Office, Plot No-11-12, Dainak Bhaskar Building, Sector-25D, Chandigarh

Sameer and I have been invited to interact with the OCC Chandigarh members.

If you are around, come by. Lets meetup and share our experiences as startup entrepreneurs!

There was once, not so long ago from now, a breeze of freshness – a new perspective, fearless opinions & unbiased bitching!.. it was all this and more@ BombayBitch. Sooner than i had gotten hooked and addicted to the Bitch i got news of this wondrous startup shutting shop!

I mourned and sulked for a while about this loss. Rizwan and I even spoke about approaching Webchutney (BB is/was an incubatee) folks to let us volunteer for BB, failing which we had our PlanB of starting something like BB on our own. In all, I just loved the way these guys presented films related information, reviewed movies and all the jazz. You know with some brands its the connection that comes naturally and BB had that going right for them!

I currently have my dancing shoes on, party cap in place and am “Cha-cha-ing” away in celebration. Why? ‘Coz I just found out that the Bitch is Back!

Just as i was thinking if BB is back as part of WebChutney or not, I chanced upon this post by Nikhil Pahwa of Medianama:  Webchutney Launches Mobile Agency; Bombay Bitch Shuts Down where Sidharth Rao, CEO & Co-founder of Webchutney mentions that BombayBitch would be back in a different avataar.

Different avataar? ohmy! i hope its not a change in the writing style, writing to please the sponsors… i hope not. Guess time will tell or the bitch will, as she speaks some more over the next few days.

For now, i have my fingers crossed and i want to get back my daily doze of unadultrated bitching on BombayBitch!

The following writeup was written for I.T. magazine. Here is the published link – Finding and Influencing the Influencers

In today’s world, with over thousands of advertising messages reaching out to us and with attention spans decreasing rapidly; with the lines between PR and Marketing blur; with the entire Social Media buzz and Social Marketing coming into play. It has become very challenging for startups and new products to reach out to the initial users and influence them to create a brand recall and recognition in their minds.

For a startup, company or brand (for ease of read I will use the word startup to mean all these three entities) it is an on-going, ever evolving process to build its identity, increase recall and recognition. With increased clutter in the world around, it is very important for startups to clearly identify who they are reaching out to, what the message is and the impact of the communication.

How does one reach out?

In the current market scenario, for any business, it makes sense to look for channels that have high viral effect, has low customer acquisition cost, has the potential to build high degrees of trust and awareness.

1.       Founders as Brand Ambassadors:
It is important for founders to channelize their efforts towards constantly building an identity for their startup and themselves as ambassadors. Constant interaction and discussion about the startup and business offering, candid sharing of opinions and thoughts on varied topics, communicating the USP and key messages about the startup – all these come a long way in helping the early adopters identify with you as the founders and the brand at large. This also helps in building awareness and trust towards the startup.

Vijay Mallaya of the UB, Kingfisher group and Richard Branson of Virgin are great examples of founders as Brand Ambassadors. These two have worked their way up in building and expanding their business empire, constantly promoting their products and offerings. Appearing almost naked for a key business announcement at the New York Times Square, flying gas balloons that are Virgin branded, personally sending out messages to all their travelers on Kingfisher and living a lifestyle that reflects the brand – these guys have done it all and constantly re-invent themselves to reach out to and make an impact in the users minds.

2.       Reaching out to the initial users to build trust about the startup:

For startups, it is important to engage in constant dialogue with the early users. The initial users, called the “early adopters” are creatures that associate with your offering for varied reasons. It could be because:

a.       they try everything that is new

b.      they are curious about the offering as it’s a related domain they are working on

c.       the startup is their neighbor

d.      they love to give their opinion on various things

Just about any reason. But, interestingly the “early adopters” are those that take on to a new offering easily, are candid about their feedback, have more patience than the normal user to try & test the product or service, help fine-tune, and most of all these are the ones who talk and propagate the startup.  Therefore, it is important to reach out to these people fast, create a feedback channel, interact with them regularly and improve on the offering based on their inputs.

3.       Influencing the Influencers:

While interacting with the early adopters or the influencers, it is important to constantly communicate with them and ensure that they see constant evolution in the business offering. Keep the influencers interested and influence them by way of fine-tuning the offering, making it sticky for them to talk and promote the offering further. These early adopters have a very wide circle of influence in the society. There are a section of people who are constantly observing the early adopters to try and test something, give their verdict for them to start using the products.

While at madhouse (Madhouse Media, one of the first organized movie rental services which was acquired by Seventymm in 2007), the one important task I had at hand was to continually seek out avenues and opportunities to reach out to, and establish a feedback loop with the end users, by way of direct interactions or through other mediums of communication.  Sameer (co-founder of Madhouse Media) and I did this to establish trust among the users about the founders – the people who are executing the idea. We did this to spread the word about our business. We did this to ensure that people saw us as authority in movies, recommendations and movie rental business. As founders who knew what their business was about. As a business that ‘cared’ and did everything to make it easy for the users.

Where & how does one find these influencers?

1.       Media: This has been a vehicle for over ages to reach out to a large audience, no doubt. But what this channel does is to interact with the early adopters first, who have influenced the rest of the society! The messages sent out via these channels have successfully created brands, heroes, patrons and most of all trust in the world.  This channel includes print media, radio, online media – blogs, news sites, social media tools like Twitter, Facebook,LinkedIn, etc.

Many people recognize Basecamp of 37Signals, because of their blog signalvsnoise. The founders wrote about things that mattered to them on their blog and started sharing their experiences with a set of readers, who would later become the early adopters of their business offering. Their blog and their presence in the online world helped in creating a strong recall factor among the minds of people who were in the online world, the early adopters for Basecamp.

2.       Public Interactions: This tool is one of the oldest and is deemed successful since Aristotle’s time. Public representation of the brand and its ambassador has a long lasting impression on the end users, increasing the chances of recall, recognition and loyalty. The channel includes Demos, Presentations, Talks, Mixers, Meets, Tweet-ups, Other face to face communication

The more you interact with people face-2-face, the better it is for you to make a lasting impression.  Interact with the early adopters, the opinion leaders, the influencers. Engage with them intellectually, challenge their notions, allow your views to be challenged. Many successful personalities are people with good interpersonal skills, presentation skills, with the talent to reach out to and convince people of their thoughts – Hitler, Gandhi, Steve Jobs, Obama, to name a few…

So, how exactly does one influence the influencers?

1.       Timeliness: Repeated updates that reach out to the early adopters, via:

a.       Announcement of important progress in the business offering or startup

b.      Reiteration of what the startup stands for and what the founders, promoters vision is

c.       Constant updates on relevant business related topics

As part of madhouse, Sameer and I continuously kept in touch with many people – people in the media, people who are early adopters, people who are bloggers, people who are influencers in the society. We made it a point to interact with everyone – big and small, as we believed that there is learning from everyone. Specially, with the early adopters – we kept in constant touch, informing them of our progress. Involving them in discussions specific to madhouse and otherwise. Connecting them to others. We entered into long-term relationship – not inferior or superior, but as equals. This worked well in creating a long term relationship. And our keeping in constant touch was – informal regular mail interactions, commenting on the writers articles, blogs, placing that friendly call once in a while – with an update, question, connection or just simply “Happy New year”, meeting them up when we were visiting that part of town or city or for that Friday evening beer. Bumping into them and spending quality time during mixers, conferences, bar camps, etc.

2.       Quality: Communication that has value, creates trust and exhibits the brands and the ambassadors authority over specific areas of expertise

a.       Authoritative write-ups about the field of expertise

b.      Analysis, projections, predictions in the area of expertise

c.       Taking a ’stance’, which the startup and the founders  will stand for and project

I love Jason Calacanis, Seth Godin, Paul Graham…. Why? Coz all these guys have a view point, are articulate about it and provide useful insights, challenge my intellect and give me more to carry away each time I read their blog,  writeup or an article about them. This is what we tried to do as part of Madhouse. Sameer particularly, as he was the external face of madhouse – practiced and still practices “Quality”. We had our view points and made sure we express them on various forums. Madhouse stood for “legal rentals” “stood for doing things the right way” “stood for organizing the rental business in India” “stood for quality home video experience” – we made sure we expressed our view point and what we stood for in our words and actions. We also wanted to share our experiences as entrepreneurs and so we did, each time we met an entrepreneur, a blogger or in our personal blogs, etc.

3.       Dialogue: Create a channel of dialogue exchange with the early adopters. Listen to them, question them, find out how things are every now and then, make sure you dig deep into what their impression is about the business offering, how they use it, what they think needs to be changed, show them your concern, show them you care!

At madhouse our goal was to never miss a movie delivery or deliver the wrong movie. We constantly kept in touch with our initial users to get feedback from them. If we missed a movie or slipped on our service for what ever reasons, we would send a small little cake with a sorry note. This came a long way for us, as these early adopters who saw us sweat it out and pay attention to detail, spread the word and helped us grow our customer base later.

4.       Innovative Methods: Find the most economical and innovative methods of reaching out, use smart techniques, but not overtly obvious ones.  Especially, these days with the social media channels, reaching out and creating a buzz is rather inexpensive, if done well. Be on the look out for venues to reach out, it could be the blogger you meet in a mixer, a journalist who is a friend’s friend or just you who’s active on the social media channels. Best marketing is the one done with no spend!

Who’s got to do it?

Of course YOU – as the founder, promoter, CEO, stakeholder – you have got to do this. It’s an ongoing task, it helps immensely and the returns are immeasurable. No outsourced firm, No internee, No management hire can do it for you. It is very important for a startup to have the main stake holders put in the efforts of spreading the word for their startup and build a social image for them. As an entrepreneur, among the many things you do, you do this too. If it does not come naturally, you lean to doing it. It is of utmost importance that the stakeholders interact with the influencers and early adopters. This established a connect with them, makes them build trust, helps you share the vision of the company with them and for all you know, you can find your potential investor, partner or employee in them!

When we started madhouse, Sameer & I did all the work ourselves, from taking orders on the phone, buying movies, packing them to delivering them to the users doorsteps, and this came a long way for us as a company. We knew exactly what it took to doing these tasks helping us build good processes and training the employees. It helped us establish a relationship with the early users; get first hand feedback from them. We were the ones who stood there in the mall and sold those initial memberships, interacted with people who did not take the membership and understood their concerns, fine tuned the sales pitch and re-sold to the apprehensive ones! We were the ones who were there in conferences, barcamps, mixers representing madhouse, talking about the concept and getting feedback. All this helped us establish madhouse as a brand among the influencers, who in turn became spokespersons for the brand!

However, above all this, it is important that as founders and stakeholders while doing all the work, we are:

1.       Humble, as humility disarms

2.       Honest, as it helps us win people over, build trust and create deep relationships

3.       Fair, as this is the best way to run a business

4.       Quick to accept mistakes, as this is another good trait that makes people like you. Everyone makes mistakes; the one who accepts it and changes is a winner!

In any society, the early adopters or influencers are the ones who have their antennas activated to receive and accept new things. As founders we must take care in building solutions that solve a problem or address a need, then it sure will get noticed by these early adopters who will give you the advantage of candid feedback and help you improve on your business. So, keeping your ears closer to the ground will help you improve and spread the word through these sneezers!

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