At the risk of being accosted on my way home tomorrow, and also risking it all on my first post on this blog. I have a question, Why are/do people find startup’s of no interest in India?
The question is probably not that straight forward, simply because they maybe of no interest because no one knows about them. But here’s the scenario, A new idea launches in the valley, it suddenly breaks into the blogsphere, users start to us, users in India get attracted pass the word word, and voila we all start using myspace, orkut whatever.
Now assume this happened down in Bangalore, budding entrepreneurs risk life and limb , build it and then…wait, emails, calls, tell a few friends, still who cares, who knows..no one, how will they, the people who talk, don’t want to talk, why should they?
You can ask all the journos in the world (bloggers excused :-)), but they are not interested unless they can recognize a name, or you can include the word Crores in your budget or revenue stream…why is that?
In a startup the entrepreneur takes a risk, the VC takes a risk…I guess we need a few more risk takers in the mass media. Correction, we need alot more risk takers in the mass media…just maybe someone will realize that some people want to read stories other that Reliance, Tata and Bharti.
To me the ecosystem is not just money + startups, PR is crucial. Example in point Proto been doing alot top get coverage…how many people know about it.
- Building a startup in 30 mins (well 41ish) – Iqbal Gandham - December 3, 2009
- Should Facebook and Twitter bother to make money? (Iqbal Gandham) - February 17, 2009
- How we got Nivio to Davos (WEF)…and won - February 5, 2009
Want coverage for your start up in leading newspapers?
Show them some money….
Recently my friend organized a Webmaster/Entrepreneurs conference and approached several PR agencies. Most of the newspapers said they will consider, but never turned up. One of them was honest enough to tell us what it takes for the exposure. They asked for Rs. 250,000 for the coverage.
Zoho is doing most of its business and PR in US. The management of Zoho team is in silicon valley and only development center in India.
Santosh: Thanks for the pointer to cyn.in – I think that’s a very interesting site I had no idea about before this. The other two were covered in contentsutra.
Zoho is pretty neat. It’s getting quite a lot of PR in blogs, I believe.
The SRIT thing: Have you tried to go to SRIT’s home page and download the press release? You have to choose to receive spam from them before that. Also, there is NO demo that I know of – I’m not sure why a press release should get more importance before the product itself?
There is something democratic about Media’s nonchalance about our Startup world – there’s been not much noise, let alone disruption. I sometimes think that non-attention is preferable to the disquiet that could influenze many a founder’s singular commitment. Is it not better to feel like an anonymous food critic who goes about his business without being fawned over ?
I would rather them improve their product, delivery quality, economics and scaling prospects that will draw customer attention – media can wait 🙂
What we lack is a medium of interaction. We talk about Techcrunch and how it empowers the startups in the valley, but the part that we miss is that the valley is well connected. Not on the internet, but also off it.
Consider this. This february I decided to start working full time on an idea. I went looking for experienced entrepreneurs to get some idea about issues I had never thought about before, like pricing the product, or how to get a team together. Or what about financials, how to get the marketing strategy together.
But the world news was that I found none. The only couple of guys I met were those who did try to startup but the companies eventually closed down without making any money. Believe me it’s difficult to take advice from somebody like that.
Everybody doesn’t think alike. And this creates even more problems. My last company was a startup too, and I went to my boss for advice. He was quite interested, but he had been running the company for the last three years with less than 10 people and thought it was just the perfect model. Alfight I agree it was working for him, but it wasn’t really what I need. I don’t want to tie up with big firms, because I think that it can really slow you down.
So after three months, when my product is almost ready for release, I still havent’ found anybody whose advice I can trust.
So basically, I’m doing everything from scratch. And this is what everybody does here in India. There is no channels for communication. Eg. if I two people need to write two websites, if both of them sit and write PHP first, it would be really long before they come up with anything.
A lot of you are entrepreneurs. You tell me how many other younger entrepreneurs have you met in the last two months, who wanted advice not contacts?
You want to blame the media, but it’s not really their fault. If the community of entrepreneurs is not building up, it’s because the entrepreneurs themselves don’t want it or are not working hard enough for it. Especially at a time like this, when every half wit like me calls themselves an entrepreneur. We have to find solution to find the good guys and ignore the bad ones.
Well so far I haven’t been accosted, so not all that bad 🙂
I think the problem is twofold,
a) the startup does not know where to go
b) the media does not kow about the startup
Yes the clever ones have probably worked out that this is a circle, so surely we need a way of connecting them both (proto comes to mind). An easy way. Currently mass media only really writes articles which are pushed to them via PR agencies (this is from experience over the last week…more later on that).
I recently watched starworld , and saw ads from desimartini, this team operate out of gurgaon, a social network…but I have to ask myself is the marketing working, or should there have been PR first…or if it was tried at all.
It was mentioned above that we need big deals, I think we need a trickle of lots of small news, which somehow we spread. Online PR is not all about techcrunch, butmore about everyone hearing it passing it on, which does not happen in India. if only a URL was sent as fast as a joke on SMS 🙂
Oh by the way anyone wanting to do a big deal, feel free to send a cheque for $100 million in this direction…should do the trick 🙂
Iqbal