It’s time to not go to work
March 29th, 2009 — 9:16pm
Archive for March 2009
Cost of Incremental Improvement
March 26th, 2009 — 9:55pm
Run a marathon. You may finish in, lets say x minutes. Now try improving that time by 5 minutes in the next marathon. An enormous amount of effort goes into achieving that much extra. Another example, consider train or bus travel costs. In the place I live, Volvo buses travel about 20% faster as compared to normal air-conditioned buses. Yet they cost almost twice as much!
Making a product which is ‘pretty good’ is easy as compared to taking that product to the next level. Startups always have this problem; Whether to make a ‘pretty good’ product or to make an outstanding product. 10% improvement in quality implies 50% increase in cost. It doesn’t necessarily mean that the cost of producing each product is higher. In some cases, it just means that a higher initial investment is needed; Maybe to put a more efficient assembly line in place.
Low cost and high quality are two things that are extremely difficult to attain at the same time. So, when bootstrapping a business, it is better to make a choice beforehand.
Open to change
March 16th, 2009 — 1:26am
A few days back, Paul Graham found a basic quality of good startup founders: Be relentlessly resourceful. Really, a beautiful definition. Think about it, one of the most important qualities required in starting up is the will to accept change and adapt to it in every possible way. You can never work the same way tomorrow as you did today. When starting up, every single variable would change between now and 5 minutes later. Today, if you are a php coder, tomorrow you are a graphic designer. Today if you are meeting CEOs in luxurious hotels, tomorrow you are doing sales and marketing in dusty streets. Today if you are reading about switched mode power supply systems, tomorrow you are learning the basics of value added tax!
Startups are inherently risky. You never really know whether the idea in your head is a good one until it tastes success. The only way to know is by actually starting. Change is the only constant in startups. The enormity of the number of changes and the lack of time to adapt to those changes can only be experienced to be understood. If you are one of those who thinks change is what you need in life, then start something today.