infogaufire

Joined 17 years ago

Karma
67
Submissions
107
Member since
Sep 16
Entrepreneur | Built & Sold a social analytics company @Pin_puff & some other stuff | Loves programming & meeting interesting people around the world.

http://linkedin.com/in/gaufire http://twitter.com/sharmag88

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Recent submissions

Comment · 13 years ago
Assuming you are US based and raised angel round at $5mil post money valuation. First employee (talented or experienced or super smart) for marketing will get a salary of $110K average in the market for Director of Marketing role. So, you will have to make sure that

X + Y/4 = $100-$125K/per annum and some more equity for being an early employee

where X is a fixed salary and Y is equity with 4 years vesting and 1 year cliff. If you pay him 80K salary, give him around 2-4% equity. And may be 1% equity as options for staying more than 2 years in company.

Comment · 13 years ago
What about Makemytrip, Naukri/Infoedge, Inmobi or Slideshare?
Comment · 13 years ago
When you say "nicely designed handmade website", what does handmade means here? What about other billion websites including bootstrap, were they machine made or something? Please clear the confusion. Thanks.
Comment · 13 years ago
Learn programming to make a prototype. I recently hired a girl programmer who learnt programming by herself in just 10 weeks and built really good product while learning programming.
Comment · 13 years ago
Comment · 13 years ago
1. Go to google keyword suggestion tool and check how many people are searching for something you are building. Say, you are building Employee Evaluation Tool - close to 74K searchers are made every month in US and 135K globally. Competition is medium, so there is still some space for new player. So, yes there is some demand for problem I m trying to solve.

2. List down top 10 blog post links which talk about Problem your product will solve and post comment on all those blogs in 3-4 lines : first two lines about the post, next two about your project & link. So, you will start getting some traffic atleast say 20-30 users daily from all those 10 blogs combined.

3. Start creating good relations with people who have given you these emails. Tell them something like : "Hi, Thanks for giving me you email. I am building this product where you will be able to choose pre-made Employ Evaluation forms or will be able to edit them too. What more do you think you will need to solve your problem of Employee evaluation. Thanks."

So, with in 2-3 weeks, you will have really good idea if this thing gonna work or not.

@sharmag88

Comment · 13 years ago
I have been a single founder 2 times (one of the companies got sold and other one is doing good) and 2 times with co-founders. And I personally find starting up a single founder.

You mentioned you have good ideas more than 2 times i guess, you will have to take that thing out of your mind. When you are onto something, burn rest of the ideas for atleast 6 months.

If you can't find co-founder, surround yourself with team members, start with hiring people remotely china,india,bangladesh.

Build prototype, no full fledged product. Try to fail fast if things doesn't pick after few months to save some time and fatigue. By prototype I mean, that one feature that separates you from others.

Learn to delegate work. As a programmer first, founder second - I used to micro manage things which gave me really bad time with my first startup. But as you start delegating work to your remote workers / employees, you will start feeling better.

I would advice you to build something with atleast some business model. Its tough to create instagrams or tumblrs of the world.

Hope this helps.

Comment · 13 years ago
Whenever lightening strikes you with a new idea. Same lightening hits 100 others in different parts of the world with same idea #realstory #universalfact
Comment · 13 years ago
If I feel this is not my bestest ever idea and I can come up with better ideas in future, I will sell it for sure. Have done it twice before, not with google although, for the same reason.
Comment · 13 years ago
Any music (beats are must), anywhere (bed or desk or couch), Mac Air, sitting, preferably in company of other coders(& friends). And I am a big time night person 11pm to 4am works the best for me.

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