Cactus Chords

At last, the basic product was ready.  We could have colleges register, students register, upload videos, view videos etc. The design was very plain. White background and a hint of blue here and there. The site was barely a portal but we had the functionality up and running. A few questions kept bothering me all the time.

- Now how could we prove this model to the market?
- How many of them will buy this?
- Will it be as useful as I thought it would be?

All these thoughts kept bothering me. I was beyond nervous. My last two posts were about how problems and challenges just don’t stop coming. Check this out….weeks before our soft launch, one of my partners decides to bail out as he had just gotten married and did not know whether he was up to the task. Though the whole team expected it, we were kind of taken aback on the sudden decision he made as he was the one insisting to join us in the first place. It does harm when you actually feel like you have a team to help you fulfill your dream and wake up to see that one member has decided to leave. Friendship and business are two separate worlds and the sooner people understand that, the better. We are still best of friends, but will never do anything professionally. Re-working the agreement, his resignation, re-filing of agreement and all the formalities took a good 2 and a half weeks and till then I could not start a bank account owing to all the changes in paperwork.

Eventually September 12th, we do the soft launch. We had nothing more than 2 technical guys (Shoban, Sreenath) and 3 marketing guys (Nisha, Aayush and myself). We did not know where the hell it would go, what was going to happen and whether we are going to be laughed at or embraced. I contact Aayush, the marketing backbone of the firm to fix up meetings with institutes in Pune. He does a swell job and within no time,we have met colleges in Pune and they loved the idea. The students praised us as they were looking for a portal to upload their work. We also had features in the platform that the colleges thought was a myth and thus welcomed us. But something was missing. Money…..

Even though we impressed upon the institutes, the money was not flowing in. People were waiting for someone to start using this portal to its hilt to see whether it is actually useful. You know one of those things…..The technical team, who has been with the previous venture of mine and seen no results starts to get impatient. They wonder if this will ever work out.  Making people buy your product is the hardest part of business.  I explained the same to the technical team and they were more than supportive. I do not blame them one bit. If I were in their place, I wouldn’t join them in the first place. But they still did, that shows passion always lies a step above money. It is hard to actually ask for a team that actually understands you and in fact sees the company as their own as much as you see it yours.

So the product is out, people like it, but there are certain factors that we have to incorporate before we can go big. We had gone a good month and a half with the soft launch and gotten a good response. A new design, more features. Till now we were just a video sharing site for educational institutes, but we needed something more for educational institutes that matter like pdf, presentations, images and audio etc. Bloody hell, we didn’t have time for that. That meant changing the whole architecture yet again. Why didn’t I think of it earlier? But I guess this is how we get to learn things. Only once we released the product will we know what is missing so we can upgrade it just as Guy Kawasaki said. So what’s next? Upgrade…..

to be continued……

image reference: http://www.fineartphotoblog.com/wp-content/uploads/the-show-is-over-say-good-bye-800.jpg,