Siva's blog

To break the silence (of this blog), I’m writing this article ;)

One of my followers from quora requested me to answer “What is your biggest lessons as a Startup founder”? After working for Trentz Interactive for 18 months, here are the lessons I learnt.

• finding Product-Market Fit.
• Not maintaining a record of every cent spent on the company.
• Building a team (other than founders)
• Have good marketing and sales team for B2B product.
• Having sufficient money in the bank to sustain the first 9-12 months.
• Convincing customers to vote through money (or other means such as subscribing to the mailing list) before building the product and regularly having communication with them.

One of the key difference between working in a startup Vs working for an IT corporate job is,

In a typical IT job, you know what to do(quoted by project leader or manager) and have to build the solution. But in a startup job, finding what to build is the key. If you choose a wrong hypothesis, you need to pivot(again and again!) before people, time and money runs out.

That being said, you will learn a lot from people around you as well as from the startup community. Being a fellow in the Startup Leadership Program(SLP) helped me learn many things, meet other founders and get guidance from globally connected SLP network. You should also join the similar program(such as SLP, Microsoft Accelerator) to enhance your skills and leadership qualities.

One of the important things I learned is to improve my perception. You may be the most intelligent guy in the room but without thinking from a different angle, your ideas/solution will not matter. Improve your perception and surround yourself with people with different quality and experience.