Bootstrap in Bangalore

A book on bootstrapping should start with some motivation to start up. I think it is a great time to do a start up in India and it has never been easier to do ever in India’s history for so many people. My own startup was born in an apartment (which I think is the equivalent of the garage in the valley). Two things greatly lowered the cost of starting up for us – cheap, reliable broadband availability and skype. Cheaper hardware also helped us but that has been cheap for a long time now. Affordable broadband in all metros in India is really changing the rules of the game. It is creating a delivery platform to reach out to thousands of small businesses/consumers within India which should be a ripe market for many budding entrepreneurs. I think the broadband revolution opportunity deserves a separate blog post later.

Another opportunity is a fact of the many indias. A small percentage of Indians is present in each economic segment spreading from the very rich to the very poor. With consistent growth over so many years the consuming class is reaching critical mass and even if a small percentage of the population is very rich, the rich segment will have enough numbers to be attractive as a segment. So right now just bangalore itself is an attractive market for someone with the right product. Indian consumption is set to explode in the coming years and products/services ready for the hungry consumers (or even better offering what people need but don’t know that they want it) will be winners.

At a micro level an entrepreneur doesn’t really need to await or start simply because of the macro reasons listed above. Admittedly, they do present increasing opportunities but the real opportunity with the Internet is that the world is your playground. With social networks, blogs and news sites one can be plugged into any ecosystem or community of choice to be exposed to ideas available to anyone else in the world. The motivation for startup has to be a little more personal with an itch to make things better, innovate or simply to create phenomenal wealth. India, with its myriad problems is a wonderful playground for any entrepreneur – there are just too many problems to solve! And the range offered is from the rural poor to the world’s rich.

For many people just the prospect of creating phenomenal wealth will be justification enough to start up. A successful start up beats any other means of getting rich quick with legitimate means. The wealth created by a startup is more sustainable since it typically creates a system where it just keeps growing and growing. Note the key term – wealth creation which means its not a zero sum game. The fact that you become rich doesn’t mean anyone else is getting poorer, the world as a whole gets richer due to your efforts. And not to mention the valuable experience that you get in doing that start up. That experience and knowledge will make you a valuable resource in this knowledge economy. I would also like to differentiate between turning self-employed or starting a small business Vs a start up. A start up by definition should have the dream, ambition and plan to be able to scale up really big. Businesses like a training consultancy, opening a retail shop or becoming a free lance software engineer do not qualify. For the US market startups are typically limited to technology products since you can scale up due to the fact of zero incremental costs of a new product. In India even businesses which scale up with people will qualify since we do have a huge resource pool available. Whatever way it happens, finally the business needs to scale exponentially in the first few years at least.

In the next post we will concentrate a bit on bangalore itself.