..you should read Loic Le Meur’s blog post. I found myself in agreement with every point he has made.

A bunch (5-6) of us back in college called ourselves as cockroaches. Because our objective was not to excel at studies but to hang in there and survive and graduate and get placed. When you look at things from a survival perspective, life becomes quite easy. The pressure is off your shoulders. This approach/way of life has remained with me. As long as I can just about manage to survive as a startup, I am happy. I have no immediate expectations of huge traffic and huge money. Right now it’s just a matter of survival and I think am good at it. Will change gears, when the time feels right.

This article talks about lessons from Robert Scoble to be Internet famous. All the points in there hold true for any content business.

1. Attack where there is no king.
2. Follow the 15 Reader Rule i.e. focus on a subject that you’re passionate enough about to keep pursuing, even when you only have 15 readers.
3. Get with REAL celebrities.
4.  Start the avalanche i.e. dominate one small niche first, then another and another until you start an avalanche.
5. Keep producing content.

Then there’s this one from Seth Godin. He identifies the common thread amongst all popular blogs.

When I was deciding to choose my hosting service, I went through tons of sites till I came across Slicehost. Slicehost was a startup hosting service and I didn’t know anyone who had any experience with Slicehost. But their no-nonsense approach endeared me. They clearly stated that they were Build for Developers. They don’t make false promises of uptime and support. They don’t oversell themselves. For me, all of this set them apart from any other hosting service provider. I really like such companies. They sport a clean and honest approach and are more likely to deliver on the promise.

And just a few days back I read this and this. My decision to go with Slicehost just got validated.

I like to have a pipeline of features to be developed for in the near-term – generally 5-10 features, each of which would engage the user during their visit to the site. I then go about implementing at least one feature each month (if not more). For me, the pipeline and its implementation is the surest sign of the health of my dot com from a product development perspective. As to how I build this pipeline – I maintain a journal (in the form of a Google doc) of ideas that can translate into features. I invite my close friends to collaborate in the ideation process. And every now and then I keep paying a visit to these docs to see what I should take up and implement. I keep asking myself What’s Next?

With the recession snowballing over us, some common-sense lessons in cost-cutting are necessary to keep startups afloat. Here are some that I’ve learnt:

1. Don’t spend more than Rs. 10,000 (USD 200) for logo design. Go to 99designs.com or logoworks.com and get it done.
2. Don’t have a fetish for domain names especially ones that cost upwards of Rs. 5,000 (USD 100). There are enough and more domain names available for the standard USD 10.
3. Don’t have fancy laptops/desktops. I have worked with a company which bought Macbook Pros for managers under the pretext of creating better UI when >99% of their users are on Windows. To ensure that this did not get everyone talking, they dished out designers (way down in the hierarchy level) with iMacs. Even six months later, the designers are clueless about using these machines. So much for fantasy fulfillment.
4. Don’t dish out Blackberry phones to everyone – especially when guys are not required to do any kind of traveling.
5. Don’t rent out fancy offices. Trust me on this one. The feel-good factor of having a sea-facing office on the top-storey does not increase productivity.
6. Push your employees hard rather than downsizing just for the heck of it or decreasing their productivity with tactics like no air-conditioning for a few hours.
7. Get creative. Let the product do the marketing for you by creating unique experiences that create buzz. Use social media. Stop popping up banners across the Internet. Abandon ad networks.

I just read an interesting post titled “Too small to fail” by Seth Godin. Key points one could take from the post:

• Keep your accounting system clean and simple. More like the way baniyas run their shop i.e. tracking the cash flowing into the cashier’s drawer and the cash going out of it.
• Don’t have too many layers between the customer and the executive. This makes sure you retain more customers because the decision-maker is able to hear them first-hand.

Almost every tech blog worth it’s salt has been talking about Sequoia’s presentation (titled R.I.P. Good Times) to its portfolio companies and how every startup should look at it and take home the message. And so I had a look at it too. Frankly, I just don’t get the logic that runs through the presentation. I wouldn’t even want to link to something as illogical as that presentation. So while the tech blogs may have taken a fancy to it, am happy that I am not the only one who disagrees with what Sequoia had to say. Check out this presentation by ALTOS Ventures which takes a dig at Sequoia and puts a different (but rational) perspective to the downturn.

SocialMention.com is a recently launched social media search engine. It searches user-generated content such as blogs, comments, bookmarks, events, news, videos, and microblogging services. It allows you to easily track what people are saying about you, your company, a new product, or any topic across the web’s social media landscape in real-time.

I was reading some of the stuff by Y Combinator (a VC firm that has been spot on in picking the right early stage startups to fund). Fabulous stuff. But then I came across the article on The Equity Equation. I suggest you read the article. Here’s a part of it:

Question:
An investor wants to give you money for a certain percentage of your startup. Should you take it?

Answer:
1/(1 – n)
Whenever you’re trading stock in your company for anything, whether it’s money or an employee or a deal with another company, the test for whether to do it is the same. You should give up n% of your company if what you trade it for improves your average outcome enough that the (100 – n)% you have left is worth more than the whole company was before.

I disagree with this equation for early stage companies. You are selling out for too less. While it may sound rational and common-sensical, you are discounting your dreams in the process. The article tries to justify selling 2-10% of your company for under USD 20,000. Unfair.