A Quick Guide, If you are planning to build in India
I am Aarihant Aaryan! Welcome to the Iron Sharpen Iron newsletter,
I share my homework from my startup journey every week, learning about human behavior, and sometimes decoding industries and business models for fun.
I can’t control my curiosity :) )
If you are planning to build a Tech first business tech-enabled business or even a tech-involved business, I’m sharing a quick guide that will help you to execute faster and increase your odds of success
This is a similar guide I wish I had 3 years back when I was building my first company.
Always think of ideas in this order: Monietisation, Retention and acquisition - If the idea ticks the 3 criteria it’s a great business to build.
Please prioritise businesses where consumers are paying you from Day 1, Even if you’re making losses on the unit level it’s okay. But make sure you tick the monetisation bucket.
When you want to explore an idea, don’t become a dev shop and code.
Instead, create the most viable product without tech or you can do a lead gen campaign via Facebook and talk to your target users and see if it works or not
Small and simple metrics like Cost per lead, cost per impression, and lead to purchase conversions will give you some clarity
When you name your company, please make sure it is a Western name or has Western essence, since India is a low-trust country having Western names for your brand cracks some level of trust, also please check in Google domains if you have the domain with your brand name is available
When you are working on an Idea, create a simple UI design and make sure the flow for every app/website App is the same.
So if you change your idea you will just have to change the main screens instead of the entire app - this saves a lot of time.
Don’t waste time thinking adding more features will make your product/business - better and more successful. If users don’t love the first use case of your product - you need to rethink every day.
If you have distribution on the internet that’s amazing if you don’t please start building distribution. It will help you get your first 100 to 50,000 users may vary based on the following but ideally, it will decrease your acquisition cost in the early days
If you’re doing ads, please make sure you use Western faces in your campaign, they tend to do very well.
If you don’t have enough resources to bring users to your product, please write something on LinkedIn or Twitter every day and add your website link or app link
Don’t do remote work in the early days, as a team meet every day and hustle together.
The quickest way to kill your business or become inefficient is being a remote-first company, launching too many offices in different locations and founders spending less time in the office.
Early days don’t even take an office space or waste time in cafes / co-working spaces.
If you know any founder ask them if you can use their workplace for some time.
If you don’t know anyone please ask on the internet most folks are kind enough
Create a talent repository on Google Sheets, reaching out to the talent and hiring them is much more efficient vs 1000’s of application applying for a single role
If you don’t have enough capital to get a team, hire freshers, trust them first and massively invest in them
Early days all you need is a Founder, designer and 1/2 engineers. anything beyond that is a vanity
Focus on building a company that achieves a crazy revenue per employee, don’t think of hiring hundreds of team members.
Trust first and delegate work to your team members, let them make decisions - you shouldn’t become a bottleneck to make decisions a lot of time goes in vain, it’s okay if they fail or you get it wrong - you will at least learn how to proceed with them in future
Create a Google folder for every director in the company and upload their documents in that folder, share the folder link when your CA/lawyer asks you for it - you can do the same for company-wide documents
The ideal time taken to get a current bank account is 30/45 days. Don’t trust any sales reps they will promise you a week to open an account :(
Get a different SIM card for your business, and use the same for your co-bank account, MCA and social media accounts - don’t link them with your mobile number or personal social accounts.
Let your first 10L in revenue be driven without discounts, most times Discount sales give a false image
Don’t create social media accounts for your business on Day 1, please double down on them after there is some direction for your business.
If you want to accept online payments or payroll you can use Razorpay / cash-free. If you are looking for any KYC Api’s signzy or IDFY can execute them for you.
One of the most important jobs as a founder in the early days is until you reach a decent revenue threshold request, beg or do some jugaad every day to get more discounts from your vendors
As a team keep noting the decisions you make and constantly reflect on them
For customer support redirect the users to your WhatsApp number and solve their queries on WhatsApp, it helps you know the ground reality
Create an Idea / Inspiration dump page on Notion, let everyone share there and discuss them period to period
Please make it a habit for your team to document every little aspect and turn them into a knowledge base.
Please add any more points if you want to in the comments and If you found this insightful.
A ❤️and share on LinkedIn / Twitter would mean a lot