Category: How To’s

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entrepreneurship How To's startups

Employee Feedbacks

There are a lot of actions happening in the company, by people. People are just faces and never judge people or try to classify people. People keep growing or changing. Just keep seeing their actions and make remarks about actions, never people. Eventually, accountabilities are defined by groups of actions or directions of actions which are needed and they are grouped in such a way that logically it makes sense that since they are interrelated, it’s easier to find in a single person or a single person can grow to doing those set of actions defining a role for accountability. If they are not able to do all such actions as a collective single individual, either they are in the wrong seat or organization has misjudged all such action capabilities can be one individual and need to remove or divide them into more grouped accountability or roles. Whatever you do or practice, remember always to give direct feedback about the actions of people (oh, and never miss giving feedback) and never to the character of people or generalizing a human.

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entrepreneurship How To's

Socio-psychological factors for viral engagement

Human beings are instinctively social creatures. Social media apps, largely since Facebook, have categorically tapped into some basic elements of social interaction, and brought it into cyberspace; and it is for this reason that they’re some of the largest and most influential companies in the world – and hence also some of the most ubiquitous, publicised, and scrutinised.

Social media, in general, lays its groundwork on some basic socio-psychological phenomena, which we should certainly keep in mind if we wish to create the next big thing in this space;

Acceptance, and sense of belonging

For the most part, people are largely driven by their need to belong. Our need for social acceptance is very high, and it manifests in various ways, eg.

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entrepreneurship How To's Productivity

Being successful

A very noble thought has come to a mind today – lets be successful. The only problem is the mind does not know what is being successful. Lets drill down to what is being successful.

Being successful really means doing things which you really want to do and more importantly not doing things which you don’t want to do. It is very much linked to being happy for success overall is achievement of happiness only. Note that much emphasis should be given on not doing things which you don’t want to do. Doing things for most is an infinite ongoing list.

Its very common to associate money with being successful. I am not denying it is not, the only role of money is “money buys you resources which can be bought and which you can not do” as well as “buy resources and time which you want to do“. That explain the role of money.

Now the most important factor apart from role of money is when money does not play a part in success. e.g., you want to be fit, control an addiction,  wake up early etc. In fact surprisingly, most of the time money actually becomes your enemy in becoming successfully.

So now when we know what being successful is, lets try being one.

What is your list of things you want to do and more importantly things you don’t want to do.

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entrepreneurship How To's startups

Art of naming your users in ideation process

[Published on nextbigwhat.com here http://www.nextbigwhat.com/user-persona-ideation-and-product-attributes-297 ]

In the initial days after I passed out from IIT, used to have dozens of business plans everyday, and was already working on few of them in a given month. Later I realised those were not business plans but cool ideas, thats all. After I was done coding, I was hardly able to find users of my app except myself for couple of days. End result is a failed startup – failure will come very soon and is much assured to come. Series of startups, at one time also made me think I should start a consulting outsourcing businesses. Happens.

Then came a little matured stage when idea of solving problems was the key. This was a stage when I was actively looking to find problems in ecosystems and came up with solutions rather discussing with people who are facing problems. End result is a failed startup. You try to articulate reasons for failure but the reason is it was not built for anyone. Your product was a solution to a problem but a solution which was not desirable. Its an assured failed startup too. Know before you fail what you missed in your product.

Then came an interesting stage. Stage where I knew I came up with ideas which are also solutions to some problems, problems not that big but interesting to have solutions of. Identifying problems for which people were not actively looking for solutions but were surprised and excited to find solutions. There were users. I could name those users when I am coding. I had that amazing feeling while working and much more reasons to work now. But the competitors were growing fast, my product lacked somewhere. Problem was solved, but there were too many solutions already. I created and showed people the problem, and was outrun before I could even imagine this would happen. Obviously I lacked somewhere. The answer was sales. Interestingly it was always sales. Even the user requirements gathering, design elements, product delivery, money collection, user on boarding, user retention, competition watch – everything is part of sales. Naming a user and selling to that named users are two different things. But with a good procedure followed to name your users, idea evolution to product is a stronger process for your startup.

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How To's

How to use laptop – good posture practices

I have been developing a back pain lately. Two days vacation at Wayanad with absolutely zero back pain made me realize it was bad working posture. I work on a laptop which adds up to the problem since there are absolutely no zero stress working positions using laptop. Really liked two videos in this context.

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