Past few days were among those 'highs' for which we work so hard in a startup.

We have added more than 600 new registered users, we got into top 100 free apps in music and audio category at Google Play store , we got more than 1000 new downloads and some good press coverage, we got couple of new advertisers; all this in last 10 days! Phew!

Moreover, I did few more interesting things which is making me feel even better. I have started talking with my users more closely. I made a facebook group for RingAd users, I emailed some of the users, I had chat with some of them. This made me feel more closer to my users and helped me understand what they want and what should I focus on most.

We internally had discussion about what problem we should focus most and where should we head. I personally believe that mobile phones have become ubiquitous to our lives , they are as essential as food, water or clothes. But what I don't like about this whole development is that we still have to be confused about what operator to use, which plans to use, prepaid, postpaid and what not. It has to be simpler. But why it is not is because the telecom companies don't want to change, change is not profitable for them. Do you think an sms message, which is of just few bytes could cost them so much? Surely not. There has to be some way.

One way is to make such tools which give more power to users, give more freedom and give more options. And with android operating system, I feel that this could be achieved. It's one right step and now it's our, app developers turn to make solutions for big problems, we have to think big and think broad.

It's my philosophy behind RingAd, solve the problem that millions of users face, the amount of time people spend with mobile phone is just huge and this time can be used in a better way, user should get reward for this time. That's where RingAd comes in.

I am sure, more exciting time to come ahead, I just need to be more focused.

Google Play store is the only major way for an android app to be discovered, yet there is so little a developer can do with the Play Store customizing, that it gets frustrating at times. I really wonder why Google is not even trying to fix it.

Though there has been some recent changes and more analytics are provided by google regrarding the number of app installs, downloads etc. But the major thing which needs to be fixed is giving the developer an ability to customize their app listing page and giving an ability to track how people are coming to the app listing page, what keywords users are searching to find the app and all other information which Google anayltics can give for a website. Why don't Google allow us to put a Google analytics code on the page? No idea.

Another important feature would be to be able to chat with visitors of app listing page, something like an Olark widget. It can developer a good insight about kind of users coming to the page and making an interaction with them.

One most important and required feature is an 'app widget' which we can put on our website and user can install app by just one click, without having the need of going to app store from website. Doesn't it make sense? Google, please do it.

It's an awkward feeling while saying that Google needs to fix search in Google Play store. It's just plain broken. If you publish a new app, it wouldn't even show in the search even if you put the exact name as search query? Is it too tough for search giant to fix search? I would be surprised.

Google Play Store needs some of these improvements to make life of developers easy. What are your pain points regarding Google Play Store?

 

 

Mobile advertisement is in a very primitive phase, lots of new ideas coming and lots of experiments happening. One of the biggest issue with mobile advertisement is that it's hard to measure the ROI(return on investement), we are facing the same issue with our model and we know that unless we figure it out, it's hard to justify the impact of our platform and making businesses to invest in our advertisement campaigns.

To address this issue, we have came up with a new business model for RingAd. You as an advertiser would now will get full ROI on all your advertisement campaigns on RingAd. We are moving into a new kind of payment system, for all campaigns you run on RingAd you would not need to pay any hard cash for basic plan, but discount coupons of your service. These coupons would be distributed to our users who listen your advertisements, at the end of every month. This means, you can easily measure the ROI from RingAd campaign by knowing how many users actually used those coupons and you are paying only when you get real customers. It's a big win-win situation for your business and our users.

The new pricing plan goes like this -

What a gimmick these telecom companies play with consumers by giving "unlimited broadband plans" and than applying fair usage policy. I have started to believe that this is a scam. I am using hathway 5mbps unlimited plans and they slapped a 10GB fair usage policy, now imagine if I use full mbps download for 8hours the math would be like -

8(hours)*(5mbps/8)Download speed*60(secs)*60(minutes) =  18000mb used that is ~17.5GB

The unlimited plan actually doesn't last even a whole day!

Is the math right? Or am I missing something?

I feel like cheated.

From some time now, I was trying to find the perfect way to write this thing, finally I have found it. From my own experience, I found that, in a startup, when you start, you start with the first round of innovation, which takes you through from idea to a first version of your product. Generally, after this first version, we launch the product. That's where the first round of innovation ends.

Sometimes, the launch goes well and you see a good traction and things start moving. But most of the times, things don't work well enough. That's when the second round of innovation comes, with this second round of innovation, I mean, it's the time when you have to put the similar amount of energy which you put into your startup when you were just starting up and had just idea in your head and you worked hard to get the first version done. In the second round of innovation, you need to put in all you have, again.

Certainly there are third and sub sequent round of innovations, but I say that the second round of innovation is most critical, since your startup exists because of the first round of innovation, so that's an obvious round but without second innovation, you would't go further, so there will no sub sequent rounds if you don't innovate hard enough in the second round. So, it's the most critical round.

Second round of innovation, may require you to completely rethink your idea, remove some of the unwanted features or add some obvious features or it might completely be related to the business process innovation. Also, another important thing that I realized is that, the seond round of innovation would be mostly be related to the business side of things and not the tech side of things. We techies really want to ignore the business side innovation, but without it, I don't think any good business can survive. So, the second round of innovation is certainly critical, in my opinion.

What's your thought on it?

 

From what I see and feel, there are lots of exciting things happening in India right now around the startup scene. It's definately growing and probably the growth is more visible now. Lots of news worthy things happening, investment, acquiring, e-commerce, mobile and what not. So, there's definately a supply of news. But there's no powerful startup blog, which is covering these stories efficiently with in-depth analysis and insights, that's just completely lacking. Though there are a few blogs with enough traffic and all, but the quality of content is just too low.

Startup journalism requires much more than just talent, it requires you to be equally passionate about startups and willing to go far to help startups, that's the only way. Doing it just for the sake of doing, is not going to work. I believe that much of the credit for the growth of the startup eco-system in silicon valley goes to the excellent blogs like techcrunch, which at one time was doing a great job in helping startups in reaching to the target audience, along with other important things like writing about trends, analysing startups etc, we need something similar here.

This is a great opportunity for someone in the right position and having the right talent. Can the right person please raise hand and come forward!

One  month after launch of RingAd android app. Here I go, with the stats so far. Total 678 downloads in the app market, 525 registered users on website and almost 60,000 ringtones played. The stats are not much good and way below our expectations.

By the end of the month, I reached to a typical mental block, when I am not sure if I am doing anything significant or whatever I am doing is working or not.

I have now decided to make a list of tasks to be completed during this coming month, so that I can guage how I am fairing after the end of the month, I really hate this situation of feeling too low during the end of the month or start of the month, I am not sure if it is common with younger startups? How do people handle this?

I am also struggling with getting the right person to join me. I think that I need to make a decision whether I want to make a sales team or not? Since we are into solving a chicken and egg problem and too many if-else-then clauses in our business, we also need to re-think the whole business model.

On the good note, I've registered a pvt. ltd. company 'Geekybuddha Technologies Pvt. Ltd.' and will operate RingAd under this name.

That's it for now. Comments and suggestions welcome.

RingAd wish you a very happy lohri and Makar Sakranti, with this punjabi song describing the beauty of festival. Enjoy with family, sweets and kites.

हल्ले नी मैई हल्ले दो बेरी पत्ते झुले
दो झूल पयेआं कह्जुर्रण
खाजुर्रण सुट्ट्या मेवा
एस मूंदे दे घर मंगेवा
एस मूंदे दी वोटी निकड़ी
ओह! खंडी चूरी , कुत्डी
कुट! कुट! भरया थाल वोटी बावे नानाना नाल

निनान ते वादी परजाई
सो कुडमा दे घर आयी !
में लोहरी लें आयी !

-Shree Kant

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I think it's time that I take one step forward to grow RingAd. Before moving forward, here's the story so far.

July 2010, I completed my engineering. August, I landed in Bangalore with Paras. Looking back I think, we were crazy. But 2010 and 2011 were the years of my life in which I learned most important lessons of my life. We started with www.iddhis.com , our idea was simple, make a relationship journal, where two people can share their intimate thoughts privately, we never wanted to change the world or make any dent in universe. Making a social network was not even in our wildest dreams.  For our initial version the best feedback we got was, "I have never seen a website geared towards relationships, built so well and simple" from an american army man, who used Iddhis to communicate with her significant other half while he was away. That was the perfect use case we wanted to cater. But our problem was, we didn't have  a good interface, we were struggling on that and we were trying to focus on too many use cases, we wanted to fit it in more than one thing. That's where we started losing focus. We iterated, but we were taking too much time, we were not reaching our target users, partly because we never tried. At least one thing has to go right in all the chaos to keep a startup motivated, but if nothing is going right, it becomes tough to remain motivated. But among all that, good thing was, we were learning very fast on the technical side,  we switched from PHP to Django, I think that was the best decision we made, our interface and design started to improve and look good, we implemented a real ajax heavy real time interface with Apache MQ, Stomp and Orbited, we learned many lessons in social media, we actually made some twitter campaigns which did reasonably well, we used a twitter app we created internally, we created couple of videos for promotion and all this without any kind of support from anyone, what so ever. We were literally ridiculed by many people, we were said things what no young man would like to hear, we were said to be wasting time and money, while we didn't spend a single penny in anything other than food, rent and server for 1+ year, that's how it goes, but we didn't know, so it was new for us. Now I have learned that first quality for an entrepreneuer is to not to take too many people too seriously :D, you just have to be strong mentally, more than your technical skills, your mental skills are going to help you. There's a Hindi proverb, "okhli main sar daala hai to mooslo se kya darna"  I now follow this and remain chill in most of the situations. I had an epiphany, sometime in June 2011, I decided to focus on formal principles of design and learn to make beautiful things and finally I was able to produce interface like http://closest.in and http://closest.in/shreekant I have got good comments for this design from designers whom I think are god level and I've met with people who I could never imagine of meeting, because of my work at closest.in , these events re-established my belief in doing awesome work and waiting for rewards. Now I am working on http://ringad.net it's something totally different from what I've previously done and how I've previously done. I am now a single co-founder ( If co-founders are said to be spouses, then you can say, we divorced :D ), but I've already met with awesome people who are helping me as co-founders,  I've got awesome response from people whom I don't know and are using my app. It's already rewarding so far. I've a simple focus now, make things really beautiful, working and be the biggest advocate of your own product, don't let any opportunity coming to you go, talk with more and more people, be open and transparent and keep doing awesome work, don't listen to too many people. So far,  so good. New things, new challenges and new learnings. Things are moving at good pace, we have recently raised small seed funding as well. And yeah I am looking for awesome people who believe in my story, who want to create their own story and who are ready to take risks for their lifetime, rewards are also proportional. Ping me at shreekant [at] ringad.net and let's talk.