Opportunities are more important than success

I can say that, having been able to build a web design company in Bangalore from ground up and keep it afloat for more than three years now. Like most of the startups I know of, we started off more out of compulsion than a pressing impulse to do so. Likewise, we didn’t have the wherewithal to invest or the wizardry to put up a gizmo on the market. All we had was a mouth that fed the stomach.

Put your mouth where the food is. When you have just started off, get into business areas that have very very short selling cycle, products / service that have low price band, and have sufficient demand to accommodate many vendors (at least you). This will help to earn the daily bread and keep the legs running. The low prices will keep the cash registers ringing and the customers wouldn’t bargain much allowing to keep the margins. Large demand base is important because, as a novice, nobody wants to be mauled in the competition and burn the profits. We got into domain registration and web hosting.

Sell what sells. Until unless you are the crafty type and can carve a niche for yourself with an ultra-modern innovative product / service, sell run-of-the-mill stuff. This will get the going quickly, without requiring to spend much of the time in developing out-of-the-box solutions at this juncture. The key is to keep the focus straight on generating revenues and avoid the gray areas. We got into static website design.

Build on your customers. Keep your customers in close quarters. Ensure that they know well about you and your business. Happy customers are more likely to entrust you with new business opportunities, although they know well that you have almost no experience in executing such work. They would factor reliability and confidence on you while avoiding having to search for an unknown, and may be, an expensive vendor. Today, we have customers who had started with basic website with us and we are managing their web applications.

I remember writing down the first two captions and sticking it up on my desk and repeating it over and over again to myself. It sure kept us in the loop all the time. We didn’t get much time to worry about the things that didn’t work. Volumes grew gradually. Along with it, the customer’s requirements grew too. They started demanding newer features. We kept toiling to execute each new requirement. Sometimes the requirements went overboard and we started getting all worked up, but stuck with it and achieved each one of them. In a while, we realized that this is the order of the day – newer requirements every moment, newer solutions all the time. The bar keeps raising all the time. Every time we overcame an impediment, it enthralled us, but would fade away the moment we had a new challenge. Success is always a moving target, opportunities are what make you stronger. Experience of handling varied challenges makes you knowledgeable. The know-how puts you in control of things and builds confidence. The confidence can open many more doors than anything else. In short, all the positive words of the dictionary start rolling into each other after this point. So Good Luck and open up your life to every opportunity.