Setting up bank accounts is not that easy in India

In India even setting up bank accounts is not a very straight forward thing. I already have a couple of accounts with State Bank of India and Indian bank, and my dad himself is a manager in one of the banks, but that didn't stop me from having to handle some red tape in dealing with ICICI bank. But, my dad rightly insisted on me starting the process very early (within few hours of landing of India), so there is some hope now.

Given that there is no single national ID like SSN and credit history concept is not developed India, banks require physical introductions from existing account holders. I had my dad to introduce me and we went to the bank to sign the stuff etc. But, then there is so much of documentation involved (like providing photocopies of my ID and my dad's ID, signed by both of us, matching names, etc). After the initial visit to the bank (I opened in a branch 10 km from my place), I said I'm not going to visit them for each small step and asked them to send guys to my home if they need any documentation or signature. I started the opening process a week ago and my account is still not live yet. :-(

One good thing is that they have a lot of low-paid labor, and if you are a big enough account potential you can bully them into getting the docs done from your home.

Once this is done, I need to apply and get PAN - the national tax ID number, and also open business accounts for my startup.

Things have changed a lot for the better, but Indian system is still ridden with a lot of redtape and unnecessarily document driven.

Hired a legal firm for the company

After searching around a bit, I got a small legal firm for incorporation and IP registration. The law firm is relatively young (1 year old) and the partners are in practice only for the past 4 years. But, they are pretty energetic and patient, and I picked them in favor of more experienced firms for whom my company will be a tiny dot... TradeMark & legal name search process is on, and once they give a green to my proposed name, official papers will be filed by Friday.

The incorporation of a Private Limited cost Rs. 18000 ($400) most of it is government fees (Rs. 15000) and rest is lawyer fee (Rs. 3000). It involves setting up 2 directors, setting up Director Id numbers and digital signature, provisioning of a minimum share capital of Rs. 100,000. TradeMark registration costs Rs. 8000 ($180) per trademark registered. Once the name search is done by the end of the week (where they check similiar names in appearance and pronounciation to the existing names), I will file the initial paper (that will allow me to put TM behind my trademark) and once the registration is complete (12+ months) I can put a circled R behind the trademark.

The incorporation might take a month, and after which I need to get initial contracts stuff (for employment, copyrights etc) setup with the lawyer.

Setup hosting infrastructure with Mosso

Setting up hosting account for my website. I already had a hosting account with globat.com ($100/year) and GoDaddy ($5/month), but after using them for a while, I decided to go with a better provider. I wanted an elastic cloud to dynamically take care of my load. Right now, I don't know how much my site is going to pick up and in these days of high speed social networking, a site could be inundated with visitors or ignored totally and this process is somewhat random. This makes allocating the site resources pretty tricky.

There are a lot of options. The most basic one is getting a shared hosting space, where you will be sharing server resources with dozens of other small fish. You might get a few Gigs of space, but it is the bandwidth and RAM where you might feel pretty constrained as things will be shared. You can get a dedicated server where your app will be the only thing running in the server, but that could cost $200+ bucks per month. And when you need to handle more traffic, you need to keep buying more servers in a time consuming process.

If you set up too big a server and nobody visits, you would have just blown away a lot of money, and if you have too little resources and a lot of people happen to visit, you would not just lose the potential visitors, but also infuriate a lot of them due to the slower page download. The entry level hosting accounts with GoDaddy or Globat can't handle more than a couple of dozen users in parallel. If you need to support 1000 concurrent users you need a dedicated server.

After considering the options, I wanted to go with an elastic cloud solution, where the hosting provider could dynamically allocate you more resources based on the traffic and you will be charged based on the usage. there are independent charges for compute cycles, hard disk space, RAM usage and bankdwidth usage. Amazon EC2 and RackSpaceCloud (Mosso) both offer this kind of a setup. EC2 is a little hard to setup, so I went with Mosso.

Mosso offers two options - Cloud server ($10/month) which is really barebones with a lot of flexibility, and you will be charged for all the stuff, and Cloud Sites ($100/month) that comes with a big package of free cycles, RAM and diskspace. For my median traffic estimates Cloud Sites seem to be more economical and easy to setup, though I might move to Cloud Server if the traffic is not as per my median estimates.

I setup 5 email accounts for the company and moved the initial content. I plan to launch a site for one of my projects from there next month, and I will know when the rubber hits the road.

Landed in India - starting stuff from here

After the first week of working in the US, now I moved to India as originally planned. The last week in the US was pretty hectic - selling household stuff, consolidating accounts, cleaning, saying goodbye to friends etc and thus I couldn't give 100% for my startyp... I spent 2-3 full days on building one of the databases...

Day 2

Day 2 is pure hard labor. I was doing a lot of data entering manually in building my database. The Database will be the central part of the value add and without it the tools I build don’t make sense and in a few hours of fast paced activity I built probably 0.5% of my desired content. Right now it is hard to automate the process and once I reach India I will hire help to do this crud work. For now it is me and I really love it. My goal is to never delegate a task that you don’t know how to do it. Delegate only when you know the task so that you can find the appropriate labor and cost it effectively.

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Leadership

Whenever I deal with a business I try to observe hard on the activity of their leaders vs their workers. Whether it is car dealership, restaurants, grocery store, there are bits and pieces of leadership that could either be emulated or avoided.

I eat out a lot and I try to observe how the store owner/manager acts. The best leaders I see are the ones who have dignity of labor who would clean up the tables and take the trash if needed. They would do anything to increase the comfort of the customer while keeping the process streamlined.

I categorize 3 types of leaders based on delegation – first group delegates everything without having the slightest understanding of what it is, and would both be ignorant of the tasks and disrespectful of some of the menial tasks he expects of the workers. Second group takes all the activities upon themselves out of pure love or the inertia involved in asking somebody to do something, and at some point they leave out the most important tasks. Third group takes up any task in the organization that is needed asap – even it means handling trash, while constantly be on the look out for delegating it if he has more important tasks to attend to.

In the end, a leader is somebody who leads – meaning he needs to know the path and handle the first brush, and somebody who doesn’t walk alone and passes some of his chores to his followers.

Day 1

Though it is not the official start (that is a few weeks away), today is the unofficial start of my startup. Next week, I will shift this startup to India and then the real action will start.
Day 1 is going relatively casual. In the morning, I finished my exit interviews with Microsoft HR to formally wrap up the process.

1. I started setting up the infrastructure - Downloading and Installing Win7 Ultimate, along with the other essential s/w - iTunes, Firfox, Office.... The upgrade from Vista didn't work well, so I went for a clean installation with a dual boot. By end of the day, I plan to consolidate the setup by moving around the necessary files and software.

2. Did some competitive study and surprised to find the number of competitors in the neighboring fields. The market seems fragmented and there is scope from attack. Took note of some strengths and weakness, on which I need to do a lot of elaboration over the next few weeks.

3. Had talk with my outsourcer in the morning to give them additional requirments in my project. I have outsourced one of my projects to a company in India and that experience is helping me a lot to understand how to farm out product development. Basically, I'm using a stepper to gradually learn and apply the learnings.

The last few months I have trying some strategy planning and have decided to place main focus on lean manufacturing. Outsource as much as possible and focus only on the core expertise. Since, my product would directly step in the toes of some well entrenched competitors this is the primary way to achieve my competitive advantage. I don't want to be sucked up into too many things that is not in my area of expertise. So, outsourcing would be the core of my product development.

But, before outsourcing my plan is to do all the stuff that is to be outsourced myself, to get an idea of what is the weight of each task. Outsourcing a task that you have no idea is a serious recipe for disaster. So, everything from UX development to data entry to facebook marketing is going to be handled by me with the clear intention to outsource.

3. After using an outsourcer for a while for another project, I have come to a simple conclusion that giving more freedom to the outsourcer and giving them big chunks of the project with proper specs, is infinitely better than splitting into too many components - icons, skins, database etc and fighting hard with putting them together.

Enter your outsourcing contract priced to the final product than charged by time. If you want to be charged by the hour, you are providing them an incentive to delay stuff. Pay for the work not the hour, and you can see the stuff getting speedend up.