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.