Hitesh Sarda » interview

20 Qs with Puneet of Young India

Hitesh — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 09:54:33 +0000

Introduction

Q. In your own words, who are you and what is your business?

I am just a young creative mind, who feels that everyone can sell anything; but the only reason why everyone doesn’t become a businessman, is that they don’t have a product to sell. Since they don’t have anything to sell they sell somebody else’s product. All one needs is to be creative, a little passionate and definitely risk taking.
My business is www.yindia.co.in. It is a new and a creative website which give a purpose to networking. It is a place where creative minds will compete and get recognition. It may not be a very big recognition like any reality show that makes you an overnight star but it will make you realise the star potential in you.

Q. How did you come up with the idea for your business?

Well a very less famous person once said that the best of business ideas come from ones own need. If you really want to start a business then just think is there anything that you want or ever wanted that you couldn’t get because of unavailability and that’s where you create a product.
My business idea comes from my own life. As a young guy I have many creative interests and dream, but I never could pursue them. May be because of lack of knowledge and may be ‘coz I never knew how good I am outside the boundary walls of my school and college. So I thought of giving the young generation something I did not get. It’s less of a business idea and more of an initiative.
By the way that less famous person is nobody else but me.

Q. Is this your first business?

Well definitely yes, it’s my first business. I would prefer to call it an initiative than business. It’s my way of changing the systems and things that are currently there in India.

Market

Q. Who are your customers?

My customers are the young creative minds who have dreams, who don’t want to follow the rat race. We all are following a rat race due to which we couldn’t follow our heart and dream careers for which we blame our society, our parents but the reason why we could follow is that we never tried because of lack of self belief. One needs to go through a competitive environment to get this self assessment and self belief.What I never appreciated in my life is the follower approach. Because following curbs creativity
This site is for those young minds that have that creativity to do things differently. They can try and test out there skills. Have you ever thought the reports and presentations we have made in our college life how good they are? Its not always about marks. If you want to check it then check it on www.yindia.co.in where you’ll know how useful it is. We click photographs in daily life, have you ever thought how beautifully and artistically these photos have been taken by you? If you want to, then check with YIndia.
Everything and anything can have creativity in life; I just tried to give opportunities to creative mind to understand their creativity and its importance. We promote talents, individuals, ideologies.

Q. What are your most significant products or services?

My most significant product is the creativity of my users.

Q. How has your market changed in the past few years?

Well the market is growing. This attempt is more like an initiative which is have not been tried.

Q. How has your business changed to keep pace?

Well the business is just in starting phase so changing environment has not been faced.

Growth and Revenues

Q. How many employees do you have? Full- or part-time?

Well we have 6 full time and around 20 part time employees.

Q. How did you finance your business? What have been your most effective sources of financing over the years?

Well finance remains an issue for a start-up forever. The terms like venture finance sound good but it is not as easy as it sound. When you come up with some new and different plan you are always circumspect about sharing your plan and your idea. I am still working on high end loans and personal savings.

Q. Is the business profitable? Still investing, cash flow positive, profitable?

Well it’s just started so there’s still time.

Q. What are the most crucial things you have done to grow your business?

Well for a journey of the thousand miles the most important step is the first step.

Q. What plans do you have now to expand your business further?

I have plans to make it global as website don’t have boundary but definitely have to have a service that caters to global audience.

Your management style

Q. What is an average workday like for you? What systems have you used to automate your business to give you more time for business planning and development?

I don’t really know how much I work. In a start-up you have to work like a clerk, peon, receptionist, customer care, sales executive, manager, CEO Keeps you occupied.

Q. What has been your biggest challenge to date?

Well I am enjoying this feeling of doing what I am and following my dream that I have stopped rating things as challenges but I take them as ladders to climb through the success.

Q. Have you ever felt like giving up?

No not even once

Q. What has been your biggest mistake in business?

I don’t consider them as mistake but errors as its better to find as many errors as possible to achieve the level of perfection for success

Q. If you were starting again, what would you do differently?

Don’t know if I start again than I would definitely do and work on different product. I won’t restrict my creativity again.

Q. Words of advice to fellow entrepreneurs.

You are all alone when you do something. So everything you do, you have to do all alone. Don’t expect anything from anyone. You have to have confidence in yourself. Don’t do it just ‘coz you don’t want to do anything else but do it coz you want to do it.

For our readers

Q. Do you have any opportunities / offers / partnership ideas about which you want to put a word out?

Well so far I don’t have but yes I am definitely looking for a person who wants to work hard and creatively. Do all works of a CEO at a salary of a sales and marketing executive.

Also please promote this website www.yindia.co.in to as many people you can.

Q. Best way to reach you (IM/email/twitter/social media/blog)

You can reach me through facebook YINDIA fan page / or www.yindia.co.in Gtalk : puneet26dec9jan@gmail.com

20 Qs with Sudhir of vfreshers.com

Hitesh — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 15:33:16 +0000

In the second interview, I get to interview Mr. Sudhir of vfreshers.com. He runs a website that provides info about fresher jobs.

Introduction

Q. In your own words, who are you and what is your business?: A. I am an IT Professional having worked in Software industry in India & USA for 4-5 years. I have been working on Vfreshers.com along with my wife who is a law graduate and left her career to pursue my dream.I have also left my full-time job 3 months back. Vfreshers.com is a platform for all the fresh graduates in India.
Q. How did you come up with the idea for your business?: A. I myself used to look for this kind of information when I passed out of University. Initially, I started with a website on Walk-in Interviews and then later on started Vfreshers.com
Q. Is this your first business?: A. Yes

Market

Q. Who are your customers?: A. Our Customers are both Fresh Graduates & all those corporate who are seeking to hire Entry Level Talent in their organization.
Q. What are your most significant products or services?: A. We are giving an opportunity to Freshers to find for all kind of Freshers Jobs at a single place. In addition to that we also write on other stuff like Resume Writing, Latest Career Trends & other Career related information which is very useful for Fresh Graduates & Entry Level Jobseekers.
Q. How has your market changed in the past few years?: A. The Market has become more competitive with the entry of more such websites. Even big companies like Naukri.com are entering this space now.
Q. How has your business changed to keep pace?: A. We have been trying to keep ourselves distinct by keeping our website as user friendly as it can be. It is very easy to search jobs in various categories and apply for the same.

Growth and Revenues

Q. How many employees do you have? Full- or part-time?: A. We do not have many employees right now we are in “start-up” mode. All of the employees are “part-time” and work from their own locations.
Q. How did you finance your business? What have been your most effective sources of financing over the years?: A. Bootstrapped
Q. Is the business profitable? Still investing, cash flow positive, profitable?: A. Yes – the business has been profitable so far.
Q. What are the most crucial things you have done to grow your business?: A. Invested lot of time and believed in it from day one.
Q. What plans do you have now to expand your business further?: A. Plans to cover more segments other than jobs too & take it to the next level.

Your management style

Q. What is an average workday like for you? What systems have you used to automate your business to give you more time for business planning and development?: A. When you are pursuing a dream or passionate about something, it is difficult to keep work-life balance. I work for minimum 12 hours each day.
Q. What has been your biggest challenge to date?: A. To find talented people to work with us.
Q. Have you ever felt like giving up?: A. Never
Q. What has been your biggest mistake in business?: A. Started Late. I wish I had started during my college days.
Q. If you were starting again, what would you do differently?: A. I would have avoided partnering with anyone in a project.
Q. Words of advice to fellow entrepreneurs.: A. Never Give Up

For our readers

Q. Do you any opportunities / offers / partnership ideas about which you want to put a word out?: A. We are always open to any business opportunity proposals that come our way.
Q. Best way to reach you (IM/email/twitter/social media/blog): A. vfreshers(AT)gmail.com (Gtalk)

One question to rule them all

Hitesh — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 07:15:25 +0000

Recently, while interviewing a person, I came up with an interesting question. That led to a series of discoveries about the interviewee. So I thought I would share it here.

How does xUnit work? **

This one question offered insight into various aspects that I cared about. I steered the discussion until I got the answers to these question, without asking them explicitly.

Do you know what unit testing is? - Awareness level
When do you write test cases? Before or after the change? - Practitioner skills
How does unit testing work? - Conceptual skills
Do you understand annotations? How are they used in JUnit / NUnit? - Advanced developer skills
Do you understand the implementation behind unit test frameworks, or are you a dumb consumer? - Architectural skills
How was the implementation explained? - Communication skills

What are your favourite questions?

** Replace xUnit with language specific implementation (JUnit, NUnit, etc.).

20 Qs with Mr. Kadiyala of fullhyd.com

Hitesh — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 05:53:37 +0000

In a planned series of interviews with Indian entrepreneurs, here is the first one. I got in touch with Kishore, an old friend and associate, and talked to him about his venture fullhyd.com.

Introduction

In your own words, who are you and what is your business?: fullhyd.com is a local content and local search company, currently focusing on Hyderabad, India, and planning to scale to all Indian cities soon. We help people find comprehensive details about various businesses and services in their neighbourhood, and help them interact with the businesses, and with each other about the businesses.
We also cover life in the city – events, movies, shopping & sales – and serve as a local community organizer, apart from being a guide for tourists.
Our revenue/business is focused on providing unprecedentedly low-cost advertising solutions to small and medium business enterprises, by helping them reach customers in their neighbourhood, and pay for just that.
How did you come up with the idea for your business?: Through reading about the Internet and the way it is likely to evolve. I felt geographic communities are quite likely to be big.
Is this your first business?: Yes.

Market

Who are your customers?: (1) All people interested in any information about a city, and (2) all businesses seeking to reach any subset of people in the city. The former give us our product (our traffic), and the latter, our revenues.
What are your most significant products or services?: Content about businesses/services/organizations/groups in a city, and the technology to deliver it and to help users interact with it and with each other, is our product to our audiences, and our traffic is our most significant product to our advertisers.
How has your market changed in the past few years?: The emergence of telephones as a key delivery mechanism, and more – and more professional – competitors, have been important changes.
How has your business changed to keep pace?: We overhauled our entire site in a 4-year exercise to get more comprehensive in our content and to provide more features to our users. We continue to evolve every day.

Growth and Revenues

How many employees do you have? Full- or part-time?: About 10, mostly full-time.
How did you finance your business? What have been your most effective sources of financing over the years?: Seed-funding from friends and family in the initial years, revenues thereafter. We seek funding to grow.
Is the business profitable? Still investing, cash flow positive, profitable?: Profitable at the current scale.
What are the most crucial things you have done to grow your business?: Use innovative approaches – good search-engine-optimization is one example, $2 ads is another – to generate traffic and revenues in the absence of an advertising budget.
What plans do you have now to expand your business further?: We seek to raise funding. Can’t say much more here, of course.

Your management style

What is an average workday like for you? What systems have you used to automate your business to give you more time for business planning and development?: The average workday is mostly consumed by operational work. We are increasingly bringing in good people to manage operations so that I get free to work to raise investment.
What has been your biggest challenge to date?: We are India’s no. 1 local guide for traffic in a city. Achieving that with no funding support, when all competitors have been funded millions of dollars, has been a significant achievement.
Bringing into existence the second version of fullhyd.com, which involved surveying work in the city on a scale never attempted before by anyone, has been a big challenge.
Have you ever felt like giving up?: No.
What has been your biggest mistake in business?: There’ve been plenty. Trying to unveil a magnificent product at once instead of putting up small features one after the other has been a mistake.
If you were starting again, what would you do differently?: Many things – we all evolve over time, and there’s been plenty of learning. Prioritization and compromising are 2 things I’d give a lot of importance to.
Words of advice to fellow entrepreneurs.: Be organized, and prioritize. And get yourself a good team. And be ethical.

For our readers

Do you any opportunities / offers / partnership ideas about which you want to put a word out?: Yes – write to us to partner us in our story. We have stratospheric opportunities to grow and very few people doing it. Join us today for stock when we are small, and we’ll make sure that in time we more than make up for your compromise.
Best way to reach you (IM/email/twitter/social media/blog): email (knkk@fullhyd.com).