How I tried to crowdfund my tuition, but got 20 potential clients instead http://t.co/98VyEkttMF by @LalwaniVikas
— The Next Web (@TheNextWeb) March 22, 2014
I've been postponing writing a blogpost for past few days and today as well I am not going to do it. To compensate for this, I am sharing a link to my guest post on 'The Next Web'. Enjoy!
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I got a mail early morning from a friend of mine. He shared a link of a company that is solving the same problem as we are trying to solve, but in a different manner. I jumped right into it and was stunned to see their progress. I can tell you it's not a great way to start your day. It's actually exactly opposite, you're demotivated and you start doubting yourself. I kept thinking about it and concluded that it's a complete waste of time to even spend a minute more pondering upon this. You probably can't control them, but you certainly can control your actions. Then this tweet came to my mind: How amazingly true is this. Take a moment to think about it. iPod was not the first MP3 player, Tesla was not the first electric car, Dropbox was not the first cloud storage platform, Facebook was not the first social network and on and on. The list is endless. You've to solve a pain point and do it better than anybody else in the world. Period.
As planned, we worked on our project this weekend and discovered quite a few technical limitations along the way. It's a major setback considering my earlier assumptions about the technology. I am not sure how can we find our way around them, but if we've to build it we need to solve them asap. Following are the things that are troubling us:
I think it can be solved if we can somehow hack inside the wrapper and understand what's going on inside. I'll have to talk to some experts and see what's possible. That's it for this post, good night fellas :) In my last post, I reported that we got rejected by Sirius Programme and I was devastated by the result. This happened because I was over optimistic about the application and thought that it was bound to get selected. And it hurt when my assumptions fell apart. But I didn't panic and patiently replied to them asking for their feedback on my idea.
I got their mail yesterday stating following three reasons for the rejection: (exact quote)
I was down for some time but as they say, life moves on. And so we are back on track to building or prototype. Bharat finished his exams and is now dedicatedly working on this. I'll call him tomorrow to see the progress. Last week SIRIUS programme shared on Twitter that they would be announcing results for the January applications by the end of the week and I was anxious to hear it. I kept refreshing my mailbox to see if there's any mail for the whole Friday but there was none. I received a mail from their team in response to my query in which they said that the results will be out this week. Now I am not sure if even that's going to happen or not.
I've decided to apply to Startup Chile as well and am planning to complete their lengthy application process by the end of this week. It's one of the lengthiest applications I've ever seen but I think it's probably worth it. They provide things like free office space, mentorship and $40,000 cash without taking any equity. I don't think there's any program comparable to it anywhere in the world and that's why it is one of the toughest to get into. Couple of hours back I heard back from Jeremy of MakeGamesWithUs team and they are happy about my idea to hack fund raising process for the academy. I need to think deeper now and see where it goes. It's time to get back to work folks, good night :) Update: SIRIUS programme results just came in and we are out. Oops, it hurts :( Last week we received our eye-tracker from The Eye Tribe and were really happy as it came after a very long wait. It requires USB 3.0 port to run which I don't have in my laptop so I right away couriered it to Bharat. He got the device early this week and managed to set it up to start working. The delay was because he has got his mid-sem exams scheduled this Sunday. Anyway, he has successfully installed it and it's working fine.
As Bharat will be busy this weekend, I've asked him to tell his friends to study the documentation so that we can get started early next week on our algorithms. Otherwise my plan was to work this weekend to hack together a very minimal working prototype by Sunday. Unfortunately, my plan has to wait for few more days. But I am happy that things are finally in place to actually start tackling the technical (and the toughest) part of the whole challenge. Let's see what's next in the store for us, good night folks :) For the past few days, I've been working on my crowdfunding campaign to arrange tuition money for MakeGamesWithUs Summer Academy. After the initial pace of contribution slowed sown, I started cold emailing people to tell them about the campaign and ask them for funds.
First few mails got a good response and some guys contributed to it. I was ecstatic to see that and began to think that I've found a solution and if I continue doing this, I may very well be on my way to hit the target in time. This increased enthusiasm saw me making huge lists of random people everyday and sending them a beautifully crafted mail to ask for their help. I stayed up late at nights to send mails and used to sleep thinking that I am going to wake up to see a huge change in the contributions next day. Day 1 passed, no contribution. Day 2, no change. Day 3, $50! Day 4, again nothing. Wait a minute, this can't be a coincidence. How is there such a slump after the initial rush? Why have people suddenly stopped listening to me? I began to think of reasons about what might be wrong. After hours of thinking and brainstorming, I came to the conclusion that this was not the right method. I confused 'beginner's luck' for a pattern. And now in hindsight, I feel how stupid I was to think that people will contribute just by seeing my mail. As if they had been waiting for this moment for all their life and would just take out their credit cards to contribute to my campaign. A big mistake and more importantly, loss of few crucial days. There are still 27 days left in my campaign and I need to device a different strategy if I want to succeed. Let's see what can I come up with. Good night fellas :) Couple of days back I went to collect my deposit and balance amount from the landlord of the house where I was previously staying. I did rough math and was expecting to get full refund of deposit and INR 700 balance amount back but got INR 0 (yes zero) against the balance amount. Why? I still can't understand that. The guy did all the back calculation and added fake prices to take the total to an amount where there was no need to pay anything back. I tried to reason with him about it but he was not ready to listen anything at all.
It was really an irritating experience and I've never met such a greedy guy before in my life. I gave the rent in time for all the months, paid for all the expenses without any trouble and behaved perfectly well during my stay but still I get to bear this illogical behaviour from him. It was not a big amount and I really don't care about it so much but it's about the way you behave. It's about fairness and it's about being a gentleman. I can't imagine a 45 years old guy behaving like a nursery kid. I think it all goes back to the his upbringing and his character. In the hindsight I can see it very clearly why the things that looked strange at that time happened to him. Now I can see why he got fired from his job as a primary school teacher, why he lost his (and a fellow Couchsurfer's) money in a ponzi scheme and why all the people used to say things about him that I didn't believe at that time. I think I should post this message on Couchsurfing wall to prevent other people from falling into his trap. But not now, I'll take a call on that soon, good night everyone :) My Crowdtilt campaign was going at a decent pace initially and even the ambitious goal of $10,000 was looking achievable. But after the initial rush, it has started to slow down. It's the way every campaign works. Initially you can approach people you know and they can contribute easily because they trust you. But after that phase, the real challenge starts because you have to get money from strangers. In my case, I've to get more than 85% of money from the people I've never met before and that's a pretty big challenge.
Past three days have gone in sending cold mails to random people with mild success. I've received some amount from famous people like Alexis Ohanian (cofounder Reddit), a top notch investor from Andreessen Horowitz and a Stanford MBA. They were kind enough to contribute on just one request but it's not sufficient to keep the pace required to hit the target. This was bound to happen and the way I approach the problem from now on will show my real character. I don't have a concrete solution to this but I believe creativity can solve any problem. And this problem too can be solved if we can 'think different'! I'll leave today at this note and think of some 'creative' solution. Good night fellas :) Monday
I had the flight to Bangalore at 11:10 AM and took a cab from hotel to airport at 8:30 AM. It was a slight mess up as the guy who was supposed to arrange the cab failed to do so. He asked me to book the cab myself and that he'll transfer the money in my account (but hasn't done so yet). I reached the airport before time but unfortunately the flight was delayed by more than 3 hours. A complete waste of time. After a couple of other random events, I ended up wasting most of my day in travelling. Tuesday I worked on my Crowdtilt campaign and contacted many new people in addition to reminding earlier ones to take action. Some of the effort was fruitful but most of it wasn't. Anyway, it has been a good exercise till now as I now know people who really care about me and people who just hang around for passing time. Wednesday It has been a productive day today as I have managed to draw more funds to my campaign and have finally got the eye-tracker that I won in the idea competition. I was not sure how to ask for the device from Abhishek, but after talking to Mayank today, it became clear that the best way to solve any problem is to talk first. If that doesn't work, then have some other plans. In my case, talking worked and I didn't have to take any other action. I've the device with me now which I'll courier to Bharat tomorrow. Luckily, he has 2013 edition of MacBook Pro which has USB 3.0 port in it. It's a must have thing to use the hardware, without it we could have faced another problem. Fortunately for us, we can now focus on actual work! That's the update for past few days, good night fellows :) |