Startup Series #2 : The Chaos

This is an out of timeline successor to my previous blog. This blog could very well be mistaken as rant rather than knowledge sharing and is been written from my makeshift workstation one week month into the lockdown to help from the rampaging second wave of Covid-19 in India.

Jan 2020 [+1Y4M] - Whenever I mention a date I will include a duration that will denote the offset from the day I officially started up

December 2020 [+2Y4M] — For the ones who are looking out to startup 3 years would seem like a eternity of time not making huge revenues let alone profit. The harsh truth to swallow is when it’s your first startup 3 years is not that long of time for you to learn the ropes. Given we were in the enterprise startup area specifically in the manufacturing industry where altering the status quo is not quick given a long market cycle involved.

Given our 3+ years of in this industry talking to stakeholders and learning the ins and outs we settled in on to build our product that we have been iteratively improving with every customer’s input and the market requirements. We called it time for an expansion after the first-wave of Covid-19 settled down and moved into a proper office space and hired more people to join our journey. I will take you through the process of setting up our first office space in another blog. We hired freshers out of college to a count of almost 10 people working through the product in a barbarian manner.

Consume caffeine and sprint through knowledge

May 2021 [+2Y9M] — The second wave of Covid-19 was showing its effects and a general sense of vulnerability and the depression of knowing people were passing with no control of their own we moved the office to WFH basis two weeks earlier than the official lockdown to ensure the safety of my people in these tough times. When the official lockdown came into place I had to move our development servers back to my home repurposing my bedroom back into a office.

During our expansion we set out our target date for launch of our product to August 2021[+3Y]. What made a successful launch had a lot of workings behind both on the technical and the non-technical sides and here we have a team composed solely of engineers with everyone except me having as their first actual job. Marketing was a non-starter for any of us and we counted on doing what we always do best — consume caffeine and sprint through knowledge.

Given our barbarian style of development cycles with WFH was a complete chaos. To settle down on to launching our platform and preparing the base for gaining traction and leads we had to have a really good planning worked out. We had to implement our theoretical knowledge of agile planning into practical effort to ease things out and understand our limitations.

I understand what we consider an achievement would be a status quo in established firms or startups with experienced founders who establish a well oiled / funded systems in place. Given I am more of a engineer the solution kind person me and MachDatum stood at the foothills with a huge climb ahead with respect to branding, marketing, sales — and whatever we have not even figured out yet.

Stay tuned to know how we go about this climb and also will be sharing the tools and methods we used for new startups to derive from.

Originally published at https://hemanand.com.