Y Combinator - How are the companies doing?

I found this spread sheet which solved my query to a good extent.

Download (XLS, 138.5KB)

You Can see the complete spreadsheet here.

Google Wave was supposed to be the one stop collaboration tool, but now that we know, it is still in its pre..pre..pre..(repeat 100 times) alpha phase, I am going to put up some tools which people might find useful, and yes the concentration will be on free products. (Remember, we donot have a million dollars to spend, we have to spend out of our pockets to build this).

• Skype (Communication): A fairly obvious choice, the international audience might think but believe me not every Indian startup is using it. Skype is just not to be used by the internet savvy companies, it is to be every damn startup  in India. You are a mechanical designing company, a web development firm, a media agency or whatever, i suppose it is fine to presume that that you will have your computers and a decent Internet Connection with you. Skype is not only to be used when you have finally got your first American client and you donot have the money to make ISD calls every other day. Use it for your team meetings, when you are working out of different locations, use it out of your Smartphonesin your Wifi area in your office. Use it also for the pep talk which you need to keep yourselves motivated when you are working out of your wifi garage. Believe me, Skype conference meetings are better for pep talks than realtime meetings; you donot have to look into the eyes of your best friend when your a trying to point a finger at his work.
• Team Viewer (Desktop Sharing): You may think, I am just talking about the Internet firms. But is it not true when you and your friend were working together on you design for a flowchart, or the next kickass car design or the next marketing presentation and were talking to each other on your 1 paisa per second STD call (which kept getting disconnected, i.e if you were not smart enough to use skype), you wished how good would it be if we could work together, talking for free and not need to email your work every now and then. Team viewer is exceptional, less than 2 M.B in size, free for personal usage, work on connection speeds of 256 kbps (I would however suggest you to go for a better Internet speed as you will have a simultaneous Skype call going on ), and works from Windows, OS X and Linux(Through Wine) and the desktop sharing happens just so seamlessly.
   
• Google Apps(Standard edition)(Enterprise Applications) : You are basically starting a company, some of you have not yet left their day jobs, and the one guy who went for an MBA amongst you has registered the company on his name.(Donot forget to register your company, it helps!!). The scene is all set, ain’t it , for the next Google to just come up. But, how can you mail people with email ID’s stating XXXXX@gmail.com. It doesn’t look professional enough. Just set up Google Apps, the standard edition gives out  10 email ID’s free (you email ID will now look like XXXXXX@yourstartuprocks.com), all you need is a registered domain hosted on the internet.(Hardly a 1000 INR = 20 USD).
• DeskAway or Unfuddle(Project Managment) : Lots of project planning happened when you had your all important discussion for the next 3 months (You did realize that you need to have these all important meetings at least once a week so that the team knows every member is contributing his bit). If you need to do time and project management for yourself,and you need proper milestones to be set up for your team, just go for Deskaway. It just does the job for you. The $10/month edition will work for a startup. However, if you donot want daily monitoring and you would rather love a code repository(and a bug tracking system) and weekly milestones, the $9/month version of Unfuddle rocks. These two tools just work for you.
• Dropbox(Folder sharing): Dropbox is a beauty. You just want something like this for free. You get the dropbox folder on your desktop once that you have installed it and all the problems you faced while uploading something to Yousendit are gone. Use dropbox as your folder sharing system on the Internet.(Mind you big companies who are trying to compete with you, and they can’t  because their recently awarded intranet fails much more than Dropbox.
• Social Media : You work 20 hours a day to make the next big thing, sometimes 24 hours because your dreams just don’t let you sleep. However, amidst all this you don’t forget to say hi (on facebook and twitter) to the chick who was your childhood crush who is dating this loser M.B.A who never had the guts to do anything kickass after his engineering or Bachelor’s. She also likes to talk about an old friend of hers (word of mouth publicity) who is making the  most brilliant 1000 Rs (20 USD) solar energy device(which is more useful than an iPad any day), which will help the poor children to study at night and their Mom’s to cook food using the same energy. Use this new age media power and donot hire anyone to do this for you(comes so naturally to you) because you deserve good word of mouth and you can get it from your friends.  Also keeping in touch with this chick may help you win her back someday.

This list cannot be complete for sure because there will many more such tools which can be extremely helpful for you to grow up as a startup. If you consider your team to be distributed in three different cities, then the total cost of having this mini intranet will be (Rs 1400*3(Good Internet)+(Free Skype) + Free (Team Viewer) + Rs 500 (for the Unfuddle or Deskaway account )= 4700 per month ~ 100 USD).  Please help me complete this list by telling me what other tools can be used by small sized distributed startup’s.

Update1: Some More tools suggested by my friends Amit and Rakesh after the post were GitHub, Google Wave in the right way , Basecamphq and Yammer.

• Find me on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.
• Find Microreviews on Facebook and Twitter.

Introduction

History: Formed by Kashyap Dalal and Navneet Rai in December 2007. Kashyap and Navneet are former batchmates from the 2002 IITB batch.

What do they do? – They get your designs and slogans printed on T-shirts and other merchandise like caps, mugs, posters etc. Inkfruit focuses primarily on T-shirts.

How do they do? – They get designs online from its users, and get them printed through vendors. The T-shirts are then sold online and through stores. The business is divided almost 50-50 between the online and offline channels. One quarter of the online business comes from overseas.

Who else does this? – There are a lot of companies which have been around for quite some time now, and have been doing pretty good business. A few to name are Myntra, Dilsebol, Pringoo, Xtees, etc.

How is Inkfruit different? – Inkfruit has the idea of being the democratic company which has all its designs created and voted by its users. Other companies do not have this level of customization. The older players allow you to customize only to the level of your name or some slogan being printed. Also, collection of Inkfruit designs was good as compared to others.

Revenue: With almost 5000 T-shirts being sold every month, and an average price of Rs. 220 per shirt, the net revenue comes to about Rs. 11,00,000 per month. Thats pretty good! They are planning to push up the sales to almost 15000 T-shirts by the end of FY 2009-10. They are also planning to foray into collared T-shirt printing.

Thumbs up for Inkfruit:

• Collection of designs is really good. The idea of being democratic has really clicked, and now Inkfruit probably has one of the best collection amongst all the players in this domain.
• Working equally hard on the offline front really highlights their deep understanding of the Indian market and mentality.
• T-shirt and printing quality is good.

Thumbs down for Inkfruit:

• I faced some login issues. Their login popup was not working properly on Google Chrome. Next thing, it does not allow me to login with my credentials even after I verified my login details from the email they sent.
• Femme collection was very small. Probably they are missing out on a large section of the customers.
• Total dependency on democratic designers. They might run out of good designs if the outsourced designers do not come up with good designs regularly. Microreviews recommends that they should hire some full time designers, given that they are looking to treble their sales in the next six months.

Overall Rating: 8/10

So What are problems with flash?

• It is far too difficult for a not so artistic guy like me to work on Flash.
• I realised Flash based web applications are not crawled by search engines and my site would not exactly be an adobe or google, backed for direct traffic for it.

So What did I do?

• I chucked the idea of learning flash.
• I had to live with CSS and JavaScript to create all the magic. Although they were never comparable to the flash applications.
• I had to wait for HTML 5 to be cooler and IE to render it correctly.!!  A distant dream I must say.

So What is the solution?

Actually I didnot have one at that point in time but having seen FluidHTML’s presentation at TechCrunch50, I guess times are changing. FluidHTML claims and seems to have come up with a markup for  Flash.

What does markup for flash mean?

With an HTML like structuring, FluidHTML allows web developers to create dynamic and rich media sites with relative ease. And there are no compatibility issues with major browsers. Also since it is markup, crawlers can read it and the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) problem seems to get resolved.

So How does FluidHTML do it?

They use an interpreter FHTML.SWF,– which reads the FluidHtml markup served on browser pages, and then renders the layout, effects, behaviours and instructions in the markup. Sounds cool.

What does it mean for the HTML guys?

Extend your knowledge and add some tags to the ones you know and build better web apps. A media player tag seems so very cool to me. Are we getting into the real WEB 2.0 or what? HTML guys need not unlearn stuff. Just that they learn more and create better.

Anything else that the HTML guys get?

A liquid layout engine with more flexibility than CSS. People need to figure this out.

Is it extendable?

Yes to a great extent. Core FluidHTML kernel cannot be extended by the developers, the effects and animations, buttons, sliders, style sheets, and layouts can be shared publicly (According to their website that is). Developers can extend FluidHTML to make their own modules. In development mode it is free with some marking done. When you go live, just buy an annual license. To read the intricacies of FluidHTML check out their about page.

Who does FluidHTML compete with?

Anybody’s guess. Microsoft and Adobe.

And Who comes out with it?

FHTML Inc. founded in March 2009. You can visit their website at fluidhtml.com. Follow them at Twitter. Email them at michael@fluidhtml.com.

Drop in to their headquarters at: 1050 Winter Street, Suite 1000, Waltham, MA, 02451, DNK.

CEO Michael Collete

Founder Jim Kremens

Do check their TechCrunch50 presentation here.

So Whats the verdict?

• Works for me.
• Flex, Silverlight and Flash, they all need to be compiled. Fhtml, like HTML, does not need to be compiled.
• A boon for the flash people who will have their content searchable now (if they switch to Fhtml that is, and that means business for FHTML Inc).
• FHTML inc is a stratup. How they are able to engage more developers is to be seen.They’re looking for $1 to $2 million in funding by October.
• The competitors are big and probably evil. Maybe  they are too big, may even sue me!!!
• Can Fhtml be light enough? Their own site wasnt really that light. Important factor that is. We even have a facebook lite now

Overall, best of luck from the microreviews team to the FHTML team. Well done guys.

“Entrepreneur is a magazine for India’s small businesses, start-ups, venture funds and financial instititutions. The magazine will offer an in-depth understanding of what an entrepreneur wants and needs : information, tools and resources to conquer their daily challenges in business.

Entrepreneur is targeted at entrepreneurs, (SMEs) and people wanting to venture out on their own.
Entrepreneur is a 30 year old brand in the US with 3 million readers. It also happens to be the largest selling business magazine from news-stands in the US. Besides the US – its also published in 6 other emerging markets – like Russia and Philippines.”

Source: Infomediaindia.com

Other magazines published by the Infomedia18 group includes Overdrive, CHIP, Better Photography, Cineblitz etc. Earlier this year the Forbes Magazine was launched in India in collaboration with the Network 18 group.

Yesterday I grabbed a copy of the Entrepreneur Magazine from landmark and I must say I was very satisfied. With so many new companies opening up every day in India, a magazine in the Start-up and entrepreneurial space was long overdue.

The maiden issue of the magazine has very interesting articles on small business, startups and interviews . The ‘How To…’ articles are also very insightful and talks about various business ideas like- ‘How to be a restaurateur’, ‘How to sue social media to advertise’ etc amongst others.

The magazine is a little pricey at Rs 75 though the subscription offers are quite reasonable.

Period: 1 Year | 12 Issues costs Rs 600

Period: 3 Year | 36 Issues costs Rs 1599