PuneTech

Nashik based StartupForStartups (SFS) is marketing itself as a “facility to help early stage companies with limited resources to build first cut of the product (V0.5/V1.0)”. Founder Sushrut Bidwai is a regular fixture at Pune startup events, and is trying to convince Pune-based startups to outsource work to his programmers in Nashik, promising that it will be cheaper than doing it themselves. PuneTech interviewed Sushrut to get a first-hand take on SFS’ value proposition.

Can you give an overview of StartupForStartups?
Many times people have good ideas, but dont have guts OR are shouldering family responsibilities, which does not allow them to pursue these ideas further. In some cases none of the founding team members are from tech background, so even getting a good CTO is difficult for them (salary wise as well skill wise) . StartupForStartups (SFS for short) is meant for such teams. Its better to have something ready before taking the risk of quitting (high paying) jobs. It gives you more insight into product you are building as well domain you are targeting.
What SFS does is, it provides you resources required to build that beta version which you will show to investors (if its a big product) or will launch to limited audience and see how market reacts to it. After having this beta ready and some reactions from market or investors it becomes easier to take the risk and pursue it further full time.

Why are you doing this in Nashik? I would have thought that being in Pune or Bangalore (near all the startups, who are your customers) would make more sense for you?
Problems with Pune and Banglore are operational costs and resource costs. Also Nasik will have lower attrition rates and keeping people happy is easier. With technologies pushing the boundaries, we have so many tools available which makes working in distributed teams far easier. We even can do pair programming with two people sitting 5000 miles away from each other using WebEx/dimdim/Skype. Also it provides lot of cost advantages to startups we are working with.

As a customer, one of the worries I would have with StartupForStartups, is the availability of quality talent in Nashik. How are you tackling this?
We have developed a unique training program called “Implementing Concepts” which all our engineers go through before joining any startup team. So even if a particular engineer has gone through it once for a particular project, he/she will go through it again using the technologies which are going to be used in new project. This kind of a very elaborate HelloWorld for a project. Also, my experience in working on tech products is 80% of work is trivial and 20% is core work which is complex. So even if a startup is working on a product which is complex, they can take help of our resource in rest of 80% work. Though this does not mean we do not have expertise to take up complex work, it just means we are flexible and are okay with working as part of larger team. Also this is not outsourcing model, it is collaboration model. So you know who is working on your product and what that persons skills are and you can choose from the pool available. Also, to keep high availability of quality talent we are in process of collaborating with colleges here in Nasik. In this we will take the training program to colleges and have students go through them while working on final year projects. Please note that we do not assign interns on the projects.

Considering that most of your customers are early-stage startups who are strapped for cash, how do you plan on charging them for your services?
Charging is transparent. We send details about salaries we are paying to engineers assgined assigned to work on a particular startup and plus typically 20% operational costs. Now if you consider Nasik and typical salaries engineers expect and are more than happy with are much lesser than in Pune/Banglore. We already have the infrastructure and are building team. We are planning to build a team of 12-15 people by Dec end.

Could you give us an idea of what kind of savings I can expect compared to outsourcing to a company in Pune? (Where are the savings coming from: lower salaries, or other factors too?)
Lower costs for resources.
Lower operational costs. Just to give you indicator of savings, an Entry level GWT/J2EE programmer will draw salaries in the range of 17-22K in Pune/Banglore same programmer if he/she is from Nasik will be more than content to work on a good startup team if given around 9-10K salary. Plus you have to keep him/her happy so there is no attrition. Spend money on infrastructure like office space/ furniture/ hardware/ software / electricity / lunch facilities and many non-tangible costs like FBTs/Mediclaim facilities etc etc. you save these costs by almost 70%.

What do you see as your key competencies?

• Experience of working in large scale product companies as well as early stage startups.
• Top management has excellent problems solving and product designing skills.
• Understand working on an Idea and processes involved in the same.
• We are young, enthu, full of energy and love working on good ideas. (This is probably the most important quality.)

In the context of StartupForStartups, I’ve heard you talk about having a startup ecosystem. Can you elaborate on that?
This eco system is for people who are still in jobs and want pursue ideas. Though part of it can be used by full time entrepreneurs.

• We are signing an MoU with a financial and legal service provider company having experienced in handling these services for startups.
• We are creating pool of consultants (Architects, Performance engineering, Marketing/Advertising, HR, Viral Video creators etc).
• We are collaborating with engineering colleges here in Nasik. We have designed an unique training program “Implementing Concepts” which is focused on training engineering students with latest technology and early stage product engineering.
• We are talking to people who have the expertise of providing mentoring to early stage companies even before product is built OR evolved. Though we are in early stages of discussions with these people, but hopefully it will happen.
• We are building a tool (looking to raise funds for this tool) which is designed around a process called Super-Agile, which I will be publishing shortly. This tool and process are targeted for early stage product development. The tool will make writing code almost a trivial thing and even non-tech background people after a little training can build the products first cut on their own.
• Network. Not all startup founders are well connected. It takes lot of time to connect with people who can provide you help in building the startup. We can help there by connecting you with people we know, so its some starting point.
• Knowledge-base. Startup entrepreneurs does not have time to go through lengthy tax stuff etc. Or does not have time to design their documents like Offer letters, seperation letters, NDAs. Over a period of time we will collect such documents and put them in an inventory. This inventory can be very valuable to startups.

Note that all the services mentioned above does not necessarily come with a price tag. Some are out of goodwill some are for money :-) . Our main problem is we are young, have the skillsets necessary to pursue an idea and make it to successful business. But we do not have the idea. So we want to work with people who do have it.

For those interested in meeting, Sushrut is in Pune today (25th September 2008) and is likely to attend the CSI Pune Seminar on Entrepreneurship. I know that there are a bunch of PuneTech readers who have an idea for a startup but haven’t made much progress yet because they haven’t been able to quit their job and take the plunge. If you are one of those, would you be willing to outsource some of this development to StartupForStartups or a similar company? Do you think this model will work? Let us know in the comments section below.

Related Links

• StartupForStartups website
• StartupForStartups: Now trade your equity for product development - from WATBlog
• Follow sushrutbidwai on twitter

Jason Goldberg is a serial entrepreneur, who founded and headed Jobster, and who is now on to his next startup, social|median, a social news website. In a long article on his blog, he talks about what lessons he learnt from his first startup, and what he is doing differently in social|median as a result. The whole article is very interesting, and I would say, a must read for budding entrepreneurs. However, most interesting to me is the fact that, although Jason is based in New York, his entire development team is in Pune, with True Sparrow Systems.

He talks about why he decided that development of social|median:

• Second [...] we decided to build on a tight budget. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not talking cheap as in 1 guy in a dorm room. I’m talking low budget as in constraining the company to <$40k/month of burn in the first 4 months and then only taking it beyond that to about $60k/month once we had shown some early initial traction. The notion here was that spending our cash is the same as spending our equity. The more we spend early on, the less the company will be worth in the long run.
• Maintaining a burn like that forced us to think outside the box when it came to staffing the company. To put a $40k/month burn in perspective, that would get you about 3 employees at most fully loaded with office space in New York (if you’re lucky). I remember interviewing a total rock star CTO-type in January in NYC and walking away thinking there went all my initial funding and that’s just for 1 guy. Instead, we have run the company out of my apartment in New York and from our development center in Pune, India. I’m the only U.S. based socialmedian employee (besides our awesome intern Scott who joined us for the summer from Syracuse and who has been a god-send). The rest of our team is based in Pune, India. We started with 6 fulltime socialmedian employees in Pune and have since grown the socialmedian development team to 11 fulltime employees in Pune.

Finding the right company to outsource to is another interesting story.

Jason first found out about True Sparrow Systems when he saw a facebook application they had developed. He felt that the application had been designed very well, by someone who had not just done a quick and dirty job to jump on the latest bandwagon (social networking! yay!), but instead someone who had spent time thinking about the application and its users. Based on this he decided to go with True Sparrow Systems.

However, this is not your usual outsourcing relationship. Jason has set-up things rather differently from most other companies:

A few notes about working with an offshore team. If you’re gonna do it, do it right. What I mean by that is that I’ve seen it done wrong so many times it’s sickening. Folks in the U.S. all too often have this mistaken belief that there are these inexpensive coders outside the U.S. who are just on call and ready to write code based on specs. That’s a recipe for disaster. In order for software to be developed well, it takes a team that is adept at planning and strategizing and problem solving together. It takes a team that feels like a team and who is passionate about the product they are creating. It takes a team who truly feels like they are building their product not someone else’s.

So, we decided to set up things differently at socialmedian. First, our decision to go offshore was certainly based on costs, but it was equally based on abilities and mutual respect. I had worked with the future socialmedian team in Pune before socialmedian on other projects and only chose to work with them on socialmedian because I was impressed with their thought process as much as their work product. We chose to work with them because they know how to solve problems and how to figure out how to respond to customer/user needs. And, they passed the most important test of all, an earnest early interest in the problem we are trying to solve at socialmedian and fantastic ideas on how to tackle the problem.

Second, I personally committed to travel to Pune, India nearly monthly for the first year of socialmedian (I’ve been there 6 times thus far in 2008 and am headed back in a couple of weeks). The logic here was that if the team was there, I, as the lead product manager, should be there too. As per our hunch, we learned early on that in-person time was critical for planning. As such, we have evolved into this regular cadence wherein for 1 week out of every month we plan together in person, and then for 3 weeks we are more tactical as our interactions are over skype. Sure, all that travel is tough (ask my spouse who hates me for it), but it has proven to be very effective for us at socialmedian.

Third, we have made our Indian team shareholders in socialmedian, so we are one company building one product. It’s an offshore situation, not an outsourcing relationship.

Of course, this model is not for everyone, but it has worked well for us thus far. Mostly because we have an awesome team joined together working on socialmedian and we’ve created an environment where it’s all about our users and the product, and the fact that we are thousands of miles away from each other is just a fact of life, not a problem. If I had to start over today I’d choose the same team 10 out of 10 times to work with.

A lot of this is enabled by the tools:

In case you were wondering, here’s the process and tools/services we use at socialmedian to mange our New York - India operations. As noted, I travel to Pune for at least 1 work-week out of every 5 work -weeks. We ship code 3x per week within 3-4 week development milestones. We use TRAC (open source bug tracking tool) to manage bugs and feature requests. We use basecamp to share files. We talk on Skype when I’m not in Pune pretty much 6x per week from 8am Eastern Time to around 11am.

Read the whole article for a whole lot of other (non-Pune related) advice. It is long, but worth the trouble, especially if you dream of having your own startup.

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• Call My Lawyer … in India

The Times of India is reporting that the increasing rentals in Pune could be a significant deterrent in growth of IT in Pune.

Sunil Patil, president (Pune region), UBICS, a software company of the UB group, believes that the rentals may spoil the show. “Rentals in Pune for software companies have gone up 300% in three years. We are being offered space at Rs 65 per sq ft, which at $1.50 is the rate in Manhattan,” he said.

This comes on top of the disappearing cost advantage, especially in product companies. Salaries have been going up, and what used to be a 1 :: 6 or at least 1 :: 4 cost advantage is fast evaporating, especially at the higher levels. For people with 7-8 years of experience or more, I’ve heard numbers like 1 :: 1.5, and in some cases, I’ve heard that execs in India actually need to be paid more than the equivalent US salary. Factor in the increasing cost of real estate, travel, and other overheads associated with having India operations, and the economics of the situation start looking troubling.

When riya.com (now like.com) shut down their Bangalore operations, CEO Munjal Shah wrote a detailed post on why they couldn’t afford India. It is very instructive reading. Larger companies have an internal headcount ratio - if you have budget to fund a 100 person team in the US, how many people can you fund in India. This number used to be 300 earlier, and there’s at least one company that has updated its numbers to 100. Think about that. They end up with the same cost irrespective of whether the team is in the US or India - and this factors in the fact that junior programmers in India are much cheaper than those in the US.

If you are not careful, your job is going to Shanghai. Or Philippines.

Note: I am talking about product companies that are trying to do full-fledged product development out of India. In services (i.e. outsourcing) the ratios are better. But even there the situation is grim. Read Sramana Mitra’s “The Death of Outsourcing“, for example.