As M & M
Innovators becomes 5 months old, I the CEO of the company will be sharing all we
have learnt so far. This is the
continuation of my previous blog post Turning your Dream into Reality: Roles of
a Tech Startup CEO (http://mnminnovators.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/turning-your-dream-into-reality-roles.html)
To start with,
to be honest I didn’t think it would be so difficult to run your own business
but the cofounder of the company and I seem to be doing fine. Following your
dream isn’t an easy thing to do as it involves a lot of risks but once you know
your goal the risks are worth taking. Likewise the journey of following our
dream hasn’t been easy as we have faced many problems so far.
In this blog we
will share what we have learnt so far, hoping it will help people who want to
start their own business.
Lesson 1:
Patience
I must say this has been the most
difficult thing for me but I am learning. Starting your startup isn’t like how
it happens in movies, its not like you develop an App and you become a
millionaire over night. You need to be patient with your ideas, your products
and your clients. Personally I hate to wait, I think I have the least amount of
patience for anything but when it comes to business you have to wait for
clients emails, calls, meetings and they can take weeks to get back to you, but
that doesn’t stop me from checking my email like 10 times a day just to see if
they have replied.
The key thing is you have to be patient
because your idea may seem amazing to you and your clients may love your work
but the legal processes like signing MOU’s take time and if you have clients
that are located in different countries the time difference makes it worse. We
have suffered with both, as one project had so many partners that it took like
4 months to actually get the MOU signed and another client of ours is in Dubai
so the time difference really made it difficult for us to have meetings with
them. But all is good that ends well; we are happily working with them and
continue to take up such challenges in future.
Lesson 2: Hire
the Right People
Since setting up a startup is hard work,
you need people who won’t be looking for shortcuts; unfortunately I am still
learning on how to hire the right people. We started with a team of 8 developers
and are now left with 6, the reason being I can’t compromise on work quality as
for me my company is my dream and with time you learn that not everyone is
sincere with their work. I know I am a workaholic but to make a startup
successful you need people who are willing to put in all the effort that is
required to make the product successful.
Secondly you need to be careful about the
employees who are putting in a lot of effort but can’t seem to deliver work on
time. Being a startup your key priority is to be efficient because you really
don’t have the luxury of wasting resources.
You need to have team of highly efficient and motivated people in order
to make your company successful.
Lesson 3: Supportive People
Yes, you need that one person in your
team that you can rely on when everything seems wrong. Thankfully I have two
such people my CTO and team lead. Whenever things don’t go as planned they are
right by my side with alternate solutions. You need people around you to
support you. Starting your own startup isn’t a joke and can be very stressful
even if everything is going according to plan, which is never the case with us.
In the support team, your family is the
key. I must say we are lucky enough to
have amazing parents who believe in our dreams and have helped us so much with
everything and for being so understanding as setting up a startup requires a
lot of time commitment. Without the support and prayers of our families I doubt
we would have made it so far.
I would like to conclude with a recent
achievement of ours, our program Eduvators has officially been granted funding
by the government and we hope to make our countries an educated state. For more
info regarding the program visit http://www.mnminnovators.com/#Eduvator
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