About Me

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Mumbai, India
I run an IT Security consulting firm based out of India. We started off from scratch in 2001 when I was 21, and have offices in Mumbai, Bahrain, and UAE. The idea behind the blog is to share the stories of how we run the business, the deals we make, the deals that break, the heartburn, and the sheer joy.

The Ultimate Startup Guide

The Ultimate Startup Guide is an e-book that provides answers to all your questions related to starting and growing a business in India. Everything you wanted to know about entrepreneurship in India from ideation to registration to marketing to hiring. The book contains a large number of practical examples, anecdotes, interviews, and motivational material to help you get started, and to grow rapidly in a booming Indian economy. If you've got the idea, this book will help you through with the execution and realize your dreams. Here are some of the key questions you will find answered in this book:
  • When starting a business, what are the legal issues involved?
  • What form of incorporation is better suited to which type of business?
  • What tax issues are involved?
  • How do I start a business and what are the pitfalls?
  • How do I market my business in the absence of significant funding?
  • How do I get funded?
  • What are the basic accounting concepts I should be aware of?
  • What is a business plan and how should I build one?
The brief table of contents of the book is as follows:
  1. Getting started
  2. Ideation
  3. Forms of Enterprises
  4. Funding
  5. Basic Accounting and Taxation
  6. Import and Export Licensing
  7. Trademark and Patenting
  8. Rules for NRIs and Foreigners
  9. Building a Business Plan
  10. Marketing on a Shoestring
  11. Website and Branding
  12. Women Entrepreneurs
  13. Templates
To order the Ultimate Startup Guide - email me at kkmookhey@gmail.com.

Details of the book are:
Title: The Ultimate Startup Guide
Author: Kanwal Mookhey
Pages: 150
Additional: Companion CD contains numerous templates for building your business plan, calculating cashflow, preparing profit and loss, and balance sheets, preparing invoices, your resume and profile, marketing material, websites, contracts, and many other useful and motivational material.

Tuesday, April 25, 2006

Website!

Most entrepreneurs make the cardinal error of not getting a good website up and running. Having struggled through really amateurish versions of our website, it took us almost two years to come up with a professional looking website. Some helpful tips:
1. You don't need Flash: well not to begin with in any case. In fact, you don't need anything fancy at all. Some of the best websites are liked purely for their simple elegance.
2. Use existing templates: don't go looking around for neighbourhood developers to help you out. Well not at first. After a lot of mucking around, someone suggested using www.template-monster.com. We purchased our first template for 60 euros, and recently rehauled our website with a new template. The first time around, I took about a week struggling with the template, mangling it, adding content to it, until we had a much better looking website up and running. Then recently, we had one of our technical writers do the same to a much better looking template, and now the website looks even better.
3. Search engine optimization: this topic deserves a whole blog entry by itself if not an entire book. I can easily claim to have made hundreds of thousands of dollars simply because our website figures well in search engine results. No matter how much effort you put into doing this is less. The returns are mind-blowing.
4. Content: the content on your website must be really well thought-out and properly organized. Don't just have content about how great your services are, but also put things which people would find useful - articles, papers, helpful hints, tools, etc. If you can put samples of your work online then do so. Don't worry about people stealing ideas or content and competing with you. They'll find enough of that elsewhere on the Internet in any case.
5. Alive: your website must be alive. Regular visitors will quickly notice if it hasn't been updated in a very long while, and soon it starts looking dull and boring. This is more so if you have a News & Events page, which should be updated constantly. We used to put even the littlest piece of news on this page during the first few months, when we didn't really have much to say. It just showed that as a company, we were still alive and kicking.

8 comments:

Himanshu Sheth said...

Hey,
These are some of the things which many developers have forgotten..Good to see them here!!!

-Himanshu
(http://thoughtsprevail.blogspot.com)

Vaibhav Gupta said...

hello sir
i am Vaibhav gupta
its good to see the participation from all over world
but none of u guys are giving any tip to start own business
such as
what should be ur mind set up, what should be ur aproach etc.
can someboby through light on these areas

Kanwal K Mookhey said...

Vaibhav, looks like you haven't read the long list of blog posts out here that cover almost any topic that would interest a budding entrepreneur such as yourself. See the links provided at the top left under the heading "Starting your own business?"

Anonymous said...

Hi,

I came across this great blog while I was reading about Entrepreneurship.

I must say that this place is a great resource.

Also, I would like to inform your readers that I run a Web Design company based in Mumbai. And one of our special packages is the one for "Start-ups".

We understand the needs of the start-ups and provide economical yet professional web design, content development and other internet services.

If any of your readers is looking out for sensible web design options, do contact me at pareen (at) imarketingservices (dot) in

Anonymous said...

Good work man...Nice and genuine tips...keep it up!!

Nishant said...

do you still monitor the Blog
let me know cause i to started some business which i earlier used to do in freelance..

BHAVIN said...

how do I set up a .in or .com website... I've designed it... but how do I put it up and have it running?

Unknown said...

Hi,From the planning to implementation web designing includes every aspect of building a website and maintenance.Web Designing is one term that encompasses every aspect in Web Design Cochin inculcating a presence on the World Wide Web.Thanks...