Software startups blog

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:

Getting started
Ideation
Forms of Enterprises
Funding
Basic Accounting and Taxation
Import and Export Licensing
Trademark and Patenting
Rules for NRIs and Foreigners
Building a Business Plan
Marketing on a Shoestring
Website and Branding
Women Entrepreneurs
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.

Saturday, May 20, 2006

Software startups blog

Here's a nice blog for software startups - Onstartups, by Dharmesh Shah. I like this post on Usability vs. Buyability. Especially, because for our own software we've been guilty of violating almost all the points he lists out there:
1. Transparent Pricing: Our pricing is not available on the website. I think we can rectify this almost immediately. The reason we didn't put it up there was so that we would at least know the people who were interested in it, when they sent us pricing enquiries. But I think it is time we changed this.
2. Immediacy: We require the request to be sent to us via email, and then we email the code back. It would be really cool to have the software activate immediately.
3. Minimal and 4. Payment methods: We don't really make it easy for customers to pay us. Heck our site doesn't even interface directly with a payment gateway.

Sadly, since most of our revenues come from the consulting services, the product has been treated as an orphan child. I wish someone would come along and buy out the whole thing lock, stock and barrel!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...: Glad you like the OnStartups blog (I am the author).

One additional thought regarding your product: I think it would benefit you to at least describe your product (or link to your company) from the blog. This way, curious readers can determine what the product does.

For example, you won't be able to "sell the whole thing lock, stock and barrel" if nobody can find more information about the product itself.

Wish you the best with your company. Sounds like you're doing really well.; 5:59 AM
Kanwal K Mookhey said...: Thanks, Dharmesh! You're right about linking to my company or our product. But, I've generally wanted to keep the blog anonymous. That might change though, if the number of readers rise significantly, and I perceive a strong business benefit from linking back to the company website. :)

Essentially, it's a security assessment software, which audits Windows, Linux, MS SQL and Oracle systems. We've also built in support for Cisco routers and Cisco PIX firewalls.; 5:50 AM