I get about 10 emails or LinkedIn messages a day from entrepreneurs and potential entrepreneurs who are seeking help. About 2 of them will be referrals, but most are prospecting cold, either having read somewhere that I am an investor or looking at my profile on LinkedIn and hoping to connect.

I tend to read most (not all) messages) and am still not sure on which ones I do read and which ones I am unable to. I know that the ones I get referred to from known or trusted connections will get a response from me, but a good % of those that are cold also get a response.

Over time I started to notice when I do respond – the easy no is the fastest response, the easy action gets a response as well. The ones that require me to do a lot of thinking, work to connect, look up another piece of information or a lot of cut and paste get ignored.

I have an entrepreneur who is very tactical and is a friend who only reached out to me when he need to connect with one of my contacts. Initially I would do it since I’d want to help, but over time it has waned – it has become a chore to connect him to my connections – not because I dont want to, but because it involves my going to two different email boxes (Outlook for work, vs. Gmail for personal) which involves more than 30 seconds and I lose interest.

Over time I have figured out the things that will get you a response (quick yes or no) and those that will get you a favorable response (mostly this means the potential target is willing to give you time – for a meeting, for a call, for advice, etc.).

When the bar for the response is high, and especially when I dont know the person, expect a quick “no” response. For e.g. even if you are referred to me and your first request is for either an investment or an mentor opportunity, 99% of the time I would say no. That seems strange given that I might miss a “great” opportunity, but I am okay with that. Lack of time forces me to miss great opportunities, and I have found that my own sourced opportunities to invest generate a bigger return (so far) than the ones referred to me.

There is no shortage of warm introductions that most of us get from others, so the bar is now getting even higher on what requires a response.

A quick yes response is usually to a specific question that I may have written about before, which requires me to refer the person to a blog post.

A no response is when the person is not clear about what they want. Unfortunately I get 40% of emails of this type.

Do you want to have me invest? Do you want me to refer you to someone else? Do you want an introduction to an investor? Would you like to apply to the accelerator in India and need my referral? Or do you want me to mentor you? Or would you like feedback on you product?

When it is not clear after reading 3 sentences what your ask of me is, I will likely not respond at all.

“I’d like 30 min of your time to tell you about my new idea” is hard to justify time for. When I know 2 sentences will explain your product or idea, why would I be willing to spare 30 min? If you cannot explain it in a short sentence or two, then there’s more refinement needed on your part, which means there’s more work to be done.

I like napkin stage companies, but clarity of problem is what I expect at napkin stage.

Over the last 4 months, I have been blogging every day to understand the discipline of writing and work myself into thinking and learning about new mediums of communication. I published a post on What’s working in B2B blogs and what’s not working a few weeks ago to capture my experiences.

One of the things that’s clear to me is that the number of people reading text-based blog posts is dropping and video is growing in popularity worldwide.

Combined with Mobile usage growth, the trends are pointing to a huge number of people watching short form video on the go.

Particular to the US, an increasing number of people are listening to podcasts during the commute or heading to the gym.

Noticing these trends, I reached out to Lakshmi Rebecca and Ravi Gururaj, two of my good friends from India, who are celebrities in the Indian startup ecosystem. I wanted to do a podcast every week on the Indian startup ecosystem.

The audience for this podcast was largely folks in the US (investors, entrepreneurs) who were keen to learn about the Indian startup scene. We also noticed a lot of people from India (entrepreneurs in particular) would be interested in listening to this podcast.

Lakshmi took the lead (as expected, since is the most creative and a media personality in her own right) and gave us detailed instructions on what we should prepare.

There were 3 steps we followed:

First was the preparation. We decided on the format (3 sections of 10 minutes each), time for each section and the topical items that mattered.

Since I was in the US, Ravi at his home in Bangalore, and Lakshmi at her studio and home office, we felt the best way to execute this was using Skype. After 3 false starts, poor recording quality and endless frustration with Internet connection speeds, we gave up.

Lakshmi then did some research to figure out that “double ender” format was the best way for each of us to record our podcasts on each end and then combine and produce it together later.

We also needed a logo and a name. Descriptive name won, although we were tempted to go with a more generic name like the Views podcast, we decided that we’d start by naming it “what it was” – a podcast about the Indian Startup ecosystem. The “Chat” was to indicate the informal nature of our riffing. So, India Startup Chat was born.

Lakshmi also put our logo together. We needed a 1400px X 1400 px sized logo for iTunes, BTW.

The next step was to do the actual recording. After a start with our own microphones on our machines, we found that  we needed a professional quality mic, since there was too much static white noise when we recorded.

I got a Blue Snowball Ice USB mic, which I have been pretty happy with, Lakshmi has a more professional setup.

Each of us also downloaded Audactity for recording.

We then got on a conference call ( so we could each listen to one another), and recorded at the same time on our own machines.

The final step was to upload our individual recording files to Google drive and Lakshmi then went to the Production studio to mix the audio tracks together. She mentioned it took her a few hours, but will be less as we get more familiar with the setup.

I then setup a SoundCloud account and posted the images and file to the site.

Please do give us a listen and let us know what you think on Facebook!

As a non-developer founder at your technology startup, there’s one thing you can do more than anything else.

A plan to acquire, nurture and grow users (customers) with as little no money.

Sometimes, though you just need to develop a prototype or mockup, which you can show to potential customers, and drawing it on your mind or writing it with words wont suffice.

In the 5 steps to building your own SaaS application, I outlined the list of things you need to do before you start the coding. After you have developed the day in the life audit, you should be able to come up with the objective of your app and the pain point it solves.

The next part is to take that pain point and translate it into screens and flows.

Any “app” screen comprises of 2 of the most basic and important elements – information and actions.

What the user sees is “information”.

What the user can do is “action”.

There are other elements as well such as navigation, input elements, errors etc. but for now we will ignore them.

Once you have the idea that your user to see something and do something, then regardless of # of screens, you just have to keep outlining the see and do in an iterative fashion.

After an user clicks on your mobile app or comes to your website, then they will see the splash screen and then “setup an account” for example.

So the information is your splash screen logo and the login is the action.

Then based on the action you have to show the next screen and next set of actions.

You have to keep iterating the see and do until you reach the list of top 3 things your user wants from the application.

Thought I should share this presentation about the state of financing and growth at early stage startups, Q2 2015 from Mattermark.

I have not done the analysis yet, but worth a review before I dig into the data.

One thing stood out.

There were more non venture backed IPO’s than those that were funded by investors. Food for thought.

There are many assumptions we make about the product or the customer problem, which makes us develop solutions that may be really more complicated than required.

A friend and fellow entrepreneur I met on Friday was showing me a prototype (HML mock up with transitions, with some simple functions implemented) of this SaaS application. He had used a developer on hire at UpWork to develop the initial version. After speaking to and confirming the mockup (wireframes) with 10 different users he was off to develop and deliver the MVP. Overall he had spent about $8000 in design and development and had taken about 13 weeks to develop the MVP. Most of the time was spent back and forth with the design team for the HTML / CSS and the development team for confirming features and transitions.

Of the 13 weeks, his development team spent 2 weeks just implementing a sign up process, a user cancellation process, a payment process, a refund process, a login process, a password retrieval process, etc. Which he did not realize was the tax of developing a SaaS solution. Instead he took the 5 step approach to building a SaaS application and followed it religiously.

The critical mistake during customer development that most entrepreneurs make is to lead with the solution or product instead of spending time learning about the current solutions.

When he was showing it to potential customers, he found that most of them liked the product and said they’d use it and pay for it, if they could find value in 2-3 weeks. He was pretty happy given that most users were ready to pay for the product, which he did believe would solve a critical problem for them.

After developing the MVP and letting his users know about the product, he followed up by asking them to start to use the application. The first two days were great, with lots of feedback and improvements that they gave him about the product.

Then for the next 3 days there was radio silence. Even after his prodding and cajoling, most users were not using the application.

Instead of talking to users face to face, he instead decided to spend time with them (3 hours each user), shadowing them to understand why they were not using the application.

Turns out most of the users needed his product, but either A) did not remember it existed or B) were used to using their workaround – largely using a combination of email and cut and paste into Slack.

The biggest barrier to his adoption and usage was their existing process (although inefficient) was something they were used to and so were able to “optimize” it to make it quick and “fast” for their own usage. So much that they felt that using his product (which I can assure you would be vastly superior) would slow them down.

He then pivoted his product (not idea) to implement the one feature they all wanted as a Chrome plugin. Which worked like a charm.

He then had to remove the top 3 features and undo all the user login and management, infrastructure code and other remaining features, just to support the user behavior for their existing process.

The big takeaway for him was that when you have a hammer, everything seems like a nail.

The biggest takeaway for his wife (who is his cofounder) was not over engineer the solution.

The big takeaway for me was the failed customer development process. With all our biases (which all of us have) – we always tend to lead with the solution (“let me show you a demo”), instead of understanding the problem better to focus on delivering the one feature that matters, without all the bells and whistles.

Image From:  http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2010/05/the-visual-guide-to-cognitive-biases/