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The Panel discussion hosted by Aspire Systems on “Bootstrapping a Technology start-up” evoked a very good response from software startups across the globe and a few consultants/ecosystem partners as well. We had 3 eminent panelists participating (Prakash Narayan, co-founder and CTO of MiCello; Ted Finch, Owner and CEO of Chanimal and R S Ramkumar, Managing Director and founder of MangoDVM) and Bhoovarahan Thirumalai, Board member and co-founder of Aspire Systems, moderated the panel.

It was an interesting & lively session – we had four broad themes, around which each of the panelists shared their views.

Perfect Vs Quick and Dirty Product

The first theme was on the conundrum of getting a perfect product out Vs a quick and dirty product. One view was that if you’re an engineer, you want a perfect product but from a marketing perspective, you want to show something to your customers as soon as possible. As users are much more ready to give you feedback nowadays, you need to get your product to the market as soon as possible.

The importance of iterating early and iterating often was also stressed upon. Another good point brought up was the use of analytics – measuring how your customers are using your product, which part of your product they are using the most etc.

On the question of who is your first best customer – one of the panelists mentioned that if you are a startup, and if you have a customer, you should embrace that customer – whether it’s a marquee customer or someone (who may not be big) but believes in your product. The point was that when you do approach professional investors, they certainly want to know who believes in the product apart from you & it adds a lot of value to have a MoU with a company willing to use your product.

Another panelist was of the view that a customer who requests your product to be custom-built is your first best customer, as your product is paid for. While this product may not meet all the market needs, it could possibly meet 70% of the needs and can get you started.

Time, Budget and Scope

The question of where does one start when developing the product idea evoked different responses from each of the panelists. Prakash’s view was that it was a good thing to have some protection (read: patent) around your core idea and to use existing frameworks and tools to reduce the time-to-market. Making crucial decisions in terms of the trade-off between features and time/budget are also extremely important.

Read the full summary here or register to view the Recorded Version of the Panel Discussion

Entrepreneurs who bootstrap typically go through trying times. Yet, bootstrapping your software business – being frugal and resource-constrained – has its own advantages. It can help you focus and prioritize, and get your product validated by customers before you consider other funding options.

However, bootstrapping comes with its own set of challenges that need to be understood and addressed early in the business cycle. Come join a Panel of experts, including Vijay Anand (Serial entrepreneur, Founder of Proto.in and Incubation manager at RTBI), Ted Finch (Hi-tech marketing expert & Owner of Chanimal.com) and Prakash Narayanan (Co-founder and CTO of MiCello, a startup in the mobile content delivery space) for a discussion on what is takes to bootstrap. Some of the themes to be discussed include:

• The importance of getting a working product out quickly
• Are customer insights a part of the product development process?
• Identifying when you need to bring in professional investors
• Engaging with external consultants for business planning, market development and sales from an early stage

Bhoovarahan Thirumalai, co-founder and Board member of Aspire Systems, will be moderating the discussion.

Since it is a telephonic panel discussion, all you need to do is call in. To ask questions, you can login to the live online meeting, your questions will be taken up for discussion (time-permitting) during the event.

Date: September 30th, 2009; Time: 11 AM ET/8 AM PT/8.30 PM IST

Entrepreneurs bootstrapping or planning to bootstrap your software venture, do join us for a thought-provoking session!

Here are some excerpts of the interview:

In the recent past, you’ve built engineering teams for 2 startup SaaS companies – what do you look for when building these teams and what were the major challenges you’ve faced?

John: I have been very fortunate in my career to have worked with a lot of talented people. Early in my career I worked at Lotus Development on products like 1-2-3 and Lotus Notes and was able to learn a lot about how great teams are put together and, equally important, how energy, excitement, and motivation is maintained while working on projects.

Putting together a great team in any company starts with having a clear understanding of your goals, looking out from 3 – 24 months. From this understanding you build an understanding of your needs, enough to recognize the skills required. From an individual perspective, the keys are character and skills. The key attributes that I look for include:

• An expert understanding of the skills required for the job. If I need a C# developer with 5 years of experience and knowledge of MVC I expect to hire people with those skills.
• I look for past examples of flexibility in their job roles. In startups you will be challenged to fill many roles, not just the one you were originally hired for. I love these challenges; you learn a lot and become a much more rounded individual. However, not everyone thrives under these conditions.
• I look for ethics and honesty. I want to work with people who can be honest about their failures, their shortcomings. When I ask people if they agree with a course of action I expect honesty. I will never know all the answers and I want people who are unafraid to speak up for the betterment of the team.

The most difficult thing in a startup environment is to bring enough attention to team and personnel development. I preach the importance of these things, I believe in these things, and I do better than many people I know. However, I find it very difficult to meet my own personal standards on this front. The challenges are varied, ranging from lack of money for training, lack of time for focusing on individual goals. At the end of the day this is an area where I know I want to focus more energy.

Is software usability a true differentiator when it comes to enterprise products?

John: Yes, and no. Many enterprise products are more difficult to use than they should be. Businesses will often have usability as a single item on a long checklist of features, and will sacrifice it over some other critical features. As some Enterprise products are commoditized, however, you see a stronger emphasis on usability arising, as it becomes more important when product pricing brace to the bottom.

From a software engineering perspective, what are the key things you would focus on to build highly scalable software?

John: As with everything else you need to understand the corporate goals and expected growth patterns for your software. While there are no one-size-fits-all rule that I would provide I would always urge focusing on database scalability first. It’s easier to scale web servers than database servers. From a performance perspective, however, I often see the biggest performance bottlenecks arising client-side with an over-use, or incorrect use, of AJAX capabilities. It is easy to bring the browser to a crawl if you are not diligent in your coding and testing efforts.

Read the full interview