<div><em>Before proving it to your customers you have to prove the value of your product to your employees, partners and vendors, writes <strong>Rahul Joshi</strong></em></div><div> </div><div>After working in a corporate job for close to 12 years I decided to chase the entrepreneur dream hoping to build on the ideas that I and my partners had in mind. It’s been around four years since then and I have been part of a few ventures spread across multiple domains. </div><div> </div><div>To briefly sum it up, it is by no means a walk in the park running your own business. You would be hard pressed to find an entrepreneur who says it was easy. For first timers who get into it after being in a job the very first thing that you realize is that there is no such thing as a regular monthly paycheck. However you do worry about ensuring your employees get theirs. A specific role and set of responsibilities become thing of the past. Meeting a customer to try and close a deal, help manage the operations at the office and sit with a developer to discuss a technical issue, all in a single work day is a norm. Finding time on the specific thing you love doing – be it coding, designing, strategizing, marketing or anything else, does not come easily. The pressure of shipping the product or completing the project is driven by how much it costs irrespective of whether you are self-funded or backed by investors. If you cannot afford the tools and resources for the technology you want to build on, one has to look for alternatives while ensuring it still comes out as a viable product. It’s a constant endeavor to maintain a balance between the three key pillars of your business, people, product and process.</div><div> </div><div>At the end of the day if you are not able to sell whatever it is you are producing and make up a case as to why they should choose you, one has reached a dead end. As a founder you have to believe in the potential of your product. Before proving it to your customers you have to prove it to your employees, partners and vendors. One of the things that make it tricky is dealing with external factors that are beyond your control. As they say timing is the most important factor that decides the success of your business. The need for your product can be market driven or introduced that you believe helps solve a problem. Although willingness to adapt your product and the availability of the supporting technology required for your product to work should be at its peak.</div><div> </div><div>Alternatively one also falls into a trap of assumptions. We came up with a mobile based service few years ago targeted for a specific group of professionals. It was obvious in our mind that the service would make it easier for them to get to the information they need. Turns out for a set of them the existing round about approach was not a big deal while for others they were not comfortable accessing this information in a digital form as they were used to the paper format. In this case the need was for us to identify and fill the trust deficit first before offering the technology based solution.</div><div> </div><div>Pricing your product be it software, a service or a retail item is another challenge that you have to deal with. I always thought how hard it could be? Determine how much it costs to build the product, add margin to it as your profit and you have the number. Just considering the cost part is an exercise in itself. Consider Fixed costs, recurring cost, indirect cost, travel and logistics, operations cost to start with a few. How much you value the customer’s business, potential to up sell, support and services desired by customer, volume involved, expected delivery timeline, resource availability on your end, available cash flow to invest up front are few of the other things to account for. Based on the domain you will </div><div>have more but not less. Then there is competition, current economic environment, and your ability to sustain and scale that further influence your pricing.</div><div> </div><div>However not all is gloomy. Had it not been for getting into starting on your own I may have not started my own blog, may have not spoken at a few gatherings, got to travel, get to learn entirely new domains and dare to write, however imperfect it may be. Of course nothing prevented me from doing all this in past jobs as well but now these opportunities came to be more obvious to take up. Sometimes your vision of what is possible becomes limited by what you are exposed to. These ventures forced me to learn aspects like branding or accounting which were way out of my league. I have a new found respect and understanding for disciplines that I had not thought about before and how significant they are in contributing towards the success of any business.</div><div> </div><div>I always envied the freedom entrepreneurs enjoyed with their time. Although you can choose your own work hours taking the time out though is hard to come by. There is a certain threshold the business has to cross to free yourselves from the everyday operation and maybe afford a vacation. Until that happens you may have to see your friends post pictures from their outings while you are hunkered down to ensure you meet the basic need of food and paying your kids school fees. But that’s what you signed up for in the first place, didn’t you?<br><br><em>The author, Rahul Joshi, is a start-up entrepreneur and founder of nectarfarm.com</em></div>
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