Sudeep D'Souza

I just went through process of getting a Freelance Permit and the visa to accompany that and I had to go through a few twists and turns as I learned about the process and accomplished getting my new visa. I did my freelance permit through Sajeev ( sajeev@fmaaudit.com  contact number +971 55 694 2016) at FMA Accounting & Auditing ( https://www.fmaaudit.com/ ) and they in turn used Al Baraka Typing Center to assist with the Immigration formalities. The whole process was done through RAKEZ ( https://rakez.com/en/ ) and almost all of the process was done online without the need to visit their office. It was smooth, logical and straightforward.  One of the limitations of the freelance permit is you cannot open a corporate bank account and you do not get any office space. If these 2 are not needed for those working from home in a gig economy this type of visa is perfect.  The total cost came to about AED 19,000 for a 2 year freelance permit + one visa for 2 years (including...

In an orchestra there are many individual great and very accomplished players of various instruments. Yet when they all play to the same composition together they bring out something special that they could never bring out when they play individually. And if they all play their own tune it never sounds great. Sounds more like noise. Its the same with any team or a startup, there are many accomplished members of the staff but unless they all play to the same composition they will not produce the music of success. And if they all play their own music it never sounds good and it feels like the team is pulling in different directions. That's where a composer plays a very crucial role, to write the music the way they envision it and then get everyone on the team to play to that composition. This needs to be fine tuned everyday so that the orchestra plays in tune and is able to adjust to the everyday changes that are bound to occur. Who is the composer in your team? Who writes...

Over the last few months I have seen a lot of business ideas that base their revenue generation through advertising. In my experience this is a very dangerous strategy for a startup. Let me narrate my experience about implementing this strategy on a website that Inforica had developed called mindqjobs.com . We launched this website in the last week of december 2012 with much fanfare with the assumption that we will get the traffic to monetize through advertising. The assumption was made on the fact that the website was to be used by the students of a software training institute Mindq Systems  which number in the 1000s every month. We started off by putting Adsense and the pennies started to flow in almost immediately. Thats right, all we got were pennies which added up to a few dollars every day, an amount barely enough to pay for hosting the site on a shared server. One of the reasons is because the traffic was from India and not the west, so you end up making very l...

Life can be challenging for an entrepreneur. The inherent risks of running the venture are high and thus each day presents their own challenges. The risks are there as the number of people that can do a job is limited, the money available on hand is limited, the number of customers you have is limited and vendors do not give you attention as you are small. Any one of these can change every day and you will notice that you have ups and downs in quick succession - just like you are going on a roller coaster. This can play with the mind of the entrepreneur in a very significant way. The important thing is to keep evaluating your position with respect to your employees, customers, suppliers and money flow as often as possible and take actions accordingly. There are days when it would seem impossible to manage all of this and you feel like throwing in the towel wondering if it is all worth it. It is at this time you have to go back to your vision and believe completely in your...

This is the certificate I got for successfully completing the Technology Entrepreneurship course on Venture Lab. The courses here are really good and I would advise all those that can do these courses to take them up.

Inforica in collaboration with Mindq Systems launced http://www.mindqjobs.com . Mindqjobs.com is a website that is going to cater to the needs of the student community. Here are 10 reasons why every graduating student that is preparing for a job or for higher studies has to join Mindqjobs.com . Browse the job board for up to date job information that is curated and posted.  Create a professional looking profile by using the Resume Builder. Once your profile is ready share it as a standalone URL to everyone and then track who has viewed the profile. Use the online material to prepare in various topics such as Quantitative, Logical, Programming languages and so on. Take tests in different topics and see how prepared you are in terms of speed of answering questions and also accuracy.  Connect with others through the discussion board and discuss common topics. Find solutions to common programming problems in different programming languages. Many technical interviews in...

Just read this very insightful quote by Oliver Emberton, Founder of Silktide - Most people spend their money to get the most utility - fun, food, whatever. Entrepreneurs spend their money to make the most money. This picture is worth a million words. As a consumer we spend money on things for personal gratification - things that give us pleasure, satisfaction, meeting a need, motivation, enlightenment, satiate our ego or whatever else that makes us feel better. They do not help us make more money unless the money is spent on buying an asset of value. An an entrepreneur one needs to spend money on creating assets that will help create more money. This goes back to an earlier post that I wrote on Building your brands and assets . It is these brands and assets that you can monetize and generate more money.  As an entrepreneur it is very important to think this way. Its important to take stock of the assets you have and evaluate if these assets are being monetized properly and at ...

How do you select a good idea that can make money and the picture above illustrates very nicely what such an idea can be. Ideas are plenty and if you put your mind to it you will come up with so many ideas that it becomes overwhelming after a bit. But which of these ideas can be converted into a company that can make money? We all end up doing what we do well and what we can be paid to do - because that is the easiest thing to do. We know how to do the work and we get paid for it so the rewards are instantaneous. But can we do this day in and day out for the rest of our lives - the answer is no because its not what we want to do. The passion will be lacking. When there is no passion there is no yearning to be the best or to give quality or to go to all lengths to ensure that the customer is delighted. When this does not happen you will start to lose customers and the business will not sustain. It is important to focus on ideas that you want to work on and are excited to work on a...

Here are my 15 reasons why every person who wants to be an entrepreneur has to attend startup weekend especially if they are planning to startup in the technology space.  Get to evaluate and try out your product idea in a risk free manner. If you have an idea and don't know if it will work you can come to the event and pitch it - if you get enough votes probably there is some credibility to your idea. Connect and network with developers and marketing and business professionals who can possibly work with you in the future. You can evaluate their skills over 54 hours in the toughest circumstances and find the right person who you can work with.  Get to meet mentors and spend 1 on 1 quality time with them when in real life trying to get even a few minutes of their time is very hard. They will help you fine tune your idea even further. Ability to brainstorm with experienced professionals and fine tune your idea to something that can be taken to market. Learn how to pitch an...

I went for a very interesting event today and its called Startup Funerals . I was surprised at the size of the audience that made it to the event and that stayed all through the event. The event had a very simple format of networking and a few speakers talking about their experiences. The event focused on startups that did not succeed, in other words they failed or they gave up. The idea of the event was to share the learning from these startups with the rest of the community.  The speakers were a couple of Hyderabad Angels who shared their experiences with the audience but the stand out speaker was K.Ramakrishna who gave a chronological history about his experiences through his entrepreneurial journey and he very openly explained about the reasons why the startups he tried out did not work out. There are not many who are very open like this about their failures. So its wonderful to see people starting to open up and explain what went wrong so that no one else makes the same m...

We finally managed to get the Global Startup Battle of Startup Weekend to Hyderabad in 2012. The Global Startup Battle is 138 Startup Weekends happening across the world on two consecutive weekends where the winner from each of the startup weekends gets to upload a video which is open to a global voting. The top 15 teams in the voting get into a semifinal and finally the winner gets a trip to Rio and the Google office in the US along with a lot of other goodies. Since we were time constrained in organizing the event we had less than a month to plan for it and also it happened to be right in the middle of the holiday season and exam season in Hyderabad tickets were hard to sell. We finally managed to sell about 60 tickets with a lot of enthusiastic and excited participants making it down to the Progress office at Madhapur on Friday evening. The event started off with the surprise visit of the Hyderabad Angels who had an open Q and A session with the participants. After that we had ...

Right from the beginning it is important for every startup to think about how they are going to build up the brands and the assets of the organization. If the organization starts up doing software products then this is a lot easier, but if the organization starts up by doing software services then this might seem very hard but it is important that a framework is put in place to capture and grow every asset the company is building over time. People come and go in an organization the only thing constant are the brands and the assets the company builds over time. The organization even if it is in the software services space should always think about how they are going to add to these assets because it is these assets that in the long run will build value for the organization. Building skills in the people working in the organization does not work in the long run, one cannot stop them from leaving the organization and when they leave, the knowledge that they gained which is the asset t...

We have been hiring and time and time again I have come to realize that it is a lot easier to hire smart bright freshers and train them rather than hiring experienced developers. The problem with hiring freshers from databases such as Naukri and Monster is that there are a lot of profiles there that are put up by consultants who fill up the profile with fake projects and experience and it wastes a lot of your time filtering this out. What are the advantages of hiring a fresher 1. They come with no preconceived thoughts of what they want to do. They have an open mind and are willing to take up any kind of tasks. 2. They are open to listening and adopting to the company culture. They fit into the way the company works and functions a lot easier and faster. 3. They enjoy and appreciate everything that is given to them. There are no comparisons made. 4. They stay much longer in the organization and they are much more loyal. 5. They are easier to hire as all you need to judge their ...

The last one year has been a very exciting year for me in terms of learning and growing. In September 2011 I signed up as a participant for Startup Weekend the first time it was conducted in Hyderabad and since then I have volunteered at Startup Weekend events in Mumbai, Bangalore and Delhi and have become an organizer at Startup Weekend Hyderabad and we are about to conduct the third event in the city which is going to be part of the Global Startup Battle. What is it about Startup Weekend?  It all starts off with the event itself - the event is in a format that facilitates one to learn in multiple levels. One learns from the speakers, getting inspired by them from what they have achieved and then from the mentors who guide and advice the participants until their ideas start to make good business sense and finally the participants who come from very diverse backgrounds with whom relationships form that carry on well past the event. The event itself is very unstructured with a...

Many of us are mostly developers for most of our careers and then move into project delivery roles. But very rarely do we have the opportunity to come up with a product idea, build it, market it, sell it and make money. But as an entrepreneur that is what one needs to do and if you can't define products and services and make money consistently it becomes impossible to sustain.  How do we come up with a product or service that a customer is willing to use and pay for it? The key I feel is to have a very clearly defined product or service in "bite sized" portions that are easily consumable by the end customer and provide a satisfaction to the customer that he does not think twice to pay for it and is willing to talk to his friends and family about it. This product or service should be given to the customer in bite sized portions so that he can easily understand and value. It is kind of like a restaurant - I have found that restaurants that have a very simple menu, the ...

I went back to Delhi after almost 6 years for Startup Weekend Mobile Delhi and it was really a wonderful experience. Delhi as a city has changed quite a bit for the better - for starters I am super impressed with the metro, it is very convenient, nominally priced and well connected. It was very easy to go around the city on the metro. The broad roads and the flyovers around the city was a very welcome change from Bangalore and Hyderabad where there are so many traffic bottle necks. The event by itself was very exciting in Delhi. There is a stark contrast between the same event in Hyderabad and Bangalore and some of those differences are We had only one round of pitches for ideas in Delhi and got close to 70 ideas. In Hyderabad and Bangalore we got through at least 3 rounds of pitches to get the same number of ideas. The participants in all the 3 cities was just about the same. The number of actual demoable products presented on the 3rd day was a lot more with almost every team ...

From winner at the last Startup Weekend at Hyderabad , to volunteer at Startup Weekend at Mumbai to Organizer at Startup Weekend at Hyderabad in the second edition - I have in the sense been through the process of moving from the front to the back of Startup Weekend over the last 1 year and what an amazing journey it has been. The experience as a participant is of complete focus on achieving the goal of building something over the weekend, molded into shape by talking to the mentors and having it validated through market surveys and interviews. As a volunteer there is so much to learn in organizing an event and understanding all the nuts and bolts that go into putting together this weekend of learning an fun. Being an organizer makes it all so worthwhile to have so many different individuals come together over a weekend and build bonds that last a lifetime and probably even create products that may go on to become the next big company. The quality of the learning through action over ...

Startup Weekend Hyderabad is back - bigger and better this time at the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad from the 13-15 of July. For those that are not familiar with Startup Weekend - read my post when I attended the last event as a participant. Watch this video preview of what happened in the last event Why attend Startup Weekend?  Startup Weekend is an event where ideas that have been nagging you for a long long time can be tried out and evaluated. Come to the event pitch your idea, if you get enough votes for it - the idea is immediately validated. For people who have a clear idea on what they want to do but dont have the team to execute it - Startup Weekend is the perfect place to seed this team. You get to work with your team for a full 54 hours in a very exciting and focused manner - giving you a great insight into your future team. The event is the perfect place to help fine tune the idea with many experts who have started and exited many startups...

The saturday before last, I was invited to give a small informal talk at Startup Saturday (SS). SS is organized by the Headstart Network Foundation - a non-profit organization focused on creation of a startup ecosystem in India. The following video gives a clear idea about what Startup Saturday is all about. This meeting was held at LaMakaan and there was a very interesting mix of attendees. There were a few students but a lot of attendees were from either those interested in starting up or those having just started up. There were also a couple of reporters of startup related websites. There were some members from angel investor organizations or incubation centers like the IIIT Incubation Center. The theme of the session was registration, compliance & finance for early stage startups. Every month there is a theme and experts are invited to talk about that theme. It started off with each of the attendees giving a short introduction and then there were a couple of sess...