Also about changing the plan, the plan change can happen with anyone. Anyone can change their plans anytime, be it a startup or enterprise.. I have seen huge companies changing the plans half way because the earlier plan did not work.. Same applies to the technology..

I have met few startup guys, talked to them about their plans… most of them eye for VC funding and selling it off.. I am talking about very well experienced guys too here..

Regards,
Deep

The good thing about startups is that they *can* change their plans as and when they want. Make use of or change technology on whenever they *feel* the need.

Though i must say i wasnt really satisfied with the products at headstart. but hey i liked Vericar.

I clearly wanted to see if we had good prospects to take our business service out and make it a success among people. Obviously our end plan was to make money/profits for time and work we have invested. On the other side we weren’t too interested in getting funding or being acquired by other biggies and our main interest wasn’t making quick money but a service that we were passionate bout and a service that could be useful to people which could infact make us money!

I was working full time and decent tech/web knowledge and my friend just completed his MBA and had proper knowledge of Business and niche we wanted to work on as he had been working on the scene for a while now.

We spoke about possible investment that’s to be made, the action of business, the progress and time until when we can start money coming in. It wasn’t soon from what we saw but again we were sure we can do it perfect if things were planned properly.

Again, we never jumped in to being yet another start-up but carefully analyze the start-up scene in India, the competitions our niche might face (present and future) and chat with few people in start-up scene who could provide us valuable insights and risks. I follow Pluggd.in – very active blog on Indian Start-ups and the site also has a Start-up Directory where you can see 100’s of links to start-up sites.

I spent my time visiting most of them and you wouldn’t believe what feedback I had after checking the site and services they had to offer. 5% of sites were down or not updated or never cared after… 25% to 30% had worst UI and called themselves a successful start-up and rest had their service running which mostly were based on already successful international websites, well in other words a clone of those services.

What surprised me more was.. I could find hardly 5 to 10 sites that had clear goal both in terms of business and end user experience (includes some of the huge ecommerce sites run by big brands). Like you had pointed, most start-ups currently want to make money while VC’s shine. I am not against these start-ups but very few had proper goal and rest would either be working on international clients missing a great opportunity in local market.

The other factor was obviously the market itself, the internet is huge in India but I still question the ability to market your service to individuals which can make you profits. The Internet Industry (ecommerce, Mobile Commerce & Start-up) is huge and has amazing potential, only a few realize it in terms of clear business plans to make the cash flowing in their registers.

Thanks for your feedback from the event, was interesting to read and so were the comments that followed it.

Cheers

Why will the Plan A not work? IMO, that means we have not done our homework well. Didn’t you analyzed the power of your Plan A beforehand? When I say “Know the way (and ofcourse POTENTIAL)” I echo yours and Amits views of doing proper planning alongside the knowledge. Each pros and cons should analyzed before moving forward with any idea. But move forward only when you are sure to achieve what you decided. It should not be that if this doesn’t works out I have a different plan B ready.

It should be like, if my first effort doesn’t works out to achieve my Goal, I’ll make more efforts (in different ways) to achieve the same goal.

I may be misinterpreting you here by assuming that by Plan – B, you mean to say “Doing Something Else”. But if, by Plan B, you mean to say – adopt or change/modify your policies, to achieve the same SINGLE Goal you decided previously, I concur to it.

If you don’t do the planning from the start, you get held up in the middle thinking what to do next.. and if we think in the situation where we are stuck.. the things do not work as expected..

I echo the views Amit just posted above..