Nerve Endings Firing Away

When DesiPundit became popular, some suggested I try to create a business plan around it and treat it like a startup. Some blogger friends even offered to pitch in with capital. But the fact that I was still in grad school finishing up that elusive PhD and also, there was no solid business plan around the concept that relied exclusively on investment of extensive human hours (still isn’t). But one of my primary concerns was my lack of programming skills and I couldn’t really do what I envisioned with the limited time I had. I had to always scrounge around the net for code fixes and given my limited knowledge or rather lack of any programming language, I could never get exactly what I wanted. Hence I had to either rely on free advice or tips from geek bloggers or had to pay coders/designers for small fixes. The problem with free advice is that you cannot demand instantaneous fixes. Within that context, it was extremely enlightening to read this post by Spencer Fry on what non-programmers can do in a startup:

Providing excellent customer service singlehandedly transformed Carbonmade from a side project into a profitable company. I can confidently say that, as pro-active customer response is the most significant “update” to our product we’ve released to date.

Of course, this assumes that you have trustworthy partners who are expert programmers and can handle that aspect of the job well. However, the real and most significant stumbling factor to any entrepreneurial venture is the degree of risk averseness which in turn is affected by several inherent and environmental factors. More on that later.