Have been busy in work resulting in a short downtime on my blog Today, I received an email from one of my blog readers who is connected with me on LinkedIn and just wanted to know about how I reached 500+ connections.I just thought it would be great to share some of my tips; which would also help me to look back and check whether I am using this great tool to the fullest !!!

Below are my Ten tips [starting with my so called own MANTRAS] which makes my LinkedIn usage effective and helpful.

My Own Mantras

1. Target relevant people:
Many of us who are part of startups would be a part of many mailing lists like OpenCoffeeClub, Startup Specialists etc. This would be the best place to build your network.What I do is “While reading the email of a person on the list, if I get a feeling that it would be useful[as well as relevant] to connect with that person , than I send the invitation” and I am sure that there are lot of smart people around on such lists….Figure them out and add them !!!

2. Be Specific and Personal:
Assuming you follow point(1), you feel that a person X would add value to your network and you would like to add him. What next “Send an invitation” [check the image below and the part in Red Color which mentions PERSONAL !!! ]

When you are meeting a person for the first time, it is very important to introduce and specify “WHY” his addition to your network and your addition to his network would be very much useful.Remember Permission Marketing by Seth Godin – “The privilege of marketing to people who are relevant to you“, the same principle applies here as well.

It takes 2-3 minutes to be specific but it is indeed helpful. An improved example invitation below:

3. Build a useful conversation and than get the work done :
In case you are connecting with a USEFUL but unknown person, make sure that once you are connected to him/her; you know more about the contact. Write a “Thanks” reply and try to know as much as you can about him/her.
Once you are well acquainted , speak up and let him/her know the NOT SO OBVIOUS reason for the invitation.

4. Group your contacts:
Once you have multiple number of contacts; it may seem difficult to remember WHO,WHY & WHERE of a particular contact.Hence, on a regular basis ; export your contact list into .xls/.csv/other format and align the contacts in proper categories like Friends, Colleagues, Unconferences, Startups etc. to make your search simpler and faster !!!

The Obvious Mantras

1. Be an Open Networker:
The start is always difficult and if you are a waiting for your first connection, than this should be the first step. Just include your email-id in the Last Name field in your Profile page eg. Himanshu Sheth(himanshu.sheth@gmail.com) . This would give an impression that you are open to connect with anyone [with an obvious filter on whether the invitation would be relevant or not].

2. Put relevant keywords:
The difference between “S/W” and “Software” is huge.If you are an engineer and someone searches for Software, profiles tagged with S/W would be filtered out….So, just like coming on Google Search is important, being in relevant LinkedIn searches is important to increase your network.

3. Attach personal photograph:
Imagine being at a conference where you might have many of your new & yet Unknown LinkedIn connections, so “How would they identify you? ” ……In such cases, personal photograph on your profile page would be very much helpful.This may also help you reconnect with your very old colleagues.

4. Use LinkedIn badge:
If you have a blog/website, do not forget to use your LinkedIn badge.Many times, the Blog name is not so obvious eg. ThoughtsPrevail is just a random name and does not convey that “Himanshu Sheth” writes that blog [Though smart people would always google for it ]

5. Recommend relevant people:
Always try to write Recommendations for people ; who you feel are worth to be recommended.Many people read the recommendations written for/by a person and a recommendation can really add value to the recommender’s profile [for his openness] and the recommended person[for the great work that (s)he might have done].This indirectly makes searching for Smart people on LinkedIn easier.

6. Ask and Answer relevant questions:
“Q&A section of LinkedIn” provides an excellent platform to gain & share knowledge, not to forget adds lot of Stars to your profile with the golden word – EXPERTISE.

If you have some more relevant inputs, do let me know and I would add them in the Reader Contribution section.

Reader Contribution:
Ramjee Ganti – Guy Kawasaki on Ten Ways to use Linkedin

Have been pretty busy off late and hence , not been able to blog much and in the process have been missing many interesting events happening in Bangalore and Chennai

Few days back, I came across this article in LiveMint, which focussed on an important discussion from the perspective of a startup – Hiring the RIGHT kind of employees for a startup.Needless to say that every employee in a startup should have that KILLER GENE to make HIS/HER startup successful.Very important to note the term HIS and HER in the previous statement, which indicates that these employees are very clear about their basics – “If they fail, the startup fails and if they succeed , the startup succeeds“.

But there are many issues in finding this perfect set of people for your startup and even if you get you MR/MISS RIGHT, it would be a much bigger challenge to retain them !!! This was the topic of discussion in the April edition of the Open Coffee Club, Chennai. Below are some of the excerpts from that meet.

[Thanks to Siddartha Govindraj for the minutes of the meet].

1.
The first step is Hiring good employees. Good here means that they should have the attitude to learn and grow with the company. Better having someone who wants to work with you and then train them , rather than get someone who may have better skills but who doesn’t have the attitude and would leave you, when given a better offer. Best is the right combination of attitude and the skills.

2.
Once you get your right set of people , the next big challenge is to Manage them.Freshers can’t be left alone because they need someone to guide them, so you need to continuously interact with them, help and guide them.This would help in boosting their confidence , so that they can take up more challenging roles in future and be a valuable asset to your startup.

3.
Experienced people can be left alone, but many of them who have worked in larger organizations may not have the attitude of working in a startup. So, there are two things which are possible in this case – either they get frustrated or they get accustomed in doing all the work by themselves.

4.
Generally, experienced people are good for high level strategy/marketing/advisory positions, and fresher/intermediates for development kind of work [but there has to be someone to nurture them & guide them). But if you get experienced people with the right attitude for startups, then thats great in any position

5.
You need to interact with everyone continuously, so that they know where they stand. In case someone is not performing, you need to bring this to their notice.This should not be done in a confrontational way, but rather you can mentor them ,so that they can perform better.But if there is no further improvement than you need to tell them that either they are not right for us or we are not right for them.

6.
Different people are good in different roles, so you need to keep an eye on mismatched roles. For example: Someone might be good at learning new stuff but may not be detail oriented, this kind of person might be good for research/prototype projects, while a detailed oriented person might be better for client production products. If they take up opposite roles, than it would be a complete disaster for your startup.

7.
Avoid a situation when you hire some people and then don't interact much with them.In this case there would be a series of confusions about their role, their expectations, your expectations; which may subsequently result in a drip in their performance.This would in turn be a cost to your company and there is no time for such confusions in a startup !!!

8.
At every moment of time, we should remember that the motivation level of the employees would always be different from the motivation level of the founders of the company hence, as discussed before[during the start of the article] always thrive the OUR attitude from the beginning.As long as your employees remain motivated and enjoy the work , they would stay and if they are not, you can be sure that they would join your competitor

9.
Sometimes whatever you do, your employees would leave you…in which case, you need to check your attitude, hiring strategy and other important aspects which may lead to such serious decisions. Always remember,”One person might be wrong in judging you, but if there are a series of people who follow their footsteps, than it is high time, you raise the ALERT signal and get your officials to discuss this issue“

10.
There are many proactive people in the crowd who would follow you and your startup from the day your startup was born.Always keep an eye on such people, since they can be future partners or employees in your company.You can always use the Stanford Shopping Center test to get your MR/MISS right in your company.

Today, we have a guest article by Nithya Dayal, Co-founder of an online music community named Muziboo. Muziboo is a great example of community building and how effective is Word of Mouth marketing[WOM] in business.

In this article, Nithya focuses on “Mantras of building an Online Community” , something which has been an integral part of the Web 2.0 space.

Web 2.0 [ Of the people, for the people and by the people]:
It is not fashionable anymore to say that Web 2.0 is not as much about technology, as it is about people. When this is an accepted truism to such a degree, it is worth spending some time to analyze the dynamics of such a model [from my experience with Muziboo]

Before you build a website [hence a service] on the assumption and wish that users will come forward to generate content, you need to understand what it takes to drive those users to contribute content.

Mantras of building an Online Community:
Keep in mind the following mantras , while trying to build an active community on­line:

Is your service unique?
During your whole thought process ­ while planning to start, build and maintain a new website­ , if ever this question sounded clichéd within yourself, you are sure to come up with a non-­starter for a service. Unless there is something unique in what you offer, how fair is it to expect people to spend their time in your platform to generate content, when either, they are already comfortable doing the same elsewhere (or) they do not see a new source of satisfaction in your service. This satisfaction as your uniqueness could be in any form for the user – expression, recognition, entertainment, social and business networking and so on and so forth.

Initiating a Culture and Driving the Culture
Once you have decided on what should differentiate your service from similar others, you as the owner should become one of the patrons and initiate that ‘culture’ among users, which will in ­turn give the desired uniqueness to the service. As the first few hundred users go a long way in giving a face and feel to your service, it is vital to have given due thought about your uniqueness at a very early stage of conception of the service. Also, one has to be around constantly, driving it in the positive direction. Majority of users need hand holding while you wait for them to acquire the taste of what you have to offer. This is the only way to bring in the kind of culture [that showcases the uniqueness] that you want to offer. Because if you leave it to the users to bring in uniqueness all by themselves or give them a good idea and not follow ­up with efforts to involve them in building the same, the only guaranteed result is the establishment of a culture characterized by stagnation and inertia among the users. Do not forget that this need for hand holding is not a reflection of the users intelligence – if you can come up with something too exciting that it needs no hand holding, then good for you – read Flickr blog to understand that Mr & Mrs Butterfield had to work hard to establish the uniqueness of Flickr, which is not just a photo sharing site but a thriving community.

Here it is important to note that this ‘uniqueness’ refers to a dynamic aspect of the site, which has the potential for something exciting or which has a proven record of enthusing users to contribute. It rarely or seldom refers to the uniqueness in technology that the site has adopted. And, more often than not, only while enjoying the ‘uniqueness’ will the users be spending the maximum chunk of their time when logged in – even if it is a little peripheral to the main service that you offer.

Unfortunately some websites after getting a whole lot funding, start operating on the premise that marketing the whole service will encourage people to register and generate content. It is not enough to ‘sell the website’, you have to ‘sell the uniqueness’ of the website after establishing one in the first place.

Post ­sign-up
User assimilation is a slow painstaking process. The new user should immediately be made comfortable with an interactive interface. With an interactive interface, one should make easy the process of a user getting acquainted with other members of the community.

Recognizing Users
Most online community members like recognition, [rightly so] either for the content contributed or for participation. Couple of ways to do that would be featured articles and featured users.

Empowering users ­ Democracy
Empowerment is a great form of recognition and by doing the needful on that count, as an owner, you manage to stay away from ruffling yourself with too many responsibilities. By empowerment, I refer to the minimal barriers that you put out for content acceptance. All generated content need not go through great levels of moderation or quality checks before being published. The motivation to contribute from the users end is highly dampened if they get spiked. Also if you shackle users with too many do’s and dont’s , you will have a lot of fire fighting to be done everyday as the service scales up. Democratize as much as possible. Let most things be decided on user votes and ratings.

Having a balance – So Much Democracy
In the nascent stages, many users come forward with their ideas – both functional and business. Some will always be more relevant than the others, the ‘others’ being the ones that do not align with your vision of the service. It is for the service owner to handle this embarrassment without stepping on toes. You do not want to paint yourself in a corner while asking for ideas, because when not implementing those bonafide suggestions, you are likely to come across ‘rude’ or ‘technically in­competent’ ­ both equally hurtful for your image.

Promoting Offline meets
Promoting local offline meets is also a way to create stronger bonds among the community members. Posting updates about such events on the site can enthuse users from other cities to initiate such activities.

It Ain’t Easy [because if it is, then it ain't fun]
Does this need elaboration??….Neah; remember the community is very intelligent and can help make/break your business.

I hope you also enjoyed reading the article, just as I did.Thanks Nithya for sharing your thoughts with us Muziboo has been quite instrumental in all the aspects as a startup and has been covered a number of times in the press, you can find the articles here, here and here.

Other Guest Articles on Thoughtsprevail:
Ten steps to improve your E-commerce business
Financial Management for a Startup Firm

In one of my Open Coffee Club meetup in Bangalore, I interacted with two young guys who knew one word well – ENTREPRENEURSHIP.They are Sumit Jain and Lalit Mangal, ex-Oracle guys and now Co-founders of a company named Max Heap Technologies

Below is a small Q&A that I had with Sumit Jain from Common Floor.The Q&A session is divided into 2 parts : Common Floor and Entrepreneurship.

Note : “I” in the conversation refers to Sumit Jain.

A. Both of us, Lalit and myself , are from IIT Roorkee and joined Oracle through the campus selection in 2006. We left in June last year. Yeah, in just 1 year. So both of us don’t have much experience to talk about. We were the part of Oracle Enterprise Manager team. Lalit holds a patent under his name. Lalit loves reading. I love dancing.

Q.How many apartments in Bangalore are currently using this service ?
A. More than 150 apartment complexes in Bangalore have signed up to use CommonFloor as their interaction platform. We expect the figure to go to 300 in a couple of month.

Q.How do you plan to take your service to other apartments in Bangalore ?
A. Now as we have reached the critical mass, we can expect the word of mouth publicity to actually work. The associations of various apartments are approaching us and we are approaching them to take CommonFloor in their apartment.

Q.CommonFloor is a niche social networking site, what is your take on Social Networking and it’s future?
A. I would rather like to call CommonFloor as the “local networking site”. With CommonFloor we are solving a bunch of needs; social interaction is just one of them. We intend to be the one stop destination for all kinds of problems an apartment residents face, making their lives simpler. We are leveraging the geographical proximity of our users and giving them enough avenues to know more about each other.

About Social networking, I believe that in Asian communities social networking is not going to work the way as it is happening in US & UK. We are a different breed and have different needs. In India particular, internet has not been able to reach to the masses. So for any social networking site to happen, it has to offer a lot more than just the networking features. The social networking has to be done over a need. It has to offer something which people can relate to their real day to day lives. In short, it has to solve a problem.

Q.There are 3 people who commonly fund startups 3F’s Friends, Family or Fools; so who gave you the first set of investment for CommonFloor ?
A. None of these three F’s as such. Though our families have been very supportive, we mostly managed to run it by our own. In a startup like ours, you don’t have to spend much on basic requirements and we chose to remain basic for some time . We had some savings and we took a couple of free lance projects in between to keep it going.

Q.What is your revenue model(apart from Ad’s)…Do you charge the apartments with which you tie up ?
A. Ad’s is always a source of revenue for any dotcom business but surely never a significant one until you manage to get the highly targeted ads. Apart from ad revenue, there are a few other areas where we generate revenue. As far as charging apartments is concerned, there is a basic version of CommonFloor which is free and top of it there are some paid features. So this would be another source of revenue in the future.

Q.What is the USP of CommonFloor over other such groups on SN sites like Orkut ?
A. CommonFloor does not complete with any of the social networking sites in the direct market. As I told you that CommonFloor is a local networking site which harness geographical proximity of its users which is absent in any of the service currently available.

Q.What are your funding options and where can people find more information about CommonFloor ?
A. More info about CommonFloor is available on request. We are in talks with a couple of angel investors and deal would happen latest by the end of this month.

Views on Entrepreneurship

Q.Both of you left your cushy jobs in Oracle to start off MaxHeap, what was the major trigger point?
A. The time is now. The idea is to leave and start and not think much. The journey is so exciting that it is worth taking a break and doing it full time. Rest is identifying yourself and going for it.

Q.You are a regular feature at Open Coffee Club,[Bangalore], how has such kind of events helped fostering Entrepreneurship?
A. It helps a lot. OCC is a great platform. I am very thankful to both of Bangalore OCC’s Co-Founders, Ramjee Ganti and Vaibhav Pandey to take this initiative. For a startup, to keep himself updated and finding opportunities for synergy is very important and OCC is one of the right platform for it.

Q.What are the major changes that happened when you moved from an Employee to an Employer [or Entrepreneur] ?
A. There is a drastic change in the responsibilities. Now you are not answerable to anyone but to yourself. You get most of the decision making power and your decisions can actually make it or break it all. You learn self management. Time Management is first and most important thing you learn while starting up. You are risking your valuable time while your peers are busy getting hikes and great salaries, the pressure is immense. Other than hard work and motivation, it requires a lot of patience and persistence.

Q.What are your key advices to people who want to startup ?
A. If you want to do it, don’t think that you can’t do it. Always see that what you want to do and then how can you do it. Challenge yourself rather than questioning. If you are falling short of the confidence to start or there are other liabilities, join a startup, the journey would still be a lot more exciting.

Q.You are an IIT Roorkie Alumini, how important has IIT been in nurturing your Entrepreneurial talent ?
A. What I personally feel is that the best part of an IIT is its network of students and alumni. Infrastructure and the professors help a lot but you spend most of your time with your friends, seniors and juniors in the college. You get to network with the very hardworking and motivating people with whom you can discuss about things other than getting a good CGPA or a job. Most of the people are looking to go for higher studies and quite a few are exploring the startup world. The number of people who start out of IITs exceeds more than IIMs.

Most of us who are thinking that we should have a startup don’t know “Which is the area that we should target” for example: If you are a blogger who regularly gets a fair amount of traffic, you may feel that you should jump to full time blogging.Or if you are a person, who has a passion for photography,you may feel that you should join a professional course in photography & turn into a full-time profession

The bottom line is “When you check your think tank , you start getting number of ideas” and in such case, the important part is to look at your inner-self & decide that “An Idea X is the one that I would perceive as a business“….The keyword in the discussion is “IDEA” and I would like to share some of my thoughts on generating ideas :

Point [7] also reminds me of an article “Sleep is a luxury at startups” which had an interesting comment from an Open Coffee Club group member – Venkat Ramana, CEO of OutSmart360

Essentially, we never stop working. We are always multi-tasking, looking for the next opportunity, whatever else we are doing. One part of the brain (the bigger part probably) is constantly thinking of solutions and problems and more solutions for them.

If you have some more ideas to generate ideas, than kindly add them in the comments & I would be glad to add them to the article.

Most of know that a startup is like the birth of a new born baby but there were some basic confusions regarding the definition of a Startup.

These were the two questions that have raised some confusion and I hope that someone clears the doubt :

1. What is a startup ?
2. When does the transition happen from Startup to a mid-sized company?

I had posted the same question on LinkedIn here and there were some interesting & diversified answers…worth taking a look at it Your contribution in the form of comments or on LinkedIn would be highly appreciated !!!

After a much needed break(of close to 2 days) from blogging, I am with the back with an event update.

The second meet of the Open Coffee Club again took place at the same venue – Brew Ha Ha and as expected, the turnout was not very high this time.As compared to the 50+ in the first meet , the turnout this time was around 30 but the good part was that there were a lot of new faces in the crowd.May be we should say the word always spreads out and you never know when it spreads like a fire

The agenda this time was “Marketing & Startups“.A universal truth is “A great idea alone is not sufficient to succeed and this is what the meet was all about.We were there to discuss on how to fill the thin gap between Technology and Marketing.As Seth Godin says “Bad marketing cannot be fixed with money” and since, there is always a cash crunch for startups, they cannot afford to be sloppy in their marketing !!! Also, since the main focus was on Marketing, how can we have a discussion on marketing without those crucial set of guys who take our idea to the market There were few marketing people in the crowd and few startups shared the problems they are facing wrt marketing , which is given below:

Ranith – Kapston (Building scalable effective websites):
Ranjith began the discussion with his startup Kapston.Kapston is a startup which is built to help startups.So what is it all about? As Ranjith mentioned “Since , most(or almost all) startups start with a part time idea, many entrepreneurs loose focus due to various reasons(like lack of time,work load etc etc) and this leads to an additional delay for the startup to hit the market”. So does he(and his team solve the problem)? Startups have to go to his company with the requirements and they would provide an end to end solution for them.Their service is only applicable to the Web 2.0 space and this is where even I felt that Web 2.0 is definitely a space which is looked up by everyone.

But the million dollar question is : “How does a startup afford to outsource the complete work since every penny is worth a millions for them” ?

Sharman ( 99% of the startups fail due to bad marketing):
Sharman who does not have a startup of this own shared his views on Business Plans and marketing.Though he does not have a startup of his own, he has helped Entrepreneurs to formulate their business plans. This statement caught the crowd’s attention and this is where Balu(wanna be Serial Entrepreneur) pitched in mentioning “Business Plan should be made by the entrepreneur himself since, he is the person who should know all the numbers(which would come out in the Business Plan). This argument went on for some time after which he closed his talk with 2 important things(on why startups fail) :

Prateek Dayal – Muziboo (Marketing through friends doesn’t work)
Prateek from Muziboo was the one who took the maximum taste from this coffee.He came out with a simple statement “Just like a startup, we don’t want to spend money on marketing”. So , how does he get visitors to his site? He started off by saying that “Friends are good medium when you want to spread the initial word since, you expect the numbers to multiply though your friends but that happens to a very less extent”. He also touched upon Word Of Mouth (WOM) marketing which would be useful when there are a considerable no of visitors to his website.There was an open question to an audience as to “How should we do the marketing?” and there were some good suggestions:

I had just one point wrt reviews : “Even though few bloggers may provide some criticising feedback but sometimes this may turn like a “Blessing in disguise” For example : Guy Kawasaki’s venture Truemors was not well accepted by the blogger community and due to this negative publicity, the site got many page views from the readers of those blogs

So, at the end of the day, bloggers just voice out their opinions and it is upto the startup to authenticate and take the valid inputs(and implement them).

Swaroop – Ion (Poster marketing does work):
Swaroop’s startup Ion is an ideal example how “A pain can be transformed into a startup” and Ion – the iPod charger is the best example to prove this point. He shared his experience on how “A simple poster did the trick for Ion”. After coming out with their invention, they(Swaroop and his co-founders) had to market the product and they followed “Poster marketing”. They stood outside a Nike showroom and asked few people randomly about the liking of the posters and finally , they chose the poster which had a majority no of votes !!! Apart from posters and publicizing their product on few blogs, they never spent a single penny on marketing and still they got good sales for their product !!!

If you find their story really interesting , check out some of the posters here

Hitesh & Vikram Mehta – PinkKatalyst:
These guys were true examples of advent of Entrepreneurship in India and just in their early 20′s , it was a nice after-event conversation with them about their startup PinkKatalyst. Since, it was more of a routine conversation, not much to be updated here.You can find more about the company here

Photos from OCC Bangalore:

Photo courtesy : Harinath Pudipeddi

What other bloggers are saying:
[If you have already blogged about the event , kindly add your URL in the comments section]

Harinath Pudipeddi : OCC Meet on 2nd Sept,2007

Vaibhav Pandey : Open Coffee 2nd Meet: What the attendants say?

Swaroop C H : OpenCoffeeClub 2

Other relevant Posts:
Bangalore Open Coffee Club debuts with 50 plus !!!!

Mentorship is one of the most widely discussed topics in every Unconference but was extensively discussed in Open Coffee Club (OCC). One attendee in the OCC had 5 years of Entrepreneurial experience but none of his ideas really took off.The reason that he indicated was guidance & lack of proper market study.

He had an excellent suggestion that though his ideas did not really do well, he could still lend a helping hand to the other entrepreneurs by being a mentor & advisor for them(so that they don’t commit the same mistakes that he had committed). Also, IMHO even if you have a vague idea of what you wish to do(either part time or full time), the first thing to be done should be to enter the Ecosystem, which helps you network and learn from other Entrepreneurs.These (Ecosystem and Mentorship) were two of most discussed points in an article by Sanjay Anandaram of JumpStartup in “The Financial Times” ; a small excerpt below:

Why we need Mentors ?
Usually, those that do not succeed realise that they have been chasing the wrong opportunity with the wrong business model and wrong team much much later in the game, if at all. What if they had been made aware of the pitfalls and dangers early on and been prepared to deal with them? What if they had had the benefit of experienced counsel from mentors and advisors? While having mentors and advisors is in itself no guarantee of success, having the right mentors can often reduce the agony of late unhappy realisations of the state of the business.

Are Indian entrepreneurs not open ?
Why are Indian entrepreneurs shy about involving advisors? While the entrepreneurial eco-system here is not as mature as in the US and the culture of mentoring is not as widely prevalent, the fact remains that most entrepreneurs are hesitant to have advisors.

Lot of learnings from the article(apart from the small gist given above) so do not miss the complete article here and here

India is truly revolutionizing and so are the guys in the Silicon Valley of India.Two of the major advantages of the Unconferences are “Knowledge Sharing” and “Networking“.How does it feel to learn & network,every 2 weeks? Lot’s of learning and this is where I would like to start my article on “The first meetup of the Open Coffee Club,Bangalore” which was held at BrewHaha on 19th August,2007(11:00 AM).Let’s do a quick recap of the meet in a Q&A style:

What is Open Coffee Club (OCC) ?
The OpenCoffee Club was started to encourage entrepreneurs, developers and investors to organise real-world informal meetups to chat, network and grow.This is the online complement to that offline network. Meet people, find out what’s going on nearby you and then go and take part. More about OCC here

What exactly happened at the event?
Since, this was the opening chapter of OCC, the expectation was around 20+ people but thanks to the power of “Word of Mouth marketing (WOM)” and “Blogging” , the turnout was surprising and was close to around 50+ The event started exactly on time at 11:00 AM and than started a brief round of introduction, which lasted for around an hour.Being the first meet, it was quite expected that there would be a mismatch in the expectations and hence, it was very important to decide the agenda for the next meet.There were a couple of suggestions:

1. What strategies startups should follow to compete with some of the big guns in the IT industry?
2. Apart from an excellent idea, there should be a market feasibility(and scalability) and hence,How do we bridge the gap between Technology and Marketing?
3. How does an entrepreneur share ideas with other people in the group and how can (s)he get an HONEST feedback about the same?
4. How much should be the VC involvement in OCC ?
5. Discussions as to whether any particular venture requires VC funding? ie Some insights into VC funding?
6. Some of the mistakes that Entrepreneurs should avoid.

[If I may have missed out some of the things discussed at OCC , than kindly leave a comment and I would add it to this list ]

Phew,after lot of discussions now was the time to network and I also shared my part-time, partly Non-technical idea with a quite a few people and was appreciated by some of them.This was a quick check as to whether I am headed in the right direction?

Some of the key highlights of the event:
Apart from the discussions, the other key highlights of the event were “Startup Funding” and “Mentorship for Entrepreneurs“.These key issues were addressed by people from National Entrepreneurship Network (NEN) – Laura Parkin(Executive Director, NEN & Wadhwani Foundation) & Sameer Kanth(Consultant, NEN Bangalore). Another notable attendee at the event was Yiting Shen from MIT Sloan school of Management. This is just a small example of a new and changed “Globalizing India” !!!

What exactly happened after the event (a Buffet Lunch Club) !!! ?
Had a good lunch with Prateek & Nithya Dayal;the husband-wife team working on their startup Muziboo, Saurabh, Ramjee, Siva, Vaibhav.There were some interesting discussions about Business Blogging, Legal ways to increase traffic to your blog, WordPress, UI Development, Unconferences, Networking …. After the talk, I thought that I should also start “Blog Consulting”

Crowd present at the OCC:
[Attendees who haven't provided information about their blogs are tagged with their email id's. Also,if I have missed out your name,kindly add it in the comment section...]

1. K. Aditya
2. Saurabh Singh
3. Kaushik Gala
4. Deepak Shenoy, founder of MoneYoga
5. Pooran Prasad, co-founder of Zealous Solutions
6. Vaibhav Pandey
7. Harish Kumar, founder of OneBigWeb
8. Sandeep C Senan
9. Kiran Jonnalagadda aka Jace
10. Manasi Baranwal
11. Shivakumar Ganesan
12. Prashant Acharya
13. Gunasekaran S
14. Sameerkanth , ConsultantNEN Bangalore
15. Venkat Ramana
16. Anand
17. Piyush Gupta, Co-founder of RouteGuru
18. R. Senthil
19. Kiran Kadekoppa
20. Parvez Ahmed
21. Ajit
22. Rohit Bansal
23. Prateek & Nithya Dayal, Co-founders of Muziboo
24. Karthik Jain, Co-founder of PicSquare
25. Satish TJ
26. Anshul Gupta
27. Meera K , Community & News media
28. Rajan, Co-founder of Motvik
29. PV Sundaram
30. Vipul Gupta
31. Bhasker Kode,Co-founder of “The Returnable Project”
32. Laura Parkin, Executive Director, NEN & Wadhwani Foundation
33. Yiting Shen
34. Saurabh
35. Paveen Kumar
36. Parineeth Reddy
37. Harinath Pudipeddi
38. Siva – now an Entrepreneur
39. Akshat Choudary, Co-founder ActivMobs
40. Amit Singh, Co-organizer of BCB4
41. Ashish Solanki, Co-founder Yulop
42. Puneeth Prasad

Time to wrap up the coverage of “First OCC meetup”.Last but not the least, thumbs up to the organizers of OCC – Ramjee Ganti and Vaibhav Pandey for taking this initiative and making this possible !!!

When does the next OCC happen?
OCC would be held once in 15 days and hence, the next OCC is on 2nd September,2007.For more updates , join the ‘OCC Community Group’

What other bloggers are saying about OCC?
[If you have already blogged about OCC , than kindly add your link in the comments section...]

Ramjee Ganti – Bangalore Open Coffee Kick Starts with Bang

Hope to catch you all at the next “Open Coffee Club” in Bangalore !!!