the USP

After been bombarded with this term zillionth time now, I wonder to understand what it means. Is it something new ? Is it something different ? or Is it something newly different ? Should you do a startup without an USP ? or should you not. How do you validate your understanding of your product's USP ? Is it in terms of success stories ? or is it getting out of a VC meeting with a happy face ?.
I have my own thoughts but that reserved for later.. Let's hear some reader's (ouch.. if there are any) opinion :D.

J.

Impossible is nothing

Lately I have been doing some flash. I made a happy, decently complex, flash app, with a total size of 10KB. Pretty neat so far. Now a tiny new feature which needed to rotate texts was needed. Apparently TextFields wont rotate (and scale) without embedding fonts. Even a single small font would be atleast 80-100KB. Stuck.....

Interestingly flash let's you paint programmatically. Which means whatever you can show on screen can be rendered onto a Bitmap at runtime. This struck a solution..

var text:TextField = new TextField();
text.text = "Hello World";

var bmp:BitmapData = .......
bmp.draw(text);

So now you have the text as image. Next thing we do draw a rectangle and this time filling it using the image.

graphics.beginBitmapfill(bmp);
graphics.drawRect(0, 0, magic_width, magic_height);

Ofcourse nothing stops us from rotating this shape (there is no text now) and hence ending up rotating the text. You still need the magic numbers to get the right dimensions, I did that constructing a boundary around black pixels in the image.

The text though looks a bit shady, but its an OK compromise. Hopefully I will get that right too. Now no more restriction on fonts I can use and the texts shall rotate :).

Well, the point here is that we do work :D, and hence get stuck, pretty often. The thing to remember is "impossible is nothing".

J.

Our first loss

With great power, comes great responsibilities. -Peter Parker.

Now I understand what this means. Like J, I too was in a company before. The company allowed me to use xxx number of machines whenever I wanted. I often slept peacefully whilst these machines were at work for me. I remember times when I must have used all of them, tens of times, just to debug some small error. In Startupness its not really the same. You have to be responsible for all your actions and you cannot waste the precious CPU resources like I often used to do.

It was last Saturday when I was playing around with Amazon Web Services. (For all the non geeks out there, its a service which allows you to run your task on their distributed network without having to worry about issues such as system down time.) I just booted one of their machines, sshed into it, ran a small script and felt so happy. But then the disaster struck. In that moment of ecstasy I forgot to shut down the instance. As it happens, Amazon charges by the number of hours you use their machine and I realized it only today which ended up costing us $10.

In the end, it was not a lot but it did make me realize one thing, in Startupness you need to be responsible for every single action you take. It might have ended up costing 100s of dollars had J,by chance, not found this out today. Another great lesson for me today.

-PD

The hard part

Once upon a time I was a software engineer. My company made sure I do nothing else. There were people who would at minutes notice solve any hardware, network issues I encounter. Infact, if any hardware fails once, I would get a new one. They really wanted us software guys jappy. I think I used 2 different laptops and 2 different macbooks in just over a year :D. Here's how my x workstation looked like (Those toy looking creatures are mine).



In startupness life's much less boring. We had to setup our own network, first we didn't have a router and hence two people couldn't connect simultaneously, we setted up a proxy on one machine. Now we have a new linux machine and a new wifi-router so things are better.

I also assembled my own PC, from parts purchased from a place called lamington road (the secret place for getting cheap and likely pirated hardware in bombay ssssshhh). Its a lot less fun to do that now though, for instance, it worked the first time, no smokes, no weird beep sounds, and 0 debugging. Thanks to the integratedness of intel boards gurrrrrrr.

J.

The First Month

More than a month since we left our job, and clearly i haven't scored well on the promise to blog regularly. Sowwwwwy.

For the busy folks, quick update, the good news is that we are all settled now in Bombay, staying pretty close to IIT, we have a CCD nearby, a 2MBps broadband connection, a house on 14th floor with terrific view (and awesome suicide spot), and a bike to explore the city (I need a license though). Check out some cool nearby pics.

To Summarize, the first month after job was a DISASTER. Everything went haywire, things went as far away from plans as possible and it was a hell lot of fun :). We spent a week in noida, roaming under the sun, crashing with friends, looking for that "dream home" with the help of stupid brokers and stupid magicbricks.com (this site totally sucks).

Finally, I gave up on that city. It always gave me that feeling of getting lost forever :(. We should have gone to mumbai the first time, anyways, its never too late. After a 7 day stint in the northern india, we moved to bombay (on a train this time \:D/). Getting a house in bombay is tough, very tough. It took us 3 weeks, costed us almost double the amount we were planning to pay. In the end, I think it was and will be worth it.

I will try to be regular now, posting how are things and how the new new company is shaping up :).

J