product market fit vs passion market fit

Before product-market fit, find passion-market fit.
The only way you’re likely to find product-market fit is if you’re almost irrationally obsessed with the market and if you’ve been working on it for a long time. Where the journey itself is the reward. Then, you’re likely to have unique insights (in the details) and consistent execution, through thick and thin, to find fit.
Here is a fantastic blog post on this topic: http://venturehacks.com/articles/passion-market

Why startup?

If you are doing it only for money, you are doing it wrong.

Obviously, monetary economics have to exist, however, that should not be first motive for founders. Instead, company building should come first and monetary results will almost always follow the company building process.

The main reason why I started the company - passion for creating great products and burning desire to change the world. The following quote comes to our rescue:

"Customers love great products that solve a clear pain-point.
Great products are built by great teams. 
Great teams in turn attract great people."

So, get out and start building a great team that is focussed on executing a clear mission.

To sum up, I'll be happier if we make money but will be downright upset if we can't win and build a great company.

Heroku + AWS Route 53 is the way to go!

If you are thinking of setting up DNS for your website, Heroku + Amazon Route 53 is a great way to go!

Heroku provides a simple interface for managing your web application deployments while Route 53 is a low-cost highly available and scalable DNS service from Amazon. Instead of using DNS registration provider such as godaddy, Route 53 is an alternative option to host your DNS servers. Since DNS records are replicated and kept in edge locations in various regions across the world, Route 53 is able to provide a very fast and reliable DNS service. So, latencies to access the website will rock from anywhere in the world.

When I was trying to set up DNS for my prior projects couple of years ago, I'd a lot of open questions. Route 53 didn't exist back then. We just set up Route 53 for our new project at www.neptune.io and we are really happy with the setup for the last few months.

Check out: https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/route-53

Give Amazon Route 53 a try today! I'm sure you'll love it.

First hike of seattle summer...

Summer is rocking in Seattle! Last year we'd an amazing summer and I'm hoping for another blast this summer.

Santhu (my wife) and I started our first hike of the summer with our friends. The weather was really good - 76F - all through the day. Today's hike is Rattlesnake Ledge hike - 4 miles round trip. I haven't been exercising in a while so it was a good work out. Santhu got tired quite a bit when we were climbing up but she was very comfortable when coming downhill. We relaxed at the top of the mountain and enjoyed nice view...

We started the hike at 2pm in the afternoon and back to base by 6pm. Then, we had a nice dinner at Inchin Bamboo Garden - one of our favorite restaurants in seattle area. nice ending to another awesome day!

We are planning to cover single hike every alternate weekend! Next up is tiger mountain....

Happy New Year!

First of all, wish you all a wonderful happy new year 2013!

This is my first blog in the new year. It's the time of year, it really pays off to write down what you want to do this year and look back next year and years later how you performed against your goals. This year is going to be an exciting year as I'm planning some things that I'd never done before. I'm really hoping to enjoy the journey even though it might turn out as a failure.

Stay tuned!

Paying yourself first with time!

This blog underscores why it's vital to pay yourself first with "time" (more important than money). Specifically, it focuses lot of on working your personal goals at a time where you are most productive. Interesting read :-)

http://sidsavara.com/personal-development/more-important-than-money-paying-myself-first-with-my-time

Transparency in Startups

Today, I read a wonderful blog post by SEOMoz, a seattle based SEO company. Hands down - it's amazing how thorough it is! More importantly, it's humbling how openly they talk about their growth over the last 5 years and their lastest financing round. I think it is great value for aspiring entrepreneurs. It's another fine example of what kind of hurdles even a revenue generating startup needs to go through before raising a big round. They had trouble raising money in 2009 and 2011 before finally cracking it in 2012.

Read it for yourself and I'm sure you'll learn a hell lot of how a great pitch deck looks like!
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/mozs-18-million-venture-financing-our-story-metrics-and-future