Building Mad Street Den: Year 1

Towards the end of March, I’d tweeted about our fundraising journey and some numbers on our first year at MSD. Here’s more insight into that journey and some takeaways for me.

Play this to your strengths. Don't let the leads drag you, get ahead of them, court them and understand why there's interest.

— ashwini asokan (@AshOnIndia) March 31, 2015

Anand and I returned from California, early 2013 with savings that could help us run a 3-4 person team for 2 years. The idea was to give us 1.5 yrs for going from exploring and experimenting with AI and Computer Vision to building something product worthy in that timeframe. This would leave 6 months to work on fundraising.

On Saying No to funding relentlessly

One of the many reasons we returned to India, ending our 15-ish year run in the US, was to explore and experiment on AI. The ‘cost’ both literally and metaphorically of an experiment was much lesser, was our assumption. As heavily impulsive, extreme risk taking type A personalities it wasn’t surprising that we picked up the entire family and left in 20 days from decision day. IMO, there’s no good way to leave life in the only country you’ve been an adult in. In so many ways, we were, what we stupidly thought of, as going into hiding. (I’ll leave the personal journey for another day)

The opposite happened, however. As an AI startup in India, we ended up attracting more attention than ever planned. And we politely said No to funding conversations at events. This was not easy. We had nothing but a vision and one PoC & one tech module of our stack/entire platform, 6 months into building the company. The interest from investor community was flattering, ego boosting … and in many ways desperately interpreted by us as a sign of the move being worth it, despite big issues with adjusting back on the personal front. We stuck to saying No the entire first year. Here are the 2 big takeaways:

Understand why an investor is interested in you. If they can’t explain why, in a convincing manner other than ‘being excited’, neither of you is in a great spot really. It’s flattering, but that means nothing!

The journey down ‘WTF are we doing’!?!

After 6 months of building what we thought was the perfect use case and technology module, we decided to reach out to folks through the investors and other connects coming through. A short month later, it became clear, the use case was the wrong one to focus on. The gaming industry was not just expecting us to enable them with tech, most of the players that wanted what we were building, wanted the entire app, not just the tech. After a few weeks of convincing ourselves that the PoC could easily be turned into an actual game with a little bit more of our money, we decided to call BS. That would make us a gaming company with a focus on a gaming product, which we were in no way skilled to do or wanted to be.

Lesson 1 / Failure 1, took 6 months, $50K and gave us 1 PoC of an app using 1 module we had built. However, it also gave us the ability to show it around and test with various stakeholders in the market.

Jump from that to the second PoC and module took 2 months. The choice of PoC and tech module entirely influenced by people we were talking to. Jump from that to 5 PoCs and 5 tech modules took 4 months. By end of year 1

2/n Result of 1yrs worth of work& product resembled nothing like initial plan. Plans change, keep eyes on vision for some sense of stability

— ashwini asokan (@AshOnIndia) March 31, 2015

Very soon our initial thoughts on approach, strategy, product, platform started falling in place. The entire process fueled by building, iterating, figuring out what the hell we were building and why, if at all, it mattered. We put ourselves out there over and over again.

Tapping into the interest shown from the community, helped us test demand for what we were building. We attended several events (thanks @yourstory) & used them to not sell our tech but show experiences it could enable through PoCs.

Our flagship product for 2015, is the last Tech module we built ? Thankfully as a AI company building an end to end computer vision platform, the previous 4 we built did not become useless. We realized we had to find the right use cases and business focus for them.

Gave us really useful insights & allowed course correction several times over. Esp if in category creation side - this can b super useful

— ashwini asokan (@AshOnIndia) March 31, 2015

Creating a category

While AI suddenly seems everywhere, we’ve barely just started on our journey. Barely! Business models are not established, use cases or applications have barely been discovered and experimented with, technology itself is far from stable, and definitely not scalable. We weren’t going to be a big data startup, which made things even more difficult. One thing we did really well, was to judge that we needed to experiment & explore before building a business. We put aside money to help us explore what we wanted to do. We were honest about saying we don’t know, until we really did, a big reason why we said No to early funding too.

3/n Knowing when you're creating a category vs. bringing about change in an existing one is very important, much before your MVP

— ashwini asokan (@AshOnIndia) March 31, 2015

5/n If you're closer to category creation, you have the luxury of demonstrating you are an expert in your area. Show for it from the get go

— ashwini asokan (@AshOnIndia) March 31, 2015

Creating a category also means, playing in a field where the metrics are unclear. How do you know when you’re ready for the market? What do you do when competition is a bit abstract, when market size is the whole world or no one at all?

Mad Street Den’s guiding principle was to experiment and explore tech through the lens of experiences we imagined people enjoying

That guided how and what kind of category we saw ourselves playing in. It helped us define every one of the pieces mentioned above from competition to market size to the funds we were interested in.

Generate interest & let funding find you

This point could very well come from a place of privilege. That said, there are days when it feels like my 5 yr old could raise funding if I let her loose on Kickstarter. India is alive and kicking on the startup scene. There’s opportunities to put yourself out there. YourStory, NextBigWhat, Inc 42 are all great platforms that open up so willingly to give you access to people, insights and money at their events.

MSD went from not wanting to raise money, to raising money to accomodate the incoming interest from customers who were introduced to us by investors, who were looking to invest in us. For them, it was a test bed. If their portfolio companies found us useful, it became a good way to measure promise. For us, it was a test bed too. Does our tech work, is there product market fit? win-win. If you’ve been able to drum up interest for your product in the form of pilots or user base (as the case maybe), the money will mostly follow you in this kind of an environment.

11/n Showing a promising vision, extensive potential & MVPs / concrete instantiations of our platform got us funding we weren't looking for

— ashwini asokan (@AshOnIndia) March 31, 2015

12/n Customers come with investors seeking you & bringing portfolio companies. Let the $$ follow you, don't follow it IF you have the option

— ashwini asokan (@AshOnIndia) March 31, 2015

13/n Don't raise sizeable rounds before you can create excitement, build momentum, and pull the community with ease, to your potential

— ashwini asokan (@AshOnIndia) March 31, 2015

The quality of your show & tell heavily rests on your mindset, approach to your startup and the actual product.

Everyone talks about passion while talking about startup. I think I’ve just realized that passion in this context, is not so much about your idea .. it’s about your journey, your willingness to change, adapt, do what it takes to survive and be patient enough to kick ass where it matters.

On not taking ourselves too seriously!

Passion, belief in self and idea, can make us all feel all too cool. After all, we live in times where founders are celebrities, unicorns themselves! It’s only human to get caught up in that madness of who’s next. I’m the one that flies, my cofounder regularly cuts my wings and teaches me to grow them back the hard way, better with each time. On the other hand, I’m the one that helps him fly, see the possibilities, the promise, the change that could be. We remind ourselves regularly to not take ourselves too seriously and that we’re barely getting started on our journey!

In India especially, every second person can be patronizing, every new hire wanting to acknowledge hierarchy and authority. Not taking yourself too seriously can help you enjoy the ride, build a team of trusted peers, a foundation that makes for a journey worth traveled. Embrace the ups and downs. Look back at every month and laugh at how stupid you were. If you’re not growing as a founder every single month, if you’re not honest with yourself, the fall can be multi-fold painful, if and when it happens. Find a cofounder and a team that compliments you. Reality checks are everything in this environment. Don’t float away!

And lastly, to balance out all those notes on being grounded, here are a few to demonstrate that you can fly if you know when, how and why. Don’t let anyone bring you down on their terms, do so on yours!