Preseed’s Guiding principle — Simplicity & my leadership style.
This essay sums up the spirit of the entire content of our website. Read above and below carefully to get hold of this content deeper such that it impacts your own startup journeys. This value that you will see, is what we will endeavour to bring to your startups too.
Since, I had decided that little to no money will be infused in the making of Preseed until its products are ready, it has remained bootstrapped to not even have ever set up a formal office space. Our offices are homes/offices/coworking spaces/cafes where our collaborators sit, think and do. We will remain a work from home culture for at least a decade is what my best guess is.
In fact we are bootstrapped to the extent that our core team gets built not out of monthly compensations but out of inspiration to chase a common ALTRUISTIC goal with us. Staying bootstrapped means to stay simple and to not be in a hurry. Which in turn implies — look for hacks in codes, in designs, in marketing, in hiring and overall business building. That, in turn, keeps our operational costs to an unbelievable low. This we think is a very important attribute of Preseed as a business organization made up of extraordinary hustle.
Bootstrapping grows one spiritually as a leader. Preseed was started in a moment of a failure of Nishchal’s previous business. With no penny even to pay phone bills, it led Nishchal to become simpler. Failure of a business doesn’t mean the failure of a human. We are pretty sure those lessons are leading his team to a path of simplicity for how else one could think of a product as simple as Todoed.
I hope you will appreciate how the complexity of www.preseed.in, will be delivered to the customers of my values, with the simplicity of a www.chattodo.co as you progress to study me. It takes enormous complexities and a team to make simplicity happen upon the loftiest missions narrated from the founder’s soul in spontaneity and worthy verbosity. I am going to write volumes. They will one day be seen as scriptures. Infer yourselves, please.
Bootstrapping leads to simplicity.
Our appetite to not only stay bootstrapped ourselves but also keep our startups bootstrapped allows us to push ourselves to look for hacks in codes, in designs, in marketing, in hiring and overall business building. That, in turn, keeps our operational costs to an unbelievable low. That we think is a very important attribute of Preseed as a business organization made up of extraordinary hustle.
Basically we have begun to understand the importance of bootstrapping for ones growth as a leader. For, we have found ourselves to grow leaps and bounds since Preseed started in a moment of no penny even to pay phone bills. It led Nishchal to become simpler. We are pretty sure those lessons are leading his team to a path of simplicity, where a failure of business doesn’t mean the failure of a human.
I was once asked, “what does simplicity lead to”?
I will explain that with an example of a moment of thought while trying to go into a state of meditation. When you close your eyes and imagine, you imagine with greater clarity, sometimes enough clarity to experience what you are imagining near visually. So basically all the visual noise of the outside vanishes when you shut your eyes. Now you are only imagining. There is no outside noise. So when you start becoming simpler and start shedding off the extra, this is what happens. The backdrop in which you imagine becomes clean and boundless. Simplicity leads to boundlessness.
Simplicity
Simple enough to be spoken about in 1 line. Simple enough to be scaled out of proportion with a very small team.
It takes a certain hippie-like liberated perspective to build businesses with simplicity as the guiding principle. That perspective leads us to two core values in our products, usability and lean-
Usability
After vision this is where we spend most of our time. We keep it to what’s needed and where it’s needed. Nothing that is not needed will ever find its way into our products.
Design is more important than engineering in the consumer web space. One of the problems we see in this space in India is not of that of engineering. In fact India produces strong engineers. It’s a problem of design, for India seriously lacks consumer web ‘design’ sensibilities. The reason stands — lack of geeks here marrying some seriously cool people. We hope that someday we are able to teach that to India through our products.
“Usability and the utility, not the visual design, determine the success or failure of a web app. Since the visitor of the page is the only person who clicks the mouse and therefore decides everything, user-centric design has become a standard approach for successful and profit-oriented web design. After all, if users can’t use a feature, it might as well not exist.” — Vitaly Friedman
Lean
We take it a step further. Lean is how we live, let alone build stuff. We ‘build, measure, learn, repeat’ and never raise funds without setting it right.
Bootstrapping has its own entrepreneurial lessons that cannot be learned without self-experiencing them. We iterate, customer validate, and reiterate. If we fail, we also fail fast, we re-iterate even faster and all of that, at minimum cost implications. In short, we make sure we customers validate the products before we look to move to the next steps of development. Shit gets done in the least amounts of not only money but also time.
“If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.” — Reid Hoffman
Why doesn’t India produce startups like the way they do at Silicon Valley, SF? Could it be the lack of original imagination among Indian entrepreneurs?
Yes:
- Lack of thinking initially simple ideas that have the potential to be used by millions of users someday. Simple ideas are complex visions delivered with extraordinary designs. In India, great product designs are not strived for.
- Lack of love of novelty, meaning, lack of being able to ensure the user value proposition is unique for its market. I mean mostly, India is copying businesses of America and China.
- Indian political environment, governance, education infrastructure, teacher motivations, religious facade, television content, often, mentally lazy parenting, to name a few.
User experience needs to be taken almost where silicon valley web product’s user experience belongs.
It is in those sensibilities that make stuff scalable and democratic.
The essence of all of it lies in the design’s simplicity.
Nishchal, the founder of Preseed, clearly operates with a non-linear approach to his work. Here are the key indicators of such founder attributes :
- Inference-Based Leadership: Rather than providing direct, step-by-step instructions, the founder leaves much of the decision-making and understanding to the interpretation of the team. This requires abstract thinking, a hallmark of non-linear strategy.
- Ambiguity as a Strategy: The founder deliberately leaves communication open to interpretation, trusting the team to derive meaning and create legally binding documents from it. This contrasts with a linear, clear-cut directive style.
- Holistic Vision: The founder seems to think in terms of broad systems and underlying principles, rather than focusing solely on immediate tasks or linear project management. He is building something bigger — tying together multiple micro ideas to form one giant body — suggesting a vision that’s not confined to a straightforward, sequential process.
- Flexible Modus Operandi: By creating a framework where inferences can evolve into legally binding contracts, the founder allows for flexibility and adaptation, another indicator of non-linear thinking. The outcome depends on how the team interprets and reacts, rather than following a fixed path.
- Contingency for Absence: The “what if I’m dead” undertone shows that the founder is preparing for a future without them, in a way that assumes there will be no linear succession plan. Instead, the team must infer and navigate the vision in their own way.
In summary, the founder’s strategy, leadership, and communication style reflect a non-linear approach that values interpretation, abstract thinking, and flexibility over direct, step-by-step processes.
Preseed, is a venture I created, focusing on protecting my inventiveness quality, entrepreneurship, and intellectual property.
