Experience of starting a new venture

How I started Cronetic Technologies and what it took to launch this startup

The intention of this article is to give you insights on how I started Cronetic Technologies and what it took to launch this startup. I will cover every aspect of it, from the idea, to raising money, building the site, the actual tools I used, marketing strategies and ultimately, this will give you an insight on what it takes to create, start and run a startup. I will be as transparent as possible.

You can also read this article on my personal blog : www.mindmingle.in

Take this as your first lesson; be as transparent as possible with your customers. Transparency builds trust; you want to be as real as you possibly can with your customers. This article in no way states that this is the right way to create a startup. I did what I knew at the time as best as I could. I feel that when you are beginning a startup, there is no right way to do things; you just need to do it.

Entrepreneur

Since I am in my early 20s I have always dreamed of running my own business. Being able to choose my own schedule, spend more time with my family and be in control of my life. Before Cronetic Technologies I have started 2 website. They failed. As many can attest, when your startup fails, it is very demoralizing. You face the reality that ALL the effort, sweat and sacrifice you put go down the drain. What you do take from it is, of course, knowledge and experience. The knowledge you gain from your failures helps you on your next venture. For every failure, there is something that I learned.

The idea

I was ready again. I wanted to start another business. To begin a startup, you should love what you are working on. My earlier startups, I was in love with the fact that I was starting a business. But I wasn’t in love with what I was doing. There is no better motivation then loving what you are doing. You wake up and whatever you are doing does not really feel like work. It’s what you love to do. Hours in the day will go by and you will never be tired.

I brainstormed on some ideas for my new venture. But again, I really wanted to do something that excited me. Something I already loved to do. The idea then popped in my head, I can execute web services really well. I enjoy the work (which is the most important factor). I wanted to pursue this idea some more.

I got the idea down, it was time for me to figure out how to build the service. It needs to be awesome and better than what everyone else is doing. Of course, it’s easier said than done. So I decided , I will deploy four different solutions to make this work. That’s four different price points, four different dashboards, and four different ways of doing things.

Takeover like a Boss.

I spent the next two weeks sketching everything and making a list of all the features needed. I looked at my competition and added ways on how I could do this better.

Problem number one. I’m need people. I needed to hire a developer. I also did not want a developer co-founder. Reason being, I didn’t know anyone well enough to trust that they would put the necessary time to get this done. I had two options, outsource or hire locally. For basic sites, I had no problem outsourcing. I had a couple of guys in chandigarh that used to do work for me on basic projects in the past. However, for this project, I needed someone local. I needed to really be able to have constant contact with this person and stay involved with the project.

Now where do I find this person? I stayed away from recruiters due to their high costs. I placed an ad in various colleges. I received some resumes. But to be honest, the offers were too costly. Don’t get me wrong, the talent was there, I just couldn’t afford Rs 10,000 per month . I was looking for someone with at Rs 3000-5000 per month. Are you laughing? Well guess what? I found someone for that price, actually for 4500 per month to be precise. The person that I hired used to freelancing . He was good. Solid PHP developer. And guess where I found him? In local college. Take this as a tip. You can find people for the budget you want you just have to be patient. Be persistent.

With my sketches done and my developer lined up, I still needed to raise money to start my project. Now comes the boring stuff. I had to go over with the developer on how long it would take to build the site. From my experience, developers are usually bad about giving correct time estimates. Whatever they tell you, multiple that by two, maybe even three. It is always better to overestimate then under estimate. After that, I had to begin raising money. I was already in a previous business venture with my friend and we had some money from our previous project. He agreed to partner with me on this new venture, as well. Our budget was not a lot and we had to do this bootstrapping as much as possible.

Development started.

It was March 2, 2013 when we started development. My developer and I had to pick a technology and he wanted to use HTML5. After a little discussion we decided to use PHP instead. The reason being was continuity. I was worried that if something happened to him I would have to hire a HTML developer. What worried me were two things: The cost of hiring a HTML5 developer would cost more than hiring a PHP developer and two, I had a few PHP developers I knew that could pick up this project in case something happened to my coder.

We tackled the first piece of the service, Web hosting. We created a concept and an alpha version was launched. I learned something quickly. As awesome as my developer was at backend programming, he sucked at visual user interface stuff. So, I had to takeover design/UI. As development continued, we kept referring to the services as Cronetic. I’m not sure why, but we thought it fit and so we made it official. Cronetic was the name of my services and I planned to register Cronetic Technologies.

Our next service was website designing. The development of this service was not very difficult. We had our first customer using our service for webhosting and everything was going well there. We wanted to make sure our Designing services had many different options to give our customers flexibility and to show things wherever and whenever they chose.

Once Designing Services was launched, the mobile App Development was our next challenge.I wanted to add the same flexibility I developed with Designing services, but I wanted to make our apps engaging and not boring.

First let me say, what a challenge. Developing these services were very difficult. We really burned the midnight oil. Luckily, our hard work did not come in vain. The end results were awesome and I couldn’t be happier or prouder of what we accomplished.

Development took 8 months to finish. What I did learn was that the actual coding of the services did not take long. It was the details. Getting every aspect of every detail of the services was very tedious. I recommend a lot of planning and in fact I wish I would have planned better, as it would have saved a lot of time.

Launch

Everything was looking good. We had a few beta customers using our services and their conversion results were phenomenal. I was getting great feedback, as well. I felt I had an incredible services with a huge value offering for any customer who had an e-commerce site, blog, hotel ,etc . Sounds good right? Well, the reality is, no matter how good your services are, when no one knows about it, it’s a ghost town. At this point, I needed to start marketing. I gave this work to my friend(partner in business) He went ahead and setup a CRM, a blog, and a cold calling list. We were ready to go!

Marketing

My friend (partner) was good at turning traffic into profits. But He wasn’t really good at generating new traffic. Don’t get me wrong, We had an idea on what we needed to do to generate traffic, we have never done it before.

While we were planning the marketing strategy, We created a customer acquisition model. We came up with a list of ways to market Cronetic.com

Paid Search , why inbound marketing ,Cold calling ,Word of Mouth , Meeting entrepreneurs

I set up an accounts with various advertisers. My friends in the advertising industry helped us a lot in setting up campaigns and research keywords. To be honest my results were not at all productive.

Inbound Marketing helped us a little bit . We created a blog and wrote consistently. After some time we hired a professional to manage it.

There is a saying- “Give something for free and people will come”. It worked well . We introduces various offers and promotional discounts to attract new customers and it worked.

We contacted various bloggers of this industries and we started guest posting for their blogs.

I needed someone to start contacting with the people. So, I hired a girl for cold calling. I found out that she knew ins and outs of cold calling So, My friend just trained her on our services. But to be honest, out of the hundreds of calls she made and the dozen of demos we did on a daily basis. We only closed 5-6 sales. This effort did not generate an immediate return. But when we did get referrals, it was a lot easier to close the sale.

I attended a few meetups that were related to my market. I found it very useful. Building networks and relationship with other people is an ongoing strategy for us. I enjoyed exchanging tips and meeting other entrepreneurs. I highly recommend this

In Closing

If you made it this far, I hope I gave you a good insight on how i got to this point. It takes hard work, and persistence. You probably know this. What I did learn, was not to focus on customers that are not ready to use a service. Instead, try to find the ones that are ready. It’s like having a store at the mall. You know everyone walking by your store most likely wants to buy something, but you would never send your sales staff outside the store to talk to people walking by. Instead, you focus and target on the customers that walk into your store. It’s not easy, but that is why inbound marketing is the best way to go about it. Its relevant prospects that are looking for what you have.

I have the services and customers that love it. They all increase sales when they use it. I love what I do. I hope my documented experience creating this startup was helpful. I tried to be as transparent as possible. If there is anything you would want more information on, please feel free to ask.

By — Heavendeep Singh