#shoutt

Its been 5 months since I made the hardest (so far) decision of my life.

In June 2014, I moved to India to work on a startup.

On the surface it doesn't sound that hard. But I want to back up a bit to set the context. I had moved to US from India in Aug 2010 to do my master's at Cornell. After that, in 2011, I joined a gaming startup Funzio. It was an amazing experience where I grew a lot. We got acquired by Gree in May 2012 and I was working at Gree ever since then.

So within 3 years I had moved from India, graduated from a damn fine university, moved to the heart of the tech industry, worked in a successful startup which got acquired, and was earning really good money for someone 2 years into their career.

But (there is always one "but" eh?) I always wanted to do a startup on my own. From my undergrad days I used to gorge on techcrunch for tech news and was fascinated by startups and entrepreneurship. Then I discovered Paul Graham and Hacker News. It lit a fire inside me. Here was finally something where you can learn about all things tech and a community which actively pursues entrepreneurship.

From May 2012, during nights and weekends I was working on the now defunct startup called Shoutt. In early 2014, I managed to hop through the hoops of USCIS to work on it fulltime, but by that time Shoutt was on its last legs. It wasn't too long before it was clear that Shoutt was gonna die.

Mansi and Neehar, my co founders of Shoutt, had moved to India in 2013 to work full time on it since they could not stay in the US due to the visa requirements. Around the time that we decided that we needed to move on from Shoutt, they came across another idea - DoctorC - which seemed a pretty good one to pursue. They wanted me to join them if possible. There was an option where I could work on it while living in US but it made absolutely no sense to me to do that when the product, the market, the people and the business was in India.

Winding down Shoutt was gonna take about a couple of months and I needed to decide whether I wanted to work on DoctorC or find a new job in the Bay Area.

Several people helped me reach the decision and I wanted to share the things that affected my thinking the most.

1. Being comfortable taking risks is fundamental to the journey of entrepreneurship

One of my mentors (an entrepreneur himself) had mentioned this to me when we were talking about the life of an entrepreneur. You have to be comfortable with the fact that there are several unknowns and risks in your path. When the risks are very real and staring at you in your face, this attitude keeps me from going down a rabbit hole of what-ifs to insanity.

2. Don't let immigration issues ever be a major factor in your long term career decisions

The incredible lawyer who secured my visa for Shoutt gave me this advice when we were talking about the implications for me if I went back to India. This had an oddly calming effect on me, because the visa issue was the biggest thing that concerned me at that time. He made me realize that giving up my H1B is not an irreversible decision, I have enough of a network in the Bay Area that I will not "lose my roots" from here.

3. It will be not that hard to get back up if I fail completely and utterly

This ties in with point #1. Failing is part and parcel of everyone's life (more so for an entrepreneur). The world will not end if DoctorC fails completely. In fact, it will be a unique experience which I will carry with me for the rest of my life.

4. The opportunity was too damn good to pass up

While talking about Shoutt to one of my mentors (who is a serial entrepreneur), I mentioned DoctorC and the opportunity to work on it. His reaction was - "Stop wasting your time with Shoutt. You need to start working on this immediately." This was a couple of months before we actually decided to shut down Shoutt. Those words struck a chord within me and are looping over in my head ever since.

5. Regret Minimization Framework by Jeff Bezos

I don't know where I came across this. For me, this is clearly an extremely good technique to make any long term decisions easier. Its advice by Jeff Bezos which he dubs "Regret Minimization Framework". Summarizing here -

Project yourself to when you are age 80 and you are looking back on your life. I want to minimize the number of regrets I have. Now if I decide X and it turns out to be a failure, would I regret doing it when I am 80?

I applied the same logic and the answer was immediately obvious to me. And it has held up so far. I don't regret moving to India to work on DoctorC.

6. The pros of living in India

My parents have been incredibly supportive through this transition. I can visit them more often, good indian food (though I still love the bay area more for its variety) etc. Plus, I wanted to learn golf since a while, the entire 10 lesson course costs less than $100! :)

Photo Credit: Erik Fitzpatrick

If you're staying in town this Thanksgiving, here's a list of things you could do with your family/friends. We have not included the usual 17 mile drive, Carmel by the Sea, Big Sur, Napa, Tahoe trips...if you haven't done that we totally recommend them!

Holiday Ice Rink

Go ice skating with your family. The best places at this time of the year is The Embarcadero Center. Keep in mind that they're not open on Thursday and Friday, so make a plan only for the weekend.  Cost: $14 (incl. rentals). $10 for kids. Event Website

Love Animals?

If you're family (kids especially) love animals, be sure to check out the many animal farms around the bay area. The Oakland Zoo is having a special Thanksgiving ZooCamp.  Our personal favorite - Safari West. A little expensive and far, but the experience is unforgettable. If you feel like splurging, try and stay overnight. www.safariwest.com

Segway Tour

See San Francisco like never before. If you have friends visiting - they'll absolutely love it. So will kids. Remember to book it in advance, they have limited slots.  Cost: $70. Company Website

ROMP by LEVYdance

LEVYdance is a SF-based contemporary dance company. At ROMP, dancers and audience members sit together at banquet tables making the dance both surreal and hyper expressive. Includes dinner and drinks. Till Nov 24th. Cost: $40-$50. Event Website

Govinda Alaa Re

Party with the Bollywood star on Nov 30th in San Jose.

Cost: $30-$130. Event Website

NAACH V

Party the night away at San Francisco's newest monthly Bollywood party. Bay Area's very own celebrity DJ - DJ Precaution - will be playing Bollywood, Electro, International, Bhangra & Top 40 all night long. Cost: $0-$10. Event Website

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We all love Bollywood movies. I mean common, who doesn't? It's such a integral part of being Indian...whether you like Ram Gopal Varma or Anurag Kashyap.

Our friends at Bollytude are creating the coolest products ever. Inspired from Bollywood movies, with wacky designs and quirky twists to the cliches, their Bollytude products make a fashion statement like no other! 

After checking out their designs, we really couldn't figure out how this didn't exist earlier! Remember the Tantra t-shirts? This is that, but version 2.0. More flair, more humor, and amazing design. 

The four entrepreneurs - Ajeenkya Bhatalkar, Akshit Shah, Pankaj Dubey, Varghese Mathai - are running an IndieGoGo campaign to help reach their dreams. Help them out in whatever way you can. In return, get some kick-ass merchandise and good karma :)

Check them out: www.bollytude.com

New User Interface

A completely redesigned 3-tone user interface to make navigating the website super easy.

Community Pages

View shoutts by communities. Browse and join the ones you find helpful.

Help Metrics, Search & More

We launched Shoutt last month. We've been testing various marketing channels and strategies to gain traction through social media. 

I came across Thunderclap a few months ago and thought it could be a great way to gain exposure for Shoutt. Thunderclap is like Kickstarter for Facebook shares & Tweets. You start a campaign and get supporters. If your campaign is successful  Thunderclap sends out a blast of Facebook shares and Tweets all at the same time...amplifying the power of the message. 

Thunderclap states that its works best for campaigns that raise awareness, inspire action, demand change or enlist help. Though we are none of the above, we wanted to test it since the concept was intriguing. 

Our Campaign

Target - 100 supporters in 10 days. Result - 120 supporters with a reach of 72,264 (the sum total of the number of friends and/or followers of every supporter)

We achieved this relatively easily by reaching out to our family and friends. On June 7th, our campaign was successfully completed and Thunderclap blasted out 120 facebook shares & tweets with a direct link to the Shoutt website

The Analysis 

To analyze the success of the tool, we considered 72 hours following the blast on June 7th. This time period should more than accomodate the life of a Facebook share/Tweet.

Last year, Techcrunch reported that the average Facebook post reached only 12% of a user's friends. For the sake of simplicity, I'm assuming that the same is true of Twitter. 

12% of the reach of our supporters = 12% of 72,264 ~ 8670 

When someone clicked a Facebook share/Tweet from our campaign, they went to the Shoutt website.

Potential eyes on our campaign - 8670 No. of unique pageviews on our website - 378 No. of unique pageviews in the US - 255 (we are available only on the US App Store) No. of downloads of our app - 36

Result

120 people sharing simultaneously resulted in 36 downloads.

We were very excited about Thunderclap and our campaign, but this result left us disappointed. At the scale of a 100 supporters, Thunderclap is not a good channel to market your product. I suspect the same will hold true at a larger scale as well. As Thunderclap stated, it might be more suited for social causes and less for products. 

We'd like to thank all our friends and family who extended their support to us and supported our campaign. You guys rock!

Or for that matter, why you should be careful about anything that ends with -er. Before I go any further, please go and read Steve Yegge's blog post on the overuse of Nouns in Javaland.

Most coders I know do not give naming things the importance it deserves. It is highly critical to get the class/method name right the first time. The name will affect the way you structure your code base, think about it further down the line, how you refactor and extend it. Nothing creates technical debt faster than choosing a wrong name for your class. It will come back and bite you very painfully.

The name of a class will determine how you delegate responsibilities to that class. Let me illustrate. Lets say you are designing the iOS client for Shoutt. The client needs to establish a connection to the server, fork over the data and then handle the response. At this point many coders will say - "Aha! What we need is a ConnectionManager which manages all these tasks." So we go ahead and create that class with the required functionality.

It works fine until we realize that the app requires multiple simultaneous connections to the server. Now because you have a ConnectionManager, you go ahead and introduce an array inside the class which maintains the state of all the open connections to the server. The code is a tad little bit more complex because each connection is established by a different object in the client and the response needs to be routed to the appropriate caller.

Fine so far... Oh wait, but now the client also needs to handle retries in case of failure. What do you do if one of the connections fail? You introduce a hashmap in ConnectionManager which maintains the number of retries a particular connection has made to the server.

Oh crap, what if the object establishing the connection wants to end it before MAX_RETRIES is reached? So now you have a connection_id which is stored on each view and is used every time you want to cancel the connection. Also, did I mention that sometimes connections need to be asynchronous and sometimes synchronous (this requirement crops up two weeks into building the app btw). So now, in your code base, when you want asynchronous connections, there is an event thrown in the ConnectionManager with the connection_id that shows the response. But in case of synchronous connections it returns the response immediately. So you have two methods on ConnectionManager object called establish_sync_conn() and establish_async_conn().

At this point, your ConnectionManager object has an array, a hashmap, probably another hashmap to track connection types and two different methods just to create a connection. Its a very complex thing to look at. Even worse is the fact that if someone else looks at your code, it will take them a while to figure out whats happening where and how everything is linked together. It also makes you prone to make mistakes and have more bugs/complexity in your code.

What would have happened if you had named the class just Connection instead of ConnectionManager? Just because of the name being Connection you think of it as a proper object (like a proper connection - think of it as an information pipeline between the client and server). You need multiple connections? Just create another object of connection. What about a single connection for the entire app? You just create a global connection variable which has that object. Retrying is also maintained by each connection object independently. How about max retries? You just have an internal max_retries variable in the class. So each connection maintains it's state internally. Since we have separate objects for each connection, each object can just handle that connection on its own and terminate it without worrying about whether there are any other connections or not. What about the sync and async type of connections? The answer is in the word type. You pass in the type of connection you want in the constructor and the object is setup accordingly.

Obviously the ConnectionManager could be designed differently and made cleaner, but giving the name Manager makes defining the responsibility of the class ambiguous. On the other hand, naming the class Connection would make its responsibility clear and unambiguous.

Anything that has the name manager (or anything else that ends in -er) in it is usually (not always) a code smell that you haven't designed your application properly. Eliminating that type of class will automagically lead you to write much better code and keep things simple as you extend your application.

Picking the right name helps you keep your code structure clean. It also make it easy to extend as well as refactor. So next time you are naming a class, please give it an extra 5 minutes of thought before you start coding.

-- Grumpy Cat

Discuss this on HN or Reddit.

At Shoutt, we decided to apply to a few incubators last month - YC, 500, Techstars. With incubators, recommendations from mentors or alums can go a long way. We asked a known 500 Startups mentor to recommend us, which he graciously did. And that's when our mistakes started --

Mistake #1 We didn't follow up to the recommendation email. We didn't reply or communicate about our company for a good 10 days. Why? Because we thought the initial email was enough. Stupid, of course. 

Lesson #1 - Follow up, they're really busy people. Make sure you introduce yourself and your company. 

Mistake #2 When we did reply, Outlook did a funky thing that screwed us over. Our recommendation email had [email protected] and [email protected], which Outlook converted changed into one email id - [email protected] <[email protected]>. So we basically replied to one partner instead of both! 

Lessons #2 - Dont use Outlook (just kidding, read the bug below). Recheck email ids, subject lines, CC's etc. 

Mistake #3 We didn't include our AngelList profile in our first email, so we had to re-reply with the required information!

Now, our application was via AngelList and our recommendation was via email. The email had no explicit mention of our application on AngelList. It was our job to make the connection explicit.

Lesson #3 - Think.

In hindsight, these were rookie mistakes that we shouldn't have made. But we did. We just wanted to put it out there in case it helps other entrepreneurs. 

- Mansi

  How to Reproduce the Outlook email bug (we've already reported it)

1. Type in "x@500 startups.com [email protected]" into Outlook & Gmail. 

2. Gmail automatically recognizes them as 2 separate email ids, while Outlook combines them together because there is no comma separation. It makes [email protected] the name associated with the [email protected] email id. 

Gmail:

vs Outlook:

Let me preface this post by saying, that good graphics and design work does not come cheap. It takes time, talent, skill and a lot of creativity. The following are tips and tricks I've learnt over the last few years to reduce the dollar value that you pay for your graphics work. 

TL;DR

Get multiple graphics designers not just one.

Have atleast one graphic designer on a retainer (the one you would use the most).

Learn Photoshop. It'll save you loads of money and time in the long run.

Long Version

Graphics becomes much cheaper when you have a designer you love and whose hourly rate you can afford. Personally, since we are bootstrapping at Shoutt, we can afford about $20-$25/hr.

1. Finding a designer

Resources I use - scoutzie (mobile designers), dribbble

Before you fall in love with a designer, make sure you can afford them. It's hard to guess what a designer charges without contacting them first. In most cases, you'll have to send them an email to find out their rates. However,  on Scoutzie you can see the budget ranges that a designer charge. Find a range that fits in your budget. You can go one range higher. So if you are looking for designer whose range is <$1000. Also consider, the designers in the $1000 - $3000 range. 

You'll find this is mostly people outside the US where the value of a dollar is higher. You can often use this as a filter to narrow down on any other website as well.  It's important to find someone whose style you love and who preferably has experience in what you are looking far. 

It'll take a while to find someone awesome but trust me they are out there. It usually takes me anywhere between 1 - 2 hrs to find 1 designer that appeals to me and fits in my budget. I send out about 6-8 emails before I finalize on one designer. On average, I spend about 8-10 hours on one designer. That may seem like a lot of searching but it's well worth the effort.

2. Pitch your product 

You need to sell your idea. When you write to your designer, you need to excite him.  Pitch your product. Include references to past & present projects that'll excite him. He might not lower the rate, but he'll take the time to understand your product well and this will get you better designs.

3. Start with Individual Projects 

Though this may cost a little more than the hourly rate, it'll give you a chance to work with each other and see how you like it. You should start with something small (maybe an ad campaign, a facebook cover page, or screenshots for your iPhone app or something else). The magic number that I've found that most designers respond to is $200. This is a good price-point for you to try out a couple of designers before you find the one. 

4. Paint a clear vision

It's important that you communicate your idea well . It makes the process faster and infinitely more efficient. You need to paint a clear vision of what you need. Take the time to draw wireframes or sketches. This will also help you refine your idea. Provide a lot of references. An image is indeed worth a thousand words. 

5. Creative Freedom

Give your designer creative freedom. Great Ideas are built together. Finding a designer whose instincts you can trust will save you tons of time and money in the long run.

6. Learn Photoshop

I can't insist how critical this is to lowering your cost. There is manual work in graphic design as well. For example, your designer has to slice the psd file he creates into individual images for you. You could save a bit of money by slicing the files your selves. Additionally, more often than not, you'll need to make small changes, changes that are too small to send across to your designer. Take the time to develop basic skills. It is an investment but you'll end up saving both time and money in the long run. 

7. Get your designer on a retainer

Once you find a designer you like and work on a few projects together, start negotiating an hourly rate and get him on a retainer. Freelance Designers often look to get on retainers as it guarantees them a monthly income. The more hours you can guarantee your designer, the cheaper your costs become. It's like buying goods in bulk. 

Further, this will create trust and help you feel like your batting on the same team.

8. Give work in batches

Once you have a designer on retainer, he might become your goto graphics guy.  You might send across every little change you need (I initially did this a lot). Remember, your designer has other projects as well. He'll want to sit down for a couple of hours and just work on one project. Giving him small changes that only take a few minutes and he might try to squeeze them between other projects. Your project will not get the focus it deserves. This can be very frustrating to both of you and can strain your relationship.

9. Understand the work involved

Different kinds of designs cost differently. Marketing graphics (ads) are cheaper than UI/UX work. UI/UX work on web is cheaper than on mobile. Understanding the difference is important since you might have the same budget for all types of graphics. 

10. Get multiple designers.

As I stated in my previous point, you might want to have different designers for different kinds of work. Understand what your designer excels at and give him exactly that kind of work. He'll work much faster as it comes naturally to him. This saves you a lot of time and consequently money. At Shoutt, We have separate designers for UI/UX work vs Marketing work

 It's taken me a couple of years to learn these things and I continue to learn new things everyday. I still spend a lot of time looking for good designers and when I find them I hold onto them with great care. I know the value of good design and more importantly, the value of a good designer. 

Discuss on HN

- Neehar

P.S - Once you find someone you love, then its' time to tango -