Youth is the best time to be rich, and the best time to be poor
– Euripides
Athenian playwright Euripides states the beneficiaries of being young and having to make important, yet difficult decisions. The underlying intent could not be far from home for fundraising as well.
Product building for all its benefits is a uni-directional process. You add features, build capabilities and you iterate as the development goes on and as you interact with the end user, sometimes a paying customer, you make improvements. Build and deploy and build and deploy yet again.
When not having enough is just enough.
If you didn’t know already, besides being the founder of Machine Dalal, I also run a deep tech company called, Hashbrown Systems. This helps, and it helps more than other startups who are in the early stages and perhaps more than those who are heavily funded as well. You will see what I mean.
When you can throw money at a problem, you would invariably throw money at the problem. It may not solve the problem, but at least you did something, and it would bear some results, it always does, that is how life (and software development) around money is structured, money may not buy you love, but it will most definitely get you laid.
It will not be much but will definitely add something.
Search is an integral part of Machine Dalal. We have certain advantages as a tech company and also as group of people who understand print, packaging and converting. To an investor or a layman, it will be trivial, but to our users and the industry we are going to be the gold standard.
Machine Dalal is a host of services working together, myriad of microservices working together to bring various products and features to the user. Without going too much into details, we tried something, and it worked, and then we implemented and were presented with an invoice that we paid but we decided not to pay again.
We weaned off a data scientist from our team, added another VM to handle search and built a working engine within two weeks, and now we are improving it and keep improving it. What I am trying to say here is that if I had the money, I would have simply not innovated. It would have still worked but I would not have respected me otherwise.
Innovation is good for the product, the team and the customer but personally building stuff gives me innate joy. And the way software industry is moving – towards a build vs die approach, it is a question of survival.
A Business Lesson from Kanshi Ram
Kanshi Ram was an Indian politician and social reformer who worked for the upliftment and political mobilisation of the Bahujans, the backward or lower caste people including untouchable groups at the bottom of the caste system in India.
I am not sure if he was the one who said it, but I always attribute this to him, ‘The first elections you lose, the second one your opponent loses, the third one you win.’In that simple observation is a business lesson of persistence, of competition and of success.
At Machine Dalal we have been persistent and a lot of other things, but persistence is what would probably save us in the end, I leave you now with this oft-repeated shot message by Calvin Coolidge.
Our userbase is growing at a steady rate of half a percent per week. We have paying Indians, Brazilians, Italians, French and Germans. A global subscriber base indeed.