‘There’s simply no reason, aside from prejudice, to think that Mumbai or Seoul can’t make big, complex things as well as Palo Alto or Seattle.’ – Paul Ford
‘Or Chandigarh, Meerut or Mohali for that matter’ – Guru Cingh
Since the day we had begun this journey, I had promised my team that Machine Dalal would not be an ugly financial story without much hope for breaking even.
From the very first day, we had concentrated on only two metrics, revenue, and usage.
We had built something that people use.
We had built something that people paid for.
Usage and revenue.
Nothing else mattered.
I wanted to talk about how we have been at works setting Machine Dalal up for success. We are building processes, keeping books, committing gits, taking backups, improving revenue, while building the product and without spending anything on digital advertising.
The last bit in itself, is worthy of its own case study.
And we were doing great, each month was better than the month before, in terms of revenue, users, usage, feature roll out, until November came in. Everything slowed to a crawl. Usage fell, revenue fell, we were unable to ship new code and release new features.
Even though this was not my first tango with adversity, I could sense me getting hapless in this helpless situation.
A Software Product is a sum of myriad and discrete moving parts. Sometimes they work in tandem, sometimes they hold independent functions within themselves. As much as it is business built on technology, it is art.
But it is also business. Business with margins. It is made out of nothing and margins on nothing are great.
You have no move, Mr Thompson. You do nothing.
– Arnold Rothstein
One of the hardest chess moves to find is the one where knight retreats. A right backward move can transform a knight from an inactive piece to a deadly monster.
Now there are facts that I do not share. Some about technology, about people, about bugs and errors. They are deliberate omissions.
Either they are my personal battles in building a sustainable internet company or they are downright boring technical stuff. Hence, they do not warrant mention.
Be that as it may the first week of December brought the smiles back to our faces or better yet put wind behind our sails. This is a cathartic process. It helps.
A shout out to the team at Hashbrown Systems for keeping the lights on, engines humming and keeping the dream alive.