Accumulating “start up debt” is unavoidable and not necessarily a bad thing – it simply reflects the set of trade-offs and priorities that a company’s leader has to contend with at a given point in time. If you build the perfect tech stack, but have no user or customer, this “over building” can waste a lot of money and kill the company. If your product found traction and took off like a rocketship, but your backend architecture does not evolve fast enough to scale, that can also kill the company. It’s not easy to strike the perfect balance between driving growth or removing debt. And it usually takes a tech startup 8-10 years to reach a stage of maturity where “removing startup debt” is warranted.
– Byrne Hobart (probably)
Now neither of the above happened for Machine Dalal but the opposite is also true. What does that mean? Our growth has been slow and steady, lot more akin to a Choo Choo Train than a Rocketship. This also means we can stop the train, make changes and resume the journey. Something that you can never do on a rocket without falling apart in space. Now that I think on it, ten times the users, could have been a curse in disguise. At the same time I would never say no to that. This can get paradoxical and oxymoronic and a lot of such things.
As long as we are solving the hard problems, and when we create two-sided networks we are not sure which one is the harder problem – to have more providers or to have more consumers, you know demand and supply, also chicken and egg.
But as we chug along, we look what incentivises the user and that drives our outcome. And we have to do this and above before the competition does.
As I shall share in my next blog about our first serious discussions on what this series had been all about, this is the point where we start the serious process of Organizational Structure. As a founder, I need to juggle between a lot of roles, something that is inevitable but also avoidable and should be streamlined.
Simultaneously, a whole set of tasks do not require more than few hours a week and does not warrant expenditure at this stage. Although those hours can certainly add up and fuck up your week if you are not efficient.
Hence late nights at office and begin your workday in the bed.
It is a mark of progress that serious questions are being asked to address Organizational Structure for Machine Dalal. And we need that division of labor to run the business processes efficiently. It is as simple as that.
Word.
It is always easier to get despondent when we attempt hard things. We are by product of our circumstances and there is nothing much we can do about it. But there is an innate joy in overcoming obstacles do things hitherto deemed impossible or improbable at least.
Machine Dalal for me over the last few months have been that sort of journey. It has been a telling experience, and it has making of something unique and something fantastic, like Mickey Mouse but for the Print, Packaging and Converting professionals.
Whenever I have hope, I have doubts, but whenever I have doubts, I reason with data and facts. Often times there are opportunities that you see, and you work upon them and notice the market responding positively and of course there are plenty of challenges, but this is how that journey works.
I avoid technicalities of building Machine Dalal. I do not think it really matters. The most reliable banking and taxation works on COBOL and those proficient in it are either dead or dying. Unless there is a pressing need to discuss data structures, language models, entity frameworks or algorithms, I focus on building the product.
‘In order to find his equal, an Irishman is forced to talk to God.’
– Stephen, Braveheart
More importantly this is a personal exercise, and it helps me not get ahead of yourself and also helps me find my feet whilst wallowing in these waters.
Let everything happen to you, beauty and terror, just keep going, no feeling is final.