So hi. Alright, so welcome to my keynote.
All right. Apologies for that.
I've been a Rails programmer for too long,
and I used Scaffold to generate this presentation,
and I kind of, I kind of kept this towards the end.
You know, I'll fix it in the end,
and I forgot.
So yeah I'm really sorry about that. But, anyway.
So my name is Prateek Dayal.
Unlike Chad, you know, I do need an introduction,
so I'll introduce myself as I go along.
So yeah, I'm currently the CEO of SupportBee,
and I started working with Ruby in 2007,
when I co-founded Muziboo.
And Muziboo is a music sharing website
and we had this idea,
how cool it would be if you know people had
a place like Flickr for music,
where they would go and upload music and discuss it,
not just share with their friends.
And we launched Muziboo,
we worked on it for a few years,
we grew it to about,
you know about half a million users. 200,000 uploads.
And as I said, I started working on this in 2007,
and it was a great time.
It just felt like heaven.
So I did electronics engineering in my college days,
and this was my first real programming project,
and unlike the unfortunate people like you,
you know I never did any PHP or Java.
So I came to the programming world straight into Ruby,
and it was so awesome,
and I could sit and code all day.
That was the part that appealed to me the most about doing a start up.
Actually we didn't even call it a start up back then.
So we just did something,
and I was sitting and coding all day.
And the community was still there actually,
surprisingly even in 2007 in India.
We didn't have a Ruby meet up but we had Open Coffee clubs,
and we had some start up meet ups
and actually all the people talk about
is programming pretty much, all the bar caps??.
So I remember meeting Sidoo??
and I remember meeting a few other people,
later I met Hemant. And we would sit
and chat about Ruby and you know,
they would give me all these cool ideas,
I would be like, I would be like hey dude, you know,
how do I deploy?
And they would tell me there's this cool thing
called Mongrel, you should look at it.
And I would go back and check out Mongrel
and I would deploy. So that was a really fun time.
I was having a great time.
But as you would guess it didn't last.
It wasn't as bright and sunny anymore eventually,
because I had to start worrying about making money.
And I, you know I would just a couple of years out of college,
not much cash, so I had to really start worrying about,
OK, how am I gonna make money?
This is all fun, but you know let's get serious
about this start up thing now.
And I had never done a business
and so I did what you know any sensible programmer would do, right.
I went to a business guy,
I went to a few business people to get their advice.
And all the advice that I got was about SEO,
about partnerships, people said oh you're a music company
you should go partner with the music labels,
you should hire a few sales people, sell music listings.
Like if, I don't know how long, if you guys remember,
but in 2007, India was sort of moving from
the offline world into the online world,
and the models were just sort of being adapted to the online models.
And everybody was sort of like,
everything was a listing site essentially,
and you could just put ads on it.
So I, you know I didn't like this obviously.
I hated doing this work.
Because I loved doing programming.
But I still persisted with it,
I still persisted with it for a few years.
So I did some SEO, you know I tried doing some sales -
it didn't work. And, you know, I really felt like this guy.
I felt like I had all these super powers,
like metaprogramming and you know all the cool stuff
that Ruby had to offer, but I would just sit and, you know,
tweak page titles all day long.
To get myself ranking. You know I felt really bad.
And I really felt disillusioned.
I felt really disillusioned with start ups because,
I said this is not what start ups should be about, right.
I should be able to do what I enjoy doing.
And that's when I kind of started asking myself,
can I leverage my strengths as a developer to build a great business?
Can I do what I enjoy doing already
and somehow build a great business
and build a company that I'm really proud of?
And I started sort of looking around to get ideas,
and that's what my talk is about.
So my talk is about coding your business.
And I just want to share some experiences I've had,
some learnings I've had.
Some ideas we are even now working on.
And just get your thoughts, maybe, you know,
it would be nice if you guys could tell me, like,
what do you think, what if you tried something similar.
Or even if later you try something
and you know just tweet to me. That'd be cool.
So when I was doing Muziboo, about a year into Muziboo,
SoundCloud launched.
And you know they launched in a public data or something.
And they are a nice product.
And they started getting some traction.
But other than working on the core product,
one thing I noticed was that they had this thing called the API.
And somehow people were slowly starting to use that API
and people started writing apps on top of the API.
And if you go to their app listing now they've got dozens of apps.
And you know they have apps which help them get new musicians on board.
These are apps which will allow people to upload directly
from let's say a music recording program.
All these are apps that get some new listeners.
So people have used API to build charts
that are hip-hop charts, specific charts.
So I think the API really, really helped them grow their user base.
And that was a great learning for me.
In some ways it was you know it was the hard way that
I was learning, because they were taking off,
but I mean there was definitely something to learn from them.
And then I sort of started looking around
and I realized that API is definitely
the new business development.
You know today if you want to grow a product,
APIs are a great way to do that.
And it's like, if you look at a lot of other products,
so GitHub, Twitter, Facebook, Google -
there are so many examples that wouldn't be the same product
if they didn't have the API ecosystem.
And especially most in the last few years,
a lot of products are actually just APIs.
A lot of products around are simply APIs.
So for example, Firebase - I should use a clicker probably, sorry.
So Firebase is a tool that gives you a back
and forth mobile of web apps.
Swifttype for Surge, mailgun for delivering emails.
Plivo from the streets of Bangalore is computing with
?? (00:06:31:06) head on.
And they both provide APIs for telephoning.
So there are a lot of products which are simply APIs.
And I think as developers we are really,
really well-suited to do these kind of start ups.
We already understand our target audience.
We are the target audience.
We, all of us have been to hack-a-thons,
we have worked with different APIs,
we know what it feels like when the documentation is shitty,
what makes good code examples,
what kind of libraries do you need to kick start the environment.
We really understand this stuff really well already,
and I think if you were to start a company like this,
you're definitely at an advantage.
And so you can build a product
and you know you can get maybe some users
but what about marketing?
That's typically the question that I get asked most often from programmers.
Like how do you market your product?
How do you get customers?
And there are several ways to market a product.
Most of them don't work.
And are frustrating actually to execute on.
And what I - personally at least for us
and our company I've realized that writing
has turned out to be the best form of marketing actually.
And what I mean by that is if you look at developer docs
or marketing copy site or newsletters,
or even delegating great customer support,
it all boils down to being good at writing.
And, I mean that's just how it is.
For example, this is Mailgun's documentation.
If you go through it, it talks about setting up SPF records,
you know how to get to deployability,
why do you need dedicated IPs,
it's stuff that all of us already understand and can write.
We just need to be really good at communicating this to our customers.
So we already understand this stuff.
We just need to get better
at being able to communicate it in writing.
The same way if you look at Firebase's landing page,
any of us could sit down and write this
and we could build this and we could write this
and you just need to be good at writing again.
So fortunately there is good news, right.
I mean it's, as developers,
I think it's very easy to improve at writing.
And I'm just going to show you a few examples of how to do that.
So GitHub. I think one of the coolest things
that GitHub does is that every time you create a new depository,
it says add a readme file.
And that's a great starting point to start learning
how to write or communicate our ideas.
How many of you guys have opensource projects.
Even, or just some bit of code online?
And have you written a readme for it?
Oh, quite a few of you have, and quite a few have not. Good.
One hand stood up very long actually.
So, there you are, yeah.
So if you haven't,
just go back and write a readme for that,
and if you already have, maybe try to improve it.
Get some, maybe more feedback.
It's a great starting point to start writing
and learning how to write.
The other cool thing, at least in today's world,
is that product development involves a lot of writing,
and this obviously depends on company to company
but you can become a company like this
so you can choose to work for a company like this.
So for example, I'll give you an example from SupportBee.
So most of our feature requests are enhancement requests
typically originate in our subcode desk ?? (00:09:41:07),
so some customer, for example in this case somebody emailed saying,
can we have search word for word trash tickets?
And my colleague I asked who is here,
I asked him you know, do we support this?
So it turns out we support this in the API
but we don't support it in the front-end.
And so what we do is we write this ticket into -
we have a GitHub app - so the code,
we would write that into GitHub,
and we create an issue.
And other than create,
other than using the issue to actually
just review code or attach code,
what we do is we try to flesh out the feature completely in issues.
So we are encourage, not only encourage,
sort of we enforce everybody to just discuss
ompletely in issues. We don't even encourage
face to face or voice calls early on.
If you're not able to communicate something
in issues then you should probably go to a call,
and then also sum it up and put it back in the issue.
What this does it just forces you to
try to explain to your peers what you're trying to do.
Sometimes in terms of code,
sometimes in terms of the marketing copy
that you think should be there,
or the subject line of the email.
It forces you to communicate your ideas.
And acquiring that skill also helps you
in communicating those ideas to your customer.
So it's really the same sort of skills.
And once we know what we want to work on,
what we do, we obviously attach code
and then we go through maybe a sprint or two with that code.
And then finally once we are almost getting done,
we post screen shots in the same issue of the finished feature.
And what that does is, it -
one thing is that it really helps us review faster,
so we can, you know, know that this feature is done
and can be deployed.
But more than that,
it's also a starting point for writing a blog post about the feature.
And we have taken the same GitHub issues process
and turned it into user for our blog as well,
you know we power our blogs by JQL.
We create issues for each new feature that we have,
or if you want to put out a def post about how we did the feature.
And we use these assets and we write the block post.
And because we are already comfortable
with this GitHub issues process,
very easy to get feedback.
So just like code we can comment in-line,
we can help people if they're feeling a writer's block
or if they want some feedback.
It's very easy to give out feedback
and push out this block post.
So we really tried to make this process work for us,
and it has ended up, it has ended in a lot of our developers,
or people who've worked with us getting better at writing,
and in fact for the first time even realizing that they enjoy writing.
And it's worked really well for us
and I encourage you guys to go and try it out.
Because the cool thing about this process
if that you can start tomorrow.
You don't have to wait to start a company
to become good at writing.
You know you can do it in your current job.
So next time you have a feature release post,
go out and propose to do it yourself.
Maybe you have a job opening
and you're putting up a job on Haskee
(00:12:23:02 ??). You know, tell your founders
or tell your CEO that you want to write that.
And just practice.
So there's so many opportunities around us
to practice writing in development.
If you build a company like this,
one of the other cool things that happens is,
it's very easy to recruit a developer.
Because developers love hanging out with other developers, right.
That's why we are all here today
and will be here tomorrow.
And so it is a very natural fit there.
And I've been talking to a few developers
in the last couple of months
and I realize that most developers hate these block,
you know, job posts written with the words ninja,
or, like how many of you are ninjas here? No one?
What about programming rock stars? No one?
So yeah, I mean, people kind of hate that
and if you are a company like this that is developer friendly,
it will show through.
You won't have to put an effort to look like that.
And, so it really does help if you hire better people.
So what I'm saying is that,
we figured out that in the end it just falls under two things.
Doing great work on the product,
on the ecosystem, and then talking about it.
I think especially in India,
where we are really good at doing great work,
I think we are very, incredibly talented set of developers here.
But we are not so savvy about talking about it,
and it's not as much of a skill thing
I think as much as it's a mindset thing.
So it's about doing great work and talking about it.
But obviously, I mean, this is not easy.
You know building a company like this
is not going to be easy,
because it's all about good teams.
It's all about hiring the best people
that you can and after you hire them,
spending a lot of time helping them get even better.
And empowering them, so they can make decisions on your behalf.
And obviously this is a,
this is a very hard thing to achieve,
and it's very easy to get it wrong.
And you have to just keep trying.
And it takes a bit longer.
So if you are definitely trying to flip a start up soon,
don't try this. Don't do this. It'll take awhile,
but I think you'll get a much nicer company in the end.
And one of the side effects of working like this
or creating a company like this is that
you can actually work from the beach,
because now everything happens on the, online.
Everything happens in tools.
Everything is written, everything is documented.
And you become really comfortable.
It's like testing, right.
Before we started testing,
how many of you felt testing is gonna slow you down?
And how many of you now feel that,
oh I can't write something serious without tests.
Yeah, well same number of people.
Yeah. Good. Yeah, so it's the same thing.
It feels like writing is gonna slow your product development down.
It's gonna take, make decisions longer,
but it actually helps you get way more structure.
And you'll definitely see that in a few weeks or maybe a few months.
And - by the way that is a real picture
of us sitting and working from the beach,
so. That's one not-stock image.
And what's incredible to me personally
is that I was working on Musiboo for about three years,
about two of those were miserable.
Right, there was, I was just banging my head against a wall,
and I could have figured this out
and I could have changed my direction,
but I didn't. And I literally felt like I was stuck
in a Groundhog Day.
Right, it's very easy to get stuck in a Groundhog day.
And what you have to do is obviously
you have to step back,
and then you have to get a better perspective.
And I think the thing that prevented me from doing that
was that I had no semblance of a work-life balance.
Nothing. I was just working all the time.
I was under this assumption that if I am failing
it's only because I'm not working hard enough.
How many of you believe that actually?
That if you are not succeeding at something
then you just got to try harder? Yeah.
Quite a few people, right.
And I think this is kind of true
but I think it's not about the number of hours.
So definitely having some work-life balance
is very important in getting this perspective.
And the other thing I give thought a lot about
as a company is that there is simply no way we can outwork our competitors.
So for example our competitors are companies like FreshDesk,
which have thirty million dollars, two hundred people team.
Even if like all of us work two days in a day,
we would still not out-hour them.
So it's simply not going to work like that
and technology companies are not built like that.
They're built one team member
and one great decision taken at a time.
And that happens when you have a fresh perspective
and a clear vision.
And it's amazing to me that being in the knowledge industry
or industry driven so much by knowledge and by creative energy,
how little at least I did, and when I talked to other people,
people understand about how our brain itself works.
And that's I think probably where a lot
of these misconceptions come from.
So I highly recognize that you guys
take a look at this book called Your Brain at Work.
It's a very quick read. It's gonna take you a few hours to read.
How many of you have read this book? OK, only two people. Cool.
So. And both of them have (00:17:26:08) ??, so yeah.
So yeah, please go ahead and read this book.
What this book shows you is how to get more out of your work life.
How sometimes just trying harder is not the solution.
And it's a very enjoyable read
and it gives you a very nice perspective.
Apart from this, I've also lately started using RescueTime.
So I did a quick survey before the RubyConf
and I asked people how much they worked,
and so about twenty people I asked,
actually about twenty people filled out that survey,
and I think seventy percent of them said
that they work about sixty hours a week.
And I encourage everyone to go back
and set up this application.
It's free for about a week.
And you'll be surprised by the results.
You'll be surprised by how much time you just lose
in a YouTube video that somebody sent you
and you had no idea that you opened
and watched for thirty minutes.
So your time is definitely finite.
So there's no denying that.
But it's amazing that with that finite time
how much of it we lose without even knowing.
So try to use this application
and free up more of your time
and enjoy your life as well while you're building a start up.
I think that's really the key.
So Bangalore. When Prakash invited me to do the keynote,
he pushed out block which it said
I'm gonna bring a unique Indian perspective.
And I wasn't sure what that was gonna be entirely,
but one thing I do feel very passionate about
is being in this city actually.
So in the last couple of years I've traveled a lot.
I've been to Chile,
I've spent a lot of time in Vietnam
and some other southeast Asian countries.
And I've traveled a lot
and I really enjoy living in some of these places.
But I always come back to Bangalore,
and I really like spending time here simply for one reason.
I think this place is full of incredible developers.
It's just so amazing.
I haven't been to U.S. Yeah, thanks.
Thank you.
I haven't been to U.S.
But I've been to some of the other hubs.
I've been to Syngapore.
But seriously the development activity here is just amazing.
People are so passionate, they really like the code,
they like trying out new stuff.
And in general if you see our English ability,
everything is really good.
And I really think that we,
and especially today if you look around you,
there's enough money, there's enough resources,
enough accelerators,
some may even say too many accelerators
or incubators around us, to help you launch companies.
And I really hope that in 2014 a lot more
such companies get launched from Bangalore.
I'm totally rooting for you guys.
If I can help you guys in any way,
or anybody else, I'm totally up for it.
Let's build more such amazing companies.
So yeah. Happy New Year, and thank you so much.
So I wanted to keep the talk a bit short,
so you can either use the time for Q&A
or reclaim your fifteen minutes of life
and go back home early. It's your choice.
V.O.: Questions, anybody.
QUESTION: Regarding the writing of,
I mean encouraging your team to start writing.
When you started up, how big was your team?
P.D.: Sorry?
QUESTION: When you started off with Muziboo,
how big was your team when you
started actually writing in the code and solving issues?
P.D.: No, no, not really.
So none of this happened in Muziboo actually.
And that's why I kind of moved away from Muziboo.
I realized I'd gone too long, far too long,
to like, totally change
and the product had taken like a lot of fundamental decisions.
QUESTION: OK, one more connecting question.
So when was the point that,
how many team members were there
when you actually started encouraging your
team members to start doing this?
P.D.: Right. So that's a cool question actually,
and you have to start doing this
when you are just one person actually.
And you have to start from day one.
So it's funny but even when I started doing SupportBee,
I would actually, you know I was the sole developer
but I used pivotal tracker
and I would try to document everything,
and not as much but still.
Because I think that's the biggest challenge
in setting any kind of culture,
that you have to start really early on.
And when you say early,
you have to basically start with yourself.
So the best time to start is
when you're starting the company.
And some companies have done a good job of explaining this,
so recently you know we've been reading the walf??
(00:21:54:23) handbook.
I don't know how many of you guys know about it.
But there's a company called walf,
which makes a lot of cool games like Counterstrike I believe, right.
And, sorry, I'm not a gamer, so, yeah.
And, so Walf has a good handbook,
and that's what they said.
To build a company like this,
you need a very strong commitment from day one.
And one of the things I didn't mention
is that one reason we can do this
in a lot of companies can do this
and take longer to build better companies
is the fact that they don't take any investment.
So you know you might have to worry about that as well, sometimes.
QUESTION: Hey, um, Prateek.
Something that always fascinates me
with entrepreneurs who have started product-
moved to a different product is,
at what time did you decide that, OK,
this product sucks.
Or it's not gonna work,
I need to move on.
When do you take that decision?
It could be a lot of factors -
finance, team, motivation.
P.D.: Right, right.
QUESTION: What was your move?
P.D.: Right. So I definitely had a moment
where I clearly knew I had to move on.
And so for awhile obviously I thought
that you know I should keep trying,
and I talked to a few more entrepreneurs,
and given. So we had a lot of traction,
we had about a million visits at one point.
And we did have a good amount of traction,
but the thing that frustrated me the most
was that over the three years that I did Muziboo,
I learned a lot of new stuff. And not just in terms of programming,
in terms of how to go about product design and things like that.
And in the case of Muziboo it had already become
too big to sort of start over or to completely change,
especially with, and we didn't have a big team as well,
so it was just me and my co-founder
and I was pretty much the only programmer anyway.
So it just felt like, with the new experiences
that we had and the new knowledge that we had,
it just makes more sense to start something fresh.
Because one of the things that also happens is
when you are just starting out, sometimes you
pick an idea that's close to your heart, or looks cool,
but may not necessarily make business sense.
So with all those factors put in it
just felt that it's better to start over again
in a domain that I can relate to more.
One of the other problems in Muziboo
was I'm not a musician myself.
So after awhile I couldn't relate to their problems actually.
And it's, in Support it's been incredible
because we use SupportBee ourselves.
And I wanted to get into a domain where
at least I could relate to the target customers a lot more.
So even though I wasn't from customer support,
I could relate to business owners and small
and medium companies,
and so it made sense to just switch over.
QUESTION: OK, so your story is very close to,
you might like this, ??, he's a ??.
P.D.: OK.
QUESTION: But he started with his own service company.
No, he- yeah. First service company,
and then he expanded his product (00:24:27:19)
and then he learned this concept of ??, so. ??
P.D.: Right. Yeah I think a lot of entrepreneurs do that.
I think visual website optimizer are another one.
Paris ?? tried a couple of ideas.
In fact he had a music service as well.
I don't remember the name but it was there for awhile.
And, so I think even India there are a lot of entrepreneurs
who have done that actually.
And I think they've had pretty good success that way.
QUESTION: Do you think it's important
for someone who wants to start a start up
to first work in a desk job, you know,
with an MNC and then start the start up?
I mean do you need the experience or can you just,
you know, finish college and then go straight into a start up?
This is because I'm a college grad,
almost, so I want to know.
P.D.: Right, so obviously this answer
will come with a disclaimer that, yeah,
you know, there are always exceptions to the rule,
and so there are, like for example,
I think Fractor?? is one company
that came right out of college and did really well in India.
I don't know if you know about them.
But typically what I've seen is,
it does help to have a few years of experience.
But at least today you don't need to get that experience in an MNC,
necessarily.
You can actually get it in a well-run start up.
A start up with a certain amount of validation.
So probably you don't want to join a start up
that has no validation,
and you're not sure where the start up is headed.
But as soon as you think there's enough validation
or you like the product story or you like the founders,
you can definitely work with start ups.
And they can teach you a lot more.
Similarly because in starts ups you work,
you have to do what work,
and your work is always going to be used.
Big companies have the luxury of just sitting
on your work or just wasting your time.
But in a start up that luxury isn't there,
thankfully. So you're always going to gain a lot more exposure.
So yes, to answer your question,
I think it's good to get some experience.
QUESTION: So hi Prateek,
I'm going to add a comment,
and then you can probably add more to it.
To start up, there's no right time.
But what I believe is the research that goes into starting up.
So whether you're out of college or you work for MNC,
whatever that means, but all your work for any company,
as long as you do good work and you find a problem you can solve,
and you validate it, by going, asking, talking to people.
Then you can start up.
And then the rest of the start up stuff
like finances and team and stuff comes through.
So Prateek it'd be pretty interesting
to see how you started about the idea about SupportBee.
Why you thought there was a gap.
When did you realize that this could actually potentially take off?
And finally, you know, competition.
P.D.: Right. Can these lights be a little bit dimmer?
It's, if it's OK.
So sorry, so your question was when did I,
when did I start and why did I think it was a good idea?
QUESTION: So you, there must have been a time
when you found there's a pain point,
and was like hey, man, this is a cool idea,
then you did your research.
Then you actually said,
all right I think there is some app to be found.
And finally competition.
P.D.: Right, right.
So when I was coming out of Muziboo-
actually in some ways that's the other lesson
I have learned. It's always easy to learn in hindsight,
right. You can look back and it's much easier to come up with lessons,
life lessons. So take it with a pinch of salt.
But one thing I realized was that after Muziboo,
I was pretty, like, not really desperate,
but I was like, in a rush. I was like,
oh my god man, you know, I've been sitting
for a whole twenty days without doing anything.
You know, three weeks. And, so I was like,
actively looking for ideas, and we've had,
we had this idea about having a customer support tool before.
Because we tried to find form to use
where we ended up using something,
but it wasn't that great.
So it was around that time that I came up with the idea,
all right. And so, one of the first things I did was,
and we had a few other ideas before that,
so we tried validating those, and those didn't work with customers.
So we would just put about,
put up a landing page and then try talking to people.
And the one of the first things I did about,
when I came up with the SupportBee idea was,
I talked to Valerie from Balsamiq.
So Balsamiq is a very popular company
I think most of you guys would know.
And they were very, very well-known for their customer support.
So I reached out to Valerie
and she was kind enough to come on a Skype call
and talk to me about the idea,
and we did this with a few other companies like BooFoo ??
and Discuss, and actually a lot of those interviews are now online,
on our blog. And we have also written more about this process,
it's still on our blog if you guys are interested in checking it out.
And so with, in a month,
a month and a half even then we thought,
OK, we could do this. I think what Coby said in the morning that,
you basically found it at least as hard
as you thought it was going to be,
in my case it was definitely true.
So I thought OK, so I just need to
pass an email and then I can get started.
And that's it. Passing the email too me a night,
and then ?? (00:29:12:21) a little bit later,
it took us a whole year or something, pretty much.
And so we started coding,
but getting the product out it took us
about a good eight months or something.
And in private ... ?? (00:29:27)
V.O.: Anymore questions? All right,
thank you Prateek.
P.D.: All right, thank you so much.