When I was in Infosys, I renovated my father’s house and constructed few new rooms. Since I was very good in Engineering Drawing, I used that trait to plan every inch of my my house. I was inspired by US buildings (when I worked there) and Infosys’ building quality. I used the same concept for my house. After building it, I realized that to build such a good quality house, it is not that expensive and by proper planning, we could get almost all the functional features that are needed for the house. Since the Indian Customers are not aware of many things about quality, I thought of sharing my experience with them through HomePlanGuru.com and make Indian homes on par with developed countries homes.

2. Are you an architect/civil engineer?
Fortunately, NO. (Had it been yes, then the concept of HomePlanGuru.com wouldn’t have come)

3. Did you plan your own house? Did HomePlanGuru came out of it?
Yes!

4. How do you use your past experience in your present work?
My IT Knowledge & experience helps me a lot in my venture. This is how it is:

• I use IT processes for everything starting from ‘Requirements gathering’.
• I use technology (free softwares like OpenOffice, Google Sketchup, etc) for planning and Email & Online Chat for communication.
• I developed my own website which wouldn’t have been possible had I not been in IT.
• I’m in the process of developing a product for Builders & Customers for which I’m using my IT skills.

5. Indians or at least the middle class doesn’t spend much on planning the house, how do you sell yourself to them?
My charges are highly affordable and are also transparent (i.e. all our charges are available in www.HomePlanGuru.com/services.php ). For a 2D floor plan (Basic), I charge just Re.1/- per sq.ft. For 3D Plan (Basic), I charge just Rs.3/- per sq.ft.

Initially, I used to charge Rs.20/- per sq.ft for all the plans and it was a bit expensive for middle class. Now I’ve split that into these various ‘Basic’ plans so that if people want to do just 2D & 3D, they can pay just Rs.4/- (= Re1 for 2D + Rs.3 for 3D) per sq.ft. Thus it is highly affordable.

It is tough to sell a new concept to any customer. But by showing them the benefits of planning and making it highly affordable, I’m able to sell my services.

6. How are you different from other architects/civil engineers?

Many people ask the same question and for the same reason I’ve given the title of a book that I’m preparing now as “Architects don’t tell; Builders don’t do; Customers don’t get and Dream Home: still a Dream?” (see attached image for full title of the book). It will have a detailed answer to this question.

To make it short, HomePlanGuru.com provides Usability & Functional plans from a Customer perspective which (to my knowledge) is not provided by Architects / Civil Engineers. They provide plans that are ‘technical’ and ‘aesthetic’ in nature which is mostly useful for the builder and not for the customer (but for the aesthetic plan).

If your next question is “What are Usability & Functional Plans?”, then you have to read all the FAQs in our website (http://www.homeplanguru.com/faq.php) or wait for the book to be released. Again to be short, they are the plans that define usable and functional aspects of a home which is much more important than the aesthetic aspect of the home.

7. What do you want suggest to other starters?
I’m not that great to suggest. But this is what I think for myself:

• You should be extremely passionate about what you do.
• You should be first convinced about the fact that you are adding value to your customer through your product/service.
• You should first get your family support (especially from your spouse) if you are a first generation entrepreneur.
  Before you quit your regular day job, you should make yourself debt free and have enough savings to face any adversity in your life.
• The most important one that gives me energy is: “Never worry about what others will think about you if you fail. You are better than other people who never tried anything of their own. It is not the end result, but the journey that matters a lot not only in entrepreneurship but also in our life”

But the true single sign on for the web doesn’t exist yet, but bigger players on the web have so many users that, we can consider them as sso providers. Allowing our users to use one of the established service providers userid/password pair gives us the advantage of converting their users into ours. It also reduces the pain of creating Yet Another User Id/Pw for the user, reducing the entry barrier for our users.

In my personal experience at ubuntuAtWork.org, I have seen 45% increase in registration after we opened up register/login using FB Connect. There are many other success stories.
Solutions:
In the market we have three big compitators

• OpenID : Platform and vendor independent. Standards set by an open standards committe. Big internet companies like Google, Yahoo, etc are supporting them. OpenId is a distributed identity provider and has the biggest user base in the world. The usebase also includes the users of gmail, ymail, wordpress, LJ etc
• Facebook connect: Facebook is worlds biggest social network as of today. It has free APIs for the usage.
• Google Friend Connect: is the compitator to Facebook connect. It has bigger user base in India considering the people on orkut and people using gmail (yes, gmail over took Yahoo recently in India)

Integrated solution: Combination of OpenId and facebook connect will give us bigger advantage. It gives us a large internet users we could target. Drupal the platform used by many communities by default supports OpenId at core. And its not difficult to use it on the wordpress and Joomla. Facebook connect is a simple API, the required modules exist for drupal to implement this.

If the user still wants to cerate pw, he can still do it. (anyway he needs to setup a userid).

Challenges: Challenges of implementing SSO is not in technology but in user interface. Making it easy for the user to register or login is big challenge. Some of the widgets/present implementation can help us in this regard.

References:

• ID selector widget https://www.idselector.com/
• http://developers.facebook.com/connect.php
• http://www.google.com/friendconnect/
• http://www.oxfam.org/user/
• https://openid.org/home
• List of sites using FB Connect http://www.allfacebook.com/facebook-connect-sites/
• List of sites using OpenId http://openiddirectory.com/

Image Credit: Idselector.

[thej] What has been the most challenging part of setting up and running the potluck?
[Birla] I guess the most challenging part has been in the mind. We do not come from a business family and the concept of doing business is alien to us. Initial decision to start restaurant was full of days of extreme self doubt to days of unlimited excitement and ideation. The next challenge was that we were venturing into a totally unknown area. We had no idea how to setup a restaurant kitchen, price food, get licenses and many more such things. We had to learn all this on job and obviously we did enough mistakes also.
In the operational phase with two start-ups in hand time is always a constraint. You might see me operating my billing machine in restaurant and also do my work on laptop ( including writing this ). Besides this Indian cooking is a very human dependent process and it is very difficult to maintain quality and consistency. Unless I monitor it closely, it can go out of hand at any point.

[thej] Why only North Indian? Why not Chinese or south Indian? or the best multi cusine?
[Birla] I guess the choice was between being master of none or master of one. I strongly feel that food is something you need to grow up with to understand the finer nuances. Our family is a multi cultural as my wife is a Tamilian born and brought up in Bihar and I am a UP guy living in Bangalore for past 15 years and our kids speak 4 languages – Hindi, English, Tamil, Kannada. I have been lucky enough to have home food from various parts of India on a regular basis. I also realize that no point in expecting a Delhi guy to understand how to make a good Bisi Bele Bhath and a Bangalore guy to make good Phulka. Unless you have grown up eating that type of food it is tough to get it right. My forte was North Indian food and I decided to stick to my strengths. But overall we are open to start a pure South Indian place but we will prefer to set that up in north.

[thej] Why the name potluck? Is there a story behind it?
[Birla] Oh Ya! There is a story. I used to organize monthly Potlucks in Amazon and they used to be real fun events. Almost everybody used to cook and bring stuff and we used to have a great time eating together. Lot of non cooks got inspired to learn cooking and I enjoyed the entire experience of organizing this. I even started awards in these Potlucks and we created innovative awards like Ma Ka Lal award for somebody who’s Mom cooked for the Potluck and a Desperate Housewife award for somebody who was over eager to feed other the stuff she cooked ( and ya I got beaten up by her after that ).

[thej] So what kind of preparation do you need to start with this venture as this was not your main strength (considering technology as ur main strength)?[Birla] I was totally new to this domain and doing the business is not something me or my family have a history of. We did pretty much all the mistakes which are possible in this domain. I guess the first step has to talk to people in this domain. Lot of restaurants do close and this is not an easy business. Lot of people have a wrong notion that any food business will run. They do not understand that food business just like any other business has a good probability of failure also.
I should not talk about my preparation as I was certainly not well prepared. I do advise few budding entrepreneurs now so that they can learn from my mistakes instead of learning it after doing them.

[thej] Anything you want to suggest to our readers who want to start a venture?
[Birla] My suggestion would be to first make up their mind. Starting ventures do require you to go through both good and bad times and you need to take both of them in your stride. Some of the assumptions entrepreneurs make do not span out as they might want it to be so you need to be flexible but then there are some areas where you need to go through those dark tunnels and you got to hold on to your beliefs and hard work.

Another important aspect is that you should be ready for learning as well as unlearning. Both might be needed equally to respond to the challenges you face as an entrepreneur especially when you venture into an unknown domain.

1. You should have a burning desire to start something on your own. Of a kind where you really don’t care about the outcome, but be prepared to go into it, just because that’s the life choice you want to have work wise. And thinking ahead, you are okay with the outcome of ‘tried and failed’ rather than ‘entertained the desire and not tried’. So at a very basic level, if you are mentally geared up with these kind of thoughts and preparedness, then you will automatically know and jump into it.
2. Reading up a lot on lot of Entrepreneur/Tech blogs helps a lot to attain a level of mental preparedness. The main thing it helps you with is, by contributing towards keeping you motivated and energized. Also it helps you especially on your downs. As so many others have said, entrepreneurship indeed is a roller coaster journey. So if you really absorb the experience shared by the ‘have been there and done that’ kinds, you can really do a lot of things in the right way.
   Since this point is about reading, its best to leave you with some good pointers to some people whom we like to read. To name a few: Paul Graham, Joel Spolsky, Marc Andreessen, Derek Sivers and last but not the least in any way, Dharmesh Shah. All of these guys have three things in common:
   1. They can code (emphasis on can)
   2. have all started companies and succeeded and
   3. also have decided to share their experiences.
3. We can write a lot of other points if we try to. But since the earlier point led us to point you to these wonderful people who have really captured a lot, which we will end up repeating, so we suggest you do read up what these gentlemen have written.
4. But finally, remember to also limit (and adapt) the extent to you want to follow these great guys. Because somethings you should do which you really believe in, irrespective of what anyone says for that matter. Remember you have decided to be an Entrepreneur! :)

Note: This series is in no way related to my work at Infosys

[thej]As of today there are quite a few players in this field from Google to mapmyindia. How do you place yourself?
[sud] Yes we looked at those players before we started. We felt it is possible to build a good user base nevertheless.

[thej]Why SMS? Do you think sms will still be big as data is becoming cheap?
[sud] Oh we just chose SMS as our first offering. User uptake proved it was a good choice. Other channels are in the lab now.

[thej]Future plans?
[sud] Help people on the move better and better. Expand to other cities.


[thej]I know you use AWS, what other technologies you use?
[sud] We initially thought we will reuse existing content, technologies and frameworks. But in the end we figured we had to create most ourselves. Majority of the systems are custom software using c++ on linux. There is also Java, perl, etc.

[thej]What blog and books do you suggest for others?
[sud]Others, who? Other startups? Then www.paulgraham.com anyday :-)

Note 1: BTW they have pretty decent size of 15 now are looking for great web developers. Dont forget to send your resume.

Note 2: OnZe expands to One and Zero. This is the name they came up with when they were trying to find a neutral tech name.

Note 3: As of now LatLong works in Bangalore and Chennai. They are working to add more cities.

I personally know many but there could be many more, who would have left Infy before I joined Infosys. So I need your help to get in touch with them. Help and expect a great Outfoscion every week starting this monday.

Please use the form below to suggest an Outfoscion.

Even though I think all big IT companies should buy some really large credits there, I don’t think its practical :) But personally I am behind lots of bad code

Every time I see my old code, I feel I could have done better. Is it normal for any developer? #

I am planning to become patron member next month (My this month’s budget for donation has been used. Also that I am trying live frugal, I can’t cross my monthly planned budget, so will wait till next month. Any wayWikipedia still needs your help). Go ahead become a patron member.
Two big developer community sites StackOverFlow and DailyWTF are supporting and sponsoring them. So its genuine.

“The Bad Code Offset provides a convenient and rational approach for balancing out the bad code we all have created at one time or another throughout our lifetime—even when we can’t go back and fix it directly.

Denominated in Source Lines of Code (SLOC), every purchase will offset the desired quantity of SLOC and pave the way toward future code excellence. [1 SLOC]

Money raised through the purchase of Bad Code Offsets supports the various Open Source Initiatives that are performing vital work towards the salvation of our future code base.

Every purchase of an offset today will take us one line of code closer to our goal of universal code excellence. Banish the bugs in your past as you help usher in a new age of software development.”

Ref:
1. StackOverFlow Blog
2. TheDailyWTF article

Ease of Driving:
Let me tell you, this wasn’t my favorite small car. It was MS-Zen. But then by the time I was capable enough to buy a car, Zen was phased out. WagonR’s engine is pretty capable for a small car with 1.1lt, 64bhp. But because of its tall body it can’t handle the curves well at above 60kmph and wind above 90kmph. But that said this car is very zippy between 40 to 60, can be as good as Zen inside the city. Since the driver almost sits on the front wheels you know where exactly they are, very important when you are competing with autos. It’s small, enough capable and easy to drive. Its an amazing city car but an average highway car.

It’s comfortable and its poor-man’s MUV:
One of the reasons I bought this version of the car was split back seats. They are full push backs, so I have a car with all four seats as push back seats. It’s very important if you plan to take your parents on a long drive. Along with good head room this makes the best back seats in small car segment. The shock absorbers are not best in the class but I heard the recent model has better gas-filled suspension.

Since it is tall and also the back seats can be folder front (one or both), it gives you lot of luggage space. We have carried almost everything at the back.

If you are a cyclist, it can easily take two bicycles without any problem. So for me its an affordable MUV.

No problem car and sure value for money:
I have few hundreds of kilomteres in a day (Many five hundreds, few 800+ and 1k). I have done 300km in one stretch. I have done that on some of the worst road. I haven’t faced any problems except for occasional punctures. Its been truly a no problem car.

I have a petrol variant and it gives about 13/14kmpl. It’s not great but neither its very bad. I think it’s on par with cars in its segment (except the ones run on LPG/Diesel). At 4lakh, I think its worth every rupee.