Utkarsh Sinha Shares Why He Believes In Bootstrapping

Utkarsh Sinha who is a Venture Capital Investment Professional at BitChemy Ventures tells us why he believes in bootstrapping. Here is what he has to say. 

I remember, back in 2006 when I had my first startup in video analytics while I was pursuing my Electrical engineering; I didn’t know the term ‘startup’ because the video frame slicing algorithm was built for a close group of dorm mates. Why? The reason is extremely funny – we wanted to find out how many times does Christian Bale wear the Batman mask and what is the total duration of wearing it. It was for pure fun, that’s it, we had no money-making intention behind it.

It worked!

Why wouldn’t it, we worked on it non-stop for 4 days and scrapped 29.6 GB worth of Batman Begins video from Youtube then and were being asked by the university to shut down; as our personal space quota of 5GB/student was exhausted (we distributed the database among 7 of us).

Finally, we found out by piecing the video dump we had to make a full length movie; where Christian Bale wore the mask for precisely 24 mins 51 secs 23 ms. It gave us the HIGH!

Dude we did it! (Post that we were asked by the IT department to delete the nonsense we had and stop using the university infrastructure and some long string of events around it.)

What did you observe in the above text?

• We never thought about raising money to build the scrappy product.
• We never knew the term ‘Startup’, totally uncorrupted minds doing things for fun.
• We never visited any so-called startup events.
• We called ourselves entrepreneurs because we solved our own damn problem, even if it was to show off.

However, the situation is very different now. Why?

• Entrepreneurs these days conjure an idea and start approaching investors to fund their idea.
• They have absolutely no clarity about the product, leave market aside because they would like to think about it post several investor meetings.
• They start attending several startup events around the country. This is where I think they waste their time.

Boss, keep your head down and concentrate on your product.

Almost everytime the same kind and catchment of startups get to pitch their products to the investors and mostly they don’t get funded. Entrepreneurs should not attend events until and unless they expect a good clutch of entrepreneurs to attend the event, investors are everywhere and they come almost everytime. Trust me, if you hand over your pitch deck in printed format or even send an email to us at the event, we forget it later until and unless you call me and that is if we take your call.

Trying not be an jerk, but every investor has to handle multiple calls where maximum is between them and their portfolio companies. If anyone tells you that the best place to find an investor is at startup events, yes we are there but won’t really take you seriously until and unless you have a strong reference.

Best reference is from the founders of their existing portfolio. Trust me, work on this angle.

Stop attending every startup event that happens in your city, stop attending all such startup competitions (you do not gain anything, you are your best judge); do not let an ‘Analyst’ who has absolutely no startup experience tell you that your idea is not worth it. Let them talk, you should focus on executing your business idea into a scrappy product first and then sell it to your frenemies, they’ll rip the product apart, you should be happy then. Rework on it, get the frenemy back and then get a founder who is in the VCs portfolio to refer you.

You’ll have the best time of your life.

Do not let startup events and fresh out of college analysts judge your idea/scrappy product; build it, rip it apart, rebuild and then get some money to release it to larger audience.

Summary:

• Do not raise VC money till you know your paying audience.
• Do not attend startup events just for the heck of it.
• Befriend founders of startups who have been funded, to learn and refine your product.
• Do not ask for money yet.
• Get referred only when you do not need to look at your pitch deck to talk to the investor.