#6 - Office spaces, Team building, Soft Serve, Entity Names, Interns and everything that happened last week!
WE ARE LIVE! WE ARE LIVE! WE ARE LIVE! Also, race weekend coming soon!!!
Hello! Hey! Hi! Welcome to the very late and what should have been #10 but #6 edition of the Wednesday Waffle! I haven’t written in a month and that’s because of an insane time I’ve been having at Fanpit!
To sum up - we got a new client (Soft Serve Co.), opened up a new office (we are calling it the Coffee House by Fanpit), had a first batch of wonderful people join us and so much more!
Oh! We got our entity name approval from MCA! Soon, we will be Fanpit Technologies Private Limited! Fun times ahead!
Read on and I’ll tell you!
Advice - A founder must sell!
If you are ever caught between having to get a sales lead, and having to sell your product yourself, pick the latter and get your hands dirty.
Customers love to see the obsession (read passion) you bring to the table and your pitch would be far more effective than any sales guy / marketing guru! I have seen this personally and this is super time tested!
Take Stripe - for example. Today, Stripe is the behemoth / identity layer for finance and payments but way back when it started, giants like Paypal already had a name. The founders apparently sat beside merchants and did the demo themselves to show them how incredibly easy it was to go live with payments!
Selling and being close to the ground is also the best way to get direct feedback on how your product can be better! We went live with Soft Serve 26th Feb and I spent all my evenings out here talking to people and getting direct feedback on my product and I was able to make some very enabling changes to my UI/UX that eases acceptance!
So my friend, go out and make the sale! If you need a sounding board to get clarity, I’m here for you! You would probably me able to catch me at Soft Serve from 6 PM to 12 AM on all days (except Monday :p)
A founder’s journey can be lonely
And especially if you are a solo-founder, it could make things a lot more difficult! Which is why building a team is very important and it could literally make or break a startup!
That being said, hello Sahithi! Welcome to Fanpit!
Sahithi joint us to be part of the Founder’s Office as an Associate and we couldn’t be happier! She would eventually move on to leading sales and operations!
We also put together a stellar tech team that has been working at ripping apart everything that I have done over the last couple of months to “refactor” my code base. Themozhi and Swetha - fresh from SSN join us as interns. My task now is to find ways to raise money and fund their salaries, because they seem to be too good to let go off!
My tech head, whom I cannot name here is my proudest convert! I have been pitching ideas to him for about five years now and I finally managed to get him excited about Fanpit! I did not know how big of a shot he was until I was informed so by our intern pool! Kudos to me I guess!
I also have Nachi join me to help with building Fanpit products. Nachi too is building his own startup and is super fun to have around in stressful situations!
We are Fanpit!
We also experienced our first server crash!
We put out an ad on LinkedIn to hire interns for design and marketing and UI/UX. We did not want to use any third party providers and wanted to collect all applications because we ran a pretty cool AI model on them to figure out a perfect fit!
Our servers were on a low tier and couldn’t handle what came next! We had close to about 500 applications hit our servers in less than an hour! We were ready for 100 overall :p
Anyway, we scaled the servers up and learnt about auto-scaling! Rest assured, this won’t happen again I hope :p
We’re live at Soft Serve!
I spoke about maybe going live with one more client last time. We did!
And as of this post, we have 98 users who have signed up to be part of Fanpit! Everyone loved what we had to say and we can’t wait to build on!
If you every are at Soft Serve, check out their Breakfast Cup and Cereal Milk! Never would I ever had imagined cereal and ice cream pair so well!
Coffee House by Fanpit
We moved into Fanpit’s first ever office space at Gopalpuram! The premises that once was home to my mom’s practice, now houses us. We did up the kitchen to give it a coffee - shop vibe and made sure every room has a TV. It feels professional now!
Oh and we have bloody fast wifi - something that I am super proud about! We bought a new router - and if you are ever looking for one - get this one!
Non - Fanpit related stuff, I watched a movie last week!
In fact two! NEEK and Vidamuyarchi! Both these movies were fun and it was nice to not think too much about things and get my mind all clouded. I do miss the Sathyam popcorn mixers though. PVR Cinemas - please bring them back!
I ALSO GOT A PRESSURE GUN TO WASH WALLS!
Omg, I have to talk about this! I bought this pressure washing gun to wash the walls and the floors in the terrace at office and it’s super cool! It felt like one of those satisfying Instagram cleaning reels! If you ever want to let off some steam and chill out, we have a lot of walls that need washing!
Do you see a difference? Amazing right!
Mind dump, raising funds
I’ve been pondering over raising funds for quite a bit of time now. The whole process is excruciatingly hard, especially if you are only cold emailing VCs.
I started writing to VCs and making pitch decks right at the idea stage and it wasn’t until we went live with our first client (Umber Speciality Coffee) and started seeing a few users did I even get a response. So cold emailing works, but you need to have something to show for it!
Here is the problem, everytime I hit a milestone, I ponder over the thought of raising funds. On one hand, this means better growth, better security and a lot other benefits. But on the other hand, it means giving up a larger share of equity and not to mention, going through a brutally hard process of making and updating pitch decks.
If you are starting up and are looking at what your deck should be structured like, there is no right answer. I’ve found that while decks need to have very specific information, the way it flows through is very personal. To make things easier for you, I’ve decided to open source my deck template for you to build on!
Tools to help you - your first 100 days!
When you do start up, you are going to have to make a lot of decisions. A bulk of those would revolve around what tools you need to use to help your team and organisation!
Here are a list of tools we are using to make it easier for us!
Communication - Slack
Slack is effortlessly the best. The kind of features and integrations it offers is unparalleled!
Email - Zoho
I am aware that Microsoft has a Founders Program that gives you email for free for one year. The reason we decided to go ahead with Zoho is that, over a period of time, Microsoft turns out to be a lot more expensive. So factor that into your costing as well!
Tasks and Tracking - Slack
Does the job
Documentation - Confluence
Recommended by my tech head. Did not ask any questions
Hosting - Render
While I was trying to figure out where to host, there was a lot of mumbo jumbo on AWS, Azure and the likes. Render seemed pretty straight forward gets the job done
Recruitment - LinkedIn for advertisements, in house development for tracking and collection of CVs.
Accounting and ERP - Odoo
We are still playing around with this one.
Sales and Leads tracking - Slack !
Earworm - Jiyara,
Check it out, you will understand why!
Hopefully, you would be able to find Fanpit in and around more! Here is to manifesting! How did you like this? What clicked? What missed? What would you like to read more about?
You can reach me at tejas@fanpit.live or wherever you usually find me hanging around!
Cheers!
TPS