Inverted Passion

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Search Results for: money

Business ideas are dead; chase after market opportunity

Posted on Author Paras ChopraPosted in Entrepreneurship8 Replies

In my previous blog post titled “How making money changed my perspective on startup ideas“, I argued that business ideas don’t have a lot of value in isolation. It is the market opportunity coupled with good execution which generates value and revenues. In this post I want to go one step further and argue that most successful (software) companies got there by chasing a market opportunity and not by having a unique business idea.

Take example of any successful software company and you will find that their business idea was not unique. You say Facebook, I say Friendster. You say Google, I say Altavista. In fact, I think citing such examples is not a good idea because odds of a startup achieving a billion dollar valuation (and becoming a brand) are close to none. I am more interested in knowing how the “long tail” of software companies achieve million dollar plus revenues. That’s a realistic, achievable target and the odds of your startup becoming a Fortune 50000 business are much higher than it becoming Google. So, we should drop the dreams of IPO (for now), let’s just see how businesses make million dollar revenues. ...  Read the entire post →

Startups and Nihilism don’t go together

Posted on Author Paras ChopraPosted in Entrepreneurship, Personal, Philosophy10 Replies

Note: if meaning of life and startups don’t excite you, it is recommended that you skip this post. You will find it boring.

I know this is a weird title. But I have finally convinced myself that you cannot afford to be too philosophical if you are doing a startup. Doing a startup could turn out to be a terrible experience for those who especially adhere to philosophy of Nihilism. For those who aren’t aware of Nihilism, it says that life has no meaning or purpose and is in fact pointless. This philosophy was popularized by the German philosopher Nietzsche and became popular with atheists. After all, if there is no God, what’s the point of life? ...  Read the entire post →

The Turing-roulette Game

Posted on Author Paras ChopraPosted in Philosophy

I don’t know if it has been proposed earlier, but the other day I had an interesting idea about creating a variant of Turing Test and mashing it up in a Chataroulette kind of environment. As you may be aware, Turing test comprises of a game where a human chats with an unknown entity (which may be a computer or another human). The job of a human is to figure out whether the entity is human or a computer. It is proposed that if a computer passes Turing test (that is, if it manages to fool the human into thinking that it is a human), then we may call that computer “intelligent”. Unrelated to Turing test, Chataroulette is an online site where random strangers are paired up for chatting.  ...  Read the entire post →

Compilation of revenue figures for different kinds of startups

Posted on Author Paras ChopraPosted in Entrepreneurship, Personal10 Replies

Imagine for a moment that you have created a new web app and after about 3 months of launching you are doing $2000 per month of sales. Would you consider yourself as a successful startup?

Well, you are already ahead of majority of startups which never get to see any revenue. So, in that way you are doing good. Plus if $2000 covers all your human and infrastructure cost, that means you have broken even and are doing really well. Is breaking-even the measure of success for a startup?

You certainly didn’t take the risk to earn just-enough money. Why would you leave your day job if your goal was to just break-even? So, this directly takes us back to our original question – when do you say that your startup is a success? ...  Read the entire post →

Startup evolution – from idea to IPO in 10 really hard steps

Posted on Author Paras ChopraPosted in Entrepreneurship, Philosophy5 Replies

1. Having an idea is easy (not a problem at all)
2. Creating a product is hard (development problem)
3. Creating an awesome product is even harder (execution problem)
4. Having people notice it is real hard (marketing problem)
5. Making people use it is very, very difficult (credibility problem)
6. Generating cash out of it is simply not doable (sales problem)
7. Generating money and being profitable consistently is impossible (business creation problem)
8. Having successful multiple product lines is you-must-be-out-of-your-mind (successful business creation problem)
9. Rejecting acquisition offers is way, way harder (because it is tempting and odds are that you will never reach till that stage)
10. Doing an IPO is the ultimate hardest but simply awesome ...  Read the entire post →

So, you have a million dollars. Now what?

Posted on Author Paras ChopraPosted in Entrepreneurship, Personal, Philosophy13 Replies

Suppose you win a lottery or get a successful exit for your startup. You suddenly find yourself with a million dollars to play with. It is like what you always dreamt for has become a reality. At this point, what would you do? What would your future look like?

It is hard to imagine not having fun with a million dollars in bank. But that is precisely what I (sadly) concluded after thinking deeply over this issue. There are multiple reasons why I think a million dollars won’t bring me the freedom, happiness and euphoria that I had thought were main motivators for me.  ...  Read the entire post →

Golden Rule for Startups

Posted on Author Paras ChopraPosted in Entrepreneurship, Personal4 Replies

If you are like most of the entrepreneurs, you want to find a business idea which can change the world and make you a famous millionaire. Plus you want an idea which is not hard to execute so that you may have best of all worlds. There is nothing wrong with this thought, except that either it is impossible or you need heavy doses of luck to make it a reality.

Easy to start and execute businesses rarely make it big. If you are thinking of writing an application which will revolutionize the web overnight, forget it. If you are thinking of coming up with a business model which will rock the world and make you arrive on the scene instantly, forget it. ...  Read the entire post →

A New Internet on the Anvil?

Posted on Author Paras ChopraPosted in Technology3 Replies

[Note: The following is a guest post written by Heather Johnson exclusively for this blog. If you too want to write a guest post, you are most welcome. Contact me at [email protected]]

In today’s scenario, is it possible to even think for a moment about life without the Internet? The web as we know it has evolved tremendously over the past 15 years to be used for purposes beyond sending email and its popularity has spread to every nook and corner of the globe. But has progress truly been made, especially in the way that it should have been? ...  Read the entire post →

How I built a web app in six days for Rs. 350 ($8.75) only

Posted on Author Paras ChopraPosted in Entrepreneurship, Personal, Technology19 Replies

I just read this story where they talk about how they built a web app in 4 days for $10,000. Voila! It struck me that I have been equally competitive (if not better) in terms of building a web app. So, here I share my story of building a web app.

I recently built MyJugaad.in, which lets anybody create a slideshow from a set of webpages or RSS feeds. Following is the time line and the money involved during making this web app.

  • Day 1: Conceived the idea. Explored the idea space. Refined it. Drew user interface for the slideshow on a paper.
  • Day 2: Realized that Javascript is the way to go forward. Researched on Javascript Toolkits. Found JQuery to be the best. Learnt Jquery. Started programming Slideshow front-end using JQuery.
  • Day 3: Wasted a ton of time on sorting cross-browser incompatibilities. Done some more programming. Working prototype ready by evening.
  • Day 4: Wanted to make a system for user authentication and management, slideshow creation and management. Confused between Django, CodeIgniter or CakePhP. Chose CodeIgniter. Started Learning and programming the web app. (Used SimplePie for RSS feed fetching and parsing.)
  • Day 5: Finished Programming. Discovered that NYTimes.com was breaking the slideshow due to their iframe breaking script. Had a hell of a time trying fixing that.
  • Day 6: Looked for interesting free designs on the web. Chose this. Implemented and integrated the design with the web app. Wrote a basic ‘about’, ‘faq’, ‘contact’ page. Uploaded the web app on a shared hosting account free of cost (courtesy: my friend). Used a domain already purchased: myjugaad.in (cost Rs. 350). Seeded the app with a few initial users and data. Announced the web app on my homepage and status message on GTalk.

What’s missing?

  • Market Research: I should have done initial market research. Instead, I simply jumped into programming the web app. If I had done some market research, I would have discovered a product with almost the same feature set as mine’s. Nevertheless, I learnt a lot during my six day journay. So, I don’t regret making this app.
  • Testing: I just did some initial testing. But should have done a little bit more testing.
  • Users: I didn’t do any marketing for my web app. That’s bad and I am going to fix it soon.

Hope this post helps you write and launch your own web app in record time.
Any thoughts? ...  Read the entire post →

30 by 30

Posted on Author Paras ChopraPosted in Personal8 Replies

Update: 5th September 2025. Striking off a few more items (only 8 years beyond 30!)

Update: 23rd November 2014. Struck a few more items (Only 2.5 years remaining to complete the rest. So. much. pressure.)

Update: 6th November 2011. Yay, striking off a few items of the list

The aim of this post is to list 30 things which I would want to do before I turn 30 (I turned 21 yesterday). Got inspired by this and this. So, here goes my list (in no particular order):

  • Learn to play Electric Guitar and start my own Rock band
  • Write a novel on my philosophy of life (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance style) (2012; Wrote a 100+ page unpublished book that successfully wooed by wife into marrying me)
  • Start a startup incubator (Ycombinator style) (2024; started Lossfunk, flirted with the idea of incubating companies)
  • Start my own (successful) startup (see Wingify)
  • Go to the moon (I know it sounds crazy!)
  • Earn Rs 100 crore (I know this sounds naive!) – (2025;  went waaay past it! Sold Wingify to private equity firm)
  • Read thoroughly The Road to Reality
  • Publish a paper in Science or Nature
  • Reduce India’s poverty by at least 10%
  • Produce something creatively viral (I guess some posts that I wrote will qualify for that?)
  • Travel backpacking across Western Europe (Partially done. Did a road trip in Montenegro in Oct 2011; Netherlands, France, Switzerland, Italy in 2012)
  • Make a truly creative Artificial Intelligence program that can learn and perhaps pass the Turing Test (2025; passing the Turing test is trivial now, can train an LLM trivially)
  • Make a short-and-slick movie that earns more than what it takes to produce it (
  • Sponsor my parents’ world trip (I really really would want to do this) (yay! they’ve been to many, many places now)
  • Learn a foreign language (preferably Spanish)
  • Live for a year or so in Silicon Valley (doing an MBA/MS at Stanford perhaps?) (was there for a couple of months; realized the oppurtunity is here back in India)
  • Read entire Calvin and Hobbess collection (Bought the collection and started reading it)
  • Do Skydiving and Bungee Jumping (2025; did both by now!)
  • Spend a year or so at MIT AI Lab
  • Buy a (small) country (it is not impossible)
  • Read all the popular books on Philosophy, Psychology, AI, Sociology, and Cosmology (Ongoing effort…)
  • (My secret wish) Spend sometime somewhere without spending a penny from my own pocket
  • Produce a truly breath taking theory (in the leagues of Theory of Evolution, Relativity and Gravity
  • Travel to at least 30 different countries (2025; stopped tracking)
  • Being featured in a good business magazine (Featured in a few already)
  • Being admired by businessmen, scientists and students (cough cough)
  • Learn to draw better cartoons
  • Read and understand the history of philosophy (Read Sophie’s world. History of Philosophy is next)
  • Read and learn about world’s religions and mythology (not interested anymore. Cosmology and mysteries of universe is way more interesting)
  • Make a 40 by 40 list

Hopefully, some of the things will come alive for me. So, life, here I come! ...  Read the entire post →