Enthuse your team... To get things going.

In the IT space, a start-up can imply a new company or a new product launched by an existing company. Essentially though, when it comes to passion-driven businesses, it helps if the new product in question is something the founders would use themselves. Like SlideShare - a product launched by Uzanto in 2006 - which is a free service that enables users to share presentations and slideshows.

Build a business around a product you'll use yourself

SlideShare allows you to upload your PowerPoint and OpenOffice presentations to share with others, and as it supports various copyright claims, including creative commons it keeps your work relatively secure. As an online storage and archiving service, it allocates a distinct URL not only to every presentation, but also to each slide within a presentation. SlideShare's clean, fast interface also enables you to tag presentations or slides, embed them into your blog or website, browse others' presentations, and comment on individual slides.

Apply yourself to solve your own problems

Now as Amit Ranjan, co-founder and COO, SlideShare points out, "The idea (of SlideShare) came to its co-founder (and CTO) Jonathan Boutelle. He got the idea when he realized that after barcamps, conferences, seminars, talks etc. people can easily share videos, photos (via Flickr, YouTube) but its not easy to share presentation files. People email heavy files, copy them on flash drives, CDs... the process of sharing was broken. When we started discussing this amongst the three founders, we all felt that this was a basic need waiting to be solved... it affected conferences speakers, corporates, educators, technology folks etc... so there would be a big market for a solution that addressed this problem."

This market, per se, also included SlideShare's ideators. "It is said that the best products come from people who build something that solves their own problems; so by building SlideShare, we were actually solving a problem we ourselves were facing... (in sharing PPT files post conferences)" says Ranjan.

Infuse passion among a team

Build for yourselves: It goes without saying that the energy levels of a team engaged in building a novel product for themselves as well as others would be much higher than if the product was only being built for a target audience. After all, the founders of SlideShare had realized that they themselves could benefit from the potential uses of SlideShare - it would ease the process of making sales pitches, share and have an online record of lectures and conference presentations.

Work alongside your team: Uzanto's team of 3-4 software engineers would also have been enthused by the fact that they worked alongside the three co-founders of SlideShare to build SlideShare. "Ideation itself never happens in isolation; it is always contextual.... we in fact had been actively looking for business ideas when SlideShare happened...then all of us got involved in building the first prototype..." shares Ranjan.

People feel passionate about newness: Then again, the novelty of the solution or in other words, being part of a ‘first' is reason enough to infuse passion among a team. While online Power Point/presentation solutions are also available to share presentations online, these differ from SlideShare in that the basic tools they provide to create presentations fall short of what conventional desktop software offer. In fact, as the solutions focus more on the online creation of presentations and less on their interface, these products are not as user-friendly as SlideShare.

So much for instilling passion in a team! The other side of the launching a start-up is the need to identify a workable idea and have the resources to carry a team through until it generates revenue.

Also consider - is your idea valid?

In this context, Ranjan opines that even though the team believed in the idea, its validation (since it concerned the Web 2.0 space) would have to come from the actual users. So, he says, "the idea has to be backed up by a hunch that what you are building has a market. Of course you keep on talking to people around you to get a sense and get early feedback from users, but that is post ideation and the initial decision to build the product."

According to Ranjan, what helps start-ups in the technology, especially Internet-related space is the fact that the entry barriers have been lowered - cheaper hardware, open source software, cheaper bandwidth etc; hence the risk of failure is lower than in other cases like say - in manufacturing.

No money, no passion - do you have funds to carry you through?

Nevertheless, thanks to the success of its earlier product MindCanvas, the team at Uzanto had a readymade office, a legal structure and revenues to tide it through until a suitable business model for SlideShare was put in place.

After all, it took ten months to launch SlideShare post ideation. Besides, the service is currently being offered free. Although the site boasted thousands of users on the day of the launch itself, and these numbers have risen exponentially since then, its business model has yet to be rolled out. At present, Ranjan and his team are still debating on an end-consumer oriented model that will offer advertising, lead generation meaning that companies will pay to get leads for their business and products say by uploading a presentation that includes their contact details, freemium accounts implying that the offering will be free for the vast majority of users but a small percentage will be charged to avail premium features and other novel features.

This indicates that a Web 2.0 start-up aiming to establish a community focused business must work on building traction before it can seek funding. In the case of SlideShare, it has raised enough eyebrows or should we say uploaded enough presentations so as to have attracted the attention of a leading VC fund in the Silicon Valley called Venrock. Now, SlideShare is well-poised to reap the benefits from the passion that was invested into it.  

Charu Bahri is an author, freelance writer, columnist and [part-time] manager - projects and information systems at J Watumull Global Hospital & Research Centre. More about her at http://charubahri.googlepages.com

Issue BG88 July 08