This is "Megam Cloud's start-up story". "Megam Cloud - Polygot PaaS with cross cloud, real-time log streaming and metering/monitoring builtin". We'll launch our beta soon (http://www.megam.co)
Sit back and enjoy. This has lessons learnt, the challenges we overcame and will help any start-up venturing in Growth Markets.
If you are business and find our services useful, we are all ears plugged to you.
Note: The start-up story in mature markets is totally the opposite of what happens in Growth markets.
3. # 0
We are a Bootstrapped entity and
recommend it.
You just incur Human Capital/Furniture/
Client Hardware
We use the latest Client Hardware
Ubuntu 13.04, 8GB +>, iCore 5 IInd Gen or >.
We found HP's Hw (http://amzn.to/1861POs better than Dell Hw http://dell.to/17Csqnl
We recommend you buy at-least 8GB +, iCore i7 3rd Gen HP or Mac
Stay Away from Microsoft
4. # 1
Start-ups don't have a brand in Growth Markets.
Incubated hiring works in Growth Markets, which means
you can't do mass hiring as pure player (TCS, IBM ..) but
rather test their programming ability.
Induct folks with good attitude & willingness to learn.
Communication isn't needed. They just have to write code.
Read our hiring experience here.
http://indykish.wordpress.com/2012/07/11/hiring-experie
nce-of-a-startup-megam-systems/
5. Training.
# 2
Recommend : Online free trainings Codeacademy(Ruby, Git,
JQuery), Coursera (FP in Scala) a big boon. Contact Us :
@indykish if you need help.
6. # 3
We planned for “Power Outages” using Invertors. A
must-do in Chennai (TamilNadu)
We planned for Network Outage (datacards 3G).
Recommend Airtel ZTE Huawei Modem. Stay away from
BSNL 3G
Endured Mr. Sun (Oh Yeah @Chennai) – {Run the Good Old Standing
Khaitan Panka, Limited Aircon}
8. # 4
Best ever knowledge management tool (Blog)
We encouraged team to blog, also reaps your IP
This helped to jump start open source participation from
college grads
Must have, Recommend (inmotionhosting.com)
PS: We aren't a partner to inmotionhosting nor are we marketing it..
9. We set out to build ...
Live cloud using Cloud Identity
Enable Cloud Apps (Salesforce.com,
GoogleApps, SugarCRM et.all) consumed
instantly with no identity hassles.
10. # 5
We choose an Emerging Tech Stack easy to
learn, extend maintain as opposed to mundane
bloated Java /.NET.
We mitigated Technical risks early on by
working on prototypes worked for us.
Which means fail-fast
13. # 7
We said
NO - Mobile First.
NO – API First.
NO – Biz Plan
Working on a plan, full fledged design is a waste of time.
We worked smarter in a prototype agile way with the Road map in
our “HEAD”
14. Found Orchestration of
PaaS was Painful
Experimented with (Cloud
Identity)
Birth of Cloud management for Megam
Nov, 2012
15. # 8
We didn't think inward, but rather adopted Open
source from the start
We joined the bandwagon to use Apache V2
license
We verified the licensing of various products used
(even images, clip arts). Be honest.
Code in http://Github.com/indykish
16. We set our sail to phase 1 ...
Polygot PaaS [Hybrid Scalable]
28. # 9
We made the core system ready, built the API
Then integrated the interfaces
Task based weekly goal to accomplish using
http://www.pivotaltracker.com worked well.
Pivotaltracker improved the team's motivation.
Code in http://Github.com/indykish
29. # 10
We leveraged free ware as much as we can
OS : Ubuntu
Sharing files : Ubuntu One
Email : Google App for Business(₹ 150 per user)
Blogs : Wordpress free account (or) Hosted
SCM : GitHub (Free for open source)
Tasks Tracker: pivotaltracker.com (Free for open source)
Trends Study : Register with Forester, InformationWeek,
Business Insider, InfoWorld and watch the competition/future