OCC Meet on 2 Sep 07

Today, we had another meeting of OCC@Bangalore. Actually, during the first meet, they have decided to meet once in 15 days (I didn't know this as I left early that day). So, going forward, OCC@Bangalore will be meeting alternative Sunday's at a location discussed and agreed on the mailing list.
It was interesting as around 30+ enthusiastic people came together. It was good to see good number of repetitive participants which makes the discussion more interesting.
Today, we discussed on "Marketing your Start-up" and it was really great to see people sharing their ideas and views. Ranjit from Kapston started the discussion. His company (Kapston) works on helping entrepreneurs with On-line marketing and he shared few insights into what his organization does.
Sharman, who has ventured into starting various organizations and also closing few of them shared his experiences with Marketing and mentioning that many entrepreneurs fail to understand the customer and being flexible because they have a strong bonding with their idea. I do agree with him...our idea/thought might be very powerful and we might be obsessed with it, but towards the end of the day, we need to look at what the customer needs. If this calls for re-thinking our idea, we should.
Pratik of Muziboo, took this discussion more forward. Muziboo is for people who compose their own music and the site allows them to upload their work and see what the world thinks about it. Here are few points from his thoughts:

• Muziboo does not have any set budget for Marketing.
  
• Friends are main source of spreading the word.
  
• Started marketing on Orkut.
  
• Spending time with bloggers to get the word of their idea to spread.
  

A very different approach for marketing and in few ways makes sense too. He is clear that he would wait until they reach good number of registrations on the site to work on other aspects of marketing. Why wait? Because, this site is for amateur and professional musicians to upload their composition and hear what others have to say. For this kind of functioning, they would need serious musicians and Pratik feels that he can get serious people to join the community through word of mouth and by personally speaking to people. I think this is a good approach when you are not rushing or looking at break-even at the earliest. Not every organization looks for breaking-even, but if you would like to sustain on the long-run, you need credibility and serious community.
Swaroop who started Ion, has a good and simple idea. In India, most of the time we do not carry our laptop to charge i-Pod. So, they have come up with a simple charger for charing their music machine.
Ramji did mention that having a "Personalized Story" for your idea would add lot of value in explaining what your service/solution does...practically.

This is an overall summary of our discussion. I have few pictures of the event on my Flickr account.