Developer to Entrepreneur: My journey to InterviewReady - YouTube

Hi everyone. This is GKCS. This is my first video on entrepreneurship,

and I hope that this is useful to you.

I am a software engineer who recently started my own company called

interviewReady. It's been a year.

So there are some lessons that I would like to share with you in case you're

thinking about moving from, let's say a "tech role" to entrepreneurship.

This talk is basically on how do you make that decision?

How do you reach that decision that? "Hey, this seems like a good thing to do".

And even if you're feeling like it's a good thing to do,

how do you make sure I have three tips to share with you?

Think about whether this dream that you have is sustainable.

Think about whether it's safe to pursue the dream.

And finally think about if you have enough data,

when it comes to sustainability. There's two things which are quite important.

The first one is, is this a long-term plan? I mean,

is it going to work long-term? And the second one of course, is that,

is it profitable? Is the business sustainable by itself?

Let's look at long-term planning first.

Let's say you have a full-time job and you decide to take mock interviews on the

side.

So you're charging people for mock interviews and you're getting a lot of money

through the side business,

up to the point that this side business starts paying you more than your

full-time job. So if I'm earning,

let's say 50,000 rupees a month on the

side and I'm earning, let's say 40,000 in my full-time job,

then it makes much more sense to actually invest here.

The problem is that you are being constrained also by the amount of time you can

spend the amount of effort you can make and the amount of preparation you have

to do before every interview right now, because it's three hours,

you are probably able to manage work and your side business later on,

when you have to scale the long-term plan, starts to becoming really,

really hard because the amount of effort you're putting in body is probably

going to burn you out. And even if it isn't,

then how much are you going to scale this business from 50,000 rupees,

1.5 lakhs?

2 Lakhs? Seven lacks?! But not more. There's.

An upper cap that you have set for yourself when you're thinking about a side

business, which is dependent on your time and your effort.

So when I think about long-term thinking about scale,

and basically you are thinking about a product instead of a personal

service.

That's the general idea.

The second thing is profitability.

And I think this is the most important thing about any business.

I've been to hundreds of hackathons and startup contests.

And I see a recurring theme.

People feel shy when talking about profitability,

when talking about wealth and money,

and you can't afford to do this if you're going to be an entrepreneur.

"Why do you want to be profitable?" is a good question: Well,

if two parties willingly transact, if party A says, yes,

I need your product. Here's some money.

So party B's happy because they're getting money.

Party A is happy because the service or the product that they're getting is

worth more to them than the money.

Both parties are benefiting (apart from the taxes that the government is getting

and the whole world is getting benefited,

that's a separate thing) these two parties are happy.

So what you're doing through this transaction is a good thing.

The second thing of course is that you, as a business,

are going to be responsible not just for yourself but for all the people working

in this business. They deserve their salaries.

They deserve their salaries being drawn from a profit.

And I can go on "Why your profitability will make sense!" But

it's a mixture of common sense and a mixture of basic economics.

If you are going to run a business, you need it to be profitable.

Let's move to the second part, which is safety.

Safety has the most obvious component,

which is savings over here. How much should you save is an interesting question.

Well,

I would suggest save enough for you to survive for the next three or six months,

and also save enough to invest in your business. For example,

if you want to invest in this camera, you need money.

If you want to invest in that computer,

which is going to edit this video after I've shot it, you need some money. So

that kind of savings is an investment in hardware. You could, of course,

go to an investor and ask them for an investment. But in my personal opinion,

going to investors for a hardware investment is which not about scaling.

Is not worth it. If you can save by yourself, it's really.

Really good because you're going to be saving long-term when you're going to

scale by investing in short term through your savings.

The second thing is skills.

So if you were a full-time engineer earlier,

then what's the worst that could happen? You're going to get employed again!

I mean, to be honest with you,

if you invest in your skills for the first five or six years,

what's going to end up happening is that you will be confident that you can

always head back to the job market in case things go wrong.

So you have already invested in your skills through time and you have made some

savings through a full-time job. Finally, safety also comes through.

A proven concept. This like.

Profitability is the most critical part of safety.

A proven concept is something which, which means that,

let's say you want to sell clothes and people say, "Hey,

there's no way you can sell these types of clothes.

This market never accepts these kinds of clothes".

And then you go in the market and you actually start making sales and actual

profits. That would be a proven concept.

It doesn't mean that you need a full fledged business for it.

You just need to make some sales to prove the concept.

The best way that I found to do this is to actually get something like

affiliates.

If you're a YouTube or a blogger or any kind of social media person,

then getting affiliates helps you build the confidence

to make sense, and also build the confidence to know that,"Hey,

I can make sense so I can probably start my own product."

I can probably start my own chain. That's useful. The second thing is sponsors.

Sponsors prove that you have a large audience,

which is interested in what you have to say.

Companies are coming to you because you have reach.

So I would say, go for sponsors maybe second,

but definitely go for affiliates that you agree with first.

If you have a channel on fashion,

going to clothing brands is a good idea.

And for every sale that they make can you get some affiliate commission out of

it? Out of the profitability. It's a good idea.

Finally, this is something that I have never done,

but I've heard is really useful. You can also take contracts.

Or there's people who do freelancing. You can.

Easily switch to your own company quickly from freelancing.

This is the easiest switch that I can see. Affiliates of course,

is a proven concept for sales. And sponsors is a proven concept,

more for reach than anything else. Okay.

Safety is taken care of. Finally, we have data.

Data for me was YouTube analytics. But in general,

create a website. If you are thinking about starting your own company,

have a look at what people do in this website,

when do they drop off? This is quantitative data. This is objective data.

You also want subjective data.

You want to know about things that they never do on this website because that

doesn't exist. So you might start taking interviews.

If you did interviews (personal interviews) with people and you ask them

relevant questions, you might be able to get a lot of information from them,

which you may never be able to get through quantitative analysis.

So interviews gives you subjective data.

Honestly speaking, keep a more open ear to critical data,

critical feedback,

because you need to make sure that they're not going to be things which make

your business not sustainable or question the feasibility of your business.

So this is something that really helped me when I was making that switch from a

full-time job to InterviewReady.

If you have experiences related to entrepreneurship or how you made that switch

from full-time role to entrepreneurship, I would love to hear it.

Until next time then, see you!

What is system design?

System what? Can we get to the next question? Can I get a hint?

System design.

System design is the process of defining components and interfaces within

interactions based on specified requirements.

Next question. Are you preparing for your system design interviews?

Head over to interviewready.io to get InterviewReady!