Kite Factory

We make kites here :)

[kitefactory-blog]

The first big day for Kite no.1

Well, we know its been a while since something happened on this particular part of the webosphere. But believe us when we say we have had a few whirlwind weeks and our focus has totally been on building our first kite.

It is time to let you in on some details.

After a few months of getting the basics sketched out, designing, researching, taking some good advise from some great people and some sleepless nights of coding, we are now pretty close to the launch of the first kite, that shall hence be known as

Shopo has moved to its new home at http://shopo.in and is in the process of settling in cozily over there.

Shopo is looking at an early April 2011 launch and will eventually become the shopping hub for everyone who want to buy something that's deep rooted Indian. More about Shopo, coming soon on this page!

You could also stay in touch with Shopo on our Facebook page or Twitter feeds.

[kitefactory-blog]

Guys, need a huge favour! There is a little survey we need you to fill out! Comes with a promise that it wont take you more than 2 minutes! Please do share it to your friends for those extra brownie points :) Thanks a ton in advance.. The survey is at http://survey.kitefactory.in/

UPDATE: Surey is over. Thanks for all the submits!

[kitefactory-blog]

Design dilemmas

This blog post is going to start with a confession. I have never ever designed for a website before. (not including a college project that I did over 5 years back!) In fact, I was pretty much worried that could become a handicap for our first kite when we first started on it! I have been designing for various other things, mostly prints! But I was a little apprehensive when Taggy told me

“Oh come on! When you can do that, why not this?”

Then I told myself it wasn’t gonna hurt to try and design a website anyway! However, I had to make Taggy promise that he was not going to accept a mediocre design! That he will push me to limits and get the best out of me! It took me a few weeks to even get used to Photoshop again and accept Adobe Illustrator, being a coreldraw person for almost 2 years! Almost 5 versions and 500 arguments later (Well I keep asking “Why not?”) one fine day, Taggy sent me an IM I will never forget in my entire life. “That looks good. I love the site!”

Honestly, what I thought was my weakness turned out to be the strength after all. Since I had never done a web design before, I came in with a completely different perspective and the site looked nothing like any other that we have seen in this genre! Earlier in November, we decided to test the design on our first circle of friends and well-wishers! 98% loved the site! The other 2% gave us wonderful suggestions that has made the UI look even better now!

And that right there has been the biggest learning for me in this process.

(Atleast when it comes to design) Experience doesnt matter as much as enthusiasm to learn!

Just because you think people are used to something, dont stop experimenting with it!

At the same time, Just because you simply love a concept, dont complicate the overall process. (Version 2 of the UI design was a brilliant idea. It is a never-before-used-this-way treatment to a very basic HTML idea. Taggy literally jumped up with gleaming eyes when I told him about it! But we had to just accept the fact that it was going to make our site extremely heavy and slow to load! The best thing to do was to drop it though it killed us to do it!)

It is ok to show your design around to people! It really opens your eye up to things you would have never noticed otherwise!

The first version is definitely not going to be the final version! Dont be disheartened by it. Trust me. the more versions u try, the better you get!

And there is a catch! The site has been designed to switch colour scheme in 2 minutes!(The hint– transparent blocks! More about this after the launch!) That ought to make Taggy smile a little! He has really been working hard to get it from PSD to HTML! I am sure we learnt at least 100 new things in the process of creating this site! And we are dying to share it with you! Our alpha version should be ready for testing by end of this month! If you would like to help us test it and give your valuable feedback to help us build a better experience, drop a note on the Feedback page and we would love to include you in the list!

Don’t worry! We will keep feeding you more gossip till then.

- Krithika Nelson, Hustler, Kite Factory

[kitefactory-blog]

Getting to the idea that works!

One word that describes the title is 'pivot' and it is something myself and krithika have done time and again before hitting on the idea we want to spend next few years of our life working together. Most ideas don't survive in their initial serve and usually morph in to something viable with time, experience and money. How much you spend of time, experience and money will determine your runway and how far your company can survive. So be sure to know when you have to pivot and make sure you have the bandwidth to run this test.

" When startups die, the official cause of death is always either running out of money or a critical founder bailing. Often the two occur simultaneously. But I think the underlying cause is usually that they've become demoralized. You rarely hear of a startup that's working around the clock doing deals and pumping out new features, and dies because they can't pay their bills and their ISP unplugs their server. " -Paul Graham

The set of questions we ask ourselves before trying to change is what we will talk about in this post.

 Are the founders in

Are you over the 'Informed Pessimism'

Can you get people on board of your idea  (first employee/advisor/investor)?

Are the founders in?

When you are starting up the only other person you know is your co-founder and in yours and his/her DNA will be the DNA of the company for the time it exists. So first take turns to see if each of you is convinced with the idea and change. A great way of confirming that is to take turns to answer the question "WHY do you want to work on this idea?".  Any honest answer other than money is fine. There is a lot more to founding team and we will keep that for another post.   

Are you over the 'Informed Pessimism' The graph i find very useful is the Four stages of an idea from Tim Ferris. Uninformed Optimism -> Informed Pessimism -> Crisis of Meaning -> Informed Optimism Are you at the stage where you are optimistic and informed about the idea and its results?  Almost all ideas when they are first put together are exciting and the one thing you want to start building right away but new ideas are a great distraction untill  you are at a point where you are at Informed Optimism. How do you get there with minimal damage and not hurting your current work and it's direction?  You don't want to rush in to unknown territory and you also don't want to wait too long to make that pivot and miss the opportunity.

A. Experience         

Most people learn from their mistakes. The smarter ones learn from other's mistakes and experiences and the only you are going to get them is by going out speaking to people about it who have taken the plunge before and have managed to come out of it. 

B. Customer Development

All you build is for your customer. Are you listening to him? Are you sure you are not spending all your resources  on things that your customer wants least? Are you solving the pain point your customer is facing? Best way to answer  this question is to go and speak to your intended customers. Understand if your idea aligns with the need.  

Can you get people on board of your idea  (hire/advisor/investor)?

If startup's are all about its people the biggest validator is can you have more people believe in you? can you have more come to you and put their hard earned money and time on your idea? While seed capital/venture capital may not be required for all ideas, what the money and investors will tell you is that you have been able to sell your vision and story to others. Money is a great validator.  To have an investor's money is a validation someone who has seen startups up and down believes you can win. Hard earned money small or big is precious. To have a customer pay you money to use your product is again a great validation. Can you sell a demo product to a customer and ask him if he would use your product in current state. Can you bring on board someone you consider smart on board as an employee? If you are smart and brave enought to do a startup can you influence a smart friend of yours to join your idea with little cash and good equity when he can be working 40 hours a week to get paid less than 97% of the people you went to college with?

But why are we ranting about all this in our blog? There is a flash back involved! Hold on till our launch and we will give u an interesting story about our first kite and how it changed genders in pregnancy!

- Taggy, Hacker, Kite Factory

[kitefactory-blog]

This is what we have been talking about!

A sneak peek to our very first kite! Keep an eye here for more!

[kitefactory-blog]

doing more with what you have

  or the word i want to use is 'jugaad'. Doing more than what we have to do right now  is something that has always been the reason why i write opensource code or why i spend so much time trying out stuff.  Kite factory is my chance at doing more than i can right now. Code a little more than i can now, build a product i can only see in my eyes right now and do more than just what i'm trained to do.  Even a crime needs a partner. How can work not need one? The answer to that question is  Krithika Nelson , a long time friend of mine and someone who has worn multiple hats. Both of us came to a point where we asked ourselves.

"Hey you know what i think we could do more, we could be better at being awesome".

that has taken shape to what we are calling as Kite Factory! and yes we make kites. At this blog we will share our work and how we want to bring you refreshing user experiences, the stuff that we build from a tech perspective and loads of opensource code. Right now it's a little too early to share what our first kite is but if you want to listen in

Follow our github for the code we want to share with others (expect to be mostly rails,ruby and tinge of clojure).

Please subscribe at http://kitefactory.in/#contact 

Follow us on twitter 

Just say hi to us [email protected]

[kitefactory-blog]

Flying kites...

Well, we always wondered why in spite of our fat paychecks and humbling job titles, our day jobs were never exciting enough!

We always wondered why our jobs, as demanding as they were, never satisfied us in any emotional level...

Taggy and I always loved discussing the prospects of creating something special. Something new! And we had ideas! Big ones! From a site that would have videos of retro TV series, yester year favs and music, to a site that will help the hungry order from multiple restaurants at the same time! Every time, we also had some reason to not take it forward. But when the idea for our first kite (come on! hold on a little more for the name now) jumped up in our faces, we knew we couldn't keep this down any longer!

Here we are, full of newfound energy and excitement, working on something that is challenging us every single day, showing us things we never knew, getting us to learn new stuff, reach out to new horizons! And we know in our guts you all will like this one just the way we do!

More about this one coming very soon!

Meanwhile, those of you who would like to take part in our initial alpha test that we are planning to do later this month, do drop a note here or mail us at [email protected]...

Krithika Nelson