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Founder of Windsor.io Pranay Prakash Talks About How to Found Your Own Start-up in Just Three Months

Thursday, November 12, 2020 0:32

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Pranay Prakash, Founder of Windsor.io

By author Ulyati Jaya

For many people, running their own company is an ultimate dream, however, it takes a huge leap of faith to leave a well-paying job for a start-up that may not do so well in the beginning. So we spoke to one such founder, Pranay Prakash, who founded his start-up Windsor.io in just three months.

While it took Prakash just three months to get his company up and running, it wasn’t an easy feat, “but there’s nothing you can’t achieve if you put your mind to it, ” says the talented founder.

Windsor.io – an analytics tool for start-ups, had come up with this idea during his interning days. According to him the main problem many early-stage start-ups face is finding their first 100 users and getting them to appreciate and love the product and/or service. “Once I realized this, I wanted to develop and launch a product that would help founders do it by aggregating all the actions a user takes and providing alerts, graphs and a searchable feed of each user,” he said.

Unlike traditional analytics, Windsor.io pulls its data directly from the SaaS tools start-ups use, like Sendgrid, Intercom and Stripe, and processes it in a way tailored for young start-ups.

According to Prakash, who in just about one month, was able to successfully raise approximately $500K for his own start-up from various start-up accelerators like Y Combinator, feels there are several things all start-up founders should take into consideration if they want to successfully launch their own start-up:

A Doable Business Plan

The first crucial step every budding entrepreneur needs to take into consideration is its viability before investing too much time or money in the start-up. A business plan helps to articulate a strategy for starting your business. It also provides insight on steps to be taken, resources required for achieving your business goals, and a timeline of anticipated results.

He also cited it is important to have a business plan which is not over-ambitious, as in the beginning it is about achieving a break-even point rather than profits. “Once you know your unique selling point, it becomes easier to capitalize on it to penetrate the market,” says the young entrepreneur who successfully established his own company in just three months.

‘Perfect’ Is Not the Keyword

Things do not need to be perfect, you don’t need to work on perfecting your product or service before launching it, as it is important to get feedback from the real users. Once your product is launched you will have a good idea of what works and what does not, what changes you will need to make and your areas of improvement.

Most early adopters are pretty content just using new products, although it may require a few tweaks here and there. As a founder, you need to be open to their feedback.

For instance, when he first moved to San Francisco to participate in Y Combinator’s Class back in 2018, Pranay Prakash found that with over 200 companies in the YC batch, the only ones which everyone knew about and loved stood out because they were obsessed with their users, not their code. It was this particular finding that led to the tweaks he made to his own service. “Our mission now is to Humanize Data. Companies are forced to interact with data in ways that serve as a means to an end – logs, transactions, reports, graphs, events, messages, errors, etc. We believe companies, and the people that run them, are providing a service to people and care deeply about those people, so it only makes sense that the tools we use to run companies focus on users and what they need to succeed – everything else comes next,” his company blog states.

Windsor.io provides start-up founders with a platform that allows them to check in on their users/customers and how they have used or are using the company’s products or services. “ Just like Facebook and LinkedIn, Windsor.io profiles give founders all the relevant information they need to understand consumer behavior and hence come up with better business solutions,” he said.

Use Your Network to Raise Capital

In the initial phases of fundraising, your actual expenses will be about three times as much as you predict. It is therefore important to really reach out to as many people as you can, because having a strong network is very important. Being in Silicon Valley for 2 summers, I used my weekends to meet a lot of the people I looked up to.

I’d previously followed popular engineers and founders on Twitter and watched their tech talks on YouTube.

So, when I first visited San Francisco, I just reached out to many of them and got coffee or lunch. When I was starting my company, it was really easy to reach back out to many of the people I’d simply met in the past. In addition to that, I attended events and spoke at tech conferences. This gave me the platform to reach a wider audience of people who appreciated my work. Once again, raising capital from them was easy because they already believed in my ability and I didn’t have to convince them over a 30 minute pitch.

According to Pranay Prakash, he simply networked with people he had enjoyed talking to in the past, and when he decided to start a company, those were the first people who came to mind.

Be Prepared for Unexpected Twists and Turns

We live in a very unstable world, and the COVID-19 situation is a good example of this. So it is very important to prepare for unforeseen circumstances and crises.

The initial product/service idea may require several changes before it can be sold in the market.

“We had to pivot a few times when we noticed our product wouldn’t work. This is especially hard for a young entrepreneur who’s spent 6 or more months working day and night on something only to see it fail,” he says while stressing on the need to be prepared for failure and sudden changes.

“Coming from an engineering background, I had no idea how to sell a product or raise capital much less build a successful high growth company. I’ve had to learn a lot along the way – quite often by failing at it first.” I used to Iterate constantly without remorse. After the second pivot, I became immune to tossing out ideas. I used to be quite hesitant in accepting that my hypothesis on something was wrong. That caused us so many issues. If I was just willing to accept that something didn’t work, we’d have tossed out most of our ideas in half the time.

Find Supportive Mentors

Another important thing is to find people who can mentor you. In your first year of business, you will constantly be throwing yourself headfirst into new challenges that you’ve probably never dealt with before.

Having a few core mentors that you can bounce ideas off of and get candid, experienced, feedback from is often the difference between success and failure.

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