7 questions and answers that’ll reveal the story behind ScoopWhoop, yourstory.com coverage

Posted on 16 mei 201516 mei 2015 by slurrpmedia

I’m sure you know what we’re trying to do with the headline. Decreasing attention spans, a growing ‘bored at work’ audience, the race for pageviews- all these reasons have given rise to this ever growing new form of content. Brought mainstream by BuzzFeed in America, there are numerous sites that have come up across the globe to ride the wave. There are ongoing debates about the future of content and whether this new form does any good but the audience at large continues to consume. Sites like BuzzFeed, Upworthy have got astronomical numbers in terms of traffic and ScoopWhoop is doing the same in India.

ScoopWhoop has five co-founders who are in the their mid twenties and know each other from their Indian Institute of Mass Communication days. The guys- Rishi Mukherjee, Saransh Singh, Sattvik Mishra and Suparn Pandey- worked for WebChutney while Sriparna Tikekar, the lady in the team worked with DoneByNone.com in her previous role. They were friends outside of work and were huge fans of the likes of Buzzfeed, Upworthy, Thought Catalog etc.

We knew that a lot of Indians were consuming this kind of content. But we also realized that most of the content coming from these sites were very global/American in nature. We felt there was an opportunity here for Indian content, in the same format. And that is when we started ScoopWhoop as a side project in August last year. We still had our day jobs and post office hours, we used to work on SW.

YS: As a company, what was the vision with which you started? What does ScoopWhoop want to be?

SW: I don’t think we had any vision back then. We were just a bunch of 20 somethings trying to have fun with Buzzfeed style of content in India. We weren’t even sure if it would work. In our very initial days, we did not even think of ourselves as a startup. But things changed the moment we started putting content on the site. Our very first article went viral and in the first month itself we started getting traction, brands started approaching us for advertising. We suddenly realized this is something that can work. The proof of concept came in no time.

The vision for ScoopWhoop is to be an out-an-out social news and entertainment company. We want to be everywhere, from current affairs, politics, sports to funny listicles and share-worthy videos. The idea is to be a publication in the league of the legacy players.

YS: SW has seen a phenomenal growth, what do you attribute this to?

SW: We are very proud of the team that we’ve built. We have some of the most creative writers who form the editorial team. So if you have to ask me one reason why we’ve been successful, it’ll be the content that we create. From day one, our stories started going viral. At that time, we had no media budget, no tech wizardry, and no revenue stream.

YS: What is the team strength at the moment?

SW: We are currently a 12 member team. 7 are hired.

YS: What is your revenue model?

SW: Our revenue model is native advertising and sponsored stories. Some of our clients include Pepsi, Godrej, HUL, Budweiser, MakeMyTrip etc.

YS: Digital media is undergoing some massive changes. What are your views?

SW: That is both exciting and scary. Exciting because there’s so much to learn and explore. And that is also the scariest thing. You need to keep your eyes and ears open and stay up-to-date. Every day there’s so much happening; it’s very easy to fall behind.

YS: What do you think of the blurring line between media, content, ads?

SW: This space has definitely gotten more interesting as globally online advertising seems to be moving from traditional display models to more native formats. It’s still nascent and while the debate is still raging between the fine line between pure editorial/content and branded content and how much is really enough, I feel native models are definitely better from the reader’s/user’s POV. But at the same time, it is important for the user to know what he is reading, editorial or sponsored.

YS: Your thoughts on competition in the space.

SW: Competition is always good. It keeps you on your toes, and there is always something that you can learn from other players.

I think since we started, some 20 other sites have come up, while a lot of established publications and legacy players have also entered this space. But it doesn’t worry us. We like to believe that we’ve built a loyal base for ScoopWhoop; and it is only growing month on month. Plus, India is a hot bed for content and with internet penetration only increasing in India, it gives enough elbow room to multiple players.

55 great productivity tools and, resources for startups and entrepreneurs

Posted on 15 mei 2015 by slurrpmedia

Between commuting to office, catching up with your inbox, to rushing for review meetings, it’s a hard life, as any entrepreneur will know. They are always on the lookout for ways to get the most out of their day. Running a startup is a daily challenge, but there exist tools out there to simplify almost all aspects of a business, enabling entrepreneurs to minimize distractions and focus on their ‘core’.

Right from naming and registering a business, to managing teams, to handling marketing and customer relations, these tools can help you ease up the process of running your business.

Here are 55 great tools that can assist your business in being effective and efficient:

Asana: Asana is a Project Management and Collaboration Tool which helps keep teams organised, connected and focused. It is one of the most popular project management tools and offers convenient integrations.

99designs: 99Designs is the world’s most popular marketplace for graphic design. It is a great platform to find able freelancer designers, especially for logo and web designing.

AngelList: AngelList is a website for startups, angel investors, and job-seekers. Its goal is to introduce entrepreneurs to sophisticated investors, and simplify the process of early stage business. An AngelList profile is also an important visibility platform, practically synonymous with a birth certificate in the startup world!

Animoto: Animoto makes it easy to create professional-quality videos. Animoto automatically produces beautifully orchestrated, completely unique video pieces from photos, video clips and music.

BetaList: BetaList provides pre-launch startups with their first hundred users. It lets them understand the market and enable them to reach the product-market fit.

Brand24: Brand24 is a tool which allows one to monitor one’s brand, product and services online. It is also a great method of measuring the buzz around a brand, product or keyword.

Bunchball: Bunchball is the market leader and visionary in gamification. Bunchball provides cloud-based software as a service gamification product intended to help companies improve customer loyalty and online engagement using game mechanics.

Codecademy: Codecademy is an online interactive platform that offers free coding classes in eight different programming languages. Codecademy also provides a forum where enthusiasts, beginners, and advanced coders can come together and help each other.

CoFoundersLab: CoFoundersLab offers an online matchmaking service that connects entrepreneurs with compatible co-founders looking to join a startup. It helps aspiring entrepreneurs connect through their online platform and in-person events.

Doorbell: Customer Feedback is probably the most crucial aspect of an early-stage business. Doorbell helps gather in-app user feedback for free. It is available for websites, iOS and Android.

Dropbox: Dropbox is the premier file backup, sync and sharing solution beloved by more than 4 million businesses. It lets you store and share huge chunks of data through the cloud.

Evernote: Evernote is a closed based freemium suite of software and services, designed for note taking and archiving. It is a modern workspace that syncs between all of your devices.

Expensify: Expensify provides an online expense management service for customers worldwide. It eases the process of tracking expenses and is one of the most popular expense reporting apps for phone & web.

Fontello: Fontello is a tool to build custom fonts with icons and helps you easily create a unique text branding for your business. It packs vector images into webfonts.

Free Invoice Generator: Free Invoice Generator provides for an easy to use free invoice template to create invoices in PDF. It ensures a standard and convenient form for invoicing every order.

Germ.io: Germ.io is a project management tool centred around ideas. It lets you get from ideas to execution by helping you capture every eureka moment.

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Get Satisfaction: Get Satisfaction is an online customer engagement community platform connecting businesses with their customers to foster better relationships. Companies of all sizes use Get Satisfaction’s platform to modernize customer support, accelerate sales and differentiate their brand.

GitHub: GitHub is a web-based Git repository hosting service offering distributed revision control and source code management functionality of Git as well as adding its own features. Over 4 million people use it to share code.

Google tools and resources

Google AdWords: Google AdWords is Google’s advertising system in which advertisers bid on certain keywords in order for their clickable ads to appear in Google’s search results. It is definitely one of the most important tools to advertise online.

Google Analytics: Google Analytics is a freemium web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic. It shows you the full customer picture across ads, videos, websites, social tools, tablets and smartphones.

Google Trends: Google Trends is a public web facility of Google that shows how often a particular search-term is entered relative to the total search-volume across various regions of the world, and in various languages. It can be quite useful for targeting the right customers online.

Google Web StarterKit: Web Starter Kit is boilerplate and tooling for multi-device development. It is a front-end template that helps one build fast, modern mobile web apps.

FullContact for Gmail: FullContact for Gmail supercharges your Google Contacts and lets you know everything about your Gmail contacts, right from your inbox. You can see the name, photos, social profiles, company info just by hovering over an email address.

Hey startups and entrepreneurs, help us with this survey! If you’ve been running a startup for some time, we need your opinion on running a business. Fill out this survey, and we may use your opinion/quote in one of our upcoming articles.Take the 5-minute survey here.

We’ll randomly pick up three individuals from the lot who fill up this survey and these 3 individuals will get Flipkart voucher worth INR 500/- each.

Homerun: Homerun is a lightweight tool that makes recruitment personal and effective. Homerun enables businesses to create authentic job openings, receive richer applications and review applicants faster and more effectively.

HootSuite: Hootsuite is the world’s most widely used social relationship platform. It is a social relationship platform that empowers users to execute social media strategies across their organizations.

How Much To Make An App: How Much to Make an App lets one calculate the cost of a building a mobile application. You just need to choose the desired features, and it estimates the cost of those features within seconds.

HubSpot: HubSpot is an inbound marketing and sales platform that helps businesses attract visitors, convert leads, and close customers. It includes tools for social media marketing, email marketing, content management, analytics, landing pages and search engine optimization, among others.

intercom.io: Intercom shows you who is using your product and makes it easy to personally communicate with them . It provides for live conversations and allows sending targeted email and in-app messages, triggered by time or behavior.

Kickstarter: Kickstarter is the world’s largest funding platform for creative projects. It is especially useful for film, music, art, theatre, games, comics, design, photography, and more.

LaunchRock: LaunchRock is a platform that enables its users to create viral “Launching Soon” pages with built in sharing tools and analytics. It help its clients incentivize and reward users for telling others about their projects through email and social networks.

MailChimp: MailChimp is a popular online email marketing solution which lets one manage contacts and send emails. It helps you design email newsletters, share them on social networks, integrate with services you already use, and track your results.

Meetup: Meetup is an online social networking portal that facilitates offline group meetings in various localities around the world. It can help you meet your fellow entrepreneurs in your region/industry and get a better understanding of the market.

Meldium: Meldium is the simplest way for teams to access the cloud tools they need. By aggregating and monitoring accounts across any web service, it frees one from tedious account management.

MobileDevHQ: MobileDevHQ is an enterprise organic app marketing platform that offers mobile marketers with app store optimization (ASO) solutions. The platform enables app marketers to analyze and optimize the app store presence of an app, track an app’s relevant search ranking queries in an app store, discover top chart rankings, analyze keywords etc.

Moqups: Moqups is a stunning HTML5 App for creating high fidelity SVG mockups, wireframes and clickable prototypes. It lets you create website and app prototypes without any technical knowledge.

Moz: Moz is an industry leader in building tools to facilitate inbound marketing easy. It provides automated research and analytics tools which lets you focus on strategy and insights and allows you to gain a quick understanding of the competitive landscape in any given search result.

Go Daddy: GoDaddy is the world’s largest web host and domain name registrar. It offers dependable and stable services to ensure smooth online presence.

Naminum: Naminum is the leading free startup name, company name, business name and website name generator on the web. It helps you find a suitable name for your business.

Near Me: Near Me is a peer-to-peer commerce solution enabling anyone to setup their own branded marketplace. Users can create peer-to-peer marketplaces to share, trade, swap or rent anything all over the world.

Upwork: Previosuly called Elance-oDesk, Upwork is the world’s largest online workplace where savvy businesses and professional freelancers meet. It is an effective platform to get quality output at affordable costs.

Pixlr: Pixlr is a cloud-based set of image tools and utilities, including a number of photo editors, a screen grabber browser extension, and a photo sharing service. The apps range from simple to advanced photo editing and can be used on PCs, and smartphones or tablets.

PostMark: PostMark is a web app which removes the headaches of delivering and parsing transactional email for web apps, all with minimal setup time and zero maintenance. It lets you see who opened your emails, where they opened it, what clients and platforms they used, and even how long they read the email.

Prezi: Prezi is a popular cloud-based presentation software and storytelling tool for presenting ideas on a virtual canvas. The product employs a zooming user interface (ZUI) and lets you create striking presentations.

QuickMVP: QuickMVP is a tool that helps entrepreneurs test a new business with a Landing Page Builder and Google Ad Creator. It is one of the easiest ways to test your ideas, without wasting time or money.

Recruiterbox: Recruiterbox is the easiest way to receive and manage job applications to one’s business. It is more efficient than email and simpler than any other recruitment software.

Rewardstream: Rewardstream lets one create engagement and lead generation through well-designed, best-practice-driven, and highly tailored referral marketing plans tuned to meet one’s business’ changing needs. It makes it quick and easy for marketers to incorporate digital, mobile, and word-of-mouth referrals into their customer acquisition and brand awareness mix.

Scoop.it: With a focus on content marketing, Scoop.it helps professionals and businesses publish content online in a meaningful, easy and rewarding way. It is a convenient form of finding and creating content for social media marketing.

Shopify: Shopify is a powerful ecommerce website solution that allows one to sell online by providing everything needed to create an online store. Shopify offers a professional online storefront, a payment solution to accept credit cards, and the Shopify POS application to power retail sales.

Sidekick: Sidekick lets you see Who Opens and Clicks Your Email. With Sidekick email tracking, one can get live notifications when someone opens or clicks on one’s emails.

Slack: Slack is a team communication tool that allows for real-time messaging, archiving and search for modern teams. It is an advanced messenger and can help ensure smooth team co-ordination.

SurveyMonkey: SurveyMonkey is the world’s most popular online survey software. It lets you create and publish online surveys in minutes, and view results graphically in real time.

Termsfeed: Termsfeed lets one create elaborate legal documents in minutes. It lets one create custom agreements that can be legally binding for users: Privacy Policies, Terms and Conditions, Terms of Use, Terms of Service or Return and Refund Policies.

TinyJPG: TinyJPG helps make websites faster by compressing JPEG images by 40-60%. It analyses images and chooses an optimal strategy to apply the best possible JPEG encoding, keeping the quality impact but reducing the size at the same time.

UICloud: UI plays an important part in defining customer experience for any app. UICloud collects the best user interface designs and provides a search engine to find the best UI elements for one’s need.

WordPress: WordPress is the most popular web platform to create beautiful websites and blogs. It provides for hundreds of free, customizable, mobile-ready designs and themes.

More on productivity, productivity tools and apps here:

5 productivity tools that every startup must know about

The myth of multitasking – how it dumbs you down

We’ll randomly pick up 3 individuals from the lot who fill up this survey and these 3 individuals will get Flipkart voucher worth INR 500/- each.

7 deadly sins of startup social media marketing

Posted on 11 mei 2015 by slurrpmedia

“Yeah, I made mistakes but…life doesn’t come with instructions.”

Sure, it does not. But that’s not the case with social media – there’s certainly some good advice out there to help you avoid blunders on social media. After all, mistakes are meant for learning and not repeating, right?

So what are some of the common mistakes that companies, especially startups, make while defining and executing their social media strategy? Here is what I’ve found:

1. Incorrect platforms

Agreed– Facebook has 1.44 billion monthly active users (as of Mar 31, 2015). But you can’t have the whole universe as your target audience. In today’s time and age, when everyone is spoilt for choice, the most important marketing decision you need to make is defining the target audience. Targeted marketing is the key of the game, and targeted marketing is, by definition, exclusionary. You need to clearly define your target audience.Once that is done, you need to identify the platforms on which your target audience is active. Remember – nobody searches for a job on Facebook or looks for a hotel review on LinkedIn. Being present on the most popular platform does not make sense if your target audience is not active there. Here’s some quick help when it comes to popular platforms:

Facebook – It’s a good platform when:

You have highly visual content
You want to leverage the community effect
You want to build trust in the minds of the users by leveraging their friends’ network’s
You are ready to spend on ads asrecent changes in Facebook’s algorithm have made it very difficult to organically reach out to fans

Twitter – It is a good platform to:

Broadcast your message
Join the on-going conversations
Connect with thought leaders and people that matter to you
Build a position for yourself

LinkedIn – Consider using it when:

You are a B2B company
You want to connect with a professional audience and establish your thought leadership within a group of homogeneously targeted audience

Google+ – Good platform to:

Help you with your SEO efforts
Participate in Google communities to connect with like-minded people

Pinterest – You can use it when:

Your primary target audience include women
You have highly visual content to share

These of course are just guidelines. You need to do a more thorough research and brainstorming to finalise the social platforms for your brand.

2. Doing Too Much or Too Little

Once you choose a social platform, you need to commit to it. Having an inactive presence on any of the platforms creates a bad impression. Having the last tweet date as two years back is worse than not having a Twitter handle. You need to show activity on the social platforms, and need to have consistency. The opposite is also true – you just can’t do too much. Don’t bombard your LinkedIn company page followers with 10 updates a day just because that will give you more number of impressions!

3. Ignoring Content Marketing

Content marketing is the gasoline of your social media efforts. You need to have good blog articles to showcase your expertise. You need interesting infographics to share with your audience. eBooks are good to share as a free giveaway. Whitepapers arean excellent way to establish your thought leadership. You need content. Period. Just don’t ignore it from your social media strategy. Not having enough bandwidth to create content cannot be an excuse today.

4. Inappropriate Content or Self Promotion

Each platform has different content needs. Don’t make the mistake of pushing the same content on all the platforms just because there are tools available that allow you to do so. Each platform requires different tone of messaging and different type of content. More importantly, you also need to mind the timing of your updates. Your audience is not going to be present on all the platforms at the same time. Social media does require some serious time and attention commitment Don’t get away with easy options of automatingyour schedule without giving it a serious thought, or having a proper plan in place. Another thing to keep an eye on is the type of content you share. Too much of self-promotion is a big turn-off. Just because you are excited about your product or services does not mean you can talk about it all day long. Have a good balance of education, industry insights, engagement and self-promotion in your content sharing.

You’ll also like to read: How to make influencer marketing work for your startup

5. No Personal Branding

People relate to other people – and this is especially true for startups, where people are buyingservices fromfounders more than from the company. So it is important that startups include the personal branding of their founders in their social media planning and strategy. You need a face for your company.

6. Canned Responses to Negative Comments

Lot of companies shy away from social media because of the fear of negative comments. But note that negative comments are, infact, good opportunities for you to build trust in the minds of your readers. (Read more about ithere.) One of the foremost thing you need to remember while handling negative comments on the social platform is that you should NEVER give a canned response to any negative comment. Be personal and show genuine interest in solving the problem. Acknowledge the issue, and take genuine actions to resolve it. If the there is a mistake, accept it and take all efforts to resolve it. Check this example here from Zappos – simply brilliant. Isn’t it?

7. Not aligning with the target audience in terms of tone and messaging

Try and align as much as you can with your target audience – if you are targeting the youth, introduce some quirkiness in your overall messaging. If you are targeting CXOs, maintain a professional tone. Just make sure that your marketing tone matches your company culture. After all, today, marketing is no more the job of marketing department only. It is the job of each and every person representing the company. Here’s a brilliant example of this –

Do share your experience on what worked and what did not work for you. It’s all about sharing knowledge, isn’t it?

Things I wish I knew before my startup journey

Posted on 11 mei 2015 by slurrpmedia

As part of my consulting, I meet entrepreneurs with a startup or who want to start one. I spend two hours as part of my business initiation to understand the person and maturity of the product idea. I ask them to explore a few things (listed below) before they are ready to invest the time and effort. Here is a reminder: Plans are a necessary evil. You plan with the understanding that all plans might not work.

I became an entrepreneur coming from a family with no entrepreneurial background. This is the list of things I wish I had known before I took the plunge.

Get ‘buy-in’ from family

Let me start with my biggest mistake. I did a lousy job of making my wife understand the need for me to start my own business and this haunted me through my startup journey.

Start talking to your family about the startup idea, both the success and failure scenario. Write down their questions and try to answer them. Do not ignore ones which you do not have an answer to; go and get answers. Do not expect them to be convinced with your answers, but still make an effort to explain.

Once they accept your decision, they may still feel insecure because there is no consistent income. Most of them are hesitant to bring up the topic so as not to upset you. Take the initiative to talk about it and look at alternatives and challenges. You need to prepare them more than yourself for the startup journey.

Remember it is your idea, and no one believes in your idea more than you do

Do not expect them to understand your idea and validate it. If they are uncertain about the project, it will affect you. You need to protect yourself from emotional pull downs in the startup journey.

My wife lost trust in my word to bring money home every month to run the family. (I had failed a few times). It was admirable of her to continue to support me and I am lucky to be with her today.

One could follow a lean startup idea while developing the product. Please do not start with quitting your job. Start with writing the code for your product or the business proposition.

Write the value proposition message for the product idea

To start with, fill the below format for your product idea and use this in talks with others to describe the product. For a platform idea, with more than one customer type, fill this separately for each customer type. When you discover new things, update the same to make it more complete.

For << this type of customer>>, Who << has this type of problem>>
We offer<< this solution>>
Which is <<different in this way>> From <<other competitors>>

Leverage the KISS philosophy (keep it simple,stupid) to complete them. Do not use buzzwords and keep it as simple as possible. For greenfield ideas, find a set of firms with businesses that are closer to your idea.

Also read: Why you should not start a startup

Fill the business model canvas

The Business Model Canvas (BMC) is a strategic management and entrepreneurial tool. It allows you to describe, design, challenge, invent, and pivot your business model. Today, firms like Strategyzer train people on how to fill out this model. The BMC has questions to help people structure product ideas in their quest for new business models.

Keep the following points in mind while filling out the BMC:

You need not have answers to all the questions. You know what you know, and what you do not know is not an issue.
In search for answers, you get to network with people who might become co-founders, moonlighting employees, or customers.
The BMC serves as a baseline to form a mental mindset of the product idea.
Be prepared to hear that your idea is lousy and is not needed. Listen and make notes; do not argue.

Application of UI Design

A lot of technical people feel that they do not have the UI skills but at the same time cannot afford to hire UI talent. If you feel that you need a good design for your product, you can learn UI skills.

Attend online courses (some are free) on UI design practices, and get familiar with design concepts.
Do research on innovative websites and applications. Use trial versions and take snapshots for features that you want in your application.
Share designs with your developer and ask him or her to develop them. Any UI developer will feel motivated to come with more ideas.
Never tell your developer that you have no idea about designing. Talk to some of your friends or contacts who might be working as UI designers in larger corporates. Ask them for feedback and share it with your developers. Be sure to water down the harsh part of the feedback!

Website design

Do not benchmark the first website with the corporate site. It should be something simple with focus on the customer. If there are multiple customers, choose one customer segment and target it. You should display the value proposition and ‘call to action’ for this customer on the home page.

The effort required for the design layout of the website is different from the developer’s effort to program the website.
There is an additional effort that comes with website content (images, text). As a techie, one often understands design and developer efforts, and underestimates content input.
It would be good for the content writer and UI designer to work together (say for 36 hours) in a focused way and complete the website to prevent delays.
Do not expect the website to be a one-time affair. You might have to update the website multiple times. Plan to perform minor updates without a designer.
Some websites talk about the company, product features, and the team. These are good for internal pages in the website. When the end user likes the value proposition on the home page, he will want to know who is behind that product and what its features are.

Build your network

As a cooperate employee, one can attend special interest groups and share ideas. I was a part of a cloud camp, and Android and Amazon meetup groups. Being an early member helped me create a network with entrepreneurs who I am in touch with even today.When you hear a speaker talk of the challenges in an area, you understand the situation better, and can ask questions.

Be a part of TIE, and try to participate in iSpirit sessions and attend meetings in Microsoft Accelerator. Some may ask for a small token amount for networking sessions, it is worth it.
Attend meetings; be open to meet people who are planning startups in your area or a different one.Attend enough meetings to identify the right community for your idea.
Free industry sessions of India Product Leadership helped me learn concepts like value proposition, the Business Model Canvas, and digital marketing.
Blogs of close.io showed me that my sales challenges were due to my ignorance.
YourStory helps in the searching for competitors or becoming aware of other startups in your space.

Gain domain experience

For techies, please reach out to professionals to get domain exposure and get your value proposition validated by domain experts. Try connecting with them through your friend circles. Some of your contacts will describe similar startup situations. You can look at their website and compare it with your plans.

Learn about the selling process

In my startup, we began with a product idea in the greenfield area. Today, I know that the greenfield area expects that we introduce the product concept to the customer and then sell the product. Being a techie in those days, I considered creating products in greenfield was cool and did not question our capability to sell products, even in areas with competitors.

If your employer provides you with pre-sales opportunity, take it even if you have to spend additional time. Sales is not account management with existing customers but also cold calling. As a techie, you may have limited or no sales capability. Sales exposure in a large company would help you learn the customer development process and tailor the same for your startup. Be open to learn from your mistakes and cultivate the ability to be resilient after rejections.

Explore external consulting opportunity

If you have niche skills, go ahead and take up consulting assignments. You can do it over weekends or at night. Look at these opportunities as a way to validate your solution to a problem.This is also an opportunity to test your ideas without actual risk.

In 2011, I failed to leverage consulting opportunities that needed cloud skills. I know of colleagues who leveraged their Big Data skills and have startups in that space today. I still remember a friend running a cloud company asking me to experiment my ideas by offering me his infrastructure.

Remember all interactions might lead to the creation of new networks and relationships. That gives you the opportunity to articulate and sell your skills. But give limited hours to consulting and be aware that you are preparing for your product, and not to become a consultant or a service company.

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