Note: This post is written for the benefit of the Indian Startup Ecosystem with inspiration from Vivek’s post “Wake up! contribute to the startup ecosystem”.

On 7th November, 2010 around 1 am IST we decided to turn the lights on at www.zaakpay.com. Earlier that week including Diwali day Nov 5 and the day after Nov 6 we had all worked hard as a team to get things together. It should have not been hard to launch, we were not releasing much – just a signup flow, a homepage and a few static pages and the signup flow had been ready a while ago. But it was hard. Someone who was supposed to deliver bailed on us, unanticipated things happened when the hosting was setup and the code was run from the server, some pages started looking funny on MacOS + Mozilla. We were all working remotely juggling time between work and spending brief moments with family over Diwali. But we came through – we picked up the loose threads, minimized Diwali celebration time, worked round the clock with our heads down and we got something done. It was the first thing we accomplished together as a team that brought us all joy.

And doing such a small launch was something we had debated heavily – some felt releasing the website for a non-functional product would be a disaster – people would come, try the site, get dejected to find nothing but the signup, leave and possibly never come back when the product is actually ready and launched. And then what could we call such a mini-launch? Actually we should not be calling it ZaakPay Alpha – since there is no complete product that even an alpha customer can use just yet. The major positive of doing this was obviously testing the waters to see how people would react, is there a strong demand for a payment product in the Indian market and so on.

I convinced the team that we should release a small site fast, call it Alpha, and then add functionality to it as and when we were ready. We decided to bite the bullet and it was the right step for us. So far we have gained a lot more than we had bargained for by doing a small release and with this post I want to list the benefits down for fellow entrepreneurs in the same boat as me:

  • The launch has validated our view that the demand is strong for a product in our area – payments. We already have interest from 25 eCommerce companies who want to try and use our product. Some have completed our signup and others have emailed us in great detail their payment needs. So before taking our product to the market we are already talking to potential customers and trying to match their needs to what we are building.
  • We are learning about features that potential customers are aggressively looking for:
    • A recurring payments solution is a hot requirement in India today, hotter than I thought! Many a conversation threads have flooded my inbox on this very topic in the last 7 days.
    • An open sandbox that allows a potentially interested developer or merchant to play with our basic product before signing up as a customer is another idea that has emerged strongly.
  • We  have seen some good interest from developers and startup guys via http://hackerstreet.in and various blogs run by people on the Indian startup scene. The mention of PayPal in a recent blog post has lead to a flurry of PayPal Chennai employees visiting ZaakPay.com (as per Google Analytics). All this has lead to better suited candidates applying for our openings (hiring for a bootstrapped startup in India is very hard). With a stronger applicant pipeline, we are closer to finding and hiring the best fit people at ZaakPay.
  • Last but not the least, going live albeit with a small site has shown us that we as a team can do this if we continue working together as a committed unit.

For me – just the last point, building confidence in the team and boosting team morale is a reason enough to justify doing a mini-launch. Everything else is bonus! So if you are in a dilemma – launch or not to launch, I hope you find this short post useful in helping you make the decision. JUST DO IT!