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!

• First there was the TechCrunch post “Three Israeli Femme-preneurs To Keep an Eye On” and the outrage and twisted comments on it.
• Then there was this article on Harvard Business Review on “How women have changed  Norway“.
• Then I heard about MIT’s 2nd Annual Photo Contest, the theme for which is Women’s Entrepreneurship: Empowerment through Innovation.
• Finally, there was an email invitation to the Delhi chapter of TIE India’s latest initiative a Special Interest Group (SIG) for Women.

I appreciate all of these initatives on one side – they encourage and showcase women in action in their respective fields of work. From the daily wage construction laborer to a small business owner to a CEO – they all should be applauded for their hard work and success.

On the other hand, does sex need to be a part of it? Is a person’s genetical framework relevant to their work? May be entrepreneurs should be applauded regardless of the sex they were born with. We all know there is no such thing as a man or woman entrepreneur. Yet we sometimes qualify professionals like doctors as male or female. Same goes with CTO, CEO, founder, Prime Minister, President, etc. Why do we do this?

Do we make any changes to the job requirements when its a man vs a woman?  No. Then why do we need such so called prefixes? I think these are just signs of how different people percieve. Personal biases remain a part of the normal social fabric worldwide, but it matters how we apply them in our decision making. If person X is paying for massage services, the person may prefer a masseuse or masseur as a matter of comfort. This may be a personal preference but to what extent is it valid? a> the gender based preffered service provider may provide worse quality b> in today’s age since you can’t tell a person’s sexual preferences, the same sex service provider might possibly cause you more discomfort. While this was a simple example of daily life biases, by the same token can people rationally apply the same comfort based bias while choosing a President or a Board Chairman?

History has taught us globally and specifically in India, that creating special fast track programs and/or reservation laws (for educational institutions and jobs) based on candidate sex, caste, religion, etc. creates more boundaries than the imaginary glass ceilings they break.

In that vein, a special interest group for women indicates to me that there is something lacking with all the existing groups @ TIE, Delhi and the avenues they offer to women for professional growth and networking are limiting in some fashion or the other. If such is not the case, then women can and should participate in the TIE groups of their industry and interest areas.

As a matter of logic, if one considers a woman an equal then by defintion she needs no special treatment. Having special groups is akin to segregation, which Dr Martin Luther King aptly explained to the entire world – is not an acceptable solution to any problem. What is the best way to treat the problems at hand:

- fewer women in higher ranking roles

- fewer women in certain industry sectors

- fewer women in the workforce than men

Is the solution to:

- ignore the problem, ensure law provides equal opportunity to men and women alike and then let the equally empowered women create their own destinies?

- or to create special rules, special groups, special laws to artificially push up the number of working women?