Entrepreneur Geek

Alan from our systems team sent me a note about Quillpad. At first, I found the name strange and did not look at it. But I was going through unanswered mails today and looked at Quillpad.

Easy online Gujarati (Hindi / Marathi / Other) typing tool

And I was amazed! It’s a web based editor for Indian languages. You can type from your standard English keyboard, but in your own language. Quillpad will understand what you are typing and give you suggestions. You can select a suggestion using arrow keys and use it by pressing space bar.

This works much like Microsoft’s transliteration keyboard, but has a better transliteration engine. The biggest thing was that it worked right in my browser, without any installation. Its auto completion is the best feature of all and typing in Gujarati was never so easy. Or for that matter, any other Indian language.

Kudos to Tachyon Technologies team!

Unicode characters and webservices always create one or the other problem for me Working on PlannerX backend was not any different. Spent some good hours fixing Unicode / UTF-8 related issues.

And while I was searching for some solutions, I found an excellent “PHP UTF-8 Cheat Sheet” by Nick Nettleton of DropSend. I highly recommend it if you are going to do anything with PHP and Unicode!

And BTW, don’t use Base64 encoding with UTF-8. It will not work!

These are hard times. We have had to take some real tough decisions. Here’s something Ami shared with me. A message from Robin Sharma.

We are in some harsh times. Many of us are going through real pain.

But here’s the thing: pain isn’t bad. It just feels bad.

I’ve had some deeply painful times in my life. Yes, felt miserable as I navigated the suffering. But when it ended (and it ALWAYS does), I was left as a better man. Stronger, more creative, simpler, kinder. Better. By far.

What I’ve come to realize is that pain is a doorway. If you have the courage to just be with it versus numbing out and escaping from it, it will bring you giant gifts. It will evoke greater leadership within you. It will show you a lot more of who you are. It will deepen you. And it will remind you that life – and whatever you have in this moment – is a blessing. And a very big one indeed.

Another recommended reading – Rules for going through tough times – another Robin Sharma excerpt I posted 3.5 years ago!

Read Jeremy Chone’s post about “Are You a Seesmic or Balsamiq Entrepreneur?” today. I love Balsamiq Mockups and have been using it for more than 6 months now. Peldi – the entrepreneur behind Balsamiq, his blog and ideas were also an inspiration behind us starting AppsMagnet.

The question Jeremy’s asking is whether you are a “scale-first” entrepreneur or “monetize-first”. With scale-first, you would go capture a big market share and then think about monetization. With “monetize-first” you will ensure your venture is cash flow positive from early days. Your plans will focus on getting more money.

I prefer the money-first approach. Guy Kawasaki suggested it in the Art of the Start, and I have experienced that cash flows are one of the most important factors for a business. When you focus on getting cash every month, instead of raising external / venture funding, you are much more relaxed, have faster (instant?) gratification and are on solid ground.

This has been the driving factor for AppsMagnet too. We have sold 32 copies of our Reports module for activeCollab in about a month, and PlannerX has received very good reviews so far. As a matter of fact, we have many people looking forward to the activeCollab version of PlannerX!

What type of entrepreneur are you?

These are the things on my mind right now!

• Finished writing Open Source CMS book. Submitted revisions to first drafts. Pre finals will be ready soon and book will be out in April.
• PlannerX is getting some good reviews. Especially ActiveCollab community (where it’s not yet launched) “loved it” – and I heard it from many people!
• Financial year end is coming near (31st March for India). And we are all pushing to close deals and get cash in at Magnet!

Exciting times!