A brief story of Bandhan.com (and Discrete Log Technologies)

This is a guest post by Shashikant Kore. He is co-founder of Bandhan.com. He speaks about his experience on founding bandhan, and general entrepreneurship blues .

Our tiny achievement after almost an year of work is Bandhan.com, which went live few weeks ago. We see a lot of wisdom dished out on entrepreneurship by anybody who is remotely connected with startups. The intention of this post is not give gyaan to you. Rather, this is an opportunity for us to pause, look back and jot down our experiences and learnings.

Genesis: When I was looking for a match last year, I wanted to evaluate right online matrimonial service(s). A general discussion with friends revealed that everybody has different opinions about each service. The reason being we had different partner expectations.  Of course, these services have their own strengths – they are strong in certain regions, languages, or community. The choice is easier if you have a clear option.  But then what about people like me who have difficulty right at the beginning?  I felt the need for a service which could suggest me the right services for me.

The second issue for me was to track other services which have profiles matching my criteria. There should be easy way to track profiles matching my criteria.

There was no service which could solve these problem. So, we decided to solve it ourselves. Bandhan.com has been started out of genuine need.

Company:  Sachin, co-founder of the company, is my classmate for graduation days. After his M.Tech CS from IIT Madras, he was working with D E Shaw, Hyderabad for nearly 4 years. I have completed my M Tech CS from IIT Kanpur, worked with Veritas (now Symantec) Pune and was working with Webaroo, Mumbai when the idea hit us.  We decided to pursue this idea full time and moved to Pune in December 2007. Bandhan.com is a product of Discrete Log Technologies. The term “Discrete Log” is from abstract algebra. These are class of problems which are very hard to solve. They are as hard as prime factorization. In fact, for me they were too hard to even understand during Kanpur days.

Product: The product has a lot of engineering jugglery going in the background, which user is neither aware nor does she care. That is the invisible work. And it can get unexciting if you are working on such a thing.  But once we reached a stage where we could see something tangible, even if it is devoid of any HTML glory in the browser, it was exciting. It motivated us to push even harder.

We spent quite some time on getting the user interface right. Many of our users tell us that the UI is very simple. But, this simplicity is result of bunch of brain-storming sessions with our friends and lots of iterations.

Working Style:  Since we are only two people working on this product, the focus is always on doing only essential things. 80/20 is just too expensive and slow for us. We look for 50/1 – the 1% effort that will give us 50% results.

The philosophy adopted here is that of 37 Signals – Do less. These nice folks have even documented that nicely in their guide – Getting Real.

Funding: We are a self-funded startup. Once our product was in a good shape, we met couple of investors just to bounce off our idea and not really seek funding. Almost all of them liked our product, but expressed concerns about size of the opportunity. Though, none of these discussions helped us financially, we got a lot of quality feedback and advice. Also, in the process, we realized the sagacious advice of Paul Graham, Raising money is hard.

Boot-strapping means a tight control on costs. On a blog of ex-googlers, they wrote how Sergey Brin considered the opportunity cost as their biggest cost. This is the cost of not being live yesterday. How do you address this cost? By releasing early and releasing often. Bunch of times, we write downright bad code which we would be ashamed to own. But the excitement of solving problem outweighs such concerns.

Roadmap: As stated above we would be doing absolutely essential features on the product. And one thing which we will need to work on constantly is breadth (adding new services for search) and depth (improving our search.)

As the feedback we have received from users is overwhelmingly positive, we know we are pretty much on the right path. We just need to keep walking. The user growth will happen at its own sweet pace.

Presently, we are not really looking at other verticals, but we believe we have building blocks in place which could be potentially replicated. Let’s see how things pan out.