Bootstrapper’s guide to starting an office in Bangalore - I
The following is a two part series by Saurabh Chandra, founder of Bangalore based startup Neev Technologies. He has a pretty interesting blog at Bootstrap in Bangalore. Check it out.
Now that you have finally overcome the inertia of being in a job and have adopted the think local, look around principle, its time to look for a place to set up shop. If your idea is at a stage where you are working on it on your laptop, the guide is pretty short for you: just continue at home. If you are starting out with friends move in to a single apartment, it saves cost and adds to the productivity. If possible, try to partition the apartment into a work area and create an office feel to it.
In case you want a dedicated office where friends would like to come over to get into the discipline of working everyday or maybe you have hired a few people who need to come, then the above strategy of continuing at home doesn’t work. Now you need to go looking out. You can still simply try finding a home but keep a few things in mind. For a business today reliable internet and power are most important. Try finding a place closer to the typical VIP areas where power cuts are minimal. In your current MNC office, you do not notice it but the power backups is often in use. In a small apartment you cannot install a generator and a UPS with truck batteries will give you 2-4 hours back up. Keep in mind that the truck batteries give off poisonous fumes so don’t install them inside the workplace. Dry batteries are maintainence and poison free but a little expensive. I stuck to the truck one’s but installed them in the balcony so that the fumes don’t accumulate. Since batteries are expensive and one way to manage costs is to weigh the cost of UPS with laptops (since they come with internal batteries). Then all you need is a small UPS to make sure your internet modem and wifi router is up (both of which drain very little power).
This is easy to overlook initially but when you have a deadline to complete work, not being able to do anything due to a power outage will seem like the stupidest excuse and believe me you will be willing to pay insane amounts for resumption of work at that point of emergency. Something that saved us at times was that accidentally our own houses were in different areas in the city and all of us had good internet at home. Outages seldom happen in the whole city, so if there was an important check-in, deployment or skype call we would just pick the laptops drive over to the other house and we kind of had redundancy this way.
When you zero in to a place evaluate it from some more angles than just space and location. Reducing commute time is important but having ample parking for employees and visitors is too. In case you are looking at a flat make sure that the association is not going to crib about business being conducted in the society (typically no one does). Check noise levels during the weekdays/weekends and day/nigh since you will typically work all the time. It usually is great to have an independent house or a first floor in a house since that makes it possible to put up a board and visitors/prospective hires have typically a better impression of the place.
You may find a place with reasonable rent but what breaks your heart is the 10 month deposit that needs to be paid in Bangalore. Negotiate hard, usually you may be able to achieve one of the two things - reduced deposit or the deposit itself paid over a longer period of time. When cash is so crucial having a huge amount stuck as deposit is the last thing you want, so minimize this damage.
Now that we have found the office - the next post will delve in the stuff inside the office.
