Continuing on my earlier post on startup ideas, here’s another one, although not necessarily technology related.

Start a company that provides handyman, plumbing, general repair etc services to people.

Before you dismiss the it as crazy, hear me out.

In my experience, getting a miscellaneous home repair job done in India is a nightmare. You need to first go hunting for a handyman or repairman or electrician or plumber. Haggle about the price and then decide upon an appointment time and wait for the guy to show up. And for reasons unknown, these guys are almost always late and never able to keep the scheduled time. If you have taken a day off from work or are working from home, it translates to lost work, time and money for you. You need to repeatedly check in with the guy when he’s gonna show up. Its almost as if you are at the mercy of these guys. And that just sucks.

So here’s what you can do:

Start a one place shop that will provide all kinds of repair services – electrical, plubming, general repair etc.

Your goal and USP should be to buffer the customer from bad service.  Period.

Encourage and instill value of timeliness and customer satisfaction in your employees.  By offering a superior customer experience and all-in-one shop, you could also get away with charging a little premium over others. People will happily pay a little more than have to deal with the whims and fancies of local repairman.

And its a win-win for the handymen, electricians, repairmen as well – they get to work as a salaried employee (stable pay) rather than an uncertain income.

Thoughts, feedback welcome.

This guest post is written by Swaroop C H, co-founder of a startup called IONLAB. He writes regularly on his blog at www.swaroopch.com. His company has announced their upcoming product called “Track Every Coin” which can be best described as “Your personal finance in a keychain.” Check it out at www.trackeverycoin.com.

I always used to find the concept of “innovation” very fuzzy, especially when the big managers talk about it. The best explanation I’ve read is “Innovation is the by-product of a well-executed product.” But maybe that’s equally fuzzy as well.

A few years ago, when I was working at Adobe, I got to attend the famous internal “Dev Summit” which is a fantastic event that happens every year. At this event, I got to attend a talk on the “vectors of innovation” by Geoffrey Moore. This talk is related to his book “Dealing with Darwin”, so for those who have already read that book, please do chip in with your thoughts on the takeaways from the book in the comments section. For the rest, I have jotted down here my notes from that talk.

First, he exploded the myth that innovation in itself is valuable and that innovation is the same kind in every company.

He explained why innovation is important to a company:

Innovation is valuable only if it helps us achieve competitive advantage. Its greatest value is when it differentiates us from our competitors sufficiently that customers prefer our offers to theirs and will pay a premium to support that preference. It also has value when it helps neutralize their competitive advantages over us and when it helps us improve our own productivity and thus profitability. But we should realize there is a lot of innovation going on today in our company that meets none of these criteria, that is in fact creating waste. Managing innovation successfully requires us to redirect that energy back into economically rewarding outcomes.

The economic argument in favor of innovation focuses on pricing power. Without innovation offerings become more and more like each other. They commoditize. As they do so, customers are able to play one vendor off against the next to get a lower price. Over time the market stabilizes at prices at or below cost, creating returns for investors below the cost of capital, causing investment to flee the marketplace. By contrast, when innovation is applied, offers become more and more differentiated from one another, leading to different ones becoming the preferred choice for different market segments, giving those vendors pricing power within those segments. In this scenario the market stabilizes at prices well above cost, creating returns above the cost of capital, attracting more investment into the marketplace.

The fundamental principle that drives this argument is that when innovation creates differentiation, it creates attractive economic returns.

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More often than not, you hear all the great, fairy tale endings of how an entrepreneur made millions by selling his startup etc.

However, seldom do folks discuss the emotional and physical toll it takes on the entrepreneur.

Here’s a great blog post by Jason Nazar, founder CEO of DocStoc.com, who describes some of the downsides of being an entrepreneur. Its an amazing read – do give it a dekko.

Given today’s extraordinary economic circumstances and the resulting bleak job market, what should fresh Indian college graduates do ? Seek a professional job and stay put or venture out on their own ?

Whatever little interest they might have in entrepreneurship is sure to be tested by today’s turbulent times.

In an effort to seek out different opinions, I contacted several successful entrepreneurs to see what advice they had to offer. Below are some of the responses I received:

Rajesh Jain from Emergic:

The thing which holds us back from doing many things is the FEAR of FAILURE. So, ask yourself: what would you if you were not afraid ?

Sanjeev Bikhchandani from Naukri:

Get some work experience before you start your own company. Learn in a bigger better organization first.

Faisal Farooqui from Mouthshut:

My single biggest advice to college grads would be to work on their communication skills and ability to work in a team.
If this is worked upon, everything else will fall in place.

Sramana Mitra:

Sramana is vocal about entrepreneurship as a viable career option for folks graduating in today’s market.

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One of the oft asked questions is — How do I get my startup idea ?

While many of the startups are founded by entrepreneurs to solve problems they personally run into, startup ‘ideas’ may not come so obviously to others. So, while some have already found that idea, some are still suffering from idea overload and several others have no clue on how to seek out ideas.

So, how do you seek out ideas ?  Specifically, how do you seek out startup ideas for the Indian market ?

Why do I specifically say the ‘Indian market’ ? Well, because the Indian online market poses some unique challenges.

First, in terms of size.

The Indian online audience is really small. Internet and more specifically broadband adoption is still in its infancy. Majority of the Internet usage happens from cyber cafes and workplace. Not to mention broadband adoption is skewed mainly across the more IT savvy urban areas.

Second in terms of the Indian online usage patterns.

Bollywood, news, stocks, cricket, matrimony, jobs, astrology still dominate the online Indian usage pattern. Indians are heavy consumers of content but dont fare well at content generation. Anything outside of the above verticals risks borderline into a niche category.

Taking into account the above two factors, seeking out ideas to the Indian Internet market is quite different than seeking out ideas for the US market. Something that has been successful in US may not work in the Indian market without taking into account the above two constraints that are unique to the Indian market.

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Sramana is doing a series on Entrepreneurship – Innovation in India for Forbes and requested my perspective about the same.  I chose to write down my thoughts as a post and seek out your thoughts about it as well.

When it comes to entrepreneurship in India, for the longest time now, it seems that most of us have been rehashing, repeating and regurgitating the same things over and over again:

“Revamp Education system”, “Lack of funding”, “No ecosystem”, “No product companies”, “Indian mindset and culture”, “Bureaucratic red-tape” and many other such reasons.

Its time we really took a deep, hard look at what is the current state of entrepreneurship in India, what is broken and how can we really fix it ?

In all fairness, I am not on ground zero. And so it may seem as inappropriate to many that I speak of entrepreneurship in India while residing in the US.  You might very well diss my opinions expressed below based on the same grounds, and in that case, I welcome your perspective – hopefully we can have a healthy discussion via the comments.  In my defense, even though I’m not at ground zero, I have been closely monitoring the startup and entrepreneurship scene in India over the last couple of years. I’ve talked to lots of Indian entrepreneurs, tech enthusiasts and VC’s over this time – enough to form an opinion.

If someone who’s totally ignorant about the Indian market walks up to me and asks me about entrepreneurship in India – my answer to them would be that its more hype than happening.  The awareness about entrepreneurship is definitely increasing incredibly, but not enough converts yet. Lots of wannapreneurs, but few actual entrepreneurs.Again, my goal isnt to ridicule or point fingers, but rather narrow down on what’s broken.

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I stumbled upon a really interested post over the weekend and thought I’d share it with you guys.

Sachin Rekhi, product manager @ Imeem says that instead of building simply based on “What People Want” (the motto preached by Paul Graham of Ycombinator fame), you should build based on  “What People Want” and “What people will Buy“.

If you think about what this means, it fully encompasses the original statement. In order to make something people will buy, you first have to make something people want. But now making something people want is a necessary, but insufficient condition. You have to take it to the next level and make something people find compelling enough to buy.

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We’ve seen a lot of innovation in the last 5 years on product, but limited innovation on the monetization front. I hope with the current flight to revenue, quality, and sustainable businesses, we start to see real creativity in the business models and monetization methods that drive web businesses.

You can read the entire post at Sachin’s blog.