heyy...thts a good one...

Focus should always be to build a sustainable business and definitely not raising money. If (and only if) former happens, later follows. Nice article Sameer....

@ sahil: agree with your point. One has to keep an eye on the scalability aspect.

@ rohit: well said. Most of the successful Indian entrepreneurs have followed the path of building stuff in their own capitalm reaching profitability and building it further. Examples: Dhirubhai, subhash chandra, mittals, narayan murthy, sanjiv bhikchandani etc.

@ sumit: You have hit the nail on the head. Just because a team raises money it does not guarantee that they will build a strong business. But a strong business can 100% get funded. Most of the folks get the order wrong.

And you are on the right spot Sameer - If I were to choose between the 2 Ms - MONEY or MENTOR, I'd dare to err towards the latter. Keep up the good work you doing Champ, or shall I say Jai Ho!

Nice article Sameer.

India does need more FTEs to enter the market. At the same time the FTEs sure can do with better guidance and support from firms like Headstart, MVP, iAccelerator, Upstart.in etc. These agencies also understand the Indian scenario better than most VC and angel investors and can also be a catalyst connecting many ends.

BTW, StartupNews.in is a newly launched news portal dedicated to the Startup industry in India. We have just launched a few days ago. We intent to provide a platform for startups to spread the word and support their work in any way possible. I invite you / MVP, startups to send us their News, stories and requests for interviews. StartupNews.in is itself a startup! Please feel free to contact us for any suggestions, ideas or comments you may have.

My 2 cents, as a first generation entrepreneur.

Startups, especially early stage and first time entrepreneurs need a lot of good mentoring than huge investment. Money at a very early stage (pre-revenue, pre-product, pre-customer) can bring a lot of obstacles as well.

1. First and the biggest obstacle. You need lot of energy and time to raise funds. Indian VCs have a tendency to take a lot of time in evaluating a company before funding them. This could lead to you losing a lot of crucial time at an early stage of your startup. The time when you should be searching for new customers, features, and PR instead of working on your Business Plan PPT, financial models, exit strategy. Yes you heard it right, exit strategy. Few VCs will ask them.Distractions are your worst enemy, and going after VCs at an early stage can be a big distraction.

2. Try to ensure that you require money to grow, not to survive. Your venture should be making enough money to at least fund your current operations. And trust me on this; going after customers is much easier than going after VCs.

3. Work on a milestone not on a date when you should start looking for funds. The milestone could be anything, 10,000th registered member, 100th paying client, revenue of $200K per annum, 1 million pageviews etc. But get that milestone first, before even working on your business plan PPT. This will help you focus all your energy on your venture.

4. Look for mentors, advisers and friends rather than investors.

5. Keep your costs as low as you can, you don’t need rackspace servers to start with. Even Dreamhost account, or Godaddy servers can do the job for few months. 15’’ CRTs and Linux running on celeron machines are good, if you are going to spend most of the time in programming.