Startup highs, lows and challenges

Startup highs, lows and challenges - Riya

One of the blogs I've been reading recently is from the CEO of the photo search company "Riya" - Munjal Shah . It has some fascinating items on how the company launched Riya, the excitement, the way they had to fix bugs and address issues fast. Now he is blogging about the change in direction for Riya.

What stands out to me is how many images got uploaded in the first few days... and how a startup has utilized engineers in the US and in Bangalore -- the growing pains, and the payoff for a "global" workforce. Often when you think of "startup" you think of 6 people in your garage.... here they have just a little bigger team than 6, but they are spread across 2 parts of the world.

The excitment of launching a product, watching the numbers grow, fixing the bugs -- all very fast -- must give everyone a great feeling. And recall that Riya has no huge marketing budget... they got pitched from other blogs like techcrunch.com..... Just goes to show that you don't need huge marketing dollars to get the word out -- but you do need to be focused. (Of course, they did have a person on staff who did nothing but launch planning)

The first "episode" is here, it makes for good reading. He has posted 3 other updates after this.

http://munjal.typepad.com/recognizing_deven/2006/05/episode_1_march.html

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