One of the delights of being an entrepreneur is how unpredictable days are. Yesterday had started off like any normal day. Everything changed quickly when a friend called in the morning referring to an article in the Economic Times on Open Source and Linux. It was the lead story on the front page. The story talked about the governments interest in making Linux a platform of choice based on a Chinese model to move away from proprietary software and cut costs. I jumped at the opportunity after all, our Thin Client-Thick Server solution (Emergic Freedom) did just that by leveraging older PCs and open-source software. So, I decided (in quick consultation with some of the team members) that we would do an ad in the paper (ET) today talking about Emergic Freedom.
To put this in context, just a couple days ago, I had decided to begin talking to prospective customers one-on-one, and leave advertising for later. But the front-page story changed all that, and I thought heres a great opportunity to get some mindshare for what we are doing in the context of what was talked about the previous day. How things change! We didnt even have our website ready, and neither did we have any ad, though I was working on getting the brochures ready.
So, in the space of a day, we had made up our ad (in consultation with our agency) which took off from the newspaper article (featuring a snippet of the headline). Have just spent all night getting our website (emergic.com) ready. The ad will be in the Mumbai edition of the EcoTimes today, and in Delhi and Bangalore tomorrow (Friday) since we were way past the deadline! Anyways, some good always comes out gives us an opportunity to make some changes, should we desire. Will put out the ad image shortly here.
Moments and epiphanies like these take thinking and momentum to a new level. It galvanized all of us in the company to action. What was going along has now been accelerated. I am not too optimistic of much of a response from the ad, but hope is what every entrepreneur lives on! Its a big spend for us (about Rs 3.5 lakhs USD 7,000). Lets see what happens. What I am happy about that is that weve got a lot accomplished in the past day, and that should help us move forward faster.
So, we are now on our way: Emergic Freedom has been launched. The first baby steps towards our vision building out the new enterprise infrastructure for SMEs and consumers in emerging markets is underway. And to think of it, even I didn’t know of this 24 hours ago!
