Structured course correction designed to test a new fundamental hypothesis about the product, strategy, and engine of growth. – Wikipedia

After the encouraging response from the potential users, it was time to build the product. We did some market research, we found some similar products, and about a week later we thought we knew how we are going to build it. The rule engine, scheduling , reports and monetisation.

The process of architecting a product is so much fun.

I love everything about architecting a product. I usually try to think a little ahead, make the problem little larger than it actually is and finally try to fit as many related problems as possible.

One Sunday afternoon after completing our scheduled work, we were having coffee along with Anubhab. Chit-chatting about our dream products, trends and lots of tech.

One of my dream was to build a “Generic Object”, so like other two I pitched in explaining the concept and how it works. Conversation went something like this:

“Some day I will create a generic object builder, using which you can represent everything” – Me

“Oh something like Single theory to define the universe” – said Anubhab laughing,

“One day Maddy will create his own clone from code, Wait a minute, are you Maddy or his clone :-)” – Utkarsh joined.

Everyone laughed and for about 5 min nobody talked. Then looking at my face Utkarsh told

“Hold on, you need to tell more about it! It seems interesting…”

“Idea of generic object is that you can represent / create everything from one template. Most of the application that we use today can be represented in a very relational manner, they can be pictured as simple Name and Value pairs.”

“Hmm, but it is still abstract, can you give specific example?”

“Sure, think about this coffee, You add right amount of ingredient and you will get different type of coffee. What If I create a vending machine and code all the combination of ingredient to it. The moment you press a button you get the coffee that you need.”

Whats wrong with me, how to make Coffee? really…???

“Ok let me explain in simpler way, What is a CRM? It has details about the customer, which are nothing but his name, contact, address, product interested in, past transactions. Look at each one, everything is name value pair.”

I continued “So If I create a God class, which will accept what object I want to represent, and pass some data, It will actually create that object and store it in DB etc”

“Is it even possible! How can you store all type of objects in one table?” – Utkarsh.

“Why would anyone want to create all of this in first place” – Anubhab

“I think it is possible” – I was serious

Adding to it “I am not kidding. I think something like this can be used to make 2 different systems to talk to each other.”

“What do you mean by talk to each other?” – Both asked

“If you can link APIs of different products you can transfer data between those, without”

“Ah yea, that will be awesome. Something like IFTTT and Zapier” – Utkarsh

“Yea, but much more powerful, They allow simple rule, here your rules and formula can be complex”

“You know what, lets build it” – Utkarsh

“Don’t tell me you are serious!” – Anubhab

He was serious

Acceleration

Changing an idea and moving on, it hurts, because you are leaving something incomplete, something that you thought as a problem.

But somewhere down the line I was scared, all this was working in my head, but anything can go wrong. What if we cannot represent all applications in generic way.

We said It is an automation engine or a Mashup tool, primarily focused on marketing automation. Where users can link different applications like email, mail chimp, google analytics, CRM etc, and automate the process by creating step by step tasks in a workflow.

But somewhere down the line I was scared, all this was working in my head, but anything can go wrong. What if we cannot represent all applications in generic way.

One day While reading Techcrunch, I came across the article which read “JFDI – Asia’s #1 accelerator is now opened their application for their next batch”

“We can get in..” I don’t know how it occurred to me, I was just damn confident at that moment, that we will get in.

Immediately I shared the link with Utkarsh, and told him we should apply.

“What? an accelerator ? But why?”

“We need to get bigger audience, the problem that we are addressing is not prominent in India”

“That is true, But we don’t have anything to show. and more over there are thousands of application these people would receive, why would they select us among all?”

“Because We are awesome :-)” I said smiling

“Dude, Do you think we can fly to Singapore and stay there for 4 months? How much money have you got?”

“I guess ~$3” I said giggling.

“Wow, I am rich, I’ve got $5”

So with $8 combined in our accounts we applied to JFDI.asia accelerator and as a bonus to Y-Combinator also, you know in case if we get lucky :-)