Who am I?

I am Abishek Muthian, for the past 5 years I had been running Timebender Technologies a consumer Internet product & services company. 

Timebender Technologies

I built my company ground up in a former village in India with inexperienced developers whom I personally trained to build world class products which competed directly with products built by established companies from better ecosystems.

Emojiball

We started with emojiball , a modern take on the classic arachnoid game.

Talk about News

We built a highly customisable news aggregator with Talk about News .

larynx

An innovative way to share web content along with voice in larynx & larynxBot which provides voice summary for web content on the major chat platforms powered by patent-pending technology.

During demonetisation in India, we released ATMBot powered by our custom BOT engine to help users find ATM with cash which was widely covered in the national & international media .

FindDate - A chat app network dating platform

The break through we were looking for came with FindDate , a chat app network dating platform which amassed over 250,000 customers within little more than a year of its run & was selected to be part of Facebook's accelerator program within a month of its launch.

Apart from initial investments, our product developments were largely funded by our services to niche customers in areas of VSAT technology, leading international telecom & digital identity solution providers.

In spite of continuous R&D to launch an innovative product every year, our company remained profitable due to my focus on capital efficiency.

By early 2018, in-order to provide undivided focus to FindDate, which had extremely successful growth rate; I closed our services division.

To avoid being quadriplegic

But unfortunately by mid 2018, I found out that I was very sick & was told that I would become a quadriplegic & I had to undergo very complex spinal fusion surgery to prevent it.

At this point our flagship product FindDate was months away from generating revenue, even though my company had more than a year of runway but considering my present medical condition & being the only executive of the company I decided to shutdown my company after helping the employees find good offers and returning the money to the investors.

Why hitstartup

In the past 5 years of running Timebender Technologies,  I had made several mistakes; but I have also took correct decisions which lead me to grow my company year over year against several odds.

During this period of my medical recovery, I'm building hitstartup to look back at the knowledge I've gained in running my company to share with other entrepreneurs to help gain correct insights to accelerate their growth & more importantly to warn against the mistakes I made.  

I notice that the startup ecosystems related media are mostly noisy with funding related news or with marketing content disguised as information or just glamorous success stories which covers only negligible percentage of startups, businesses specific to certain regions of the world & less about creating successful startups.

My goal with hitstartup is to make a startup or business reach their goals regardless of the environment they are located.

My priority with hitstartup is,

1. Stop the entrepreneur from making mistakes at an early stage.
2. Help the startup to build products which people want.
3. Aid the startup to market its product.
4. Get the startup to make money.
5. Support the startup in reaching to the investors, only when absolutely needed.

Noiseless medium

The primary medium in which I broadcast knowledge is via hitstartup's website . It is not another 'X startup received Y funding' startup news website; which are in my opinion useless to most startups.

The content in the hitstartup is split into two categories 'Mini Essays' and 'Comics'. Both are Complimentary and Contradictory to each other by design.

In Mini Essays, the content is focussed on actionable knowledge. No distractions whatsoever, hence there are no images, videos, graphics embedded in the essays. But the essays have links to the relevant Comics.

In Comics, the general theme is sarcasm towards the startup ecosystem. _A picture can tell thousand words, _I've chosen comics as a medium to showcase the issues in the startup ecosystem for avoiding them and has yielded commendable results.

Communication

As with the knowledge mediums, I have chosen my communication medium to be strictly noiseless; which is 'email'.

email is an excellent piece of technology, it is distributed i.e. all technologies of it (protocol, server, clients) are distributed across several systems and federated i.e. no single entity owns email.

But the primary reason for me to choose email is because, it doesn't waste time by forcing one to communicate in real-time like a chat or telephone call. So, the parties involved in communication can put in more thought into communication by listening and just not wait to speak.

Best of all, email allows batch processing(mentally). So the communication is strictly email unless otherwise the situation demands a real-time communication.

Entrepreneurs/Startups can consume the content which I create and reach to me by subscribing to hitstartup . They can reach to me by either replying to the hitstartup content or send a direct email.

Feedback and scale

Feedback, so far has been extremely positive. There is no regular schedule for new content on hitstartup to sustain the quality. A content is made available only when it is ready.

I have kept the scale of hitstartup to the minimum for the same reason, to sustain the quality. Yet I try my best to communicate with every single startup/entrepreneur who get in touch via hitstartup.

So the reach is completely dependent upon word of mouth from those who feel hitstartup would be beneficial to their friends and family. If you feel the same, do spread the word on hitstartup.

Online Startup Coaching

After being requested by several of hitstartup's readers, I've started providing online startup coaching. It builds upon the foundation of the hitstartup's goals and focuses on providing personalised startup coaching via noise free mediums.

Business Plans

Needgap my free problem validation platform which connects consumers with entrepreneurs to build what people want has grown tremendously.

Often when I suggest any solution to a problem or a need gap, I get asked how to start a business with that solution. Hence, I'm launching hitstartup's business plans which details the problem, need gap, possible solution and even the business plan to build a product out of that solution to help entrepreneurs get started in launching their startup.

Solopreneur

Henceforth I plan on writing actionable content for solopreneurs here on hitstartup. I don't want existing followers of hitstartup to be disappointed, as any critical action for a solopreneur is a capital efficiency hack for the startup!

Update log

October 2021: Solopreneur

July 2020: Business Plans

October 2019: Online Startup Coaching