A few good men and women

This is a followup to my last post about the new RadioVeRVe. Before i get back to the deluge of things which need to be done, i would like share some of my experiences in releasing the new RadioVeRVe, hopefully there are somethings in this post which help you in your endeavors.

These days i have suddenly become a senior citizen when i go speak at colleges and meet people at conferences, This is slightly unusual and takes some getting used to. One of the common thing discussed is “How do you find people who help you in your projects/ ventures?”.

Too many people are stuck on this question, “If only i had three guys who worked with me, i could release this in 3 months. I am even ready give share/ stock in my venture”.

Today I can safely tell you “Stop waiting, get out there and start working, if you are doing the right thing you will find the right people eventually”.

Barcamp 6 (or was it 7) was the turning point for RadioVeRVe, i had finally given up on finding the right person to implement our(Me, Atul and Gaurav) vision for the website and had started to dive in and implement stuff myself. This was hard, i am not a css junkie and i generally had more things to do than i could handle. But i was open to putting in the nights and the weekends to get this done. And at Barcamp i met Praveen and Jonathan, to my credit i had some sort of new version to show them and explain what i wanted to do with the site, we got talking and soon enough both Jonathan and Praveen were working on the site as part of team RadioVeRVe.

It was slow at times, even painful sometimes. Weekends of rapid action were replaced with weeks of inactivity but during all of it there was a great sense of belonging of doing what we believed in. After 5 months of hardwork when we finally put out the new RadioVeRVe, it was one of the proudest moment for me. I finally felt like i can pull off anything from scratch and even make some great friends along the way. This confidence is new and i hope will drive me through ups and downs in the future.

If there is one lesson i learnt from this, and this applies to Open Source projects and Startup Ideas, Dont speak about the idea and expect it to draw other people. Start working on it, there is nothing like a demo to convince people to join you and make your idea a reality.

I would like to take a step back and thank Jonathan, Praveen, Shilpa and Arjun (Shilpa and Arjun have been part of RadioVeRVe for much longer) for all the work you guys have put in for RadioVeRVe. It just wouldnt have been the same without you guys.