Am I still away from trees ?

It was in August 2007 that I decided to quit my job. From that day I have been dreaming about staying away from computers and getting close to nature. Well everything went as planned. But there was one small thing we didn't consider in the initial stage of planning. Yes it was the website for our company.

Days past and we started planning our investment for sapgreen and the website the heart of our business turned out to be costlier than expected. Every consulting company we went to quoted huge prices. That when we decided to do it ourselves. The problem was we didn't have any experience required for doing that. Wait a minute !!! What is opensource for ? It for people like us, free of charge softwares and yes open source did matter for us.

After months of googling, PHP codes, forms,secure form,testing (last few days have been hectic and I did develop few symptoms RSI, more on this in the next blog :) ) we finished the site.
And today I'm proud;we saved lot of money, thanks to Ravi, K* and K's sister Sapgreen is finally up and running. BTW Ravi is part of sapgreen,

And now we are back on the web. So more on green entrepreneurs, my RSI problems and Ravi's entry into sapgreen coming soon.... We are all now going to back to Trees.

(* Ashwin is known as 'K' among us)

Where do we start?

For a long time I had been reading lot of books,articles,blogs on being an entrepreneur. Everybody had their own views about when to start? Some say wait till have the right moment, some said you shouldn't wait. At the end of the day what mattered most was, what I wanted to do. I'm sure many would agree with this.

Now it's all over and here I'm sitting at my office, writing this. Had been a long time since I wrote the blog. Had multiple reasons for not writing a blog as well. Can you believe a city like Mysore can't even have proper infrastructure for Internet ? Ok now coming to the topic, Well we have started. What have we started? Where are we right now? Where do we go next ? phew !!! I'm confused myself. We have a lot of plans for EnLEn. But where do we start from? Do we do this first or do we do this next?

Things keeps changing. We are totally new, highly immature, It's like learning at kindergarten. It's astonishing . I'm learning a lot of things including my writing skills, as you can I have written lot many words without having anything to say :-). A blog for which I don't even have proper labels.
Anyway we will be getting our first salaries from April at EnLEn, Pretty excited :-)

First Day at EnLEn

Friday, 1st of Feb 2008, I was roaming around the office to complete my last day formalities at office. Finally at 5:00 PM just 30 min before the official day ended I got relieved :-) . That was the moment. We had a great party at office CCD. My friends visited my home for the last time in Noida. We partied whole night. The moment I got relieved, I got a call from Ashwin to inform me that the company was registered. EnLEn Marketing and Renewables energy systems Pvt Ltd.

And today on Monday 4th of Feb 2008, here I'm at Ashwin's home and our new office, working on the SapGreen's website.

How to Start a company in India ?

When we had our first draft of business plan, we thought it's time to go ahead and register the company. When I visited MCA website, was relieved to see that they have option for doing many process online, which is a rare commodity in .gov.in websites. After some googling we started and we were able to get our DIN and the process went smooth.
It was time to go for the next step, but we stopped !!!! Reason the process was simply pathetic. The website seem to get worse day by day. We had know way to proceed, until we came across
this DoingBusiness . Just to remind you this data is the ideal case. There's no way you can do it within 89 days.
Here's what we decided ; We went to an auditor. It was tough time to choose an auditor in Mysore, many didn't wanted to take and some said we do only "technology pvt.ltd". Finally we got one who understood our idea and he agreed. And latter we cam know why other audiotrs rejected take this up.He said it would cost around 30K INR !!!!!! WOW there goes major chunk of our budget :(.

Now came another tough part, choosing the name, we had to choose four names.... that was OK, but the company name should also tell what your company does. No one knows what a GREEN business suffix should contain. Auditor suggested "SapGreen Marketing and Renewables Pvt. Ltd".

They rejected it saying the name was "too general" and no other information was given !!!! Yes the weasels rejected it saying the same thing three times. The worst part was they took their own time to reject our applications. They things much slower than a koala bear walks, what are they trying to preserve their energy for ? counting bribes I guess. It was so obvivous, they needed money and it was even more obvious we are not ready to give them. They are playing with our dreams. They will do anything for money, they even register companies like "Mintreee Tech" (note the extra 'e', check here) but not "SapGreen Renewables" !!!. (SapGreen here mean yele-hasiru in Kannada which has nothing to with SAP Technologoies). We are now trying with "EnLEn Marketing and Renewables Pvt Ltd". It has already been five months since we started this process :(

They are just killing innvoation. Hats off to all the Indian Entrepreneurs who do end up being successful after such chaotic start. It's a good thing I guess, because if you solve this problem you will have the mental strength to face any challenges :-).