We built our startup while we worked full-time : Here’s how interns helped us.
About the Author: Dinesh Kumar Kotha is the co-founder and CEO of ConfirmTkt, India’s leading ticket search platform for trains and buses with more than 1 million monthly active users. He shares how they built ConfirmTkt while still working full-time, powered by interns.
It was July 2014:
I and my co-founder Sripad were still working full-time. While I was a software engineer, he was working as a business analyst. We launched the website ConfirmTkt.com on 5th July and started getting a very good response. Since I am a full stack developer, I managed to finish the coding all by myself. Sripad had taken care of data analytics. In the same month, we also launched our Android app.
We decided to hire interns:
Numbers were growing. We had 1000 downloads within 10 days of launch! We wanted to take it to the next level. Since the product was accepted, we decided to launch it on other platforms too. As both of us were still working full-time and couldn’t spend more time on this, we decided to hire work-from-home interns. Our budget was very less, and so we were only providing a stipend of 3-5k/month. We started looking for Web Developer interns, and soon enough, we received a lot of applications. Sripad had undertaken the task of short listing the profiles.
One thing which we were sure about was that we wanted an intern with some prior experience so that he could start working on the project from day 1. We were skeptical about the technical abilities of students, but to our surprise, we found that some of the students were better than 2-3 year experienced candidates. Soon, we hired our first intern. Our desktop site was not optimized for mobile. We gave the intern the freedom to build a lighter mobile site from scratch using our APIs. He had a lot of energy and enthusiasm and did a great job.
After gaining confidence that a team can be built with interns, we started hiring interns for other projects too. Our first Android developer intern was good with app building experience but he didn’t complete his first assignment and continued delaying the deadlines. Finally, we decided to move on but it was heartbreaking to fire even an intern. I couldn’t do that and delayed it for a week. After a week, the intern himself resigned. That was the only bad experience we have ever had with the interns. After that everything went smoothly. We hired interns for Windows App development, iOS development, Android development, and design. We released Windows app prior to iOS in 2014 as the target segment that we had in mind was different. We were proved right and by the end of 2015, we had more users on Windows compared to IOS. At one point we had 10 interns working remotely for the company. All of them gave their best and helped the company a lot.
We dived in completely, left our jobs, and hired full-time interns:
There was also the issue with code confidentiality. Our entire IP is our algorithm. So, we decided to handle the backend ourselves and all the UI related stuff was delegated to interns. After 6 months, we left our jobs and took this up full-time. We also started offering full-time summer internships. Our first two employees were in-office interns. We had taken office space on the same day that these 2 interns joined. Before that, we worked from home and remotely managed team. Now, we prefer full-time interns as we can afford them and can work more closely. Finally, I can say that the interns played a very crucial role during the initial stage of the company.
My tips for fellow entrepreneurs:
1. Spend time on shortlisting and hiring an intern just the way you would do for a full-time employee.
2. Treat the intern well. Include her in important decisions you take and make sure that she doesn’t feel neglected.
3. Make interns fall in love with your product. This applies to your employees too as this will change the way they do everything
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