GreenPreneur

Dilbert 2.0

2008-05-10T09:54:00.000-07:00

This article doesn't have anything about going green nor does it have anything to do with sapgreen. After a lot struggle I finally got BSNL dudes to come to my home wire my phone and internet connection. I just decided to visit my favorite page on the net after a long gap of 5 months. Surprise surprise !!!! Dlibert has changed... WOW. New cool 2.0 looks was just great. Scott rocks even more.
It can't get funnier than this. Though lot of flash slows is down, the content fits right there. Just fell in love with the animations and the mashups makes it more interactive than old fashioned letters from dilbert's fan.

More than anything, do you think Scott will forget his geeky followers ? Check the Linux/Unix section at the bottom of the page. I'm definitely missing my "pointy haired weasels" these days.

The Clean colors

2008-04-24T00:45:00.000-07:00

The rebranding trend has started. The old biggies are changing their indentit. It was UTI who changed to Axis, Canara bank changed the logo, Hutch and now it's Ceat. When rebranding happens a lot changes, company ownership,company ethcis,visions,services and the list goes on. But the most noticable change is the logo.

Have you noticed the trend in these logos ? The changed logos are simple, with clean colors,very little curves,no animals running,no hand-holding-flowers. Now why am I talking about logos heres ? Just writing a stroy about sapgreen's logo. Check the logo and colors on the site. The story behind it is simple. Ashwin as usual coming with some really funny ideas (Will post it sometime if get hold of those pages), he was revovling round the combination of SUN-WIND-TREES,combining them to create most complex and bizzare logos ever made. The current logo was desgined by his sister.

What does it mean ?
The Yellow-Orange means life and energy, the green circle surrounding it means confined within the environment.

Seth's Fan club ?

2008-04-21T01:16:00.000-07:00

Anybody who reads Seth's blog will be his instant fan. The classy Bootstrapper's bible was an instant hit. Does it work ? Who cares, business is fun, bootstrapping is even more fun, most of all the book is great. If you are thinking you need huge investments to start a business, then don't think again, just go an read this book.

All I wanted to say was "Can we have a Seth's fan club site? And probably make some money out of it... :-)" Well Pamela's fan club makes money,Ronaldo's fan club makes money, why not Seth's ? There are so many bootstrappers around, who would love to be part of this club !!!!!

Climate change : Winners and Loosers

2008-04-20T07:30:00.000-07:00

Climate change talks everywhere. Few raising voice against it, few trying to fight it,many just don't care. Now lets forget all these for a moment and lets look into the direct economics of climate change.

Lets see who is loosing.

Short winters, snow for a little time, yap the skates business throughout the world.
The insurance companies. You remember Katrina ?
Agriculuture, I have no comments on these, you know the prices, high costs doesn't mean profits for farmers, but lack of supply.
Infrastructure !!!!! Yes they need to spend more to maintain them. Long summers, heavy rains will definately change the roads.
Packed food industries in developing nations,as more and more people go green, they are slowly loosing thier charm.

And Who is winning ?

The clean energy companies. The most benifited, the most happiest.
The climate experts, they are fast becoming page 3 celebs.
The Carbon offsetting companies :)
The green fashion desginers and stores
And the next obvious profit makers in the thrid world countries are the cooling solutions. As people get ready to pay a 1000 INR more every month to avoid heat, they become easy targets for these brands.

And the list goes on...
Things may be little different in developing world with packed food industry growing, infrastructure changing, but they will have their share very soon, because climate change is not going to wait.

Am I still away from trees ?

2008-04-19T05:16:00.000-07:00

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)

Away from trees...

2008-03-28T01:45:00.000-07:00

After a few green blogs, I will go back to technology. Well the reason is simple, our business does require some good online marketing, and a decent looking website, but technically complete website was required. I will describe a two things that has helped us and might bring some traffic to our site in the future, joomla and meebo.

Joomla is a content management system, ok in simple words it helps you create a website. You need no technical knowledge, unless you want to do add something on your own to joomla. If it is for a simple clean website, this is a perfect tool to start with. Most importantly it's open source and free !!!!! All you need is little experience of using internet and a browser. Well it sounds simple, but we did have our set of problems. We needed a template of our own, graphics of our own. Thankfully we had our resources for these.

Secondly, meebo a great instant messaging web 2.0 tool. Just get into meebo and you can chat with any instant message account, anywhere, without installing anything. Now how did it help us? Meebo had released two great products, "meebo me" and "meebo rooms". We just added a meebome widget to our contact page, and added a meebo room as well. Check these out and you will know what I'm saying. Overall meebo is amazing. It does bring some problems with it.
1) If you have noticed it doesn't require a login. Now it's a toy for pranksters !!!!
2) Few visited our page during testing phase, they dropped a offline message, and probably forgot to drop their name or mail id. They would probably mailed us if we didn't have a "meebo me" in our page. We are just looking to find a solution for this problem without driving away the visitors from messaging us.

Finally thanks to treeless-squirrel for their amazing video.

A new economy of carbon

2008-03-18T06:16:00.000-07:00

As the prices of different commodities are going up, something that would change the world economy is being sprouted by the world leaders and that is the Carbon market. In years to come the Carbon emissions will be a main factor that determines the prices of everything that is being traded. So when the word "carbon" is being given a solid shape what are we doing ?

The answer is just simple, find a business in the word "carbon". Many companies are being setup which just handle the trading of carbon. As many global giants from different fields are being increasingly held accountable for the amount carbon they emit, it is necessary to find a solution to calculate,reduce and then nullify their green house gas emissions. The reduction and nullifying is together called as carbon offsetting. Now the other question is how does a organization offset it's carbon emission ?

Switch to green energy source. If they can't do it at the source, do it somewhere else
Invest in carbon sinks, the only known carbon sink (luckily for us) are trees.

Now when large corporations are responsibly offsetting their carbon emissions through accountable firms like carbonneutral and using mechanisms like CDM and VCS, we as individuals have a much simpler solution and costs much lower, Just find a ethical offsetting company and plant trees through them, whether offsetting your long drive or offsetting your flight trees a prefect way to do so.

Do you think offsetting is a solution to all the problems ? Well the answer is NO. Carbon Offsetting comes only after you reduce your emissions. The above systems works well but not under voluntary basis, it works well only when the "Carbon money" is part of the main economy as carbon taxes. But in India we have a long way to go, first we have to pay our taxes !!!!

The CDM forestry complexity

2008-03-13T04:21:00.000-07:00

We were looking at different marketing techniques to promote forestry project, we also looked at carbon trading through forestry projects as an option to promote agroforestry among small farmers. Gradually we realized one thing, CDM, carbon trading,CER, these buzz words were not a farmers cup of tea. Here are few reasons.

The technicality is too hard for anybody to understand let alone the farmers
The project registration is fee it too high, it might be much higher than credits you get. Just check the data here.
The credits are much lower than energy projects since forestry in most cases will be Temporary CERs.
Land requirements are pretty complex
The consultant charges are too high!!!!! Yes you need one.
Most of all CDM is governed by National government... You don't need a better reason to back off. Here is the Indian version. If you are interested in a forestry project, first thing you will notice in this website - There is no forestry project section !!!!! But luckily you can find one such project registered.

Well if you have been looking around for a while about forestry-CDM projects, you might have come across the Gudibanda Taluk in Karnataka. This project was carried out by carbonneutral.com, the website of carbonneutral says, the project had initially failed due to drought in the area and some replantation had taken place. This will be a good example if somebody wants to start doing such a thing.

So you own a waste land in your home town and what to do forrestion for carbon credits, you may have to think twice. The initial investment would be too high and unaffordable, rather a simple aggroforestry would work wonders for you or you may end looking for other voluntary carbon standards.

Where do we start?

2008-02-23T23:37:00.000-08:00

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

2008-02-04T05:56:00.000-08:00

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.

Go BUS Go.........

2008-01-28T10:49:00.000-08:00

Just imagine what would be the fate of Bangalooru without BMTC !!!! It would be killer traffic. Their are too many articles explaining about traffic in Metros. I don't have write about them.
I just want to say hats off to BMTC and KSRTC for managing it beautifully. These companies were much like Indian railways running under huge losses. Bus service was pathetic in Karanataka. Thankfully someone at BMTC and KSRTC was able to act at right time. Now BMTC alone has made 224.32 crores in year 06-07.
There is one thing they need to adopt yet, CNG. Thanks to these people Bangalooru is still green. This should also help them start trading carbon.
I'm just so happy talking about these people, without them we would be having killer blue line in Bangalooru too. Trust me guys it's horrible to see Blue line driving :)

I came across Redbus.in through Swaroop, I fell in love with the site on the first visit. Simplicity is what I loved. It would be great if they can come with something that will encourage people to use more public transport for daily conveyance. It will help in creating greener Bangalooru.

Choices for a Social entrepreneur

2008-01-26T07:18:00.000-08:00

When we came up with the idea of SapGreen, we were in fix. We didn't know if we should start this
as an NGO, in the old fashioned way and people to donate money or to start this a profit making company. After few days of discussion we decided to go with the idea of a company.We had our reasons.

Accountability : To make sure our clients trusts us, we had to make sure we were accountable. We were ready to pay tax. We knew tax exemptions given by govt. to NGO/NPOs was a good thing, but it turns out be a play ground for the rich and mighty politicians. Just to narrate an incident, one my ex-colleagues had taken a receipt of 5 lac INR from an NGO to save his tax and the NGO in turn converted it's black money to white. He refused to tell me the name of the NGO.
Sustainability: By making a profitable business it not only helps us make sure the trees survive but also to make sure we grow. At the same time we could make sure to replace dead trees and monitor them.

In simple words profitability helps us serve better. Hence we decided to go with a profitable business model. You can actually see how companies like SELCO and TreeFlights are make a difference with a profitable business model.

BOP: Rickshawala

2008-01-25T07:21:00.001-08:00

Ever since I read about C K Prahald's concept of BOP, I was looking to find many examples that already existed in India. The selling of smaller shampoo and soap packets was one nice thing. But most of the BOP initiatives were taken by huge companies which could afford. But I was trying to figure out if a small business can make profit by helping the nextbillion.

I have lived in Mysore since my birth, for almost 22 years. I had never been to northern parts of India.I decided to relocate to Noida for a shorter period, just to experience different things. When I first arrived in Delhi and took a cab, I saw a lot of cycle rickshaws. I was just more then shocked to see such public transport system. I had seen tangas in Mysore, they were available for sight seeing only, though are diminishing these days. But seeing so many people taking rickshaws to reach their work places was just surprising.

I got too curious and started doing some research. It was clear, most of the people had moved from villages from UP, selling their lands, just to move the cities. They own nothing. I was confused. Then I came across a Rickshawala who told me how this system worked. Most rickshawala's can't afford to buy a rickshaw and they don't prefer to do so. They just rent it !!!!! At 25 Rs a day it works out pretty fine for them. A single 2Km trip fetched them the investment they had made. They make around 150 to 200Rs ($5 a day).

Plus it's a nice thing

Provides affordable service to people
They don't cheat like autos in Bangalore or Delhi
Creates self employment
Thankfully for Delhi it has rickshaws to save them from pollution

How to Start a company in India ?

2008-01-24T22:47:00.000-08:00

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 :-).

Are you Credible enough to do such a thing !!!???

2008-01-24T09:45:00.000-08:00

When I decided to quit my job, there were many type of questions,trying to discourage me, confuse me......... Most funniest of them was "Have you really thought about this ?"
What I'm supposed to say ?

"No man I don't "think", I just listen to my tooth fairy who comes in my dreams every night, she told me to quit the job "

Some of the questions were really annoying, some really crazy..... Then I had to quit answering them. But one question really made me think, "Are you credible enough to such a thing ?"

Now let me define "such" a thing, I want to be greenpreneur in India. No I don't want to be part of NGO. I want to run a business, a green business !!!!!

I thought about being credible enough. I did ask myself a few questions.

Who is the credible person to be a greenpreneur?
"Me and you"
How to become credible?
I just need to work towards it.
Is it impossible to start a business without right qualification?
Is there a right qualification for doing a business?

Now it's not just being greenpreneur, its for every business, every job,to be a father, to be a mother........... you need to be credible. But you will be credible enough only if you jump in and do it. No self made billionaires living today was credible enough when they started. You will never be credible enough to do anything as long as you listen to people who themselves are credible enough to be an Idiot for their lifetime.