Browsing: Business

Most business writing online is either motivational or theoretical. The more useful part of this section is neither: it is a long run of interviews with people who actually built something, mostly founders and bloggers from India’s first internet generation.

That archive is the reason to come here. Conversations with Neil Patel, Anil Agarwal of BloggersPassion and a dozen others were recorded while they were still building, which makes them a better record of how these businesses were actually run than any retrospective written later.

Around that sits the working material: entrepreneurship and the habits behind it, the quotes people actually return to, and the unglamorous mechanics of running a team – consistency across locations and roles, and whether a meeting needed to exist at all.

The perspective is small-business and founder-side rather than corporate. It assumes you are deciding things yourself, with limited money and no committee to hide behind.

Beyond the interviews, two subjects dominate. Marketing is the larger, covered from the position of someone who has to do it themselves rather than brief an agency: positioning, branding mistakes that are expensive to undo, and the channels that actually repay a small budget. The other is people — hiring, managing, keeping standards steady across a team, and the everyday friction of running one. Startups and funding appear, but as a smaller thread and usually from the operator’s side rather than the investor’s.

What the section is not is a news desk. There is very little here about funding rounds, valuations or which large company reorganised itself this quarter. The questions it does return to are smaller and more durable: how to decide something without enough information, how to keep quality steady as a business grows past the point where you can watch all of it, and which received wisdom turns out to be wrong when you test it.

It suits someone running or starting a small operation, a freelancer with clients, or anyone curious about how the first wave of Indian internet businesses were actually built rather than how they are described afterwards.

What you will not find is company news, earnings coverage or commentary on large corporations. The unit of interest here is a business small enough that one person’s decision changes the outcome — which is also the only kind most readers can act on.

For the marketing and website side of the same work, see Digital. For personal finance rather than company finance, see Money.