CovIndia — Beginning to Success to End in 2 months
As the saying goes — “It is better to burn out than to fade away”. This is the story of how CovIndia, India’s first district-wise live Covid Tracker, went from success to end, and the lessons therein for other would-be entrepreneurs.
CovIndia began as a weekend project of me (a professor) and three of my students. Any project, for having even an iota of chance to succeed, needs a unique selling point (USP in startup-lingo); ours was district-wise tracking. However, just having a unique and useful product is no guarantee for success. Our initial boost came through various news-articles ‘advertising’ our tracker. This is something an average startup cannot afford. But then, an average startup has much more time to succeed. In the end, all it takes is someone already famous, recognizing the potential of your idea and endorsing it. The media attention comes automatically. In our case it was Anand Mahindra.
The real testimony to our success in creating credibility was requests from World Bank, Indian Meteorological Department, as well as researchers from IISc, IIT’s, Yale-NUS for our data. We were on track to become the reference for Covid data in India. And this was in 2 weeks after the project had started. We had scaled up from 4 to 15 in a short time.
However, right when the number of cases started growing in India (March End), Mahindra Ecole Centrale decided to kill its golden goose. Professors and students were asked to get back to coursework, and maintain CovIndia as a secondary activity. Coursework, they said, is our primary duty. Before this we were all working 16 hours a day to improve and upgrade the website continuously. Despite repeated requests for exemption from April first (the fool’s day indeed), our bandwidth for work reduced significantly.
Also, we had chosen to be a small team. This meant faster decisions and turnarounds, but it also meant over-reliance on people. If one developer got busy with something else, our entire development pipeline completely stopped. Each new feature became difficult to add without the kind of coordination we achieved pre-courses. We still soldiered on with limp legs, but we could never regain the momentum thereafter.
Meanwhile, another team covid19india, had a completely different strategy. They decided from beginning to be volunteer driven. Anyone could join them and pitch in. While it reduced the speed of decision-making, they had a lot of hands to help. This made sure the site wasn't reliant on anyone in particular. With better organisation and a big workforce, they managed to churn out site features regularly. It became more and more difficult for us to keep up with that speed.
When we did decide to ‘open up’ by letting others join us for developing the site, it did not work out. Mostly since our site was not very modular, with very non-standard manipulations to make our district graph interactive. It would scare any potential contributor. When this failed, we had no other option but to accept that we wont be able to catch-up.
Our data acquisition was however still the fastest and most accurate thanks to the considerable work we put in automatizing the process. So we still continued for about a month but saw our audience drop out slowly, but steadily. Time, not ideas was what we lacked.
Most important thing in life is to learn when and how to let go. In startups as in relationships, the natural tendency is to keep at it and try to make things work. This leads to failed startups and relationships lurking around much longer than they should. We have always been told the virtues of never giving up. It is difficult to give something up when you have invested so much of your time, life and energy into something.
However, it’s the most important for startups to realize that things might never work out. All the extra energy one is spending on a certainly failing product/relationship is energy that could have been used to start something new.
We, at CovIndia, realised that we would never be able to be as good as covid19india, and that our data is no longer unique and thus not so valuable. Instead of hanging around, our team decided to close down CovIndia and move on to future projects. It was great while it lasted, and what we learnt from this experience will definitely help us succeed in future.
Some of us are looking for jobs, projects and internships. If you would like to get any of us in your team, do check out https://covindia.com/about for the team and the roles of everyone.
Stay Safe and Godspeed to us all in these difficult times.