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Diwali is always a good time for me. The one time of the year when, no matter where I am in the world, I must trek back to home base. The same holds true for each and every cousin of mine; one makes the long and tiring journey from Buenos Aires for a week.

Alas, it is also the time where I have to go through the yearly review with my father. This time, I was expecting a decent bout of water boarding; a barrage of questions on what the heck was I up to with this business plan of mine. Startup? What is that? Why? What happens to your job? And, importantly, will you be asking me for money?

To my good luck, however, it turns out that my mother has been lazy in picking up their copy of Entrepreneur in the last few months. Landmark, the bookstore closest to my house, is luckily one parking slot too far for my mother to make the effort. Send us copies, she tells me. I will now, slicing off the pages of my column.

Anyway, it is also the time I meet up with my best friend of the longest time. He works in the corporate arm of a big outsourcing firm, as a digital marketing consultant. While the designation means he has an interesting job, he is not so big on it. Since I cannot really name him, for the sake of his current employment, much to my perverse pleasure, we will refer to him as Kaw.

Kaw has hit the mental ceiling that is there for most people in corporate jobs. He does not really care for his job; he wants to get out and start out on his own. His reasons are much like any other entrepreneur’s—tired of a bad boss, not enough pay, too much of the Delhi-type office politics, etc. But the one major reason for him to do so is wanderlust. Kaw and I—and more him than me—have over the years made some insane trips to the back and beyond of India. Places you may not even have heard of, that make you wonder why you should be stuck in a cubicle for the rest of your life.

So Kaw and I, for maybe the second time in our lives, had a serious talk about something. Turns out, Kaw is already preparing himself. Apps are what he wants to make and sell for the iPhone and the iPad.  Step one, he tells me, has been about sketching—the most basic of skills you need to develop an app. Big sketch pads and tons of pencils in hand, he goes about sketching. He is developing his hand, to be able to develop the idea in his head into a design on paper. For the programming bit, he is going to look at freelancers off the web. That is a skill he cannot develop, he knows.

Knowing yourself is one of the basic pillars of starting up, isn’t it? Before you even begin developing your basic idea, you should know what you have, what you are capable of, what you are incapable of, and what you wouldn’t have. A yellow legal pad is your best friend at this time. Kaw and I took out one to run that exercise on me. This is what we came up with.

The ‘haves’ are not much to write home about. I can write, can talk (?), can steer and sail boats (true story), can multitask, know the subject end of entrepreneurship, manage teams, work my economics, can live cheaply, understand the business of magazines, and I have tried and failed miserably once before. Kaw was of the opinion that we add the inclination to travel as a ‘have’. Hell, no!

The ‘have nots’ are, of course, much more in line with other budding bootstrappers. I do not have any savings, have no special skills such as programming, design or finance, do not have a rich pop, do not have any extra space, do not have extra time, and do not have too high a disposable income.

To the entrepreneurs reading this, this list-making and their entries may seem a bit naïve. Surely the business idea comes first and then the ayes and the nays? Maybe. I am of the opinion, though, that your business idea should be an evolution of something you already know or have. It is definitely more desirable that you should not start from zero.

Clearly, the balance of things is a bit on the negative side to begin with. But at least now I know what I have and what I can do with it. To my mind, the process of ideation is a progression from an analysis of what the heck you bring to the table. And, more importantly, can you do it alone?

Kaw is a close friend. And he is probably the dude who gets me the most. But is he the most able business partner? A question for another time, I deem it. For now, we have been banging our heads together with all sorts of ideas. We are throwing them at a wall, watching them splatter, and checking if any masterpiece is in the making. There have been a lot of light arguments, copious amounts of beer, and many chewed-through pens.

This is what we have come up with. The business we start:
a) cannot be a bricks-and-mortar business. We don’t have the money. Online is the way we are going to go.
b) cannot be technology-intensive. Our knowledge of leveraging technology is limited to finishing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 on the PS3 in record time.
c) has to be a mobile business. Both of us are in different towns doing different things. And this is a bootstrapped venture to begin on the side. Nothing is set.

For now, Kaw continues to make more sketches and develop more app ideas. Though the last sketch I saw of his had him making Godzilla take on King Kong in a pub brawl. That would not bode well for most business ventures. But hey, being crazy has worked for us many a times before. I, meanwhile, have developed a couple of concepts that seem worth pursuing. Kaw has run through them and dished out some points as well. That’s okay. Anyone who has King Kong fighting Godzilla reserves the right to take potshots at his possible future business partner.

My concepts, or business ideas, are in their earliest of stages. I wonder if you have gone through what I’m going through right now, of imagining the business going live, of talking to vendors, of talking to clients, what kind of customers I would attract, how the business will grow, what it will bring me, what will it bring others—basically, everything short of going public.

To be truthful, the idea of your own business is pretty seductive in the way that you could quite quickly go from a random thought to a much larger bubble that you go on believing will never burst.

I have had these ideas tumbling around in my head, and the shocker is that finding faults in these ideas has been really difficult. In my thoughts, each is as good as the other, and failure does not look like a possibility with any one of them. They seem and feel infallible. Thanks to my talks with other bootstrappers, I do know that I am not alone in this process of being consumed by your own idea.

That’s what your business ideas can do to you. They can own you. They can possess you. They can transfer their infallibility onto you. They can take you away with them to a place you think no one and no problem will be able to touch you.

But daydreams are still dreams. You have to wake up and shake yourself up to be objective again. Rather, kick yourself hard up the cojones. I, and you, have to go back again to that yellow legal pad, and see if the jigsaw is completed by your ‘haves’ or left unfinished by your ‘have nots’. If it is the latter, then it is back to dreaming again. With that legal pad by your side.

©Entrepreneur December 2010

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Ankush Chibber, starting up