Arvind G S (CTO - Foradian) and Vishwajith A (COO - Foradian) met Kris Goplakrishnan (CEO - Infosys) and discussed about Foradian's achievements and strategies for future. Kris was really impressed with Project Fedena and the strategy of opensource business model implemented by Foradian.
We asked for his advice and we were lucky that he provided us with lot of information which can be used to succeed in our present projects and deals. We felt the following advices are applicable to all startups similar to foradian. So sharing the valuable mantras.
Advice #1 : Learn to Sell
He mentioned that inorder to sustain a business, other than building a great product we should "sell early and sell often". Even if you dont have any product, if you can sell, you can run a profitable business.
Advice #2 : The founders should Sell
It is not enough that your marketing team makes the sale. If you want your company to successful, the founders should sell. And need to learn the art of sales in the hard way
Advice #3 : Focus
Foradian is slowly entering to ERP developments in the million dollar range and Kris adviced us to focus on a certain area. Since we are already successful in education sector, he told us to focus on erps for universities, group of institutions etc.. In short his advice was to concentrate on a single thing instead of diversifying to multiple products and services.
Other than the above advices we got advices specific to our current projects and government deals, which we are not revealing here. Anyhow it was a great experience to meet and talk with a Man who is part of an empire they built from scratch.
When Derek Sivers visited the geographic area under the "Empire of Foradian", there happened an unexpected but planned meeting which had all the ingredients to be the meeting of this millennium. :)
Derek Sivers is best known for being the founder and former president of CD Baby, an online CD store for independent musicians, which he sold in 2008 for 22million dollars. CD Baby was the largest seller of independent music on the web, with over $100M in sales for over 150,000 musician clients. Read more about Derek Sivers here
Today was the birthday of the CEO(Unni Koroth) of Foradian and he along with the President(Abdul Salam) and CTO (Arvind GS) met Derek and discussed for more than 2 hours. They talked about the startup experiences, challenges, failures, sweet victories, long terms goals and strategies of Foradian and Derek Sivers.
The foradian startup team was motivated by movies like Matrix Trilogy and 2001: A Space Odyssey which intelligently incorporated numerous references to philosohpical and religious ideas. So when the time came to decide about the logo of foradian, the team decided it to be as simple as possible and rich with inner meanings.
Foradian
Before explaining about the logo, those who don't know what the word "Foradian" means, here is the explanation. The name foradian is motivated from scientific unit of angular measurement "radian". Radian measures angles in two dimensional planes and Steradian measures angles in three dimensional space. A new word "FORADIAN" was coined to describe the experience on the next dimension. We chose our startup tagline as "Business in Next Dimension" meaning helping the offline business to shift to online through our internet engineering services. The team chose orange-red as the official color theme. It portrays the aggressiveness as well as the hacker attitude towards life and society. Orange-red is a bright vibrant color which symbolizes physical energy. Logo
Foradian logo is simply an angle created by two straight lines with a common starting point and the shadow the angle on the surface beneath it. In the direct sense it portrays the concept of angle of the term "radian" and the number "4" created by the logo and its shadow. If you haven't noticed the number 4 in the logo, look carefully. It was not meant to be a secret. :) Now to the actual secrets.Secret 1: 36 degrees of the angle.
The angle created by the foradian logo is exactly 36 degrees or if we put it in correct units, it is π/5 radians. The number and the angle 36 has got many significance which you can read from here. Secret 2: Golden ratio
The edges of the foradian logo triangle keeps golden ratio. The ratio of the longer side to the shorter side is always φ which is approximately 1.6180339887. Watch the following video to understand the importance of golden ratio in designs and nature. Secret 3: 11:11 phenomenon
Just before starting foradian, when the cofounders were at different places all of them started noticing the 11:11 phenomenon, which might be pure coincidence. But we loved the concept and it became one of our motivation to make the logo.
Foradian logo is actually the hand of a pentagram. The prominent part of the logo is from the inverted pentagram and the shadow from the normal pentagram. Pentagram has got a prominent role in most of the religious and philosophical views of the world.
