Butterflies in our stomach...

It has been a long drawn week - the last one, as well. We have been trying to get everything in place for the forthcoming US launch. Testing and finding issues were, at times, getting under our skin. Getting fixes ready, telling the world that we will be serving information about places of interest in the USA is just the tip of the iceberg. There are umpteen other stuff that I cannot recollect that has been going on. All to make sure everything goes well as per plan. When you are at the eye of the storm, all seems peaceful, life moves in super slowmo and you tend to feel that sense of calm, because all that you can look at when you lift the head is more things to do.

Now that we are almost ready and are cleaning up after what was madness, the madness is starting to take hold of us. The uncertainty of what will happen when US destinations become available on FmC, is killing. It is like the night before your kid goes out to school for the first time. You are thrilled at the fact that she has grown up to go to school. But at the same time, there are umpteen things going through your mind that can go wrong. You run over everything that was to be done one last time every few minutes and still cannot get those butterflies out of your stomach.

This is the feeling that you look back to, fondly, when you are way past this stage. These are the small things that make this journey what it is - Enthralling. I hope you like the US carrots we bring to you, as much as we like bringing them.

The grass greener on the other side?..of the pond

A few days back, we made it public to whoever cared to listen, that we have set our sights on crossing the pond. Almost everyone wished us luck. A few expressed astonishment at what seemed audacious to them. Some of them put words to the question in their mind. Are we done with India? Why such a hurry to get to the USA? I believe we owe an answer to all of you.

We are NOT done creating information in India. On the contrary, we have begun a phase where the information creation graph in India is going to hit a plateau. There will be painstaking and time consuming machine training phases where, we will have to spend significant effort and will be able to show small, incremental but fine grained progress. But the learning that we have had so far in creating information out of data in India is now ready to be replicated. We want the machines to help create information in the USA while we spend time training it further up in India.  Hence, we have kicked off the information build up on the greener side of the pond. All that we do every hour we are awake counts for nothing if it is of no use to you, our beloved users. Hence, we have decided to bring FmC to USA to hear and learn from you, feed the learning back into FmC, so, our quest of a little learning every day makes us the automatic option when you want to Dream, Search and Experience your next vacation.

In search of liquid propulsion...

   We attend a few fun(d) raising events to pitch to Angels and early stage VCs, looking for liquid propulsion for our intergalactic launch. Most mortals refer to that as money. Guess what is the most popular rebut to FmC, from the money bags? Big daddies of travel with deep pockets will throw money and solve this problem in a few days and you will be left looking like the idiots that you already are. While we completely agree, that we are utter idiots, we tend to come back and sew together whatever is left of our tattered self-esteem and confidence with this 1 thread.

    There has been no dearth of money in online travel. There has been consistent research reports and opinions from the online travel industry leaders that this is precisely the problem to solve. Hell, some of the big daddies of investment have invested sizeable money into pumping out information from the depths of travel data through some well known startups, both in India and abroad. So, if we have not seen any movement after quite a few years of engine revving, FmC, perhaps, fails to reflect how big an idiot, we are. Perhaps we make this pipe-dream look so real and achievable, it seems money can be thrown to solve it in a few days!! 

There in lies our success, till we succeed in making that intergalactic trip on the spaceship named FmC.

Our Humpty-Dumpty days

Everyday, as we try and build up FmC, we are trying to scale a wall. The wall of our mind where we set limitations on ourselves - about what we can achieve. So, everyday we try to climb this wall, we sit on it for long, staring at what lies on the other side, tentatively, thinking if we can take a plunge. But as you might be expecting, more often than not, we have a great fall in this endeavor and, boy, does it hurt!

The sad part is, no horses or men from the King's cavalry come over to lift us up. Forget that, to add insult to injury, the naysayers and the enlightened of the world heap scorn explaining how stupid we must be to try such improbabilities. After all, who will want to use FmC when the Advisors and the Makers have Clearly won over the Yatra ecosystem of the travelers. But then, when you start digging the earth to mine, you are not expecting results before you started digging. Mining for Carrots is tough and we knew it from the moment we enlisted to go underground for your carrots. Therefore, the self conviction does not erode. The taste of dust in our mouth, we help each other up in the team, shouting out a curse here an expletive there, to give vent to our fury at not having succeeded, but doubling our resolution that the next leap will not be far off and success is just on the other side of the wall...

Proud to be Humpty Dumpty for 30 days of the month. Because we live for the 31st day of the next month, when the naysayers will hide their head in the sand. Let us change the rhyme to:

Humpty Dumpty got up from the fall.. 

Humpty Dumpty scaled the HUGE wall..

Getting the timing right.. Of our US launch..

Perfect timing! That is what transforms a good to sublime. A little too early and our Carrot dish will be under cooked, a little too late and we run the risk of burning up the taste. Hence, choosing when to launch FmC in the USofA is tricky.

As I write this, we are getting the first tastes of US Carrots in our kitchen. And boy, are we loving it! A couple days back, when the first few queries came online in our lab and we saw the map of  USA lit up with our custom pins, we were hyper. We wanted to bring those pins and queries to you, immediately. After all, who does not love a pat on the back? But then, slowly, reality set in. There were some queries that were failing, some information like "hill stations" showing up, which is not in the American vacation-dreaming vocabulary. So, we decided to give ourselves a little more time to scrub up the information and ensure that the learning we have had from query-fixing for Indian vacation-dreaming are used to add the final zing to the US dish. Our ovens are on the full blast and we can almost smell the final delicacy. Hope you love the taste of the readied FmC platter as much as we are loving cooking it.

Introducing the FmC Super Star

Luis Suarez... This goal scoring machine is dominating the World Cup 2014 news, today. And why not? He is the Super Star that transformed a listless Uruguay team that was drubbed by the CostaRicans, to a potent force that has almost ensured the exit of England from the biggest stage of the Beautiful game at such an early stage. Your FmC team boasts of a much bigger Super Star. But unfortunately, I do not have a picture to post for the introduction. And this definitely has nothing to do with hiding our trump card from the competition in the worry that they will offer an astronomical salary and steal our star.

As we get ready to launch FmC in the USofA in the next few days, we have to take our proverbial hats off to this member. We have been at work for this launch for the past fortnight and every day has been a revelation. The quantum of work and the massiveness of the data that we have to handle to bring FmC to USA cannot be fathomed. So, this member's ability to accomplish this herculean task in a matter of weeks, left us dumbstruck. Therefore, it is my pleasure and honor to unveil this star member of our team to the world. 

Ladies and gentlemen, please put your hands together for the (Artificially) Intelligent Computing Resources of the FmC team. Some are as small as a laptop, while others come to us from the cloud. But whatever form they take, they are the force multipliers that make our dream of making FmC a world-wide phenomenon, a possibility and an unfolding reality.

Tiki-Taka?? Bring it on, says your team

Watching the Dutch team run circles around the Spanish football machine in the 2014 FIFA world cup was unbelievable. Most of the Spanish footballers are maestros, much better known in the footballing world than their Dutch counterparts. And yet, on the pitch, where it mattered, name counted for nothing, what mattered was thinking on feet, execution as a unit.

The FmC team has some of those Dutch traits. Thanks to the self confidence,faith in each other and determination, we do not get overwhelmed by the well known Indian travel giants. If we did, the team would never have started taking the sticks to find you your carrots. We know that the only currency that works in building something new, is if we build something useful that solves some problem.

Its the pride, fun and love for what we do, that ensures that we stick together as a unit to become the dutch team that can upset the tiki-taka of any travel behemoth.

The Days that keep us going..

Building a new product is painstaking even when you know that there is a sales and marketing corps to take it to the customers and help make revenue. If you have to build a product and sell it too, that increases the complication, exponentially. That is the reason, why a typical day in our lives consist of some pretty serious head-scratching sessions. But law-of-average applies to our lives too, and once in a while comes a day, like today, when, we take a break from trying to analyze every bit of south-pointing stats and soak in some happiness.

Telling enough people how FmC can help make discovering their next vacation destination, an experience to enjoy, is tough. We have been trying to tell this story with limited success, for the past few months. Therefore, we chase the master storytellers (the journalists) to tell our story in a way that grabs and keeps a reader's attention. We achieved a major milestone when the revered online journal TechInAsia featured us here: http://www.techinasia.com/findmycarrots/

We are elated, that we could make it to the feature. The number of startups are huge and space available on such journals, limited. That is why it brings a smile to our face. Days like this, shoot some vital energy into our system and keeps us going till we get another shot in the arm. 

We are loving it!!

Blogs... Our lifeline.

Reading, is a wonderful way to get back some sanity in life. So, is wandering to a destination that is "Just right". Without much of a plan, I have merged the two - reading about nice places and learning to identify the next "Just Right" destination for my family and me. Blogs from people, therefore, are godsend. But the reality is brutal. Reading blogs and daydreaming, in the process, can grow to fill our entire day and can bring in stress at having not worked much. How nice would it be, if someone could read up blogs for us and tell us which of the blogs provide the information that we are looking for. We then, can have our cake and eat it too.. The information we desire and the read of a few blogs in between work, to relax and refocus.

This is precisely what drove us. Desperate to make the right decision and still not wanting to spend the time that it required, made us turn to the only friend we know who could deliver - our computer. FindMyCarrots is all about making information from data - and that is exactly what we were looking at FmC to deliver from blogs. We were unsure, but gave it our first decent moonshot at the Tnooz hackathon. 2 days of mad coding later, the basic functionality of understanding blogs automatically, worked and we were happy. However, the training that our machines needed was big and the "quality control", we humans had to put the machines through was long and arduous. 

But as they say, good things happen to those who wait, but better things come to those who hustle. We hustled our machines through the learning process, and here we are today bringing you information gleaned from blogs that some of your fellow travelers write. We are eager to know what you think about this endeavor. Tell us. We are listening, intently... 

We fight, therefore we are... fanatics!!

Building FindMyCarrots one excruciatingly small step at a time, is painstaking. Behind every dragged circle to get more results, every blog that adds value to a destination, are countless hours of, well,  fights!! The 3 nuts that take all the sticks to find your carrots, are opinionated, to the point of being fanatics.

Well, that is to be expected. If we did not believe in our ideas, so overwhelmingly, a small whiff of doubt would have sent us back, packing to our day jobs. The reason, why we are still able to get up every morning, and believe we will turn the world of travel on its head, is because we are fanatics. And there is obvious fallout from it.. The FIGHTS!

These fights ensure, only the best of our umpteen ideas survive and see implementation. However, when there are no clear proof or overwhelmingly supportive data to go by, we iterate and try to look at data to define the direction of iteration. So far we have moved using each fight as the source of our inspiration. We love these mental and verbal duels. They keep us planted and focused. Be our referee. Tell us how you feel we are doing and help us decisively in these fights...