058: Recurpost Founder – Optimizing Your Social Media Presence to Increase Sales (w/ Dinesh Agarwal)

Summary: Dinesh Agarwal is the founder of Recurpost, a social scheduler that lets people recycle their best updates on social platforms. It is the only “one click, share all” social media system that seeks out content with the highest “like-and-share-me” power, attracts highly-qualified leads, and inspires sales calls that practically close themselves. Dinesh holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science and had initially created Recurpost to help his start-ups build a strong online presence but as his clientele grew, he choose to provide Recurpost to them and it became a huge hit. <br> <br> Period in full-time business <br> <br> When he was an undergraduate, he started a software company with his fellow students through which they developed different software for local businesses and it worked very well but after undergraduate he went to a master’s program and had to stop doing the software work. He knew that he wanted to be an entrepreneur but didn’t realise it until he went into the Ph.D. program.  <br> <br> At one point, a former school mate approached him about a software idea and Dinesh developed the required algorithm immediately. Dinesh used to attend a lot of events in Atlanta based on startups and he realised that most of them had great software ideas but didn’t know any IT people who could develop them affordably and reliably. Dinesh saw an opportunity in that and once he graduated from the Ph.D. program, he went back to India and started a company offering the development services to people who had ideas. <br> <br> Initial project <br> <br> The first project his company worked on doesn’t exist anymore because they couldn’t get users to use it so they had to shut it down. He says that over 30 projects they worked on ended up failing. <br> <br> Tip: If you are working on an idea and it fails, don’t feel bad about it, just move on to the next failure. You only need one successful idea <br> <br> Reason for failed projects <br> <br> He says there are many things that cause failures. They now don’t work on ideas that are not properly defined in terms of the target market and other criteria, Dinesh also says he does not invest in online marketplace ideas.  <br> <br> Tip 1: If you want to get into your software idea then be ready for a lot of expensive marketing or work with someone who knows exactly what needs to be done <br> <br> Tip 2: If you are getting into an idea with someone who will not be able to contribute a lot of time, the chances of failure are high. You should work with people who are passionate about what they are doing. <br> <br> Importance of technical founder Vs. outsourcing  <br> <br> Dinesh says that there are 2 problems to outsourcing and they include; the person is not married to the idea, they are more concerned about the money they will make. They may be good people and do good work, they will not be there to handle all the technical issues that will definitely come up. He gave an example of how once they had someone buy a domain for them and the person forgot to renew it so it expired and the client’s website went down and affected his business. <br> <br> Business model <br> <br> He says that his company works with its clients on a partnership/equity basis where the client doesn’t pay them for their time but instead gives up equity in the idea. The client only pays for any required freelancers and pays a small amount for the overhead costs of Dinesh’s company. Therefore, the company only works on projects that have future value. They never work on more than 4 projects at a time. <br> <br> Core revenue streams <br> <br> Right now, Dinesh says they have some projects that are making them money like Recurpost. Recurpost is making them enough money to pay the bills. One of the projects they just started is about to get funded and he hopes that it will be a great success. The project is based on replacing ERP software from th...