@ infinity, plus 1

I’m peeved by a trend I’ve started to see among Indian startups: trying to be casual and ending up being unprofessional.

Being casual may be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on who you are targeting. But being unprofessional is never a good thing.

<Edit: I’ve taken off the rant about a particular website that I had here.>

The worrying thing is that this kind of unprofessional-ism is all too common among Indian startups. (Even my own company’s corporate website is an offender. At least we are not trying to use it as the forefront of our offerings. But that’s not an excuse.) We need to buckle up and get our act straightened out.

Now, I’m no spelling/grammar Nazi. Heck, my grammar sucks and I look up spellings on Google at least five times a day. But that’s no excuse for putting up a public website that is sprinkled with spelling mistakes and grammatical errors. Your website is an indicator of how professionally you handle everything else.

Here are some concrete suggestions (based on my observations):

• Use a spell-checker. They are now integrated into most of the modern Web Browsers. It’s unfortunate that I even have to state this.
• Don’t write “its” when you mean “it’s”. Or “thats” when you mean “that’s”.
• Don’t write “few” when you mean “a few“. Or “little” when you mean “a little“.
• Use apostrophes correctly (hat-tip to Varum M).

I’ll keep updating this list. You can make suggestions in the comments.

It doesn’t take a lot to avoid these mistakes. Please do.

So, You want to work for a startup? is an interesting post by the founders of Taazza targeted at people who want to join a startup. Having worked in a starup for more than two and a half years and having known other people who have done so for even longer, I can easily appreciate the post; it is great advice and I would second it. Most, if not all of the things they say in the post are bang on. This is very unfortunate, in my honest opinion. I’ll try to explain why I think so in this post.

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