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.

Let’s take a quick look at what the proposition is when an early-stage startup is looking for an employee (update: this is not a quote from the Taaza blog post):

We are a very young startup who does not yet have a business model. We are looking for some really bright fellows to do some time with us. There are very many advantages of slogging with us: You’ll not get paid much, pay a lot more tax than your friends in larger companies and of course you won’t get almost any of the perks they do. You will work your ass off; and not just on the stuff we are hiring you for — you’ll get to spend some quality time on everything from maintaining our website to keeping our office clean. If all these great things are not attractive enough for you — you selfish pig! — we’ll give you some stock options. Yes, that’s right, you’ll actually own a teeny-tiny percentage of our company, a company whose value there is no easy way of determining. And in the (very unlikely) event that our startup succeeds and makes an exit (in say 3-5 years time) — and you don’t get fired before that on account of cost-cutting — you’ll actually make some money! So what if this money isn’t much more than what you would have earned in the same time had you joined some other company? The money you will make from your stock options will feel better — after all, it has come at the cost of your social life and health. “This will build character.”

Only a fool would look at the above and shout in excitement “Oh Wowie! This is the greatest opportunity since God offered a job to Moses!” This isn’t too much of a worry though — there are enough smart fools who would in fact do that very thing. But — and this is an important but — for how long do you think they’ll continue to think so? How long before they see that they are really getting a raw deal? After all, these are smart people!

I am not accusing founders of trying to fool smart people into joining them as employees. I am just pointing out that, amid all the excitement, founders tend to not empathize with the people they want to hire. They tend to become overtly greedy and miserly. Greedy and miserly is good — even great — for a startup; but being so in some cases might be detrimental to the very goal they are doing it for. The expression “penny wise pound foolish” very succinctly summarises this.

Of course, none of this applies if the founders are looking for a co-founder and not just an employee. The issue probably is that they are really looking for partners who can take up only a little less responsibility than a co-founder but they treat them as mere employees.

P.S.: Of course I am exaggerating.

P.P.S.: Lest it comes out that way, it is not my intention to rile at the post by the Taazza guys, I sincerely think it is good advice.