[swombat]

How did you end up with $1m of personal debt? That seems like an epic disaster, worth telling the tale to allow others to avoid making that sort of mistake.

For my part, in 2 failed businesses I never went more than £10k or so into personal debt.

[appreneur]

In india when you borrow for business ,it's usually personal friends, family and distant cousins.

I never borrowed but from my family , but since my business partner borrowed hell lot from friends, cousins, to keep it going , we were essentially paying 24%-36% interest on the debt, almost all the profit was going to just pay interest.

And since we were Not making operational profit , we did turn over of 5million usd , paid interest of 2 million and operationally we were in a debt trap. It was classic case of denial of risk and peril. just thought that I will come up with blockbuster product and wipe it all,it never happened in 7 years the problems multiplied. Debtors were hounding on the door for their principal, even though we paid them huge interest,it's like bank run, once they sense things are wrong , everybody wants their money back on that day. Got into new personal guarantee agreements ,made huge sacrifices and finally here I am.

[jsudhams]

Any reason why you went for 24% to 36% loan with friends rather than bank loan? with the turn around like that you could have also taken small business aid loan which are 12% at worst.

Also why would you pay US$ salary in India(assume)? There are lot of well funded small startup's that would staff augment you for US20$ an hour for decent programmer and you could have used remote college student for the programming after initial training.

Haven't done startup as thinking of doing in in our environment gives me jitters as I am not a very social person and gets really pissed of with govt officials. May the that was only way you had at the time.

[appreneur]

I wrote numbers in dollars for wider audience understanding, I paid salaries in rupees. As you might understand, a business loan from bank depends on collateral security you can offer , I could only give 200k collateral hence the business bank loan got limited there.

One of the most important lessons , I got early on is ,you need developers and staff full time on rolls,right next to you if your business model is dynamic and also you are not sure of staff quality. If you go to skillpages, there will be thousand resumes claiming they know Python , once you hire them you will know the quality, outsourcing works to that kind student quality is like sure shot disaster.

Also I just was not lucky enough to find quality talent to outsource.

About india being good for entrepreneurs , yes and no, depends on what you are working, but just to give up on startup idea altogether is not recommended ,choose carefully plan well and most of all EXECUTE WELL.