The Startup Journey

Business Line  has a fascinating account of the travails faced by Chennai-based children's entertainment and education brand, Karadi Tales, in its search for strategic / financial partners. Viswanath has been fire-fighting to keep afloat Karadi Tales (now a unit of Karadi Path), the company he and his wife Shobha founded in 1996. A distribution agreement with Times Music had landed them in court. And the merger with ACK Media (publishers of Amar Chitra Katha) and subsequent acquisition by Kishore Biyani’s Future Ventures didn’t pan out as expected.  ...The partnership (with Times Music) turned sour when there was a change in leadership at Times Music...When Viswanath cited the exit clause and asked for the agreement to be nullified, his partner refused to oblige and instead took him to court, which issued a stay order. Viswanath and his team, despite founding Karadi Tales, could no longer use the brand. “It took us two years to get out of the case,” says Viswanath, wh...

Did you know the most profitable car of sports car maker Porsche is actually its family friendly SUV Cayenne? Wait what! How? Enter building to Customer's Willingness to Pay (WTP). In a FirstRound.com post   Madhavan Ramanujam, Simon-Kucher & Partners , shares the story of Porsche's counter-intuitive move in the mid 1990s. In the mid 1990s Porsche's annual sales were a third of what they’d been the decade earlier when it almost died. The company badly needed a turnaround.  So Porsche "designed the car around what customers needed, valued and were willing to pay for – in short, around its price. All the items customers weren’t willing to pay for, like Porsche’s famous six-speed racing transmission, were thrown out, even if their engineers loved them." In contrast Fiat Chrysler, which was also looking for a hit, " focused its development process on engineering and design, settling on a price for the car at the very end .  Market performance wa...

Content marketing has been a great and effective way to acquire customers. One question that all entrepreneurs ask is how to create viral content. In this Ink Talk, Sattvik Mishra, Scoop Whoop shares his lessons and the thinking that drives stories at ScoopWhoop. Reality - Not all content goes viral - "while we had some wins, most of them were duds" he recounts. Why do some content go viral? While traditional media hasn't changed - newspapers, websites, apps are all just versions of what editors want readers to read, content consumption has changed . e.g. While newspapers decide what news to put up on what pages, social media feeds are deciding for consumers what to consume. News is very subjective - for a millennial a Game of Thrones episode would be a huge thing, while there are people who don't follow it. To be relevant to your targeted audience - you need to listen to know what they are talking about and what they'd like to talk about. Th...

In a ET article , Ankur Singla, CEO of Helpchat shares where Indian Entrepreneurs are failing at building for Indian masses: "My hypothesis is that most Indian entrepreneurs and product managers build products for people like themselves - elite and westernized Indians who think and speak in English. This is also why almost all Internet companies fight it out for the first 10-20 million internet users. However, the honest truth of the Indian internet market is that to build a large Internet business, you need find a way to build for the 200 million common Indians ." How can Indian Entrepreneurs build for Indian masses ? 1. Go out, talk and relate to the COMMON MAN. "One weekend, I took all product managers in our team to Church Street in Bengaluru and we spent four hours talking to security guards, waitresses and small business owners. You need to see their phones, their home screens and understand their behaviour. All of them mooch off the Starbucks intern...

Writing in Founding Fuel , Baba Prasad, CEO of Vivekin Group who teaches entrepreneurship in B-Schools, bemoans the fact that a lot of the students would like to emulate the founders of companies like Facebook and Amazon and do not even bring up names like Narayana Murthy of Infosys or Azim Premji of Wipro, leave alone like Laxmanrao Kirloskar or Jamsetji Tata. "So, if business models for Indian entrepreneurs are fashioned in the West, and business heroes are not Indian, the question comes up: What is Indian about the Indian entrepreneur?," he asks. According to the article, the crux of an Indian Entrepreneur is: 1. Balancing profit-making with the burdens it is imposing on society and the benefits it can deliver to society 2.  The entrepreneur is solving problems, that are not uniquely Indian, but the scale is Indian.   Contrasting the Western/Capitalist model and a not-too-practical Gandhian/Socialist model, the author provides Aravind Eye Hospital as a bala...

Extracts from Suvir's recent blog post on how entrepreneurs & investors should determine timing of a strategic sale. 1. People - There is fatigue or lack of passion at the founder or leadership level.  Or  it is hard to attract or retain key talent in the company. Or there is a strong disagreement amongst the various stakeholders on the way forward. 2. Approach - The approach to solving the problem is either not working or not scaling. Revenues cannot scale without scaling costs proportionately 3. Market - The market is either not large enough, or the competitive dynamics in the market puts pressure on current business model Venture Intelligence  is India's longest serving provider of data and analysis on Private Company Financials, Transactions (private equity, venture capital and M&A) & their Valuations in India.