The Startup Journey

You have to be confident and shameless while crowdfunding. Priyanka Agarwal, Wishberry shares on how to succeed in crowd funding with Venture Intelligence in this  interview. Priyanka also candidly shares how the team built Wishberry, raised funding from top angel investors like Rajan Anandan, on pivoting, and difficulties in raising capital for entrepreneurs operating in niche spaces not chased by VCs. Q: What does Wishberry do? Priyanka Agarwal : In its latest avatar, Wishberry has pivoted into crowd financing of low budget films (INR 1-5 Cr). We are essentially trying to create an internet platform for investment opportunities for HNIs in films including Marathi, Tamil, Kannada, or films targeting the global diaspora. L-R: Co-founders Anshulika Dubey & Priyanka Agarwal, Wishberry Given that you are building a marketplace, how did Wishberry solve the Chicken and Egg problem? Beyond the “all or nothing” model what did Wishberry do to pull in more arti...

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.

In a Medium blog , Mitchel Harper  shares his thoughts on what makes great products. 1. BFBC - Build For your Best Customers They bring you most revenue and are willing to pay for upgrades and newer products. Give a higher weight age for their feedback. 2. Solve Tier I Problems Tier I - One of top 3 problems of potential customers . If  you are solving a Tier I problem you will have the Customers' attention and budget spend. The rest are Vitamins - "nice to have fixed" problems. 3. Build 'simple to understand' products Design is your most important feature. Every time the user experience is great, a startup's revenue grow like weed. 4. Make a cupcake Most startups try to build the wedding cake (the big final product) on their first iteration instead of starting small with a cupcake, then turning it into a cake (based on customer feedback) and then finally into a wedding cake (again, based on customer feedback). 4. Prioritize Customer Feedba...

In a Medium Blog , Julie Zhou, VP - Product Design at Facebook shares (pun intended) a few doodles on what is Great Design. She calls it as the congruence of high "Positive Utility" and lotsa "Customer/User Love" The Ambition Hierarchy of Designers Catch the 3rd Doodle here We've been getting our hands dirty at trying to get well designed infographics on Venture Capital & Private Equity. You can catch the stories here Venture Intelligence is the leading provider of data and analysis on private company transactions, valuations and financials in India.  Click Here to learn about Venture Intelligence products that help entrepreneurs Reach Out to Investors, Research Competition, Learn from Experienced Entrepreneurs and Interact with Peers. Includes the Free Deal Digest Weekly Newsletter: India's First & Most Exhaustive Transactions Newsletter.

Gary Vaynerchuk's advise to Whiner-preneurs: "Bullshit entrepreneurs cry about the way they want it to be instead of reacting to the way it actually is." & "Nobody gives a f*ck about your feelings and you need to stop crying and adjust" Click Here for the video Arun Natarajan is the Founder & CEO of Venture Intelligence, the leading provider of data and analysis on private company transactions, valuations and financials in India. Click Here to learn about Venture Intelligence products that help entrepreneurs Reach Out to Investors, Research Competition, Learn from Experienced Entrepreneurs and Interact with Peers. Includes the Free Deal Digest Weekly Newsletter: India's First & Most Exhaustive Transactions Newsletter.

Sara Tavel compares "Good" employees with "Rock Star" employees (whom she calls as the Mitochondria of the company) 1. Both are good at their jobs 2. The difference being in the  scale of adding value.  For good employees, it is is linear (more pay or higher the hierarchy = more value), while rockstar employees - "they add value to the company beyond their job description and responsibilities. They ask and do what is best for the company" The  "founder’s job (is) to attract and retain mitochondria through all stages of a company. At the early stages, this rare group of individuals is the core of the company. As your startup scales, they are your leaders." How do you spot them? - Do Value Interviews "Don't just hire for competence, interview for values" Typically the founding team should check if the candidate is going to be a match with the core values of the company. If you had a chart for that you'd want someon...

Derek Sivers has a great step-by-step guide: Go to the following sites to open an account at each: upwork.com, guru.com, freelancer.com ...You'll get many offers, but if they don't have your magic phrase at the top (“I AM REAL” or whatever), delete them. This is very hard to do, since you'll feel thrilled that so many people are offering to help, saying things like, “We have looked at your project and would be glad to complete it immediately,” but trust me and delete those. If they didn't read something marked as VERY IMPORTANT already, you don't want to work with them. ...Here's the real reason why you're stopping at a simple milestone: you're going to hire at least two different people to do this first step, expecting that one will go bad, one will be so-so, and one will be great. Yes it means you're paying multiple times for this first milestone, but it's worth it to find a good one. Arun Natarajan is the Founder & CEO of Venture ...

D. Shivakumar of Pepsico India has a nice presentation type summary in Founding Fuel from the book "Move Your Bus" by Ron Clark. The book classifies team members into high performers (" Runners " - who consistently go above and beyond what is required.), the dependables (" Joggers " who do their jobs well without pushing themselves), average workers (" Walkers " who just get pulled along) and deadweights (" Riders " - who put their feet up and slow down the whole enterprise). Here from the slides are the characteristics of "Runners"... Runners bring positive energy   Runners carry the load and provide momentum. They come early to work, never complain and bring a positive energy.  Runners go for excellence Runners are driven by the goal of professional excellence and take pride in contributing to an entity that wants to be top notch. Their impetus to work hard isn’t led by personal accomplishments, but is more abou...

From an article on the IIM-A CIIE blog based on the experience of Flick2know and Revive, two incubatee companies of CIIE which have recently raised debt fund for their ventures (both from SIDBI): Typical private debt funders provide loans in the range of Rs.5-25 crore per transaction at an interest rate of 15-17%, while govt. and govt. supported institutions provide as low as Rs 1 crore per transaction with interest rates starting from 9% for startups...Siddharth, for example, recounts from his recent experience of raising debt from SIDBI. Initially, they were hesitant about considering Revive, given the non-generic business model even though they had a revenue model in place. Revive took almost 1.5 years to raise debt from SIDBI under a scheme which is co-supported by DST for MSMEs with an interest rate of 5% per annum, although earlier they were considering to go with the Credit Guarantee Scheme. As far as the criteria of selection is concerned, Divir mentions that unlike equ...

From the summary of a "10 Tips for Entrepreneurs" speech by AirAsia co-founder Tony Fernandes in Digital News Asia : Don’t be scared of complaints Complaints are actually free market research. Someone took the effort to write to you to tell you where things went wrong and how they should be improved. These are things that companies pay a lot of money for consultants to tell them that same thing. So we treat every email preciously. Arun Natarajan is the Founder & CEO of Venture Intelligence, the leading provider of data and analysis on private company transactions, valuations and financials in India. Click Here to learn about Venture Intelligence products that help entrepreneurs Reach Out to Investors, Research Competition, Learn from Experienced Entrepreneurs and Interact with Peers. Includes the Free Deal Digest Weekly Newsletter: India's First & Most Exhaustive Transactions Newsletter.

Cross posted from the Entrevista blog : Jeff Seibert, a techie who founded one company while still a student at Stanford and sold it to Box and then founded and sold another company to Twitter (where he still works), describes - in this returning to campus talk (at Stanford eCorner)  - "what went well and what didn't during the acquisition of his earlier startups by big-name technology companies, stressing the importance of culture fit, maintaining your team's trust throughout, and continued investment in growth after being acquired. Seibert also explains how an acquisition isn't always the best exit strategy for a promising startup. Arun Natarajan is the Founder & CEO of Venture Intelligence, the leading provider of data and analysis on private company transactions, valuations and financials in India. Click Here to learn about Venture Intelligence products that help entrepreneurs Reach Out to Investors, Research Competition, Learn from Experienced Entrepren...

From the article by the Zoho founder in Economic Times : Another day , another hot tech company raises $500 million (or is it a billion?) in Series D, Series E -I propose we just call all of it Series QE , because that is where all the money comes from anyway , right?  ..If you are in one of those hot companies burning cash, enjoy the ride as long as it lasts--and make sure you have a safety net if, heaven forbid, something bad happens. But what about companies that cannot or don't want to raise that kind of money? ...In the world of business and finance, following fashion is the path to the poorhouse. Avoiding the fashionable location, the fashionable field and, dare I say , fashionable employees, may be the best way to survive a bubble. Arun Natarajan is the Founder & CEO of Venture Intelligence, the leading provider of data and analysis on private company transactions, valuations and financials in India. Click Here to learn about Venture Intelligence products ...

Extracts from Mukund Mohan's post titled "What to negotiate on your investment banking advisory engagement letter" : Most bankers typically charge between 2% (highly unlikely, but possible if you are a hot company, with a high probability of sale at a large price) to 7% (smaller transaction, < $5 Million).  ...Term of the agreement: Since most M&A transactions take 3-6 months, these agreements will last at least for that duration. Most agreements also specify that if your company gets sold for 6-12 months after the start of the engagement, the investment bank will likely get a portion of the sale, even if they did not make the introduction or help negotiate the final sale. While many will claim it is standard to have a 12 month clause, there is no “standard” – it is all negotiable.  The engagement fee or retainer: To help prepare your documents, pitch deck and start to position your company, the company will ask for a retainer fee between 10% and 20% of t...

Source: NextBigWhat . Also read the related post on Bootstrapping by Ashish of NBW Arun Natarajan is the Founder & CEO of Venture Intelligence, the leading provider of data and analysis on private company transactions, valuations and financials in India. Click Here to learn about Venture Intelligence products that help entrepreneurs Reach Out to Investors, Research Competition, Learn from Experienced Entrepreneurs and Interact with Peers. Includes the Free Deal Digest Weekly Newsletter: India's First & Most Exhaustive Transactions Newsletter.

From a  blog post  by Aaref Hilaly of Sequoia Capital titled "How to Present to Investors": Everyone who watches Bond loves the opening sequence, before the titles come on. There’s suspense, action, and unbelievable stunts – in essence, those first 5 minutes bring home why you love Bond, and that keeps you going through the next 2 hours of nonsensical plot twists.  In the same way, you need to convey the main reasons why an investor should love your business in the first 5 minutes. We found the best way to do that is to open with 3 slides:   1.What’s changed? Explain what’s the discontinuous shift, break-through, or innovation that opens the window to create a substantial new company.  2.What you do: A one-sentence explanation of what your company provides to capitalize on that big change. It still surprises me how often we can get 20 minutes into a meeting without a clear picture of exactly what a company does.  3.Fast facts: Lay...