Learning from Failure – Building Sustainability

Springpad was an organizer for all kinds of projects and tasks such as home improvements, interior design projects, movies to watch and so on. It closed it’s doors in mid 2015. The startup had over 5 million users and a product which users loved. The main reason for it’s closure was the inability of the startup to create a sustainable business model within time.

"We built a heck of a product," Springpad cofounder Jeff Janer says. "But we didn’t build the business. In that respect, given our background, we wanted to provide useful information to people that could be monetized. That meant considering micro-transactions. We were considering organizing guru Peter Walsh’s Instant Kitchen Organizer as a free example for a series of different room organizers that we would launch as paid notebooks for purchase, or generating income from affiliate conversions, but we never rolled out a premium or freemium offering based on notebooks or anything like that. We had to make the choice of going for ad support or a freemium model. We went down the ad support path, which just required a lot more scale than we could ever achieve." (excerpt taken from this link)

Advice – Look at building a model which is not just scalable but also sustainable in the longer term. 

Learning from Failure – Premature Scaling

Rewardme was a loyalty program for restaurants and retailers which closed down in mid 2015. The startup was funded and spent a lot of money in trying to acquire customers and scale the business. What made them close shop was that they spent huge amounts of money in acquiring customers without really having a clear business plan and product market fit. Their customer acquisitions costs went through the roof and eventually the startup ran out of funding.

Advice – Cash is king. You need to find the best product market fit before deciding to spend cash on scaling the business.

"We didn’t do anything wrong, but somehow, we lost”

During the press conference to announce NOKIA being acquired by Microsoft, Nokia CEO ended his speech saying this “we didn’t do anything wrong, but somehow, we lost”. Upon saying that, all his management team, himself included, teared sadly.

Nokia has been a respectable company. They didn’t do anything wrong in their business, however, the world changed too fast. Their opponents were too powerful.

They missed out on learning, they missed out on changing, and thus they lost the opportunity at hand to make it big. Not only did they miss the opportunity to earn big money, they lost their chance of survival.

The message of this story is, if you don’t change, you shall be removed from the competition.

It’s not wrong if you don’t want to learn new things. However, if your thoughts and mindset cannot catch up with time, you will be eliminated.

Conclusion:

The advantage you have yesterday, will be replaced by the trends of tomorrow. You don’t have to do anything wrong, as long as your competitors catch the wave and do it RIGHT, you can lose out and fail.

To change and improve yourself is giving yourself a second chance. To be forced by others to change, is like being discarded.

Those who refuse to learn & improve, will definitely one day become redundant & not relevant to the industry. They will learn the lesson in a hard & expensive way.

(written by Ziyad Jawabra on Linkedin.com)

What Sundar Pichai Did Right?

I read this article written by a PM working at Google about what separated Sundar from his peers. 

"Besides being incredibly talented and hardworking like many of his coworkers and peers, Sundar did a few things:

Foremost, he led successful efforts for difficult projects that were core to Google's continued financial success, namely Toolbar and Chrome. Toolbar wasn't an obviously sexy product but it helped defend the presence of Google search on users' computers during a critical period following the revelation of Google's incredible profitability. Chrome extended that mission to improve the user experience of the entire web: keep users on the web and you'll keep them searching on Google.

He recruited, mentored, and retained a great team. Sundar's team of product managers had a reputation as being among the best of the best, similar to the reputation of the software engineers within Search Quality.

He avoided making enemies. Google has politics like any other large company, and Sundar navigated those politics to make his team successful while inflicting the least possible damage on any other team."

It's amazing to see how a little known soft-spoken manager becomes the second most important person at Google (the first being the co-founder Larry Page) and one of the most important CEOs in the world.  

Winning is Everything -- there are no 'Participation' Trophies in the Real World

This is an article from www.entrepreneur.com which highlights a lesson we can learn from Donald Trump. It is a contrarian view but an interesting one nonetheless.

"The younger generation today is being set up for failure. Its members are being taught at a very early age that participation alone is acceptable, but in fact that is so far from reality.

Trump never sets out to be a participant, in anything. He’s going for the win in the election and I guarantee he never opens a Trump resort with hopes of being one of the "top" hotels in the area.

I remember an incident back when my dad was the president of our local Little League. A parent was livid that the first-place championship trophies my team received were significantly larger than the ones awarded to the other teams. And my dad? He just smiled and said, “Welcome to the real world.”

I can’t help but think how he would have loved this TV commercial from Kia. It addresses a very serious problem head-on. While most companies play the PC card, Kia says it like it is, and for that I applaud them.

Trump is going for the win, and nothing less, which is the kind of attitude that every entrepreneur should adopt."

Lord Krishna & Entrepreneurship

I went to Vrindavan & Mathura today to visit the famous Bankey Bihari & Dwarkadhish temples. A priest helped us in our darshans. He was telling us stories about Lord Krishna and also briefly explained some shlokas from the Bhagvad Gita.

There was one particular shloka I started thinking about:

Karmanye Vadhikaraste, Ma phaleshou kada chana,

Ma Karma Phala Hetur Bhurmatey Sangostva Akarmani.

The meaning of this shloka is do what you have to do. Do not bother about the consequences. Just have trust in yourself and go with your instincts.

This shloka by Lord Krishna is such an important lesson for all entrepreneurs. A lot of times we tend to think so much about the results that we are not able to give our best in the process. This overthinking and analysis tends to distort our minds and tends to shake our confidence every now and then. It is extremely important to do a detailed analysis upfront, make a plan and then start executing as per the plan and with immense focus. 

My next startup - Bitequest!

It was 2007 and I was in Oxford doing my Masters. Frankly speaking, the course turned out to be much more theoretical than I thought and I barely used to go to class. As a matter of fact, I attended barely 3 classes over the 9 months I was there :)  I got involved with a host of entrepreneurship activities there. I was interacting with local entrepreneurs and also headed the Entrepreneurship Network at the Business School.

During this time I came across Toptable, a restaurant listing and reservation portal. I really liked the concept and felt that India should also have a similar concept. And hence came up the idea of starting Bitequest. The name was quite easy to come up with and I felt it was catchy. Bitequest - your quest for the perfect bite ends here :)))

I started contacting some website development vendors through email. I came to India and finalised one and got the work started. Thereafter, I started contacting restaurant managers/owners through email to make them understand the concept and get them on board. We were not charging anything. We were just hoping to get discounts from restaurants and wanted to list them with us. The ball started rolling.

I realised that probably I can look at the operations and marketing. However, I was a more 'serious-about-life' type of guy and had hardly frequented any restaurants/bars even when I was in India. I wanted to rope in some people who were more into the social scene as I thought they must have a better idea as to how restaurants run and also had a better social network. Then I roped in a friend of mine who was studying in Melbourne. Thereafter, 2 more friends joined and we started growing the company and really enjoying ourselves in the process. We were able to scale all over Delhi/NCR and had tie ups with more than 300 of the most premium restaurants. Also a lot of the time when we went for tie ups with bars/lounges, we used to end up drunk after the meeting ;)

Came February 2010 or even earlier, I started having differences with my team members about how to scale up the business. I wanted to make it an online restaurant discovery tool and expand the business geographically. On the other hand, the rest of the team wanted to scale it up by setting up a call centre where customers can call and we reserve the tables for them. Due to these differences, I eventually backed off from the business.

The website is still live and being run by a close friend of mine. They some awesome restaurants on it and some great deals for users. Check the website out www.bitequest.com. 

Hello!

Hey guys, welcome to this blog.

I am Manish Hada. I have done a B.Sc, MBA & M.S and have founded 2 startups till date. I have also worked on a host of ideas which never saw the light of the day.

I have been trying to start and sustain a business for the last 10 odd years now. I've started a few, scaled up in some and have had to exit all :( I may not have the bank balance to show what I've done, but through this blog, I want to share what I actually have gained in this journey and also in the times ahead.

Hope this helps :)))))))))))))