My story / How this book is written / What are startups / Why are startups the in thing now / Who do so few startups succeed
My story
I’ve been running startups since 2007. It’s been 17 years now. I have created 5 products and helped multiple startups along the way. Either as an angel or as an advisor.
Being a child of a separated and single parent, I started earning when I was just 15. I started doing odd sales jobs to keep the money flowing. I hated being a financial burden on the family, so I worked through my 5 years at college. I was fairly hungry and loved working. It gave me a very early grounding in professional life. I’ve sold jeans, clothing, sim cards, phones, wheat flour and credit cards. In 1999, my sales stints landed me a job at JWT, one of the top agencies in the country. I learnt a lot about direct marketing and advertising there. After working with agencies till 2003, I went to Manila for my MBA at Asian Institute of Management. I was unemployed for 4 months before I landed a job with ICICI Bank as a product manager. I'll always be grateful to Aloke Panikar and MVS Murthy for believing in me and giving me a chance. At ICICI I worked on the assets and liabilities side, both, and was handling a portfolio of about Rs. 40,000 crores when I left to join a young startup called redBus.
In 2007 I became a coreteam and foundation team member of redBus, which would democratize buying bus tickets online in India (and now the largest bus ticketing company worldwide). I was 26 then. I used to head marketing, product and sales. redBus was acquired in 2013 for ~$100 mn by Naspers owned Goibibo, which was further acquired by MakeMyTrip for ~$2 bn.
Since redBus I have run multiple startups, some bootstrapped and some funded and have had my share of failures and successes. This book is an extract of my learnings along the way and if they help even 100 folks, I’d consider my efforts of penning my thoughts worthwhile. Post redBus I started a bootstrapped startup called The Media Ant that democratized media planning and buying. We aggregated advertising options across India and made all the information available online. While running The Media Ant as the CEO, I realized that I don’t enjoy running B2B startups. I handed over the company’s operations to my co-founder and ex-colleague from redBus, Samir, who then became its’ CEO and has run it beautifully. Today TMA stands on its feet as an independent 100% owner-owned enterprise that clocks a yearly revenue of $30 mn+.
I then co-founded a B2B2C startup called Goodbox with an ex-colleague from redBus, Abey Zachariah, and some young entrepreneurial folks from IIM-B. They were already experimenting with some ideas and I joined in the journey, as a co-founder and COO, to help structure the final offering we should take to market. We raised venture funds to the tune of $4 mn from Nexus Venture Partners. Goodbox was structured around WeChat for Business. With the advent of messaging apps as the main source of communication in India, we believed that commerce could be shaped around this behavior. We created a product that enabled any seller to have a mini app within the Goodbox mega app structure, and get a storefront that had messaging, cataloging and payment, all integrated into one beautiful online presence on the web and the app. Goodbox was too early for its time. It wanted to be the OS for commerce in India, but the vision was too grand for most VCs to understand or buy into. It’s a venture that needed deep funding. It was literally an online infrastructure project to enable a new channel of commerce for the entire commerce community in India. Today, you will see ONDC fulfilling this dream through an India stack approach, backed by the Government of India. We had the right thoughts and the right framework but backed by VCs instead of the Government. This startup gave me and the team new learnings on who to partner with for large vision projects and to time the market better. Goodbox finally wrapped up operations after 4 years of operations and multiple pivots to explore a short term viable business model.
Post this I co-founded a startup called Vokal with Aprameya, whom I had consulted during my hiatus post The Media Ant. I was consulting a fast growing startup called TaxiForSure (cab aggregator) at the time and helping them scale from 1000 to 5000 transactions. I worked directly with one of the Co-founders, Aprameya. We had a great working relationship and became work partners. I brought in a lot of learnings from my redBus experience to the early stage to growth journey, that really helped TaxiForSure scale up with structured growth projects. Aprameya and I had decided that post the TFS journey, we would build startups together. We co-founded Vokal in 2018.
Vokal was an Indianized and new age Quora that had answers in audio instead of text. The insight here was that the new internet adopters were largely vernacular users who did 80% of their Google searches using voice. What they got in return were text links. We believed that their preferred mode to get answers was in voice too. We validated this and it turned out to be true. We decided to double down on this thesis by creating a Q&A platform that would become the largest repository of voice answers to generally asked questions by vernacular India. We raised funds from Accel, Blume (previously TFS investors) and Shunwei Capital. Our traffic grew from a few 100 visitors a day to about 30 million a month within 14 months. We concentrated on growth and were able to grow the community from a small number of contributors to a few lakh expert and fact-based community members within a year. However, given how Quora was being valued, most VCs had lost interest in funding this space, given how low the monetization on web-based platforms was. There was interest to fund the vernacular space, but mostly for app-based solutions.
We started thinking of the next need for vernacular users. We knew that 80% of India and the world spoke a native language other than English. There were no deep-experience platforms for these users. They hung around on English dominant American social platforms and found some way to express themselves and consume content using translation services. We believed that an open and inclusive platform, built in native languages with deep experiences around expression, consumption and connection would do much better than the english-dominant Twitter. This led to the initial thoughts around our next product, Koo. We spoke to creators and they felt a deep need to express themselves in native languages. We already knew this from our experience at Vokal. We built a prototype that would enable people to create in their native language and built some flows that Twitter lacked - namely a people discovery feed.
We launched Koo in the thick of COVID. In fact a week into the lockdown (in 2020) and we had launched it in Kannada. Koo got lapped up by Kannadigas. We grew from a handful of creators to 1000s of creators within weeks. Our DAUs grew and that gave us the confidence to launch in multiple languages. We launched in Hindi next, since most of the engineers and team members couldn’t relate to the Kannada version. The night we launched it, all the employees used Koo till late at night following and messaging each other on the platform with fun conversations. While using the product we figured out small features we needed to complete the experience and started building those features. Within a week we had a fully operational prototype that could be used by millions of users. We were elated with the way the community was growing on Koo. The growth was fast and strong. With extremely healthy cohorts.
Somewhere around July 2020, the Indian PM Narendra Modi announced the intent for an Aatmanirbhar India and how we should be self-sufficient in every sphere. This included technology. He announced the Aatmanirbhar App Challenge. There were 7000+ entries. While chatting at night, and after a lot of back and forth about this challenge, Aprameya and I decided to register Koo in the challenge. After weeks of waiting, we got an email about being shortlisted in the top 100 startups that had registered. It’s difficult to explain the excitement a young product’s founders have when they get selected in the top 100 ideas from 7000+ entries. There’s an urge to announce and get many more to celebrate this moment with you. And we did.
The next few rounds of Q&A by the app challenge panel were grueling and as expected they asked us questions that we weren’t prepared for. I wish I could narrate the entire story without eating up ink here, but to keep the climax short, we made it to the top 3 winning entries in our category of ‘social media apps to watch out for’. If I remember right, there were 10 categories and 3 top apps in each. We made it to the top 30 products from among 7000+ entries. What happened later became a highlight in our product building journey. In Aug 2020 Aprameya and I got multiple calls from friends and family. They had heard the Prime Minister mention Koo in his Mann Ki Baat speech on the radio and on YouTube. He was requesting Indians to take to this home-grown microblogging platform. I was driving at the moment. Stopped my car to go to YouTube and rewind to this part. And there was the PM of India, talking about a product we had created just 6 months back. There are very few moments in my professional career that trump how I felt that day. The team was probably as or even more excited as I was. The excitement is directly proportional to the disbelief in the idea. We had an engineer who was almost always a naysayer and didn’t believe in the idea as much as others. He was one of the first calls I made to ask how he felt and I could literally hear him smile and say “I guess we made it”. These are truly moments to live for.
What ensued after that is stuff dreams are made of. The IT Minister of India joined the platform and following him were many other Union and state ministers. We got over 50,000 downloads within hours. Most known media and journalists reached out to us to cover our story and vision. We had arrived. Having run multiple gigs that attract media attention, we knew how to handle the situation and just keep building the platform without any external distractions. The next few months we started concentrating on feature completeness, scale and security. We knew that having known personalities attract their own worries of the platform getting hacked. And we were right. We had our first hacking attempt that we got away with. Long story short, Koo, the little yellow bird now had wings. From the early days of requesting eminent personalities to join the platform, we now had hordes of them joining the platform on their own. The media pegged us as “India’s very own Twitter”. Some understood what we stood for and some didn’t. We got more attention than our incomplete product needed. Every product needs early nurturing and building to be complete. Especially when it’s competing with a large sophisticated silicon valley product that had 15+ years of engineering behind it. We weren’t close to ready for attention and traffic.
That’s when it happened.
The Government of India threatened to ban Twitter in India over the farmer’s protest. Accounts were requested to be banned in the name of national security and Twitter had ignored the Government’s request. That’s when the Union Minister declared “We have our own Twitter and will migrate to that and it’s called Koo”. What ensued was exciting and scary at the same time. We got millions of users within days of that announcement. I personally may have done 200+ media interviews within 72 hours. Every known newspaper, channel, influencer in India was talking about Koo. We went from a relatively unknown brand that the PM spoke about in Aug to a national brand that was being splashed across media outlets, not just in India, but around the world. A Government ban by a country is no small thing and it attracted global media attention. We interviewed with BBC, Bloomberg and most known global media outlets too.
This move came with its share of ups and downs for Koo. We weren’t ready as a product. And that’s what the urban Indian hated about Koo. Those that supported the Government were elated to find 2 young entrepreneurs that were ballsy enough to take on silicon valley giants with their little yellow bird. We got a lot of attention from eminent personalities and most of them we dealt with directly between Aprameya and I. We now had one of the most envied rolodex an internet entrepreneur could ever have. Koo was the most spoken of brand in the few months that this spat lasted. Meanwhile, we kept building features and strengthening the platform. We truly experienced what the phrase “resource crunch” means. We had 100 things that needed to be done with an army of 20 people. We got a lot of interest from investors and soon closed a few rounds of funding successively within months shooting our valuation to a $130 million startup in less than a year of starting up!
The Koo story is a book in itself and I wish I could tell you more. Among the various startups I’ve run, Koo has been the most exhilarating. It’s given me my highest highs and lowest lows. I had grown many decades in those few years of running it. Running a microblog is like being in politics, film business, media business, living a startup founder’s life and being in the most eminent circles, all at the same time. It can grip you and give you a lifetime’s learnings within months.
Each startup holds a very dear place in my heart. redBus being my first love. Most of my learnings and grounding in startup formulae and frameworks were learnt while we were running that startup. It was one of the earliest true internet startups in India. In fact redBus and Flipkart pretty much grew together at the same time and I remember exchanging notes often with Sachin and the early team there. We would meet often. I was soft consulting many founders at the time over short calls. All of them are unicorns and some of the largest startups in India today. These became good friendships over interesting chats over scaling their individual startups.
redBus was almost always ridiculed for the small ticket size and we always heard VCs say “how can you make a business out of earning just 50 bucks on every ticket”. Till a day when most who passed on us at the time, regret doing so. Heavily. If redBus were to be valued today, it would probably be a decacorn with over $1 billion in top line. It’s the undisputed leader in bus ticketing around the world. With many more markets around the world, left to be dominated. We were just 26 years old when we started running this. I still am very protective of the brand as I was then. Probably more than most current employees may be. I still keep sharing errors I notice in branding or the playstore with the current CEO, who gladly indulges my messages with “I still can’t believe you’re so passionate about redBus”. It’s always tough to move away from your first and to me redBus was a baby that we nurtured over years to make it what it is today - an undisputed market leader. The redBus story deserves a book. It has many learnings that today’s market places that deeply benefit from. It’s one of the few monopolies in a world of internet duopolies.
The Media Ant was close to my heart because we changed the game. We disrupted the media agency model that thrived on a small number of large clients to a model that served a large number of small clients. We wanted everyone to get access to information around advertising options. The Media Ant truly delivered on that promise from Day 1. It grew from a monthly revenue of $1000 to about $2.5 million. Today it houses information on almost every advertising option in the country. It’s grown from 5 people to about 100+ employees. It remains a bootstrapped, highly profitable enterprise that’s here to stay and I’m extremely proud of what it has achieved in this world dominated by media agencies that refuse to service the smaller folks. And we did all of this without raising a single venture dollar. TMA is a model that can scale in any part of the world, and it will. It’s a business that’s here to stay and grow around the world, with strong reserves from its home market, India.
Goodbox was truly ahead of its times. Especially when you see ONDC taking wings. You could easily say that ONDC is today what Goodbox wanted to be in 2018. Timing the market is very important. Being too early is something many take pride in, but it shouldn’t. It’s nothing but a waste of a lot of talent, effort and money. We did a lot of really great work at Goodbox and it was a great learning running a B2B2C platform. A skill very few can boast of. We were 7 co-founders running Goodbox. Again something that’s very rare, but we made it work and these are some of my most trusted and closest friends today.
Vokal was a great learning on community building and Indianizing global products that could grow to a few 100 million users a month just with a few relevant tweaks to suit the local market. We met some of the most interesting experts from all spheres of life and many of these are big cheerleaders in most of our entrepreneurial journeys. Vokal was our first tryst with competing with global valley startups.
Koo has been the crown of my startup journey for many reasons. My highest highs and lowest lows. The stuff that dreams are made of. Larger than life. Global ambitions, competing with the richest man on earth, heavy attention from media in India, Brazil and the US. Creating best in class processes, systems, teams and a world class product, all in 3 years. There are many firsts that we achieved at Koo. Till date many fail to understand how we are different from Twitter and how Koo was built to house the 80% of the world that doesn’t speak English as their first language. How it has much deeper experiences than Twitter for native language speakers and how it’s the future framework for an inclusive platform for the world to interact with each other. Sometimes the myopia of the majority affects the work of the few and Koo is a good example of that phenomenon. Till date we face resistance in our home country for being a clone, without the same folks unwilling to double click and understand that it wasn’t made for them and their type, to begin with.
Koo has been very close to my heart and the journey for the brand is yet unfolding as I pen down my thoughts.
Over my 17 years journey of running startups, I have gained 100s of friends, 1000s of acquaintances and many who dislike my aggressive working ways too. I couldn’t have had such an enriching journey if I continued working at a corporation. I’ve had the joy of building large companies from seedlings, that have stood the test of time, and the heartache of shutting a few. I’ve gone through the pains parents go through while having multiple babies and restarting from scratch and the ultimate joy of seeing these babies grow into adults over years. I’ve had the good fortune of a very supportive group of friends and my wife and brother who have always encouraged me to follow my heart. I’ve had close family members who’ve always resisted every startup attempt and been a source of constant personal anxiety as well. I’ve gone through 3 serious phases of depression that I’ve come out of on my own. I’ve had years of self-doubt followed by decades of excellent work. I’ve worked across transaction startups, to B2C to B2B2C to B2B and running social startups too. I don’t know any founder within my circle that has had this diversity in their gigs. In short, I’ve gone through every emotion that journeys like these deliver and have become immune to most negative emotions and much richer to handle any situation that can be thrown at me. From creating narratives to handling ransom conversations with international hackers, from handling disgruntled customers who have tried to hit me on missing a bus to handling disgruntled foreign celebrities, from handling requests for bribes by officers to handling sophisticated requests from VIPs, from walking away from a startup I built to seeing co-founders leave - I think I’ve seen it all. And I still stand tall telling people that if I could do it, so can you. And if you can do it, you should. Don’t die with the regret of “what if”.
How this book is written
Over the years I’ve realized the importance of writing things down. It gives clarity and helps remove the noise. Most of my documents are just a flurry of bullet points around important things. This book is nothing but a scribble of those bullet points. If I feel the need to expand on any particular point, it’s preceded or followed by a paragraph that explains the subject or an example from my experiences. If I feel that one of my stories may be an interesting read, then I’ve narrated it. Overall I’ve tried to write it the way I would do an in-person interview with a journalist. It will be a light and quick read.
You will find books that are very well researched and in-depth. There’s a lot more explanation of basics in some of those. That’s not my objective with this book. This book is written for someone who has a basic knowledge of startups and is purely a list of tips and insights that can help accelerate their journey. I’ve tried to concentrate on the most important things rather than every single detail. I’ve tried to discuss important frameworks that can help deal with the majority of the scenarios. The decision making framework is more important than the decision itself. There’s a lot of literature out there that can help you go deep in any topic. That’s not the objective of this short book of tips.
I’m a big fan of scale and writing this book is the most scalable way to share my thoughts and experiences with anyone who’s interested. Helps me become redundant. Most of these learnings will stand the test of time in our ever changing ecosystem because they are fundamental.
The other important point is that whatever I have written, is my truth. It may not be in line with what you or someone else believes in. And that’s fine. This is an attempt to share what I learnt. It’s not a search and documentation of the ultimate truth. Every founder will have their own insights and you may be able to follow them on their social media. Since I’m not very active there, I wanted to create a living repository of what I learnt. If not for someone else, just for me to read when I’m old and want to recount forgotten memories. If this could be of use to someone who makes it big, they could buy me a mansion with a private pool and hot tub, one day perhaps. But without the excitement of the hope of that large mansion or the burden to be right or wrong, consider this book my mental ramblings. And like every pivot, I’m happy to reconsider my opinion on these ramblings. I’m a WIP and will continue to remain so for a long long time. Just like most of you.
What are startups
Startups are high growth engines built to and for scale.
They may or may not need an infusion of funds depending on the nature of expenses needed to run these.
Tech enabled startups are built around defensible technologies / processes / capabilities / knowledge that are native to you and your team.
If you just started a neighborhood grocery store, please don’t think it’s a startup.
Unless you want to create 100s of these in the next few years and this one is just a proof of concept you want to learn from, before you scale.
Why are startups the in thing now
When we were building redBus back in 2007, the media would sparingly write about internet startups. After the 2000 bust, internet startups had a lot to prove. They didn’t get any space in newspapers or channels. Fast forward to 2010, when there were online websites, forums and newspaper space dedicated to these. India saw many startups being born between 2007-2010. Many were solving basic needs and were showing a lot of promise. They were catering to a growing internet population that was taking to the internet on the mobile. From days of pleading with journalists to write about redBus, to seeing journalists trying to schmooze founders and executives for a constant flow of interesting angles for stories, I've seen things change. A very well known startup-dedicated online site, with a lady founder, had dedicated a tab for redBus and Flipkart related stories and I was asked to constantly supply a story no matter how irrelevant it seemed to me. “These stories help millions live vicariously and get a sense of the journey till a point they get the confidence to do it themselves” I was told. I happily obliged.
I’ve seen many advantages and disadvantages of this media attention that started around 2010.
Pre 2010 the people that joined startups did it without knowing where it would lead.
The salaries were very low.
ESOPs had very little meaning. Nobody even knew how they worked. Let alone making money off of them.
People joined startups because they wanted to do work and solve problems they believed in.
They wanted to know that their contribution mattered.
They wanted to feel like their existence mattered. They wanted to know that being in a 10 people organization meant that they were at least a 10% contributor to the future of this company. They didn’t feel the same way in a 10/20K strong organization.
These people understood the meaning of sacrifice. Sacrifice of their time, material gratification, family facetime and personal hobbies.
They knew that they were pouring all their time, effort and their money earning opportunity cost into something that has a less than 1% chance of success.
This breed was very different from the ones I see today. I’ve seen this cohort changing from 2010 till now.
Today people care about things like a 5 day work week compared to 7 day work weeks. They care about market salaries vs taking 70-80% salary cuts to build something they believed in. They want upfront ESOPs worth lakhs and millions without proving a fit or worth.
They want perks today vs folks who worked through the 2008 recession without a fan to save electric bills.
I think that the media attention has shown how there’s quick money on this side of the farm. That there’s very little or the same effort for a huge upside. And I think it’s misleading.
Truth is that startups pay well because it’s high leverage work. A coder can create as much leverage and impact as 10K call center execs. Which is why they get paid the way they do. Because there are just a few needed to create products that will be used by millions of users.
The internet has changed the landscape of distribution, enabling businesses to have much lower costs to deliver the same thing to millions of users online at a fraction of cost offline.
In my opinion, a lot of recalibration needs to happen in the entire ecosystem, be it employees, founders or investors.
Employees need to know that they will get to contribute, create impact, feel meaningful, do the work of their life, do the work of 10/20 people at a corporation, handle larger and heavier responsibilities, grow faster, learn more and if all goes well, earn more too. Not the other way around.
Founders need to know that this isn’t a ticket to the easy-get-rich-quick table at the casino. Startups are hard work that should only be done by the ones with the right reason for building one in the first place. It has to be driven by the joy of creation, not the joy of extraction. It’s an extremely difficult and testing journey, with a very low success rate and the burdens are almost impossible to bear unless you’re in it for the right reasons.
Investors have to spend more time asking founders the right questions. Why are you starting up, why this idea, why do you need so much money, can you do it in ⅓ the time and money, would you do this if you couldn’t raise, why this valuation, why me, would you still choose me at a much lower valuation, would you run this for the rest of your life if there was no exit possibility, what’s your vision for the world through this product and so on.
We need a huge reset, irrespective of the growth models we follow. Be it the traditional model of raising smaller rounds till POC or the Chinese model of dominating an industry at any cost and ploughing huge capital to create a monopoly.
There need to be strong and fundamental reasons for starting, funding or joining a startup. Frivolous or lateral reasons will only dilute creators and their creations. And that will be the start of the end. None of us true startup romantics would want to live in that world.
Why do so few startups succeed?
Startups are tough and most fail. Very few make it. But why? Because they need many things to come together for them to become successful. Startups are trying to do in 2 years what regular businesses achieve in 10+ years. Why the hurry? Because if you don’t achieve it in that much time, anyone could have done it, including larger companies, and there’s no need for your existence. Startups are about doing what larger companies can’t. That’s how you find your place under the sun. And the only thing that matters is speed. Which means that you turn the pyramid upside down in sequence and start building assets at a rapid pace. That needs substantial investments to be made upfront. Traditional business folks who talk about startup profitability and compare startups to corporations don’t understand this game well enough. It’s a shot at achieving the impossible for unimaginable returns and doing this in record time. Anyone could have built Uber in 10-20 years. Can you do it in 3? That’s what matters.
Startups need many things to come together for them to succeed. The right market, product, team, founders, investors, execution, pricing, adoption, virality and 50+ such variables.
It’s a lot of skill, luck and getting every piece of your plan and execution right.
You need to get it right within the right amount of time. Else someone else will out execute you.
It’s very difficult to build a great team that can strategize and execute to a win. It needs a very different kind of person to work the amount that a startup needs. It’s like running multiple companies at the same time.
There are 100+ risks in running startups. Founder risk, market risk, tech risk, product risk, IP risk, competition risk, security risks, policy risks etc. I can go on. You have to keep reducing risks at every stage of the startup, making it even more attractive for it to attract funds. It takes time to eliminate each risk. It takes a mix of serendipity and skill to find the right formula.
Startups are usually built in gaps. These are gaps that were left out by larger companies because they were small markets at the time but have the possibility to become large in the future. That’s the gap most startups will play in and hope that the market adopts their solution as the new way of doing things. Airbnb is a very good example of this. These gaps exist for a small period and those that build around it have a good chance of making it if larger companies sleep on the opportunity long enough.
Startups are also usually tech in nature. This landscape is changing rapidly. Faster than we’d like. New tech renders a lot of older habits and products irrelevant. Your startup needs to stand the test of time. Very few are able to adapt and morph their solution to these changes.
Your job as a founder is to take an extremely difficult and ambiguous idea and convert it into a stable and predictable ship. That’s like getting 100 things right and it needs just 2-3 things to kill the startup. Nobody will clap for the 97 things you got right as much as they’ll remember the 3 you got wrong.
This book has a lot of learnings from various experiences that can reduce your chances of failure and help you succeed in a much shorter period of time. Hope my claim is true and you’re one of those that benefits from some of the tips sprinkled all over the book.
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