Chennai at par with the best in the world!!
It was only 8:30 in the morning on Saturday the 2nd March 2013 at the IITM Research Park in Taramani but the auditorium was already being filled by entrepreneurs, rookie & experienced, young and old, for the first session of the Super Start-up event organized by TiE Chennai. This event attracted people from Bangalore and Pondicherry as well!
And 9 entrepreneurs (yours truly included) were about to make a pitch of their business via skype to Sramana Mitra, the charismatic founder of the 1Mby1M network aimed at global entrepreneurial development.
And it was like a torrential downpour soon after where each entrepreneur got 5 minutes to talk about the technology and the business side of his offering (how come there wasn’t the 33% reservation for women?) and answered questions from Sramana and the audience for the next 5 minutes or so.
These included very varied products and services like diabetes management, office supplies, marriage gift registry, shopping comparison based on social-media, low-cost high-speed entertainment on the go, wind turbines, MSME network, Field force automation and crowd-sourced content creation and publishing.
Some of us were looking for inputs to further fine-tune or tweak our offering whereas there were others clearly looking for funding. Sramana asked questions largely on the monetization models, the existing revenue levels and the go-to-market strategies but it wasn’t like the Spanish inquisition that I had expected.
After all the presenters were through, Sramana complimented the Chennai ecosystem for working on products and concepts that were quite aligned with the global scenario and in some cases even competing with the best of breed offerings.
5 entrepreneurs were selected for the first round of Premium Membership of 1Mby1M by Sramana and the TiE Chennai team and there would be another iteration after which 3 will be given the scholarship for the same.
This was followed by a speech by Raghu Rajagopal, a serial entrepreneur, investor and mentor where he shared the mistakes and the lessons learnt from 8 different entrepreneurs from different industries based on his interaction with them.
Since most of them were from the IT background, these entrepreneurs didn’t quite understand the importance of financials and more specifically cash flow early in the game and that was a recurring theme. There was also this pattern of hiring people based on hope that they will perform and continuing to give non-performers a long rope. One admitted to taking more initiatives at the same time leading to dilution of focus and it was also common for them to have high expectations of others.
This was followed by an interactive session where Raghu fielded questions on paper-money exits, mentoring, his bandwidth for providing support to upcoming entrepreneurs etc with ease.
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The final session of the morning was one on marketing by Dr Jayaram K Iyer, an employee turned academic who is now donning the hat of Chief Strategy officer for the Bharat Matrimony group of companies.
Although he was talking only of the fundamentals of marketing, he made it so interesting by turning it interactive with subtle doses of humour. He also regaled the audience with short anecdotes and video clips.
He emphasized on the need for the entrepreneurs to identify the need first and define the segment and positioning before creating the products whereas it was usually the reverse. He made some interesting observations on the importance of businesses to make it easy for the prospective consumers to know about the offering, access it, purchase it, use it until the point of disposing it. The session was so engrossing that most of us did not even feel the pangs of hunger until 1:30 pm!!
Post lunch was the UnConference session organized by Dorai Thodla where people can walk into any of the discussion groups located at different parts of the conference room and participate freely.
There were topics like pitching, Marketing for startups, Hiring and HR & Lessons from Failures. Because it was new and people expected someone to talk centrally, there was some confusion initially but once they got started, there were animated conversations at various levels.
There was also a media corner where Murali (ex- Business Line) was giving an opportunity for entrepreneurs to share their journeys on camera in the form of 1-2 minute video capsules. I personally found the experience really gratifying.
Overall, it was a day which offered numerous options for those who wanted to take them, both in the formal and informal sessions. The photos were courtesy Agni Sharman.
TiE Chennai’s Startup Super Day Brings Meaningful Help for Startups
On March 2, as Chennai was feeling a transition from the passing winter into incoming summer, the heat was being felt inside the auditorium in IIT-M Research Park. The occasion was fourth edition of Startup Super Day of TiE Chennai and at the Pitch Fest 10 startups pitched to Sramana Mitra, founder of 1M/1M, who listened to them from Silicon Valley through videoconferencing.
Most pitches seemed intent on solving problems. While some were very ambitious in scope (connecting SMEs to automobile giants), some were novel (surrogate advertising on windmills) and some tried to change the status quo (crowdsourced content for online learning). The Pitch Fest’s winners will walk away with a cool 1M/1M program membership worth $1000 per annum. Three winners were to be finalized from the 10 pitches. The scholarships are sponsored by TiE Chennai charter members.
Chennai on top of technology
“I am impressed with the pitches,” Sramana told the audience from the Valley. Then she listed the biggest trends in the technology space today and Chennai being very part of it. Some companies like Avaaz and OrangeScape are at the forefront of this innovation. Mobile apps like Avaaz, a technology product that helps autistic children communicate, has developed apps for iPhone, Android, Blackberry and in the process of developing one for Windows 8. Similarly OrangeScape, which has developed KISSFlow, a workflow tool to help enterprises through PaaS and Fresh Desk, which has leveraged SaaS to develop a suite of CRM applications, are leading the way in this technology. Big data is another area of expertise that not many are comfortable with but big corporations are increasingly focused on it to make informed, data-driven decisions. Data mining is no longer in fashion but data analytics is a fast catching up trend. Latent View Analytics from Chennai is serving a global audience through its big data analytics. Niche e-commerce is a fast developing trend and Carrot Lane from Chennai is selling diamonds online in partnership with an American company, Blue Nile, based on contract arbitrage. Through this, diamonds worth $16 million are being sold online.
Failure as a stepping stone to success
TiE Chennai Charter Member Raghu Rajagopal, a serial entrepreneur, investor, and startup mentor, gave choicest lessons on failing. Quoting various entrepreneurs from his interviews, he listed the entrepreneurs’ mistakes and lessons they learned from their experience. Most entrepreneurs find finance troubling and do not know how to channelize funds appropriately early on. While entrepreneurship is a learning curve necessarily, a heads-up advice like Raghu’s helps avoid many mistakes that startup entrepreneurs are prone to. The key mistakes were mostly in areas of thinking and functioning, customers and customer intelligence, matters internal to the organization, and finance. “Staying on your core is important,” stressed Raghu. “Don’t compare yourself to other entrepreneurs. Focus and attention to detail, how to be in play, and knowing success is relative are of immense help. It’s a marathon,” warned Raghu, adding those who are there for a quick buck and quick exit cannot make it. The stories were rich and provided good take-aways for entrepreneurs in a practical sense.
Marketing mantras
Prof. J.K. Iyer, strategy head at Consim, that owns Bharat Matrimony.com, enlivened the audience with his interactive marketing “seminar.” After understanding customer needs, it’s imperative to segment, target and position your product, he emphasized. Segmentation and positioning is important, as, in his words, “your product cannot satisfy everyone’s needs.” Sometimes the product might find another use apart from what it is intended for. Quoting a light-hearted marketing folklore, he said entrepreneurs should be open to understanding this. When a survey was done to find out why washing powder Surf wasn’t selling as quickly as the washing machines in Punjab, it was found that washing machines were employed for making lassi. Describing customer need as very crucial to a successful marketing campaign, he said HDFC has a product that serves only 119 customers out of its customer base of 3 million. Such micromarketing efforts contribute to success, he said. Increasingly understanding customer behaviour and developing products around it is emerging as a latest trend in marketing. This is called psychographic segmentation. Fixing value is arbitrary, he said, quoting an experiment where MBA students were asked to suggest price of two shirts, one branded and another of the same brand but with labels removed. The students tend to put higher value for the branded shirt. That plays a big part in us attaching value to a product, he said. Packaging also enhances value, he added. One important part of marketing is understanding what it entails. To illustrate a myth, he quoted another folklore where it is said a marketing person should be able to sell a comb to a bald-headed customer. “Maybe he can convince a few customers but there will not be repeat business,” he joked, and if the product is not used for what it is intended, repeat sales will not happen, he explained.
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