Tagged: Entrepreneurship
Marketing your start-up to stakeholders – Employees and Customers
Quick answer: It depends 🙂
Lessons from a successful e-Retailing entrepreneur
Recently I met the father of Indian e-Commerce, and had an opportunity to hear him out on several topics related to his Work, Life, Entrepreneurship and the Indian eCommerce Industry.
The person I am talking about started a e-Retailing in year 1998, succeeded in his effort by taking it to a level which is still unreachable by most of the companies despite all the funding and manpower they have in their hand. His lean approach in building the business, was evident in his precisely chosen tips for youngsters, and his client focus was loud and clear when he was reviewing some of the ideas put forward while the discussion went on.
He learnt it much ahead of time that e-Retailing is an art which needs patience, passion and courage which can’t be bought by investments from outside and keep watching it grow. He understood is really well, that the market would flood with e-Retailing business and all the companies would soon lose patience and they will start buying revenue under the shadow of a hallowed jargon – creating value 🙂 He laughs over the current situation and says that – The moment you have a huge pile of external money to build your business, you lose focus from the business and start doing things which appear ridiculous in the hindsight.
So, while he was years ahead in successfully executing his e-Retailing experience, he saw another opportunity ahead of the time – eCommerce 2.0 And hence in year 2007, when India was still going gaga over Flipkart, and its popular competitors, he silently moved on to his dream venture to take e-Retailing to deeper level for the next generation of e-Retailing – e-Commerce 2.0 . And so far he has exceeded his own initial imagination. He has an awesome client base, which is growing at a pace which would impress any investor or a probable competitor. And whats the best part – He makes money whenever people enroll for his platform to do the e-Retailing.
When I inquired about any possibility of making the platform run on the freemium model in future, his answer was clear and to the point – “Something which comes for free loses its value, and you develop a client-base which has a mindset of ‘trying’ things out. I don’t want a non-serious client base. I was to enroll only those clients who value the platform, and realize that their business would get a direct benefit out of this technology tool. I will not make it free ever. And if at all I have to invest into getting clients, I would rather invest in educating people about e-Retailing business, rest all will follow on its own. I might not win all the customers (and neither can I serve the entire market base), but at least the industry will benefit from the investment I will do in educating the market.”
While his e-Commerce 2.0 dream is nearing its peak, others are still announcing their plans and some are even evaluating the probability of e-Commerce 2.0 . And in the mean-time, he has already started executing his e-Commerce 3.0 plans 🙂
So, in all I was impressed to take away a few things from this gentleman…
#1. Always try to be a step ahead from the market while you are building something new. There is no fun in starting 399th e-Retailing portal which sells the same stuff which the 1st one started selling almost 5 years ago. You will always get bogged down from the competition and will never be able to concentrate on the business or develop a passion for doing things the way you always wanted to do.
#2. Know when to move out. In any business, a point comes when things reach a stage where market gets attracted to the idea and starts replicating it and eventually compete with the original idea. You must know when to move out, or else you will have to fight out the muscle power of the market and deviate from your core business motivation. The other way is to keep innovating so that market remains busy following you instead of competing with you. Imagine India’s first software outsourcing success – Microland, they saw great business, but didn’t understand that the market is following them and forgot to diversify or innovate and then never saw anything awesome after a few years of initial success.
#3. Charge Premium. When you do something new and solve a market problem, do not hesitate in charging your customers. Always keep it in mind, the copying power of this market is so rapid that you would never know when you would have already lost the power of charging the premium. Understand the reason why online retailers can’t charge any premium now – Because they don’t have that power, and hence all of them are selling things like beggars.
#4. Invest in building a team. As an entrepreneur, your success is 99% of the times dependent on the core team you will build. And the chances are really high that you will continue working with them for decades to comes. Irrespective of whether you are a success or failure, if you have a dependable core team and if the team trusts your capability, you guys will never regret working with each other and the association will continue forever. [This person still works with the same core team which he had formed in year 2008].
[I have intentionally not mentioned the name of the person to eliminate the hype and unwanted popularity, which this gentleman hates.]