StartupCentral-Medianama Round Table: Before & After (Starting Up) – Part 1

The world has changed quite a bit since last November when Nikhil Pahwa, Medianama, and I pulled together an eclectic bunch of entrepreneurs for a round table discussion, the venue for which was Sequoia Capital India’s office at Worli. Our theme was ‘Before & After (Starting Up)’ and the attempt was to discover how five randomly chosen startups had tweaked or completely overhauled their business plans in the course of their journey from drawing board to real world.

The theme we had chosen is perhaps even more relevant today as we find ourselves in the midst of a growth slowdown. Well thought through ideas followed by razor sharp business plans have never been more important. The stories shared by our five panelists Saurabh Khullar, Ideacts; Jiby Thomas, Quikr; Hrush Bhatt, Cleartrip; Saurabh Gupta, Phonethics; Naveen Tewari, mKhoj — which were candid and insightful may help some of you through these difficult times. Happy reading.

Getting Started

Khullar: We actually started up in 1999 in Pune. We went to 30 cyber cafes and installed our application (a desktop interface application targeted at cyber cafe users), which had taken six months to build in-house. And we were in business for about three months before we went bust. At the time we (Rudrajeet Desai, Maninder Gill and Khullar) were 20 years old and nobody would give us money, especially since dotcoms had just gone bust. So we shut shop, went out own ways and picked up where we had left off a couple of years ago. We’ve been friends since school and always wanted to work together. In May 2007 we commercially launched operations.

Thomas: In our earlier avatar we were a company called Kijiji in the online classifieds space. After having been around for two and a half years we reached an inflection point where we realized that there is huge potential in the local classifieds space. However, we were part of a larger organization (eBay) and they needed to take a call on what they would do in India. As part of that call, it was decided that it would be best if we were spun off. That move gave us the freedom to do a lot more instead of being restricted by a global platform. In February 2008 we rebranded ourselves as Quikr and started again from scratch. It was a new team (we were a two-member team while at Kijiji) and the good thing was that we saw scope for reasonable success over other players in the space, who had been around much longer. There were small things that we were doing that were making an impact because we probably understood and addressed people’s everyday needs and problems better.

Bhatt: I’ve been self employed or an entrepreneur since 1999, largely because I have a healthy disrespect for power point presentations. The first company I started was called Paper Plane. We were in the business of making websites for other people. The first client we landed was Thomas Cook and came through luck rather than hard work. We spent about six and a half years running their entire online operation and in the process learned a lot about online travel. We also realized that the Thomas Cook guys were not going to take the opportunity seriously. So a couple of us decided to start Cleartrip, which was formed in 2004, got funded in 2005 and was launched in 2006.

Gupta: I became an entrepreneur when I was in college. Set up a company called Brandmakers & Promotions People in 1998, which was essentially a tele-marketing company. I sold it in two years while still in college and therefore had a whole pile of money that I didn’t know what to do with. So I taught myself film-making and worked on various (advertising) campaigns. For about six years I ran a production house called Ethics. We made television commercials and corporate films for brands such as Hyundai Motors, Honda Motors, etc. Around that time one saw a trend of not only attention spans and and costs of content creation falling, but also this new distribution coming in through the Internet, mobile, etc. So we produced a 30-minute film called ‘Control+Alt+Delete’ in 2006 with Rahul Bose. Now logically it was a stepping stone to making a feature film. But the interesting thing that happened is that a lot of people came and said, “Why don’t you look at monetizing this? Release it on Internet and mobile and see if it will actually make any money.” Frankly I got into this venture (Phonethics) as a skeptic. I didn’t know whether it would make money. Anyway, Ethics became Phonethics and we were funded by a bunch of angel investors. The primary hypothesis of Phonethics has two heads. One, short form content. Two, we felt that characters, visual icons, which have historically been the strength of Indian communications and is the way Indian art and storytelling is done, was somehow lost in translation in the last 30 years. So our hypothesis was short form content, but not disparate pieces, folded into characters.

Tewari: We started in early 2007. Before that I was in business school (Harvard Business School) and after school while trying to figure out what I would do next, the whole idea of mobile search, which didn’t exist in India at the time, began to look very interesting. So I packed my bags, came to Mumbai on vacation and decided to build a search platform. The assumption was that I would build a great interface and give people information. The mistake I made was that I did not realize that the information for search did not exist. So we figured, we’re in the search space, we just got funded for it (by Mumbai Angels), we should figure out what’s the best way to go about collecting information. One of the things we always kept in mind was that the business model has to be scalable and sustainable over a period of time. Now, collecting information is not scalable. That’s when we realized that this was not necessarily going down the right path. In all of this we had decided that we would monetize anything we did through ads. So we said that anyway we want to get down to a SMS-based advertising model or build an ad network around SMS, so we might as well change it (mKhoj changed from mobile search to mobile advertising six months after starting up).

Coming up in Part II… Drawing Board