My plunge into entrepreneurship

Road to Startup

I always had a strong urge to start my venture but I was a little bit reluctant. Though I did attempt to start a business venture on more than one occasion and went as far as to register a web domain based on some ideas, I managed to revert the decision on both occasions. I considered three important aspects before starting a business venture of my own. 

1. The risk and potential impact to my family 
2. Finding the right co-founder with a technology background 
3. Surviving the first two years perhaps without drawing any salary  

It took almost 15 years for me to tick all the above 3 aspects. The driving force in the pursuit of entrepreneurship is to

1. Have a Vision (Gives a sense of direction and clarity)
2. Build a positive work culture (Seed for competitive advantage)
3. Empower people with compassion (Develop people and create future leaders)
4. Build a good team with an emphasis on teamwork (Business success is teamwork)
5. Get the Product-Market-Price fit

Co-founding Turiyatree Technologies

I co-founded Turiyatree Technologies in July 2018 along with my partner Lakshminarayanan. I met Laskhminarayanan at Sify and we kept in touch since 2011. We had a good synergy between us and the common thread that kept us in touch is the mutual respect we had for each other. Though Lakshmi is 4 years younger than me, I found him very balanced and level headed. As a technology enthusiast, Lakshmi is very focused on solving customer problems. Lakshmi has an engineering mindset that is always curious to explore problems and discover solutions. I come from a Business Development and Marketing background. My strengths are Strategy, Branding, Sales Operations, and Marketing. We both have good people skills and can build a good team. Besides, we have a genuine heart to mentor the team. We believed our professional competence and synergy is a good combination for the founding team. We defined our roles aligned to our strength - Lakshmi to focus on Product Engineering, Innovation and Operations(Internal and Product focused). I decided to focus on Strategy, Funding, and Marketing(External and Market focused). We outsourced Legal, Finance/Tax and Regulatory filings to professionals as we don’t have any background in this area. 

First 90 days

The exciting part of the journey is the first 6 to 8 weeks as we are very enthusiastic about our startup - Setting up the company, finding an office space, roll-out a website and so forth. Slowly, we started waking up to the realities and uncertainties of building a company from the ground-up. Our idea was to build a niche consulting services in the cloud transformation and infrastructure space, cross-sell any application integration opportunities, build robotic process automation (RPA) practice in the enterprise market segment. Lakshmi tried to onboard a third co-founder with a strong cloud and Infrastructure architect background with whom he had a good professional association. He was also excited to be part of the journey with Turiyatree. Due to personal reasons, the third co-founder could not continue and decided to quit. His exit completely derailed our business plan in the first 90 days.

90 to 180 days

I and Lakshmi went back to the drawing board. We brainstormed for a couple of weeks but somehow we both felt that we are not fully convinced to build an IT consulting services business model. We came to an agreement that our company should solve a current problem in the market, it should have a larger market to expand and newer possibilities should evolve in the future to build product + ecosystems in the future. We narrowed our thought process by asking ourselves a set of simple questions:

1. What is the problem we want to solve? 
2. Why is it important to solve this problem now?
3. Can we build an effective/innovative solution?
4. Does our business model futuristic and in the emerging technology space?
5. Do we have a larger market for the product?
6. Does the customer willing to pay(WTP) for our solution?
7. What will be the price the customer is WTP for the solution?
8. Which business segment are the innovators and early adopters of the product?
9. How to get our early customers and some traction?
10. How do we demonstrate and deliver business value to our customers?

We zeroed in on a potential business space to build a minimum viable product (MVP). We decided to bootstrap until we develop a minimum viable product and demonstrate value to a potential client. This means that we have to live without revenues for a while. Once we get initial traction and few paid clients, we will seek professional funding like a typical SaaS product venture. 

We are now very clear about our vision and what we wanted to build in the first 2-3 years to pursue our vision. There are a few questions that we still don’t have definite answers and decided to let things evolve to a point and revisit those questions.

“You can’t find answers to all the questions you have immediately. Time is a non-renewable resource and we decided to move on with what we knew”. 

2019 - A New Beginning

The beginning of 2019 brought a lot of clarity and fresh thinking into our minds with the product idea. We were operating in a co-workspace center. We started looking for an office space with a capacity of 10 seats. Around the second week of January 2019, Lakshmi rang up and said that he was down with back pain. He was going to see the doctor and will work from home for the rest of the day. Lakshmi is a cycling enthusiast and very active with his fitness routine. I was confident that he should be back in a couple of days. The back problem put him out of work for almost 7-8 weeks. This was one of the challenging times we had to go through. One thing for sure I knew that I should support him at this critical juncture. At the same time, I stepped back and waited for him to come back. I used the time to really unwind from business and did other personal activities. I was looking for the office space so we can move in when Lakshmi is ready to work.

The last 180 days

Lakshmi returned to work by mid of March. We moved to a new office by early April 2019. We decided not to build the MVP with our imagination alone and started looking for a trial customer to give us an opportunity to do a pilot and demonstrate business value. We convinced a prospect to deploy a pilot solution on a discovery phase and run it for 6 months. This required that we need to import some hardware and build the technology stack. We hired a couple of freshers and training them now to help us with research and development. We have a couple of senior consultants doing a freelance engagement with us in User-experience and Data Science. Lakshmi needed some help to architect the Cloud system and help came through a college batchmate of mine who lives in London. He is a consultant serving the public sector and private companies in the UK and Germany specializing in IoT, Cloud, and Automation. He is an advisor to us in the IoT and Cloud space.

Key Learnings

1. Failures as Success - The domain of entrepreneurship involves a process of uncertainty influenced by the socioeconomic environment. The ability to interpret and respond to uncertainty with a decisive mindset determines the outcomes - success or failure. You need to have “Skin in the game”. I learn to have an attitude to see failures as a success as it opens the door for newer opportunities. The game is exciting but be wise enough to stay floated long in the business. Adapt and respond to changes swiftly as market dynamics are changing faster than we could imagine. Pivoting once to validate the product-market fit is necessary but overdoing it may backfire.
2. Scale your intellect - Your professional competence alone is not good enough for the founder to run a company. As an entrepreneur, we realized that we need to scale our intellect constantly. Have a small group of selected mentors and advisors. Listening to them will help you see the big picture and get a broader perspective. Then, trust your intuition to lead you to do the right thing.
3. Hiring smart people - If you don’t influence smart people to work for you, you ain’t building a successful venture. Generously give ESOPs to smart people with a vesting schedule. Empower and develop people. The entrepreneur should focus on creating an environment that nurtures a culture of teamwork, excellence, personal growth and learning
4. Competition - Do not worry about the competition too early in the venture. Focus on what you have to build and get it right. Competition only proves the commercial viability of your business model. Once you determine the product-market fit and the product is scalable, then build the differentiation. Either you make a new market-making venture (Zero to 1) or position early in the emerging market, differentiate and lead (1 to n). Both have their pros and cons.
5. Care Yourself - As an entrepreneur, do not take yourself so seriously and cut-off from the real world. Try to find time to spend with loved ones, friends, and families. It is important that you stay grounded and be a normal person. Interact and share your problems with your family and ask for help when necessary. Above all, enjoy the entrepreneurial journey, you have nothing to lose. Whatever may be the outcomes, I am sure the learning is invaluable. Perhaps, you can discover something new about yourself which is hidden for long. Uncover the hidden gem!

The Future

I don’t know how the future will unfold but the product vision looks compelling. Our mindset is very open and we will evolve as we discover new insights along the way. Once we observe something significant, we will go deeper into it and find an optimal way to solve the problem. Without experimentation, I think we won’t discover anything new. When you discover something new which is not in your plan, evaluate and adapt to make the necessary shift. What we want to solve and what we will eventually solve could be different. Overall, my experience is liberating, fun, and extremely alarming at times. We have the prototype ready and signed up trial customers to deploy. I never regretted so far that I took the plunge into entrepreneurship.