Posted on : 2022-07-03 22:34:00
Article : Good Morning Monday Management Solution for TASK 197- Startups fail due to lack of focused business planning based on customer need and strong aligned vision for all stake holders…..
When the product was ready Karunakaran was aiming at some big schools and he wants more new features implantation to sell the product, while Avanth argues that there are enough features for any school to get started and there was something missing in sales process hence he feels that small and medium schools should be approached even the earnings are low. Conflict between them started rising. By this time they are running out of money and they have made some more investment into this startup.
Since both of them have no sales back ground, to improve upon they have appointed a sales person from competitors, he did offer competitor’s secrets of selling product to schools but could not make a single sale in One month. They observed that his impressive sales record is due to brand name and asked him to leave due to no productive results.
While karunakaran was chasing big schools and influencers, Avanth was learning more about startups to do more with less resource. They had a difference of opinion on running their startup as Karunakaran wanted it like a big corporate while Avanth wanted to go for lean start methodologies with low expenses and targeting smaller schools in the outskirts of cities. By that time they have wasted RS 15, 00,000/ on a product that nobody wanted to buy. They could get only two paying customers and few on sales funnel. With Karunakaran leaving Avanth has to close to their startup within a year.
When introspected, initially Mr Avanth had no idea on what to start and when Karunakaran joined they jointly decided to develop a techno product for school but they never planned on target customers. Building a product without knowing customer is immature planning of a startup. Initially they have invested more on office infrastructure and employee salaries- instead they should have worked out from homes to reduce 80% of the expenses. They were avoiding expenses on the professional design of sales material, marketing tools, and paid consultancy. They should have spent money on the things that translate into more sales or leads and should know the pain point of the customer to talk about and sell their product. Basically the entrepreneurs should have knowledge about technology to guide the staff otherwise they become clueless of technical knowhow.
Since the closure of the first venture, Avanth started taking firm decisions based on the available information at that time. He understood that one can never have 100% data available for taking any decision and one should be smart enough to derive a conclusion with 60-70% information and fill the gap with own intuition.
Further Avanth felt that entrepreneurs doom to fail if they stop learning. Entrepreneurs start a venture to solve a customer’s problem and to explore their passion; money is just a fuel for a startup vehicle. If focus is more on money, they would become short-sighted. Finally, Mr. Avanth has joined another startup as co-founder and it changed his life in a positive way. Now he is working with startups to help them unlock growth.
Endpoint-: Most of the first startup entrepreneurs are on similar path. Firstly they should be owners of their areas but at the same time they should have first-hand experience of all kind of jobs in a startup. They should take decision and trust their intuition; otherwise as data points show 90% of startups close in First Two years.
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