Recently, Dr Kaustubh Dhargalkar, one of my school friends, who is also a Jamnalal Bajaj Institute of Management Studies alumnus wrote a book – It’s logical: Innovating Profitable Business Models. He is into design thinking and is a firm believer that innovation is not only for the born genius but also for those who wish to acquire the skill by following the rigour of a process which has delivered results and I agree wholeheartedly.
There is a general belief that talent is something that one needs to be born with and only then can it be honed. However, if I look around, I can readily see examples of acquired skills. In case of cricket, take the case of Ravi Shastri v/s Sachin Tendulkar. In the case of Sachin, he had loads of talent and greatness could be achieved by merely staying disciplined and on course. On the other hand, Ravi Shastri started as a left arm orthodox spinner batting at number 11 on his test debut and then trained hard to gain confidence of the team management to be given the opening batsman’s slot. This gave him an opportunity to showcase his all round skills (batting and bowling). It also brought him laurels as an all-rounder in the Champions Trophy down under in 1985 to lift the Champion of Champions Trophy & also be awarded the coveted Audi car.
Closer to home, I have experienced a similar logical approach and dedication benefit my wife ( a dental surgeon by vocation) in acquiring skills beyond her profession. She is passionate about art forms such as calligraphy and photography. She decided to take formal training in both to acquire trained skills and then through rigour in practice has managed to attain commendable proficiency in both. Besides this, she also ventured to launch her own online venture in dental consumables.
For those who launch businesses or startups, there is generally a similar belief about entrepreneurship being an innate skill. I recently read four books that logically lay out broad principles and frameworks for startups, which if applied, can increase the chances of success. The table below captures the key learnings from these books :-
Let me share with you about the online startup attempted by my dentist wife in her dental domain- a marketplace for dental consumables, which she was successful in setting it up even though she had no tech expertise. You will see that she ticked almost all the boxes from the logical framework mentioned in the table above for startups-
- Solving a problem that she wished someone else to solve for her as a dentist – inventory ordering and management.
- A burning desire to change the way things were being done – from manual to online
- Being a first mover in the industry with possibility to diversify into other medical fields
- Getting an angel investor backing her startup.
- Going through the customer discovery process, did product market fit and also launched a Minimum Valuable Product, which went through iterations for Go To Market
- Building a network in the form of a community of members who enrolled looking for internship placements across the dental fraternity. They were engaged through discourse in the form of listing continuing dental education courses, articles and posts.
- Successfully enrolling vendors to upload product catalogues, service partners tied up with tech integration for tracking deliveries, payments as well as initial set of dentists with repeat orders.
- Introducing habit forming hooks such as facilitating building of a shopping list to place repeat orders.
However, after 2 years’ effort the platform was unable to scale up as it couldn’t attract a critical mass of end users. On analysing, I realise that its failure did not have much to do with lack of any innate entrepreneurship skills or even lack of market. It could have been more due to a combination of the following factors: –
- inability to attract talent to take it from zero to one.
- multi tasking – she was running the venture while continuing with her dental practice – any business is a 24 X 7 job, no venture can afford part time attention.
As it is always said, there are more lessons in failures. If I have to dig for lessons in this case, I would think one of the following could have helped: –- While assessing to persevere or pivot, agility in decisioning to pivot could have made a difference.
- While assessing to persevere or pivot, agility in decisioning to pivot could have made a difference.
- Pivoting from a B2C (dental consumables to doctors) to a B2B marketplace, focusing on the niche of nursing homes or smaller private hospitals could have
Im convinced that by following a logical and disciplined approach, anyone can not only give their ideas wings but can also increase their chances of being successful in their venture. Cheers !!
P.S To read my other blogs on Cricketing / Corporate Tales, Start up stories, Covid Times, Friends, Family, Marriages and Parenting go to the Home Page
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