Wake up Mr Entrepreneur!!!
Well when I started my entrepreneurial journey, I was in my early 30s. I was brimming with confidence, had just returned from the bay area and was sold out on becoming Richard Branson. I mean the guy practically started from scratch and ended up creating an empire. There wasn’t one movie or book on entrepreneurship that I hadn’t consumed. I mean it seemed like the easiest task on the planet. Start a web app or a mobile app to sell something and in the process raise cheap cash from angels or VCs at an astronomical valuation and after several rounds of fund raising till PE or hedge funds get involved, do an IPO or maybe make an exit, thereby becoming richer to gift yourself a vacation in Bahamas. But alas, reality had other plan for me which were nowhere close to Bahamas. But before I go there, let me talk a bit about myself. Well I have around 2 decades of experience with a decade of experience in failures. But don’t be surprised as these failures have taught me much more than my entire corporate career put together. This might have evoked your curiosity a tiny bit but don’t worry,I will explain.
To me it seemed like a sea of opportunities waiting for one to be exploited and the gold rush would follow. At least that is what I thought in my early 30s before starting up. To talk a bit about my fascination with startups,I was hooked to watching Shark Tank some 15 years back and made it a point to attend Startup Saturdays organized by our very own Headstart Network. Now this is early startup era in India when the boom hasn’t yet started and we see a bunch of startups popping up from time to time. In some years we would see Open Coffee Club coming up with their gatherings which a lot of startup folks used to attend. The rest as we know is history till Koramangala became the Sand Hill road of Bangalore. I remember watching the Flipkart guys in a flat right next to mine in Koramangala sipping tea as their 5 member team would be strategising about their next move as they forayed into the Indian eCommerce with their online bookstore. It was just a few years later that I had to move outside India and kept on hearing stories about India becoming the next entrepreneurial hub. So when I finally decided to take the plunge in 2013 post my return, I was brimming with ideas.
When I opened shop in 2013, I wanted to build a Netflix like product based on social recommendations. It would host content which would qualify a certain criterion based on a system of rankings and several other data points. The idea was novel but the cost was enormous as procuring content from production houses required significant investment. So after trying to unsuccessfully build a business like Netflix, I failed miserably because there was no viable economic model. So next came a code comparison tool, a job distribution engine, a blue collar job search application and most recently an experiential school for product management. Save one out of the above, everything sort of failed and I did not make as much money as I had thought initially. So I spent the next few years thinking through what could have gone wrong and arrived at a singular conclusion. I did not understand product management as well as I had envisaged earlier. Then as I was grooming and mentoring a lot of startups over the years, I realised that its not something that I did not know. It is a universal problem and many entrepreneurs do not understand product management till they succumb to the forces of the free market. The free market fundamental is simple- the best product wins and the bad product loses. No amount of great packaging can save a bad product from failing. We have seen such examples from even the likes of Apple, Microsoft and host of tech behemoths over the years.
The funny yet important thing is that no one realises this itsy bitsy fact about product management till they have failed a couple of times. Although I would cite the reason to be this misconception that product management is a tried and tested practise only for mature organisation and in a startup since everything is subject to chaos, one doesn’t require product management. This notion or the very lack of the right product management information has been responsible for wrecking a substantial amount of entrepreneurial ships. It might sound like a shocker to many but product management in today’s world is largely responsible for the success of software product companies. It’s had such a dramatic influence on service organisations lately that many large service organisations have started focusing on products. Today Fast Company cites product manager as one of the top jobs in the world with students from B-Schools choosing product management roles over the quintessential Investment Banking or Consulting roles. But lets get back to our discussion. As an entrepreneur I never felt the need to get my product management fundamentals right and thus did not see the full picture and ended up failing multiple times.
It was also because of the fact that with such an enormous information explosion on the internet, one does not really know how to understand product management. There are so many books on the topic that one can barely. understand which one to read. Same goes with blogs and articles. The last refuge being courses is the most disappointing one because product management cannot be learnt theoretically. It’s an experiential science and it has different variations for different companies. What works for one company might not work for the other. Having said that there still are a bunch of things quite important for an early stage entrepreneur to know before he launches his products. The fight an entrepreneur is not with anyone but time. If an early stage entrepreneur cannot launch his product or make revenue from his product in a span of 6 months to one year then one might have to shut shops. Its actually happening all around us as small businesses are dying everyday in numbers and new businesses are popping out of nowhere and the cycle continues.
So to deal with that predicament, I decided to use my experience as an entrepreneur who has failed numerous times to write a book that could educate early stage entrepreneurs about the 10 percent product management gyaan that they need to launch successful products and make revenue from it. Believe me when I say it’s easier said than done. Its extremely difficult to find a problem that one can solve and then to use it to make money is another arduous task. This is the point where a little idea about product management can save the day for an entrepreneur. My book doesn’t guarantee your product will be a huge success or you’d become the next Unicorn but it will definitely help you avoid the pitfalls one faces. It would also help you save a lot of time which could break a deal for many entrepreneurs. Check it out and help yourself launch a successful product. Here are the URLs.
India- https://www.amazon.in/ESSENTIAL-PRODUCT-MANAGEMENT-TECHNOLOGY-ENTREPRENEURS-ebook/dp/B098KC5L8J/
US- https://www.amazon.com/ESSENTIAL-PRODUCT-MANAGEMENT-TECHNOLOGY-ENTREPRENEURS-ebook/dp/B098KC5L8J/
UK- https://www.amazon.co.uk/ESSENTIAL-PRODUCT-MANAGEMENT-TECHNOLOGY-ENTREPRENEURS-ebook/dp/B098KC5L8J/
France- https://www.amazon.nl/ESSENTIAL-PRODUCT-MANAGEMENT-TECHNOLOGY-ENTREPRENEURS-ebook/dp/B098KC5L8J/
Germany- https://www.amazon.de/ESSENTIAL-PRODUCT-MANAGEMENT-TECHNOLOGY-ENTREPRENEURS/dp/B098W78J6F/
Italy- https://www.amazon.it/ESSENTIAL-PRODUCT-MANAGEMENT-TECHNOLOGY-ENTREPRENEURS/dp/B098W78J6F/
Spain- https://www.amazon.es/ESSENTIAL-PRODUCT-MANAGEMENT-TECHNOLOGY-ENTREPRENEURS/dp/B098W78J6F/