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Strategy
Use mobile coupons to send special offers and discounts to your customers. It just might turn your slowest
day into the busiest.
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Give your website a makeover. After all, it is the face of your organisation in cyber space.
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START-UP DIARIES
Why do some ventures succeed while others fail? What makes some start-ups grow, even as others flounder? One way to find some answers is to look at a few enterprisesv closely over a period of time and then introspect on who got what right. We have chosen three such interesting start-ups—as much for the unique idea as for their passion and drive to succeed. We will publish monthly entries on the progress they make this year—in the hope that these will provide a glimpse of the struggle that most new ventures go through. Here’s a background on each of the chosen ones.
My Sunny Balcony
Green thumb grows into a
fruitful business
When friends meet for coffee, big plans and even bigger dreams often brew. And sometimes, the caffeine kick may last long enough to change lives and cities. Ask 31-year-old Reena Chengappa and her band of boys, Shailesh Deshpande, Sriram Aravamudan and Athreya Chidambi. In December 2008, the four friends, all from Bangalore, nurtured one such session to grow an idea into a business venture.
Nature lovers and spirited eco-travellers all, they founded My Sunny Balcony, a garden consultancy, to design dream gardens for busy, urban professionals, and create little patches of green in concrete balconies across Bangalore’s expanding high-rise suburbs.
“With so much construction you see felled trees everywhere here. One feels helpless because it can’t be stopped. This was once a city of bungalows with front lawns and backyards. We wanted to bring that back, to supplant our loss. It’s a simple idea really. We have moved the front garden up the elevator to the balcony,” explains 40-year-old Shailesh Deshpande, also an environmental consultant.
The idea quickly found its way to sunshine. Within a year, My Sunny Balcony has done over thirty concept balcony and terrace gardens in themes as varied as Zen, European and traditional Indian. An impressed customer base and an effective digital viral marketing strategy have helped ensure a steady stream of future projects. Requests to expand operations beyond Bangalore are also stacking up.
“This is not what we visualised. We began My Sunny Balcony as a weekend enterprise, a hobby. But, the response surprised us. And now we mean business,” says Chengappa who quit her Infosys content design job to work full-time in the venture. She confesses they broke even with their first project and are now “minimally profitable”.
Thirty-three-year old Sriram Aravamudan, a former software techie with over 12 years of IT experience, tries to decode their success. “We have been extremely lucky because we’ve hit the market at a time when there is a huge consciousness to go green. Our work ties in with that ethos.”Like Chengappa, Aravamudan too works full time in the business now. The other two founder members, Shailesh and Athreya Chidambi, a web designer, have kept their day jobs and pitch in part time.
And, it’s already time for reinforcements. My Sunny Balcony gets up to twenty to thirty enquiries a week but can manage only two or three client visits and two garden executions every week. Aravamudan says an intern garden designer who can independently execute projects and a supervisor are urgently needed.
None of this is surprising considering how no-fuss it really is to get your dream garden without once leaving home. The team begins with a site visit to analyse a client’s needs, assess the area and understand their aesthetic sensibilities. Within a day or two, a garden design --which takes into account which plants to choose, what materials to source and the unique design elements which make the garden custom --is sent to the client. Fifty per cent of the project cost is taken in advance to buy raw material and the garden then typically takes a day for execution.
“We have done gardens in two days flat. All our gardens have been finished within two weeks of first meeting the customer,” says Chengappa. A garden from them can cost anywhere between Rs 9,000-20,000 for a small balcony and Rs 50,000-Rs 60,000 for a terrace garden.
And, their ambitions are clearly taking root only now. Plans are in place to launch an online store that sells modular gardens. “We want people to come to our website, see our various theme garden design tips and order bamboo fencing, pots, wrought iron parapets to install their own gardens,” says Deshpande.
A Gift-a-Garden option is also being worked out as is the vertical of annual maintenance contracts for the upkeep of gardens --even those that have not been designed by them. They would like to expand to other cities but Aravamudan admits it’s going to be tough with their existing skill set. “We would need to collaborate with garden enthusiasts and experts as well as get our sourcing right. It's a daunting task though.”
All you garden lovers outside Bangalore can rest assured because the wait is unlikely to be long. With what they have achieved so far, greening rough patches is barely a challenge for this team.
The Shoe Spa
Shining the world, one pair
at a time
It’s easy to take a shine to Tabish Ahsan and Saral Budhiraja. They are young, ambitious and have a definite spring in their step. The happy feet aren’t surprising considering Tabish and Saral run The Shoe Spa, a specialised shoe cleansing and shoe repair service they founded in July 2009.
The Shoe Spa claims to transform old shoes into a shining new pair. The process, which the young promoters guard zealously, includes several steps like conditioning, massaging and moisturising to keep your soles soaring. Little wonder then that the company tagline reads, “We don’t just clean your shoes, we give them a spa”.
Management graduates from Indian Institute of Planning and Management, Delhi, Tabish and Saral, were not groomed to fill these shoes. When they passed out together in April 2009, they were buffed up for lucrative corporate careers. Through campus placements, 22-year-old Tabish bagged a job with a tourism and retail management company, while 23-year-old Saral was set to join a market research firm. But, both their employers kept deferring joining dates.
The idle time allowed innovative rethink. Saral had been toying with the idea of setting up a shoe cleaning business and felt this was a good time to step in. “Shoes aren’t a necessity item now. They are about luxury, indulgence and making a style statement. I was sure people would pay to preserve their favourite pair.” The spa, he believes, caters to this loophole in the market.
One evening, he called Tabish, a close friend from b-school, to pitch his idea. “He asked me if I would pay Rs 50 to get my sneakers cleaned. I said no way. And told him nobody else would either,” laughs Tabish.
Saral’s prodding soon converted him, and the duo began an interesting journey of experimentation. They trawled through upmarket shopping streets and dingy, crowded wholesale markets in Karol Bagh to discover the best cleansing items.
Equipped with some of their find, they used their family for market research and pleaded with them to pass up their shoes. They charged Rs 50 at first but quickly hiked that to Rs 80 and then to Rs 100 as they got better.
Convinced they could give old pairs a new lease, Tabish and Saral once again turned to family, this time for seed fund, to set up a workshop in Noida. Both families were supportive despite the fact that neither of them have shoes in their genes. Tabish’s father is in the merchant navy and Saral’s father works in real estate.
They began operations with Rs 3.5 lakh to buy equipment, get a website up, and print branded flyers and shopping bags. The first 15,000 flyers were distributed in Noida’s posh Sector 15A. “Nothing happened the first two or three days. There were no calls. We were depressed, anxious and worried. But, suddenly we started getting customers,” says Tabish.
Nearly two lakh flyers later and a service that has expanded to Delhi, The Shoe Spa now gets 15-20 pairs of shoes daily. In fact, in October 2009, the duo got more than 50 shoe orders in a single day.
Shoes here are divided into three categories – sports, leather, suede/nubuck. A basic shoe spa is the signature treatment. Shoe moisturising, shoe waterproofing and shoe repair services are also on offer.
Customers can call them or leave a message on their website (www.theshoespa.in) to buy these services. A delivery boy is sent to collect the shoes and bring them to the workshop which shifted to Civil Lines in September 2009 to serve Delhi neighbourhoods better. A diagnosis is arrived at.
“We call the customer to tell them what’s needed,” Saral explains. A basic shoe spa costs between Rs. 150 and Rs. 225. Each add on service is additionally priced. Tabish and Saral now employ around five people, mainly cobblers and a supervisor, to run the workshop. They also have two delivery boys.
Over the last six months, Tabish and Saral have put in around Rs 5 lakh into the business. But, recovery and profit maximisation isn’t a big concern for now. “We don’t charge our customers if they are not satisfied. We want to deliver the best quality. We learn every day and we improve every day,” says Tabish.
Quick on the heels of that sentiment though is a quiet confidence. “The Shoe Spa is going to be a big brand if we can survive the next couple of years. We want it to be all over India. The expansion will happen,” Saral asserts.
A bigger workshop, more new machinery and an improved online order system are the definite goal posts for the next three months. With a belief and determination that can only come with youth, Tabish and Saral think they can manage much of this with little outside help. They are wary of “doing PR” and want to grow as organically as possible. Although they have started talking about a bank loan recently, they haven’t worked on a business plan geared to seek organised funding.
RideinSync
Share a cab, choose a
partner, choke the jam
Last summer, when most students were preparing to leave the landscaped campus of Indian School of Business (ISB), Hyderabad in pursuit of high-flying corporate careers, Deepesh Agarwal and Amit Gupta were getting ready to test their “cabpooling” idea on the incoming batch.
Agarwal, who majored in entrepreneurship at ISB, was not willing to accept that shared transportation as a concept had failed in India. It was just not presented correctly, he believed. The hammer hit the nail bang on. “Our shared cab service was a hit. We had 120 students sharing 60 cabs, saving Rs 36,000 and 200 litres of petrol in a single day,” he recounts.
A quick market research carried out by the duo on 200 people in Delhi, Bangalore and Hyderabad, showed that the idea was worth pursuing in terms of business. The survey found that nearly 65% of the people were willing to share a ride.
After some tweaking of the initial model, RideInSync was launched in September 2009. The service packaged the basic virtues of carpooling – dip in transport costs, congestion on the road and carbon footprints – along with the option of choosing co-passengers to and from a common destination. The entire service can be accessed through a mobile phone or laptop.
For instance, an ISB student taking a cab from the airport could send a text message to RideInSync to check whether any one else wanted to share the ride to the campus. It will match the flight and city details, and provide a list of passengers headed the same way. The student can choose a co-passenger, and a cab is arranged.
Making business out of a virtue is not easy and Agarwal knows that pretty well. But the numbers he throws up are pretty interesting. A shared ride from the airport to the city costs Rs 250 between 5 am and 11 pm; and Rs 300 from 11 pm to 5 am. A regular Meru cab or Radio taxi would typically run up a bill of Rs 550 for the same trip.
“Our survey showed us that 50% of the cabs carry single passengers. Often, there are colleagues, neighbours or friends who live near each other and are going to the airport at the same time. If finding out who was heading which way was easily possible on a laptop or a mobile phone, wouldn’t these people be interested in sharing cabs to save money, and to meet up with other like-minded people?” Agarwal asks.
Currently, RideInSync offers this service on a single route – to and from Hyderabad and its twin city Secunderabad to the Rajiv Gandhi International Airport.
“I knew this service had to be launched in Hyderabad or Bangalore. Since both these airports are so far from the city centre, the service offers immediate returns to our users,” explains Agarwal.
While Bangalore and Delhi are the next expansion points, Agarwal wants to add to his list of destinations covered within the City of the Nizams. In fact, bringing the Hyderabad railway station under his service radar is high on the priority list.
But before anything else, he knows he has to pull up the numbers on the airport pilot route.
“We have 730 registered users right now, but the critical mass is around 5,000 members. This increases the probability of finding a partner to share a cab with. Currently, only 15% of the cabs booked on our platform are shared cabs because of the small user base. We also give our passengers the option to book a non-shared cab with us, if they are not able to find a partner,” he says.
Agarwal, whose partner has since moved on to a job in Mumbai, is now thinking of tying up with big companies, such as Infosys and others to get more people to warm up to the idea of “cab pooling”. “That should be a quick way to increase our strength,” adds the first-generation entrepreneur, who worked with Motorola India as an engineering manager before deciding to join ISB in 2008.
The b-school network has helped tremendously. RideInSync works out of the Wadhwani Center of Entrepreneurship Development, ISB’s Incubation Centre, with two other full-time employees - a master’s graduate from IIIT Hyderabad and a software engineer from BITS Pilani.
So far, 80% of the Rs 5 lakh that Agarwal had put together from personal savings and borrowings from family has gone into developing the software platform. “I don’t worry about this. It cannot stop me from realising what I want. Moreover, I am not looking for immediate funding. I don’t want to sell my equity for cheap. I want to work on a stable cash flow,” he says.
Whether RideInSync will become a pin-up darling of start-ups or run out of steam in the long run may be difficult to predict, but there is one thing for sure – Agarwal and Co. will save the planet a few extra carbon footprints and noxious fumes on their way to the bank.
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