Having said that, what exactly should be the good habits that an investor should follow? Well, for that Ms. Jain mapped out a basic flowchart explaining how evaluating your insurance cover, evaluating loans is important and should be done periodically. One needs to save for their goals first and postpone spending in order to gain wealth and allocate their assets according to their risk taking capacity. She said, “when you look at your investment, do you want to eat better or do you want to sleep better”, if you want to sleep better then you should invest in safer assets and if you want to eat well, you will have to beat inflation and go for growth assets like equity.

Audience Asks

From my understanding, there’s no right time to invest but can you list some reasons as to why one should start investing early and what all financial options will be beneficial for millennials like us?

Ms. Jain answered this question by giving a personal example of how she started spending more, unconsciously, while owning a credit card. Eventually swiping her credit card became a habit, in her words, “a habit that I want to break”. Ms. Jain explained that there is no right time to invest and it is intertwined with your goals and aspirations. Talking about the beneficial aspect of investment, she said, if you have long term, high aspirations, then you should invest in equity. It is based on choices, whether you want to play safe and invest your entire money at once, for a long term goal, or if you want to take that risk and keep investing in small amounts on a monthly basis to reach that goal. Ms. Jain advised not to fall into the trap of FDs, rather start investing in equity, and be consistent.

I wanted to know something about SIP, which is more profitable – short term or long term, because I have seen people withdraw their money when there is a downward trend in the market.

Ms. Jain chuckled while answering this question and talked about the basic human nature of following a herd. She said, “Although it seems much safer, don’t follow the herd and do what is right for you”. Ideally SIPs in the long term are much more profitable but it is something that should be towards a goal. So if you have a short-term goal, there is nothing stopping you from investing in SIP, for that duration of time. Ms. Jain gave an answer related to her life, about how she is doing SIPs for her son’s school fees, which is a short term goal and for the long term, she is saving for her retirement as well. So it does not have to be an either-or decision, rather it has to be both and has to be oriented towards your goals. Long term SIPs are more profitable but a short term SIP is more beneficial.

Audience Asks

I want to create a diverse portfolio. How do I invest in multiple sectors and how many sectors can simultaneously invest in? Any limit to it?

Pick out 3-4 good multi-cap funds like Kotak focus, SBI focus, DSP flexi cap, Tata large and mid caps and it will give you good exposure. If you have time and know how to read balance sheets then you can go ahead with buying good companies. Having said that, start with a mutual fund investment portfolio and they will give you good exposure across sectors and market caps.

As a beginner how do I narrow down the good companies as there are many publicly listed companies in the stock market?

Out of 6000 listed companies, the actual company to look at is not more than 500 and they are further drilled down to 160-170 companies which are actually good. So instead of looking into the individual companies one of the easiest ways is to look at good portfolios of mutual funds or multi-caps or large-caps funds and work on the various parameters. Start with Nifty 50 and narrow it down in terms of earning number, longevity of business and economic growth.

Sir, as a newbie investor can you guide me regarding the small-caps, mid-caps, and bluechip companies? And also investment in which will be more profitable for me?

Mr. Mahajan quoted, “The more the risk, the more the return”, there is a variation in the market where a bluechip company will give 13-14% of return, a mid-cap company will give 16-17% return and a small-cap company will give 18-20% return. The profit is little higher for the small-caps but the risk associated is highest as compared to mid-caps and lowest in large-caps. It depends on time and therefore the best way is to invest in a multi-cap fund where you will get all these three categories and your job will be done.

In the goal identification step, it gets very challenging to look beyond the long term horizon, so one should categorise it into short, medium and long term. After identifying these goals you need to calculate the approximate values that you will be needing. Mr. Shenoy advised, “Fulfill the nearer and easier goals first, it’s easier to do that. But start early for the long term.” In all these comes the power of compounding, the 8th wonder, which will eventually help an investor to fulfill their long term goals. With the new products in the market coming each day, it makes our tasks more challenging to find the right financial product. “First and foremost, whenever you decide to invest, be clear in your mind whether you are looking at a wealth preservation objective or a wealth creation objective. There is no other third objective in my opinion.”

As far as selecting the right vehicle is concerned, always look for your own comfort level. Get a right time frame for your investments so that you do not regret the lost opportunities. Be patient and stay focused on real returns and never ever get swayed away by the luring market values. Instead be patient, as the journey of wealth creation needs persistence and determination. Last but not the least, drawing the analogy of a road trip throughout, the mentor underlined the relevance of periodic checks. Similarly, your investments and your portfolio needs to have a periodic review. Get this review done by a financial coach, or an advisor to get a third party perspective. Monitor and rebalance your portfolio and avoid over-information.

There is a difference between an obstacle and an impossibility. Towards that, when is the most appropriate time to Pivot?

Pivoting is not an independent activity, it includes assessment of your performance and revisiting your business model periodically. What you are doing by revising and assessing your business model is that you are revisiting the aspects like technology, marketing modules, vendors, team management, logistics and finance help that you are getting. In short, it will give you a heads up regarding your business status and you can improve accordingly.

Pivoting is like an experiment, whenever you change your business model, in a way, you are pivoting slowly. Pivoting is like a holistic thing, like a trial and error method that entrepreneurs use and change their status quo into something new based on what is happening around them.

Now when we talk about obstacles and adversities, healthtech, which indirectly benefited from the pandemic, is the most pivoted sector. Startups in the health tech sector have come up with innovations like disposable ventilators which nobody thought of before COVID.

Please suggest ways on how startups can be sustainable and scalable, thus thriving through any adversity?

Sustainability is the function of three elements:

Innovation

The first fundamental aspect is the innovation, trying to create some kind of unique deliverable and patent-able, which has IP (Intellectual Property) attached to it. Once you build that uniqueness into your business model, at least in technology, for next one year you have that first movers advantage. After this you have to rethink about new challenges that are faced by your customers and build products to address those particular challenges.

Increase Customer Base

The second aspect is the focus on increasing the customer base. The agility, the speed of operation matters when it comes to getting more and more market shares which is a sure shot formula to be a sustainable startup.

Solve a Long Term Critical Problem

The third and the most important aspect about being sustainable is whether you are trying to solve a long term critical problem faced by your customer. If you are talking about problems which are faced by, hypothetically, say 1000 people around so you can probably do the business with those 1000 people. But your product should be such that it should be addressing a common problem or a pain point that is faced by your customers.

Create Value

Ultimately the fourth important point is the value that you create by giving your unique product, capturing market share, and solving long term problems. That is what I think about sustainability, it is a step-by-step process and will only come once all these aspects are taken care of.

Please suggest some action points which creative entrepreneurs can consider to design a robust social media marketing strategy.

The first thing we did was put everything on social media. Knowing what your product is, who your audiences are, it needs to be consistently directed through social media posts. Every platform works according to an algorithm, for example, right now reels than other types of content is really popular and you can see so many small businesses using it to the fullest of the advantage. At Pluc TV, we believe in organic growth and a paid social media marketing strategy only has limits. If you have a good story to tell and if you are hitting the right algorithm it grows faster. If you take the ad marketing or influencer marketing route, you are just ending up spending a lot of budget where if you notice your conversions are very low. I really think organic needs to be prioritised.

How do you think this creator economy space can be utilised and coordinated with sectors like Edtech, Agritech, Fintech?

You already see it happening – in edtech and agritech platforms, there is a massive demand for content creators. The biggest issue that the farming sector has, for example, is the amount of training they are given by existing methods which are traditional. It is very difficult for them to absorb it. They need training which helps them on the spot which is through the new agritech apps that are coming up. They are able to sell whatever they are producing in the best way possible and this is where content creators are coming up. We are going to see a rising trend of experts especially after the pandemic really controlling the narrative when it comes to important subjects that are related to edtech and agritech platforms.

Thereafter, the mentor elucidated a typical marketing model framework. “I have always experienced that marketing is always considered as a cost centre. I think it is high time we consider marketing as a revenue centre, because your reason to exist is itself a cost. From day one, you are incurring a fixed cost. Therefore, marketing should be considered as a revenue investment.” He further talked about the different stages of marketing from the awareness stage where a brand introduces oneself to the prospective customer mainly registering their presence and offering a solution.

Engagement follows awareness wherein the prospect’s information has to be collected. But that appears difficult without selling a unique or emergency product. But again, to convert the prospect into a subscriber, social media outreach is the way. An advantage that social media automation offers is brand listening which is nothing but a means to know what prospects and customers think about.

Are there any errors that you have seen that people can be aware of?

I can point out what are the mistakes first time entrepreneurs commit. You have to think of breaking out the problem into smaller parts and that is an art. The problem is – a lot of first-time entrepreneurs get discouraged when we tell them this – you do not go and solve what will happen on the thousandth day, you start from day zero and slowly build on top of it. Again, regarding solving too many problems at a time, I met some interesting startup founders. A lot of them say that I am thinking of making a startup which is Zomato plus Paytm plus Book my Show and I have no competition at all. Of course, when you look at that particular thing, it will have zero competition. But individually if we look at them, there are vertical leaders to compete with. So, do not try and solve everything. Another big problem is that the motivation to do a startup until and unless they jump into the ecosystem is derived from external sources like funding stories, Pitchers, Silicon Valley and so on and so forth. Do not solve a mammoth problem on day one, start from a small problem and build on top of it. Create a better start of your journey when it comes to beginning the startup game.

As we say that the first impression is the lasting impression, would you like to share any thumb rule?

I think one thing that a lot of investors like is authenticity. There are a lot of things you do not have an answer for. Be authentic, just say ‘I don’t know’ and move on. Always make sure that your communication is crisp, clear, to-the-point. Thirdly, which overall again is a very cliche advice but again very very underestimated is to make sure that you leave a great impression. Make sure people see that you are invested, you have put in time, money and energy. And you have prepared well. So, your deck should be very nice, if not designed well, at least aesthetically nice. Your communication should be well. Your pitch should start on time, end on time. You should be very clear as to what you want to talk about. So, practice enough. As per the industry, you have to make at least a hundred pitches to get your first deal. Make sure that you are invested enough. If not, people will again catch hold of you and they will realise that you are faking and nobody likes fakers.

Audience Asks

Newbie investors can invest in a loss making company. Don’t you think it is risky for them?

The newbie investors should be asking themselves what is their risk appetite. This is where I usually tell people, please do not take the gambler’s approach. Please do not do it with your own money unless and until you know that you can take that risk for many people. Yes, startups are very risky. As I said, out of ten, they know five, six, seven of them will miserably fail but one has to take that risk. Higher the risk, higher the return, lower the risk, lower the return.

The investor has that mindset that it does not matter even if the company is burning cash – I will invest because when we take that company to the next stage, we know to a great extent that it is going to be valued at least three to four times the money that they have invested.

When a profit-making company merges with a loss making company will there be any benefit in the portfolio of investors of both the companies?

Sometimes it might be a strategy with regards to buying a competitor or it might be simply because they want to create more monopoly. For example, Ola, when they launched, there were many other players who were offering very similar services. 

Two founders of two such companies, they were techies. I had met one of the founders so I was listening to their story and they said, we knew Ola was one of our competitors and then it is like – you are playing a cricket match against each other and you really hate them but all of a sudden in IPL you have to play next to them. You have to share the same dressing room, so even the same thing happens in the investment world. When our investors in Ola decided that let’s buy them out, they bought TaxiForSure. 

Of course, even Taxi (TaxiForSure) was making a loss for 200 crores, the main reason behind the strategy was to make sure that they are capturing the market and they are kind of creating a monopoly. So, with that perspective, yes, it was definitely a success. Now that does not mean that we can apply the same strategy to every business or industry.

Considering the supply chain, Indian agriculture exhibits a highly fragmented scenario with concerns like high water stress, degrading soil quality, unavailability of labour coupled with low mechanisation. Similarly, inadequate storage, processing and transportation facilities cause a significant amount of food loss which makes the supply chain very inefficient. “If you look from a farmer perspective, one of the biggest challenges most of the farmers in India end up selling their produce at the nearest mundi (market yard) which is typically thirty to fifty kilometres from the farmer’s field and it is not necessary he gets the best price from that market.” Thus, there is an urgent need for logistic solutions to discover more buyers.

Agri-fintech: The Next Big Opportunity for Agritech Start-ups

Mr. Mathur also mentioned that only about thirty percent of Indian farmers have access to institutional credit and the rest have to pay as high as twenty-four to sixty percent of credit per annum. He stated, “Just imagine the cost of capital is so high which makes the whole farm economics look very vulnerable. So, can we improve the excess of institutional credit to the farmers and that is where I see a very interesting intersection of agritech and fintech, I call it agri-fintech.

I think this is the next big opportunity in the sector.” Again, data figures out as a scarce commodity in the entire agricultural value chain where it fails to meet the requirements for decision making. “That is where I see a huge application potential for data sciences. I think agriculture is another area which is heaven for data scientists, there’s so many variables and you can do so much with it which can essentially help in decision making for the farmers as well as for other value chain members.”

The mentor listed down seven opportunities in his presentation for the audience and thereafter he elaborated on each of them. The seven opportunities are:

• Access to Quality Inputs
• Farm to Fork Market Linkages/Post Harvest Management
• Access to Financing (Agri-fintech)
• Data & Advisory
• Mechanisation
• Novel Farming
• Platforms

Mr. Mathur underlined the nitty gritty of the Indian agritech ecosystem. He is thrilled at the promising presence of many high-quality entrepreneurs, supportive incubators and accelerators to whom he insists to connect. “One area which I feel is catching up is the village ecosystem. None of the agritech models are going to scale without participation from village level entrepreneurs. Because a farmer is not going to trust a person who’s coming from Bangalore, Delhi or Mumbai. He is going to trust someone who is there in the rural area. So, I think that it is very important that we build the local ecosystem, create opportunities for rural entrepreneurs.” He believes that entrepreneurship and agritech go hand in hand and it will create millions of jobs in the rural areas. Furthermore, Mr. Mathur also listed down some of the key incubators who can be reached out for assistance.