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.

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

Pitching your research and solution to investors is challenging. What was your experience?

Absolutely pitching your research and solution to investors is challenging. Please follow this path. Whenever there is a project, I make these five slides for myself. If you do this then you will be able to tell the investor in 30 seconds – this is the market pain, this is the solution, this is the market I am going after and I can do it because of the credentials. So, this is how you channelise it.

Investors look out for clarity is what I have understood and believe me I understood it after pitching it to 180 people. So, you have to make sure that you keep it as simple as possible. Another thing which helped me to pitch into the investor was I was very upfront, saying I can do this and I cannot do this. I had told my investors very clearly that I am good at doing research. I do not know how to handle manufacturing or labourers or I even do not know how to handle sales. So, we ended up making a model which actually benefited both of us.

Look out for investors who you want them to be investing in you not just because they have money but because every business is different. Some businesses in the IT sector require a different strategy of investors. The businesses like ours which have a long gestation require a different strategy so you need to understand what your business requires.

In the presentation shared by Dr. Indukuri, he elucidated the story of Sid’s Farm. Some excerpts:

When we started, our initial business plan was to have an integrated farm that produces great milk and food without any hormones, antibiotics and pesticides. Our plan was that we will have three to four acres of land that will have sheds for animals, it will have processing equipment and any other land that we need we would take on lease. Each farm will have an in-house pasture facility for milk and milk products. We also wanted to see if along with milk and milk products we also should be growing other vegetables as well. With a little bit of information that we knew about, we put together this business plan in early 2012. So, the idea was we would buy 50 cows and for each animal in those days, it was about 45,000. Then we would know what is the investment in preparing feed for these animals. It is important to make sure that you grow your grass or feed before you buy your animals when you start a dairy farm. This is so as to know what is the cost for an acre of land, what is the cost of seeds, what is the cost of manure, what is the labour cost and number of acres.

In 365 days, cows have to be milked two times a day, every day no matter what. There are no breaks here, people who have been in this field know they can’t attend marriages, they can’t do all the things that you think are important. In 2013, when we started selling milk direct to our customers and we would a milk our cows started us 4 am in the morning we would manually packet our milk and then we would take that milk from our farm to the city which was about 40 kilometres away and by 6-6:30 in the morning we would have the milk reach our customers. As demand for our milk increased in an automatic packing machine, packing is not a problem now.

Fodder is the most important thing. You have to make sure the land that you choose the location of your dairy farm is also very important so you make sure that you have a good amount of water in the facility where you are starting your dairy farm because both for your cattle for drinking as well as for growing grass you need quite a bit of water so water source is important if you are closer to a river belt you can do it at a fairly low cost. You should also put up a low-cost protein source, like at our farm we have azolla ponds and along with it we are also growing a few tree fodders like suspenia, moringa (or moonaga as they call here).

Audience Asks

Any plans to venture outside India?

Yes, of course. A friend of mine who also happens to be a pilot and entrepreneur is running a successful chain of hotels in London. We are planning to set up a store together in Scotland and that will be the first Wat-A-Burger store outside India.

We already have a supply chain system where we can make a provision to supply all the unique sauces that Wat-A-Burger uses, to any country outside. We have a setup to replicate our recipes outside, starting from beverages to burgers, to wraps, to sandwiches, to everything.

UK being the first country, we want to enter parts of Scotland, and also, Australia is on the cards. We’re talking to somebody for the master franchisor and some parts of UAE and Qatar also on the books.

How much dependency should a business have on technology?

Well, see technology is efficiently replacing manpower requirements to some extent. At the same time, you should not completely rely on it for replacing your manpower, because a human element asset is something which your machine will never (or a lot of leap years ahead) be able to replace.

Considering Wat-A-Burger, technology has really taken a good show. We’ve replaced a lot of quality checks and area manager teams through technology. We are now using the SAAS base checklist through a platform where all the store opening and closing checklists are done digitally. These are processes which were done earlier through messaging apps, like WhatsApp, getting pictures from the store, calling up stores, doing it manually. So, technology is really taking up even simpler tasks like billing, the POS systems have been redesigning that and are making it more efficient.

We’ve just moved to a QR code-based ordering system, where we will have in-car dining, a modular drive through or I would say a virtual drive through. All of this is really helping a business scale up. My costs are very much controlled compared to what I would have to spend if I did not have the use of technology.