Building from Scratch

As a young management student at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School in 2011, Rohan Mirchandani happened to attend an inspiring business talk, and subsequently, stayed in touch with the speaker. Cut to today, Mirchandani’s start-up Drums Food has its own line of yogurts and ice creams, where the previously mentioned gentleman is an advisor and investor.

Dishing out the bad news first, Mirchandani, Founder, Hokey Pokey ice creams, warns that start-ups are not for those with a faint heart. “It requires dedication, passion, no sleep and compromises at every level,” he says. However, he goes on to suggest why the plunge is totally worth it. Mirchandani
reveals that besides your faith in the blueprint, a good business idea requires you to identify a particular customer need and address it effectively.
While Mirchandani sees it as one of the many paths leading to a solid business plan, some insist on following the “problem-solving” approach. For instance, ex-IITian Shyam Shah, who took the “problem-solving” road to fulfill his own lovely idea. Shah co-conceived the idea of the Electronic Braille Display—a gadget for the vision impaired, which digitally converts data from parent systems (smart phones/ computers/ laptops) into Braille. “It’s like a tablet for those who can’t see. It is not a data-generator by itself,” Shah explains his creation rather humbly. Titled ‘Innovision’, the project is one Shah traces back to his third year in IIT-Bombay, when some statistics about the lack of literacy and employment amongst blind people pushed him to solve this under-recognised problem. It’s not that they don’t have digital Braille displays in the market, but the gadgets are really expensive. “The steep cost was the problem, and we managed to bring it down to around `12,000,” informs Shah.

Both Mirchandani and Shah agree on the importance of working with a good team. While Mirchandani recommends a team that shares your vision and passion, noting that having a co-founder is the ideal scenario. Shah roots for a cross-disciplinary team, where members are ready to go beyond their immediate ambit to contribute across verticals. “Subject specialists are required, but what is more important at the initial stage is that the guy who is good at coding is also curious about the business/market aspect of his project,” he cautions.

For students, “The process of selecting business partners should be less about the departmental best friend or that hostel buddy and more about a set of team players who complement each others skill sets,” points out IIT B Professor Milind Atrey. As the head of IIT B’s Society for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (SINE), Atrey speaks of the various “hand-holding” stages incorporated in the incubation process to weed out margins of error for most business ventures. The average incubation period for a plan is around three years, although extensions are often considered. During this time, one has to write a detailed business plan, with a projection of the next five years, for the venture. “The plan is then approved, rejected, stalled or modified by a team of reviewers (mostly alumni in the real-time market), depending on its merit and acceptability in the market at that point,” Atrey explains adding that there are mentors and monitors who keep guiding the model forward without any hiccups.

Professor Satyajit Majumdar, from TISS’s Centre for Social Entrepreneurship believes that start-up plans addressing social issues can very well be profit-based models, as long as they have substantial impact. The Centre has so far funded 37 such ventures and has 30 others under incubation. Some are craft-trade models involving female chikankari workers in Lucknow and others are building supply chains for organic vegetables and A-2 milk, while still others are creating waste-management companies at the heart of Mumbai.

Inspiration in the start-up arena is almost as free-flowing as the capital. Whether you plan to increase literacy, generate employment or simply serve unforgettable desserts, start-ups could be your one shot at double-dating creation and commerce. Mirchandani agrees, “Nothing is as rewarding as being able to say–Hey! I built this.”