MxMIndia

Tag: Team

  • It is important that the co-founders have a common vision in the game. As the promoter of the business, you should clearly articulate your vision, says Rohit Sharma.

    5 things to keep in mind while starting an online venture

    By Rohit Sharma

     

    #1 “Be Frugal” should be your mantra

    It is very important to be extremely frugal. Cash is King and start-ups should keep their fixed costs as low as possible. Try multitasking. It is important to conserve cash and be completely stingy before you raise the required capital for the business. Ideally, you should have capital for next 18 months either ready or in the pipeline.

     

    #2 Team, a critical success factor

    It is all about the team – their motivation levels, dedication and perseverance to make it happen. It is important that the co-founders have a common vision in the game. One of the biggest challenges is to hire the right start-up team (excluding the founders/co-founders). The team needs to be extremely good in terms of skill-sets; one also can’t afford to hire very expensive people. As the promoter of the business, you should clearly articulate your vision so that the start team comes on board completely motivated and with a strong belief in you and the business.

     

    #3 Business Metrics: Get them right

    It is very important to get the key business metrics of your business right from day one. Have complete clarity in terms of key growth drivers, revenue drivers and cost drivers and continuously monitor track more efficiency in the business. Business plans should not be made for the VCs, but for yourself and for the growth of the business. If you have done that successfully, VCs will anyways buy in.

     

    #4 Don’t give up too soon

    It is important for the entrepreneur, especially in the digital space to be extremely nimble and flexible. Mainly because the environment is very dynamic, business models are continuously changing, new technologies/innovation keep on coming, so one should be prepared to quickly adapt to newer business models if required. You might not be doing exactly the same thing eventually that you started with. There is nothing wrong with that as long as you have created a sustainable growth model in your business.

     

    #5 There is no experience like good customer experience

    It is very important to focus on a great customer experience. It is all about the right product that the customer loves and it could be the biggest differentiator for the business. One needs to spend disproportionate time to deliver an outstanding customer experience across all the value-chain components of your business. A great product or customer experience can be your biggest marketing tool.

     

    Rohit Sharma is the Founder, Wopshop.com.

     

  • In Freaking News, Ranjona Banerji reviews the fare on prime time news and the morning papers

    Turning 50 and other problems!

    By Ranjona Banerji

     

    I was quite happy to discover that this is my 50th update for Freaking News and am unhappy to find that I was so wrong yesterday. By the evening, it seemed that TV had decided that the shenanigans of Team Anna required as much exposure as possible and that being sensible was just a whole lot of horse feathers, while being unreasonable was so much more fun. So there were members of the core committee of the anti-corruption movement doing their normal threatening and grandstanding all over TV and this morning had an unpleasant photograph of Anna Hazare and Kiran Bedi ominously wagging their fingers at us. Bedi on Times Now was as annoying as she can be, insisting that the Cabinet and Parliament must go no further than the Jan Lokpal Bill.

     

    But it was later that matters got really appalling on Times Now as Mumbai-based film-maker and activist Ashok Pandit (I did not recognise him because his grey hair has turned black) accused another guest of being a terrorist because she looks like one (a Muslim, she was, of course – Hamida Naeem, a lecturer at Kashmir University). What was even worse was that although Arnab Goswami said “no personal remarks”, he did not stop Pandit and neither did the other guests, Madhu Kishwar and retired general, Shankar Prasad. The issue was the death of a young shopkeeper in Kashmir who was beaten to death because he refused to shut shop. The people who killed him are called “stone-pelters”, a special breed of humans who exist only on TV land. TV wanted to know why the Armed Forces were blamed for all kinds of things but “stone-pelters” are not condemned with the same outrage by hardline separatist groups in Kashmir. The many specious conclusions in this argument need another whole article to deal with them.

     

    So I was wrong again because I really believed that the deaths of 145 people from drinking adulterated illegal alcohol in West Bengal needed more prominence.

     

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    The end of the American occupation of Iraq got plenty of play on international channels but only minimal on Indian TV, not unnaturally. The newspapers as usual filled in the gaps.

     

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    The Hindu has an interesting editorial on how the BJP loved Union home minister P Chidambaram when he was tough on Naxals and Maoists but are currently gunning for him because he targeting Hindutva-inspired terror groups. Who knows, this may well be true.

     

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    After the Parliamentary debate on black money, newspapers could have given us more figures on the parallel economy in India, its size and reach. The problem is not just about money stashed abroad: it is as much about the money within India which never enters the system and so bypasses not just tax but also quality control and standards laws.

     

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    Incidentally, just for the information of our ultra-jingoistic TV-wallahs, the battle against the Armed Forces Special Protection Act is not limited to Kashmir – the act is also why Irom Sharmila has been on a hunger strike for over 10 years in Manipur. Do we as journalists have the mandate to take sides without adequate information?