This article written by me was published in entrepreneur.com on February 9, 2017 1) List down your fears The number one fear for any entrepreneur is failure. Irrespective of whether this is the entrepreneur’s first venture or tenth, there is always a risk of failure. However, it is important to not allow this failure to hamper the company’s growth or the ability to pitch to prospective investors. It is important to overcome this fear right at the beginning or find a way to redirect your fears into something else. Another common fear is societal pressure – How will this failure affect close family and friends? So knowing your deep fear is critical for any entrepreneur. Fund raising is an important aspect of any entrepreneurial journey. It\’s important to get capital for one\’s idea, but it\’s even more important to understand when to approach an investor for funds. Here\’s what I believe an entrepreneur should consider prior to raising funds – 2) Why do you need MONEY now? You probably walked away from your well-paying job to start your own company. While you might be infusing your personal funds into the venture for maybe a year or two, there will be a time when you will need to start approaching external sources for money. This could be family, friends, mentors or investors. While pitching to all of these potential money lenders, you will need to justify why you need additional funds. The best reason to ask for money is because you know your audience very well. You have found a great problem that needs solving and the existing solution is not enough, moreover your customer base is increasing. Now you want money to scale upwards in technology or expand to other markets with clear goals set. Raising money in this situation is a matter of scale – it allows you to do things you can’t do otherwise, like hire people to help you scale faster. 3) Define your audience – clearly A start-up is built to provide a solution to a problem or to enhance the existing solution. It is built for a specific audience. For example, LinkedIn solves the problem for job seekers and recruiters. This is a market place to connect job seekers and job providers. Uber got off the ground to solve a major problem that was faced – hiring cabs instantly and carpooling to reduce pollution. If you don’t understand your audience needs very well, you won’t be able to build a sustainable business. You might make some short-term money and the business will run for some time. But businesses built for a specific audience and that solve their problems like never before, will flourish and have potential to grow globally. So knowing your customer is critical before starting your company and raising funding. 4) What is this money used for? Are you going to hire people? Are you going to expand your office space? Are you going to do interiors? Are you going to hire contractors to build your app or website? The minute you hire people for any department, stakes get increased. Now the company has to sell more to more customers to bring in enough revenue to not only pay your own salary, but also to support each of the hired employees. Raising money allows you to do all kind of fun things in short term. Those short term decisions have long term effects on your business. Sometimes it’s better to start simple with something you can manage yourself rather than get in over your head. 5) Are you building this business to sell? You have to be very clear on this. Most of the investors want to know the founder’s intentions. If you meet an investor who wants to sell off faster and make money, it might be the wrong choice for you if you are a person who wants to solve certain problems before selling off to make money. So be clear on why you are building and try meet investors who align with your vision.
Entrepreneurship is a life, not a career
Article published in YourStory. All the world is full of suffering; and it is also full of overcoming, reminds a quote of Helen Keller. Interestingly, the story of some of the successful enterprises can be traced back to how the founder underwent suffering, and then decided to launch a solution that addresses that pain-point. In the case of Karthi Easwaramoorthy, President and Co-founder of TicketGoose.com, it was a hassled bus journey from Erode to Chennai that led him to join his friends in starting the enterprise, as he shares the tale with YourStory. Read on. Story of the company so far I was living in America from 1997 to 2011 as a software professional working with multinational giants like Hewlett-Packard, Oracle Corporation, Sun microsystems and Tibco Systems. When I was vacationing in India in 2007, I wanted to meet my friends, Arun Athiappan and Vasu Ramasamy, in Chennai. But that meet turned out to be prelude to launching online bus ticket portal TicketGoose.com together as co-founders. Since I love road journey, I tried to get a bus ticket to Chennai from my native place, Erode. Having been used to easy ticket-buying options in America using the Internet, I went through a lot of difficulty in buying the bus ticket. When I shared this ordeal with Arun and Vasu the next day in Chennai, they too agreed that bus ticket-booking was indeed a tiresome process. Hence the idea of online bus ticket-booking struck us so as to ease the task for commuters who prefer road journey and bus travel. This gave birth to “TicketGoose.com” in the year 2007. So far, our journey has been eventful personally and professionally as our online bus ticketing solution TicketGoose.com, has been able to solve the problems of millions of people till date aggregating close to 1,000 bus operators with 10,000 routes and 20,000 buses. Having grown with TicketGoose.com from 2007, I can confidently claim that we are the first portal which introduced the best user interface in comparison to the existing portals. E-commerce is all about usability. Our focus is in pixel level, not in feature or in page level, of precision to bring the best of ticketing booking experience to the world. New look-and-feel was introduced two months back which has made it possible for us to acquire more customers. Our existing loyal customer base is thrilled about this new and user-friendly way of presenting tickets graphically which does not exist with our competitors. Hence we have been able to keep our customers happy and satisfied and we will continue to do so as we have several innovative ideas in the pipe-line. Challenges in your industry, and outlook for the near- to mid-term Despite having a number of challenges we are not anxious. Commuters had to undergo a lot of hassle while booking bus tickets 5 years back. We took that as a challenge and we believe we did a pretty good job in accomplishing that mission of making bus ticket booking easier and fun. Although bus is the primary mode of transportation in India, and Internet, broadband, smart phones, tabs, credit cards and Internet banking spread like wildfire, only less than 10% of bus booking happens online. This is the biggest and foremost challenge of this industry, which is not just specific to us. Our bus market size is massive, but the addressed size so far is very less. But we at TicketGoose.com are determined to take our world’s best ticket-booking solution to Indian people, build trust that transactions in Internet and mobile are safe and less time-consuming. I believe the Indian people will buy that idea. Because, we Indians are the smartest people on Earth! We are always open to change. We are the people who supply intelligent workforce across the globe in the IT field. India is the only place on this planet which produces smart engineers, technicians, doctors, academicians in tons. No country is closer to what we are today in terms of intelligence and smartness. Our people are connected like never before. So outlook is absolutely so bright. This outlook overshadows any other challenges we have now. We bet on people and customers by providing consistent value, service, support and best usability. Mid-term outlook is bright that at least three different big players like TicketGoose.com can coexist and be profitable simultaneously, along with smaller players. Plans, going forward. We are working on a number of plans. Every plan that we put together is customer- and operator-centric. In the same line of challenges described in the previous question on market space penetration, there are several challenges that are being faced by bus travellers and bus operators on a daily basis which are yet to be addressed. Giving you a simple scenario I faced last week. I had bought tickets for my family to my native place. The departure time was 10:30 pm and I left home with my family 1 hour before the departure time at 9:30 pm only to be told by the operator that the bus would be delayed by an hour. Imagine the situation of managing two kids till 11:30 pm in that crowded boarding point. Not only me, the entire boarding point was chaotic. Every customer was restless, tensed and lost the interest of enjoying that bus journey. Customers like me understand that departures can get delayed due to unavoidable circumstances like traffic, road accidents etc. But if I had known that bus was going to get delayed at 9:29 pm, i.e. just a minute before leaving my home at 9:30 pm, I could have started one hour late so that kids could have stayed within the comfort of the home. Note, as I did not know that delay information just a minute before leaving home, it spoiled the whole mindset of travel. This is being faced by almost every customer travelling by bus. Now TicketGoose.com understands the importance of that crucial one minute. Every TicketGoose customer should have the relevant travel information like delay