Great Lessons From A Great Founder and CEO — Girish Mathrubootham teaches SV.CO January Batch.
by Bharat Verma & Sanjay Vijayakumar
(The following essay is from Girish’s Commencement Address to the Batch 3 inductees at SV.CO in January 2017. The original video of the session is accessible to SV.CO Startups only. )
Hello everyone, glad to be talking to you today. I’m really happy to be a part of Startup Village. I believe it is a great mission to bring college students like you to work on meaningful stuff.
I’m a bit envious of you really, because when I did my engineering degree, from 1992 to 1996, there was nothing like SV.CO, so we ended up wasting a lot of time in college. Your first step, in joining this programme, is in itself a phenomenal thing. You have the chance, while in college, to form teams and work on very interesting problems with a strong safety net; so even if you fail nothing will happen, and if you succeed you have such a big opportunity ahead.
I’m here to share some of my key learnings with you which will, hopefully, help you to continue on this journey for the next few months.
Your big change, the big transformation, starts here! Anyone who has ever been on an entrepreneurial journey will never be the same again. You have been infected with the “idea virus” and you’ll never be satisfied with the mundane ever. This is a life-changing event for you and you probably don’t know it yet.
DREAM COME TRUE
In 2003, when I was building my first product called Op Manager, a network monitoring project, I actually thought about what will make me a successful product manager. I decided I will consider myself successful if I hit revenues of at least one million dollars.
We had seven DP boxes in our office; I told my friend we will stick a zero on each box every time we hit a target. It was a big ask at the time, we had not even started the product and had zero revenues.
In October 2005, we printed those stickers and it felt great! That’s the moment I had the joy of seeing a dream come true.
Dream Big: We are only constrained by the limitations of our mind. Start thinking big, don’t limit yourself to small ideas and don’t let anybody tell you otherwise.
The solutions to most of the big problems today sounded stupid when somebody attempted to solve it. Talk about your dream to your friends; the moment you do that, you will start living them.
Learn from the Best: We don’t have to limit our learning to the education system. Getting an engineering degree and actually learning something are two very different things. I’m a big believer in learning by doing; and all of my education happened after my college.
But you do have the opportunity to learn while you are in college; the internet is a great learning place.
Learn to pick your role models; if you are building a SaaS startup, you need to learn from the most successful companies. Learn from the best and top them.
Innovate on the Product, Not the Business Model: It is one of the commonest mistakes early stage entrepreneurs make. Since business models are pretty much fixed, innovation on top of that occurs rarely. I’m not saying it is impossible, but the number of people who have tried and succeeded are few. Many companies have failed because they did not understand the right business model; I’d say find somebody similar, follow their model, but innovate on the product.
CHANGE BY CHANCE
Take the example a company called 37Signals, now BaseCamp. When they were a startup, they were small and wanted to accept credit card payments from customer — until then all software was sold as one time purchase or annual subscription. The payment gateways would not allow them to take upfront payment for a year because they were a small startup, and if they folded, the bank would be responsible for returning the customer’s money. They were forced to take monthly payments, and that is how the SaaS industry, as we know now, got its model of monthly credit card payments. It was not a plan, but chance stumble upon a new business model.
IDEATION
I know some of you who are here already know what you are going to build, others are still thinking up ideas. Here are some of the things I’d like to share with you on ideation.
Scratch Your Own Itch: It is one of the most famous approaches to ideation; solve a problem that already exists. If you come up with solutions to imaginary problems that may occur, but won’t be used by anybody at present, your chances of failure increase.
As Paul Graham (programmer, venture capitalist and writer) said, build something that users want.
Take the example of Dropbox. The idea came to founder Drew Houston when he went to his university one day to copy files, but forgot to carry the USB stick. He had to go back home and it was a total waste of time, which got him thinking: ‘Why do I need to carry a USB stick? I should be able to access my files anywhere’; and so the idea of Dropbox took shape.
Spot Opportunities in New Technology: Look at what is changing in the technology landscape and see if that can be applied to your domain. For example, I talked about Freshdesk , where social networks changed the customer support industry.
Take Uber and Ola for instance. When Apple and Google built features like GPS and Location Tracking into software for smartphones, they did not particularly consider the transport industry. But someone somewhere thought ‘here is a phone, there’s location tracking and there’s GPS, can we build a cab hailing service on it and disrupt the transport industry?’
You have plenty of ideas floating around in social, mobile, local and even Artificial Intelligence or machine learning. We need to look at the technology and find applications for it to solve real-life problems.
Identify Changing Consumer Behavior: Look at the changes in consumer behavior and needs, and see if you can do something about it. Identifying these trends can throw up some very interesting business opportunities.
MY PROBLEM
This happened in 2009. I was returning from the US and shipping my stuff from there. My TV arrived two and a half months later in a broken condition. I had purchased insurance so I thought it would be easy to get a refund. Five months and multiple efforts later they wouldn’t even tell me which company underwrote the TV.
I got frustrated, went online and posted my frustrations on a forum. Other customers started engaging. The next day the president of the shipping company called me to apologize and the very next day the money was in the bank. I realized that something was changing in terms of social platforms.
When I complained about a brand on a social forum, it was forced to respond and do the right thing in terms of customer support. So as somebody who had experience building helpdesk and software for customer support, I thought it was an opportunity to build a Fresh Helpdesk, and I called it Freshdesk.
When IRCTC came up with the option of booking train tickets online, many of us were saved a great deal of time standing in queues. Then businesses like BookMyShow followed up on the idea thinking ‘if I don’t have to stand in a queue to book a train ticket, why should I stand in a queue to book a movie ticket?’
Combine Existing Technologies: A third option for ideation is combining two or more existing technologies.
A great example is (customer messaging platform) Intercom. We all know about Google Analytics and Mixpanel; the analytics technology has existed for at least 10 years. We also know Chat has existed for several years. But Intercom took event analytics and combined it with chat and put it inside web apps saying ‘Hey now you can understand what your user is doing inside the web app and chat with them’. They are now a very successful company.
The Niche Trap: Sometimes entrepreneurs make the mistake of choosing a small obscure, niche idea; your solution has to be usable by a huge number of people, companies or users.
The first fundamental lesson to know in startups is that market trumps everything. The number one reason startups fail is that they do not have a big enough market. If you choose a big market, there are chances that you will have at least enough customers to be successful, but if you have a niche market to start with, even if you win all the customers, it may not be enough to be successful.
THE BUILD
So, you are now at the drawing board; you have a team of people, an idea, and you’re now ready to build the first version of your product. The most important thing is focus. As Steve Jobs once said: “Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do.”
Every startup founder today comes to the board with too many ideas and, I must say, a lot of free advice. When you are starting, don’t concentrate on building too many things, don’t be carried away by the breadth of ideas. Pick a viable product, iterate, and build it extremely well.
A minimum viable product is something that different people interpret in different ways. You need to build in such a way that you have a working prototype or product at every stage. The sooner you get to this stage the more successful you will be.
And I can tell you that the hardest part of any software development, when you have multiple people working, is getting all the code converged and getting the first version from your laptop to where others can see and use it.
MAKING BIRIYANI
In Dindigul, a small town in Tamil Nadu, there is a shop called Dindigul Thalappakatti Biriyani that started many decades ago. A man made delicious biriyani in this small town and people flocked to his place. People visiting the city made detours to have lunch here, including then Chief Minister MG Ramachandran and actor Sivaji Ganesan.
Today the next generation of the family, his sons, are building the business globally. They are essentially taking the same recipe and selling it all over the world.
As founders, our job is to make the first delicious biriyani. Your focus should be on the craftsmanship that you put into building a product; on the flavours, the intricacies and the nuances, like the UI, the copy you write on the website, the care and attention to detail you pay to every pixel in your product. Think about how you can bring joy to a user, don’t worry about the business now.
If you focus on sales and revenues right at the start, you will lose the flavor; and a flavorless biriyani will never sell and there will be no business to build. Craftsmanship is the most important ingredient of a successful startup.
My advice is, get to a working prototype as soon as possible.
When my co-founder Shan (Krishnaswamy) and I started, on the first day I simply purchased a 200 dollar open source code which could convert an email id into a ticket and show it on a form. So, basically, even before we wrote a single line of code, we had a working prototype ready
And here’s some advice for engineers: you have to understand what the core of your product is and build it first, you can always add on the other things later.
If you are solving for customer support, or transportation, or healthcare, pick the one feature that you are trying to disrupt and build it well with a great UI and great user experience; that’s all that matters. It may be just two screens, but you are demonstrating something new; everything else is a solved problem.
FOLLOW YOUR PASSION
As entrepreneurs just starting off, do not focus building a startup because you want to get rich or get funded. Build a product because you want to learn, because you want to solve a problem. If you focus on being passionate, doing the best job and being world-class at what you are doing, you will be successful.
Nobody has gotten rich in life by chasing money; Dhoni is rich because he chased his passion for cricket, Rajnikant is rich because he chased his passion for movies, every successful entrepreneur is rich not because they chased money but by following their desire for creating something they cared about.
THE FEAR OF FAILURE
My former boss once told me that it’s OK to be unemployed, but it’s not OK to be unemployable. When I started Freshdesk, I had some experience behind me. My worst case scenario was that if Freshdesk failed, I would have to type a resume and find a job in some other company.
For you, who are just starting out of college, the environment today is such that even if your startup fails, you will have picked up so much valuable skill — as an engineer, as a product manager — that there are people willing to pay for your services. You can be in a better position even if you fail. So being in such a position and not doing anything is actually worse than being afraid and not doing anything.
GO ALL IN
One of the important lessons I learnt from my startup journey is that is if you want to be successful in life, you have to slog for some part of your career.
My slog phase was after I left college and started learning Java on my own when I had to spend days and nights working. What I would like to tell you is that it is easiest to slog during school or college days, the early phase, because your success only depends on you; other variables get added later on.
With the opportunity that you have today in college, go all in and slog it out. You are learning valuable skills and these will stay with you for the rest of your life. If you pour your heart and soul into what you are doing now, put in the blood and tears and actually build something worthwhile; the worst case scenario is that you will have failed, but still learned something; the medium scenario is maybe it will help you get a good job; and the best case scenario is that you have a successful startup, and we can all celebrate together.
I wish you all the very best. Let’s go and change the world!
While Girish was delivering his course commencement address, this is what happened:
“I could never have imagined to learn from such an awesome founder whom I have admired but never got a chance to interact with him. Today, I am learning from him, asking my doubts and highly inspired to show my product to him in 6 months.” — Prabhakar, founder @ SV.CO January batch
You can also read Life lessons from the SaaS “Thalaivan”
