When it rains, look for rainbows. When it’s dark, look for stars!

I am almost nearing 2 years of my entrepreneurial journey with denture Capital. The first video went live on Youtube on March 11th 2016. It has certainly been hard at times, but with the support of team members, friends and family, it has been very satisfying and I am looking at the future with a lot of hope and excitement. We’ve just gotten started!

As the title of this post goes, the the biggest win for us is that we have managed to survive 2 grueling years and have chased opportunities as they came knocking. While we started as a ‘Content company’ doing videos around startups, we found a bigger opportunity in more of an agency play, helping startups with video content. Of course the only reason brands trusted us was because we had demonstrated how we could do deeply engaging, fun video content.

• We have worked with brands like WeWork, Swiggy, Go-jek, Ninjacart, Akshaya Patra, Prime Venture Partners and about 40 others. This is just a start for us in the ‘client services’ / agency business. Though we never intended to do this, it has been fun. We do full service video right from concept to post production and in some cases distribution.
• While the client services business is thriving, we are also on a mission to help early stage startups with their first video. You can read about that in this post.
• While these 2 business verticals are becoming stable, we are also going back to why we started denture Capital. To create fun, interesting original content. You can expect to see some originals from our stables soon!
• Our community on social media is about 200K strong and growing.

What has worked for us?

Not to say we are in the best place, we do have a long long way to go, but these are some things that worked for us.

• We were clear we wanted to build a brand and no just be another company down the road. We did everything we could, found a name that will make people think, appealed to a particular section of people, created content that was whacky (Most of our social media posts are around investor bashing, something that startups love). Do you know that our logo resembles showing the middle finger? We are often introduced as arguably the best in the space we operate in.
• We have gone really deep. We are clear about the kind of clients to work for. Only after having gone really deep in one vertical have we started thinking of others. It was clear from the start that we will work only with startups or rather ‘new economy businesses’ because that was the opportunity. We have slowly started expanding the niche.
• We have built a team that is more like a brotherhood. We help, challenge & empathize with each other with zero petty politics and no hierarchy.
• We have only built relationships with clients till date and this is the only way to build long term connections. We never nag anyone for payments, we try to work extra hard to ensure our client’s deadlines are met. We are available almost 24/7 for them.
• One of the major wins has been keeping operational costs very low.

How did we keep Operational Costs extremely low?

• 11 of us work out of a space that can seat 8 and that too, at a Coworking space. This is sufficient because everyone has different working hours. Nobody except for 3 editors are assigned a seat, Sales folks are usually out doing meetings and we also have a common conference room to work from when we have more people than seats. Though we’d like to change this when we make more money, we have saved a lot on seats this way.
• Except for the 3 editors who have been provided with really badass machines to edit, everyone users their own personal computer / laptop.
• We only have one email address, the rest of the addresses are all aliases. Most of our communication both internal and external is on whatsapp
• Our first website was made by a very close friend. He did it without asking for a penny. Our second version is getting ready and again, he is done it without charging a fee. Some benefits of me having built long term relationships. I will always look for ways to help him and hence if you need help with a website, please reach out to Amitoj Singh.
• We haven’t institutionalized a practice to cut cakes during birthdays, we don’t celebrate farewells nor do we have elaborate parties. But this does not mean we are a disjoint unit. We care for people and empathize. We genuinely help each other. We care to learn and we take up challenging assignments.Our culture is one of a brotherhood. Nobody has left the company for silly petty reasons, people who have left have gone out to learn. And they come back when we need them.

The three most important reasons why people work with us is

• The work is interesting.
• They are working with interesting people.
• They are paid on time at the end of every month.

The reasons why we think this is a good business opportunity

• While the barriers to entry for video creation have been reduced, the barriers to creating exceptional video have actually skyrocketed.
• 62% of consumers can have a negative perception if you ship bad quality video (Source — BrightCove)

Really excited about starting year 3! Let’s see how the next 6 months pan out!