Building a startup within a startup

Have you ever imagined the thrill of starting a new business from scratch? Now, picture doing that within the safety net of an already established, successful company. This unique journey, full of its own challenges and rewards, is the exhilarating world of ‘intrapreneurship’ I’ve been navigating for the past year at Quizizz for Work, inside Quizizz.

When I met Ankit a little over a year ago and looked at the strengths of the Quizizz product, in my head, I assumed optimistically that building Quizizz for Work would be a cakewalk. However, when we started the Go-To-Market journey, I was humbled. It was much more challenging than I had anticipated. It took me three months to get the first serious enterprise customer on call and almost a year to onboard them fully 🙂

We feel proud to have helped 30+ organizations transform their training into engaging formats over the last year. Our team works closely with every customer, building the right customized solution for them, even if it takes months. Kerzner, a large luxury resort operator, is one example where Quizizz closely worked with the client’s quality & technology teams to co-create the learning journey.

One belief, now reinforced for me, is that it takes work to build any business from the ground up, period. And when you want to build a new business inside an existing business, it comes with its own sets of benefits as well as challenges. Whether it will make it easier to build a business depends on many factors.

Leverage the parent business for infrastructure, IP, and knowledge

You get several benefits from being inside an existing business, improving the odds of success, versus completely being outside on your own.

• Launchpad with basics of company setting, figured out, less time spent on logistics of getting stuff like office, registration, infra, etc. setup.
• Captive product or service IP to leverage and build on versus starting from scratch.
• A lot of tribal knowledge and industry expertise guides inside the organization to help prevent some of the obvious first-time mistakes.
• Some Free traffic 🙂

However, you need to build a winning team & culture to meet audacious goals.

To make it successful, one still needs to be mindful of some things that can make or break the journey:

• Define the right success metrics for your startup: this is tricky. Success metrics in an early stage of business are fundamentally different from those of a fast-growing or mature business. There are a lot of leading indicators and qualitative aspects one has to look at, like logos, engagement, customer feedback & love, compared to only hard quantitative metrics like revenue and MAU, which are available for parent business. Imposing similar metrics can lead to wrong decision-making and choices in the early stages. Thus, it is critical to be clear here.
• You have to get the team & culture right: the type of people needed in the early biz stage differs from a mature business; you need more agile, generalist, hands-on, first principle thinkers versus more domain expert, specialized, process-oriented folks to grow/scale the business. Hence, we need to apply a very different hiring lens also. Then comes the culture of decision-making, rewards & appreciation, which again has to link to the success metrics above, which are different for an early-stage business. You have to reward people for their bias for action, creativity, pushing the envelope, and sometimes even failure.
• You can not avoid failures in the early-stage building: you can connect the dots only by looking backward, not forward — the journey to getting PMF (product-market fit) is non-linear. It requires one to go back multiple times to iterate the value proposition based on customer feedback. This journey requires an immense conviction in the overall problem statement and energy to keep up the momentum. It needs the entire team and leadership from the parent business to come together to add fuel to it.

Embarking on this journey has proven immensely rewarding for me. The opportunity to be an intrapreneur is a rare, once-in-a-lifetime chance. To anyone encountering such an opening, seize it without hesitation. The path may be challenging, but the personal and professional growth is beyond measure. Embrace the opportunity; it’s a transformative experience worth every effort!