Confession Of Entrepreneurs

 

Steve Jobs carrier saw soaring highs to its crushing lows. Jobs is hailed as a tech visionary, but he also weathered his fair share of fiasco products and nearly witnessed the demise of the company that he founded in his youth. Henry Ford suffered a few failed automotive endeavors early in his career, including Detroit Automobile Company. Its cars were low quality and too pricey for average consumers.

It is said that every good and successful entrepreneurs know how and when to fail. So did Jobs and Ford. Mistakes are common during the initial days of starting a business as entrepreneurs are not prone to the results of the reaction that the market will show towards their product or service.

Nishith Shah, Founder, True Sparrow

Nishith when founded True Sparrow, made many mistakes during the initial days of starting the enterprise. “The most common was thinking our business to be an extension of ourselves and not running in a more proficient approach. We kept trying to make our product as perfect as possible as we were afraid of failure after launching the product,” says Shah.  This lead to several issues as they were not able to catch up with other similar ventures in the market and lost a lot of resource in terms of time and revenue. “We never framed a deadline for the launch and stretched as long as we wanted to,” adds Shah. Their prior venture, an online retail of fine jewelry, also suffered crunches as they put in unnecessary details and over rated their products. This led to slow scaling of their business. “I would suggest that it is important for every entrepreneur to frame a deadline and think their business as a separate entity. This will  help them scale in a much profound way,” Shah says.

 

Navin Kumar, Co-Founder, eLagaan

The startup entrepreneurs are so obsessed with their own idea that they do not wish to look beyond it. “The first and the foremost reason for failure of any startup entrepreneur is his ego and blind believe on his being on the right path,” says Kumar. Among the new-bie, around 60-70 percent feels that they can make it too big with their idea and crack the market by bringing in a revolutionary product or service. “Marketing, sales, product development, R&D, channeling, and what not they think they are master in. We also did the same mistake. We tried to focus on R&D more than marketing and sales, thus leading us to major loss,” adds Kumar. He also tried to outsource his services, but found it of lesser value as his company lost lot of time and the service provided was also not up to the mark. Even if one thinks of outsourcing, he should look for quality service and strong associations to partner with to generate good brand name and add value to the organization

 

Ramesh Jagannathan, Co-Founder, Lucivid Software

“During our initial days, we made a big mistake by over estimating the market and how much we will be able to reach. The result, we failed to fulfill the target and lost our precious resources in terms of money and time,” says Ramesh Jagannathan, Co-Founder, Lucivid Software. Churning the first revenue out of the sales and transforming it into working capital is more difficult than it appears in the business plan. They tried to do every bit of the work themselves. When the founders realized their mistake, they tried to broaden their channel through collaborating with how have more larger reach then theirs and help them churn more revenue in a lesser cost of marketing and advertising.