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“One may strategize how much ever but at the end of the day life is all about oppurtunities” – that was the best quote of the evening in TiE Bangalore networking meeting that I attended yesterday. The quote was made by Ameesh Patel of Aarohi Communication, the main speaker of the evening.A team of 5 people from Aarohi had come down for this and It was an interesting and insightful talk. Below here I am posting some of the points made in the talk(from what I recall). As was mentioned by Ameesh these are some points that might come in handy who want to tread down the road of building a company.
The talk topic was titled
“Transformation from Concept to Productization –
How a Startup did it in the Post-boom Era”
Aarohi communications builds Intelligent SANs( Storage Area Network solutions).
Some Important Generic points
– Technology product companies can be built of India ( Bangalore) , Aarohi is live testimony of that.
– Persistence is one key quality that every entreprener must develop.
– 5/6 degrees of seperation that is often talked about in the industry is very true – Relationships matter highly in getting funding/deals done etc.
– Back in the days of 1998/99 just an idea could lead to funding but now concept validation is absolutely necessary done typically through showing a function model.
– Not only is the conceptual validation Important but customer validation is needed too. ( Gave the example of Kumar giving the customer validation where he was a founder of one of the customer company who understood the idea of SANS and was ready to source products from Aarohi)
– Product companies is more than just about engineering. The goal of a product company is sales , so stay in close touch with markets, understand the customer needs and build what the customers want.
– It is very important to understand the customer needs
– Price is not an entry to market barrier at all. (Never)
– It is great teams that get funded not just the ideas.
Some Salient Points about Aarohi
Aarohi had a proper chalked out Strategy
A well thought out product startegy – Arms Dealers/Components provider kind of a model where components are sold to vendors ( like selling bullets to all who need them and can shoot each other)
Marketing Strategy – Building an entire ecosystem,creating a market pull – going to the customer’s customer and source their requirements.
Business Strategy –
– NOT TO PLAY THE OUTSOURCING GAME – Very important, but still leverage Bangalore for cost factor. By building a bangalore office from day one the human capital was retained in the organization ( distributed across geographies of course ) thus having created assets which could potentially innovate.
– Standardization – Appropriate Value out of it by steering the standardization in this area, Standardization is a double edged sword, it typically indicates commoditization of market which is very dangerous for startups but by steering it ( which Aarohi could do here as this is a very nascent niche market ) thereby gaining immense advantage
– An End to End solution for SANS market,
Operational Key points
– Cross border development processes
– Communication is key for such cross border setups, heavy infra for communications.
A point that was repeated in this meeting, but a very important one , a pure Bangalore based company has to focus on the local market, the local market is building up but is in a very nascent stage. I could not blog about the previous talk but you can find it here in another blog which is maintained by Ajay Sethi.
One question that I did not understand that was asked by one gentleman from the audience
The question was on valuation , it was something like if you are stating that it is an estimated 1 billion dollar market of the SANS market and you obtained a 46 million $ funding then it is about a 20 X evaluation which is fantastic , what is the magic valuation formula which the VC fell for 😉
The answer to that was intelligently evaded !! but I could not understand neither the question properly nor the answer !! I had to rush back to office to do a release or else would have spoken to that gentleman to find about it in detail 🙂
