Celebrating Startup Failures
The panel on startup failures consisted of Kshitij Garg and Sunali Aggarwal, both of whom have seen downfalls quite closely in their entrepreneurial journey. The discussion was moderated by Alok Ramsisaria, a founding member of Chandigarh Angels Network.
Mr Ramsisaria started the discussion by saying that up until the previous generation, failure was considered a stigma. However, in the world of startups, there is nothing called a “failure” – an entrepreneur either wins or learns. Sunali started by talking briefly about her experience. She started off as a consultant in a few startups before creating an e-commerce company of her own. After spending a couple of years building the product, she soon realised that the product market fit was incorrect and that was her first failure. The major learning that came out of it was that one needs to be quick in developing and testing MVPs so that user feedback can be incorporated at an earlier stage. Sunali then went on to discuss her second startup by the name of Trabug where they used all these previous learnings and built a successful services startup.
Kshitij explained that he started Healers at Home because of his personal back problem. After starting in Gurgaon, they were quickly able to raise two rounds of funding and scale their business. However, in this process, they forgot about customer centricity and hence ended up compromising severely on the quality of their service. Kshitij then took the decision of pivoting their business model and again scaled up well from ground 0. Everything was going quite well till they decided to raise more funds. At this time, VCs were not particularly interested in the home healthcare segment and chose not to fund Healers at Home. They continued running the business in a way that helped them burn less cash and yet did not require additional funds. However, once they absolutely had to raise additional funds and nobody backed them again, they were forced to shut down operations. Despite this, Kshitij revealed he is working on similar lines at 1mg, a more established company to avoid previous challenges.
Sunali further revealed that entrepreneurship and failure both are very heavy terms. As an entrepreneur, there are so many aspects involved that it is not possible to be great at all of them in the first attempt itself. It is important to learn from so-called failures rather than take them as something negative. She further added that it is her failures that helped her become an entrepreneur and not the other way around.
Sunali said that her biggest learning was to focus more on building a product or service that not only has utility but also gets people to pay for it. On the other hand, Kshitij said he would now prefer building a strong team beforehand, focus on consumer centricity from day 1 and focus on a scalable tech business rather than a services model.
Talking about dealing with failures, Mr Ramsisaria said that if an entrepreneur makes an honest mistake, anybody would value it since it will most definitely help that person make better decisions in the future. Kshitij said that he got his job at 1mg because of this very reason – the fact that he was whole-heartedly pursuing a home healthcare startup and had expertise in the same. Mr Sisasria also suggested focussing on only one business and go all out for it.
On being asked when is a good time to gracefully accept failure, Sunali was of the opinion that if the business does not give value for the time invested, it is time to step away. Kshitij, through personal experience, said that he made a spreadsheet to evaluate all possible outcomes and gave a deadline to try each of those. Eventually, it led him to making a good decision. To sum it up, Mr Ramsisaria said that it is conscious decision-making that is of utmost importance, whether done emotionally or rationally.
Watch the session video here:
