Tag: Resources

Startup or Small Business?

December 20, 2019

For many first-time entrepreneurs, ‘startup’ can be a confusing term because it is used in many contexts. The Startup India campaign by Indian government has inspired millions, but has also led many to believe that a ‘startup’ simply means starting one’s own venture.  Starting a business is not new – people have been starting out on their own for hundreds of years. In fact, before organized corporate structure (which came in vogue during industrial revolution driven by division of labor and management theories of the likes of Adam Smith), perhaps everyone used to be ‘self-employed’ or a mini-entrepreneur.
But, in today’s business ecosystem, ‘startup’ is not just starting a new venture, but refers to extremely innovative businesses which can grow rapidly driven by massive unmet demand to gain disproportionate market-share. This exponential growth needs massive ‘risk-capital’, which is usually funded by seasoned fund managers/investors who can take upfront risk in the hope of exponential returns in the future – if the venture succeeds.
Here’s one of my slides that I often use in startup workshops to explain the difference in the ethos of a new ‘small business’  and a “startup”.

I also like this video which captures the differences quite well…  and especially, the candid way this person explains how he discovered that he was a small business and not a fundable startup.. ! 🙂

Hope this is useful for folks.
-Abhishek Sanghvi
Founder, iLEAD Group

Journey Post Funding by Mr. Abhishek Sanghvi

October 18, 2019

Raising funds is one of the biggest milestones in the journey of a start up. From hundreds and thousands of new ideas, new teams, and new business models, less than a quarter are able to get support at the seed stage, and perhaps less than 5 percent end up with funding from institutional funds — VCs or angel networks.

Fatal Flaws in Balance Scorecards for Companies

July 18, 2019

Flaws in Balance Scorecard


Most modern organisations implement some form of the Balanced Scorecard for performance management. However, very few of them are realising the true benefits of the tool. Results are often relegated to Excel sheets in unused folders, and the blame for that lies squarely with poor design.
Tools are tools… and tools alone cannot deliver results unless there is enough intellectual firepower that’s gone into designing the processes, identifying the KRAs and ensuring team compliance. Read more

Instruments for raising capital

March 2, 2019

How early-stage startups raise money

This is the second round of fund raising completed by the Gurgaon-based D2C Consulting, which owns and operates RenewBuy. Options include going to friends and family, crowdfunding, dipping into one’s savings, or, if one is lucky, finding an angel investor
BENGALURU: The first ‘round of funding’ Abhishek Latthe got when he was setting up his wearable device startup SenseGiz in 2013 was from his family and friends. The next year, he set up a crowdfunding page on Kickstarter and raised $47,000. Late in 2014, he took out a bank loan. It was only two years later in 2015, that he could convince Karnataka Semiconductor Venture Capital Fund to back him with Rs 3 crore. 

Indian startups have attracted billions in private equity and venture capital funds from across the world, but early-stage startups — those that haven’t yet started raking in revenue — s 
truggle to raise funds. Banks do not back companies without collateral and since the business model is unproven, other investors too hesitate. So, funding options include getting help from friends and family, crowdfunding, or dipping into one’s savings, but how do founders decide on the path to take? 

“Choosing from the options can be tricky. It depends on the company’s financial needs. We went with friends and family at the earliest stage because it was difficult to raise a VC round. We chose crowdfunding when we needed publicity for our product,” says Latthe. 

Mandar Gadkari, head of investor engagement at Cross Border Angels (CBA), says the friends-and-family route is a good option for initial capital infusion. “Investors look for your skin in the game. Having internally-funded your startup gives them confidence to invest. A bootstrapped or seed funding round increases your chances of getting a follow-on round,” says Gadkari. 

Although bank loans are an option, startups, especially in the technology space, avoid them due to the high interest rate and need for collateral. The natural progression for a startup is to bootstrap, and then look for a professional angel investor. 

Government grants are an option if the startup operates in a sector that needs the government as an agent. Leo Mavely’s medical device company Axio Biosolutions is one such example. It was relatively easy to get grants and funding from the department of science and technology as the armed forces is its biggest client.

Gadkari says peer-to-peer lending and bridge funding, which fulfil a company’s short-term working capital needs, have also become popular. Choosing the best funding option depends on the company’s need. The next step for an entrepreneur is to negotiate the company’s valuation. 

Negotiating with investors is all about playing hardball. Abey Zachariah, founder of Goodbox, an app platform for SMEs, made sure that he didn’t give up more than 10% of his equity while raising angel investments in 2013. “Angel investors often ask for more stake than the money they give. You have to ensure that you don’t give up more than 10%,” he says. 

Sometimes, entrepreneurs and investors are unable to reach a conclusion on the valuation of the startup. Giving up equity then becomes an issue. To work around this, convertible notes or compulsory convertible debentures (CCD) have become popular in the startup community. 

Convertible notes are a hybrid form of venture equity and debt. The investor loans money to the company without arriving at a valuation figure. The promise is that the loan will be converted to shares when the company raises its next round of funding from a mature investor. If a follow-on round doesn’t take place, then the money remains a debt for the company. CCDs are a form of convertible notes, where the loan necessarily has to convert into equity after a certain period of time. These have been used regularly in Silicon Valley and Singapore, but have been gaining popularity in India from 2016. 

Harshita Srivastava, head of venture capital investment at Nishith Desai Associates, says convertible instruments are the preferred option for foreign investors in India. “Among convertible instruments, CCPS (compulsory convertible preference shares) is the most favoured because it allows the investor a preferential right to dividend and a preferential right to recover investment in case of liquidation. While CCD is another option, it is primarily a debt security and sits as a loan on the books of the issuer company, with an agreed rate of interest,” she says. 

Srivastava says foreign investors have been choosing convertible notes after the RBI issued a notification dated January 10, 2017. “Considering the challenges around establishing the valuation of an early-stage startup, RBI came up with the notification which allowed startups (recognised under the government’s startup policy) to issue convertible notes to incoming investors. Pursuant to the notification, a lot of the non-resident angel investors are keen to invest in convertible notes since the instrument gives the option holder a right to convert into equity in conjunction with a future funding round. Startups too have become more comfortable with the idea of convertible notes.” 

This article was originally published by TOI in Jan 2018, authored by Shalina Pillai

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/trend-tracking/how-early-stage-startups-raise-money/articleshow/62769466.cms

4 Things Your Startup Needs to Attract VC

February 7, 2019

So you’ve finally finished developing your product or service, flushed out your business model, and you’re ready to dive head first into your new business venture — but how the heck do you raise enough capital to get started?
Taking venture capital is one way to secure the funds necessary for starting your business. According to recent statistics from Reuters, venture capital firms invested over $4 billion dollars in startups in 2012, and more than $900 million was invested in the first quarter of 2013.
Although there is a lot of potential with venture capital firms, it is important to make sure this is the right path for your startup. In exchange for the high risk that venture capitalists assume by investing in your company, they generally receive significant control over company decisions — in addition to a portion of the company’s ownership. But, VCs can definitely be an attractive option for startups unable or unwilling to secure bank loans or complete debt offerings; so, if you’ve decided that applying for venture capital is the right move for your startup, read on to learn about the must-have traits your business needs to attract funding.

1. Have a Unique Idea With High Barriers to Entry

In order for venture capitalists to justify the large risk they are taking with your company, you must offer them a fresh business venture that promises to fill a void in the marketplace. In an interview with Mashable, Charley Polachi, partner at Polachi Access Executive Search, elaborated on the importance of having a truly unique idea with high barriers to entry.
“Venture capitalists are looking to fund projects that are unique and can’t be easily replicated.
“Venture capitalists are looking to fund projects that are unique and can’t be easily replicated. Ideally, the technology or service can be patented or trademarked to give the startup some breathing room and really allow the business some time to gain traction and marketshare.”
Anyone can sell something online, but there are certain products that have yet to be developed — like the car battery that goes forever, or innovative, accessible and low cost energy sources, these are the ideas that venture capitalists would drool over — they are motivated by the next big thing like anyone else.

2. Develop a Compelling Value Proposition

Venture capitalists are really knowledgable in the startup space, so you must be able to show them why your business is different and better than each of your competitors. Showing VCs that you have a compelling value proposition is hugely important, and is often overlooked by first-time entrepreneurs.
Michael Goldstein, founder of DC-based startup accelerator Exhilarator, stressed the importance of determining customer interest.
“My personal gauge when evaluating a startup is, would the target customer wait in line for five minutes to get access to the product/service, or would they abandon? If it took five minutes to download an app or to access a site, would the customer persist?”
Another important factor of creating a value proposition is scalability. Are there enough people interested to scale the business? Even if you have a really cool, unique idea, it’s not fundable if it’s not scalable. What market are you going after, and how large is it? Investors need to believe that the market opportunity is sizeable, and that your company can generate substantial revenue at scale. Prahar Shah, CEO and co-founder of Mobee, elaborated on the importance of recognizing the opportunities in your market of interest.
“Be sure to size the market correctly and educate the investor not only on how large your market opportunity is, but also why it’s ripe for disruption.
“Be sure to size the market correctly and educate the investor not only on how large your market opportunity is, but also why it’s ripe for disruption. When I asked one of Mobee’s investors why he decided to back us, he quickly responded: ‘You’re going after one of the only billion-dollar industries — Mystery Shopping — that’s still run on pen and paper!’ ”
So, the takeaway is this: If your business is a product, demonstrate that people are willing to pay for it and have an unmet need that your product fills. If your business is a marketplace, be ready to show traction on both supply and demand sides.

3. Demonstrate Market Traction

In a competitive economy where only 2.5% of angel-funded companies go on to raise venture capital, it’s important for a startup to show cognizance and relevance in their market. Early-stage VCs want to see a sizable market opportunity before writing a check, and startups can demonstrate this through a pilot or beta customers.
More importantly, startups should demonstrate the ability to convert that pilot into a paying customer. Nina Nashif, founder and CEO of Healthbox, believes that showing market traction is critical, and startups should be able to replicate the process of turning a pilot into a paying customer over and over again. “The greater the number and the quality of early customers displays the startup has the ability to grow past the initial interest from early adopters.”

4. Assemble the Perfect Team

Some think that having the right team is the most important factor in attracting venture capital funding. Startups rarely have the perfect product and market fit right away, and they will probably need to pivot based on customer needs, competitive factors and industry transformation.
Ryan Feit, CEO and co-founder of SeedInvest, an equity-based, crowdfunding platform that connects investors to high-quality startups told Mashable about the importance of finding the right team.
“Given the high degree of uncertainty associated with early-stage investing, VCs bet on the jockey over the horse because they need to have a high level of conviction that the team has the necessary skills, domain expertise and diversity to evolve just as quickly as the industry does.”
So whether your team is made up of experienced entrepreneurs, or recent college graduates — as long as your team members have complementary skills with a track record of collaborating well, you should have a solid shot at attracting some venture capital funding.
~source: MashableIndia

55 great productivity tools and resources for startups

February 2, 2019

Between commuting to office, catching up with your inbox, to rushing for review meetings, it’s a hard life, as any entrepreneur will know. They are always on the lookout for ways to get the most out of their day. Running a startup is a daily challenge, but there exist tools out there to simplify almost all aspects of a business, enabling entrepreneurs to minimize distractions and focus on their ‘core’.
Right from naming and registering a business, to managing teams, to handling marketing and customer relations, these tools can help you ease up the process of running your business.
Here are 55 great tools that can assist your business in being effective and efficient:

  1. Asana: Asana is a Project Management and Collaboration Tool which helps keep teams organised, connected and focused. It is one of the most popular project management tools and offers convenient integration.
  2. 99designs: 99Designs is the world’s most popular marketplace for graphic design. It is a great platform to find able freelancer designers, especially for logo and web designing.
  3. AngelList: AngelList is a website for startups, angel investors, and job-seekers. Its goal is to introduce entrepreneurs to sophisticated investors, and simplify the process of early stage business. An AngelList profile is also an important visibility platform, practically synonymous with a birth certificate in the startup world!
  4. Animoto: Animoto makes it easy to create professional-quality videos. Animoto automatically produces beautifully orchestrated, completely unique video pieces from photos, video clips and music.
  5. BetaList: BetaList provides pre-launch startups with their first hundred users. It lets them understand the market and enable them to reach the product-market fit.
  6. Brand24: Brand24 is a tool which allows one to monitor one’s brand, product and services online. It is also a great method of measuring the buzz around a brand, product or keyword.
  7. Bunchball: Bunchball is the market leader and visionary in gamification. Bunchball provides cloud-based software as a service gamification product intended to help companies improve customer loyalty and online engagement using game mechanics.
  8. Codecademy: Codecademy is an online interactive platform that offers free coding classes in eight different programming languages. Codecademy also provides a forum where enthusiasts, beginners, and advanced coders can come together and help each other.
  9. CoFoundersLab: CoFoundersLab offers an online matchmaking service that connects entrepreneurs with compatible co-founders looking to join a startup. It helps aspiring entrepreneurs connect through their online platform and in-person events.
  10. Doorbell: Customer Feedback is probably the most crucial aspect of an early-stage business. Doorbell helps gather in-app user feedback for free. It is available for websites, iOS and Android.
  11. Dropbox: Dropbox is the premier file backup, sync and sharing solution beloved by more than 4 million businesses. It lets you store and share huge chunks of data through the cloud.
  12. Evernote: Evernote is a closed based freemium suite of software and services, designed for note taking and archiving. It is a modern workspace that syncs between all of your devices.
  13. Expensify: Expensify provides an online expense management service for customers worldwide. It eases the process of tracking expenses and is one of the most popular expense reporting apps for phone & web.
  14. Fontello: Fontello is a tool to build custom fonts with icons and helps you easily create a unique text branding for your business. It packs vector images into webfonts.
  15. Free Invoice Generator: Free Invoice Generator provides for an easy to use free invoice template to create invoices in PDF. It ensures a standard and convenient form for invoicing every order.
  16. Germ.io: Germ.io is a project management tool centred around ideas. It lets you get from ideas to execution by helping you capture every eureka moment.
  17. Get Satisfaction: Get Satisfaction is an online customer engagement community platform connecting businesses with their customers to foster better relationships. Companies of all sizes use Get Satisfaction’s platform to modernize customer support, accelerate sales and differentiate their brand.
  18. GitHub: GitHub is a web-based Git repository hosting service offering distributed revision control and source code management functionality of Git as well as adding its own features. Over 4 million people use it to share code.
  19. Google AdWords: Google AdWords is Google’s advertising system in which advertisers bid on certain keywords in order for their clickable ads to appear in Google’s search results. It is definitely one of the most important tools to advertise online.
  20. Google Analytics: Google Analytics is a freemium web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic. It shows you the full customer picture across ads, videos, websites, social tools, tablets and smartphones.
  21. Google Trends: Google Trends is a public web facility of Google that shows how often a particular search-term is entered relative to the total search-volume across various regions of the world, and in various languages. It can be quite useful for targeting the right customers online.
  22. Google Web StarterKit: Web Starter Kit is boilerplate and tooling for multi-device development. It is a front-end template that helps one build fast, modern mobile web apps.
  23. FullContact for Gmail: FullContact for Gmail supercharges your Google Contacts and lets you know everything about your Gmail contacts, right from your inbox. You can see the name, photos, social profiles, company info just by hovering over an email address.
  24. Homerun: Homerun is a lightweight tool that makes recruitment personal and effective. Homerun enables businesses to create authentic job openings, receive richer applications and review applicants faster and more effectively.
  25. HootSuite: Hootsuite is the world’s most widely used social relationship platform. It is a social relationship platform that empowers users to execute social media strategies across their organizations.
  26. How Much To Make An App: How Much to Make an App lets one calculate the cost of a building a mobile application. You just need to choose the desired features, and it estimates the cost of those features within seconds.
  27. HubSpot: HubSpot is an inbound marketing and sales platform that helps businesses attract visitors, convert leads, and close customers. It includes tools for social media marketing, email marketing, content management, analytics, landing pages and search engine optimization, among others.
  28. intercom.io: Intercom shows you who is using your product and makes it easy to personally communicate with them . It provides for live conversations and allows sending targeted email and in-app messages, triggered by time or behavior.
  29. Kickstarter: Kickstarter is the world’s largest funding platform for creative projects. It is especially useful for film, music, art, theatre, games, comics, design, photography, and more.
  30. LaunchRock: LaunchRock is a platform that enables its users to create viral “Launching Soon” pages with built in sharing tools and analytics. It help its clients incentivize and reward users for telling others about their projects through email and social networks.
  31. MailChimp: MailChimp is a popular online email marketing solution which lets one manage contacts and send emails. It helps you design email newsletters, share them on social networks, integrate with services you already use, and track your results.
  32. Meetup: Meetup is an online social networking portal that facilitates offline group meetings in various localities around the world. It can help you meet your fellow entrepreneurs in your region/industry and get a better understanding of the market.
  33. Meldium: Meldium is the simplest way for teams to access the cloud tools they need. By aggregating and monitoring accounts across any web service, it frees one from tedious account management.
  34. MobileDevHQ: MobileDevHQ is an enterprise organic app marketing platform that offers mobile marketers with app store optimization (ASO) solutions. The platform enables app marketers to analyze and optimize the app store presence of an app, track an app’s relevant search ranking queries in an app store, discover top chart rankings, analyze keywords etc.
  35. Moqups: Moqups is a stunning HTML5 App for creating high fidelity SVG mockups, wireframes and clickable prototypes. It lets you create website and app prototypes without any technical knowledge.
  36. Moz: Moz is an industry leader in building tools to facilitate inbound marketing easy. It provides automated research and analytics tools which lets you focus on strategy and insights and allows you to gain a quick understanding of the competitive landscape in any given search result.
  37. Go Daddy: GoDaddy is the world’s largest web host and domain name registrar. It offers dependable and stable services to ensure smooth online presence.
  38. Naminum: Naminum is the leading free startup name, company name, business name and website name generator on the web. It helps you find a suitable name for your business.
  39. Near Me: Near Me is a peer-to-peer commerce solution enabling anyone to setup their own branded marketplace. Users can create peer-to-peer marketplaces to share, trade, swap or rent anything all over the world.
  40. Upwork: Previosuly called Elance-oDesk, Upwork is the world’s largest online workplace where savvy businesses and professional freelancers meet. It is an effective platform to get quality output at affordable costs.
  41. Pixlr: Pixlr is a cloud-based set of image tools and utilities, including a number of photo editors, a screen grabber browser extension, and a photo sharing service. The apps range from simple to advanced photo editing and can be used on PCs, and smartphones or tablets.
  42. PostMark: PostMark is a web app which removes the headaches of delivering and parsing transactional email for web apps, all with minimal setup time and zero maintenance. It lets you see who opened your emails, where they opened it, what clients and platforms they used, and even how long they read the email.
  43. Prezi: Prezi is a popular cloud-based presentation software and storytelling tool for presenting ideas on a virtual canvas. The product employs a zooming user interface (ZUI) and lets you create striking presentations.
  44. QuickMVP: QuickMVP is a tool that helps entrepreneurs test a new business with a Landing Page Builder and Google Ad Creator. It is one of the easiest ways to test your ideas, without wasting time or money.
  45. Recruiterbox: Recruiterbox is the easiest way to receive and manage job applications to one’s business. It is more efficient than email and simpler than any other recruitment software.
  46. Rewardstream: Rewardstream lets one create engagement and lead generation through well-designed, best-practice-driven, and highly tailored referral marketing plans tuned to meet one’s business’ changing needs. It makes it quick and easy for marketers to incorporate digital, mobile, and word-of-mouth referrals into their customer acquisition and brand awareness mix.
  47. Scoop.it: With a focus on content marketing, Scoop.it helps professionals and businesses publish content online in a meaningful, easy and rewarding way. It is a convenient form of finding and creating content for social media marketing.
  48. Shopify: Shopify is a powerful ecommerce website solution that allows one to sell online by providing everything needed to create an online store. Shopify offers a professional online storefront, a payment solution to accept credit cards, and the Shopify POS application to power retail sales.
  49. Sidekick: Sidekick lets you see Who Opens and Clicks Your Email. With Sidekick email tracking, one can get live notifications when someone opens or clicks on one’s emails.
  50. Slack: Slack is a team communication tool that allows for real-time messaging, archiving and search for modern teams. It is an advanced messenger and can help ensure smooth team co-ordination.
  51. SurveyMonkey: SurveyMonkey is the world’s most popular online survey software. It lets you create and publish online surveys in minutes, and view results graphically in real time.
  52. Termsfeed: Termsfeed lets one create elaborate legal documents in minutes. It lets one create custom agreements that can be legally binding for users: Privacy Policies, Terms and Conditions, Terms of Use, Terms of Service or Return and Refund Policies.
  53. TinyJPG: TinyJPG helps make websites faster by compressing JPEG images by 40-60%. It analyses images and chooses an optimal strategy to apply the best possible JPEG encoding, keeping the quality impact but reducing the size at the same time.
  54. UICloud: UI plays an important part in defining customer experience for any app. UICloud collects the best user interface designs and provides a search engine to find the best UI elements for one’s need.
  55. WordPress: WordPress is the most popular web platform to create beautiful websites and blogs. It provides for hundreds of free, customizable, mobile-ready designs and themes.