In late 2011, my entrepreneurial spirits were on stanazalol with levels higher than Ben Johnson. I was looking to start my first business. I had completed a very ambitious and demanding new product development project at one of the world’s largest security services firm and I was confident that with my pseudo intellectual abilities were just the thing that corporate India was waiting for.
The SMAC(Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud) wave was on
and with the advent of smartphone across sectors in India it got me thinking
about ideas for apps. Educational Reforms is a subject I’m passionate about, so
I came up with a concept for using web and Phones for creating a marketplace of
proprietary materials developed by Indian teachers. I talked to some distinguished
personnel from the teaching community to vet the idea, built a financial model,
mocked up the product and even registered the domain name seeksha.com (Indian Flavor)
There was only one problem. Major problem, although teachers
seemed excited by the idea but none of them were keen on buying proprietary
material from others, one because most of the stuff was available free online
and second it was somewhat demeaning for them to use the stuff developed by one
of their contempories. So I shelved the idea. I also shelved 3 other equally
ambitious, but challenging-to-execute ideas (that I won’t be disclosing right
now – maybe I’ll start them some day in the future…). And instead, I went a
“safer” route, joining boutique research start-up Corporate Knowledge Partners, CKP. The goal wasn’t to
change the world, but to create modest cash flow by capturing business research
in the SME category. For about a year, CKP remained very profitable and the
talented team there executed well against more illustrious research firms.
We hit our goals, but didn’t change the world, and I watched
as the vision for Seeksha was implemented by a company named teacherspayteacher, which has
gone on to reinvent the way teachers use educational content marketplace.
I’m thrilled at the success
of teacherspayteachers, both because it validates the vision I had and because it’s a service which is used globally. And while part of me still regrets not pursuing Seeksha,
I’m not at all convinced I could have executed as well as taecherspayteachers, plus the fact that I was in India and the market is more developed in western countries makes me believe that maybe my assessment about its viability was correct.
Not moving forward with Seeksha taught me that launching
a business with modest goals is just as hard as launching one with great ambitions,
and that I do my best when building big, world-changing products and ideas.
Lesson: If you have a big idea, pursue it. I wouldn’t be
here if it weren’t for learning that first-hand.
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