SeedToScale | Curated by Accel

In this edition of the #InsightsPodcast series, we have Harsh Jain, founder of Dream11, India’s largest fantasy sports platform with 70 million registered users and 10 million paid users. Harsh talks about how he achieved product market fit after multiple pivots while persistently following his passion.

After answering a quick round of rapid-fire questions that reveal his loyalty for Manchester United and Mumbai Indians, Harsh gives a preview of the scale Dream11 has grown to today and the journey that led up to this. He reminisces his high school days in London when he first picked up fantasy football and how it helped him keep in touch with his group of friends in Mumbai over the course of 2 years in London and 4 years of college in Philadelphia. Unwilling to join family business in real estate, Harsh’s itch to do something different and the hype around IPL at the time led to starting Dream11 in 2008, not the version we see today but more of a cricinfo++ with too many features and too little traffic. They moved to an ad driven business model only to realise that CPM rates in India were too poor to build a large business out of it and reached a stage where they ran out of money and had to run a services company on the side to keep the engine running at Dream11. Finally in 2012, they moved to the version of today, removing everything except the core business- fantasy cricket!

It was the time when Airbnb, Paypal and Facebook where in their growth phase and ‘growth hacking’ was a buzzword doing the rounds. Harsh left no stone unturned as he read up everything he could put his hands on around growth hacking, learning about A/B testing, cohort analysis, retention etc. along the way to finally understand what product-market fit was for his business, Dream11 would be an entertainment, fun product rather than an ROI driven product, a platform to multiply the fun of watching sports manifold at a nominal spend.

Harsh adds about the importance of founders knowing their numbers in and out and being crazy about a problem. “If you jump into a market when it’s hot, there is going to be a time when it’s not and you will be the first one to leave as well, because you never came in with passion, you never woke up every morning saying that this is what I want to do with my life, Founders need to enter this journey only when they wake up every morning thinking about this problem and they have a tough time to sleep at night because they’ve not had a crack at it. You have to have that passion because the journey is full of potholes and barriers and if you don’t have that passion, you won’t be able to survive.”

As a last thought, Harsh says, “Just fail, just go for it. Stop sitting, stop thinking, just start. Fail early, fail fast and be open to continuously pivoting and finding your way. Don’t wait for that big idea and more importantly do NOT not share your idea, speak to others and get feedback.”

In this episode of the #INSIGHTSPodcast series, Divyank Turakhia, Founder of online advertising business Media.net, speaks about why entrepreneurs should focus on the right things, keep risks in mind, and must always be nimble.

We continue with the #InsightsPodcast series, and on this edition we have with us Divyank Turakhia, Founder of Media.net, one of the largest online advertising businesses worldwide, which he bootstrapped till he eventually sold it in 2016 for $900 million.

Divyank starts off by talking about his early days growing up in a small apartment in Mumbai, and how he started reading his dad’s collection of books at the age of five. This love for reading is something he attributes his success to.“I spend somewhere between 800 to 1,000 hours a year reading, and I’ve done that for the last 20–30 years of my life”, he says. The learning goals became more specific as he progressed along his entrepreneurial journey, but even today, you’ll find him trying to get every bit of information possible on a topic that is relevant to a business problem he’s solving.

On being asked how he went about picking ideas for his startups, Divyank stresses on how it was never about coming up with a truly original ideafor him, but about coming up with a large space to focus on.

Being a techie, Divyank was looking for a large industry that had something to do with the internet: ecommerce and online advertisingwere the most obvious businesses that came to mind. He went ahead with online advertising as it was closer to his domain experience (the fact that he didn’t know much about logistics, which was at the heart of ecommerce also influenced the decision). He started with the niche space of domain advertising, leveraging his knowledge on domain names from his previous startup, as well as the relationships he had built. As he expanded from domain advertising to mainstream online advertisingat Media.net, he made sure he used the same strategy: owning a nichebefore moving to the mainstream part of the online advertising industry.

“If I directly started competing with the giants on day one, I would obviously fail because I don’t have the same resources in any form. The idea was to pick a nichethat some of the giants were not paying as much attention to, so that once you grow in it, you know enough,” Divyank says.

Sharing tips for young entrepreneurs, Divyank talks about the importance of keeping an eye out for the risks that the business faces. “As you build a business, you need to keep thinking about what are the top 10–20 risks that exist in your businessthat could wipe you out entirely and have a very rough plan to tackle them.”

He adds that having success metrics and measuring them on an ongoing basishelps prioritise efforts and resources on the most important problems.

Talking about dealing with failures, Divyank mentions how he keeps working on the problemuntil he’s solved it. That said, he urges entrepreneurs to reprioritise when needed. “Whenever you come across something that is more meaningful and that deserves your time and the time of your team a lot more because it’s a larger opportunity, you need to have that nimblenessand you need to be okay to let go off certain things that you’ve been working on. The industry changes all the time, events happen all the time, the marketplace changes all the time, needs change all the time, newer tech comes in. You need to benimble to change and constantly change.”

Towards the end of the podcast, Divyank urges entrepreneurs not to fuss about market timing. “There’s no such thing as perfect timing. All timing is perfect. The more important thing is to get started.”

Tune in to listen to Divyank share his views about startups, growing them, and the need to be willing to change.

In this episode of the #INSIGHTSPodcast series, Ashwin Damera, Co-founder of EdTech company Eruditus, speaks about the effect the 'founder-startup fit' has on scaling a company and the importance of a mentor.

We continue with the #InsightsPodcast series, and on this edition, we have Ritesh Arora, Co-Founder and CEO of Browser Stack, a mobile and web testing platform. In this podcast you will hear about Ritesh’s journey as a young engineer how he pivoted through a few startup ideas before landing on the BrowserStack idea. And how he bootstrapped the startup to more than $20M in revenue - a humongous achievement for any founder.

Ritesh comes from a family background in business, and always had an eye for venturing

Unable to come up with a go-to-market for the product, Ritesh and Nakul decided to take up jobs, but the desire to build something consumer-facing got them started soon on their second venture, in the space of information aggregation on the internet. This time around they were even able to gain traction, but monetization and identifying the right business model proved to be a challenge.

Ritesh and Nakul spent a year brainstorming before stumbling on the problem that BrowserStack solves today, while consulting with companies that were seeking their help in building machine learning solutions. ‘Testing website on internet browsers’ was a challenge for thousands of developers globally and something that Ritesh and Nakul experienced first hand as developers .

Ritesh and Nakul, set out to simplify the journey of developers by helping them test and debug their website on different browsers (mainly Internet Explorer at that time). The traction they got this time around was explosive, starting with 10K beta users in three weeks (thanks to John Resig’s tweet), moving to a paid offering soon that grew to $20K monthly revenues in about 4-5 months and $1M annual recurring revenue at the end of year one- all this when they were just a team of two, working out of a coffee shop in Mumbai!

The focus on global market from day one helped them scale to $20M annual recurring revenue in a span of four years with just a 50 member team. They realised the need to scale up the organization to be able to sustain the growth and decided to get advisors on board who can help mentor the team in the right direction. The fund-raise for BrowserStack was more about finding the right partner than about raising money. Ritesh speaks about the value that a good investor brings on board especially in the scaling phase, because the founder is always doing it for the first time while the VCs have helped many such companies scale.

Apart from talking about the journey of choosing the right investor, Ritesh shares learnings for younger entrepreneurs, from the early days and emphasizes on focussing towards solving large problems, getting feedback from customers, not solving for monetizing in early days and building a great product that makes the customer’s journey frictionless. “When your customers use your product, they should feel that it has changed their life” he says.

Tune in to the podcast to hear Ritesh’s phenomenal journey which has become an epitome of bootstrapping your way to success.

On this edition of the #INSIGHTSPodcast series, we have Rahul Pangam, Founder of Simility, a fraud prevention and risk management platform that was acquired by Paypal late last year.

In this podcast, Rahul talks about his early days working at Google, how he met his co-founders, started off with a focus on building solutions for e-commerce companies, which became interesting enough to pique the interest of larger banks as well as Paypal. And of course, the entire phase of the exit.

On this edition of the #InsightsPodcast series, we have our youngest guest so far, Farid Ahsan, Co-founder of ShareChat, the most popular company in the Indian languages, i.e. vernacular, space. It has over 100 million monthly active users, a feat that they have managed to achieve in less than four years.

In this edition of the #InsightsPodcast series, we have serial entrepreneur Meena Ganesh, Co-Founder and CEO of Portea Medical, the leading provider of in-home healthcare services in India. Meena has had an illustrious career spanning corporate and the startup world. We talk to her on what has helped her scale across these various environments.

Growing up across the country owing to her father’s job in the Indian Railways, Meena believes her initial days of studying in Kendriya Vidyalaya served as a very good indoctrination, and helped shape how she treats people today. “Studying in a KV really makes you very egalitarian, and you learn to respect people from every background,” she says.

Meena had always been a good student in school, and decided to pursue her undergraduate in physics with the intention of becoming a nuclear physicist, before realising that she was more of a generalist and didn’t have the mentality for research. She pursued a masters from IIM Calcutta and soon after graduation, married her classmate Ganesh. Growing up in an environment where the idea of women having careers was uncommon, the question of whether to continue a career after having children always lingered, But Meena was clear that there were no second thoughts about continuing her career: it was as important as family for her.

Tutorvista reached a scale of managing 35 schools that housed a total of 35,000 students and was eventually acquired by Pearson.

In 2013, Meena set out to look at different focus areas that offered the next big opportunity and felt there was a lot of disruption that could be done in the healthcare space. She observed that there had been a lot of investment in the healthcare provider space in the form of new categories: multispecialty, single specialty and quaternary care hospitals, but not a single well-known brand existed in the outside hospitals space that served as a partner for patients in their long-term healthcare journey.

New to the healthcare sector, other than her experience of being a user while helping her father through his cancer treatment, Meena spent the first six months identifying market problems and realised the importance and need for an ecosystem in the continuum care space.

Convincing hospitals to hand over their patients, convincing patients to adopt a traditionally unknown concept of healthcare delivery at home, and convincing medical professionals to see this as a legitimate career option were all challenges that Portea had to overcome to reach today’s scale of 4,000 medical staff on their platform across the country in over 16 locations.

This need gap quantification, and aligning the opportunity with Portea’s capabilities proved crucial in its success. The visionary in Meena is evident as she shares the one question she’s constantly asking herself, “Does your solution make a big enough impact on people’s lives?”

Summarising her learnings from a plethora of experiences, she says the willingness to shed your ego and learn from everybody, along with the ability to look at the 30,000 ft view as well as work with colleagues in doing ground-level work have been important in helping her scale. Meena’s advice to fellow women professionals is simple, “It is important to prioritise. Work towards making things work at home as well as career, but never second guess yourself. Be open to reach out to people in your circle and ask for help”.

We continue the #InsightsPodcast series, and on this edition, we have the ever-inspiring and charming Shradha Sharma, Founder & CEO of YourStory. In this podcast, we uncover Shradha’s journey from being a young girl from Patna to building the media powerhouse that YourStory has become today, with a team of 93 people, 80,000 stories published, 1 million subscribers and 20 million readers reached.

Being on the other side of the hot seat for a change, Shradha reflects on her successes and how she scaled as a founder over the past decade. From starting off as an idea to tell positive stories (something that she saw was lacking, in her experience at established media houses) to reaching a stage where the Prime Minister called out to the nation’s youth to read YourStory for inspiration, it has been a long journey for Shradha, where staying true to the vision proved crucial.

We get a peek into Shradha’s childhood: growing up in a family with four daughters and a son, raised alone by her mother while her father was away on work in the Merchant Navy. Shradha was a go-getter from the start and left no stone unturned to give her mother ample opportunities to be proud. She went on to major in History from St Stephen’s in Delhi, where she discovered her love for communication and writing, and also met the love of her life.

Shradha did stints with The Times of India and CNBC in Mumbai and climbed the corporate ladder before finding her calling in sharing relatable stories of common people, which she felt needed to be celebrated. Shradha recalls the struggles in the early days – not just to convince investors that she was not building an NGO but also in getting friends to join her. She was ridiculed, everyone said it wasn’t going to work, but she always had the conviction. In fact, the constant undermining helped stoke a fire in her belly, she shares.

“I chose to be the heroine of my story and not the victim. I used every stone thrown at me. I knew my business was not going to be an overnight success, and that it will take time to build. I wasn’t chasing big money or building a unicorn but drew joy from the work, it was what I loved doing.”

Talking about lessons learnt on both professional and personal front, Shradha has creative acronyms MNM (Mind, Network, Market) and 3Ms (Meditation, Medication, Mentorship). She says it’s important for founders to control their “mind”, invest in building a network with a focus on ‘giving’, and for the market to align with you. She illustrates on how increasing digital penetration and the coolness quotient associated with starting up provided tailwinds to YourStory’s growth.

At a personal level, Shradha has benefitted from both meditation and medication to overcome the agony of personal tragedies. She emphasises the importance of mentors and being open to asking for help from young and old alike. She laughingly points out that entrepreneurs become comfortable with being shameless in asking for help, thanks to the innumerable times they get no as an answer. Things change for the better, though, as one treads along the path to success, “Aaj kal toh mere acche din aaye hue hain (My good days are here!),” she jokes.

Shradha adds that the ability to communicate well (storytelling) is extremely crucial while building for success and that the narrative should evolve as stakeholders change. She talks about how investors have been a positive force in her journey, helping her shape into a better CEO by ensuring for discipline, rigour and accountability.

Just like any other founder, the journey has not been an easy one for Shradha and has involved making some hard decisions and surviving through tough times including those in personal life such as the unfortunate tragedy of losing her mother, who was a major source of inspiration.

In this edition of the #InsightsPodcast series, we are joined by Kunal Shah, Founder and CEO of Cred, and Founder and former CEO of Freecharge.

Freecharge was part of the first wave of ecommerce startups in the country, along with the likes of Flipkart and Paytm. It was acquired for $450 million by Snapdeal in 2015, making it the biggest startup M&A in the Indian startup ecosystem at the time.

In the podcast, Kunal starts off with talking about his early days, and how he started working at the early age of 15 to help his family tide over a financial crisis. He juggled a full-time job while pursuing a bachelor’s degree in philosophy (which he chose based on class timings given his work commitments) and some freelance work in the evening, making him financially independent at a very young age.

He talks about his journey from a being a freelance designer and programmer to building a small SaaS company that pivoted many times to eventually become Freecharge. After the acquisition of Freecharge, Kunal had a couple of stints in investing, before deciding to start up again in 2018 with Cred.

In true entrepreneurial spirit, Kunal jokes about how he has done almost everything under the sun - from selling music CDs and mehendi, to running a SaaS business and even a BPO company. He also had a laptop import business for a while before finding his calling with ecommerce.

On how he achieved the product market fit for FreeCharge, Kunal says it started with the simple idea of offering a mobile top-up (which was the largest selling product at the time) free of charge to draw enough customers on the platform to potentially build a business. This was very much on the lines of the ‘loss leader strategy’ adopted by grocery stores to attract footfall. Kunal says he saw big opportunity in the mobile recharge space, which had a use case for 99 percent of the population who were on the verge of getting comfortable with online transactions, thanks to IRCTC.

That, along with reduced interest among merchants who were selling mobile recharges offline due to diminishing margins, made it a no brainer for these transactions to move online. As Kunal puts it rather nicely, “I saw recharge as the gateway to a transacting India.”

He calls himself a mediocre founder who found a great product market fit, and adds, “Terrible product market fits, even with the greatest founders, can never create value. Fighting headwinds never creates value, you only burn fuel.”

In the podcast, Kunal also talks about how it is challenging to get investors and team members on board when dealing with original ideas that do not have any global models to serve as comparables. Interestingly, it is these original ideas that have disproportionate wealth creation opportunities.

Kunal also gives the listeners a glimpse of the philosopher in him as he explains how platforms with a high frequency of transactions almost always win because the trust and habit built over many transactions enables such categories to expand faster in a mistrust democracy like India.

He also speaks of his famous Delta 4 theory, which encapsulates the need for new products to create significant delta in value creation for the customer through superior product/ service experience, making the switch from old behaviour to new behaviour irreversible, instead of giving massive discounts to infuse the delta in value creation for customers which is not sustainable without systematic change in consumer behaviour .

Answering a few questions from the audience, Kunal shares some words of wisdom for fellow entrepreneurs to succeed in a rapidly changing world. “Founders that try to fit in don’t raise the bar. So, if you want to be an outlier, don’t try to fit in.”

We continue with the #InsightsPodcast series, and on this edition we have Girish Mathrubootham, Co-founder & CEO of Freshworks. Freshworks scaled from $1 million Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) to $100 million ARR in five years and two months, making it one of the fastest growing companies in the ecosystem, and one of the first VC backed software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies in India to achieve this milestone.

In this podcast, Anand and Girish discuss Girish's early life, and the series of events that led to starting Freshworks. They speak about how Girish's ability to translate even the most mundane stories, his product training, and focus on culture has helped build a successful organisation poised to grow even further.

Girish talks about his upbringing, and about how he was an average student in school and college. But he really loved to learn; just not in a classroom environment. He attributes most of his learnings to after college as he could learn through practice, not confined to tests and a specific set of topics. Teaching is something close to his heart, and he is always looking for innovative ways to teach or communicate. This has honed his storytelling ability.

His learnings from Zoho, and his ability to tell stories has helped him immensely as he scaled Freshworks. This is especially so when it comes to hiring (Helpdesk is very boring, he says), and selling his vision for the company to a new hire.

His motto for fundraising is very simple and is something he's been meaning to tweet for a while: "Data is your enemy, story is your friend".

Girish further delves into how he got into products at Zoho, and later how business models influence products and not vice versa. Company culture is very close to his heart - Happy "work" organisation is his motto, and he's always had an eye on how to build the organisation's culture. The importance of culture fits within your organisation, and gearing the organisation to stay true to its values is further highlighted.

We end the podcast in true Girish fashion, discussing the next leg of growth for Freshworks - the jump to a $1billion business, and how he believes that Freshworks is not an aberration in the Indian product space but is just the beginning of India producing great global product startups, with a simple, yet intriguing story.