ENTREPRENEUR / STARTUP SPECIAL ..................Thank God I Failed 5. ABHISHEK KUMAR

STARTUP SPECIAL Thank God I Failed

5. ABHISHEK KUMAR

Third Time Plucky

If you are from Benaras, selling benarasi sarees may not be an out of-the ordinary business to plunge into. But what if you are a B Tech student from the Indian Institute of Technology, Banaras Hindu University (BHU)? Simple, you use your tech savvy and start an internet-based venture to sell those sarees. That's what Abhishek Kumar did when he kicked off BenarasiSarees.com in April 2012.

The online store for selling handloom products from the looms of Varanasi, especially benarasi sarees, began well. After five months, the bootstrapped startup started generating revenue, was getting orders from different parts of the country and even inquiries from other countries. However, serious trouble was lurking around the corner.

Kumar was simultaneously run ning another venture, Careerandme, a startup specialising in career awareness workshops, sessions and counselling. It was started in April 2012, the same month in which BenarasiSarees.com took off.

Both startups had their own set of woes. Careerandme was not scalable and BenarasiSarees was facing issues of delays in delivery and sarees getting damaged in transit, thereby eroding consumer trust. Result? Careerandme folded up by end-2012, and BenarasiSarees a couple of months later.

Kumar was down, not out. The learning from the twin failures was staring him in the face. “Focus on one startup at a time,“ he reflects.

By mid-2013, Kumar was back with his third venture, this time one closer to his area of expertise. An educationtechnology startup, SchoolMitra is a cloud-based product for schools with offerings such as school enterprise resource planning, a communication module, an android app for parents and analytical reporting. The startup's services have been used by over 25 schools and the target is to cover 5,000 schools by 2020.

Kumar believes the target is not unrealistic as there is enough scope for scaling up and the pricing has also been kept quite reasonable. So a school opting for any of the four packages is charged anywhere between `75 and `200 per student per year.The startup has started earning decent revenue but is yet to break even.Kumar is now hunting for funding to expand his business.

Will third time be lucky for Kumar?
He's keeping his fingers crossed, but suggests he's onto a better thing. “It's not how far you fall, but how high you bounce that counts.“

ETM26JUL15