Thank God I Failed
10.
BLOGTARD
They came from different educational
back grounds but common to them was the entre preneurial instinct. Yash Shah,
Abhishek Doshi and Anupama Panchal started up Blogtard, a builder of internal
social networks for companies, in April 2011. The venture would create
platforms for enterprises where employees could blog and post updates, photos
with notifications, profiles and the like.
Blogtard survived for under two
years. Funding was a challenge, and the trio resorted to participating in
business plan competitions. But after 13 such contests they had just `3.5 lakh
in prize money to show for their efforts. Other than funding, selling the
proposition to enterprises wasn't proving easy.“It was hard to get companies on
board with the idea of an internal social network,“ recalls Shah, a mechanical
engineer who also had a one-year stint as an investment banker. When paying
salaries became difficult and debt started piling up, the trio took the call to
shutter Blogtard in February 2013.
The failure hurt, but as Shah says:
“Looking back was not an option for us.“ They went back to the drawing board,
reformulated the strategy and factored in the lessons learnt from the debacle.
Lesson No. 1: “Talk about benefits of the product, not its features,“ says
Shah. Almost a year and a half later, the troika flagged off their second
startup called Gridle. The Ahmedabad-based venture offers a cloudbased
communication platform for enterprises.“Gridle is one place for all
communication channels,“ says Shah. With Gridle, companies and teams can sign
up, invite colleagues and start managing their tasks, interacting with instant
messangers, upload files, plan with a scheduler, view analytics and integrate
tools like Skype and Dropbox. The service costs $50 per month and $500 a year.
The performance so far has been
encouraging.Gridle serves over 800 teams in 100 companies, and has raised seed
funding of $20,000 (almost `13 lakh) from IIM-Ahmedabad's Centre for
Innovation, Incubation and Entrepreneurship, Hiraco Ventures and an angel investor.
Shah says Gridle has broken even, and is now on the verge of raising `1 crore
from fresh investors.
So, is it necessary to fail in order
to learn from the mistakes? “Not necessarily,“ says Shah. “But if you fail
first it's better to fail fast too.“
ETM26JUL15
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