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Dream. Innovate.
Build.
India's startup successes are mostly about software firms
such as Flipkart and Ola, and rarely about hardware
product companies.
J Vignesh spoke with product entrepreneurs who have
been there and done that for lessons the industry can
tap into
When
the founders of electric scooter maker Ather Energy and
medical
diagnostics firm Achira Labs had not much more than
concepts
of their eventual products, they turned to familiar
environments
for direction. For Tarun Mehta and Swapnil
Jain,
that was their alma mater, the Indian Institute of
Technology,
Madras; and for Dhananjay Dendukuri of Achira
Labs,
it was his employer.
“We
reached out to one of our professors in engineering
design
at IIT Madras and told him we wanted to build a
battery
and maybe a full vehicle and put in a lot of
engineering
effort doing that. He immediately offered to
support
us 100%,“ said Mehta, chief executive of Ather
Energy
that is set to roll out its S340 smart electric scooter
this
year. “If we hadn't had that support, our starting would
have
been 10x harder and 10x longer.“
Dendukuri
got support from Connexios Life Sciences, where
he
was a lead scientist; the company incubated his
microfluidics
startup so he could tinker and experiment
with
developing a low-cost diagnostics device.
That's
lesson 1 on building a product startup, an area
where
India has a woefully poor record. Unlike software
ideas,
even simplistic ones, that can find ready backers,
products
have to climb a steep arc to prove their worth in
a
market not known for its manufacturing prowess.
Products
have to evolve from being a concept to a physical
prototype
and undergo various iterations before they can hit
the
market. And then the market has to want the product.
Which
is why getting that first person to believe in your idea
and
give you the space to experiment is critical.
Product
entrepreneurs should gain indepth understanding of
the
problem that they want to solve and its magnitude, and
determine
how it can be solved best.Niche problems might
seem
exciting but may not earn your startup the money it
will
need to sustain.
“We
never started to become a medical device company.
We
felt that the magnitude of preventable blindness was
really
high. Then we went about understanding the limitations.
Why
is there such a high prevalence of preventable blindness?“
said
K Chandrasekhar, CEO of low-cost eye screening devices
maker
Forus Health.“We were then convinced that technology
is
the only way we can solve this problem.“
The
next steps are finding a core team and raising funds,
because
developing a product requires money. While seeking
funds,
have a working prototype ready.“As a hardware company,
one
of the trump cards that one has is to be able to show a
prototype--an
actual, tangible, physical thing. The impact that
a
physical product has is unparalleled. You cannot do the same
by
making presentations,“ said Ather's Mehta.
Since
the product startup sector is only picking up now,
finding
core team members might need time along with
foresight
and ingenuity. Find people who are as passionate
about
the field you are working on as you are. Dendukuri
of
Achira Labs went to various colleges to deliver lectures
and
took in members who seemed passionate about
microfluidics.
“I went to IIT-Delhi to give a talk.
Somebody
there was doing his Ph.D in microfluidics.
He
attended the talk and then he stayed back to ask questions
and
now he's been with me through the entire journey,“ said
Dendukuri.
“The other important pick we made was through
a
scientific adviser.“
Dendukuri
offers more suggestions: Scout for Indians abroad
who
might be seeking interesting options at home to come
back
to.Non-resident Indians working abroad come with
interesting
expertise and cutting-edge knowledge, he said.
Also,
hire consultants or advisers from the first generation
of hardware companies as they will have
experience in
managing
an en tire product lifecycle.
Finding
the right vendors for different components is a
challenge
of its own. Understand the sourcing ecosystem
and
reach out to vendors who can understand your vision
and
will want to be involved for the long haul.
Akash
Gupta, chief technology officer of robotics enterprise
GreyOrange,
holds one advice from the company's experienced
Germany-based
cofounder Wolfgang Höltgen close to his
heart--there
is a lot of difference between cheap and
economical.“There
is a big difference between a cheap
product
and a viable product. Viable products cater to the
market,
not the cheap. This was drilled into us by Wolfgang.
A
lot of our supply chain is from Germany, Taiwan and Japan,
so
it is possible to make products which have really good
components
and still be viable enough,“ Gupta said.
It
is critical to get the pricing right. Chandrasekhar reached out
to
experts in the eye care industry to determine the pricing
for
Forus's ophthalmic imaging devices. “We were able to
understand
what would be a typical price a customer would
be
interested (to pay) and we got a particular price point.
That
price point was definitely not very profitable for us to
sell
at that point of time, but then we went about announcing
it
at that price point, which helped us to make inroads into
the
market,“ he said.
Finally,
as all success stories go, it is the underlying passion
that
can take you through the arduous journey of building a
product
startup.
“I
started the company pretty late. Before that I was into
racing.We
named the team as Tork and remained in that
space
for fourand-a-half years. And then I had a bit of free
time
(when) I built a prototype,“ said Kapil Shelke, founder
of
Tork Motorcycles, a Pune-based maker of electric
motorcycles
that is backed, among others, by Ola cofounders
Bhavish
Aggarwal and Ankit Bhati. “The perception of
electric
motorcycles was not good then. So I wanted to build
and
show that it is possible.It worked well.“
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J
Vignesh
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ET13MAY16
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