Building It Up with Bertelsmann

In a country like India, where age is the gold standard of experience and wisdom, how do you win credibility for a new institution, university or school? How do you overcome the intimidating stature of traditional brick and mortar institutions that have stood the test of time. For Pramath Sinha, Founder & Chairman of Harappa Education and India’s ed-tech ambassador, the answer lies in employing an outcome driven approach. “Focus on ensuring outcomes in your initial years. This does more for your institution’s credibility, than your curriculum, faculty, or board.” Getting students the right jobs may help in the first phase, but what then? How do you sustain this credibility? How do you build institutions that last beyond you? Tune in to this episode of #BuildingItUp with Bertelsmann to find out.

In a country like India where parting with your money is like a painful trip to the dentist, how do you scale lending? How do you forgo the traditional approach of extending loans, where meeting and accessing clients is second nature? “We’ve given out 70,000 loans across India, but 99% of my borrowers haven’t even seen me!” For Lendingkart’s Co-founder and CEO Harshvardhan Lunia, data was the ultimate answer to lending at scale. How did he overcome the historic red tape around loans? Especially in the non- collateralized space of MSME lending. Tune in to this episode of Building It Up with Bertelsmann to find out how he revolutionized the FinTech industry with his trust-first approach.

“2 or 3 campaigns will not make your brand! You have to be consistently at it for years” Content marketing is critical, whether you’re chasing sales or website traffic. It isn’t as easy though, especially for a startup where change- across product, people and placement- is the only constant. And when you’re caught by these waves of change, you either sink or swim unless, of course, you’re smart enough to build a boat and turn a profit by offering rides. Influencer, content entrepreneur and internet sensation Tanmay Bhat did just that as he built India’s first viral content business. From engaging a room full of comedy enthusiasts to winning millions of subscribers on YouTube, Tanmay has literally defined the formula for user engagement and retention.  “Virality isn't science! It’s a product of experimentation," says Tanmay. With social media gaining more popularity by the day, your company’s valuation is definitely linked to customer validation. So if you want to scale your brand love, tune in to this episode of #BuildingItUp with Bertelsmann to catch his definitive guide on creating viral content.  

How do you thrive in low margin super competitive cohorts? What do you do when your startup is up against really established players -those that are really institutionalized or well-funded or have been in the business for a really long time? “2010 was the worst year ever for the broking industry. That’s when we started.” When Zerodha was started, no VCs had ever invested in a stockbroking firm. Yet, this did not stop the team from building India’s largest stockbroking firm, successfully navigating a market with poor financial knowledge and well-funded competition. They bootstrapped and built their product focusing on the customer rather than what will please the investors. All this with minimal spends on advertising and marketing. In a startup world obsessed with speed and growth hacking, co-founder Nithin Kamath believes that growing at their own pace helped them build a great product. Tune in to this episode of Building It Up with Bertelsmann to find out how Zerodha built a massive business and lived up to the meaning of its name which literally means “zero barriers”.   

What does it take to overcome regulatory hurdles, build a loyal community of 50 million users and scale-up the business to a billion dollars? It's grit, passion and focus. Starting-off as a fantasy sports platform, then accidentally evolving into a sports social network and then pivoting back into fantasy gaming, the journey of Harsh Jain and his team at Dream11 has been nothing but incredible. By turning couch captains into strategic game players and achieving product market fit within a year, the team has truly hit it out of the park. Curious about how Harsh navigated these critical decisions about business models and product offerings? Or how Dream11 manages to drive a 30% growth average while maintaining an ethos of experimentation? Tune in to this episode of Building It Up with Bertelsmann to hear Dream11’s ‘playbook’ on success.

“Leadership is a verb, not a noun!” Founder and CEO of Druva, Jaspreet Singh believes that leaders have to constantly evolve to stay relevant for their team and business. This agility has helped him guide his company through multiple pivots, which was almost like relaunching Druva as a Cloud SaaS company in 2013.    Having scaled their company to a billion, becoming India’s first SaaS unicorn, they now have to navigate the journey to an IPO. With prominent SaaS companies like Slack shunning the IPO route in favour of a direct listing, Pension Funds entering the Venture Capital market and the ever present unpredictability of market timing, how should a global SaaS company prepare to go Public? Tune in to Building It Up with Bertelsmann to know more. 

“Grit is the stubborn refusal to quit.” This could easily be the ixigo tagline with co-founders Aloke Bajpai and Rajnish Kumar having mastered the art of turning roadblocks into opportunities for growth. Post financial crisis of 2008, with zero dollar marketing budget, employees at half-salary and four well-funded competitors, ixigo founders share how they had their backs against the wall and how they came up with ingenious ways to scale-up and build consumer loyalty. From leveraging word of mouth, earning free traffic through SEO, and data scraping to enhance customer experience, innovation became their mantra for survival. But as a startup it's about thriving and not just surviving, which means taking hard decisions. Tune in to this episode of Building It Up with Bertelsmann to hear how the entire team at ixigo inculcated full-stack thinking and frugal innovation to become one of India's most loved OTA platforms.

According to Harvard Business Review, only 7% of customers are online-only shoppers and 73% are omni-channel customers. Clearly, a good looking e-commerce site is not enough anymore.   Ambareesh Murty, Founder and CEO of Pepperfry, shares how he navigated through some of the most critical business decisions on omni-channel strategy, franchise model and advertising on television, etc. Why consumer categories like furniture, require a physical presence, not as a distribution channel but a way to build trust with customers.   Establishing India’s largest business-to-customer supply chain wasn't really easy for Ambareesh. It was the first furniture marketplace to build its own logistics network and managed to establish a niche category for itself in a very crowded unorganized market. In today's world where differentiation is key to success and multiple factors have to be considered to achieve any foothold in competitive markets, Pepperfry continued to build for scale while keeping its inventory light.   On this episode, listen to Ambareesh's definitive guide on what it takes to put-together a winning omnichannel retail strategy and how customers look at the other established horizontal players such as Amazon or Flipkart when it comes to vertical e-commerce. Time range    Topic of discussion 1:05               What got you into the furniture category? 2:12               What made you realize that online was not the only thing that the                        customer needed? 4:29               How did you figure out that opening a physical store was the right thing              for your business? 6:40               The pure reason to have physical stores was to build trust 8:06               What got you to consider a marketplace model? 10:34             Why did you decide not to go custom? 12:08             How do you look at established horizontal players like Amazon                        having a furniture category as well? 15:23             Any advice to entrepreneurs who are thinking about taking their                        vertical business to the next level? 16:59             Your view on profitability versus growth? 18:29             How did you adopt to the franchise model so well?

“Why is there so much spam in the world!?”  In the process of answering this question, CleverTap grew from being a group of engineers tinkering code, to a global SaaS company. Co-founder & Chief Strategy Officer of Clevertap, Anand Jain, believes that the first step to building a global company is to “remind yourself that the problems you are solving are universal”. If you are building your product keeping the customer in mind, then no borders can constrain your company’s reach. But with no sales team until 2018 and having monetized the product only after their Series A funding, going global wasn’t an easy feat for them. Building a global company requires one to ask tough questions – How do you hire for a global company? When and how do you monetize your product? How big a role does your sales team play in establishing the early reach of your company? How low does your churn rate need to be? Catch this episode of  #BuildingItUp with Bertelsmann, to find answers to these plaguing questions as SaaS maven Anand Jain, shares how he charted CleverTap’s journey beyond Indian borders. Time range    Topic of discussion 1:03                Why B2B SaaS? 1:47                What were the main challenges in building a B2B SaaS company? 3:51                Was going global always the plan? 5:02                 Initial strategy: small ticket size model vs large ticket size model 9:08                As an entrepreneur what kept you going? 10:24              Why monetizing your product is important?  11:30              How do you price your product?  13:02              Does every market has a different pricing strategy?   13:54              How an entrepreneur in B2B SaaS think of unit economics? 15:12              Is it important to be close to your customers geographically? 16:28              Why building a sales organisation with locals having sales                         expertise is crucial? 17:25              Would you advice entrepreneurs to have a professional sales org                         much earlier once they have a product? 18:51              Partnership: Should we take a collaborative approach for sales? 20:09              How did you win over in a crowded market? 22:02              Is churn really an important metric and how frequently did you                        track churn?

Revelations from the other side of the table. As season one comes to an end Ankur Warikoo, our host and the Co-Founder & CEO of nearbuy.com, shares his top takeaways from the extremely insightful and brutally honest conversations with some of the finest leaders from across the world.  From building great products that sell themselves to using storytelling to engage with stakeholders and founding the right culture, Ankur shares how implementing some of these learnings at his company has generated some spectacular results.  With 26,000+ listens and over 2.5 million audiences reached, Building It Up with Bertelsmann has been appreciated not only in India but around the world and ranked as the best business podcast in India by Apple.  Hear Ankur Warikoo give the entrepreneur's perspective on season one on this episode of #BuildingItUp with Bertelsmann

A fact deduced by marketers is that the best marketing doesn’t feel like marketing at all. Whether you’re leveraging an influencer or a celebrity for a marketing campaign, it’s vital that you find a way to market authentically. With multiple tools, platforms and techniques to build loyalty for your product, endorsements still remain the most commonly used strategies. Celebrity endorsements have been around for decades and something most businesses tend to take without pre-empting the feasibility for their brand. For an entrepreneur looking to spend on a celebrity promotion, the most significant question remains: Will my real customer associate with a celebrity and buy my product or service? If Yes, how do I leverage celebrities and influencers to boost sales? Preeta Sukhtankar, Founder of TheLabelLife, believes “If a brand is not talking to you directly and does not respond to you directly there's a problem with the brand. Having said that, one should list down what their brand stands for and what are the kind of things that appeal to their audience”. Further, authenticity and alignment of personal values with your brand are key to deciding ‘who’ should represent it. “The key is authenticity. Celebrities and influencers that work really well are the ones that are authentic about what they are promoting”, says Malini Agarwal, Founder & Blogger-in-Chief of MissMalini.com. On this special episode of #BuildingItUp with Bertelsmann, hear two accomplished and dynamic women- Malini Agarwal and Preeta Sukhtankar, who aced celebrity power for their business and crushed the stereotypes with their phenomenal success.

Customer's money or investor's money, what is more critical? Can hiring right help to scale globally? Can a compelling story mold the core existence of a business? These are some burning questions that every entrepreneur faces while growing their startup. The podcast Building It Up with Bertelsmann, through a series of episodes, covers answers to such questions. So dive in deeper to not just understand the enterprising, dynamic and inspiring guests but also hear their incredible insights on what it takes to scale a startup. Tune-in for your dose of advice from some of the most accomplished entrepreneurs and business leaders across the globe!

In an industry where a large number of companies are attempting to use technology to deliver high quality education to students worldwide, championing educational outreach and expanding globally is a mighty task to achieve. Then how did Eruditus – an online education company offering executive education programs, become one of the first EdTech startup from India to go global? What set it apart from other online ventures? How did it manage to get the top global universities to join them? “A key skill brought to major universities in the online space is taking the offline programs and translating them into an online medium. Access means affordability, but also beyond that. We believed in creating a model that can efficiently scale globally and reach out to diverse geographies”, says Ashwin Damera, Co-founder & Director, Eruditus. Going global was not an easy feat to achieve for Damera. Initially, the pitch was mainly about doing classroom programs in India, which then gradually was expanded to larger diasporas including the Middle East (chiefly in Dubai) and Singapore; subsequently moving towards online courses. Building a strong team that collectively believes in the mission of high-quality education, assembling the best available resources and metrics, and focusing on the product design capability were fundamental to the soaring success of the venture. Hear the EdTech visionary share the startup’s consequential journey to scaling various geographies on this episode of Building It Up with Bertelsmann.

Putting in place an elaborate sales channel, training an army of dealers and distributors, and executing an aggressive marketing strategy has been customary to several leading companies. However, in industries challenged with fierce competition and volume-driven topline, how can startups put together the most effective sales strategy for their business? “There is no science or logic behind sales, it is about who you can sell to and who is ready to buy”, says Hitesh Oberoi, Managing Director, and CEO of Info Edge (India) Ltd.  Info Edge’s Naukri.com is India’s largest job portal and acknowledged as one of the most successful sales-driven organizations. Despite its humble beginning, Naukri.com soon realized that the key to their success was to drive unadulterated volume of sales. For Oberoi, building this sales DNA was critical to the company’s growth and it included years of hiring and relentless training of the sales team, appropriately incentivized and acknowledged for their contributions. From doing away with direct mailers and intermediaries to adopting new strategies, going Public, surviving the 2008 crisis and resurrecting soon-after to become India’s indomitable hiring giant, there is nothing that this ‘sales-obsessed’ company hasn’t encountered. Hear Hitesh Oberoi tell how to build a fierce sales team that acquires, develops, upsells and retains customers like none else.

An effective brand story is an authentic narrative with a strategic message that expresses why a brand exists, what it stands for and why consumers should choose it. Every Company has a story to tell – either the one that incubated it or the one that inspired its growth. Yet until early 2000s, most of these stories of Indian startups never reached an audience. “Every story can be as extraordinary as we choose to see and the role of communication should be the ability to go behind and see that story”, says Shradha Sharma, Founder & CEO of YourStory Media in this episode of Building It up with Bertelsmann. From views on the changing face of content in India to what consumers like when it comes to content across multiple platforms, Shradha shares insights, learning and must-dos for creating the ‘right’ story and a powerful content strategy that can help your brand grow.

Every brand needs to invest in finding and implementing its DNA and core values if they want to remain great. In today’s dynamic customer-driven marketplace, businesses need thoughtful investment into defining their company’s mission to retain their relevance, value, and vitality. But often when founders have dozens of competing priorities, defining this DNA and core value usually takes a backseat and many times, this culture becomes intuitive, especially when the organisation is just a few members strong. “While getting a business model right is the first step to create a great workplace, truly successful businesses are those that have a robust DNA” says Prasenjit Bhattacharya, Co-founder & CEO of Great Place To Work India, in this episode of Building It up with Bertelsmann. From talking about what start-up founders can gain from defining culture early and often to understanding the role of a CEO in building a company’s culture, Prasenjit shares all the insights, steps and must-follow techniques that are essential to build a great place to work.

Over 90% of Indian startups fail within 5 years of inception. What mistakes are these startups making? While some say that ‘premature scaling’ is perhaps, the number one cause, our speaker on this podcast feels the problem lies in the basic foundation of the startup & insufficient understanding of the market. “Startups in India are so good at creating solutions, they spend very little time understanding the problem” says Kunal Shah, Co-Founder of FreeCharge- which was one of India’s most innovative business models. Shah who spent years doing consumer surveys and behaviour analysis before launching FreeCharge in 2011, is an ardent believer of “Plan better than fail fast” strategy. He’s not just someone who has scaled a business but has also delivered one of India's largest acquisitions of his times. And now after mentoring and investing in over 100 startups, Kunal is all set to start-up again. In this episode of Building It Up with Bertelsmann, Kunal Shah talks about how an entrepreneur should mould himself for all the phases, one hex that’s curtailing ‘success stories’ in Indian startups, his next big startup idea and all the 'theories' that resulted in his business success. All this and more on this episode.

While globally there is a large scale fear that automation will replace jobs and humans, India- the country with world's largest youth population- has a bigger problem, that of employability. For far too long, the traditional education system and regulations haven't kept up with the fast-changing business needs, thereby making graduates less employable. With some promising startups coming-up in the education tech space, green shoots of growth are beginning to be seen however, a lot of ‘patient’ capital coupled with deep understanding of edutech and its scalability, is the need of the hour. On one hand while Edtech startups are making the workforce job-ready, on the other hand startups in HR space are effectively deploying mechanisms to help workforce cope with the changing workplace dynamics. From L&D to hiring for Gig economy, HR Tech startups are developing one-stop solutions to all HR-related challenges of companies. In this episode, we have Ashwin Ajila from India’s largest virtual university iNurture and Pankaj Bansal from PeopleStrong- which is transforming HR operations for companies. Ashwin and Pankaj share the opportunities and challenges in these highly regulated sectors and shed light on how they are making India’s workforce, future-ready.

170 million app downloads, 85% business outside India and 0 marketing spend. Our guest in this episode of Building it up has made these astronomical numbers true for his start-up. With a razor-focus on creating businesses that weigh high on the ‘engagement’, he has built, scaled and sold three successful companies in India & abroad. How did he do it? “By building great products that sell themselves”. Alok Kejriwal, CEO of one of the leading casual mobile game companies in the world- Games2win, takes us through his journey from being a socks manufacturer to becoming a successful internet entrepreneur, investor, mentor and author. Alok talks about how it was to go global and scale his business in China in early 2000s, how he built an app that ranked #1 on Google Play Store in USA and what made Games2win one of the top games company from India. All this & much more on this episode of Building It Up!

‘Copy to China’ is history and the roaring success of companies such as Xiaomi, WeChat, Alibaba, Baidu (and many more) narrates a story of grit, creative thinking and the ability to adapt to local geographies. It also speaks volumes of China's determination to 'outlast all competition'. As our guest on this episode is the woman responsible for 20 exits, 8 IPOs and 10 unicorns in China- Annabelle Long, Founding Managing Partner, Bertelsmann Asia Investments and she says _“It’s not enough to have a powerful product in China. You have to be a general, a king, a warrior and a fighter to survive, scale and grow.”_  So what can Indian start-ups and entrepreneurs borrow from China’s playbook? How can India implement China’s scaling strategies for reaching from 10 to 100? And what do Chinese investors look for in an Indian start-ups?  All this and more, in this episode of Building It Up.

In an environment where funding comes fairly easy, IPO remains the gold standard of recognition for a company coming of age. But even after being home to various billion dollar companies, Indian startup ecosystem is yet to mature as compared to its peers in the west.  So what’s holding back Indian ventures from going public? Is it the slow, arduous process or just the non-willingness to take the risk? When is a a start-up ready to go public, even-so how and where?  In this episode of Building it up with Bertelsmann, we delve into all this and more with Sanjeev Bikhchandani, the man behind India’s first dotcom IPO. Sanjeev takes us through the transactional and tangible aspects of the IPO journey, while also sharing how to make those tough choices of NSE or BSE vs. NASDAQ, growth vs. profitability and many others.

Stories are an essential part of our day-to-day communications and an effective story-telling has the potential to breathe life into your brand. Apart from helping shape how people view your brand, a powerful story can create legacies, generate profit and help win loyalty of audiences. Simply put, it’s an asset that your business must create keeping in mind your product, customers, profits and investors. It must be a part of setting up a successful, thriving business.  “Therefore, what founders need to do is understand their story and integrate it in a way that it becomes an essential component of your existence,” says Google Venture’s Shernaz Daver in this episode of the Building it up Podcast. The discussion goes beyond the art of compelling storytelling to learning some traits from the effective storytellers such as Netflix’s Reed Hastings.  How does the business growing from 10 to 100 alter its narratives while communicating to the broader audience? And how should founders, especially those who are not effective communicators, tell stories that evoke trust and make their stakeholders stick to the brand? All this and more in this episode.

Starting a start-up has never been easier, but building it up into an iconic brand is harder than ever. As a start-up founder aiming to take your start-up from 10 to 100, you can definitely relate to this! But what often gets lost is the fact that behind every successful start-up, exists a fair share of research, trial-and-error, and even failed attempts.  Even the most iconic start-ups of our times began with concepts that were new to the industry and the product that had few or even no takers in the beginning. But what determined their success was a close correlation between the product, team and market, believes the guest on this podcast.  Deep Kalra, the man behind India’s largest travel website shares how he created, grew and perfected a product in the market where no-one bought online. He share how to go about building the right product, what to do when a competitor enters the market with a tried and tested discount play, what should the team that’s scaling the magical product look like? Deep Kalra talks candidly about his decade-long internet journey and his greatest regrets- on this episode of Building it up!

When an organization grows from 10 to 100, how to scale communication, team & culture along with it? While there’s a lot of knowledge out there on what to do in the early stages of a company, there’s little on taking the next big step such as hiring, product management, funding or raising money, among others. In this episode of Building It Up, Pankaj Makkar- Managing Director of Bertelsmann India Investment, shares insights on this elusive growth journey of a start-up, why some startups shouldn’t raise VC money, boards role, India’s next big tech idea and of course, why he launched this growth-focused podcast.

Plug in the headphones, pull up a chair and get ready to take notes as we gear up to launch our first-ever podcast, Building It Up with Bertelsmann. #BuilidngItUp will bring honest conversations and never-shared before stories straight from the people wending India’s startup ecosystem!