My order for today is a plate of chicken momo and do you have biryani from Seema ji?
Yes, this is what I see every day and every order brings smile to my face. Hi, I m Rohit Tiwari, Age 27, I look little old with grey hair and usually on t-shirts. I see myself as any other individual I meet on daily basis, trying to play their part to make world a better place. I Co-Founded Foodmario, a food tech company that enables people to sell food from there homes. Like any startup we work very hard every day to get that one more sale and never getting tired building something called dream.
If you have wondered what does it feel like to build a startup? Let me explain it on basis of what I have felt, strictly personal, this can definitely vary from person to person, founder to founder.
Any company, a startup or a business starts with a vision, you dream of it as something that might just change your life or even change the world. When I started working on Foodmario, closely working with my mentors to guide me through the process this was my 6th venture, I started my first venture taking few thousand rupees from my family. It’s a long story, I’ll try to cut it short, few companies I build were making money but I failed to scale up at all of them, failed to reach people, make a difference and my companies were not invested enough in time and in funds ( At least that’s what I thought ).
When Foodmario started, we decided to start it on a Facebook group, we knew one thing for sure that starting lean and validating idea is the way forward. We ran a group called, Let’s Talk food- Nepal, with a soul purpose to figure out if people would love to share what they cook at home on social media, never promoted Foodmario or ever let anyone promote anything in the group, keeping is 100% non-commercial. After we started getting tens of active posts in a day, of people cooking and sharing food from home, we started Foodmario- Community, another Facebook group for small group of people who would be interested to sell and buy home cooked food. This Group later converted to Foodmario Facebook page, I made sure I would not invite anyone with annoying invitation as I used to do before, we let the page grow very organically, months in operations we have 600 Likes on page but these were people who in real were interested about Foodmario. Then we followed up with website that was built in 30 minutes in WordPress (old website ), as we knew for the scale of operations, this was enough, now as we grow, we have decent website and mobile application to take orders from hundreds of people every day.
What I m trying to say is, starting up something comes with passion and one can go very aggressive with it, but sometimes business can kick start slow and steady, and with every process you learn. If you read the above paragraph you must have realized the capital investment was majorly time, and realizing that existing platforms such as Facebook can help you validate business, then when we want to scale you can have your own tech. Starting lean is the key. But there is more to it, its about team, operations, stress, success much more.
Building a team, there are two ways to do it (there can be more obviously but I’ll talk about two). Either, we get moderately good people in business and form our team, or we hire people who are young with minimal experience and we all learn as we grow. I decided to go with second, but both are risk of its kind, first is a risk that our assumption of the quality of recruit can be wrong, someone who is good at selling cars might not be good at selling trucks. Even in first way of team formation we don’t get exactly what we wanted, with second it’s a difficult task to teach our team, make them learn and improve, asking them to document as they have no experience of working before. Second kind of team is very passionate, hardworking, and might exceed expectation but it’s also important to know, doing more doesn’t mean getting more done, so it is a process that takes a lot of effort, and not everyone is going to be with our startup for long time. But with second method we realized startup will form a team like no other, people who trust each other, believe in the vision and work for the dream that is shared mutually.
Once we are done with validation, and building team. Here comes the daily work and documentation. Get ready for late nights and early mornings. We need to ask our team to execute founders ideas and there’s as well, now is the time you will see an early growth and we are bound to be very excited, seeing our startup grow but soon feedback will start coming and startup will need to work on it as soon as we can making sure we correct ourselves and change as soon as we can. It is going to be tiring because we are going to make tons of mistake, team and we need to realize customers are always right and we need to make sure we provide them with what they want. We will try to document whatever we do, and team will not be as prompt as founders may want them to be, but this is what it is, we had decided to go with second type of team, they will learn and yes it will be frustrating at times. Communication within our company will be a struggle, but startup will finally figure out the right way for it and team. Learning from daily operations is an ongoing process and founders will have to build a culture within team, to keep all the best things as part of our team and to reflect that in who ever new comes to join in. We need to trust your team, its them who run the company.
Time to stress out, stress isn’t bad it makes you do things faster, quicker, and work more, but we need to know how to manage it. Times will come when we don’t see expected growth, team will try to run as many experiments, add more people yet it will be kind of stuck, you are desperate for growth now and it just seems like its not working. With startups if you’re not growing your dying, this particular thought will give founders sleepless night and team will be struggling to work efficiently but sooner we will find a way, a spark of hope and startup will again be back on the block working and making things happen. Finally, tech will be working, team will be meeting target and documentation and measuring growth is exciting. Its going to be stressful, don’t give-up, its worth it.
What does it mean by having a good growth, what’s the pattern? If that what you are seeking for, measure your progress give your team a goal, usually companies with 4-6% weekly growth at early stage are the once that bring changes to ecosystem anything more than 7% is great, getting distracted by media is so obvious have to focus on work, meeting founders often helps, only they will understand your challenges and believe in your mentors and team. Its not an easy ride with a startup and even while scaling up, if its difficult to start its 100 times more difficult to scale and working hard long hours does make a difference.
Do leave your comments and suggestions, and please ignore any mistakes that might be with spellings and grammar.