misbahashraf-blog

[misbahashraf-blog]

Things missing in Indian early stage funds and things that need to be fixed?

After shutting down my venture 2 years back, I had decided that I wanted to build global consumer products. It was a very sad decision for me to leave my own baby and start looking for another journey, where I could learn and create impact with my hustle and experience of failing at an early stage startup. I started working with startups and small funds in Bay Area and Singapore, where I interacted with a lot of entrepreneurs during which I always tried to help them in whatever way possible.

During these interactions I became used to a feeling of incompleteness, it sat on my shoulders like a ghost. I felt a vacuum, an urgent void. It became clear, that something crucial is missing here in India. Most of the time, these young entrepreneurs came to me with similar underlying problems like finding the right target audience for the product, product positioning, launching the products, etc. But, I used to worry that “Why were they coming to me when they had actual business people, the real investors working with them?”

Is money the only thing required to run a business? If that were so then rich people would never fail at startups. It seems that Investors are just writing the cheque and are not able to give any proper direction required for an early stage team.

I’m very fascinated by the way Chamath is building Social+Capital in the Valley and creating some incredible impact while backing companies likeFront and Slack. They are not just writing the first cheque, but they have built a fantastic in-house team that works with these startups very carefully to scale faster. There are some others also like Binary Capital, Peach.vc, First Round Capital, a16z, KPCB which inspired me to dig out more about Indian early stage funds. What I discovered was very discomforting.

After researching more, I found out that most of the time startups get investors just for the sake of few thousand dollars, and there is no other tangible value. I have started talking to more people in my network about this problem and tried to understand, what are other funds doing in different countries?

I have found these are the necessary things needed for an early stage startup:

1.Early money: Some money which they could use in hiring the right talent required the most in their venture and proving product market fit for themselves. But, they shouldn’t take these funds as investor money, but they should take these funds as a liability so that they could understand the value of every penny spent. They should understand that this investment is the minimum amount of money their business is supposed to make now to succeed.

2.Right set of mentors: Startup Founders are mostly first-time entrepreneurs, and they’re building their ventures because of their passion for impact and change. But, they need people who can engage with them on a daily basis and advise them on the things they shouldn’t do. They need people who’ve experienced similar problems while building their businesses.

Right now, founders usually get some famous names to join on board just for the name’s sake. But, the value and impact are missing. No one is guiding or helping them hire the right team, deal with customer acquisition and overall, build a viral product. Founders are busy trying out everything available on this noisy internet, rather than act on available experience.

Founders’ top concerns are talent and customer acquisition.

In last two years report of First Round Capital, It has been clear that access to right talent and right ways of customer acquisition which retains for a long time are the biggest problems for an early stage startup.

Entrepreneurs have started focusing more on customer numbers and have forgotten the rule of super users which can let you scale business with hockey stick curve.

I had began dating Indian early stage funds to see if my experience with multiple early stage startups can add value to their portfolio companies. I have dated almost every stage funds here in India and came up with the conclusion that nobody can understand the things I wanted to tell them. These early stage funds are a critical part of the Indian startup ecosystem, and they are missing the key point of value creation, which is more important than just writing cheques.

Never reduce a target. Instead, increase actions. When you start rethinking your goals, making up excuses and letting yourself off the hook, you are giving up on your dreams! — Grant Cardone

Most are following the “how things have always been done” attitude. We have to find our true north and push past the default.

Our ecosystem needs to change in the way early stage funds have been working till now. We need to think more from value creation perspective. Otherwise, we won’t be able to get the best out of the potential our country has.

So, what are the possible changes that could be done?

1.Community Building: If you are an early stage fund, why don’t you build a community of founders in the house where everybody can help each other with their expertise and network rather than fighting with each other. Early stage startups can’t survive by just competing with each other; rather they have to help each other to grow. Right now, a16z and YC are killing it with their amazing community and network of founders.

2.In-House Talent Team: Experience and attitude towards learning always beat everything. Why don’t we put together some smart people in the house who are struggling to find their next series of their life? While they are fighting to find the next magical wave, they could add incredible value to your portfolio companies with their skill set. Since they are about to start the journey of starting up, they would do it passionately for learning and impact also. Design and growth are two skill sets which are hard to find, and it shouldn’t necessarily to any early stage team 24*7. So, an early stage fund could put together the talent pool of these skill sets in the house.

Grant Cardone has given an interesting 10X rule. The 10X rule is based on the idea that you should figure out what you want to do, goals you want to achieve, and multiply the effort and time you think it’ll take to do by 10.

Step that I took

What is the solution?

I started thinking as to how I can contribute in filling critical gap of this ecosystem and started my discussion with Amit Agrawal. We began meeting multiple startups to understand the things they are currently looking forward to. During this journey of meeting more than 200 entrepreneurs and investors in a year, we found out that significant value creation for an early stage startup is missing.

Most of the early stage startups have the common problem of not being able to figure out product positioning, the right product and how to monetize their traffic. And, these issues have become the reason of failures and shutdowns. I have always taken tangible Growth as not an option for an early stage startup

Either you scale, or you die.

So, in order to build a bridge for the gap we thought that WHY not combine our experiences of building products and grow it globally.

Finally, we have came up with idea under India Goes Global in June 2016 to help startups on this exciting journey to the path of 10x using our experience with growing different products from 0–100 M USD in revenue. Through this mission, we are trying to contribute to this startup ecosystem and help India create multiple profitable businesses.

I have been in a place where you have to pull the curtain on months of pain. Nobody should have to be in that position. Let’s put the effort, together as a fraternity, to make a great ecosystem of opportunity and learning.

Yours Truly Misbah

[misbahashraf-blog]

Dear Hustle, Happy 5th Year Anniversary!

5-year long roller coaster ride.

It started back in my high school days. I belong to a very small town, Biharsharif, a few kilometers away from the land of learnings, Nalanda. After my class 10th, my parents sent me to Bansal Classes, which is situated at “so called” hub of engineering coaching centres, Kota. I had never heard of IIT till class 10th. But, my parents sent me there so that I can get into the best IIT and have a good career ahead.

I faced first failure in my life when I was not able to crack IIT JEE and couldn’t live up to my parent’s expectations. I felt bad. So bad that I got depressed.

My whole Kota Journey gave me the real experience about Life and Success through my coaching teachers. I found awesome friends like Prashant Kumar, Sagar Patidar and Irshad Alam.

First Year :

My life was full of adventures and accidents. I met with an accident in 2011 and got few stitches on my head. It gave me the freedom to pause in life and think how I wanted to go ahead.

Life is a rat race. And, we keep running without knowing where or when to stop. I think everyone should take a break and rethink from scratch as to what you want to do in your life.

Stop. Think. Learn. Analyse. Restart.

I discovered “Entrepreneurship” using this time and decided not to get any degree anymore. But, my parents convinced me to continue studies while working to take a degree.

My bug of discovering entrepreneurship lead me to meet Imbesat Ahmad, and help them in organising events for students preparing for iit. It helped me to meet a lot of awesome entrepreneurs like Saif Khan.

The best advice I’ve been given was to ‘never stop learning’, because the moment you give up and think you know everything, you end your journey of becoming a leader. At that point in life you should just quit.

Second Year :

From the first day of college, I knew where I wanted to go in my life. I started HUSTLING every single day since then, for my dreams, for innovation and for change in the society.

I have been bankrupt many times. Many times I had to skip meals to save every single penny. I started living on my own. Attending college from 9am–5pm and then working from 6pm to 6am, till the sun came up. The sunrise was my hope for a better tomorrow and a desire to learn something new.

I heard a story in my childhood in which a guy carved a road between mountains through regular and authentic hard work. This story always helped me to keep my motivation up and flying when I was about to fall. You just have to keep going till you can, see the beauty of never giving up .

Being authentically passionate about what you do.

I got to meet two amazing entrepreneurs Prasad Ankit and Mohd Waseemwho were building Touchtalent at that time. My desire to learn pushed me to take that leap and I started helping them with marketing and building community. It was my first attempt at learning basics of marketing.

Third Year :

From that day, I have never stopped. I got lucky and worked with some amazing people in the first 2 years of my journey through college. From a content venture to selling t-shirts to colleges and corporates, I have never left the chance to learn and grow. Being with early stage startups, I had to wear multiple hats, and which pushed me harder to learn multiple things from operations, talent management, finance, and marketing.

Your mind is like a rubber band. The more you stretch yourself, the more you can learn.

You have to keep working hard till you attain escape velocity fueled by your will power to fly away. And, HUSTLE is the only key to achieve this in your life.

This year was full of ups and downs. I met another road accident and again had to take bed rest for few weeks. But I got to meet this amazing entrepreneur cum brother Abhineet Kumar, who is always ready to push you ahead when you are at it. We started The UnConference, a platform to bring global change makers on a single platform. We worked together on few projects. Learned and improved from every mistake we made.

I also met a sales HERO who can sell anything to you. Veer Mishra started out by selling parathas and now he caters the best available technology to the world.

Fourth Year :

After 2 years of painful HUSTLE, I took a year gap to start a payment venture Cibola with the best people in my life.

I am a strong believer in serendipity and Pulkit has described it in the best possible way here. I have met one of my co-founder Utkarsh without any expectations of starting something together soon.

I have met awesome mentors like Shamir Karkal and Prateek Gupta because of serendipity, they became mentor cum friend and helped me to learn a lot of things about life. Even meeting this crazy Hustler Nikunj Jainhappened without any expectations, who later became our first investor. He writes some awesome stuff on brutal truths of Life here

I wrote about my learnings from First 100 days of building Cibola with the coolest people on this planet here.

We had to shut down our venture in November 2014. It was very painful to see my creation die. As a Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl wrote in, Man’s Search For Meaning, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

I had decided to move on and search for new quests of my life.

Benjamin has taught us that relentless entrepreneurs have an internal locus of control, which means they believe they are personally responsible for the outcomes of their lives. Lou Holtz has famously said,

“Life is ten percent what happens to you and ninety percent how you respond to it.”

I have written about this year’s experiences and learning more in detail here.

Fifth Year :

Tim Grover has said “Pressure can bust pipes, but it also can make diamonds.”

“Implementing extreme ownership requires checking your ego and operating with a high degree of humility. Admitting mistakes, taking ownership and developing a plan to overcome challenges are integral to any successful team.”―Jocko Willink

You miss gold with every shot you don’t take. And most people don’t want to take that shot. Fear of failure paralyzes them.

I started with my hustle while trying to make good relationships with best people around me. It helped me to learn a lot of things and opened a lot of new dimensions for me. The satisfaction of overcoming challenges and obstacles is sublimely greater than any momentary pleasure.

If you want to create something powerful, you must be willing to fail in all of your nakedness. There have been times when I used to send emails and wait for months to get answered by my recipients. Every time I failed at something, I tried to take lessons from that and kept trying till I got the right result by doing improvements in my efforts. And, Eventually, they used to reply, after seeing my consistency and HUSTLE.

The concept is: Do something and don’t stop until it’s complete, no matter how long it takes.

Patience is the key behind the success of most people.

I always knew that If you haven’t had your big break yet, keep going. Consistency is the most fundamental virtue to becoming the person you want to be.If you want it bad enough, you will do whatever it takes to make it happen. If you don’t, you won’t. Almost everyone can sprint for a while. But most burn-out and quit. Everything meaningful in life is a marathon — meant to test your commitment and it will. And, I know I am running a marathon and I can’t burn out.

Starting my sleep with Sunrise leading to few or no hours of sleep made me achieve a lot of things. I got to work with the best people around me and made some good friends during this journey.

From working with early stage startups like Spangle to working with 100 M USD Fund, Hatcher. I have learned the ethics and discipline of running a business more than all skill sets from these places.

I will write my next post on How I made 100,000 USD in a year while attending college and how can you do it?

I Learned how to scale user base from zero-100k in a month without spending a penny. I’ve made some amazing friends like Supriyo, Rabi, Amitt , Aman and Dhruv who have always motivated me during my ups and downs of my life.

Friends like Payoj and Abdul became my moral support during extensive HUSTLE days. Serendipity has always helped me to meet most amazing people. And, I made friends with Diwank because of this lifestyle. A person with whom you can talk about anything. A genius who has answers to any query you have. This crazy hustler I met through acquittance, Akshay Pruthi, who helped me to learn how to run your startup like bootstrap after raising funds.

Met this amazing guy Ayush Shukla, 5 years back on Orkut and finally, got to spend some weeks with him. This guy helped me learn ethics of finance management.

I always wanted to have a mentor who can challenge me daily. And, I have found that in Amit Agrawal. It took us a whole year of talking, sharing and brainstorming before we got into any professional contract. He made me learn the art of building businesses from 0–100 M USD in revenue by learning the hacks of doing sustainable businesses.

We have recently launched a campaign at India Goes Global, a mission to help entrepreneurs to take their ventures further and faster using our experience of scaling businesses. India Goes Global is an initiative that lends strategic advice to Indian internet startups to maximize their potential in a hyper-connected world. It helps driven entrepreneur teams with working products to scale up by leveraging global business trends.

If you need any help, just ping us here

[misbahashraf-blog]

Apology Post

Hello Readers, Thanks for always supporting me and motivating me to pen down more. I am writing this post to let you know about an inadvertent mistake done by me.

Here is how it happened -

I read a startup hiring framework and thought it could be valuable for startup community in their biggest problem. I then added some points using my experience with hiring but unfortunately never saved the edited copy which included credits to Rob Grady!!

Which meant I ended up sharing the framework of Rob Grady which is indeed awesome…..this post got shared everywhere for getting feedbacks and guest blogs.

Some of you expressed hurt at plagiarism and I totally understand the pain. However, we all live in a world on turbo batteries and I guess in the hurry of publishing, I never proof read enough.

FYI, I was not even using it for commercial use, just wanted to share the good knowledge with people. My sincere apologies to everyone who felt bad about this.

Having said this, lessons are learnt - I will try this mistake never happens from my side again. Thanks Misbah

[misbahashraf-blog]

First 100 days of my start-up

For every start-up, first few days are the basic bones for your company future. It is a tough journey full of ups and downs, when every morning starts with a bad news and every dawn ends converts that bad news into something good.

I am putting together few key recommendations that I have learned hard way.

Team : Building the right team is very important, consider it a marriage 0f 7–8 years because you will see them every day. From viability to funding, everything depends on these fundamental elements. Even a bad cop in your team could break up the whole team apart. You have to be smart while choosing them. Hire fast, fire fast method is the best one to be followed.

Problems: You should know about the worst and the best of your company. It is good to know about the loopholes in your idea. Only then, you can solve them and execute your idea in a better way. Ignoring them could create a risk for your team.

Funding: Most of the funding is done on the basis of the team ability to execute the market fit product. Anything you hear other than ‘yes’ is bullshit. Move forward, you are wasting your time in front of them. Smart investors take decisions in first 30 seconds of your pitch and next 3 minutes they devote in deciding whether their decision is right or wrong. Don’t wait for those who make you carry forward discussions through mail. You have to convert the leads into deals on the spot.

Early adopters: Your early adopters are the representative of your product. They will help you move around the community. Listen to their feedback carefully. Try to talk to each user personally. Improve your product if certain features are missing out. Early adopters could help you save a lot of time by not doing wrong things.

Be Confident: Start-up journey is not an easy one. It will screw up your life. Give it a long thought before stepping into it. But, whenever you are in, never look back. Never lose your energy. It is a learning curve. You will learn a lot of stuffs. You will know what is working or what is not. You might need to pivot. But, don’t pivot from your dreams of changing the world.

“It is a wild ride. Be prepared for it.”

[misbahashraf-blog]

Read. Think. Travel

I've always believed that if you fail, your effort was not good enough. I've failed many times in life. But, after each failure I have learned from my mistakes. After failing miserably in IIT-JEE and inspired by the poems of Robert Frost, I decided to choose a road not taken for myself. I've always loved reading, travelling across the places alone, meeting new people and learning from them and their experience.

This interest of meeting new people has helped me in many different ways. I always wanted to start something of my own. And since I loved meeting new people and talk to them, I was able to understand their problems and thus, I was at a better position of solving them. 

During my freshmen year at college, I started a company to sell t-shirts, which eventually failed because of lack of motivation of other team members. Team building is the most important phase in any startup, believe me. But as people say, you learn from your mistakes. I also did. When we used to deliver t shirts, the delivery boy had to wait for around half an hour because people don't generally have cash at home. So people generally went to ATM and then pay the delivery boy. This process was irritating because as a startup, we ourselves used to deliver bulk orders sometimes.

I found this process very irritating and, wanted to solve this issue.

Left that tees selling startup and, started researching on payment industry. I was very happy because I used to meet different people from different geographic region daily. Every-time I met someone, I tried to talk about the issues faced by them in their daily life and during that time that I realized that payment industry is irritating for the end user.

Another event made me think more seriously about this Idea. One day, me and my friends were working over one project during night in his campus. We were feeling hungry and so, decided to visit nearest Tea Stall. Unfortunately, I forgot to carry cash. My friend rushed to nearest ATM to get some cash. But, as usual ATM was out of order. I had my phone in my hand and, I started thinking- “if I can make a payment from my phone to this tea stall guy that would be pretty great." After returning from Tea Stall, I discussed my idea with my friend who had been sleepless since a few days. But, after listening to this vision of disrupting the mobile payment industry, he again became sleepless. We discussed continuously regarding the execution of idea and how exactly we were going to shoot this silver bullet to kill the mobile payment problem.

And, this was the first step taken in forming the foundation of my venture CIBOLA .