Notion Of Making It Big Is Overrated
Success mantra Perseverance — a dogged determination to succeed no matter how thin the odds are.
The driving force behind your journey I have been lucky to have chosen the right space in the right market for my business. I owe it to the ability to survive the very rough journey in our early years. We did things the hard way — bootstrapped for five years till Series A funding, survived with no money during the financial crisis, grew with zero marketing spends.
Business advice Listen to your investors and the Board, but always do what you feel is right for the business. No one feels for the business like the founders do, and their intuition often helps them take the right decision even if some of their Board members think otherwise.
Tips for budding entrepreneurs The notion of making it big is overrated. Small wins on product, customer love and partnerships matter. Spend time in understanding the market and building the right product and tech for it. If you get organic growth with a good product, you will make it big eventually, but be prepared for a long, tiring, challenging, bumpy journey. To make it big, you need to make it small zillions of times.
Government support The government has a limited role to play in ecosystem creation, beyond policy, tax sops, and cutting red tape. It is up to entrepreneurs, investors, mentors and large corporates to take advantage of it to build an ecosystem.
The team Your team is one of the two most critical determinants for startup success. The other is the market you are going after. Startup teams need to not just complement each other’s skill sets, but also have a culture that constantly questions the status-quo, raises the bar, and pushes each other to the limits of their high-performance zones.
The inspiration Elon Musk. His ability to come up with big audacious goals that benefit humanity, and then his habit of applying first principle thinking to assemble the right resources to execute that vision one bold step at a time. Everything he does is pretty inspiring.
The next step At ixigo, we are working on solving a lot of complex pain points of Indian travellers, and our vision is to make travel planning, booking and trip management a hyper-personalised and friction-less experience. We believe we are the most tech-intensive travel player in India, and will continue driving many industry-first experiences as we already have. Within the next two years, we aspire to become the most used mobile travel application in India (we are already
No. 2).
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