But You Learn 50 Times More When You Run The Business Itself

I always wanted to set up a business of some kind. But I worked for Deloitte for about a year or so first. Then I decided to start Instadel – a delivery service. I seemed like a feasible business option. I hired a person to build a website. It didn’t turn out the way I had visualized it. He reworked on it. And it still wasn’t what I was looking for. So I hired another person. And it seemed okay now.

But I was not getting much traffic on my website. And I was wondering how I could change that. At that time, Patanjali products were doing very well. So I asked my grandfather to speak to the owner of the Patanjali store in our area. He did. And he was amenable to making me a distributor for Patanjali products.  I thought I would get some traction on my website after this.

But something else happened. The Patanjali products started doing so well that we started doubling our business every month. Yes, logistics means travel-related business. That’s okay. Not everyone can understand business jargon. I’ll try to make it as simple as possible so that you can relate to what I say.

So, I had the logistics, delivery boys and team in place with my InstaDel website. But not as many customers as I wanted for my other products. It was during this phase that I met Rakesh. He had started a service on WhatsApp. He would get anything and everything done for people. Booking flight tickets,  fetching groceries and stuff like that. It was doing very well. But they were getting plenty of orders and were unable to deliver things to their customers because they had no logistics to support their service.

So we teamed up together. That’s how Genie started. The first thing we did was to create an App. And we had some really nice moments with Genie, you know. We have even delivered a mother’s milk to a baby regularly. The mother was a working woman and she relied on Genie to deliver her milk to her baby. Once we delivered a wedding dress to a bride to be. And a passport to a person who was at the airport and had forgotten it at home. We had several such experiences.

 

Of course, not all was hunky-dory all the time either. We quickly realized that we needed an in-house technical person. And that is how Rakesh’s friend Shrikesh joined our team. Definitely. We fought regularly. Every day. Several times. But we patched up within 30 minutes too. We had a business to run, after all. What kept us together was that all three of us had the end-user in mind and we went out of the way to ensure that our users got the best experience. Every day. So they started relying on us.

Once there was a strike of some kind. So our delivery boys could not report for work. So all three of us personally delivered things to people. What worked in our favour was Satyam popcorn. The people in Chennai are very fond of Satyam popcorn. And we ensured that we delivered this popcorn to them whenever they felt like eating some.

The Satyam popcorn people realized that we had boosted their business by several notches with our delivery service so all of us were happy with what we were doing. Of course, our expenses often – very often – far exceeded our profits. There were several instances when we had absolutely no money in our bank accounts and had to pay salaries to our staff the next day.

What did I do? Borrow. What else. From family. Who else. We had to run the business, you know. But all three of us were very clear about our breaking points. We knew we could borrow from our family members too only up to a certain limit. So when we could no longer continue running Genie, we decided to shut shop.

Of course, it was a tough decision. But we had to do it. But guess what happened after that. All our customers vouched for us. So many people supported us over Facebook and felt sad that we were calling it quits. But a fortnight later, this venture capitalist got in touch with us and said he was willing to fund us and asked us to continue with Genie.

See. They don’t get a share of the profits and stuff like that. Venture Capitalists get equity/shares in the company that they fund. Venture Capitalists invest in companies like ours. When we do well, the value of our shares goes up manifold and they earn quite a bit more this way. And they don’t invest in just one or two firms. Venture Capitalists will invest their money in about 10 upcoming firms. 2 may do extremely well. 4 may do good business or break even and the other 4 may sink.

But at the end of the day, they earn much much more than if they invest their money in fixed deposits. The value of their shares keeps increasing if the company does good business. And the share value will be different in all the 10 companies that they have invested in. But overall, Venture Capitalists know that this is a better way of earning money on their investments.

That’s how Genie was back in business. But we were still a small company. And we knew it was time to scale our business now. So we were looking for slightly bigger companies that were working on similar business models. Swiggy was willing to buy us out. But we knew we would get lost in a company of that size.

We were looking for a smaller company where we could get the freedom to explore our own ideas. And that is how Genie merged with Dunzo. Our entire team was absorbed by Dunzo. We manage about 15,000 orders a day now. Swiggy manages one lakh orders per day. Ah. I know that is a huge number.

Yes, we are just a delivery service. We will get you whatever you want from whichever store you want for a fee. No. The fee is not decided upon the weight of the object like courier companies. It is decided on the distance. Yes, we have added Time to the lives of our customers. You don’t have to deal with traffic, crowded stores or serpentine queues to get what you want. We do all that for you –for a small fee.

Yes, a lot of people have realized the value of online stores and delivery services during the lockdown. Online stores are doing very brisk business now. Yes, we all have cushy jobs at Dunzo. But we are not in this just to earn money. At the end of the day, we want to set up our own enterprise. And we are working towards that end too.

Absolutely. I keep telling this to everyone. If you want to set up a business – start early, when you have no other responsibilities to fulfil. You may spend 50 lakhs to do an MBA. Of course, you will get a good network at the end of it. But you will learn 50 times more when you run the business itself. And you can never learn such things in any course. That much I can assure you.

Yes, I know Supr Daily. And I’m glad you like their concept. We too have set up a warehouse now. And we too may move in that direction eventually, where we will supply all that you want along with your milk every morning. But right now, we are doing very well with our delivery service itself so that may take some time to evolve. I’m glad you realized the worth of online stores during this lockdown. And I’m happy to hear that you appreciate what we all are doing. Thank you.