Failure is part of the process. Fail and learn

Introduction

The journey has always been difficult, and it is getting more and more challenging. Kenney Jacob and I met while we were doing our undergrad in computer science and engineering way back in 2001. Both of us came from villages in Kerala and have no idea of the world that we were going to face. However, Kenney's parents were well educated so he had exposure to computers. I never had much experience even using a computer prior to 2001. I opted for computer science because I felt it is going to be a revolution when every brick and mortar business is going to use computers for daily use. For me, the best option to learn is to learn from someone who knows it. At that time, Kenney was the best bet for me to learn.

Chapter 1

Kenney was an audacious internet user and have been downloading a lot of engineering materials from the internet. I was still trying to learn the basics of a computer. Few of my colleagues were mentioning that if Kenney itself is an internet of engineering books. One day he said if a lot of colleagues in our college need those books, why not sell them online. At that time, it did not amuse me but I have joined hands with him anyway. After all, it would be great learning for me. He then decided to put those on a Yahoo Page. hey, at that time even Wordpress was not launched. We identified in order to sell those books you need a payment processor. There were not many payment processors at that time and India was definitely not ready for that either. So we researched and found there is something called VPP, a service offered by the postal office of India. It was amazing, that at that time we just send them through the post office and they will take care of delivery and collect the payments. In the second year of engineering, we were mostly learning how to write CDs faster and pack them properly, so the customer receives them without any damage. To our surprise, the orders received from Yahoo pages were substantial that we could not study and just focus on packaging. So we never knew how to scale it or how to turn them into proper e-commerce or a publishing house for engineering books. We made some good money and then we shut it down. After all, the products we were selling is copyrighted to someone else. So we shut down the business to focus on more simple things.

Business Outcome - Failure due to increasing demand

Lesson learned

1. Never underestimate the power of the internet
2. Digital is the future of commerce
3. The simplest idea may be the smartest way to start

Chapter 2

At that time we were in the third year of engineering school. We had to do a minor project as part of the curriculum. By that time, I have learned computers and programming and was very passionate about it. The minor projects were eye-opening for us about the computer programming skills that we have acquired. We have developed a great download manager in Java on our own. It was one of the best and it became news and a lot of students started asking our help to mentor or do student projects for them. It was a money-making machine at that time. We were literally doing a lot of projects for students and it was easy money for me and Kenney. But it started to become so boring and becoming less and less scalable.

We realized that the internet is our best bet for scaling any business, Kenney and I decided to start a project called "Project Guidance". It was a simple site mainly a forum where we were helping students to do engineering projects. Our team was grown by then and included Sajith (one of the best engineering brains I've ever met), Sarath, and Manoj.

At that time, every student in India knew about the site. It was a great success and we started ways to monetise it. Adwords was our best bet and it was generating an enormous amount of money for students who were still studying. I think there would be a handful of companies in Kerala which were generating free cash flows as we did at that time. It continued for over 1.5 years and then Google understood one thing. The clicks generated from our site was not valuable but they said we were involved in Click fraud, so they are banning our advertising account. We had never been involved in such activity but we knew Google banned it because the quality of traffic they were receiving were engineering students who don't have any buying power. Yes, Google banned our account and still, Google owes us $15K.

Business Outcome - Moderate success leads to disaster in a single day

Lesson learned

1. Never rely on a single source of income for revenue generation when you run a business
2. Find a mentor when you see success and don't believe that you are always right.
3. Always find new avenues to invest when you have free cash flow

Chapter 3

We have graduated from engineering school with a lot of valuable learning than regular engineering students. And we knew getting into a job should not be our right path. So we chose a different path, we joined with a few folks from another engineering school which includes Sanjay Vijaykumar, Sony Joy and a few other folks. Our team, Kenney, me, Sarath, Sajith, Manoj had a lot of digital knowledge and Sanjay and Sony knew how to sell. It was a perfect marriage we thought at that time and we started MobMe wireless Pvt Ltd (Torque Technology solutions first). We had a lot of mentors at that time from Technopark, so we were the first successful student startup. We started building products for the telecommunication industry because Sanjay & Sony was really good connections with Vodafone, Idea. I am still very proud to say we were able to build some great products for the industry. It was selling like a hot cake and generating revenue. We also raised a few million dollars in investment as well. But things were not going right because we diluted our shares a lot. We had several disagreements with product focus and internal conflict of keeping a lot of founders who were not bringing any value. The majority of them left after engineering graduation because they never thought the business will succeed but soon they came back after we had some success.

Cash was sitting in hand and we decided to reinvest into something more. At that time, my dad was the best bet. He is not educated any of us but he knew how to invest in real estate. He turned our real estate investment fivefold within a span of 18 months.

We parallelly started a project guidance institute as well because things were not going well inside MobMe wireless. The company was generating a lot of revenue from the initial products we made and founders wanted to focus on a product that is completely new in the industry. I was very firm and was less confident in the product focus.

The project institute was fully funded by our team and was doing really well the first year. That's where I met one of my best friends Prasath (the best mechatronics genius). Please reach out to him if there is any electronics project. Prasanth P S <[email protected]>. The second year is managed by another person and it did not succeed. We decided that it is not something we can scale or pursue properly.

At that time we decided to part ways with MobME Wireless. The new product was a complete failure but they learned the lesson and entered into a new segment, mobile payment. India was witnessing a mobile revolution and it eventually generated funds from Sequoia MobME later was acquired by True Caller.

Business Outcome - Business was successful but our team hasn't made enough return as we should have.

Lesson learned

1. Never start a business with a lot of founders. It is very important to find the right team to be successful.
2. Never take very early stage angel investing which may dilute your liquidity
3. Don't quit a business you started due to an emotional issue (I was very emotional about the products we made and the revenue that was generating).
4. Never start a business without your complete involvement

Chapter 4

We as a team (Kenney, Sanil, Sajith, Sarath & Manoj) decided that we need to improve our business skills and decided to pursue an MBA or Masters from good schools outside India. Kenney, unfortunately, had to stay back, so I and Kenney started Ayruz Data marketing. I moved to the UK to pursue MBA from Strathclyde Business School. It was one of the top 30 schools based on financial times ranking back in 2009.

In a year of learning, I thought I had so many experiences because of my failures in business. But I have been working with people who had been in different industries for at least 15 years. I felt like a kindergarten student in many group exercises. But the only place where I find the most knowledgeable was in terms of entrepreneurship and connecting with people. No one in my cohort has any idea how to start a business and grow it. They have never seen it at all. It was eye-opening for me because the lesson learned in entrepreneurship was huge. In my entrepreneurship lectures, I was always a case study.

The MBA really shaped my maturity and how I think about my prospective customers. I realized my strong area is marketing and analytics. Ayruz was serving small startups and very small businesses back then. The majority of them were acquired in the UK but the servicing business for SMEs was a headache. Customers had too much expectation and too little to pay. I met Michael Flynn and worked with his team at his agency. That's where I started to understand the importance of focusing on fewer large customers. I met Tom Smith, one of the great digital marketers I met in my life. I have learned a lot of new digital things from him.

Mike has been a pioneer in the marketing industry, especially in the Sports industry. Mike eventually realized the skill I had and he became one of my best buddies to learn from. He was one of our large customers for several years. Ayruz has acquired so many large customers and team members were growing but as an organization, it was not growing. I had to work enormous hours to acquire customers and nurture them. It is difficult and is been very difficult to manage as well.

Business Outcome - It is been 13 years and still trying. I am making progress slowly at a snail pace.

Lesson learned

1. Servicing business is a great revenue maker but it is not easy for a founder to be not part of the day to day operation.
2. One business model is always risky, so we expanded different revenue models

Chapter 5

Covid-19 was another shocking revelation to me. In two months 60% of the recurring revenue projects were stopped. Mike was bootstrapping his new venture with me. It was the only light at that time. I was involved in the project from the idea stage to executing the project. Kenney and I really felt the heat of not having different revenue sources from products. We have been discussing ideas for products for many years. Every day it was client objectives that were distracting our product focus. It took almost two and half years to finally agree on two products. We may have discussed over 1000 ideas but it was always there. We made several mistakes in the past creating products that is early in the market.

It took us two years to finally agree on products that we believe will generate a significant impact.

Introducing our new products DynaQR and GameOn+.

DynaQR

Unlike the regular QR code, the dynaQR is something unique because it can uniquely identify a package. It can be used for authenticity tracking, running awareness, loyalty campaigns, tracking the entire supply chain of products. Please be in touch with the product owner to learn more about how you can supercharge your consumer campaigns with DynaQR.

Major customers - TetraPak, Nandini Milk, Verka, Pran (mostly large consumer companies in South Asia). We are looking for partnerships to expand to Europe & USA. Please reach out to me.

GameOn+

Our most ambitious project which potentially can become the biggest revenue contributor to Ayruz. A product to attract audiences who are looking for legitimate ways to sports streaming of major sports. We just soft-launched it without any promotion or social media post and have already generated significant traffic traction. Please contact the product owner Vishak Kumar if you have any suggestions?

Business Outcome - Testing in progress

Summary

It is been 20 years since I have been introduced to computers. It has given me a lot of learning and ways to lead a fairly decent life. To me, learning and a fairly decent life is a measure of success in my entrepreneurship journey. And I am planning to continue this until I find the right business that can make me self sufficient.

I would also want to thank a lot of my friends and business friends without them I would have not been able to make progress. Jill Schultz, Ashish Kapoor, Fabio Verdelli, Sophia Bellos, Alexandre Donegatti, Michael Flynn, Tom Smith, Stephen O'Malley are a few of them, whom I should be very thankful.