What does not kill you, makes you stronger!

I am writing this post sitting in office on a Diwali day. The mood is upbeat and there is a not a lot of Biz Dev activity to be done today (That's the role I play at dC). Also the fact that we Keralites don't celebrate Diwali and I don't have anything particular to do at home today.

It has been 1 year and 8 months at denture Capital, still very early days. I don't have any fatigue and it feels like day one. We have done a lot of right things in the last 20 months and our existence is proof of that. Most ideas don't last this long and I have personally given up on a lot of ideas very early - about 6 months into doing it or lesser.

I have learnt to see things in black and white. There is no ambiguity about what business to do and how to do it. Though the central theme remains the same, which is about doing great video content, we have found some business opportunities that take care of our bills. We are now in a position to scale from this comfortable position that we are in. After all, only if you move out of your comfort zone will you find new opportunities.

There was a time 8 months back when we were at the cross roads. Could have killed the business or kept it going. We kept it going and started helping brands with video content and started making money. This ensured we ran the business profitably. Some of the opportunities that we didn't have then were doing Original Content which was possibly the reason we started dC. But, this detour was necessary to keep the business going.

The good news - After about 8 months of building a solid services business, we are now seeing some opportunities of doing original content.

We have now made a very logical team structure. Dividing the team into two, one which works on projects that don't need very high quality of production and one team that only works on projects that need high production quality.

We are seeing business opportunity in original content, event video production, our own formats that go on our channel (paid for by clients), branded content and a lot of other formats in video.

Apart from doing standalone high quality video promotional content, we have also been working on some of the below mentioned ideas.

Branded Content - We have built a very unique brand identity and have about 200K followers as of today. A lot of brands want to ride on our reach to get their messaging across. They also want us to make videos for them. This is a very exciting business for us as we get to make video content and stories we like and we also get paid for it.

Events and smaller properties - This vertical of ours has been doing really well for the last few months with us bagging about 2 projects a month. This largely takes care of all the costs we have and also helps build our brand identity. Again, some of these videos are shown to our audience as well.

The agency business - We sign retainers with clients and help them execute any video project they have. Since this is monthly billing, this ensures we get plan for resources and get paid on time. This is also beneficial for the client as he can call us anytime and we are there. The only catch is that we normally work with startups and the startup ecosystem.

As content Creators - We have also been approached to create video content and shows. We are going to come out with an original soon.

One thing that I am proud about is the team we have here. The fun part is that everyone on the team except for me is born in the 90s. So it's a very young team that is driving the company forward. Learning is a pillar and we all try to up skill and help each other out all the time.

I am also thankful to my family for their support without which this dream would not have been possible. My wife and kid, my brothers and my parents root for me all the time. That's a big reason for comfort and a huge motivator.

We are going to scale the business soon, adding more clients which means we will also need talent.

We are currently looking for Writing and a Sales / Account Management talent. Ping me if you wish to talk or have anyone you'd like to refer.