No Profits from a profitable idea? Rethink on team building

By Eureka Bharali, SiliconIndia   |    1 Comments
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Bangalore: A great idea with a well set ROI proposition, still the business hasn't turned around profitable? It has to be the team. "All start-ups start with one unique idea to address customer pain point. While the idea seems very interesting initially it may not be true during execution," says Anil Joshi of Mumbai Angels. It is very important for entrepreneurs to validate their solutions. The members of the National Venture Capital Association considered management as the most heavily weighted factor when deciding to invest in a particular venture with over 35 percent voting for it compared to 25 percent for market opportunity in the targeted sector, 20 percent for business model and just 15 percent for the actual technology or the product. For instance, Inmobi, an ad network, where the team kept on working on viable products. However, the initial solutions didn't click and there was very little money left with the company. At such an instance, a company mostly would have come to a phase of closing down, however, Naveen Tewari, the CEO and the two co-founders Amit Gupta and Abhay Singhal were persuasive. Today, the company ranks as the second biggest mobile advertising network in the world, with nearly 17 billion monthly impressions combined on mobile apps and mobile websites. "We have seen many companies stuck post initial success, mainly due to lack of good team. One point which attract our attention is how flexible promoter is to add on resources where there are gaps," says Narayan. It is easy to demonstrate "proof of concept" but very difficult to scale up in absence of a right team. Hence building right team is a very important milestone. The team shouldn't be an amalgamation of all alike, rather as the saying goes 'it takes all kinds' i.e. different people who complement each others' skills. The best execution is possible only when there is business innovation than technology innovation. A look at the common phenomena, startups tend to hire more and more thinking of a better scale-up. But does that make sense? Hire aggressively, only when one can see the hockey stick growth, till then reserve wastage of the resources, as it would only turn heavy on the pockets.