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Feedbacks: The New Stepping Stone to Success of the Start-ups

Mayank Khanduja, Vice President, SAIF Partners India
Wednesday, July 2, 2014
Mayank Khanduja, Vice President, SAIF Partners India
Saif Partners is the leading private equity firm that has been investing in India since 2001 and with $1 billion of investments under its management.

Gone are the days where the start-up space was considered as a future-less business. As the time went by, the era changed and so did the start-up ecosystem in India. We are now looking at that vibrant India which relishes the growing start-up space. The cost of creating a company or the product, which was once a threat to the entrepreneurs, now has gone down leveraging more and more births of start-ups. With the escalating numbers of venture funds, early stage funds and angel funds, the access to capital has become smoother.

Bringing the Customer under Limelight is Productive

As a major equity firm, our custom of funding to the appropriate start-ups depends upon numerous major facets. Currently the major challenge is having fewer companies that solve customers' woes. So primarily, we look for a company which focuses on the real pain-points of the customers but not on the market size. Because we believe ideas that solve a strong and real pain point of the customers will be productive in the long run. Even though selecting an apt talent in the pool of talents is a biggest challenge for the company, it becomes very essential to team up the right people for a perfect roadmap to the success. In this context, having a strong and solid team becomes an added benefit. The structure of the unit economics of the little grown-up company turn into a foremost aspect for the funding.

On the negative side, there are lots of companies which still need to espouse several alterations. The companies which come with the only motive of magnetizing the customers with their best and perfect products do not comprehend on the fact that they will miss out the opportunities of fine-tuning the products into a more ideal one. Accordingly, they take a long time in releasing the products into the market. With no sense of market, target customers and product distribution; lot of companies plunge into the market with one version of the product in hand.


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