PDF: Explorations in Entrepreneurship Podcast - Ashutosh Ananth

Explorations in Entrepreneurship Prof. Suresh Bhagavatula Scaling, Sustainability and Entrepreneurship - Podcast with Ashutosh Ananth Yeah. Hi, welcome back to our podcast. We're on the fifth...

Explorations in Entrepreneurship Prof. Suresh Bhagavatula Scaling, Sustainability and Entrepreneurship - Podcast with Ashutosh Ananth Yeah. Hi, welcome back to our podcast. We're on the fifth episode of Founders FOPPA. Thanks a lot Ashutosh for coming on. Great to have you back. I, you said that I you know, Taught you one session online. We are looking at this online medium right now. So Ashutosh is, young serial entrepreneur. He's on to his second venture right now. He's making sustainable printer paper. And one of the customers right now is IIMB. So we'll probably listen to a story in terms of, How did he get into this? How he has started nurtured and gaining traction over the last few years. So welcome Asutosh. Why don't you tell us a bit about your journey, entrepreneurial journey before maybe right from your BBA days as well. Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me here. I think it's always great to be part of this. Part of the campus that, you know, you got some knowledge out of, and it's really exciting and definitely an honor. So BBA, yeah, that was actually the most exciting time. I think for any business student when they are in their BBA, more than theory or looking at their CIs or assignments, they start thinking of B plans. I think I myself would have come up with almost 20, 30, business plans, whatever it may be, if it was feasible or not, but just for the sake of brainstorming, you know, we would do that a lot. And it was actually even my co-founder is from the same class, but yeah, I'll get onto that later. And BBA is when I started my first venture. I was in my third year and my cousin approached and said, let's start a business where his mother used to make these instant foods for him to carry when he travels to Japan and Korea. He used to travel a lot to the Far East and being a vegetarian was so tough for him. So his mom made some instant foods and all his colleagues started asking for it. So when one day in a function, he said, you know what, let's let's start this as a business that is definitely a need. And you know, there's probably a few key players, MTR and Mayas. I think there's room for more. Okay. That was the idea. So we started a company called Express Feast © All Rights Reserved. This document has been authored by Prof.Suresh Bhagavatula and is permitted for use only within the course "Explorations in Entrepreneurship" delivered in the online course format by IIM Bangalore. No part of this document, including any logo, data, illustrations, pictures, scripts, may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means – electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise – without the prior permission of the author.  Explorations in Entrepreneurship Prof. Suresh Bhagavatula right from when I was in college and the idea was you add just water and you have preservative free homemade meals anywhere on the go, right? And this was a flash dried or Yeah, not freeze dried, but this was more of a roasted you remove the moisture by roasting. That's it. We didn't do any freeze drying process. It was just add hot water or add water and cook. So it's very slow process of heating. Not so, it is fast. Few used to get done by eight minutes, few takes about 10, 20 minutes. So if even, these are natural home methods actually. If you see, you can make dry poha at home. Just add hot water, you have poha that's edible. So it's something that was there from before. And that was my first venture along with my cousins. It did well. We got onto a few good companies like Indigo flights. And we'll be serving up may have eaten Sabudana. If it was on the menu, I would have certainly asked for it would have definitely been there. In fact, when I used to travel, I used to see people next to me on front of me, eat it. Like, okay, that's nice. What's your feedback? It was a good it was a good So it was just out of the blue, your cousin saying, let's start and without a thought, you just leaped in. I just leaped in. I just leaped in. I didn't know what else to do. I wanted to do a business, but I saw this to be a great, and they're great people actually, and it was a good chance for me to be mentored with them. So that was one of the key factors why I started that business with them. Post which I came out of that company. It's doing well. It did well. Yes. Yes. In fact, they were on Shark Tank season one also. Okay. Yeah. It's doing well. It has its own audience. It's doing quite well. Then I came out of that and I was in the YLP program in IIMB had a lot of insights there and during the YLP program is Where all this started but not necessarily into what I am doing right now. So to give you a bit of the story on my current journey me and my co-founder, we're both from Christ. We know each other from childhood, from school days, both of us. We graduated from the same college as well. And we were just having coffee one day and we wanted to just start © All Rights Reserved. This document has been authored by Prof.Suresh Bhagavatula and is permitted for use only within the course "Explorations in Entrepreneurship" delivered in the online course format by IIM Bangalore. No part of this document, including any logo, data, illustrations, pictures, scripts, may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means – electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise – without the prior permission of the author.  Explorations in Entrepreneurship Prof. Suresh Bhagavatula something. I had come out of this. He was in his family business and he was part time working in one corporate gifting firm. And I think let's do something. So you believe or not, sir, this, we started this business. This company was formed without any idea what we're going to sell or serve. We just said, let's start a company first. Then we'll figure it out. We did register. We we started exploring a few products and we had a few because I was in the FMCG space, some people started saying, asking me for distribution of unique products, right? Some Stevia based products. Someone came up with an energy drink. And so the idea was to take unique products and start distributing them. So we named our company Bun Pie. Bun Pie? Bun Pie. Bun Pie literally means distribute in Japanese. Oh, okay. So we just named our company Bun Pie and we started taking a few other products and started doing business with that. And in this journey, we found a interesting product called these plantable pencils, seed books. So the idea was once you use your pencil, you can put it in the soil and grow a plant. And it had ladyfinger, tomato, cucumber, all kitchen you know, kitchen plants. And, we started with these products. We supplied to Infosys, SAP, EY. We did sell them. We did, we did good quantities as a startup. It was less than two or three months and we did good numbers. In fact, we were the very first to start this in Bangalore. But what we realized was EY would not buy the same product again because it was given as a gift. It was a novelty. So all that effort of getting into such big corporates and then they buy it once and not again. We said, why can't we bring sustainability into an everyday use product? Right? And we started observing that A4 paper, printed paper was being used in abundance, not just in corporates. It was COVID time after that, right? And we saw hospitals using it so much. And that's when we said, okay, let's do something where, you know, it's an everyday use. You sell it to the client once. And you recur, recur. That © All Rights Reserved. This document has been authored by Prof.Suresh Bhagavatula and is permitted for use only within the course "Explorations in Entrepreneurship" delivered in the online course format by IIM Bangalore. No part of this document, including any logo, data, illustrations, pictures, scripts, may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means – electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise – without the prior permission of the author.  Explorations in Entrepreneurship Prof. Suresh Bhagavatula makes a lot more sense. So we did a lot of R& D. We got this product introduced to the market. We gave it to one client, one diagnostic center for six months. We did not go anywhere else because what if the printer gets damaged in other places? So we didn't know how much this would perform. So what did you do? Did you start making it yourself or did you buy something off the shelf and to see whether there's a market? So actually, so We didn't buy this off the shelf, we worked with a manufacturer, so a paper mill who we knew through a close contact, we worked with him, and got this product made, got done, yeah, made. Wow. So this is a very this is a batch product, right? You would have to give them a certain quantity of production. Correct. We did take a quantity, but we kept it in inventory and just gave it to one client. We didn't take that risk. We didn't. But did you do some experiments? Did you talk to some experts before you got this product? How did you even understand? You were selling poha and sabudana, and then you are selling pencils, which would be regenerated into plant. And now you're suddenly looking at a paper from a market point of view made sense that you sell ones and then there are several sales happen if it's successful. But for each of these products, the first one, at least it's homegrown, the technology mother was already making it. Yeah. The pencils are not really rocket science, you could figure something out, but this is a little bit of technology, right? A little bit of research. It is. So actually I would say we're at the right place at the right time. The mill, the mill owner who came up with this product with us, he had actually done a lot of R& D for about six years to try something here. And he's a pure manufacturer. He didn't want to be in the marketing and put a brand and this thing. He just kind of half created a product with a few variations. But did y'all know that earlier before you went to him? No, we did ask him and he said, okay, we have this and let's like work on this together. So we did work with him together. We tweaked a lot of it. Was he the first manufacturer you reached out to? He's known to us. He's known to us. So it was a common channel. Okay. So © All Rights Reserved. This document has been authored by Prof.Suresh Bhagavatula and is permitted for use only within the course "Explorations in Entrepreneurship" delivered in the online course format by IIM Bangalore. No part of this document, including any logo, data, illustrations, pictures, scripts, may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means – electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise – without the prior permission of the author.  Explorations in Entrepreneurship Prof. Suresh Bhagavatula we worked with him and we got this citation. So what's so unique about ours, even though there were other recycled papers in the market was ours was naturally white without any bleaching. So if you see other recycled papers, it comes either in a brown color or a little grayish color, right? Okay. In our paper, even though it is completely recycled, it is a little off white, it is more soothing to the eye and this happened without bleaching. So this is where how is it possible? That is something that these people have done? Yes. We did it together and it was Okay. Mostly goes into the segregation and the use of the raw material. So the raw material, the kind of raw material that you are using. Yeah. Okay. It's more pristine. It's more pristine. Okay. It's it is segregated, highly segregated and we you know, recycle that and we get this natural color without adding any chemicals to it. Oh, so this is because paper industry is also an extremely polluting industry because of bleach, right? Yeah. Yeah. And also taking off those cellulose, absolutely. It is. Deinking is very harmful. If you have to de-ink paper, you have to put in so many chemicals. You have to make paper white, you have to add over 18 bleaching chemicals. And if not treated properly, it does go into our rivers and agricultural fields, kind of pollutes that environment. So it is a polluting industry. This is where we thought we'll have better impact of, you know giving paper that is non bleached. Okay. That's where, but this pulp is where? Where does the pulp come from? All recycled paper. So we take waste from packaging industries. So let's say for packaging, you have a die cut, right? So there's a lot of excess around the edges. So we take those. Cartons you mean? Cartons. Not those cartons. I mean, monocartons. Okay. Let's say a medicine box maybe. Right. So there'll be non printed areas, which gets cut out. And when you make textbooks, though, again, the excess edges, which are again, non printed. Oh, okay. Got it. So we take that, and yeah, we take these kind of waste and we recycle. So these are all non printed, but in tinier wastage. Okay. So, so they were earlier being pulped together with ink products. So now you've separated them out and created a product just using these waste materials. © All Rights Reserved. This document has been authored by Prof.Suresh Bhagavatula and is permitted for use only within the course "Explorations in Entrepreneurship" delivered in the online course format by IIM Bangalore. No part of this document, including any logo, data, illustrations, pictures, scripts, may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means – electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise – without the prior permission of the author.  Explorations in Entrepreneurship Prof. Suresh Bhagavatula Yes. So, okay, which is a largest resource for you all in terms of raw material? It's packaging industry, sir. Okay. Largest. And they're happy that you're picking it up for them? Absolutely. That's what, that's one of their revenue streams. When we buy waste out of, that's a big revenue stream for them also. Not just packaging, second comes our publishing, where they make textbooks or notebooks and they have the edges trimmed off again. Yeah, and we have a lot of corporate shredded paper that we take. We do take a lot of old school notebooks, not necessarily. How do you aggregate all of this? These are so dispersely done, right? Yeah. So, is there an aggregator that you go to or you're doing it to yourself? No, actually we do take waste, but only in bulk quantities. In our startup, we don't have the bandwidth to collect a lot of waste because we had to send it in bulk. But when we take different types of waste, they go into different purposes of recycling. Not necessarily into making only our paper. Now, for example, if we take newspapers, we can make newspaper pencils. For our product. Yes. Right. And we do take a few other variants where we make a little slightly lesser GSM notepads, maybe. So we kind of segregate each paper for different purposes and then we recycle it. Okay. So now that you had your product, How did you start convincing people that here is something that you need to buy? Initially, it was a lot of knocking on doors and going to known people of course, the awareness on sustainability had built people were seeing, okay, if there's any other option for me to implement some sustainable alternatives. So easiest was paper. So let's say you have to do some kind of a water STP or any, some rainwater harvesting. It involved a lot of. Investments, right? If you want to do solar and all. But now as a company, everybody wants to go carbon neutral, right? Apple has set that trend and they want to you know, the Paris climate accords, they've signed a few of the fortune 500s. And when you look at the SDG goals again, By 2030, companies, individuals, organizations want to adhere to more and more SDGs, right? So for them, this became a good switch as the © All Rights Reserved. This document has been authored by Prof.Suresh Bhagavatula and is permitted for use only within the course "Explorations in Entrepreneurship" delivered in the online course format by IIM Bangalore. No part of this document, including any logo, data, illustrations, pictures, scripts, may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means – electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise – without the prior permission of the author.  Explorations in Entrepreneurship Prof. Suresh Bhagavatula first switch. Easy switch. Easy switch. It was in the same price point. It was a sustainable alternative and it shows some change in the organization. So I think it was far more easier for us to start asking people. So even now, if , before when we started the business, we had to make a lot of calls and tell them we do recycle paper and, you know, approach, but now it's become so this thing that people search for recycled paper and re script kind of shows up and then they approach us. So this is re-script. Rescript. That's the name of the brand. So what happened to that previous venture where you said distribute, bun pie? bun pie is the name of the company. We are still bun pie, they're private limited as a company. Okay. But Rescript is the brand that we launched for our stationary products. So you have been successful in all the initiatives that you have started, right? Yeah. In the movie. So what would be. Probably let's say one of the significant capabilities as a salesman. Oh, significant capabilities. Because a lot of people refuse to do things because they're much more comfortable working on the product, building features. Then trying to sell. Correct. Right. Correct. But a significant success of an entrepreneur depends on how terribly to go and sell, which you seem to be doing in all your ventures. I think even from the first venture I started, I leveraged a lot on networking. It was a big catalyst for me. So I joined networking organizations. There's BNI, which you would have heard of business networking international. There were a few community based networking for me. I actually did a lot of my. Sales there where, you know, people gave me feedback, they started and kind of boosted my confidence also. That's where my sales trajectory would, you know, initiate and then we would build on leads. We would build on you know, any kind of generation. Yeah. Okay. But so for this paper, it was a little easier for you to sell than your other product. Initially people were not accepting the color. Few have even said, okay, I got that paper. But I wouldn't say a lot. I think 8 out of 10 sales pitches have always gone great. © All Rights Reserved. This document has been authored by Prof.Suresh Bhagavatula and is permitted for use only within the course "Explorations in Entrepreneurship" delivered in the online course format by IIM Bangalore. No part of this document, including any logo, data, illustrations, pictures, scripts, may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means – electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise – without the prior permission of the author.  Explorations in Entrepreneurship Prof. Suresh Bhagavatula So I'm not going to complain. It was, of course, better than any other product. So if you were to look at your product right now, there is sufficient success right now, right? Who all are buying your products? So right now we're supplying to good names would be Indian Oil Corporation. We have J. P. Morgan. We have selling to Wipro, DMart. And we recently signed on with Hero Motor Corp, Munzur Group. And Castrol recently onboarded us. IIMB, of course, and IASB has also started taking our paper. So these are a few. So was some kind of a snowballing effect that decided to get a big marky customer first and then get others. So who was the first one you tried selling to? First one we had, we did for Aster Hospitals initially and we did do Wipro was one of our initial corporate clients. So, okay. Let me probably like step back a bit. And go back to your early days in terms of now you started working with this person who was extremely happy that you came along because his expertise was in manufacturing and coming up with the product that's, acceptable by the market, but he didn't like going and putting it out in front of customers. Yeah. That's where you all came in. Right. So how did you all then convert this product into a market? Ah, so yeah. So like I told you, when we first started taking the product we did go to small steps, right? We, during COVID, we tried schools, but schools were closed. We went to corporates, corporates were closed. So we saw the only functioning hospital. And we went all out on hospitals. So you would name it every neighborhood hospital we went, started knocking on doors and we said we'll give it to you at 5 or 10 rupees lesser and they started. We started with Columbia Asia then. Then after they converted to Manipal, I haven't been able to crack it, but Columbia started buying. They were the first to buy one of the first hospitals to buy from us. And we had a Shanti hospital also. It gave us a lot of confidence that the paper is being accepted. Right. And so what number was Columbia? In terms of knocking doors, this was your fifth, fourth, tenth, thirtieth, what? Somewhere in the top five. What? Somewhere in the top five? Yeah. Yeah. Oh, you didn't have to lose confidence. This is the last. No, no, no. You don't have this story where you just were giving up and No, no. The © All Rights Reserved. This document has been authored by Prof.Suresh Bhagavatula and is permitted for use only within the course "Explorations in Entrepreneurship" delivered in the online course format by IIM Bangalore. No part of this document, including any logo, data, illustrations, pictures, scripts, may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means – electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise – without the prior permission of the author.  Explorations in Entrepreneurship Prof. Suresh Bhagavatula last door you knocked and that again, this happened through BNA, right? So it was a referral connect. So when there's a referral, there's a little more legitimacy gets established. Yes. So that's where our selling started. And yeah. So you asked how we created that market rather. With paper we did start getting more clients. Then we started different products in the same thing. We started notebooks. We started journals. And with notebooks we went to schools. And schools teach so much about environmental education. And children are so aware. So, in few stalls that we had kept before, they used to come and say, you know what, I want to introduce this in my school. I want to go to my principal's cabin and tell her that she has to switch to this kind of paper. So you had ambassadors? We had ambassadors. And they were so happy to take it. So we started creating a market with schools and now we're catering to about 25 schools as of this year. And corporates wanted to give different journals. Swiggy was one of the first ones who, what journal we make journals for corporates where they give it as onboard their onboarding kits. Okay. So kids, so who are fresh joinees will have to. So we used to make these journals and Swiggy gave us a very good order. They gave us about 20,000 journals order as a new year gift, they want to give employees. And again, that created another big market for us in general segment. So, but you were branding yours all over the world saying it's Rescript. Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. So did anybody look at it and come to you saying that, Oh, I looked at This gift from Swiggy. Yep. Would you be able to do something for us? I think the case here was better in schools. We, we, what do you say? Gave out notebooks for schools, right? So one of the few parents called, I saw my son's notebook. I want to use your paper in my office. Oh, that was a better That was also kind of a good, you know, parents came and asked. So, so, so tell me how big is this paper market? So just notebooks alone would be, notebooks I'm saying, is 6,000 crores. And copier paper would be somewhere in 30-40,000 crores. Wow, staggering numbers. © All Rights Reserved. This document has been authored by Prof.Suresh Bhagavatula and is permitted for use only within the course "Explorations in Entrepreneurship" delivered in the online course format by IIM Bangalore. No part of this document, including any logo, data, illustrations, pictures, scripts, may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means – electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise – without the prior permission of the author.  Explorations in Entrepreneurship Prof. Suresh Bhagavatula Yeah, just as per my study, research survey, 36,000 crore reams of paper were used in the, you know, on an average per year. And this is when a large part of India is also not formal. Yeah. Exactly. So a company like Accenture is a startup. I mean, as a tech company, right? They use 75,000 to 80,000 reams per annum. One company. So you can Did you tell them? I did. We are trying to get them to switch to our paper, but I'm saying a software company also uses so much paper. I think there was an attempt many years ago when I was working in one of these companies. That we should attempt to be a paperless organization, right? So therefore you set up a lot of paperless technologies where email, you mail each other presentations. Correct. But then you ended up putting printers in the, so easy for you to print, that you're printing for no reason. Other than to have a copy which we are so used to. Now we have devices all over. Yep. There is a lesser need for us to print because it is available on a device near you, you have iPad, phones, computers, right? But I don't think this paperless organization is just a myth. Yeah, I feel the same way. So honestly, It's always i'm sure you have to believe in that because that's the bucket you're going to send to anyway Yeah, but it's a lot more assuring when you read content on paper, right? We are being mentored by Mr. Chandas, who happens to be our mentor through NSRCEL our incubation also. So he's the founding CEO of ITC classmate right? So he mentors us, and he told me, people used to ask me the same thing. In 95, they used to ask me, why are you getting, starting a new stationery line in ITC when everything's going digital? And he said, look at now, paper manufacturing has doubled. Rather, people do use a lot of final drafts, and a hospital can't function without paper. Yes. They have to get these reports to be sent to another room, maybe a doctor prints out something to go into the scanning room. These kind of mid transactional, you know, it's all by paper, right? And we recently met with a very large builder Divya Shree. And she was telling me that, you know, the MD has to look at paper drafts in the end. He is not going to sign anything unless it © All Rights Reserved. This document has been authored by Prof.Suresh Bhagavatula and is permitted for use only within the course "Explorations in Entrepreneurship" delivered in the online course format by IIM Bangalore. No part of this document, including any logo, data, illustrations, pictures, scripts, may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means – electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise – without the prior permission of the author.  Explorations in Entrepreneurship Prof. Suresh Bhagavatula is on paper, touch, feel, read. Well, it's the same with me. I can't read on digital, digital. Like it depends as an, if it's a crime novel or some kind of a travel story, right? I don't mind reading on a device, but if it is an academic paper or a non fiction related to my work, I prefer a printed copy because sometimes I can write, write my thoughts, put a post it note on it. It is far more comfortable. Even from a, mental satisfaction point of view, that you're holding an object in front of you, which is paper, right? So, I've been reading up these new devices that R like paper. Yep, ink and ink and color. I'm looking at them. They're currently 40,000 not available in India as well, but I am eyeing those products saying that it looks like paper, you can write on it. Correct. But yeah, that is the final frontier for even the tech. Tech products that they need to look like a paper. Correct. No, they are amazing products. No doubt. In fact, I did a lot of research in the ink to see if we can release a rescripting tablet. If it makes sense, right. If you had to catch up with AI and all of that, but I think they're more complimentary. So these tablets are that they are a little more expensive to use, but paper has its own benefits. You know, the ease of flipping back and seeing and referring. Yes. that for sure, going back is much easier. So now that you said it's a very large market size, who controls this particular paper industry? Oh, they're big players. We have JK we have TNPL, ITC. ITC is one of the biggest paper manufacturers. They do ITC boards apart from the stationary supplies. So they supply to packaging industries and everything. So they're large players and, not, you know, Nobody should get us wrong. We're not saying our paper is derived from paper made from trees, right? So we're not saying it's just that we're not cutting trees and everything. We, we come here and say let's use paper more efficiently. So paper can be recycled six, seven times, but doesn't happen so. © All Rights Reserved. This document has been authored by Prof.Suresh Bhagavatula and is permitted for use only within the course "Explorations in Entrepreneurship" delivered in the online course format by IIM Bangalore. No part of this document, including any logo, data, illustrations, pictures, scripts, may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means – electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise – without the prior permission of the author.  Explorations in Entrepreneurship Prof. Suresh Bhagavatula Oh, is it? Yeah. Probably once or twice. So we want to add more layers into recycling. That's right. Create a more circular economy. That's it. That's it. That's our end goal. It's not like, we're not going to say, Oh, cutting trees is bad and that's for paper. No, we have limited resources. Let's make the most of it. No, no. I, I think we have a very wrong notion of forest. Yeah, it's not being, we shouldn't cut forest. I think wood is one of the most regenerative product, right? It's unlike, let's say, metal that we are digging out from earth and we're using it up. And there is very little regeneration of it. Forests are regenerative. You, if you plan things out, you can always have wood, you can always have paper, but you're basically saying that increase the cycle for new wood to come in. Great. So, so where would you want to go now that things are going well, there's Tailwinds. Yeah. You're moving quite fast. Where would you want to go in the coming years? For the brand personally, my desire was always to build a consumer brand that is a national brand, something known to people. You know, they should recognize Rescript as a product and that is something I'm really working hard. Me and my co-founder, in fact, that is our goal. In we have set another goal in the environmental to save about 6 crore liters of water by 2025 because our paper consumes less than 50 percent of a normal, paper used. So we have these few goals that we've set on the environmental basis or for the brand. And for me as a personal goal, I don't know. I've always thought I should do something so well that I could be part of the distinguished alumni list of IIM. I think that'll be my biggest reward if it does happen, but that is one goal of mine. Okay. So, but one of the things that is very evident is when you create a new category, And there is money to be made in this category. You need to build moats for others to protect yourself from others coming in, right? Correct. Correct. So what are the kind of moats that you're building? So in our case, like I said, the way we've created this paper, it is a little hard to you know, recreate because of the kind of paper that we use outside. © All Rights Reserved. This document has been authored by Prof.Suresh Bhagavatula and is permitted for use only within the course "Explorations in Entrepreneurship" delivered in the online course format by IIM Bangalore. No part of this document, including any logo, data, illustrations, pictures, scripts, may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means – electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise – without the prior permission of the author.  Explorations in Entrepreneurship Prof. Suresh Bhagavatula You could have done it. Somebody else can do it. No, it does take a lot of trials. It puts a halt on manufacturing. It takes, it can happen. I'm not saying it can't, but it takes a lot of time and resources to do it. So someone who's willing to do that, of course, could enter the market, but And today we are happy, right? It is somehow contributing to the environment, creating a bigger market size. I don't think there's any fun in being the only company doing the same thing, right? We need to have more people in this. So how did you raise money for this? So we're bootstrap. Really? Yeah, yeah. We've been bootstrap. We just, received a seed fund from NSRCEL, Startup India Seed Fund, but we've not diluted anything. That's more of a debt, funding. So which you're going to give back? Very soon. Okay. But we are bootstrapped. It's we invested, me and Naren invested less than five lakhs each. That's it? Yeah. And we recovered our money and last year we've clocked four crores of turnover. And we're seeing, I think this year we're 10 crores of revenue. Started with Less than 10 lakhs. Less than 10 lakhs and a good contact. Yeah. And that's what, and then your ability to knock on doors. Yeah, absolutely. Okay. So tell me something about this co founder thing because In quite a bit of research, right? Co founders have is a very tricky thing. Yeah. And especially if co founders are friends. So there are any number of cases that we've had in the history where we have seen that co founding because I like hanging out with you. So I'm going to be, it's going to be fun. Yeah. Right. But things don't pan out that way. So have you all had a discussion in terms of who's going to do what, how the rewards are going to be displayed? So how do you do that? Absolutely. I think both of us bring good strengths into the organization and fortunately they're not overlapping. So the conflict comes when you have something that's overlapping in decision making. Right. So my co-founder, Naren he, his strength lies a lot in administration, financing, and you know, operations, these things, and I do not interfere in any of that. © All Rights Reserved. This document has been authored by Prof.Suresh Bhagavatula and is permitted for use only within the course "Explorations in Entrepreneurship" delivered in the online course format by IIM Bangalore. No part of this document, including any logo, data, illustrations, pictures, scripts, may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means – electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise – without the prior permission of the author.  Explorations in Entrepreneurship Prof. Suresh Bhagavatula And I'm very particular on branding, product, marketing, and sales, and this, where he doesn't. Come in. So we each have our own strengths that we play it. We're very complimentary touchwood. We're very complimentary to each other. Yes, there do come disagreements, but we've both established that if there are disagreements or any arguments, we both know it's for the best of the company. We're not gonna take what he said is wrong or what I said is wrong. It's a discussion at the end of the day and we're very clear about that. But you have had fights that kind of add ups and get lost your bugger. No, not yet. Fortunately, not to that extent. Because you tend to be also very easy with your very close friend. Correct, correct. That you can throw your words around. Yeah, we have that rapport, of course. But I don't think it's gotten to the seriousness of saying, you know, I'm done. Okay, so, so what's common across both of you? Because what people tend to look at when you're looking at co founders is that there's complementarity in their capability. But for you not to get to say get lost, there has to be certain commonality. So what is common across both of y'all? I honestly think it's that we both look out for each other. I honestly look out for him a lot. Anyone, anything says Naren, this, this, this, I will not allow that. And it's the same for him. So I think the interest of protecting each other in business, or if not business as a friendship has gotten a good essence. No, in, in, so, What is it that you like about him and he likes about you, which, which kind of holds both of you together? I think I respect a lot the few things that he can do, I, I can't do. So it may be from recovering our, females, receivers. He's very thing on that. He's so adamant on making sure we get money. Even if it is, DMART or if it is anyone, if they're not paying, he would go to the CEO's office. He did that for one big organization. I don't want to name them. Very big organization. They were not paying. He went to their cabin and for me it was like, we'll lose the client. Don't do it. Don't do it. You know, but I gave him that space. I understood. I respected his thoughts © All Rights Reserved. This document has been authored by Prof.Suresh Bhagavatula and is permitted for use only within the course "Explorations in Entrepreneurship" delivered in the online course format by IIM Bangalore. No part of this document, including any logo, data, illustrations, pictures, scripts, may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means – electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise – without the prior permission of the author.  Explorations in Entrepreneurship Prof. Suresh Bhagavatula on, you know, you can take that call. So it's a similar for me. A lot of branding decisions or any product decisions, which he may not like, he will let go. But you all are doing this without a discussion, right? Did you all discuss saying that? Yeah, we keep each other informed. No, I mean to say that here is what, You're going to be taking decisions. Yeah. Here's what so who's the CEO? He's the CEO. He's the CEO. He's the CEO. Okay. Yeah, you have I have no, I don't know. Okay, why not? I'm more interested in building like maybe when you're like, three crores, five crores. That role doesn't matter. What if you're like 500 crores and he's getting all the limelight, he's getting all the pictures being taken, flashed on nice big magazines, and you are working around, you're the ones making money. Do you think at that point of time there will be a conflict? No, no. I think I voluntarily, willingly would say you be the CEO, be the front runner and I would sit back. So, so you'll have taken decisions where say that you take a call. Yeah. So what are the decisions that he lets you take a call saying that, okay, I'm going to believe what you say. Right. If anything comes to customer relations, product, just making the product or anything in the printing side, the manufacturing side of that, And even in a lot of sales if there are a few negotiations where You know, it's quite crucial. I do take calls there as well. And of course his own clients, he does the same and I do the same. So we, we've had that. I think it's not structured or specific, but we have that understanding to know that that's yours. But have you seen any other co founder team not do well that you thought would have well. Absolutely. Okay. I have, I have, and I've seen them struggle. I've seen people not work, come out of it. But I have seen successful ones also. Yeah, it's good. Do you all talk in this and these are the Game plans or you let everything come organically or you have a game plan? We do have a game plan. We kind of review what we did last month the previous month and how to go about next We do come up. So how do you hire people? © All Rights Reserved. This document has been authored by Prof.Suresh Bhagavatula and is permitted for use only within the course "Explorations in Entrepreneurship" delivered in the online course format by IIM Bangalore. No part of this document, including any logo, data, illustrations, pictures, scripts, may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means – electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise – without the prior permission of the author.  Explorations in Entrepreneurship Prof. Suresh Bhagavatula You're a startup, like nobody wants to join a startup. You're not a tech product. He gets a good product, a nice product, but this is not going to get them to AI, ML, and some of these things that they would like to get to. How do you hire people? A lot of people who want to work with us, in fact, come from creative spaces. You won't believe our social media head is a lawyer. He studied law. He joined us when he was doing law and he stuck with us after he finished graduation and he is doing everything he's with us even to date. Why is he doing it in the sense he'd been like being a lawyer? I don't know but I thought he I think he thought this was more interesting and had a better and there's a lot of scope for creativity which he loved. We do have other people working. I guess a lot of creative people get extremely energized when they look at paper, right? Absolutely. Stationery brings in a lot of Stationery, right. Yeah, right. I've been to the stores in Japan where there are like five or six storeys of Yep. Mochi, you know. Yep. Stores which have, tons and tons of paper. Absolutely. Right. So Coming back to your co founder thing, you all have decided these are the things that you're going to be good at, those are the things that he's going to be good at, and that's continuing. Yes. Okay. There's a question that I wanted to ask you that I seem to have forgotten in the interim. Okay. In what way has being at NSRCEL been of advantage to you? A lot, sir. I really think the growth which we had this year, I have to give a lot to NSRCEL. To give you an insight, like the previous financial year, we did 1. 5 crores in revenue, and this year we've done 4 CR. A lot has been, Because one of the funds that we received, the seed fund, of course, did help us with more inventory and pushing out the product more than our mentor, Mr. Chandas, who, being in the same industry, who has built the biggest brand classmate in India for stationeries is showing us this route on how do you tackle this industry. When it came to school season he guided us so well on you know when you had to start paper for which reason region you had to start printing ready and these insights helped us a lot. So apart from that, even when I was part of Velocity, the sessions that we've had, the network that we built, all of this was of great benefit to you. © All Rights Reserved. This document has been authored by Prof.Suresh Bhagavatula and is permitted for use only within the course "Explorations in Entrepreneurship" delivered in the online course format by IIM Bangalore. No part of this document, including any logo, data, illustrations, pictures, scripts, may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means – electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise – without the prior permission of the author.  Explorations in Entrepreneurship Prof. Suresh Bhagavatula How did you find NSRCEL? I was part of YLP. Right. Right. Yeah. But apart from that, I think a previous cohort member referred as he was into corporate gifting and we were giving our products. So he referred saying, you know, join Velocity and who would not want to be incubated at NSRCEL. So I took the first chance. It's nice to know. There are a lot who don't want to be in this part of the world, Bannerghatta, getting through all this metro. So, let me go back to your YLP. Yeah. Right? That's been of interest because I'm kind of interested in online education. Yeah. That was an experiment that we did. Yeah. What was good about it? YLP, I think brought in a lot of focus in me. I didn't know what to do after ExpressVista, after my experience. So YLP, was it synchronous classroom, live classroom or recorded? We had both. So we all had both. We had both. We had modules online. We had modules offline. No, not offline. I meant to say when you're looking at the video, was the video live classroom or was it recorded? No, there were both in that also. Okay. We had both. We had pre recorded. We had live. Classroom session also. And what part of the program was pre-recorded? A large part of it was pre-recorded. A large. The IIMBx part, largely, is the pre recorded content that we used to consume. But in between, we did have live classes. We also had in campus classes. And they were the best ones in class in class. No, but that's not what I want to hear. What I really want to hear is how do you make online better? Because I think that's the future or at least something that we are attempting to do is how do you make offline more attractive? How do you make offline more attractive? Yes. So offline was like interesting for in terms of your value saying that, Oh, I didn't know this. So I think offline for me is still the better not offline. Sorry. Online. Okay. Yeah. Right. Online was, it did get interesting. So I was a person who used to take these courses in edX just to, you know, stay in touch with some new course, build your knowledge, right? © All Rights Reserved. This document has been authored by Prof.Suresh Bhagavatula and is permitted for use only within the course "Explorations in Entrepreneurship" delivered in the online course format by IIM Bangalore. No part of this document, including any logo, data, illustrations, pictures, scripts, may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means – electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise – without the prior permission of the author.  Explorations in Entrepreneurship Prof. Suresh Bhagavatula And, that's where I was introduced to the IIMBx also. And it was good for me because the teaching modules, it had a lot of interactive sessions after that, like after class, right? It could be question and answer, it could be discussion points and we had built our own through YLP we had our own class network, so we. But that was across the country. No, it was only for No, it's a YLP participants were across the country. So you all were interacting digitally. Digitally as well. Okay, so let me put you on the spot and say which part of the online course that you did that you still remember that I remember this lesson. I remember this lesson. I think, we had one lesson for it was not an elaborated case, but with strategic management about Southwest Airlines. Oh, that was something that was quite Reji was doing that as well. Yeah, yeah. But that was synchronous, I'm sure. Yeah, yeah. It was a mix of both. Okay. But yeah, you did put me on the spot. So we just had, we just told Reji, Reji, don't do Southwest anymore for some of the other things. People are complaining it's such an old case. Probably I tell him that of the entire course. Yeah. You remember Yeah. His case. Yep. So maybe you'll have some emanation to go back to people who are saying change the Yes. Yeah. I, I, I really hope he does. Okay. Okay. Yeah. So great. Nice talking to you. All the best. Thank you. And hope to see you succeed more. And I really wish for a paper product. From India to be a desired product in Japan. I think that will be your, that will be your absolute ultimate glory in terms of the Japanese folks wanting. Right. So wishing you lots of luck. Thank you for being around. Thank you so much. © All Rights Reserved. This document has been authored by Prof.Suresh Bhagavatula and is permitted for use only within the course "Explorations in Entrepreneurship" delivered in the online course format by IIM Bangalore. No part of this document, including any logo, data, illustrations, pictures, scripts, may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means – electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise – without the prior permission of the author.