'Start Up Koodal' a meeting was organised by Nativelead Foundation, a not-for-profit organisation that works towards new-age entrepreneurship development in tier II & III regions. Nativelead has been focusing on organizing talk shows and mentoring programmes for start ups in Coimbatore, free of cost.
At today's session, Pravin Shekar Chairman and CEO of KREA Angel/Social Investor was the keynote speaker, who gripped the audience through his talk on the topic 'Idea Validation and Value Creation for start ups'.
'To start with ideas, there are three stages which budding entrepreneurs or startups come across. During the first stage, one might feel that his own idea is actually horrible; at the next stage he/she would witness that his ideas are actually been implemented by someone else in the market; and at the third stage he/she would be disappointed to learn that their idea is already fetching money to someone else who has implemented it. Never keep rinsing over and over your ideas or under-estimate it. Ideas might sprout up every now and then but it is important to ascertain which of that is purposeful and worth executing. The sole purpose of Ideas should enable us make money' Pravin Shekar said.
Speaking on Validation of ideas, Pravin Shekar said, 'We would never buy a Car after just walking in the showroom. A lot of analysis and market research goes behind every purchase, right? And, that's called 'Validation of ideas'. Working on assumptions is the biggest mistake any start up or entrepreneur could do.
However, validation should be appropriate. Self-validation or validating our ideas with friends and neighborhood aunts doesn't make the validation complete. One has to discuss about his ideas to experts, critics and knowledgeable people to validate his idea. Through this process of validation, one should be thoughtful of putting a full stop for validating and jump onto to executing. As, many people never get out of the validating phase and finally fail to execute the idea itself'.
'You need to seed something inside people, so that they come back to you' said Pravin Shekar as he started to speak about Value creation. Citing a real life experience Pravin shared that "Once there was a vegetable vendor named Mariamma, who used to sell vegetables in a pushcart in a residential area in Chennai.
Most of the residents of the colony were her customers. As online culture bloomed, Mariamma's regular customers diminished. She barely made a decent sale. And, that's when Mariamma though of a smart and touching idea, which finally got back Mariamma all her loyal customers back in business. As we all know, in our culture, every morning ladies clean the frontage of their house and put Kolam before they start their routine chores.
And, that was what Mariamma targeted! Every day morning, Mariamma cleaned the frontage of all houses in the locale and put attractive Kolams', which made the ladies speechless. Women of that Colony appreciated Mariamma for reducing their chore and started buying vegetable from her again. In this example, what Mariamma did is termed as Value Creation. You need to seed something inside people so that they come back to you. Holding on tight to your ideas close to your chest will do no good. Let your ideas out!. said, Pravin Shekar to his audience.
At the interaction session, the participants raised queries on various issues regarding implementation of ideas and validation. Undoubtedly, Pravin Shekar's speech session was an eye-opener for all the participants, who were mostly start ups and budding entrepreneurs.