Air, Muscle & Rhythm - Indispensable Pillars of Modern Business

Sales, Technology & Culture are three indispensable pillars of corporate & business growth in the 21st Century - The AI Century

I have been fortunate to work in both a big corporates and done my time in the startup world. My first startup, as you can imagine, from a garage. Not any garage but my living room… my living room as an international student doing graduate study in New York in a 10ft X 10ft room in a 6 bedroom ghost house built in the 1960s … where 10 of us stayed.. and where every foot step crackles through the hallways in the sub-zero cold winter days! Perhaps “Garage Startups” have a jinx to it! :-)

The first startup, I & a bunch of our college friends, kickstarted — https://www.behindwoods.com/

While I was only associated with this venture for only three years initially, the site / startup is among the leading online media outlets in India and is being well run by my college buddies.

Post graduate study, I was fortunate to work for Amazon for 14+yrs, bouncing about in 4 different orgs within Amazon and then finally hanging the boots with Amazon to jump all-in to my own startup Sigaram Tech (second innings).

At Sigaram Tech, After 2.5yrs of wearing multiple hats, going hither and tither to every block and talking with a variety of people at every level from diverse walks of life, the last lighting & thunder to strike our nascent startup was the COVID Pandemic!! Being in the food-tech space, this was an ELE — Extinction Level Event (Deep Impact). As entrepreneurs always do, we hustled, we pivoted and morphed into something else that can salvage some of the tech that we’ve built so far. The startup is afloat, and working towards a light at the end of tunnel, thanks to the indomitable faith and spirit of the current team!

At the end of 2020, I decided to part ways and take up a full time employment to both , pay for my bills, and to not be a burden to the startup itself. After a bumpy 9 months stint at AJIO.com as a the Vice President of E-Commerce Platform , relocated to Dubai as CTO of Namshi.com and exciting to be part of its growth story. Post Namshi's acquisition by Noon, I moved and currently working as the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Hyke.ai, part of Axiom group for the last 2+yrs.

Having worked at a large, innovative, power house like Amazon, having ruffled with two startups in my career, and having worked at leadership positions at three large corporate houses, I am writing this blog about — Important Pillars to build a strong successful business — to shed some learnings / retrospectives / insights from my professional experience. HTH — Hope This Helps!

The Air:

Being a techie, I made the classic textbook mistake of not appreciating the importance of Sales and Marketing. In both my startups — marketing, branding, & sales were mostly an afterthought and not meticulously planned and internalized from the get go. In retrospect, I can admit that this was a huge mistake.

No matter how good, how perfect or how pristine your product , your solution is — you are not solving the problem that you set forth to solve for your customers — if you do not market it to the world, if you do not build a recognizable brand that pops up on potential customers hindsight, if you do not “sell” your product to your “customers”

As you can imagine, an Entrepreneur / Startup , kicks off with the identification of a key pain-point that the founders want to solve and that which they believe is common pain point to many. Thus extrapolating that they can make a business out of it, if there were able to sell their solution (Product) to the “many” people who have the same pain point (Market). Thus sales is all about selling your product to the right set of customers — and hence the whole Product Market Fit (PMF) galore!

The PMF doesn’t happen automatically. The PMF isn’t happenstance as some might think. PMF doesn’t work out of magic.

It takes a lot of marketing, branding, and selling to get the word out. It takes a lot of marketing to make your product known to the world, to your customers. It takes a lot of selling to attract your customers and lot of relationship building to retain your existing customers.

The Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) varies a lot based on type of product, type of industry , and type of business you are in. Customer Retention Rate (CRR) is even more important to grow and retain your existing customers.

Attracting new customers for your product, retaining and growing your existing loyal customer base is the underlying fuel, the “Air”, that is paramount to any startup and businesses at any stage. Without the Air element, startups and businesses alike risk choking to death. Sales, Branding, & Marketing are the indispensable oxygen — the Air component — for sustaining life of a startup & mature business alike.

A lot of startups and businesses do also get this right part right, about sales and marketing. I have seen both early stage startup and growing startups sometimes doing an amazing job at branding, marketing and spending that extra CAC to register in the minds of their customers. This is a great early win.

Spending money to acquire customers is probably a necessity in the early days for many startups & businesses. Examples are abound plentiful. Taxi aggregators like Uber & Lyft, food delivery startups like Doordash, Zomato, Swiggy, E-Commerce startups like Myntra, Flipkart, Snapdeal, and a whole gamut of startups in the last decade have trampled on this path of “paying forward, digging into their wallets to acquire customers”. Deep discounting, multiple offers, wallet credits, free services, partnerships, value added services at deep discounts, are some strategies employed that weigh heavy on the bank balances but do give attractive topline growth numbers.

The holy grail, end-of-tunnel, hypothesis is that these customers will at some point payback bigtime and stay loyal that can propel the startup to even higher growths and profits!

While these are great early win strategies, these tend to fizzle out quite rapidly if the underlying “mote” or “differentiator” factor isn’t sticky enough. Transforming from a growth startup to building & running a sustainable business needs investments and focus on multiple dimensions, IMHO

The Muscle:

The Tokyo Olympics isn’t far behind us and as in the Olympics the one who runs faster, jumps higher, lifts heavier, throws farther, smashes more — gets to be the winner. All of these winners have at least one thing in common to be a “leg up than the pack” — more muscle, more power. For businesses in the 21st digital century, the race is on full-throttle in every imaginable dimension.

For a startup, this is where the 10X rule kicks in

The rule is pretty simple, if your product isn’t 10 times better, it will be hard to sell in a crowded market. You won’t be able to differentiate your product from existing solutions, plus customers won’t be willing to pay switching costs unless they’re getting a huge benefit.

This famous rule presented by Peter Thiel in his revolutionary book “Zero To One” is quite simple rule and seems perfectly logical.

Simply said, for startups & businesses to continuously “win the race” — transitively win the customers, win the sales pipeline, win the customer retention game — it has to offer a vastly superior product than the rest of the pack!

In the post COVID pandemic era, it cannot be more obvious than ever before that — almost every other company out there is either already a core tech company or is / wants to be a tech enabled company in one way or the other. This in part due to the irrefutable realization, even more so now, that technology is the muscle that powers & helps deliver the efficiency, the disruption, the “superior product” that customers can begin to love & stay loyal.

Just imagine, Google’s Search market share is 80%+ and it has been so since its inception 20+yrs ago. Amazon is THE dominant E-Commerce player for more than 20yrs. Facebook is THE dominant Social Media players for the longest period. AWS is THE dominant Cloud Services provider. Nvidia is zooming past its legacy counterpart Intel in market share because of its superior chip technology even though Intel has been around for 30+yrs more than Nvidia. Apple iPhone is THE largest mobile phone business that no one could even have imagined a decade ago and in this transformation, Apple has trampled upon a huge list of legacy counterparts who were dominant before , but nowhere to be found now, primarily because Apple had superior technology than others. Not to mention Tesla, now valued at about $1 Trillion , which is more than sum of all the 5 of worlds major automakers’ market cap put together.

Its just not with the biggie stalwarts alone, look at Uber trampling over legacy Taxi industry in a matter a few years, HubSpot winning the digital marketing software landscape, Wayfair winning the furniture Ecommerce vertical, and much more.

A lot of startups and businesses, while they may start off with big bang, tend to fizzle out as they lose track of nurturing & building the Muscle component for them to thrive and succeed in the competitive landscape.

In 2024, in the dawn of AI Revolution, technology keeps changing almost everyday. It takes a lot of effort, investment, dedicated focus to keep up with the changing times, changing technology.

A strong technology team is a crucial and decisive component of any startup and large businesses alike today. Just like offense is the best form of defense, staying ahead of the curve in technology is the best form ensuring the survival and success of any business today. A lot of older startups, traditional businesses fail to come to terms with this eventuality and go stingy on tech, which sooner than later backfires big time!

The AI revolution that kicked off with 2023 with Chat GPT comes with real, solid productivity improvements. It is by no means perfect, but just like Cloud Tech grown powerful & ubiquitous over the last decade, AI will surely only reach ubiquity much sooner than any other phenomenon in the history of tech.

It would be a blunder if corporations, business do not build the AI muscle and leverage its machinery prowess.

The Rhythm:

OK, I have got the Air (Sales) , the Muscle (Tech) — what more do I need?

Now that we have loaded up fuel tank(Air a.k.a Sales) for the car and packed with much needed horsepower (Muscle a.k.a Tech ), we need to ensure that the car is good for a long smooth ride!

The whole point of starting a business / startup company is to ensure that , after the initial humps and bumps, the business keeps running for longer periods giving handsome returns much more than initially invested. Why would anyone risk their career, fortune, sleepless nights and all the insecurity in starting off a new venture, when they could work for a well paying day job or go do something else?

There can be as many of 30,000+ auto parts — the nuts, bolts, IC engines, pumps and etc — that make up a simple car. The cars of the 21st century probably has even more parts with all the sensors, digital telemetry and more. All these thousands of parts need to work in tandem and alignment for a smooth ride.

Similarly, the company, business is all about the team. No one person can build a billion dollar company. No one person can wear 100+ hats all at the same time and do it efficiently. There are leaders of course. There are geospatial, epoch spatial heros , of course for sure. But there its never a ONE person company that can do it all. Its always the best team wins!

“The whole is greater than the sum of its parts “ — Aristotle

Aristotle’s age old wisdom of cannot but be more applicable here.

The startup, company, business with the strongest team has a distinctive competitive advantage.

A great culture becomes the glue that binds and aligns the entire team into a singular focus. A great corporate working culture sets the tone for positivity, collaboration, self-esteem, diligence, and effectively delivers better results. A great corporate culture sets the rhythm for achieving the company’s vision and encourages the team to uphold the mission dearly voluntarily.

The culture of the company is like the “ether” that has the potential to permeate into everyone soul & thoughts that pays back in multiples, if done correctly with utmost sincerity.

Getting the rhythm of the company, getting the company culture is the real hard nut to crack, among the three!

Having worked at Amazon for 14+yrs, yes I am partial to Amazon’s work culture, which I have shed some light in my other blog — No Mercy, No Malice, Amazon’s Tech Culture!

I am sure, I have heard many positive things about all the tech biggies Google, Amazon, Facebook (Meta), Twitter, Microsoft, Netflix and all of the 21st century internet / software companies.

I have also seen quite a lot of startups, companies, businesses, completely screwing up work culture and have had to pay costly repercussions.

Conclusion:

I strongly believe that in this 21st Digital Century, in the coming decade of AI, many of the old corporate policies, culture are outdated and need to consider full reboot / relook from ground up.

I strongly believe Sales, Technology & Culture are three indispensable pillars of corporate & business growth in this digital century!

I don’t think you can take one and leave the other, I believe each of these three are indispensable by in itself and together as pack as well.

What do you think? What your thoughts on pillars of growth for corporate in this day and age?