Founders Friday – Vikas Jha
Introduction to the series
What are the typical challenges faced by startup founders? What do successful founders have in common?
In this series, we find out how startup founders overcome key challenges to growing their companies.
This Friday, we are excited to feature Vikas Jha, founder of Alore.
About Vikas
From sailing across the seven seas as a merchant navy officer to accelerating startups as a venture capitalist, Vikas is now an entrepreneur and founder of Alore. During his time as a VC in the Netherlands, it took him 15 deals with 2 exits to realise that he enjoys creating products more than merely helping companies grow with money and guidance. Vikas eventually gave in to his entrepreneurial side and took the plunge to start his own company.
In 2013, Vikas quit his job and moved back to India to build a mobile app. It was a roaring success in its own right – achieving a million downloads within nine months of its launch. However, the challenges in monetizing the app and the immature mobile ads market at that time compelled Vikas to pivot his business. The search for scalable revenues led him to focus on Alore, an integrated CRM and sales software solution for small companies.
About Alore
In one sentence, how would you summarise your journey so far
What has been the most satisfying aspect of entrepreneurship for you?
What do you feel is the essential quality a startup founder must have?
How did you acquire your first customers?
What was the biggest challenge you faced in scaling your sales?
What advice would you have for someone contemplating leaving the corporate world to be an entrepreneur?
V:
1. Entrepreneurship is a change in lifestyle (not just change in job/role/position)
2. For most people, it’s a long haul. Plan it accordingly.
3. Focus on people and process from day 1. Build a great team and culture.
4. Don’t try to do everything yourself. While you might still manage to get things done, it will take an awful lot more time.
5. Time is the only currency. Don’t waste it. Speed does matter.
6. Aim to get to cash flow positive early.
7. Never take investment before you have proven your Product-Market- Channel fit. ( At least one channel).
8. The success or failure of your startup should not affect you.
9. Live by your principles every day.
What aspects were the most important when building your team?
If you had to build your team again, what would you do differently?
Did you know?
Using Alore, clients have targeted more than 1.1 million prospects, sent close to 5.1 million cold emails and generated sales pipeline worth US$ 5.4M!!
Read more about how they scaled from zero to 3000 signed up users in 12 months
Did you know?
Alore fosters workplace diversity seriously. At any point 50-60% of our employees are women.
We support remote working and our team currently works out of 7 different locations, with three of our long-term employees self-identifying as ”modern nomads”. Alore is all about culture, although it took time to get it right. We work with people we’d love to hang out with beyond work and be friends with for years and decades.
What are the top 3 tips you have for investor pitching?
V: Pitching to an investor is no different than pitching to your first co-founder or first client.
1. Sell a story, not a feature/product.
2. Know your numbers.
3. Know why you need the money (where will you spend and how much you expect out of it)
According to your investors, what sets you apart from other startups?
V: Different investors focus on different things. Our investors were attracted to the team – they said we had a combination of resilience and flexibility. Resilience to keep carrying on when things don’t seem to be going well, but also flexibility to pivot when necessary.
Any other words of wisdom that you would like to share?
V:
1. Think big, start small, scale quickly and never give up. If your idea or product isn’t working, kill it & move ahead. If you survive a battle today, you might win the war tomorrow.
2. As a founder, your job is to constantly find new bottlenecks at breakneck speed. Setup the infra to collect data as you create your product.
3. The only way you will find bottlenecks is by consistently learning from the data
4. You aren’t a failure just because you launched a failed product
5. Take good care of your mental health. Running a startup is an intensive affair. You have bugs to fix; probably few months of runway left; processes need improvement; parents have no clue about what you’re up to; co-founders have quit; friends crib that you never have time; you need to do a new fundraise; clients are not paying; you’ve put on weight because there’s no time to exercise; you cannot afford a vacation for your anniversary because you have product releases; heck you probably don’t have enough money to afford it. All this is real, but in the end, nothing is more important in life than your sanity and happiness
Stay tuned for next week's episode of Founders Friday
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