Author: yazdi

Motivations, Social Entrepreneurship

These 12 social enterprise ideas could change India

yazdi

Every year, international social entrepreneur network Ashoka’s chapter in India, Ashoka India, identifies and selects social entrepreneurs for a Fellowship every year. After a rigorous selection process, Ashoka India helps these social entrepreneurs with innovative solutions to social problems. Here are this year’s 12 entrepreuneurs and their ideas which could change India.

 

Farm2Food Foundation

The brainchild of Deep Jyoti Sonu Brahma, the Farm2Food foundation runs the “farmpreneur program” in government schools to encourage children to create and take charge of school gardens. Training them in technical farm skills, organic farming and agricultural trade, the idea is to inspire children to take up agriculture as an occupation. The foundation also engages with farmers to build their entrepreneurial skills. By 2015-16, Farm2Food aims to expand to 150 schools in 4 districts.

 

Carers Worldwide

Started by Anil Patil, Anil highlights and tackles the problems faced by ‘care-givers’. There is an increasing need for quality long-term care for people with chronic illnesses and disabilities. Usually, family members or friends play the role of ‘care-givers’. But it is not easy being one, as the pressure on carers is high and they do not have a support system. This is where Carer Worldwide steps in, by trying to create a world-wide network of carers who can create a helpful ecosystem for each other and augment their incomes. Advocacy is also an important element

 

LeapForWord

For those who cannot afford quality education, schooling in India can be a nightmare, especially because of the lack of teaching in English. To help students in rural India learn English and unlock their potential, Pranil Naik has designed a unique, plug-and-play model which democratises teaching and learning of English. From curriculum and delivery mechanism to after school classes, Naik has created an easy atmosphere for learning.

 

World Health Partners

With the public health system in India far from being sufficient for the needs of the poor, several informal healthcare providers, sometime referred to as ‘quacks’, act as the first line of healthcare defense for the poor (read a related TNM story here.). World Health Partners (WHP) identifies and orchestrates the relationship between different stakeholders including informal medical provider to create a robust network of healthcare centers under a common brand name, “Sky”, in underserved and remote areas.  WHP equips informal healthcare providers with further medical knowledge and diagnostic skills.

– See more at: http://www.thenewsminute.com/article/these-12-social-enterprise-ideas-could-change-india-32785#sthash.WYZtnh67.dpuf

Business Ideas, News

Toy car powered by evaporating water engine

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A group of scientists from Columbia University have created machines that harness the power of evaporating water, tapping in to an area largely ignored.

A floating, piston-driven engine that generates electricity to make a light flash and a rotary engine that drives a miniature car both use the process, with the exception of the car starter, everything runs purely on water. Researchers at Columbia University in New York said that evaporating water could one day produce electricity from giant floating power generators that sit in bays and reservoirs or from huge rotating machines, similar to above-the-water wind turbines.

Ozgur Sahin, an associate professor of biological sciences and physics at Columbia and the paper’s lead author, said: “Evaporation is a fundamental force of nature. It’s everywhere and it’s more powerful than other forces like wind and waves.”

Last year, Sahin observed that when bacteria shrink and swell with changing humidity, they can push and pull other objects together, and now he and his team have built functioning devices that draw energy from water.

 

http://eandt.theiet.org/news/2015/jun/evaporating-water.cfm

Finance

How to fund your own startup

yazdi

India ranks fifth in the world in terms of startups, with nearly 3,100 currently in operation. ” India is seeing high quality of entrepreneurs giving up large opportunity costs and it has never been witnessed before. This, combined with the Internet growth story, makes it a very attractive investment market,” says Gopal Modi, President, Investments, Orios Venture Partners.

In tandem with the surging enterprise, funds are flowing in like never before and the country is buzzing with options—venture capitalists, angel investors, incubators and banks. Currently, the number of active investors in the country include 172 VCs, 43 angel investors and 48 incubators. As much as $4.75 billion of VC funding came through in 2014 and it has already touched $3.18 billion in 2015. Flipkart made the biggest splash with its two rounds of $1.7 billion funding, the highest in 2014, according to Venture Intelligence and Tracxn!, two of the VC tracking firms.
The business environment is also turning more conducive, with the government setting up the MUDRA Bank, which offers a corpus of Rs 20,000 crore for small and medium enterprises. Besides, various banks and finance companies have stepped up to encourage the trend.

If this has got you fired up to launch your own enterprise, hold on. Stories abound of individuals who have raised millions of dollars with merely ideas and passion as collateral, but these often overshadow the struggle, sweat and tough negotiations that go into soliciting funds. Without a feasible business plan and working model, it is not easy to secure capital. Even if you do, keeping the venture afloat is difficult. A good start does translate into half the work done, but how do you go about securing the much-needed funds?

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People / Stories

eCommerce: Do you know the seller’s story?

yazdi

My name is Gurudatt. I have a business in Home appliances.

We are online sellers with Flipkart, Amazon, Snapdeal, Paytm, Shopclues and Ebay.

This is my experience as an online seller addressed to all the online buyers in India.

We sell Home appliance products of all major brands like Milton, Cello, Nayasa, Signoraware, Prestige, Tupperware, etc.

As you are aware, all the above mentioned companies have moved from “Inventory based” model to “Marketplace” model. “Marketplace” model means the eCommerce companies do not own any inventory, they enable sellers and buyers to connect with each other and transact.

We know that the eCommerce companies have changed the way we do commerce in India. They offer discounts, wide product selection across all categories, faster delivery, customer care support, user friendly return policies, cancellation options, product exchanges and thus made our lives easy. We can sit in our home or office and order anything we want and pay easily with credit cards, debit cards or cash on delivery.

So half a billion people are excited about eCommerce in India and this number is growing.

I will explain the other part of it – from a seller’s perspective. I will explain the hassles we face to keep you happy.

I was excited when I decided that I would sell home appliance products online through eCommerce portals. I made the list of products I wanted to sell and uploaded my catalog on the websites. On day 1, I got 11 orders. Who could stop me now? I was on a journey of infinite miles.

The initial days were good as I was just focusing on number of orders I got per day. I reached 10, 15, 30, 50 orders per day and I started dreaming of becoming a millionaire soon. Dreams are great but I was not keeping the accounts of the sales properly. One day, my charted accountant called to ask all sales and purchase details to file monthly returns, then I looked at all my bills, bank account statements, invoices, pending payments from eCommerce websites and could not find a logic or proper cashflow in my accounts. I started digging my invoices and got to know that I was losing more money on product cancellations, returns, logistics, and marketplace commissions than I expected.

On an average the marketplaces charge:

Marketplace commission – 15%
Domestic shipping per Kg – Rs 30
National shipping per Kg – Rs 45.
Fixed commission per order – Rs 10 ( for orders above Rs 250 )

Along with these, I incurred huge losses in

*Customers using products for a week and sending them back.
*Product damages (they tell us we can claim for damages, but they never do).
*Product returns (they come in a condition, where we cannot resend to other new orders. Most of the covers/corrugated boxes of brands are damaged.)
*Reverse logistics charges (When you cancel, the seller pays the return logistics charges)
*Marketplace commissions (When you cancel, we the sellers are still charged the commission).
*Product Cancellation (Paytm charges a commission of 15% + logistics fee of Rs 45, when you order and cancel in minutes. See the logic, the customer cancelled it by choice and order not yet shipped. But still seller has to pay commissions).

Please note that the average return rate for ecommerce in India is 30 %.

Our operational cost:

* Office Rent.
* Admin costs (I have 1 person for packing apart from me )
* Packing material costs (on avg Rs 15 per order package ).
* Transportation cost incurred for product purchases.

I do not have a retail shop, so my costs are minimum. But can you imagine the above expenses if I was paying Rs 1 lakh rent for my shop?

Logistics Issues:

* The pickup guys do not come regularly. If they skip pickups for 1 day, 30 % of our customers cancel the orders. And no company takes the responsibility. They tell you, “vehicle was not available”.
* We have to call the pickup guys every day and tell them the number of orders and whether they should send a van or bike. Amazon and Flipkart does a good job here by making the process automated. But Ecom, Bluedart, Delhivery teams are way behind in communications.

Payments:

* Shopclues take 30 days to settle the payments (so we quit selling there).
* Flipkart -15 days for settlements after the product reaches customer.
* Amazon – 10 days for settlements after the product reaches customer.
* Paytm – 8 days for settlements after the product reaches customer.

Sellers are made to compete for pricing. I have seen sellers playing the number game rather than serving the customer. Sellers are left with very little or nothing at the end. You will ask, why are sellers not complaining? I do not know. But most retailers who started selling online but gave up after 2 to 3 months, couldn’t communicate with anybody. They either get satisfied with offline sales or think it’s not for them.

Every day thousands of sellers are added with no knowledge of the rules of the game. The companies talk big numbers and sign them up. But the companies never call and ask you how you are doing or what problems are you facing with business or how they can help to grow our business…?

Taxation:

I bet 99.999% of charted accountants do not know how eCommerce taxation works. Not to blame them, but every company generates invoices in different formats and and when we sit for filing our returns, its headache.

Marketplace?

The eCommerce companies have total control on our inventory. They can block us anytime, make our listings inactive anytime, can damage our orders in transit, delay our payments, cut huge commissions, cut buyer claimed refunds without giving any notification.

Dear Online Buyers,

Who is paying for your offers or discounts? Please note, that to change your online purchasing behaviour, habits or addictions, eCommerce companies are just racing to capture the marketshare to get more online buyers, increase their buying trends, capture all your shopping data to raise the next billion dollars from venture funds.

There is nothing wrong in eCommerce companies modelling their business and pricing the sellers with such policies. But in the long run, this is a biased business model, where sellers are screwed to make customers happy. The discounts and offers do not go a long way and the customer expectations are increasing day by day. To meet those expectations sellers are giving up their margins and closing businesses.

I am still optimistic about my business and not quitting my journey. It’s a start. I am here to build not to fall.

Hope your support stays with all online sellers to serve you.

Thanks

Gurudatt

Founder & CEO

Smarthomez

Twitter handle: g_datt

http://therodinhoods.com/forum/topics/ecommerce-do-you-know-the-seller-s-story

Networking

4 Ways To Stay In Touch With Senior Executives

yazdi

Have you been to a networking event, saw a super star executive, ran up to him to chat with him, and later go home to add he/she to LinkedIn? For me, this story is way to familiar.

Unfortunately, time after time I let the potential relationship go cold and unfortunately this is a story I have to go through over and over again, and I hate it!

We show up at networking events, meet great people, follow up poorly, and later kick ourselves when we realize we should have worked harder to create a relationship. It’s a painful situation, and here are three tips to avoid this happening to you in the future. After doing this over and over again, here are 4 ways that I stay in touch with executives

  1. Schedule Time For Follow-up

The networking event ends at 10PM but the ‘networking’ continues. If you want to effectively connect with future partners and customers, your responsibilities extend beyond the drive home.

If you’re like most people, you don’t have a set routine for post-event follow-up. Reaching out on LinkedIn, sending an email, and entering information into your CRM are all vital to growing your business and your network, but it’s all to easy to just ‘do it when I have a free minute’.

If you want to get the most out of your business networking events, build ‘post-event follow-up’ into your calendar either that same night after an event or the next morning.

For example, I go to the Cambridge Center of Innovation every Thursday night, and collect at least 20 or so business cards. Lately, I have made it a religious practice to come home and enter in all those individuals in my LinkedIn. Especially if it’s LinkedIn, I’ll make it a point to include a short message:

 Hi Jack,

Great meeting you at the CIC last night. I can’t believe you also had a Labrador retriever growing up – they are great dogs. Let me know if I can ever be of help.

Thanks

Chirag

Co-founder, Insightfully

Click Here for more

Finance, Motivations

Crowdfunding Advice From the Kickstarter Consultant with an Amazing 100-Percent Success Rate

yazdi

Dubbed the “Crowdsourceress,” Daly has a unique knack for running successful Kickstarter campaigns. It’s likely that you’ve even helped fund a few of them. Through her company Vann Alexandra, Daly has helped launch and run campaigns such as the Joan Didion Documentary, TLC’s final album, the Standards Manual (co-created by her boyfriend and collaborator, Hamish Smyth) and Eric Reis’s latest book, The Leader’s Guide (which we wrote about here). The company has a 100-percent success rate so far, and has several new campaigns in the works, including NYCTV, an initiative to help independent video creators and filmmakers.
Daly has proven extremely adept at organizing others’ funding campaigns, but she had never attempted one of her own until yesterday, when she and Smyth Kickstarted a limited-edition poster with all 468 New York City subway stations painstakingly hand-drawn and arranged in alphabetical order. Perhaps not surprisingly, the project exceeded its $29,800 funding goal on the first day. As that project was about to launch, we caught up with the Crowdsourceress to tease out some of the secrets of her success.

Click Here for an interesting interview

Finance

Sidbi’s electronic platform to make it easier for start-ups to access institutional funds

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The high-end technology platform will enable investors to manage and monitor investments in small enterprises, while giving start-ups a one-stop shop for meeting their funding needs

Raising institutional finance – both equity and debt – is likely to become easier for early-stage start-ups. Small Industries Development Bank of India (Sidbi), which targets micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs), is setting up an electronic platform for institutional investors, angel and venture capital funds, start-up accelerators and incubators ventures to meet the financing needs of early-stage start-ups.

The collaborative electronic platform under the National Innovation Finance Programme (NIFP) is currently in the development phase in the Centre for Innovation and Incubation and Entrepreneurship (CIIE) of Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Ahmedabad. The high-end technology platform, backed with analytics tools, will enable investors to manage and monitor investments in small enterprises, while giving start-ups a one-stop shop for meeting their funding needs.

At the pilot stage, the electronic platform would offer assistance to 10-15 start-ups, before ramping it up to the need of 500-odd companies.

According to K I Mani, general manager, Sidbi, SME Development Centre, the development bank is playing the role of a “market maker” in this exercise, while collaborating with different stakeholders, including the IIM Centre and the German sustainable development agency, GIZ GmbH. “We want to bridge the gaps in the MSME system, rather than become the biggest lender to the sector,” says Mani.

Click Here for more

http://sidbi.in/?q=loan-facilitation-syndication-services-entrepreneurs

Motivations, News, People / Stories

How Ratan Tata is working in intersection between entrepreneurship, tech-led innovation and philanthropy

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Recently, when four students from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) approached Ratan Tata, expressing their desire to work in India and help solve a grassroot-level problem here, Tata did not connect them to the Tata Trusts which together invest Rs 340 crore every year to solve social problems. Instead, he plugged them to Paytm, an e-commerce company in which Ratan Tata made a personal investment this March.

Similarly, R Venkataramanan, the one man who has screened, consulted and led every one of Ratan Tata’s 10 personal investments in startups including six in e-commerce over the past 12-15 months, is not a hot shot investment banker, but a trustee on many of the charitable trusts set up by the Tata Group. Half-a-dozen entrepreneurs who Tata has invested in told ET that Venkatramanan was with Tata in every one of their meetings.