Our first speaker was James Joseph, founder of Jackfruit365, on “Excess capacity is better than capital”, he was a former Director in Microsoft. He happened to eat the same dinner course which was served for Barrack Obama and to first lady of USA in 2010 in Mumbai at Taj Hotel and one of the signature items was VarqiKumbh (mushrooms), and immediately he knew this dish could have been easily replaced with raw jackfruit which he used to enjoy in his childhood in Pala, a small town in Kerala. On chatting with the chef, the chef said “Jackfruit is seasonal and not available at all times, it took very long hours to prepare and on preparing it masks the whole place with its aroma”.

He found out that in India around Rs.405.40 crores worth Jackfruit is thrown away as waste. He decided to convert this inferior Jackfruit to a superior class. He soon realised that jackfruit is sweeter and can be used in pie instead of apple pie, and also raw jackfruit is more nutritious and have more fibre content than potatoes. He saw McDonald’s Veg Burger in India was a big hit so decided to sell Veg Burger with raw Jackfruit instead of the potatoes. Even though Jackfruit Veg burger was much tastier he found out that to distribute via cold chain was lacking infrastructure in India.

Luckily the help came from an old contact, Dr. Koshy whom he had met in a train ride; he was into spice export business and recollected how they used dehydration process for the spices. He soon found out from Dr.Koshy’s son that freeze drying was the best solution instead of cold chain. With this new technique the package’s weight was reduced by 80% and could last in room temperature for 365 days.

Sharing this new dried jackfruit package with the chefs from India and abroad, he soon was surprised by the variety of recipes created by the chefs and they liked this package since it was readily available and required less time for preparation. So he dropped the idea of selling Jackfruit Veg burgers and decided to leave the creativity to the experts to try out new recipes with his new ripe and raw processed Jackfruit packages. Meanwhile his idea and mission got much media publicity and with that business investment offers also came from several investors but he had to turn down those offers because none had any experience in the Food Industry.

Now he needed huge capital to purchase the machineries for processing and packaging the Jackfruit, but with lack of capital and no guarantee whether customers will buy it or not, the risk was too high. Drooling down with this issue, he was struck with a brilliant idea to share the manufacturing units of any company who had excess capacity and wasn’t utilizing the units full-time. This paid off; he was able to produce his freeze dried jackfruit package in low cost and with no additional burden of huge capital, the other company was also happy with this deal since it was an added revenue for their unproductive time. Next big hurdle was to distribute the product, again using the same idea of sharing the unused capacity; he was able to partner with e-Com site that was focussing on food products for a small commission for each item sold through their channel.

In spite of Food Industry trend to spend cores of rupees in marketing campaign, he employed less costly social media marketing. He also understood that managing cash flow was very important because he knew some startups which failed in order to showcase more transactions for the investors, they gave product/service for later post-payment collection but this couldn’t sustain their business and soon the cost to collect was more than the actual revenue itself.So he was careful to ship the item only after receiving the amount.

Luckily for him his product was well versed with Chefs in five-star Hotels, nostalgic NRIs and mother’s sending it as a gift. He was successful in re-positioning the jackfruit to a superior food.

Our next session was highlighting the Lean Startup Techniques jointly by Rajesh Sukumaran, Cofounder of Finahub Technology Solutions and Radhesh Radhakrishnan, VP of Nibodha Technologies.

The birth of any startup is an idea and the idea should address a customer problem and solution. But the customer problem and solution are just hypothesis which we are not sure of. Ideas are cheap and acting on it is really expensive and most often the developed products fail. Well this where Lean Startup Techniques comes into picture, it’s a practice to quickly validate our idea and reduce the product development cycle.

Stage 1: Get out of the building and interview the customers, learn and understand their reactions. 1. List all customer-problem hypothesis associated with the idea 2. Consider one hypothesis and identify all the assumptions in it. 3. Take the riskiest assumption and test to see if it’s true with at least 5/10 customers interviewed. 4. If less than 5, then you have to pivot or else preserve.

Stage 2: Study the product market fit using Minimum Viable Product Lean StartupTools:

(1) To validate your idea- http://www.javelin.com/experiment-board.html (2) To understand your business models – http://businessmodelgeneration.com/downloads/business_model_canvas_poster.pdf

(3) http://youtu.be/Kzpvs9_vIOM

 

Next session was by Prabhjot Singh Bakshi, Business partner, Microsoft India on Introduction to Microsoft Bizspark for startups. Microsoft is offering $150 per month of FREE Azure cloud services for 3 years for startups. All you need is a startup website and fire in the belly. To Signup for Bizsparkhttps://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/signup/default.aspx

 

 

 

Green Felicitations! 🙂

A big thanks to our Headstart Kochi Volunteer team to make this happen – Yadu, Remesh, Shaheen, Vinayak and Ajoe. Write by: Ajoe