“D” for Device, “N” for Normcore

As I turn a year older on this day, I figured it might be the right moment to take a timeline preview of my learnings in the entrepreneurial journey so far.

To get started, just let you onto few words of wisdom by Jack Ma, founder of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, that he spoke in a recent interview to aspiring young entrepreneurs.

On what entrepreneurs hopeful should do when in their 20s and before their 60s:

- Before your 20s, be a good student.

-In your 20s, make as many mistakes as possible to gain experience. Go to a small company; learn the passion, the dreams, and how to do lots of things at one time. In a big company, you will learn the processes as more often than not, you are part of a machine. It is also about not the company you go to, but the bosses you follow. A good boss will teach you differently.

- In the 30s, work for yourself if you really want to be an entrepreneur.
- In the 40s, specialize and do the things you are good at. The risk is too big when jumping around doing new things.

- In the 50s, work for the young people because the young people can do better than you. Rely on them, invest on them.

- In the 60s, spend time for yourself. Relax and enjoy life.

The entrepreneurial journey

While starting with entrepreneurship at the age of 29, after various stints at small company, mid sized company and large MNCs, the learning was just as Jack Ma had put it. The starting up process gained traction only after being guided by few thought leaders and experienced entrepreneurs on how to go about it.

I first realized that there was a difference between entrepreneurs and businessmen. Though technically they sounded like doing the same stuff, personally I felt the difference was in the outlook.

If a businessman would use his skills to maximize the margin in his dealings with methods like tax evasion, an entrepreneur would identify a pain point to be solved.

He would then provide a solution to that pain point with methods like innovation and offer the service at a certain cost. The solution is a boon to the society and the entrepreneur would have created a social impact along with the profit earned. 

This for me was motivation enough to deliver.

Just casually looking around, one could identify various pain points in their daily lives.

As a techie working with mobile technology and telecom vertical, I too had witnessed the rise and fall of mobile phone manufacturers post the success of Steve Jobs led 'iPhone'. Not just Apple, but Google, Facebook and other giants thrived with their services on offer.

Few pain points that I was not particularly happy about:

- Smartphones were brilliant with the performance. Serving many applications that was once available only to computers. But I still liked the phone to be small, handy and with a physical keyboard.

- The nausea of advertisements, that these companies would put forth on account of their services on offer.

With the first case I had envisioned a small phone with a physical keyboard that could be extended to become a smartphone when needed. My concept was very simple, its a phone first and a smartphone next.

With regard to the second pain point, I had noticed that when elders watch TV and skip advertisements, the children do exactly the opposite. They skip the main content, but find the advertisements attractive. My challenge was thus to find out a way to make advertisements attractive for elders.

And to solve these challenges, I came up with various iterations of my concept, through a series of design iterations and business model innovation.

The funny part or rather the challenge with the entrepreneurship cycle, is that once you are not able to prove the startup has the potential to become a company, you need to work your way from scratch again. 

Starting from a clean slate, was part of what I had to go through many times over.

Testing times with the changing markets

To identify the market is an important aspect, just as your timing to launch it. I felt the analogy of the segment of cars launched in recent times a useful one. The car segments initially was just the hatchback, sedan and SUV. Now each one has its own variants such as SUV, companct SUV, crossover, MUV etc.

It shows that people would be willing to experiment and re-segment with the options, based on their need. So there is no reason why they would not love to have their phones back to their basic with an option to become a Transformer, but for phones.

Witnessing the phones evolve post the iPhone period was quite interesting. I find it weird when I see people trying to take selfies with their 10 inch tablet. Or using the phablet as a style statement and talking on it for long with the large screen display towards their ears. 

It seems fine if they had wanted it as an alternative for mufflers to warm their ears!

Or to try the magician's abracadabra to unlock the slider, sometimes impatiently doing a Fruit Ninja when your phone won't take a call with its slide feature failing to unslide.

I still keep my phone small and handy, and a smartphone ready with applications separately. My smartphone is named as 'Device', since its smart and I don't intend to use it as a phone.

People love to adopt to new fashion, its a normal thing. When smartphones started growing larger and that became a style statement, its inconvenience serving the basic purpose was smartly forgotten. Or the advantages outweighed the small purpose phone.

With a perspective that the best option is to go 'Normcore' (normal + hardcore). It means that its best to stick with the classic look when you feel that the fashion around you is changing at a faster pace and may get over saturated.

The same would happen with the case of phones. With the designers and technocrats trying to create a new feature in design with each phone launch, their efforts eventually getting saturated. 

Nevertheless, I am pumped to contribute to 'Next is What ' with the next round of iteration and conceptualization.