I AM NOT A STARTUP

What is a startup?

Startup brings innovation, disruption & impact to market or society. They dream to change the world on their own means and execution. Startups creating something which never existed before or even if it existed before did not impact masses and now does impact a lot.

Beginning of startup craze!

I had an idea & I wanted to startup! I did my initial research, market survey and chalked out business model. Everything seemed to be going great as per the startup world. We took office on rent, built a team and started approaching investors for funding.

We presented in front of various investors, but all passed as we did not have a working and revenue generating startup. So at the end we failed to raise funds, as a result team, office and other setup went for a toss.

Reincarnation of startup bug:

Then I invested Rs. X lakh from my savings and started operating my own startup with new phase, but this time I started with a small scale. We acquired few good paying customers and then we started hiring few team members as my startup kept growing.

Since my initial days I was bitten by the startup bug and being pressured by the growing startup culture, daily investment news, glamorous PR and buzzing news of the startup crowd, now I started scaling fast and again approached investors. Fixed appointments, presented our Biz model, showed them our tack records, revenues etc. to couple of investors. I was rejected every time.

Birth of Business:

Being frustrated and sick of startup buzz, I decided to call myself a small business rather than a startup. I had a working and revenue generating business of which I was confident. Now I was bit relieved of the pressure to scale fast and all those glamorous buzz of the startup world. It was cool with me if I earned 10x or 100x less than unicorn startups as long as I was earning a decent income and was able to pay my employees on time and most important keep my business alive without someone else money.

As long as my legitimate business can sustain by itself and keep my customers happy I will call myself a small business.

At the end of the day, what matters is all businesses need to generate revenue and pay their bill and employees to stay in market & survive. One may call it a survival instinct – it needs to feed itself or they will die.

At the very end I just wanted to work on my idea, my goal hasn’t changed and neither my product. Only thing changed was the cool startup fad. Leaving the startup label was like a blessing to focus on what I wanted to rather than to what I wanted to do being glamorous.

Being a customer funded business is much fancier to me than VC funded business, which is almost like doing a job.

What is not different between a startup and business!

Both startups and businesses are business with an aim to generate revenue at the end. All business are governed by laws of business & rules that effect both startup and business equally (there may be exceptions for startup for few initial years, but at the end all laws applies to startup as well).

Author: Admin