Entrepreneur's Interview - Flower Aura

MandE: Welcome, Today we have with us Shrey, founder – Flower Aura. 


Could you please tell us your background and something about flower aura?

Shrey: I began the business of Flower Aura in Jan 2010, after working at Quetzal. The intent was always to have something of my own and that’s how I started this business. I and my cofounder always felt we wanted to operate in the e-commerce space. Both of us were from IT background so we felt online business is what we wanted to get into given our IT background, and also the financial restrictions, but we were not clear about which domain we would operate in. Gifting struck to me as an option since I had difficulty with the poor quality of service that I had personally experience – this let to us starting off with Flower Aura.

We made a search of around 40-50 websites, even at that time – but they were not an e-commerce site really. They were florists who built websites for additional sales rather than having online business model..  We were confident we could do a better job than them.

When we entered the market, our expertise was IT, but this is just a part of the business. Operations is critical in the whole game, and we are still learning, and this would be very important for our growth across cities.

MandE: Currently in which cities do you operate?

Shrey: We have a reach in over 100 cities – These are through the affiliate networks of existing florists, which we built by visiting different cities over the last couple of years. We have handpicked these florists, and provide them with a checklist of things before they go and deliver.
Not everything has been smooth sailing; there have been bad experiences in the past. We have sort of stabilized this now.

One big challenge in the current mode is that – on Valentine’s Day typically 10% of the year’s transactions happens. When you do not have your own warehouse, and you are dependent on so many people who are not under your direct control. There are absolutely no issues through the year but on that specific day something goes wrong – we would have to show a sorry figure. This strains our relationship with the customers.

MandE: Feedback is critical for your business, how do you handle get this?


Shrey: We encourage the recipients to send us a picture with the flowers they have received, along with some write up. These could be testimonials as well as some negative feedback.
Flowers are agriculture based, extremely delicate – so we have to factor in the losses that might affect due to these. Our florists too have been very understanding of the fact and have supported us this far.

MandE: Your business requires you to negotiate with florists across the country - how was the experience been?

Shrey: It has been pretty difficult – in all the major cities are able to do it, because we are in a position to provide them volumes. We can have strong terms with these partners. They were florists who built websites for additional sales rather than having online business model.

In the Indian Context, As we have also started our workshop in Gurgaon, we can relate to their challenges and work more closely with them. Both founders work on this aspect. We have divided the cities amongst ourselves and closely work with the florists.

In addition to this, there is the forecasting of such a perishable entity that getting as precise with the forecasting is important.

MandE:  Do you support your florist’s network in different cities with forecasting? 


Shrey:  We provide our florist network with a forecast of how many orders we can provide on Valentine day before hand.
We provide for only 5%-10% of our partner’s business so they do not heavily rely on us, hence there is no great dependence on our forecast. But we see this could be extremely crucial in the future as we grow larger.

MandE: Could you tell us a bit about your partner in business?


Shrey: My partner is Himanshu, who was my batch mate from in my engineering days at NSIT Delhi. The cities we hail from were along the same route and that helped bond better during those days.
Post engineering, while I worked at Quetzal in Mumbai, he was my roommate and used to work at TCS there. We used to discuss numerous ideas every day at that point of time and finally started off.
At the point of starting off Flower Aura, we had almost similar skills, but over the last 2 years we have focused on developing complementary skills. He focuses on technology, while I take care about marketing. For the operations, both of us pitch in.

MandE:    How did working at a start up help you?


Shrey:  I worked at Quetzal in the online and offline education space – I gained tremendous confidence from this experience. This helped me work on projects from scratch to scaling up. I started around 7-8 different products, and this experience of starting new things and meeting different people to make it possible etc was very valuable.  I realized that in a start up you need to extremely generalist to begin with and be pretty open to get moving quickly.

MandE: How was the experience of moving from online education to running an e-commerce industry?


Shrey: Definitely the two industries are definitely different from each other. When we entered into the e-commerce business, we entered it with the assumption that the major component would IT based. We realize, getting orders is only one part, there are aspects like how to buy, purchase, manage inventory, forecast etc.

The Marketing skills I developed while working in the educational space is what I carried over to this business. The other skills required today are the ones which we have acquired over the last 2 years.

MandE: Did you choose to get into the e-commerce business based on the trend in the industry?


Shrey: We got into the e-commerce business when the industry was just emerging. We operate in a very niche segment of the business, not many people operate in this segment given the kind of challenges I have discussed earlier.  There are some funded companies which have a lot of money to spare for the business promotion unlike us. We have started off in a boot strapping model using the investment of the founder.

Given that we have bootstrapped ourselves, and had a lot of learning by taking care of the operations ourselves, we are in many ways a head of the companies that we currently see.

MandE: Are you looking for funding now?

Shrey: Yeah, I guess the time is pretty apt now. I guess this is the right time to grow and we will grow irrespective of the fact that funding comes in, but funding can definitely speed up the growth.

MandE: What would be your major learning other than the operations that forms the basis of your business?

Shrey: I would say the major learning we have learnt is on the business front is the human resource management. Questions like, how to get the right people, hire them, retain them etc. Nearly 40% of my time is spent on managing people and handling issues related to them. From my experience I realize that, if you take care of people who are working with you, most of the operation and marketing things will be taken care of automatically.

MandE: What is your message to aspiring entrepreneurs? 


Shrey: My message is follow your heart and be smart.

When people come to me with the take that being an entrepreneur is extremely risky, I simply say - It’s not very hard to earn what you are getting now, so where is the Risk?”
Yes it will require some of your patience The entrepreneurial experience one has would be extremely valued and cherished.

MandE: Thank you Shrey for the interview. Thanks.

Entrepreneur's Interview - Taxi4sure

MandE: Good afternoon. Today we have with us the founders of Taxi4sure. Welcome to the interview Raghu and Aprameya. Could you please introduce yourself as the starting point of this interview?

Raghu: Hi, my name is Raghu. I am a Computer Science Engineer from KREC Surathkal after which I worked at Texas instrument. I then did my MBA from IIM Ahmadabad, followed by a stint at Feedback Ventures. My hobbies include reading books, running Marathons. 

Aprameya: Hi my name is Aprameya. I have known Raghu from the past 13 years. We were being batch mates from engineering and I was a year junior to him at IIMA. I worked at Infosys before my MBA. Post MBA I worked for Jones Lang LaSlle where I used to head Business development for India so one of the vertical. 

MandE: Could you briefly explain what Taxi4 sure does? 

Raghu: Taxi4sure is an Online aggregator  of taxi, we intend provide a customers a one stop solution for booking any kind of taxis and for a operators  to actually aggregate their inventory and try to  get customer. 

For the customer, our value proposition instant booking of taxi, a choice of all taxi operators across cities, price advantage, reliability, safety and surity of the taxi when you book it one line. We identified this problem as a common one across various customers and our own experience. This is what taxi4 addresses. 

Loosely, we could compare our business model to that of make my trip of taxi or red bus of taxi.

MandE: In your introduction, you mentioned that Marathon have helps you - could you please explain?

Raghu: When you jump into entrepreneurship, your income dries out and you begin feeling the pinch of it – it’s not as easy as you thought it would be. It’s when things are not going the way you expected that perseverance come into play. It is here that perseverance and determination helps you see through difficulties phase – This is what is akin to running a marathon. 

You hit a wall after cross around 30-35 km and all your physical energy has drained out. It’s only the mind that get you going – you tell yourself – just a little more and push harder. Similarly when you hit a wall in your entrepreneurship journey - You know that this is yet another race, another week, another month and you will be there. 

Once you hit the finishing line when you are really happy about it. Once you cross that, you feel you can still do another marathon. 

MandE: Aprameya, How did you begin thinking of entrepreneurship?

Aprameya: I didn’t have a predetermined intention of getting into entrepreneurship, I always thought of myself as working for some company. 

When at JLL I worked closely with CXOs of the company and department Head – this gave me an exposure to the everyday functioning of the company.  I felt this wasn’t very difficult and thought of trying it out. This was the best time to try it out before, your liability in life increase.

The confidence that my experience at JLL gave me, and the timing are the two things that gave me the confidence. 

MandE: Raghu, how did you begin this journey?

Raghu: Aprameya and I used to discuss quite a few ideas across the table but there were always many “what ifs”. Then I thought let me give the idea 2 years - if  things doesn’t works out – we could get to work elsewhere; but if it works out then we didn’t have to worry. 

In hindsight, that was one of the good decisions we made. Since I have already done my post graduation it is kind of easy for me to compare. If you are looking to do a post graduation, you generally take a loan and spend 2 years working for it, but in entrepreneurship there is generally no loan that you take and the returns invariably would be higher than what you could expect after an MBA or an MS. If it hasn’t work out then too, you would have learnt much more about what works and what doesn’t than in MBA or an MS. From the learning point of view, having started off early in life helps – So it was an easy decision for me to make. 

If it works out, fine. If doesn’t work out I am not learn from it.  Either ways, beneficial – so I decided to try.

MandE: OK. Your business is an operations intensive business – what where the challenges the business that you faced and how did you go about fixing these challenges? 

Raghu: Ours is an extremely customer centric business – our objective is to ensure we give an extremely good experience to the customer when he books taxis online.

It is an operationally challenging business, and we attempt to ensure that the taxi customers’ book reaches the customer in time – in addition we focus on a very smooth experience during the journey. 

It is very different from booking a flight or a train or a bus – in these modes of transport, the customer rarely interacts with the driver. The role of the driver is extremely critical in ensuring a smooth experience. We are still attempting to reach this, we are positive of achieving this goal. Handling drivers and ensuring they provide a good experience is our biggest challenge.

Apart from this, it is important to note that the taxi rental industry is extremely seasonal – it has very high peaks and very dry seasons. The technology, supplies and people to handle these is another major challenge in itself.

We are very cautious in our growth rate, and our operators too resonate this vision. They understand that in our success lies their success. Initially it was difficult to get the operators to align with our vision but, as we have shown the effectiveness of this model, they are now more willing. They don’t regard us as competition but more as facilitators to their business. This was a major hurdle we overcame.

There are many more challenges to solve, but the most critical thing that we need to focus on next is the drivers.

MandE: Your have scaled pretty well over the last 9 months of operation – how did you manage the finances for your venture?

Aprameya: We began with investing our own money. Right since the beginning we have been extremely critical of the way we spend money – this has helped us look at alternatives we wouldn’t have found otherwise.

We made sure that our employers are not driven by money alone but believe in the long term vision of the company. We have realized by our experience that whether it was a technology or call centre operations, over a period of time – the people who are stuck with us are those who actually believed in the long term vision.  Getting such people has helped us cut down our expenses. We pretty much have done a good job in terms of keeping our expenses low and keeping maximum benefits out of it – this very important to do that as a start up.  

Even when you go and rise investment later on your VCs or angels respect the fact that we have not spent too much to reach the current position. 

As entrepreneurs you need to be frugal, for at least one or two years, you are not  going to think about like going out on weekends or a trip somewhere etc. Whatever you spend on without thinking much right now has to be cut down. Give yourself a time limit so that you are not really bogged down by it.

You need to be disciplined at the personal level, and this would translate to the company too. This has to be extremely important.

MandE: How did you develop the necessary networks and how did you leverage it to grow up?

Aprameya: The initial networks that is always something that you grown up with. Our first set of advisers and investors came and our college from NITK. The first person who put us in touch with all the big VCs in the country is from our college IIM Ahmadabad. 

These networks have helped us initially, but then when you make new connections – you should not look at it as transactional. People need to buy into your story, and feel a part of what you are trying to establish. Once you do this, the network naturally builds around you. 

These are the softer aspects of network building that the entrepreneurs have to take care. Without people putting in confidence in you, you would find it hard to deal with various different unknown territories in business. You need to be out there interacting with the people, letting them know what you are doing. Media shouldn’t be the first point of approach, it is important to know the right people who matter for your business – media shall come if what you are doing is really worthwhile, i.e. if people are using your product or service, which investors seem to buy into etc.

Raghu: When we began networking – we believed our idea is our IP – if we reveal it to someone, they would leave all their work and get to working on this idea. This I believe was one of the most common mistakes entrepreneurs do at the start up stage. This in hindsight we believed prevented us from using the doors that were open for us! Idea is only 10% of the business, execution forms the remaining 90%; so just because you have shared your idea, people will not get to doing it.

The second important lesson is to be at the right place at the right time, you will find the right place and time only if you visit a lot of places – and many of these wouldn’t be the right ones. You need to keep trying. 

Do not restrict your choice of meeting people based on their background; show them you are passionate about what you are doing. Even if the people you meet aren’t the right people to help you, they might know other who could help you. The passion you show, really rubs off on the people you meet. We have witnessed this in our interactions with both NITK and IIMA alumni.

The more open you are with your idea and sharing it, the more you gain from this sort of networking. Networking doesn’t just help you in finding the right finance sources, but also getting the right people to work with and for you.

MandE: Maintaining a good relationship with investors is very important, how have you done this?

Aprameya: Ours is an e-commerce portal that has a potential to scale up at an unpredictable pace. When you are speaking to people, don’t limit it to only those who can be a potential source of fund to you; discuss your idea, its feasibility, anyone  who has tried similar things earlier – this way you will get to know a lot of things other than just raising money. This way you create an existence in their mind space – it might not give you an immediate return, but you need to be determined.

If you find someone who could be very influential, don’t waste time – just go meet him; without the expectation of any financial gains, or connections. Unless you tell everyone whom you meet, nobody would come forward to help you. This is something that we have constantly being doing since the very beginning.

We never really looked at what stage of growth we are in – we never said we have these many transactions happening a day and so it is good to visit an Angel, or a higher number of transactions we go and meet a VC. We were never able to predict our growth. We never believe we have that extent of control of our business – in fact, being out of control in many ways is one sign of success in the initial period.

When you have been connecting with so many people, you realize that someone has shown interest in you. If we would have spoken with an angel today, the transaction growths over the period of a couple of weeks or a month would have got a VC interested in us… It is extremely had to predict such things in our business. 

You should never restrict yourself to the number of people you talk to, or the kind of people you talk to. Talk to everyone you get across – you never know what kind of value each one will give you.

MandE: What is the message for aspiring entrepreneurs?

Raghu: Message is simple – if you have always been thinking of starting off and haven’t done it this far, just take a two years break and start off. If it works out good for you, otherwise you would have learnt a lot. If you have an idea just go ahead! If you do not have an idea – don’t wait for a right one, work with multiple people that would help.

Starting something all alone, and taking yourself through entire journey would be extremely difficult - If you have someone whom you really trust and respect, that goes a long way. 

Just for statistics, 75% of the entrepreneurs who have started with their first idea were not successful, but they were successful in later their ideas. Don’t wait for idea, get a good team and get start.

Aprameya: Stop thinking about the pressures and liabilities you have in life – it doesn’t really help. In some form they are bound to exist.

If you have thought of starting something, just go ahead and do it – give yourself a timeframe and move head. It would be foolish if you do it for five years and still not done anything substantial. Give yourself a decent amount of time to explore an idea, and don’t keep shifting ideas.

Don’t keep shifting focus, and working on an idea and making it into a business is not as easy as one might think from the outside. It is important to give an idea the time it asks for! A simple benchmark could be - unless you are ready to spend one and half year on an idea, don’t start it. If you think it is worthwhile to spend that many numbers of years then you start and don’t shift focus. 

MandE: Thank you Raghu and Aprameya, for taking time out. Thanks

Interview - SecurityXploded.com

MandE: Good evening. Today we have with us NagareshwarTalekar who runs the community website called SecurityXploded.

Nagareshwar, could you please begin the interview with a brief introduction about yourself and then explain what SecurityXploded is about?

Nagareshwar: Thanks, I am a Computer Science Graduate from KREC – Surathkal of the 2004 batch. I joined Novell before moving on to Citrix where I worked on virtualization technology.

Since my college days, I used to do a lot research and publish articles in sites like Codeguru, Codeproject etc. Most of the tools I built during that time were all free. I grew more passionate about this, I felt I would need to have a portal of my own where  I could share the work I did – so I finally launched my own website – the primary objective being to share the research work which revolved around reverse engineering and security tools. The site was named - SecurityXploded.

The first tool I wrote was – “FirePassword” which was incidentally the first password recovery tool for Firefox, I then wrote another tool, FireMaster to recover the master password of Firefox. I would constantly add tools to this website based on the reverse engineering – so the website continued to grow.

I was more involved in Reverse Engineering stuff figuring out hidden things under Windows, undocumented stuff and write tools around these discoveries to make the system better.For example: One of the tools I developed was the ProcHeapViewer – whichcan enumerate process heap memory on Windows  much faster than the documented API functions – reducing the time from 20-30 minutes to just 10 seconds!

This quality work began getting attention from a lot of people. The users were steadily rising.

Around the same time, the work at Citrix was draining a lot of my energy and I couldn’t focus my energies on my passion of reverse engineering and tool development – This was around 2010. Around the same time – the movie “3 Idiots” inspired me to make the choice of taking this passion fulltime.

I guess the timing was also right – I had completed 7 years of corporate career; I decided to go full time to work on SecurityXploded and also had intention to run a Startup later on if things go well. That is when I decided to quit my work at Citrix.

I made this my first priority to complete the tools in my long to-do list and began working full time on it. These helped the website rating increase too –We grew from “Alexa Rating” of top 500,000 websites to coming in the top 100,000 websites.

Today we also promote a lot of local and international security conferences bringing more focus and success to these events.We also have local monthly meets along with other security communities such as null, g4h, owasp etc. Since this January we have also started a free training on ‘Reverse Engineering & Malware Analysis’ delivered by experts from corporate firms and some of our core team members. This is extremely beneficial for anyone either students or professionals working in this field.

MandE: Tell us more about building community and how challenging it wasto start with?

Nagareshwar:  Looking at the work I was doing, my friends approached – then some more people to put their stuff on the website. But that time it was more of personal knowledge sharing site. Then it stuck me that I can make it like Community Website where other passionate folk’s mainly young security geeks can showcase their work. It can not only help them to utilize the popularity of the website but also take their work to wider audience in shortest span of time.

So I transformed it to a Platform for contributors to freely publish their work.To make it easy for the contributors, I adopted detached model (rather than volunteer-ship) where they neither have to work for SecurityXploded nor have any commitment from their side.

The intension was never to increase the contributors, but to help youngsters get early recognition and grow at the international level. Today we have instances where people have got very good jobs having put up their work on the website. We cannot take the complete credit for this but it has definitely helped them to grow from no-one to some-one. That makes the difference!

So we are not like any community that runs on numbers and volunteers – this model mostly works as a medium to inspire youngsters to aspire for more – become role models for others. This is where I derive my satisfaction and motivation to live for another extra day J

This website has taken a lot of my effort into it – it is not easy. For Example: When someone submits and article, I proofread it, fine tuneit, add graphics etc–giving it that professional touch. This makes the article look far more professional than the original one. This takes a dedicated 4-5 hours of effort from the draft to final article. At the end of the day it is worth it.

Some of the contributors are now part of our core management team and they work on Training, leading local meets etc. All these efforts have immensely helped us to cut across the Indian boundaries and to grow at international level with strong community support.

MandE: Your site operates on a completely free basis – so the consumes of your website have given extremely good testimonies to signify the work you are doing. Could you explain a bit about that?

Nagareshwar: Currently, the portal contains tool written by me as well as other contributors. I specialize in writingtools; I can write tools faster than writing an article. Of course excluding the research work which takes significant amount of time.As of today we have over 80 security tools, nearly 70 of them developed by me alone. Some of these are also comparable to professional software from Elcom Soft. A major portion of these are password recovery tools, and most of the users are from the US, Europe and India. Over the last year, the downloads have also increase in line with the growth of the site ranking.

Our tools are recognized & published by leading downloading sites like Softpedia, Brothersoftetc and given 5 star rating, editor pick awards etc. Around 5 of the tools have crossed over 100,000 download mark. Our best tool, Facebook password tool has crossed over 800,000 downloads in just 14 months! Imagine if we had charged $1 for each download and assume 10% conversion – we would have been far wealthierJ.

Our users are either home users or professionals spanned across the world, but last year we had one special person – who works in Forensic investigation at Police Dept of Delaware County, USA. He wrote to us thanking for our Password Recovery tools and how they have helped in his forensic investigation. That was one of the special moments and he later sent us testimonial also which is featured on our site. Another memorable testimony was from the president of CompUSA – for our SpyDLLRemover tool. We have also received nice words from couple of security community founders citing our good work.

These testimonies inspire and keep us on our tows all the time.

MandE: Your website operates on a completely free model, and you haven’t worked for the last one and half year. How do you manage your finance?

Nagareshwar: Yeah, frankly it has been difficult period. It is not easy to convince people at home – saying you are on our own, running a community etc. especially in the Indian context. More than the money part, convincing at home was most difficult task and people are still not convincedJ. 

I had planned that; this activity would take substantial amount of time and so had been saving for a while. I am not married Jand have noother financial liabilities too. The internal urge was getting stronger, and I knew I had to jump in full time at some point. I expected it to be difficult and had planned my finances for a year or so.

At the SecurityXploded end - the major cost for us was the hosting – it doesn’t come free. Initially I paid it from my pocket, but later on it become difficult when last year we moved from shared hosting to dedicated-hosting. Now the advertisements and promotions help us to cover the hosting cost.

It is the satisfaction at the moment that I derive. And finally what goes around comes back around.

MandE:  You have been doing this for the past 4-5 years, it takes a passion to do something like this.What drives the energy for you?

Nagareshwar: Yes it has been nearly 5 years. Initially, it was a difficult especially when you try to manage your full time job along with it. 

The sort of reverse engineering I do, generally goes for days often weeks together –you constantly concentrate on the binary numbers on your screen.Once the research work is completed, it will lead to new tool or article. This takes a lot of work and energy. It is primarily the passion that has kept me kicking all these years. Inherently I am blessed with lot of energy and passion that drives me to do things – I guess it’s a God’s gift to me which helps me keep running.

MandE: What is your message for aspiring entrepreneurs?

Nagareshwar:  The most important is – pursue your passion.

An entrepreneur needs to look beyond the monetary gains. An enterprise cannot be built with only money as the motive. You would have to be passionate and believe in your ability to pull off things that you dream of. Only this can help you sail in the tough times and surge ahead!

MandE: Thanks Nagareshwar, thank you once again.