Part A
A Day without the Best
It was a strange morning with the sunlight waking me up. I was left puzzled seeing my window panes just vanished leaving a huge hole in the wall. But with important meetings lined up I took to my morning routine. Later when I went to open my wardrobe to suit up I was again stumped to see that my best clothes had vanished too. The bad day then continued with more strange events of ‘vanishings’ like my car tyres went missing and when I took to public transport the local trains read, ”Stay safe, Poor insulation.” On my lunch I found my rotis were not fresh in the tiffin box. Then the tired me got home to listen to our domestic help lament about how her son’s education would have to be discontinued since his school, a philanthropic marvel had vanished too. My grand mom also seemed shattered with her spiritual haven having vanished as well. That was the last straw and I screamed loud enough to wake myself but was only relieved to see our lovely Eternia windows in place, my favourite shirts from Van Huesen and Louis Phillipe stacked, my tyres still strong and the electric insulators performing well in the Indian railways . My lunch was packed to stay fresh in the FreshWrapp & also, my grand mom had just left for the Birla temple and so had the boy for his school. It was all only a nightmare in deep sleep but I couldn’t complain, such is the comfort of warm pantaloons.
Part B
Victory from the Jaws of Defeat
I have been a core member at an IOT startup handling B2B operations & strategy. I was very passionate about my role and had we ideated a Product. With about 8 talented engineers working on the project for about good 8 months, we had heavily invested into the project. We got close to the product release but in the very few initial tests of the final build we realized we had not matched up to the customer requirements and product needed more time and resource, which we as a non funded startup at that point could not afford. The Board took a decision to stall the project and focus on other revenue sources but the coming days were not easy as the last bet of ours had gone bad and we were not in a position to fuel the project more with any resources. It was crisis! I felt responsible as a core member towards the engineers who had toiled day and night. It was this sense of ownership that made me look for ways to generate money for an incomplete product. I started analyzing what was the asset of the project which could earn us revenue and it struck me that it was the domain knowledge. It was a tremendous amount of knowledge that our engineers had built during the product development that could be tagged with a price. This was possible because on visiting various exhibitions I learnt that most Indian brands were only importing from CHINA or were mere distributors of big brands. I could sense their aspiration to go big and build a brand themselves. I tapped into this level of aspiration and presented to various such aspirants with a team and knowledge base that could fast track their GoTO market to only about 6 months from the schedule 14month cycle. In return I stated the company’s expectation for a one-time fee that could help us to make the project profitable. There was value addition for the distributors as they saw it as a safe bet to save time. We on the other hand would be getting the Market knowhow which were their areas of strength. This process led me to a gentleman who accepted the offer and entered into a Joint Venture. This helped us to make the project profitable and also achieved product release thereby not letting the teams efforts go in vain.