The Unique Tale of Startup ‘Co-Creator’ GrowthStory And Its Next Conquest — B2B

In 2011, after Krishnan Ganesh, a seasoned entrepreneur, sold online tutoring platform TutorVista to leading British learning company Pearsons for $127 Mn, he did not want his next greenfield venture to be in the same model as his previous three ones. With decades of experience and success, he now wanted to do something different.

Ganesh wanted to shift from being a serial entrepreneur to parallel entrepreneurship, which meant that instead of working on one startup at a time, he would focus on multiple startups simultaneously. The result of this mind-shift was GrowthStory, an entrepreneurship platform that Krishnan Ganesh started along with his wife, Meena Ganesh, also a serial entrepreneur and a co-founder in all his previous ventures.

Bengaluru-based GrowthStory is unique in the way it operates. It’s neither a venture capital firm, nor an angel investor, nor an incubator.

Then what is it? GrowthStory, in Ganesh’s words, is a “promoter that co-creates the business.” It identifies areas of potential growth, seeks out entrepreneurs, and helps them with the research, strategy, and raising of funds. Naturally, for all this much work, it takes a hefty 50% stake in the startup.

“There is no selection process as we’re not an accelerator or an incubator. We don’t evaluate plans or proposals or choose from them. We are also not a fund that people can approach. We look at the next big potential opportunities within a 10-year horizon, where we can add some expertise and value, and then get the core co-founders together for specific ideas,” says Ganesh.

Growthstory is a promoter that co-creates the business.

The firm has seen big success with the likes of Freshmenu and BigBasket and, until recently, was focused on B2C ventures, but now that is changing. Ganesh has now turned his attention towards the B2B market as he looks at high growth areas that will present themselves in the next 5-10 years.

Krishnan Ganesh, a postgraduate from the prestigious Indian Institute of Management Calcutta, seems to have an inherent a knack of predicting trends and capitalising on them. GrowthStory is not his first venture. In 1990, he started IT&T, an IT support and services company, just when the Internet boom was about to encompass India and open the doors to outsourcing. In 2005, he started TutorVista, an online learning platform, three years before Byjus came along; six years later, he exited the company after selling it to Pearsons.

Ganesh, however, humbly disagrees with the conjecture that he has an ‘inherent knack’ for spotting potential successes. He says a lot of his success has resulted from sheer luck and serendipity. But the shrewd methodology with which GrowthStory operates and has reaped rewards doesn’t seem to have much to do with luck.

Next Stop For GrowthStory: B2B Startups

After B2C successes like FreshMenu and BigBasket, GrowthStory is now shifting its focus to the B2B space because, besides being a huge and largely unaddressed market, it is also a capital-efficient segment where it’s not the a-winner-takes-it-all situation.

Ganesh knows what he’s talking about. According to an IBEF report, India’s B2B ecommerce market alone is expected to reach a massive US$ 700 Bn by 2020. A NASSCOM-Zinnov report for 2017 showed that B2B’s share in the overall tech startup funding is over 30% while over 50% of startups added in 2017 were in the B2B segment, led by the fintech and healthtech sectors.

GrowthStory has promoted companies like Hungerbox, which does digital cafeteria management just for corporates, and Social Frontier, a SaaS company in social media marketing.

Elaborating on the rationale behind these ventures, Ganesh says when it came to Hungerbox, he observed that in corporates, food and transportation are two of the biggest areas of employee dissatisfaction.

“These are areas where even the best companies have very little standardisation, quality systems, control, and feedback,” says Ganesh.

Hungerbox today services 1.85 lakh orders a day and has some big clients like GE, Qualcomm, and ABB. The company recently closed $2.5 Mn in a pre-series A funding led by Lionrock Capital and Kris Gopalakrishnan, co-founder, Infosys. Sandipan Mitra, Co-Founder and CEO, HungerBox, expect the startup to exceed half-a-million daily orders by the end of this year.

Running a business and the dynamics of the food sector are something that both the co-founders of Hungerbox understand well. “Entrepreneurship was not a new cup of tea for us — both my co-founder, Uttam Kumar, and I have had experience in a couple of previous ventures. GrowthStory has a number of companies addressing interesting whitespace opportunities (space where needs haven’t been categorised, organised and serviced) and many of these companies have scaled rapidly and enjoyed significant success,” says Sandipan.

He believes that there were synergies with GrowthStory that they could draw on when it came to positioning the startup in front of investors, customers, partners etc.

Commenting on Social Frontier, Ganesh says, “We saw a crying need among GrowthStory companies to optimise the social media spend across channels. No such platform was available and hence we took a bet on the space.” Today, the company counts clients such as Freshmenu, Bigbasket from GrowthStory’s portfolio along with Asianet, Zoomcar, and Grow Fit from outside.

For Growthstory so far the investments have been in the range of INR 5 Lakh to INR 6 Cr

The startup has already crossed the mark of $22,365 (INR 15 lakh) in monthly revenue and is looking to take the number to $149,100 (INR 1 Cr) per month within a year. “We are going full-fledged into the Indian market. Our vision is to target the US market as well, in a couple of months,” says Abdulla Basha, co-founder of Social Frontier.

How much does the platform typically invest in the startups? Krishnan Ganesh tells us that it depends on the company, but so far the investments have been in the range of INR 5 Lakh to INR 6 Cr.

“Because we are not a fund, we don’t have any pressure to ply capital or any time frame, which funds have,” he adds.

Ganesh Krishnan On How Does GrowthStory Lay Its Bets

How can one predict the future? Or, more realistically, be able to assess possible successful outcomes with reasonable accuracy. It’s something all of us wish we could do. There is a famous quote that says those who know what the future will be are called futurists and those who know when the future will happen are called billionaires. So basically, all of us want to be billionaires (duh!).

Easier said than done, we know. So, how does Krishnan Ganesh go about identifying his opportunities?

He breaks down the answer into three points — the market should not be niche, there shouldn’t be large and established players existing already, and there should be scope wherein he can use some of his strengths such as digital marketing and data analytics to disrupt the market. “You need to be solving a bigger problem. However, a lot of times, people have the solution and try to find a problem, which is the wrong approach,” Ganesh says.

“You need to be solving a bigger problem. However, a lot of times, people have the solution and try to find a problem, which is the wrong approach,” Ganesh says.

While talking to him, it is clear how intuitive and simple his business philosophy is. Basically, in a price sensitive country like India, can you provide a service that consumers will readily pay for?

“You need to follow the money. Just look at our portfolio, they are all very unsexy, non-glamourous businesses. At first glance, one may question what is the greatness in delivering bread, milk, and eggs to people’s houses Or, look at the example of Portea Medical (one of GrowthStory’s ventures), where we send a doctor or a nurse to people’s homes. We do this because people will pay for it… these are very strong, deep-rooted learnings,” says Ganesh.