Santosh PandaSantosh is the CEO & Co-founder of Explara : Leading Online Event Ticketing & Registration Platform
Background
During childhood, my father had setup a dairy firm so he can earn a bit more money for giving better education and life to me and my sisters. He had a day job in a bank.
When needed, I had also distributed milk by going on a cycle to various customers, including some of my classmate and friends house.
Born & brought up in a Ruban (Rural Urban) city in Odisha.
Always heard stories from my father on how people in my small town built successful businesses with little loan from bank.
After an initial attempt to get into study medical and being unsuccessful, I did an engineering in Industrial & Production.
Fast Forward
Early in career, between 1998 to 2001, I travelled some 17 countries in Europe, USA, and South East Asia. I saw the world and it further influenced my passion towards entrepreneurship.
Gave up a hugely double-paid salary ($ in Finland and Rs in India) and life in Helsinki, Finland to come back to Bangalore to work for a small startup.
This is during the year 1999/2000 when most IT professional in India were moving to west i.e. USA.
From Bangalore, we built some amazing products for USA market from India. I tasted my creative mind and was ready to start. But I needed some money. This time I relocated myself to London & then to work with a small startup there.
Started a company in 2005 while living in London, went with a solution concept paper to University of Wales, Manchester University to solve their ‘higher education /study abroad’ programs to acquire students for various studies.
Fail & Fail Again
Tasted first failure! Me & My co-founder couldn’t agree on investment and specifically my co-founder thought it is full of risk. We closed & we are still friends.
Started another company in 2006, with 2 other co-founders, one in Bangalore, other one in USA. We struggled on selecting services vs. products and more specifically which product. We also took several months to establish a bare minimum team.
We called off the startup after 5 months of starting up and no substantial progress.
Started another startup in 2007, this time outsourced my product development to a team based in India. I had trained the team remotely from London using Skype and webcam. The company which was developing my product decided to let go several of team members. I was about to taste 3rd failure.
I approached the founder, conveyed that I intend to take over the team (or few members) if he has no issues. Started the company in 2008, while I lived in London and remotely collaborated with my team.
Adversaries
Bootstrapped from 2008 to 2011 by having a contracting job. Within 14 months of starting up, I ran out of money in 2009 Feb. My uncle gave a personal loan so I can pay salary to my associates/employees for a month.
Again ran out of money in May 2010, a childhood friend and an engg classmate offered me money so that I could pay salary to my associates/employees for a month.
My wife and my first son had come to India for my son’s birth day in 2011 and their return VISA was rejected as I had no money in my bank account in UK. As per UK law, I can’t maintain a family basic need.
Relocated to India in Sept 2011, pitched my childhood friend and got his first few lakhs investment.
But couldn’t take salary as company needed money badly. My wife, & son lived in Odisha; whereas I lived in Pune for 2 more years.
Not much appreciation in family relative circle for giving up a great life, salary & career in UK.
Culture
The remoteness in starting up shaped up excellent culture and collaboration.
We hired people who had an attitude and desire to do good work. We never hired anybody just because of their great educational qualification.
We had 100% open information sharing : We used Skype group conversation to share info/ chat, work & discuss, celebrate success/ express sadness, pretty much every communication was an open expression on Skype.
We never worked in weekends for the sake of it. We encouraged team to write beautiful software that works in nights & we sleep peacefully.
We encouraged team to stay ethical and not win any customer with false promises. If we miss, we own & rectify it.
Collaboration
We used simple online tools & easy to follow process to enable remote collaboration.
We used Skype group conversation to share info/ chat, work & discuss, celebrate success/ express sadness, pretty much every communication was an open expression on Skype.
Collaboration tools for project management, document management, communications helped to bridge the gap among team and also among team and customers.
We even encouraged/influenced team members to access Orkut, Facebook, Twitter, almost open access to any social communities. This helped us to source feedback/learn insights and we could even connect to Customer on this channels.
For instance, we could win 100s of customer (between 2008 to 2011) just via Twitter.
Failures
We have an open understanding in the company: Try, if you fail, there is no penalty. Rather, if you don’t try, you will loose lot of opportunity.
Don’t have to have the mindset that things will always go wrong, but let’s celebrate it when it does go wrong.
We started the company to solve ‘venue sourcing’ for events. We failed & pivoted to ‘Event Ticketing & registration’.
We failed several times during the product development, many customer had to suffer with changes/issues. We ensured we win them back with better products.
We grew to 600% but product name (it was called Ayojak earlier) couldn’t work across globe. We pivoted to a new brand “Explara”.
We are now working to lead several markets in various countries. We may fail.
Customer First
As I operated remotely, and we had established a culture of ‘kill the distance’ among myself & team. We extended the same to our customers.
The tone across the company was (& is) that we are passionate about reaching to our customers and delivering to their issue. So let’s kill the distance between us and the customer.
When there are issues (support, product, communication), its not about who is right, the customer has to be heard.
How will we expect if we were the customer? Make sure that we’re down to earth and tuned to life.
Keeping ethical and customer focused. If customer calls, we call them back within few minutes.
If you look at any part of the world it’s customer support that matters. The more customer focused you are the better world you’re building.
That’s my Startup Explara for YOU!
