Entrepreneurship – Raising Investment or Making Revenue

“Today startups are built for investors not for consumers”

Recently I have seen many startup founders either with a seed or first round funding, been glorified by some prominent sections of media as “Top Entrepreneurs”, “Entrepreneurs with Impact” “Inspirational Stories” & similar headlines with “CAPS ON, Bold” fonts. Even some publishers have covered success mantra tips given by these “Top entrepreneurs”. So, was randomly wondering whether entrepreneurship is about generating revenue out of business or investment for the business.

Raising external funds in a competitive startup space is definitely an art. But, when we look into the list of “Startups That Shut Shop in 2016” where startups like “Pepper Tap” & others those who despite making millions of dollars (ofcourse not through sales) rolled down their shutters in just few years of their market debut, my understanding about the concept of Entrepreneurship goes into dilemma.

Entrepreneur India Magazine once compared Pepper Tap with US based hyper local player Instacart & called it as a “unique business model”. TechInAsia magazine has featured Rahul Yadav, the “bad boy” of Indian startup space in the list titled “India’s top 30 startup founders” much before his venture Housing.com made any remarkable market traction (even today Housing is nowhere & his second inning with Intelligent Interfaces also failed badly).The same list has also featured Pranay Chulet, founder of online classified website Quikr in the 5^th position. Need to mention here that Quikr has recorded a revenue of Rs. 95 crores against a loss of Rs. 534 crores in FY 15-16.(Source – Next Big What). In November 2015, Inc42 covered the story of Rashi Choudhary, co-founder of “abruptly closed” online supermarket store Localbanya.com in its article titled “Inspiring Stories of Some Amazing Women Entrepreneurs of the Indian Startup Ecosystem”.

Shutting down of these so called “game changers” startups may be because they were not been able to raise further investment to sustain or some issues with the business model itself. But, the question is why such a hurry to promote them as “game-changers”, “wave riders” etc. Reason may be because the new age entrepreneurs & their business investors relies more on PR activities than creating an impactful enterprise which can really solve consumer problems.

Biggies of Indian startup ecosystem like Snapdeal, Flipkart, Ola all have been making huge losses since inception & are solely surviving on the investors’ money even the latter two called for government protection against their foreign rivals.

My point here is by glorifying such early stage entrepreneurs & portraying them super successful is injustice with the entire ecosystem & with the people following them. Success of entrepreneurs should not judge by the funding received but the way they have sustained a business model.

Image Credit : Google / VCCircle