We invited Venkat, Founder of Woovly for an interview with Most Popular Stories to know more about his entrepreneurial journey.
Venkat is a startup enthusiast with a history of working in the internet industry. He is Skilled in Digital Strategy, Business Planning, Management, Operations, Scaling and Start-ups Management. He has also Incubated 3 businesses in 2 different countries with a scale of operations.
- Tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey as an entrepreneur.
To sum up, I am an adventurer looking for opportunities to explore. Prior to founding Woovly, I was one of the founding members of Quess Corp Limited – India’s leading business service providers. In Quess, I incubated three businesses spanning across two countries. I was also the CEO and Director at Styracorp Management Services, a leading HR solutions company in the Middle East and was instrumental in spearheading Adecco Middle East as the country head.
Apart from that, I am a biker. I love going on road trips in my Harley and doing wildlife photography.
- Why did you choose entrepreneurship over a job?
The process of converting an idea to a business and a need always intrigued me. Through my career, I was always nurturing my idea and understanding what the market was asking for. It has been a thrill to search for problems to find solutions. Hence, I was always an entrepreneur in my head, and I was working towards it for the past decade. I converted that into reality.
- What was the vision behind it?
People often tend to forget about their wishes and dreams. They think of how difficult it is to go about it and give up on it. The vision behind Woovly is to help people accomplish that wishlist and a platform to never give up on dreams.
- Describe the services that you offer to your customers and in what way they are unique?
The main motive of Woovly is to help explore, discover and share your wishlist. The services we provide are discovering, learning and connecting. People can discover an array of things they can do in their lifetime, through our categories – travel, adventure sports, DIY, fitness and so on. They can get an idea, get inspired and plan their own through other users’ experiences.
Lastly, Woovly connects people with local service providers who can help them achieve their bucket list.
Most social media platforms help people to express their content and to show what they have achieved. What makes us unique is that we help them plan. People can express their accomplishment, track them and put a date to when they want to accomplish it. Moreover, since we are creating a bandwidth of service providers, it can help people get to their goals and plan in one platform. They don’t have to go through travel agencies or packages. In that way, we help out providers too who don’t have to go through middlemen and can reach their costumers directly.
- What difficulties which you have faced or you are facing?
Like most start-ups, the major challenge was attracting initial set of employees. As founders, we have a lot of conviction but the struggle is to pass the same to our employees to get them aligned to our vision.
Second, it requires passion and perspective to present a concept as a business idea. We have been going through bucket lists but converting that bucket list idea into a revenue model was new. There are a couple of them in China but the success stories apart from that aren’t really available. Hence, getting the idea across to our employees and investors has been a challenge. However, we were able to overcome it when we started gaining user traction onto the platform. Thanks to that, we have been able to convince our investors as well as our founding team to have confidence.
- How do you handle the pressure and manage stress?
Every business comes with pressure. The trick to overcoming the pressure is remembering that. Every founder should expect challenges and work towards them. Acceptance is the key. Moreover, hobbies help a lot with stress. I look forward to a day off when I can spend time gardening or ride off on the road on my bike.
- What is one strategy that you believe has helped you grow as a person/startup?
Employees are an extremely important part of an organization. As a start-up, we have limited resources hence we have to use the available manpower to its best. Making employees ake the ownership of their projects and giving them the freedom to experiment and push themselves has been a good go for us.
- How your company is helping India to grow?
India has a huge platform filled with travel and adventure opportunities. We as a platform are enabling these local service providers from smaller cities to reach those who are looking to do something unique.
Till now, we just read things like that on blogs where someone found something new to do but the question is how to go about it. Our platform gives these service providers the freedom to get their resources out without the help of middlemen. That way, it helps smaller cities and business to grow their tourism and India to uncover its hidden beauty.
- In your opinion what are the keys to success?
There are three keys to success according to me.
First and foremost, the founder of a company should have focus and patience on the product they are trying to build.
Second, they should understand the available resources and find ways to use them effectively.
Third, a passion may be the key to starting out but it needs to generate revenue. The focus should lay on how to generate revenue out of the product so as to give a good return to investors.
- What advice would you give to someone starting out as an aspiring entrepreneur?
My first advice would be to have a passion and a heart for the space that the entrepreneur is trying to venture into. There are many opportunities in the market but looking for the perfect opportunity cannot help a business grow if you don’t have an emotional attachment to it. Second, before starting a business, it is important to understand the problem you are trying to solve and if it really needs to be solved.
With the basic solutions according to you, you move to understand logistics through the years. Only after that, you can venture into starting a business out of the experience.
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