Attended a sesion organised by #iimaventures and #echai on " scaling star ups " .

#growthmindset

it was indeed entrepreneurial and stimulating and enriching to listen to
founder of TorchIt .

torchit works towards empowering the differently abled community using modern tech and giving them independence.( www.mytorchit.com)

Learnings from the founder of Torchit :

_ attendance to networking events helps find mentors and investors ..keep attending. keep meeting lots and lots of people .

_ alignment with your co-founder at skills and belief level is more important than functional alignment. having a co-founder always helps .

_ your purpose and it's clarity triggers the scale up strategy automatically.

_ innovation engine of a start up business is like a popcorn machine where you need to continuously pop up innovative ideas ..how many pop corn machines Can you instill in your start up ?

_ 18 versions of his prototype has made the company product robust to scale. keep on developing prototypes .fail forward .fail fast. iterate .
_ you can learn anything .anything .including coding even though you are not a coder professionally . keep aspiring and keep learning. he built his program code himself .

_its good to have multiple mentors for every area of your business where you have concerns .listen to all mentors , use your gut and do what feels to you is good. you as a start up owner may need different styles different nature and different type of mentors as you progress along the business journey .having functionally qualified mentors ( as for example legal experts etc ) is more apt .

_ continuously talking to , interviewing with and observing your target audience is the best way to learn about products and innovation. he learnt that visually impaired clients not give " blunt " and right answers ..they always give good answers .so meeting more and more users, one of the users helped in understanding that his product was not up to the mark .and that thought triggered him to go deeper in their lives.
so the founder decided to employ micro blind entrepreneurs who become trainers to their clients for torchit clients.

_ game of start up entrepreneurship is about completing a full cycle of the value chain . once done, and once sorted, your role is now to give the execution of the cycle to your team .your role is to be mentally free. being a innovator your role is not to sit idle, but to create similar such multiple cycles ( new products / new markets / new tech/ new orbits )

_product innovation and business innovation are two sepate types of innovation streams, according to him business innovation is the key trigger for his success

_ community building has been a key success factor for his success.creating a band of micro entrepreneurs who are having partially disability are a key segment for training and marketing their products

Anay Mashruwala