BrandAdda, a destination site to track community pulse has decided to shutdown, citing lack of success on the business front.
Founder, Tej Arora shares some of the insights/challenges they faced while running the company.
‘There were many challenges we faced in building the business, and a few we faced building the product.
- Working without a founding partner was extremely hard.
- Hiring quality talent was super tough.
By and large, we found people to be risk-averse, and putting more emphasis on cash compensation than on equity - Brands have not yet appreciated social media, specially in India. It was a hard sell. It was hard enough explaining the concept to them, forget selling a service. They need to first warm up to it, and then organize themselves appropriately to take advantage of it. That will take longer than we had hoped for.
- The budget for internet marketing is a tiny fraction of the overall marketing budget.
- BrandAdda wasn’t giving consumers something compelling or solving a pain point, so consumer adoption was poor. We were counting on Brands to be able to offer something of value to consumers, but with no traction from Brands, this never materialized
- There was no one from the Marketing industry in the team. We were outsiders to the industry, trying to reach Brands through a well-established layer of Agencies around them. That was hard. The soft business climate made matters worse. – blog
I have known Tej Arora for quite sometime and one thing he and I have always shared is the challenge of not having a cofounder in running a venture.
Sometimes, you need validation of idea/hypothesis, a healthy argument around the venture (as well as product features), somebody to question things, to brainstorm ideas and being the solepreneur just takes you into ‘Let me try this’ loop [Read this: Successful startup needs 2.09 founders to make it big!].
Must Read: What exactly makes Entrepreneurship so hard
That is a very candid disclosure of the reasons for shutting down. I hope them the best for their future ventures.
Well the reasons that Teja provided are common,
for me what i plan is simple, hiring the good talented is tough game but at the same moment those high talented will not be standard because they got some demand in market and they can change companies easily. The solution is get a less experianced and learner guy, who can sit and work for atleast 1 year standard and who can learn and whom we can manage easily
and coming to funding.. these days people look for big projects and also look for great returns, but if you take pagalguy.com or some innovative unique projects which started from scrap and ruling the sector now. So for a business the product should reach the specific public and those public need to kick the product up or down it all depends upon the public so looking for a funding person, or VC for a business is good but i say its not 100% necessary
and coming to marketing division, concentrating on the typical market and getting the reports regularly from public is main course. Putting up thousands and lakhs for ads in TV or internet or any source of media is a waste matter, because it costs more and thinking of people will run for it is waste. Remember for any thing Slow and Steady Wins the Race.
Finally at the end most points that Teja spoke out are completly normal points which are to be taken at first before starting the project.
Thanks & Regards
Sai Pothuri
Probably the first point carries lot of weight in the reasons stated for shutting down. Practically it is complex to run a business without co-founders with similar wave length and profound knowledge is his/her area of work.
For such websites engagement of brand is very very important. Unless they engage, its hard to keep users coming to the site. I think it will take time for Indian companies to understand this. have seen complain board where no companies representative ever respond to the complains filed.. and me as an end user just spent time and expressed my frustration without any hope of solutions or response from the vendor.
thanks
@Tej I want to congratulate u for having the rare ability to accept and talk about your mistakes..very few ppl actually do this. We are also a start-up and we can actually relate to what you have mentioned…thanks for sharing ur experience with us all. I’m sure, this experience will take you towards something better.
I have been tracking BrandAdda personally for sometime and it’s unfortunate that the company is being shut down.
More and more I peel, it is becoming hard to find people who could make a tangible product out of an idea. The lack of capital is another deterrent to attract top engineers to work on something to at least see through even half of a product’s 4-year life cycle. However, on the flip side there are smart people who are waiting to be “redeemed” by a startup gig. But, they don’t know where to go (I’m going tangent and it’s a meat for a separate discussion)
On a different take — the market for enabling marketing measurement (brands, adoption, social media pulse, etc) is just opening up in India. However, these are being serviced by all-you-can-eat media agencies with significant firepower and resources.
Tej, best of luck on your next gig!
Cheers,
Indus
Tej, thanks for all the insights. The news did come as an unpleasant surprise. I still feel that you ought to keep it warm for another year. Last year was bad for marketeers. This year should be different.
Quality talent is always a challenge irrespective of your muscle power. I subscribe to khaitan’s statement. I see so many enthusiastic people at the startup networking events.