 Welcome to the course Understanding Incubation and Entrepreneurship. This course will help you build an entrepreneur's mindset and take you through various stages of how to convert an idea or a solution into a business. All the lectures are recorded from our live classes at IIT Hyderabad and we also have included their project discussions and presentations to help you learn from their experience. The main idea behind this course Understanding Incubation and Entrepreneurship is to encourage you to become entrepreneurs and not graduate with degrees. Well, we have you covered. We have 12 exciting modules for you wherein we have brought in pre incubators and incubators from across the country and also expert mentors and consultants for various discussions and deliberations there on. All of you should know that becoming an entrepreneur is not an easy job. There is always the fear to fail, but that shouldn't stop you from starting up. Let us quickly dwell upon what entrepreneurship entails. Entrepreneurs are people who spot opportunities where others see confusion. They break new grounds to solve problems and bring economic prosperity to the country. They are leaders and have a good grasp on all aspects of business from planning, execution, finance and of course, excellent product ideas. Let me share a story with all of you of how to start small. It's very interesting that Bhavish and Ankit are students who started Ola started very small. They actually started with a company called Ola Trip. This company actually helped tourists to navigate through various tourist destinations and help them booking and other resources. It's interesting that Bhavish while traveling to one of these locations had a severe problem with the taxi service. The driver actually left him in the middle because he was negotiating while he was on his travel and left him in the middle and then went away. This one idea triggered the whole new company which was Ola. From the Ola story, we have learnt that customer discovery is the most important feature in any startup and you saw how Bhavish could trigger the change from being a Ola trip to a taxi hailing service. We are starting our lecture today with evidence-based entrepreneurship. You all can guess how evidence is very important for a startup because you need to know whether your idea is good or not and this is what our Gopal Krishnidesh Pandey Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship has been doing over the years with phenomenal success stories. Let me now introduce you to the team from the GDC who are very, very passionate about entrepreneurship and who will take us through this journey of how to find out whether our idea will work or not. We have two members from our GDC today. We have Mr. Raghutam Rao who is the Chief Executive Officer of the Gopal Krishnidesh Pandey Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Prior to this, he was the Chief Mentor of ICRA, a credit rating and analytical firm in South Asia and a subsidiary of Moody's. Raghut's last executive role was as MD and CEO of IMAX, a management consulting business which he founded as a subsidiary of ICRA with an operating footprint in over 20 countries. Raghut has a postgraduate diploma in management from IMM Dabat and a Bachelor of Technology in Mechanical Engineering from IIT Madras. So it's no wonder that we have alumni working back in the IIT Madras and we can expect a lot of interesting insights and directions for our entrepreneurship course from Raghut. Let me now introduce you to our second speaker, Mr. KV Anand. KV, as we fondly call him, has deep understanding of the innovation and entrepreneurship activities as well as a very deep understanding of the startup ecosystem in the country. In his earlier avatar, he was a senior business leader in pay television, cable broadband and e-commerce industries. He was a member of the founding team and has served as a chief service officer of Tata Sky. KV also coaches and mentors change makers, social entrepreneurs and fellows of leadership program for aspiring young women leaders. KV is a cost and management accountant by education, a professional certified coach, interest inventory professional and an NLP practitioner. No wonder KV can bring in his rich experience for startups to scale up too. Let me now take you to our first lecture on evidence-based entrepreneurship by the GDC team. Thank you, Professor Chakravarti. You know, you will get a flavor of, you know, what is this concept called evidence-based entrepreneurship? And I can assure you that it is going to be novel. It is usually not as exciting to sit through a lecture as going through a boot camp because our program is actually a boot camp for about, we have a four-week boot camp, we have an eight-week boot camp and both are highly transformational programs. And you know, if at any time, so let me make this an unabashed, unadulterated pitch for that because now that we have done 200 startups and the evidence and outcome is simply overwhelming, all 100% of them have been transformed in their own words. So this program is exciting in that sense. And today we will actually share with you what this program is about. So as you say, this is something called evidence-based entrepreneurship. This is not a term that you will hear very often. You know, we were set up by three illustrious alums at IIT Madras, right? Deshpande, his wife, Jayashree and Chris, Gopala Krishnan. And we are about five years old today, you know, as an entity, but as an organization working, we are about four years old, right? And our mandate is actually to work with STEM colleges across India. So the objective of Deshpande Center is to identify such ideas, which basically they are in the science labs, right, agnostic to discipline or domain, but they are science-based and fund them to a level where, you know, their results start becoming obvious to people and then the market, commercial funding of some kind takes it over and goes. They have been very successful. They started in 2000 or 2001. Ten years later, the US government, in fact, Resh was the advisor to President Obama. He was the co-advisor of innovation to the then president. And they wanted to step up innovation in the US. And along with the National Science Foundation, Dr. Deshpande worked and came up with a program. In fact, the National Science Foundation funded that program. Health started with people from Berkeley and Stanford, right? Which now runs as, which was running in Stanford as the lean launchpad. It was an academic program in Stanford University. So Professor Steve Blank and a couple of other people, they came together. They started this program called ICOR, or Innovation Core. This happened less than 10 years back. The program took off and the National Science Foundation has scaled it across the US. It has become so successful in universities in the US that now any federal funding, whether that goes through NIH, that is National Institute of Health or National Department of Energy, Department of Defense, NSF itself, and many others. They all have to do this program called ICOR, which is a seven-week program. And that's how GDC was set up to see, don't become another incubator. But to see how can you improve the impact of R&D by helping faculty, scholars, and students think like entrepreneurs, become entrepreneurial. And through, take the research to market to a start. So how do we do it? We move research from lab to market to create impact at scale. No point doing something which is small. You know, that's not what we want to do. Can you create impact at scale? Can you create, can you help solve blindness? There are more than two crore people who are blind in India. Can you help solve diabetes? We are fast becoming the diabetes capital of this country. Can you help people who don't have limbs? The number of handicapped people physically is one of the largest in India. You know, unfortunately, so there are many areas where India can be helped and by science and it's not happening. And therefore, what ideas that GDC wants to really help with are those that have IP, that have science at their base and those that can go to solve difficult problems. That's what GDC does, right? The second line is very important. Startups have a very, very high failure rate. Everyone knows that it's a difficult game. In fact, we will talk about it in more detail. Our job is to say, how can we reduce that also, right? That's what we're trying to do. And we are trying to build entrepreneurial thinking in campuses. And we do this with working with STEM colleges and incubators. So we are not an incubator. People who go through our incubate program, right? Which is not, we're not an incubator, but who go through the incubate program of eight weeks. At the end of it, roughly two thirds, 60% people say, I think we should go ahead with our startup. About 35% to 40% people are not social. They hesitate to go ahead. And some of them actually stopped, about 10% to 15% stopped. To us, all three are success. This is not a motivation statement. I say this, the design of our program is to help entrepreneurs, because this is what you will hear in the rest of the morning session. Startups fail not because of bad ideas. Startups fail because they fail to get customers. That is what happens. So this is a busy slide. I won't take you through it, but short to tell you that what it says is on the left-hand side is the research lab where you have an idea. You build a prototype. And then usually you scale it up, go to an incubator. You miss everything in this red ellipse out here. You do something sometimes, but you try to start scaling up because your idea is very good. Your prototype works. Your prototype is very promising. And usually you would have raised some money or some grant or some VC or said you've seen money. But we think that is the reason why startups fail. And there are many other intermediate steps, which is what evidence-based entrepreneurship forces you to look for. It looks at what's called a phase called customer discovery. We do this through the Intubate program, as you can see here. And we make the team go and meet a hundred customers. Go and meet a hundred customers out there. Usually they have met nobody. They have met their uncle or their friends, father's friend or mother's friend, and whatever it is. Who usually encourage them? Betachaya is a good design. They want to encourage you. But that's not the hard market feedback. You need to go and meet real customers to see if they are real problems that you can solve. And that's what a hard-nosed customer discovery program helps you do. Only if that tells you unambiguously to go ahead, do you then build your minimum viable product? Do you then build a pilot plant or whatever your domain is? Do you do clinical studies if you are a medical product? Do you see regulatory approval, depending on the domain that you work in? Or, and then do you seek to scale up with a business model, a partner, and so on? And then, of course, you raise more money and move ahead. So this whole process of evidence-based entrepreneurship is a series of experiments. That's a word we'll use. And I think KV Anand will tell you that. You do that, and you then look for evidence. And what is an evidence is what goes to the heart of telling, informing you whether your startup is better place to succeed than not. So that is really what GDC does. It is a difficult set of programs that we administer. We don't apologize for that. Startups is for people with a stout heart and willing to give it all. And therefore, we promise nothing less than that. But those who go through with us are transformed for the better. And usually, even if their idea does not work out, as I told you, that's a success because they now know how to fish, right? Even if they did not get the fish during the program, they know how to catch the fish. And that's what actually helps them for life in that, right? So our whole idea is how can STEM research be better channeled to solve problems in real life. Ideas are simple, building a business is difficult. You know, that's some sit-down. Ideas are simple. You can sit and generate ideas. You know, I can solve diabetes. I can solve blindness. I can go to Mars. I can build the cheapest satellite to do this, that I can go underwater. I can do so many ideas. But when you want to make a business out of it, which means that business should make money. It should deliver a product or a service and make money at the end of it, enough to keep everybody happy, then you have success. So I promise to people that I'll come back and ask you. I won't wait for an answer here, but think about it. When you have started your, you know, what is successful? Is it raising money? Is it building the product? Is it getting a few customers? Is it getting a co-founder? All of them are important, but it is useful to understand when you embark on building a startup, becoming an entrepreneur, right? And devoting some part of your career and life and savings and all of that, you should ask this question of yourself. What is successful? And that's not a trivial question because that will guide you all the way. This is a difficult task. At the idea stage, 99.8 or 99.9 or even higher startup will fail. That is the failure rate at that stage. And the job of evidence-based entrepreneurship is to slowly chisel that number and bring it down before you sink in serious time, serious money and other resources into it. That should have come down by very, very, I'd never become zero ever, but it should come down to a much more manageable number. So therefore think about as an entrepreneur, what is success? Because as I said, and that answer doesn't have to be the same for everything. You know, you will know whether your startup will run for six months or will it run for six years or will it run for 60 years? Entrepreneurship is about bringing to the table all kinds of resources, intellectual, physical, fiscal, financial, what have you, and to solve the problem and take it ahead. That is really what entrepreneurship is about or being entrepreneurial is about. Let me hand it over to KV. So there's evidence-based entrepreneurship and then we weave these two words, lean startup. That's really what I'm going to talk about. So let's build a startup story. So we think about different things when you begin, somebody thinks about money, somebody thinks about solving a problem or a fulfilling a need, somebody thinks about customers, somebody thinks about, you know, how do you connect with a customer? So you may start with something in mind, but all of us begin with this in mind. This is the dream for every startup, right? You want to be a unicorn. How many of you do not want to be a unicorn? Okay, but it's a big dream, right? You want to be a winner. You want to be a winner all the way. You want to be like the most successful businesses in the world, you know, whether it is Apple, whether it is Google or in India, whether it is a Flipkart or it is an Ola or your rooms. So buy juice now. So there are many, many examples that all of us are very familiar with who have made it really big. I understood that all of you are in this program because you want to know about entrepreneurship or 25% of you have already tried your hands with entrepreneurship. You have either built companies or you have worked with startups. You have built and moved on. So clearly all of us are, we do have a dream about building a unicorn or a very successful startup. That's how we start. So with this, what do we do next? What's the next thing that we think about or we do? You have an idea, you have thought about the resources that you need to think about the impact you can create. You also think about consumers and you think about timing, okay? So typically what does a startup do? They begin with a dream and they think that they are building an empire. They'll start small and they'll become big. All of us have this vision of becoming a Fortune 500 or even a Fortune 100 company. That's the big vision that we have. And then typically what we do is this. So you have an idea and you also believe that the idea is disruptive, but you are not so blind that you believe that nobody in the world has ever thought about it. You also look around, look at competition, you look at what is really going to happen if I bring this idea to the world. So you think you should study what is already happening and not just believe that nobody has thought about what you have thought about. Because most tech startups at least, not just tech startups, in fact, most startups, they begin with this belief that their idea is novel, is disruptive. And if it is not disruptive, what are you building? If you're not really disrupting, can you think of building a unicorn or building another Baijus or another club cup? Were they not disruptive ideas? What is the most disruptive idea that comes to your mind? Can you give me an example, anyone? I mean, maybe going to space, taking custom, what SpaceX is doing right now. So some... Yes, fantastic, SpaceX is disruptive, okay. So disruptive is not really, that only SpaceX can be disruptive. If you are disrupting the ecosystem in which the business is operating, that is also disruptive. What did Uber do? Did they just come up with a technology or did you think they did something really disruptive? They disrupted the entire ecosystem where taxi operators have been operating, the workflow, the ecosystem, everything changed. How did you get a cab before Uber? They disrupted the ecosystem. They brought a new workflow for the customer, the customer and the taxi drivers, everybody benefited from this new ecosystem and what the company did with technology. They call themselves a technology company, but what they did was truly beneficial for so many people. So they have created impact, they have made it useful for customers. They've thought about customers, they have disrupted, they've done everything. So all of us, at least a typical story starts like this. The founder has a dream. The founder then thinks that I need to start small, but I'm going to go big one day, one day I'm going to be that unicorn. And then they believe that the idea that they have is disruptive, they have conviction and there is nothing wrong. Only if you have conviction about what you're building, you'll be able to build it successfully. So this passion, this conviction that I am doing something that nobody has thought about and I am disruptive is good. So that's how a typical startup starts. And then what do we do? And most of us then think about, okay, I have an idea, it's disruptive, I need a team. Okay, I know how to code. I need somebody who can market it. I need somebody who can sell it. I need somebody who can manage the money, raise money and manage the money. I need somebody to have relationships with the external world. I need somebody to have technology. So you need a solid founding team. You may give yourselves all these titings, but you need equal amount of passion and commitment from all the co-founders, isn't it? So we think about that. Do you also think about employing people at the stage, do collaboration, partnerships? I don't have to do everything myself. I can collaborate with somebody else. I don't have all the money to hire 20 people. So let me do what I can do best and collaborate with the people who have those skills, other skills that I don't have. That's how we think about it, right? We think about building an organization. Do we think about it now or not? Building an organization. In my experience, once the founding team has a code plan ready, I think then they'll think of expanding it. Once a certain sampling or pilot run is done and then expansion, yeah. Sure. So that's what we do. We think about, we have an idea. Sorry, we have a dream. We have an idea. We think about the impact. We think about money. We think about resources. We are convinced that we have a disruptive idea and then we look at division of labor or getting the right skills to actually build it. So you would have already started developing, but now it actually can happen full speed. You can go full speed and you can develop the product because you have the code team. It's the MVP is what we kind of make and then we try to see whether people are interested in it. So you're either developing the product or you're developing the MVP or you're developing the product or you're thinking about launching the product. That's what you do next, correct? We also, at this stage, from my experience, we were also working at pitching the idea to get more funding. So that's where I am right now. Would you go and launch your product without a plan? How will you pitch? How will you get money? And what do people ask you if you ask them for money? So there is a business plan. What would be the next thing that we would do? What should be? I think the business plan should get validated, should have good validation. How do you validate a business plan? You have to run it through investors. You have to get their opinions and according to that, you keep refining your business plan. So the investor's opinion will validate the business plan. You're testing the waters at this stage. You don't have to necessarily validate your plan with the investors. You can also test the waters with the customers, right? After all this, where do we spend most of our time? The founders. And where would the founders like to spend most of their time if they are building something disruptive? I think the balance sheet. Oh my God. No, no, they'll spend all the time on their product. This is what they do. You can't sleep. You get new ideas about your product. You want to make your product the best. It is disruptive. How can it be simple? It has to be complex. It has to be world-class. It has to have all the features. I need to pack my product with all the features. And every day I get new ideas about adding a new feature to my product. This is what we love doing. This is our comfort zone. Customers are not our comfort zone. Market is not our comfort zone. Our comfort zone is this. And all the co-founders sit and dream about that product that nobody has even imagined. And then we launch. The founder says, great, I've got a plan. I've got a product that nobody has built. I've got it packed with all the features. And I have this commitment and passion. The co-founding team is equally committed. And let me launch. So we launch. And then what happens is this. More than 90% of the startups, the number can vary from 90% to 97% or 98%. Most startups face this when they go to the market. They get run over by the market. And this is the fate of over 90% startups. It's not a small number. The startup success rate is less than 10%. Globally, we're not talking about only India. Globally, even now after so many years, the success rate is less than 10%. Why? Customers won't accept the change. Sometimes customers are so strongly on their own foot that they don't want the change, you know? Nobody wants to change. Absolutely. We think we are winning, but the market always wins. Professionals are aware that it is unpredictable and we can never predict the market. But what also, you know, we need to think about is the market always wins, right? So this is the fate of most startups. And now let us look at the statistics. This is the survey which was done by 4,000 tech startups, technology-based startups. You're making something that nobody wants or very few people want. This is the number one reason. This data is not different between countries. This was done in the US, but this data is very similar in the country as well. So just about two years, three years ago, they did a survey of 1,000 startups which started up in India. And 50% of them did not survive beyond six months. And 90% of them did not survive even a year. These are people who burned all their resources. They spent time developing a product. They took it to the market and then the market told them, sorry, we don't need it. Whether they built sports cars or they built something that is common or they made salt. That's how you look at this data. So the number one reason is this. And you look at number two reason and number three reason and even number four reason. They're all connected to the number one reason. If you have hired people and if you have spent a lot of money and you have completely focused on your product but not focused on what customers need and then you try to take it to the market, you see fail to execute sales and marketing. It's not the salesman's fault. The fault is in number one, the reason number one. And in India, the data is not very different. If you look at all the efforts that the government and the corporates and everybody is trying to put in to make startups successful, you can understand why it is such a big deal for everybody to spending so much time and efforts and money to make startups successful and support them. There are grants available. There are seed funds available. There are angels available. Everybody is there but they know that if they invest in 10 startups, it's not like all 10 will take off. They invest in 10 startups because they know that only one will take off. They are de-risking their investments. So that's how the startup world is. This is the truth. Most people, especially the technology startups, the founders, STEM startups, the founders are in love with what they are creating and they wear blinkers and they don't really even look beyond their noses and they get disappointed. So having said this context, let's look at what are some common mistakes that startups make. The first thing is we think that a lot of people have the problem one. Nobody thinks small. Even if it is sports cars, you don't think five sports cars. We think at least 5,000 sports cars in year one and 50,000 sports cars in year three. A lot of people have the problem or need and in reality, you find that they do not and that's what happens when you lose focus of what you're building. I mean, you're only focused on what you're building and without understanding what customers need. The second most common problem is we think that it is urgent. It is a must. These 5,000 people cannot live without my sports car for at least even one more day. They're just waiting for me to launch and they are going to grab it and it's a must have for these people but we find that they don't care. Customers don't care about your product. They care about a solution for their problem. If you can solve it, good. And we usually talk to people who have spoken to friends, who have spoken to your professors, who have spoken to your parents, relatives, who have spoken to a lot of people that you are comfortable talking to but you don't talk to the right people. Who are those right people? Potential customers. You don't talk to them and instead you talk to the wrong people and just go and build a solution. This is a typical startup. If some of you have done it differently, congratulations, you've done something right but this is what happens to more than 91% of the startup. They just go and build a solution. And this is invariably true for every founder who's building a product that is disruptive or not even disruptive but building a product. Making it work is the toughest part. If I don't have a product then I have nothing to sell and what we usually forget and we don't talk about the other 99. So there are so many other things that one needs to think about and we don't. So that's really how startups fail. So these are the most common mistakes that startups make. Now the question is, if this has been happening for so many years then why is it not being solved? Why are we allowing startups to fail at this rate? Why can't we just reduce this failure rate at least? And that's exactly why Lean startup came about. This is evidence-based entrepreneurship. So Lean startup, there is a book called Lean startup written by Eric Rice and that is about agile engineering, MVP development. So those who are already familiar with MVP will definitely know about Eric Rice because he's the one who developed this concept of low fidelity MVP, high fidelity MVP, testing the MVP, iterative process of development, agile engineering. So that's how it started but now Lean startup does not mean as a methodology, it's not just agile engineering. It's a combination of the three things that you see on screen. Osterwalder, Alexander Osterwalder is somebody who was doing his PhD and his PhD was about business models. And when he was doing that, he actually started his own company. Sorry, he went to Steve Blank and they joined together. Steve Blank was already teaching entrepreneurship at Stanford and he had come up with a methodology called customer development. They joined hands. The business model Canvas is developed by Osterwalder and then Eric Rice, he wanted to, he wanted Steve Blank to invest in this company. He went to him and so Steve Blank said, I will invest in your company but with one condition, you come and sit through my customer development and Lean launchpad or whatever the classes. And then you tell me whether you still want me to invest. So this is how these three people came together and they have created something called Lean startup. This is a huge movement now and the Lean startup methodology is what we refer to as evidence-based entrepreneurship because in this methodology, every decision you make should be based on evidence and not based on your assumptions or others' opinions. Usually we will start up with our assumptions and others' opinions and this completely removes any ambiguity and it says you build your business only based on evidence. Osterwalder developed this business model Canvas. So this is a Canvas which has nine boxes. It's a very popular tool. In one page, you can see all the nine things that are critical for your business and it forces you to think about them. You don't just think about money. So this tool actually forces startups to think about things that they usually don't think about. The first rectangle has two circles, customer discovery and validation. And the right, you see two circles, customer creation and company building. A startup usually spends more time here or startup who spends enough time here on the left-hand side has a higher probability of success because they have made assumptions about what customers need and why they need it. They have followed the process of customer discovery and gone and validated them without simply creating the product and trying to sell to customers. Most startups don't spend time on the left side rectangle at all. They think that they have building a product that in their minds what customers need and then they go and start selling. This is a huge missing piece in the world of startups and that's really why startups fail. And then once you have validated all your assumptions about the customers, about their needs, why they need your product, why they will stop buying what they are buying and switch to buying your product. All those answers are here in the left-hand side and then you go in, start selling at scale and you scale up your company. If you do that without doing any work on the left-hand side you burn all your resources. Startups have limited resources. So this agile engineering is the iterative development of product. Gone are those days where you did waterfall engineering because waterfall engineering would take years. Every cycle would take years. But with agile engineering you do sprints and each sprint is done by a team. So these are all very small teams. They don't build large teams. This is the framework which we just spoke about. So right from the idea stage to the time you start making lots of money. So this phase, the first rectangle or the first two circles on the left side is called the search phase. So we'll explain what is different between a startup and a company or a large company. Not just a business but startup and an existing corporate. The essence of lean startup therefore is this. Technology is not the reason for startups failing. In most cases it is because they built something the market does not need. People think that startup is a smaller version of a large company and they end up doing what a large company does. A large company hires people and they get a functional team in place. The organization structure will be like you have a CEO, you have a CEO, you have a CFO, you have a CTO, you have all the C's and then you have VPs and then you have large teams. That is how a corporate or a large company functions. But startups think that they should follow the same structure and they end up putting a functional organization structure too early. When they still don't even know what they are building and when they are going to launch. But a functional organization structure is not the useful structure for a startup. Startup even does not have those many people. And customers are not interested in your technology or product. They want you to satisfy their needs or they want you to solve their problem. And a startup works very differently. You'll see why it is a temporary organization. And evidence is not in your office or amongst your friends and family. Evidence is out there and you need to go and seek that evidence. And after all this, we don't claim that if you do this your startup will be successful. Because lean startup does not guarantee success but it reduces the odds of failure. So it's de-risking you from building something, spending two years or three years burning all your money and resources and building something. Take something to the market and get this appointed. It de-risks you from that. So this is the essence of lean startup or evidence-based startup. These are the fundamental differences between startups and large companies. So a startup does not know who its customers are. Whereas a large company knows who they are already selling to. But a startup does not know who could be their customers. So your customers are unknown in a startup. That therefore, if you don't know the people you also don't know the needs of those people. And you're working with guesses with a lot of assumptions and you're trying to find your way around. This is why we call this the search phase. Whereas large companies are executing their business plans. A business plan is not useful for a startup. A business model is useful for a startup. So if you write a hundred page business plan thinking that your investors will be impressed. Again, you could get disappointed because they don't look at business plan. They look at how much you know about the customer's needs and how well have you researched the customer's problems and built a solution to solve their problem. And then they look at the team that is actually solving the problem. The credibility of the team, the credibility of the customer discovery findings. This is what makes an investor invest in you. Not just because you have a 6,800 page business plan. So business plan is not useful. Business model is what we are searching for. We are searching for the right business model. Therefore, we call this a temporary organization searching for a scalable and repeatable business model. The three fundamental question for any startup or anything that you're thinking innovation. The first question that needs to be answered is who needs it and why? If we don't get an answer to this question and if you go ahead and start building something, you could be in one of those 90% of the startups that have not been able to make it. Absolute clarity is required when you get the answer to this question which is supported by evidence. It's not a test where you say, who needs it and why and your co-founder answers it. Okay, all parents need it because of this. That's not what it means here. What it really means here is can you go and talk to hundreds of potential customers without actually discussing your solution, without telling them that you have a solution or a product in mind and listen and only listen about their problems and then come back and do that, whatever solution that they are looking for and develop it, your chances of success will be higher. The second question is, can you deliver that value? It's not about challenging you. It's about, can you build an organization? Can you build with the limited resources will you be able to deliver that value? We are not asking question, can you deliver that product? So that's what startups again make a mistake. They think that they are being asked the question, can you deliver that product? If I replace the question with, can you deliver that product? Your answer will be different. And when I say, can you deliver that value? The answer is different. What's the difference between the product and the value? Is it solving the problem? Is it fulfilling the need? That is value. Value is not your product. So here value is not from your point of view. It is from the customer's point of view. And finally, the last question is, can you make enough money? I think one of you spoke about viability. Yes, you need to think about viability early enough because costing a product is not just adding the bill of materials cost. There are so many other costs that happen and then your business should still be viable. Unit economics should work. That is what we mean here. Can you make enough money? These are the three fundamental questions for any startup. In this order, don't try to answer the third question without answering the first two questions or don't try to answer the second question without answering the first question. And finally, there is a lot of debate that goes on about design thinking and lead startup. A lot of people think that they are opposing. A lot of people think that if you do design thinking, that is better than doing lead startup because design thinking is really God. Everything else is slave. But there's no dichotomy. There is no opposing views between design thinking and lead startup. Gartner has created this. They have explained how you begin with design thinking because design thinking requires you to empathize, define, and ideate, right? But what we do at GDC is that even at that stage of customer problem definition, where you're empathizing, defining, and ideating, we are applying one more layer of validating the problem. And then you go to lead startup where you do your MVP, first cut MVP, second MVP. You can have any number of MVPs because it's an iterative process. You test it with a few customers and make sure that the value that they are expecting is getting delivered and you keep iterating. And then we use the agile development to do iterative development. So this is how design thinking and lead startup go hand in hand. They work together. So that's really what evidence-based entrepreneurship is all about. It does not work with your opinions or your assumptions and others' opinions. Everything is supported by evidence. What is evidence? When you attend the program, you will get much more clarity, but it saves you from building something that nobody wants. Thank you. I'm extremely glad to introduce my most favorite student, Dinoj Joseph, who actually underwent the DDC program and he's going to show you the methodology he followed and, of course, what he learned in the DDC program and how it transformed his entrepreneurship journey. So welcome, Dinoj. Let me just quickly introduce you to Dinoj. Dinoj was our 2018 pass-out master of design student from the Industrial Design School here at IIT Bombay. He then, after his graduation, one of his projects, which he worked on, like he wanted to continue that project as an entrepreneurship, he went on and joined the Betix Center at IIT Bombay. We were going to have the lecture from Betix Center in a couple of weeks and then there was no looking back for Dinoj and I don't want to spill the beans here. Dinoj, you're welcome. Thank you so much for agreeing to talk to us. Let us hear your story. So thank you very much, Chakusar. And it was always a pleasure being a student of yours and we have actually learned, you know, the idea of product development and entrepreneurship, everything from IDC, IIT Bombay. So here I want to explain here about how my life transformed. I would say life here because it is not just entrepreneurship journey. It's about the transformation what happens from a student to an entrepreneur. So this is what I want to explain through this program and how GDC, I Incubate program helped a crucial role in transforming. So as you all know, like GDC I Incubate is a program which is really focused on entrepreneurship, especially in the part, the need identification. So need identification is one of the key element in the journey of entrepreneurship because in IDC, we have worked, we have learned product development and we have worked on a lot of projects. So the project known as portable operation room for conducting surgeries in remote and low resource settings was my master's project. And I had a design in my mind and I have made it during my course. But I was not sure like who is going to be the real customer or the customer identification part was not perfectly done. But I remember the notes, you traveled all the way and you did very good user survey for sure when you designed your product. Yeah. So even if I had conducted a lot of travels and met a lot of people, but they were not in a structured way. So I was getting a lot of information but I was not really getting an insight like how I should rearrange to assimilate that and how I should take decision points to refine my product. I was mostly concerned with my idea and there was like more mean that rather than you or you here I mean the user. And that is what the transformation happened to me. And I feel like this should happen to each one of us who is into entrepreneurship or into product development. So we had a beautiful team embarrassing of mentors from various expertise. And as I mentioned earlier, I was working with Pettig at that time. And Pettig has really helped me to understand the clinical immersion part. And we had a four member team and we joined I Incubate program with this idea what I discussed before. So the basic idea or the concept was a sterile enclosure for conducting surgical procedure. And there were certain assumptions what we had while entering into the program. I thought here I would say I because that is what as a designer we generally think. So here I thought the rural surgeons are going to love our product are going to use our product. Then again I thought like the surgical infections are majorly causing and this is happening. This is leading to a lot of issues. Then for this what I felt is like the solution is going to be only what I have discussed. And there should be some quickly deployable solution which should cater to all these problems. These are the assumptions from which we started. But the GDC team insisted us to validate each of these hypothesis. And that is not just by Google research. It was by going and meeting persons face to face asking them questions having a chat with them spending enough amount of time understanding their feelings understanding their you know their personas and really deep diving into their life and to understand what are their concerns. That was something very important. So we have traveled all across the country and met more than 100 customers. And we visited more than 10 states. We met people like the patients from the poorest of the poorest places in the country to the richest of the richest places in the country. We met ministry level people. We met government officials. We met college professors. We met the hospital cleaning staff. We met the doctors. We met the nurses and a lot more. And what we found is like even as in something specific initially our hypothesis was the rural surgeons are going to allow our product. And that was true. They love the product. But the issues like there are other set of issues like financial there are other stakeholders like decision makers. So we were not at all approaching those people or we are not focusing on those people. So it is not just one customer for a product what we have. It is all bunch of stakeholders like decision maker the one who is going to invest on the product the one who is going to get benefit out of the product one who is going to use a product. And again there is someone who will be always looking to stop our business. It can come in all forms. So we should be aware about all the you know things what we'll find in the ground reality and we should have plan and strategies build up accordingly. So this was one of the key learnings we got from the methodology what we followed which was mentioned which was taught in the GDCI program. So as I told from this solution how we transformed is like we got there was an eye opening interview which I'll be explaining later that we got an understanding like it is not just for surgeries what we really need but there is another huge segment known as burns. Why because generally for the surgery it is just a half an hour or one hour thing what we are looking at. And the cost come for the product compared to the benefit they get and there is a huge difference and generally in lower source setting they are already short of financial things and they are not really you know capable of affording it in a developing country like India. But if you see the burns market actually it is not a one hour thing. It is more than you know 40 days treatment what the patients need. So if a patient can afford a 5,000 rupee enclosure they can use it constantly for the coming 40 days which will be more adding more value to their life. And if you see the current market size there are more than 7,000,000 people who need the treatment and currently 1,400 facilities are available. So that is a kind of market or the scale of market what we really have in front of us. So being told this I just want to show you the in-depth process or you know what we followed. So whatever interviews we conducted we had to the mandates were forcing us to you know type everything down record the videos, record the audio. It was very difficult for us in the short span of time but somehow we managed to do that and the results were amazing. So you can see how much amount of information actually we got. Among this whatever I have highlighted are like the very good insights which led to the pivoting of the idea itself. So you can see earlier we had told like the surgeons are going to allow the product they allow the product they identify the need everything is cool but there is a huge part of finance what should go into it, right? Then from this we actually got an idea like there are other markets and what we should what we can cater to. Then here I have highlighted something related to the defense. So during the course of our work we met the 69 para regiment in Agra and we spoke to them. So we understood like still they are using the second world war vintage OTs for conducting surgeries and it was like a very sad thing like you know the Indian defense still not really having enough products for conducting this kind of you know surgeries in a very safe and sterile way. So we told them like we have such a solution and will this going to be any sort of help for you? Then they agreed like this sounds promising and currently we are having discussions and we are gonna parallely develop a product for them. But again there is an issue is that the kind of product volumes what they need is low. So as a startup you cannot sustain like even if you have got a dream project but sometimes you have to focus on other projects what will generate revenue for your startup then you can focus on the dream project or you know the project what you really need. So right now you can assume like we have shelf the operation room project and we are focusing more on burns because both of them has got equal need and the patient is a patient. You cannot say like you know only the customer segment is large then only we should treat them it's never like that. But as a startup there is a different strategy what I feel like we should do it right now. In fact so you know it's so nice it's music to my ears and I hear all these aspects of business coming in because that's the core right entrepreneurs have to make money and they have to actually sell a large number of products to make both ends meet and make the company successful and prosperous that is really, really excellent of how you could change from in fact you also rightly said that you're not going to shelf it you may just once you have your main product you may have this as a secondary product that's also a fabulous way of putting things together. Very good. Now let us see how you progress from here on to build up your you know like the next product. Yeah so here before going to that I will tell you something like this product the portable operation room I was so confident like this product is awesome even we had a patent known in the world as I have done that and so I was like I was so confident like I am going to get the funding for it and I applied for a BAG program and I was not able to get any funding for it because the need identification who is the customer who is who you are going to target that is not clear with just a technology with just a beautiful design it is impossible to get into the market that is a great revelation what I really got so with this thing in mind understanding my own failures even if I believe I failed in a recruited way but still I failed a failure is a failure you have to accept that and from this we got our second version of the product which essentially we voted back in the GDC I Incubate program and that was an affordable isolation room for burn treatment in burn treatment currently if you see the expenses are so high if you see the daily room rent that is coming more than 7,000 rupees per day which you can imagine like who really can afford that much and 90% of the burns are happening in very low resource settings or 70% of the burns are again happening to women and children so it is more like a social economic thing rather than just an accident or an injury and if you want to understand the real number of burn patients in every hour 16 people are dying due to burn injury so that is the kind of statistics we have and the pictures you see these images we actually the situations in the current hospitals are somewhat similar and then we went and did the users to understand what is the real gold standard for treating in burns and we came to know it is all about treating them in a perfect isolation room with following proper protocol but most of the times we are unable to do it because of its sheer expense then we again did one more GDC program personally because I really learned what they taught me and this is not a one-timing that is what I want to say each time you are going to launch a project each time you are going to think about a product before sketching the product you should do the need identification part that is very important and need identification is not just a secondary research it is the road that what you should get from right from the mouth of the customer that is very important don't assume we shouldn't assume the assumptions are just assumptions it will lead you nowhere you should have solid concrete evidence and always you should ask the customer like are you willing to buy the product don't ask them like does the product look good you should always ask are you willing to buy the product and if for how much that is some very important questions you should answer because once you have a startup once you have your own funding then you have to feed your own bills right then in that case these questions become very important and it's very important to understand who all are the stakeholders in the customer for example for my product doctor is going to use the product majorly they are going to be the decision maker whether this product is a go or no go but the hospital is going to be the buyer or they are going to invest on the product then for hospitals they will be looking for something like a combat unit so that they can accommodate more number of patients where they can generate more revenue for the patients it's all about faster recovery with less financial burden it's always less financial burden than the recovery I would say yeah so we have to cater to all these stakeholders or else our product is going to fail then what we are planning to make is something which can convert just a hospital but onto an isolation group so what you see in the image is a computer generated image which shows the concept what we are looking at and we again have the IP protection and everything so for each customer stakeholder each stakeholder who we have addressed we should have a unique value proposition for them that is very important it has to be really unique it should never be generic and it has to be quantified that is equally important we cannot say like it is going to improve if it is going to improve then at what percentage if they can treat more number of patients then how many number of patients they can treat in a day come back to the existing system such quantification is again very important again we conducted earlier we conducted one open interview now we conducted more than 140 interviews so that is the kind of hard work and effort we should put in to make our design a reality or to make our products hit the market and it's equally important to have the positive feedbacks as well as the negative feedbacks because often the negative feedbacks will really help us to refine the product and to develop into something better then we should always look for the competitor products what all are the things which are good in the competitor product and what are the drawbacks in the competitor product no product in the world can be perfect even the product what we are designing but we should find a market gap such that the pursuit benefits are better or more than the risks what is associated with the product or the difficulties what is associated with the product and it's very important accordingly you have to position the product and it's something very critical as a startup you should have a robust business model and even if it is partially clear you should start building the business model you should start identifying the customers at a very early stage and always what are your potential what are your capability what are your weaknesses this is very important and most importantly how much is the minimum number of units you have to sell just for you to sustain if you cannot meet that number then you are dead the company is no more it's impossible and never push everything all the products to some NGOs or to some government sectors because generally the selling to government or a government comes secondary more important you should initially focus on the areas where there is money for us to sustain so this is some of my personal observations or my personal learnings from the interview you see may be applicable for everyone or it may not be applicable for you then it's important to have a long-term vision because if you are doing a product development right now in 2000 point you may be selling the doing the clinical trials in 2023 or in 24 and 25 you will be selling the product so our products need to be futuristic you need to understand what all materials what all manufacturing process which all kind of expertise in the domain are going to be there at that time and what is the potential market changes and all those and again the team can change but the passion remains the same so that is what I want to explain from my experience and I hope this will be helpful thank you So that's perfect Dinoj I think you really summed it up very nicely all the advantages of evidence-based entrepreneurship and what is very heartening to learn from you is also the iterative process on your own when you went back I think the GDC program was so well ingredient in your mind that you used it again extensively and came up with the success story we wish you really really all the best and any support from all of us we are all there and we wish you all the best and I'm sure your product will really really do well with this type of evidence thank you so much Dinoj and we look forward to being touched with you Thank you sir, thank you very much and thank you IDGDC team for giving me such an experience and transforming me from a student to an entrepreneur thank you very much