 Namaskar. I'm Professor Devade Purkayastha from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. Welcome to my course, Business Fundamental for Entrepreneurs Part 1, Internal Operations. As part of the course, I'm very pleased to invite Mr. Kalpith Virwal to share a case study about how he founded Accord Boost when he was still a student at IIT Bombay. As background, Kalpith is an alumnus of IIT Bombay and he shot to fame in 2017 when he was probably the first person to achieve complete full marks in the prestigious GE entrance exam, which is an entrance exam to get into IIT Bombay or any of the IITs. He went to complete his computer science undergrad and then he founded Accord Boost while still in the campus and now he's growing his startup. So with this, it's my pleasure to hand over to Kalpith. Welcome to today's lecture. Today we are going to discuss Business Fundamental for Entrepreneurs. I have a company called Accord Boost, Technology is Private Limited and I'm going to tell you how I learned business and I use that knowledge in building my own business. I will also tell you how you can learn those techniques yourselves. So a little bit about me, my name is Kalpith Virwal. I was born in Udaipur and that's where my company, my business operates from. I'm 24 years old. I have a bachelor's in computer science from IIT Bombay and I have some more achievements academically which you can read about NTSC and all indirect one which I got in the GE exam. But more importantly, we are going to discuss about how my business functions and how I started it. So this was just a hobby project which started out as a Facebook page and a blog. Right after my exams were over, I started mentoring students about different kinds of exams and how you can study about them. So I had a Facebook page, I had a Quora page where I had some popularity because of my J results and I gained some instant followers there and then but it was a small number of followers. From there, I grew it just as a passion project, just as a hobby just because I was 17 or 18 years old at that time and I had holidays, I had nothing else to do so I just started writing a bit about how I prepared for my exams. So slowly this evolved into a YouTube channel and then into a website and then we launched our own courses, our own app, iOS as well as Android and then we built an entire platform for students of class 9th till college stage. So we have online courses for all kinds of varieties. We have courses for J students who are trying to get into engineering colleges. We have courses for medical aspirants. We have courses for students who are in classes 9th and 10th and are preparing for different kinds of exams or Olympiads or they just want to get an early start at their entrance exam preparations. We also have courses for students who are in colleges who couldn't get into great colleges and they want to upskill themselves. So we have a complete stack of solutions right from your class 9th till the time you get yourself a good job or a career. So some numbers, we have around 10 lakh plus students across our apps, website, followers, subscribers, all of those things and we have around 10,000 users who have paid us something and this is all with zero advertising spend. All of our marketing is done completely organically. I will talk a bit more about it later on in the lecture. So the first question which arises in our mind when we talk about business fundamentals is that why should we learn business? Why should we even think of learning about a business? Because a lot of us think that business is 100% practical and that it is just a business. A lot of people have this delusion that business studies is not actually a studies. They just think that physics, chemistry, mathematics, biology these things are actual studies and business is more of a practical thing and I do agree with that premise because 80-90% of business is practical but there is a certain section of business which is not completely practical which involves some bit of theory as well. You need to know a bit about finance, you need to know a bit about marketing, you need to know a bit about how to build your product. These are all small, small skills that you need for building a business. So the first thing which I would like to say is that business is basically maths. So there is a formula which I have listed. You can see it here. I have listed this formula. This is all you need to know when it comes to business. So what is this formula? This formula is that traffic which is the number of people who visit your website or who come into your store or who visit your shop, whatever it is multiplied by the conversion rate. That is how many of those visitors can you convert into paid users? Converted by the price of your product, the lifetime value of price. So it could be a subscription product. So let's say you are charging rupees 500 per month or you are charging $100 per month. So if someone stays for 10 months, someone keeps using your service for 10 months, so we count all their revenue. So this is like the complete pricing of your product over a lifetime for an average user, multiplied by the margin. So what is the margin? The margin is basically what percentage of your revenue. So these first three things are your revenue. This is how much money you are making. Now you will also have some expenses inevitably. You will have to pay your employees. You will have to pay people who outsource your things to. You will have to pay for all the services that you use. You will use a lot of product inventory as well. So you will have to pay for all of those things. You will have some kind of depreciation. So all of that is your expenses. So margin is basically the percentage of your revenue, which is left over as your profit, which is in your hand after everything. So you multiply that and this will give you how much profit you are making because in the end, business is about profit. You don't have to make profit on day one, but at some point you have to make profit. So this is the equation and this is all you need to know about running a business. Now there's a lot of study which can go into all of these individually, but basically this is it. So this is the math which I'm talking about in the first point. So business skills is about increasing all four of these things. You want more traffic on your website. So let's say someone has 1000 visitors on their website per month and then there's someone who has 10,000 visitors to their website per month and both of them are in the same business. It's obvious that the second business will have probably 10 times more revenue than the first one because surely because they have more traffic, they have more people visiting their shop. Then if you can convert more, then you will sell more. If you can sell a pricier product, nobody wants to sell a cheap product. Everybody wants to sell expensive products. Everyone wants to sell an iPhone. They don't want to sell some random Chinese company or some cheap phone. They want to sell an expensive luxury product. That's what every business should strive for in theory. And you want to have high margins. You don't want to run a business which has like 1% or 2% profit. For example, the airline industry has an average profit of I think 2%. If you look at the global average, which is abysmally small, right? You want to learn how to build a high margin business, which is usually a tech business, okay? Internet-enabled businesses, online businesses. These are all using technology, right? So these are some ways in which you can boost your margin. So you have to increase all four of these things and that is what business studies is all about. You need to read, analyze, observe and implement, okay? You have to keep on reading analytics. You have to keep on reading books. You have to keep on reading what your customers are saying. You have to observe how people are using your products, what your competitors are doing. You have to analyze what is happening with the traffic. How many people are visiting? What are they doing after visiting? Why are they not buying? You have to observe all of these things and you have to implement strategies in order to succeed, okay? Now, another thing which you must understand is that there is no such thing as, you know, so a lot of people have this thought that they will build a business of, let's say, Rs.5 crore a year, 10 crore a year, whatever the number is and then they will be satisfied with it, okay? Then, okay? Now I don't need to do more, right? They have this kind of a thinking. But this is false. This does not happen in business because in business, you cannot afford to stagnate because there is no such thing as stagnation because the moment you decide to stagnate, you will actually start dipping. You will not stay at the same level. So you have to keep on growing. Even if you want to maintain your business at the level, you will have to work on it. You will have to keep on going. Even if you want to stay wherever you are because of one reason is inflation and because of competitors as well, okay? So you have to keep on learning and improving your business skillset. What are the business skills that you need? So the first skill you need is ideation, okay? You need to be able to think of good ideas and you need to be able to implement those ideas as well. Second is building your product, okay? So an idea is as good as nothing, right? Because the one who makes money, the one who builds a business, the one who gains all kind of popularity and all the benefits of running a business is the one who has actually built the business. It's not the guy who has thought of the business because anyone can think of things, right? What takes effort is building those things. So you have to build your business, your product. Then you have to do marketing and sales, okay? This is the lifeblood of any business. If no one knows of your product, your product will simply not sell. You will not make money. If you don't sell, you don't do sales. Then what's the business, okay? Because business is all about selling things. So if you don't sell things, you don't have a business, right? So that is like the lifeblood of a business. Then you have to learn how to leverage others, okay? So you cannot build a business on your own. A lot of people have this misunderstanding in their mind that they can run a business on their own, okay? This is the worst mistake that you can make. Actually you are just becoming a glorified employee. And it's even worse than being an employee because in employment, you don't have responsibilities. You just have to do your work. That's the responsibility you have. You can go home at 9 to 5 and that's it. You get paid. If you are starting a business on your own, you become what is called a soloprenor, then you are doing the worst of both worlds, okay? You are taking the worst side of the business world risk and all the stress that comes with it and all the responsibilities. And you are still doing everything on your own. So you are taking the worst part of both employment and business. So you have to learn how to leverage other people. You have to learn how to outsource everything you are doing. In the beginning stages, it is okay. You can do everything on your own. But later on, you have to hire people. You have to leverage money as well, okay? So some businesses require a lot of money to grow and you cannot grow or you cannot even start without having money. So you have to leverage investors. Now these investors can be even banks if they give you a loan or it can be someone who is investing in your company in an equity transaction. Then we have tools, okay? So we have a lot of AI tools, software tools which have essentially taken up the role of a lot of people. So in earlier times, we used to have a lot of, you know, people doing very menial tasks like accounting or social media management. Now these things can be automated using tools. So you have to learn how to leverage those as well. And probably the most important skill of all is the last one, which is discipline, determination and risk management. Because for starting a business, you need to have determination and you need to have a healthy appetite of risk, okay? I'm not asking you to go broke trying to run a business. You have to analyze how much risk you can take. Not everyone has the same risk appetite. A lot of people don't have stability in their life, in which case you should reconsider what kind of a business you want to build. I'm not saying you cannot build one, but you should think a bit about, you know, if you want to build a crash and burn kind of a business, you want to build a profitable business, what exactly your strategy is going to be. So you have to understand your risk level and you have to calibrate your business model according to that. You have to be determined and most importantly, you have to be disciplined because in every business, there are going to be some very menial tasks which require a lot of effort and they are just boring. They will not get ahead unless you can work on them, okay? So now let's discuss these point-by-point ideation, okay? So how can you ideate better? So the first thing I would suggest is to read more and talk to more people. So when you talk to a lot of people, you understand the pain points of people and you also gain a reflection of what happens in others' lives, okay? A lot of people, they just know what is happening in their life. They don't know what is going on in others' life and we as engineers, a lot of people are watching this, are probably engineers. So we have a certain perception of the world. It might not be the same as someone else, okay? And if you are just thinking the way you think, then you are being, to be honest, a bit selfish because you cannot start a business which can impact the world if you just think the way you think, all right? Because an entrepreneur is an exceptional being, right? He or she will have a certain thought process which will not be shared by the world, okay? And you have to calibrate yourself according to the world and that can be done by talking to more people. You should also read a bit. You should read some books. You should read news. You should read all of those things because that gives us perspective and it tells us about what's going on in the world, okay? Another thing which has helped me is spending some time alone, observing people, reading the news, trends, and then you can just go on a walk when you go outside. You can think about these things, okay? So that is something that I really enjoy, you know, walking in the grass or going outside in the sun. These things are not only beneficial for your health. I believe that you get a lot better ideas when you go outside in the sun. You walk a bit. You do some exercise. I think it's good for the ideation side of our brain. Always mind your surroundings and a good idea is in combination or it's at an intersection of what you know, what can be a viable business, what people want and what you can do for 10 years because business is not a one-year thing. You will be doing that business for 5 or 10 or 20 years, right? So you have to have the appetite or you have to have the capacity to run for so much time, right? The next thing is building a product. So earlier building a product used to be a big deal, okay? It used to be, you know, people used to go crazy about coding and, you know, we have to code an app or website. Nowadays it is not like that. It is very easy. There are lots of no-codes, SaaS, AI, agency, these kinds of things are their freelancers. Who can build a product for you in just a matter of weeks? So you don't have to be a coder. You don't have to be a technical person. You can build a website very easily using these ways, okay? Another thing which I must say is that you should think about how you can solve your customers' problems, not about the features or the tech of your product, right? Fast and good is better than slow and great, okay? Because you have to launch fast. You have to know where your misgivings were and you have to correct on them, okay? You have to keep on iterating on your idea. Don't just, you know, keep building very slowly and then by the time you launch, everyone else is out there with the product. Then we have to leverage. Keep money in terms of debt or venture capital if your business leads a lot of capital for expansion or operation or if it's not profitable initially. You must leverage people. As I mentioned, you cannot work in the business. You have to work on the business. You have to ideate. You have to have the vision. You have to instruct people on how to grow the business. You should not grow the business yourself, okay? That is one thing very important. Your work should only be ideating, okay? And then you hire someone to do that work for you, okay? These hires don't have to be full-time people. You can use some tools, some AI, some freelancer, some agency as well. That is also fine, but you should outsource your work. That is important. The last point is discipline and determination, okay? So entrepreneurship is not pretty. A lot of people have made this a very glitched line that, you know, entrepreneurship is not pretty. The money is nice, okay? A lot of people think that startup people are broke. Well, if you are not a good entrepreneur, then maybe otherwise the money thing is nice. But the process of making that money is usually not pretty, okay? It is usually boring. You have to do some sales. You have to do some people management. All of these things are not, you know, pretty like they look in movies and TV shows, okay? It's just boring, plain, simple work, okay? Growth can often be slow, linear, frustrating, okay? When people brag about, okay, 10x growth in one year, usually there is some caveat in that. They have probably burned, maybe they are in a thousand percent loss for that growth. So all of these things are there, okay? It is not easy to grow. You will have to have some patience and you have to be determined in order to continue despite these challenges, okay? But you should not, you know, give away your life just beating up a business side which is not working. So you have to be reasonable about how much determined you are, okay? Don't be over optimistic as well. Business is about daily habits, okay? You need to have daily habits that, you know, today we have these, these, these tasks. We will do it, okay? No matter how our mood is, we will try to do as much as we can, okay? There is a certain amount of risk associated with any business activity. It is basically an investment of time and money. So you should understand how much risk you can take and build a business only according to that, okay? Don't take too much risk and don't take too little risk, okay? But you have to understand this very well. Business is risky and you have to have a risk appetite to continue. So how do I learn these things, okay? So the first way of doing it is by learning. And that is like the 90% of the learning, right? You cannot learn business by reading, okay? It is not a course. It is not something, you know, that you read from a book. Books are nice. I will discuss them. But mostly it's by doing. Just launch something. See what happens. If, if it doesn't do well, doesn't matter. You can launch again, okay? A lot of people think that people are judging them. They are not. Everyone is busy in their lives. You can launch something. People will forget about it after one month, even if it's a failed product, right? It doesn't matter. But if you are successful only even once, that can actually change your life. Read books, interact with successful mentors, follow their social media, et cetera. But, you know, a lot of people tend to do this too much. They just keep on reading Twitter and LinkedIn and all kinds of podcasts and books, which doesn't lead to anywhere. You should have some, you know, inspirations. You should follow these things sometimes. Okay. Read when you need to know something. But don't be someone who is just reading business books 10 hours a day and not building anything. Okay. For concrete scales, blogs and courses are good. Okay. Our university division is actually for this purpose only. That's why we built it because this is important. Okay. I even took the entrepreneurship course in IIT Bombay, where I got to learn a lot of these things. However, you should understand that 90% of learning will happen outside the classroom. Okay. Classroom is for theory. Then you have to go and apply these things. All right. Now, my counsel to aspiring entrepreneurs, students who would like to build a startup or company and to people who are not even students and watching this, what would I advise you? First, I would advise you is that you don't have time. Okay. A lot of people are under this impression that, you know, you are young and you have a lot of time. And, you know, even I was told these things when I was 17, 18, 19, I'm told this even today. I'm 24 years right now. I'm going to be 25 next year. And you will not get many opportunities to be an entrepreneur. Okay. I know I'm 25 and I'm saying this, but you have to understand this, that as life progresses, you will have to take up a job after college, you know, and all kinds of responsibilities will start mounting up and then it will be harder and harder to take risks. Okay. I started when I was 17 or 18. So I had my entire college life to build a business. So by the time I was graduating, I had a business which was operational, which was making profit and really good profits. So I didn't have to sit for placements and I could continue on my entrepreneurial journey. And now I'm doing great at my age. Now, if you keep on waiting because you think that you have some time or, you know, you can wait for your after your placements will build. No, that time will not come because you will now start, you know, working on your job or something like that. So don't be, you have to be a bit impatient about this. Okay. College is the best time you don't have much time and you will have a lot of freedom as well. So start now. Start. Just get started with something. Okay. Even if it's a bad idea, according to you, just get started. If you don't, you will regret it because time will pass. And the last thing which I would say is that you should start small, but think big. Okay. Don't think of ideas that you cannot pull off right now. Start with something that can make you a few dollars right now. Okay. It will make you a few rupees. It will maybe make up your pocket money for the month. Okay. Start some with something like this. Slowly you will keep on growing it. And one day you will be making crores and millions of dollars. Trust me, you will. Okay. And hopefully you will do something impactful for the world as well. So thank you. I hope you enjoyed this lecture. You learned something from it. I thank NPTEL and IT Bombay for inviting me and for sharing, for sharing my learnings. If you have any queries, you can feel free to reach me out on my social handles. I'm pretty Googleable. You can Google Kalpith Viva. You can find me or you can email me at kalpith at the rate acadboost.com. Thank you for watching.