 a brief introduction. I am one of the co-promoters of aria.ag. We are the largest integrated post harvest grain platform and the only profitable platform. And then I request the panelists to give a brief about them and the organization before, you know, we start off with the challenge which we have and so we have two challenges in hand. One is to take the ambiguity out of time and second to keep the participants awake because after this lunch and the ambulance, they may fall asleep. Thank you. I run Park Plus. At Park Plus, we are trying to build SuperF for car owners. So everything around your car, starting with standard stuff which is around parking, excess control, chalan, car wash in the morning, servicing, insurance, car buying and selling, fast, etc. Everything happens on Park Plus. Would have roughly about a crore car owners on the Park Plus platform, which means roughly every fourth car owner in India is today now on Park Plus. That's where we are right now. Hi, I'm the founder and CEO of Aarum Wisex. Aarum Wisex is the leading alternative investment platform in India wherein investors can access curated selection of investment opportunities. So we launch opportunities in various kinds of formats all the way from practical ownership in real estate to structured credit. But all of these are primarily in the alternative segment. So trying to democratize traditional investments which have only been accessible to institutional investors to a much larger investor base. Hi, I'm Vikas Lichwani. I'm the co-founder of Pep Technologies and I think more commonly you would have seen M. Caffeine. That's our brand and we also happen to have launched a second brand called Hyphen, which just got launched two weeks back. But I just hope and pray that there would be at least one person who has used M. Caffeine over here in the hall. And so we are in a rather simple business into personal care. That's about it. Yeah, hi, I'm Akhil. I'm the founder and head of research and development for Technology on Intellectual Ventures. It's an innovation firm which specializes in building products which are inventions. We have been doing this for almost a decade now and we hold patents in over 14 different sectors. Thank you. Thank you, Akhil. So coming on to TAM, what is TAM? So I'll start with some basic stuff and leave the more scientific and detailed stuff from my fellow panelists who are much more, you know, talented on this aspect. TAM basically is a fundamental matrix which we use for evaluating the size and the growth of a business. Now it's a tool which is becoming very imperative which will help you for decision-making, planning your resources. It has relevance from two aspects, one from a promoter's aspect as well as from an investor's aspect. From a promoter's aspect it helps them to prioritize their product launch, what segments they want to address first, and also plan the viable business opportunities. It also gives them a tool to forecast the business planning and more importantly the resources which have to be deployed to achieve those targeted segment or targeted numbers. It also and more importantly it helps them to showcase the growth potential to the stakeholders, mostly the investors as to what is the potential for the business which they are doing. From an investor's perspective it is basically helps them to understand the revenue generation model, the total market size which is available, or the potential of a product or a service, viabilities. It also gives them an understanding on the scalability of the product or the service which further translates or helps them to calibrate the return on investment. With this I move to Amit. You know, Amit most of the time the startups face a challenge in terms of the cash burns and the future addressable market which is available and it's a very delicate balance which has to be done. What according to you are the strategies which the founders can use to strike this delicate balance? I think couple of things which is important while looking at the time part. One is how many of the consumers of your survey of how many consumers actually face the same problem today itself and are using some or the other solution to solve it. Which would mean then you are just building an ecosystem to just make these consumers switch from their existing solutions to a new solution. So the customers already know what is the problem, customers are already using a solution, the solution might not be perfect, might be broken, so it becomes easier. The second part is how many new customers you would expect to figure out that there is a problem and then things will work out for them. My belief system whatever I've learned over a period of last 10, 12 years in Indian internet space is focusing on the customers in the first segment which already are buying and selling. Like for example when we talk about the car usage, there are already 4 crore guys, car owners who are spending close to about two lakh rupees per annum on their cars through things like fuel, servicing, chalance, car wash. In fact most of you sitting here would have chalance of 5,000 rupees plus on your cars. Like you may not know but if you go and figure out like all of you would have chalance of 5,000. So people are already spending, people are already paying. Similarly when you look at the examples of like things like PTM etc. I built the whole payment business at PTM. Again people were already paying, they were paying in cash but people were already paying. That is still relatively easier to convert but if you look at would new people come into that segment who would start paying, would new people that is very hard. At least at an India level, India's per capita income like in 2015 was about $1,600. Right now it is about $2,400. It is not growing at the pace that it should be growing. So while GDP overall has been increasing but the per capita or ability to spend is not growing. So if you are in a business which requires capital, external capital etc. You just can't bank on the fact that the new consumers will come up, their spending power will increase, they'll spend more with you etc. That's not going to happen over a period of 5, 7 years. So from a time point of view the most important time to focus on is the consumers who are already using that service one way or the other. Very valuable point of view that instead of focusing on what might come, the focus ideally has to be what is there and what are the consumers using it. So with this, there are various methodologies which are adopted, top down approach, bottom of value theories in order to assess the market or the potential of the untapped markets and the customer base. So with this I move to Aryaman. What are the other methodologies which people can adopt or different approaches which the founders can rely on to get a much more accurate assessment of the time? Sure. So there are multiple variations of time as well. There's Sam, Som, a lot of three letter of abbreviated words via which you can measure the market. But I think the intent is pretty simple to understand if you're solving a problem statement which is large enough. You should not have a problem in terms of demand and that's the essence of trying to quantify a market. But where these things tend to sort of not be helpful is when you use a very macro funnel to sort of define what time is for you. So I'll give a very simple example, you know, behind the investment business. Now I could say theoretically the time for my business is all of India with all its money in it because technically everyone can invest, you know, on an investment platform. But again, that's not the right implication or that's not the reality behind the market that I am sort of going after. You know, I might be going after a more niche segment. I might be going after people who are, you know, above a net worth of a certain threshold so that they can invest into alternative products. So sort of defining that time becomes very, very pertinent and truly becomes the target of the company. The second part to the time story is that I believe the time also evolves over time, right? So a lot of businesses that do zero to one or that are in their inception stage have to be a little bit flexible with respect to what time means for them. I mean, today, you know, you might start off as an investment platform. Tomorrow you might augment it with your own payment gateway. So, you know, the time will keep evolving and keep changing. And quite often, you know, getting lost in time is not something which, you know, ends up being fruitful for the company in itself. So whilst, yes, time is important, but the way to calculate it is really based on reality on what you're trying to go after, not really what theoretical, you know, the size of the market may be. Very well, R M N. So what essentially R M N is saying that there are three things which are important for a business to run. One is a product. The second is a team. And third is a market. Product and team are in your control. Market is not. So you have to stay agile. You have to stay flexible. And for a very, for a successful business, it is important that you identify the customer need. And then probably you can add those value propositions to assess the time per se. So with this, you know, we move to Vikas who has set up a personal brand with McAfee. Vikas, how has your experience been, you know, in setting up a personal brand? And how do you, you know, draw a line in terms of not overestimating the time and slightly being more realistic about it? So this is an interesting question. And you know, so let's understand the question, right? How do we not overestimate the time? So there's a fundamental assumption that time are meant to be overestimated. Right? Now I'll give you the brand side of the story. So brands, fundamentally, you know, live in a paradox. The paradox is this, on one end, you want the time to be as big as possible, which I think is the fundamental question that we are starting out with. Second thing is you want the brand to be as differentiated as possible. Now these two things are absolutely contradicted to each other. Right? If you want the biggest time, then you make a brand which is for everybody doing everything. And you know, but anything which is for everybody is practically for nobody from a brand side of the world. So you want the brand to be very precise and very differentiated. So this is one question that you deliberate with on a daily basis, rather, you know, more than once a day, that when is it that you're expanding the time or when you are actually diluting the brand? Right? So when you make a brand, the brand again, you know, there are multiple parts as we were talking about to a company. Similarly, for a brand, part of it's the consumer, right? But you have to pick the consumer that you're targeting. Right? So that when you talk about time, you know, the target market, so you need to define the target very carefully. You simply can't say that, you know, anybody who can, you know, who gets into a shower will be a customer per se, because that's when, you know, before your, you know, shampoo, your brand gets diluted. Right? So this question, you know, becomes very, very relevant for brands overall, because, you know, fundamentally, the best brands have been which are very, very specific. So in this question, one part is basically the size of the market. Second part is differentiation. I think the thing that bridges the two is relevance. So we need to be absolutely relevant to the audience that we are, you know, assuming as the target audience per se. And that's where we can, you know, and then we have the remaining, what you call 999 problems to solve still, because we have just defined the brand. We still got to build a company and build a brand around it and stuff. Right? But that's the brand side of the story to this. Very, very valuable point because I have come across a lot of, you know, founders talking about when they want to assess the time, they will say, we believe in, that's what my gut says. Trust me, nobody cares what you believe in or what your gut says. It will all boil down to numbers and numbers have to speak for itself. So who better than, you know, giving your direction on the numbers than the research. So over to Akhil, you know, what is the relevance of those research reports, which you basically doing? And how does those reports and consultancy assignments help the founders to assess the actual time as Vikas was mentioning, you know, you build a brand, so you have to be more specific rather than, you know, more generic. Yeah, thank you. I'll take it from the non-brand perspective. I'll take it from the perspective of what is the overall actionable that you have to do when you're trying to come up with your own startup, right? Defining the time is very, very hard to do, especially in the initial years or in the initial time period, because you do not know what you're trying to build. Right? It is a work in progress even at that time. So what did we do in Technotrion? We focused on something called Integrated Industry Research Report. That is something that we came up with a couple of years back. And we came up with it specifically for upcoming startups, the new startups, the seed around startups and below them. And what that essentially had was all of the data that the patents had to offer from the history of that industry. Anything and everything that you're building today, anything and everything that you have in your hand that you're utilizing, the history lies in the patents. If there's a certain technology that is in your hand in your phone today right now, the patents were not done today. The patents were done quite a long time back, so that you can have that technology in your hand. And patents are an everlasting record of the technologies that exist, because there is no change in those documentations once done. So once you are able to go back into the history of your industry, into the history of your own product, you're able to understand the trends that emerge from it. And the market size correlating to the overall sales of that time period allow us to define what are the market trends for a certain thing. On top of it, there are platforms that exist that give you the overall landscape at a global level as to what technologies are developed where, by who, when, and what are the overall trends. So one technology, one particular platform is called Lens.org. So I also request the panel members, for those of you who are not familiar with this platform, to just go and search for your keywords of the product offerings that you have on this particular platform. And you'll get a global idea as to who is developing these particular search results in what area, at what time, and what all bigger companies are interested in the development of the set technologies. Thank you, Akil. Research and the trends are something which we cannot run away with. They will remain as they are and they are quite ineffective tools in paving the path which an organization would want to take. Now, coming to Amit. Amit, you have seen CDC funding in your organization. Apart from TAM, what are other factors, you know, which help you to decide that time has come for us to raise funds and use effectively because we have seen a lot of startups and organizations, they've taken too much money, which added to a lot of inefficiency within the organization. And when the funding winter came in, they're all struggling. So what is an advice from you or the factors which people should consider before going in for a fund raise? So Park Plus was obviously my fourth venture, like before that I have been part of three funded ventures earlier, make my trip, Paytm and Tokopedia, and have seen all these organizations raise a large amount of capital before going public. So one thing I think which I've been very, very clear about the Indian market is that Indian market, like if you look at the listed market, apart from the top 15, top 25, top 30 companies which are the banks or reliance, et cetera, kind of companies, like if you make like a few hundred crores of Pat, you would be among the top hundred companies of India. So which means the Indian market fundamentally, it's not a very sizeable market, like if you have a five hundred, seven hundred crore annual revenue, you have a hundred, hundred fifty crore Pat kind of a company, you'll be among the top five hundred companies of the country, and that company would be valued at two thousand crore, three thousand crore, five thousand crore in the public markets. So which again means that if you are a company which is in the private markets getting valued at ten thousand crore, fifteen thousand crore, or like higher what we saw in last two years, that is not going to sustain when you go public. Market India ka chhota hai. GDP level pe ham baad bade hai, par at a company level, at an individual level market chhota hai. So you don't have a choice but to build a business which is very, very, which has to be very frugal in nature. And you have to focus on the revenue, like if you look at all the companies that got listed, like while now everybody is turning profitable, but roughly everybody of them is like one-third of what they were being valued at in their peak private market. So for these companies even to reach their private market value which was three years, five years back, it'll take another three years. India to like I think it has to be very clear that India is a market which is at a each company level, it is very hard to build. And if you look at the same companies like for example, HDSE would have a bank also and an insurance also and a security is also like the brand trust look at Tata, same group building more and more this thing. So it is just important to understand that market is not very big, there is no need to carry away. It is important to be frugal because finally things will catch up. Like if you look at like most of the startups like if you're having so many like ITC, companies like ITC, HLL would have only 100-200 crore people, 100-200 people with a crore salary. If you look at most of the startups which have raised 100 million, they would have 15 people with more than a crore salary. If ITC and HLL cannot give a crore salary by making so much money then why are you giving? I mean there is no market. So that is the truth of life, that is the truth of India and that will not change in the next five years. So when you raise capital and capital is not coming for free, like as a founder you are giving your share of equity. It is not free money, it seems that there is no debt that is why it is free money. But it is not the free money, you are giving your equity, you are giving your share in the business. You are investing your 10 years in making that business. After that 10 years, you don't know that business will not be made. For you there is one shot in life, one shot is ruined, 10 years are over. You sacrificed for your family, you sacrificed for your personal life, you sacrificed for your health. You did it. If you fail after 10 years, no one will count you. So that is the truth of life. So when you focus your energy is your thought process with that clarity. Here I have one shot, I have to make it successful and when it becomes successful, I don't want to be a two percent, four percent founder. So when you want to be at a certain scale, you want to have a certain percentage in the company, you want to make sure things are working for you. This is very hard to pull off. But then you have to focus on revenue, you have to be focused on the reality, you have to limit the experiments in every corner, you have to limit the salaries, you have to limit the spend. If you don't do it, like five years down the line, you will recognize that the market is very, very different. So that has been the philosophy from day one at a pointless level. A very valid point Samith. It's always a trade-off between valuation and the profitability and the time factor attached to it. Many a time start-ups get over-carried with the valuation game and they raise too far and they spread too thin. So by the time they achieve those numbers, the ownership is very minuscule. So people end up asking why did they do this? Very valid point. So with this, I move to Hariman. Hariman, when you started this fractional ownership investment platform, it was a pretty new industry by that time. So how did you go about assessing the potential in the market? Sure. So when we started off, we didn't look at it so much from a directly TAMP perspective. It was a bit more organic than that. So the problem statement was very simple. Indians love rental income. Indians love real estate. As a country, we love real estate. But the kind of access that people had was very limited. The kind of experience people had was terrible. The number of people who would have said that we burnt our hands while trying to invest in real estate would be far more than the number of people who would say that about any other asset class. So the problem statement was very straightforward as to how can we address this issue? How can we make the whole asset class something which is a little bit more investor centric, investor favorable and transparent and provide them a solution to do the same. So that's actually the intent via which we started off with and really TAM followed. I mean, once we were able to demonstrate that we can reduce the ticket size or the quantum of funds required to invest into real estate by syndicating investors or by creating fractional ownership in properties and doing that more in an organized manner. So doing it through proper securities, proper structure, compliance, governance. Once you're able to demonstrate that value, add your TAM changes. So on day one, your TAMP was people who could buy real estate, which would be a handful in India, especially if we talk about commercial real estate, not residential. So we also focus on commercial just for perspective, but when we started, there might have been maybe a hundred commercial real estate investors, simply because a single commercial real estate property would cost maybe 75 crores, 100 crores. So you know that the suppose that TAM would have been very small, but to address that concern, we introduced fractional ownership, reduce the ticket size to about 20, 25 lakhs per investor. So suddenly your TAM also became very, very large. It became, you know, a space which hasn't been ventured into before. So we started tapping into fixed deposit investors, fixed income investors, and suddenly our TAM grew tremendously. So more than actually trying to figure out the market size, we figured out a problem statement which people wanted to be addressed. And you know, we unlocked an asset class which otherwise was quite antiquated, you know, in its ability to access and invest into. A very valid point, Aruman. So I will take this question along to Vikas also because his, while we are talking about data being a tool to assess the market potential, he started a different product altogether on the personal healthcare and a brand where a lot of, you know, secondary data research was not available. How did you go about Vikas doing that, you know, to address the TAM, SAM, or the SOM? It's very interesting, right? So one way to glean information in certain sectors is when you look at top-down and you know, you look at these industry reports and very valid and you know, because they give you like a perfect top view and a complete picture of the whole thing, right? But then, you know what, as far as lifestyle products are concerned or lifestyle brands are concerned, there's a lot of information that you can only get through people directly. Now understand this particular thing, right? So imagine if you had to make such a company, let's say 25 years back in time, right? Now what is it that you're trying to do? You're trying to do surveys asking people about, you know, like how do you bathe? How do you use a cream? What do you use? When do you use it? You know, who all in the family use it? So basically these are all stated preferences that people tell you about. I mean, and obviously we all know that stated preferences and revealed preferences could be very, very different, right? I mean, I could state that my preference is a Ferrari, but I end up buying a Nano because that's all I can afford. So, but then over this time period with this advent of social media, right? The interesting thing is people are giving you a glimpse into the bathrooms, right? People are telling you that this is what I use, this is how I use it, this is my lifestyle. People are giving you a glimpse into your lifestyle, right? So now, fundamentally the entire equation or the entire proposition on which that industry data or top level data was collected, that paradigm is completely changing, right? So you go back to 70s and they were talking about, you know, what we have a cream that you can use in summers, you can use it in winters, you can, you know, use it if you are, you know, if you get a rash, you can use it if you go to a party, you can use it, you know, a gel be gay, cream, let it be, and, you know, this is one cream. And now there is this market where we have a day cream, we have a night cream, we have a face cream, we have an elbow cream, we have a barrier repair cream, we have a serum, and, you know, and so on, and so for the list is much longer. Not because people have become frivolous because the market has expanded and people have understood that they have various different needs for which they need dedicated solutions. Now if you look at the overall industry picture, it will never reveal as to what this picture could be over a period of time. What you need to do is you need to get into people's lifestyles, people's aspirations. I mean, until some time back it was very prestigious to say that, you know, you've got something from, you know, so and so European country and therefore this product must be good and, you know, please believe us, trust us because it's a foreign imported stuff. I mean, today we are proud to say that we can do stuff in India. It's a paradigm shift from the consumer side, more than from the, you know, people who are doing the work. It's from the consumer side. So when you look at it, then you suddenly realize that all these typical ways of being, you know, TAMS and SOM, they'll all, you know, they'll be inadequate, right? And suddenly you realize that people are going to be consuming the products very differently. They are going to be consuming the products, you know, more or less. It could be either ways, right? I mean, you know, whichever way it goes. But people are these days giving so much of glimpse into the lifestyle that you can start defining, you know, these target-attressable markets through that, right? And I think that's the crux of all the lifestyle kind of businesses that are emerging out of India now. Very true because so a lot of, you know, this social media data is also becoming a good tool to assess the market potential available, something which good to go answers are always there. People will not want to open up the heart, actually what they, in terms of the preferences. So a very good, you know, insight on using the social media as a tool to get to know the preferences of the consumers. I remember Jordan, when they first started their brand in Singapore, they went and asked everyone to open their cupboards and show them what kind of dress they have. And that's when they arrived that most of the people have a black and a white combination. And that's when they started with the black, white combination of dresses and the grates to it. So it's a very, now, people did it physically, now they can do it sitting at home, sitting in office. Very good insight. So Akhil, coming to you, your strength is research, you know. What is your experience about some of the companies in terms of their dynamic and agility to handle uncertainties, you know? Yeah, thank you, Mr. Anand. So the way I look at it is very differently than my panellists do just because of the kind of industry I'm involved in. All right, let's look at TAM from the perspective of a patent. Some of you might be familiar with the book by HBR called Blue Ocean Strategy. I am a heartfelt believer in that book that do not fight for red oceans, make blue oceans and win in them. So what do patents really do? All right, patents grant you a monopoly over the said product or idea that you have. That essentially enables you to stop other people from competing, number one. But on top of it, it allows you to create your own segment, you know? In the first and second session today, we discussed with the other panellists the segments which allow you to create your own niche, the products which are segment creators. So what do patents do? And I'll take a small story which happened within this year, all right? There was a certain company which came to us and asked us for some IP portfolios on smart variables, specifically covering smart glasses. As you all already know that Google, Meta, as well as Samsung, they have been working on this tech for the last one and a half decade. So clearly the patent landscape is very, very cutthroat and very competitive. And we had initially refused to take up the project just because of the complexities involved in securing those portfolios. So what did we do? We focused on the creation of new and novel ideas in that particular segment. And it took a little while, it took us almost three months, but what we were able to do was get him a patent on a body regulating smart glasses. That opens up an entirely different avenue. You're not talking about AR, VR anymore. You're not infringing on any of the other large MNCs patent rights. What you have done is opened your market up to people who would wear your glasses on the beach, who would wear your glasses when they're hiking on a hill station. They would wear your glasses for maybe treatment purposes. That is the sort of time that we aspire to build for every startup in the organizations that we run. Because we believe that time is not limited by just the numbers that you see on the reports. Time is essentially limited just like everything else, by the imagination and by the work that you put when you build your own startup. So please focus, like my panelists said, do not focus on defining the time. Focus on expanding it and overcoming it. Thank you. No, thank you, Akhil. I think one of the cues which we can always take is from Arjun of Mahabharat of staying focused looking at the fish eye or the bird's eye rather than anywhere else.