From Developer to Serial Entrepreneur: Hevo Data CEO Manish Jethani (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You talked to me about doing a startup in the beauty space. What do you know about the beauty space? You don’t have a particular domain expertise. When you go into a field where you don’t have real domain knowledge, it doesn’t create for the kind of passion that drives a startup to go big. There are exceptions of course. A good formula is you want to go after something that you have a passion for.

Manish Jethani: More than the domain expertise, one thing that has the shortest lifespan is the borrowed conviction. You cannot build something on a borrowed conviction.

Sramana Mitra: But you can only have conviction about something that you know something about.

Manish Jethani: It could also come in different ways where you’re observing a problem for a long enough time. You acquire certain nuances around it. Initially, you don’t have to go and build a startup on that immediately. There are a few problems that you observe around you.

Sramana Mitra: So what did you do?

Manish Jethani: My first iteration was I was trying to build a B2B vertical search engine. Let’s say you are a small business. You want to find a vendor who can do the interiors for your office. If you search this on Google, what you get are the vendors who are good at SEO. Google is not the right place for you to find vendors.

Sramana Mitra: Depends on what you are looking for. One place where a lot of vertical search and vendor recruitment is happening is in Upwork. Not for interior decorations, but for technical and marketing skills.

Manish Jethani: For a lot of these small businesses, what is the right way to discover the right vendors? Imagine you are a midsized firm. There are vendors who specialize in serving the midsize firms who are in your city. You may have someone in your network who has used their service. If you can bring your professional draft from LinkedIn and then start searching about vendors on this platform, it prioritizes vendors based on your business profile. If you know a friend who is working at another startup, it will be easier for you to trust that vendor. That was the whole concept.

Sramana Mitra: How did you validate?

Manish Jethani: We spoke with a lot of people around what is the problem that they face around finding the vendor.

Sramana Mitra: Were you speaking to purchasing in different midsized companies?

Manish Jethani: We were speaking mostly to the early-stage startups. We talked to the founders or someone who’s taking care of the procurement. In smaller setups, they didn’t have a dedicated procurement departments.

Sramana Mitra: You went after small companies; not midsized companies.

Manish Jethani: Yes. Based on those learnings, we started building the technology around it. The mistake that we made was that we were obsessed with internally building something that we were convinced should be built. We didn’t probe potential customers enough to understand if we really need it. It’s the problem of confirmation bias.

Always start with the pain point without a solution in mind. Obsessively focus on the problem. Once you want to disprove your own hypothesis, you’re more likely to discover the real truth about the need of your solution. Do people really need it or are you trying to over-read the signals?

Sramana Mitra: There are a lot of false positives and false negatives in the validation process. Validation is tricky for those reasons. Something that may be interesting for a larger set of customers doesn’t exist for smaller customers. There are a lot of different signals and factors.

Manish Jethani: The other important element is just the timing.

Sramana Mitra: Absolutely. Timing is huge. That’s one of the reasons investors ask you, “This concept has failed. What has changed?” What happened in the end?

Manish Jethani: The other important element is I figured either the timing is not right or the segment is not right. What was clear to me was I wanted to build something. I didn’t want to take up a job. That was quite clear to me. Back in the day, the expense was very low. The personal runway was high enough for me to experiment and figure out.

One day I was working in an office. I used to go out for lunch. I thought, “Wouldn’t it be nice if someone can deliver food to me? Every day, I eat lunch between 12 and 1. What if someone would show up on a regular basis?”

Sramana Mitra: So the dabbawala concept?

Manish Jethani: Not exactly like dabbawala because in dabbawala, you don’t control what you eat. Here, you have a menu where you have five options. You’re scheduling your food order well in advance. That was the whole experiment that I was trying to do. Out of curiosity, I created a landing page and posted in one of the FB groups for startups.

I started working on this concept around 9AM. By 7PM, I created this website and put it on the Facebook group for startups in Bangalore. There were about 1,700 signups in four hours. Once I looked at the data, I realized that people were choosing healthy food. This was a completely random experiment. Those food items didn’t exist.

Back in the day, there used to be no food delivery. It was not quite obvious that people would order. I saw that a lot were ordering fresh food. I figured out that probably there is a need for that. We did more experiments around that. This time around, we just had healthy food. More people were subscribing to it. When someone subscribes, we call them up to say that we don’t operate in their area.

I contacted certain kitchens. They were following our recipes. I got professional chefs who specialize in healthy meals. We raised venture capital from Elevation. We got a call from them saying they’re interested in investing. Finally, they reached out to me through my network. They asked why I wasn’t responding. I thought someone was playing a prank.

This segment is part 3 in the series : From Developer to Serial Entrepreneur: Hevo Data CEO Manish Jethani
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