Sunday 4 December 2022

Build Thought Clarity to take the right decisions

One of the most important skills to be successful in entrepreneurship is 'thought clarity'. The more is your clarity of thought, the better would be your execution.


Let's take an example. Back in 2019 when I was recovering from my cofounder's exit, an important decision I took was to focus only on the Financial Services sector for our Product. We were into Conversational AI solutions. So, there was, as such, no sector dependency, and we could have sold our products to all domains.

However, there were a few constraints:

1. We didn't want to raise funding (limited financial resources).
2. Ours was a sales-led model rather than a marketing or product-led model (limited human resources).

Essentially, we had limited resources. So, we had to focus on those sectors where the return on time invested would be the highest. Our early customers were all Financial Institutions (BFSI). We had pitched our Product to some companies outside BFSI also. But we realized that in BFSI:

1. The value we could create was the highest due to the sheer scale of these companies.
2. The money they could spend was quite high.
3. There was a huge scope of expansion within each BFSI client by going to different Business/Product Teams.

For instance, if we had sold a Chatbot for Customer support, we had an opportunity to sell an Employee Support Bot, a Job Applicant Support Bot, and even Internal Agent Support Bot.

This thought clarity led us to the important decision - to only and only focus on the Financial Services space.

That decision was life-changing. We grew fast within BFSI and onboarded the likes of the State Bank Group, ICICI Group, HDFC Group, Kotak Group, Aditya Birla Group, Bajaj Group, and many others. When I say Group, I mean Bank, Life Insurance, General Insurance, Mutual Fund, Stock Broking, and the NBFC Arm.

Fast forward to today, when we have been acquired by Exotel and have their support, brand, and capital, we have expanded now rapidly across many other sectors - EdTech, Retail, e-commerce, Travel, Hospitality, Supply Chain, Entertainment, Healthcare, etc.

Having thought clarity is the best way to take the right decisions. The best way to build thought clarity is to explain the thoughts to someone. The best way to explain the thoughts to someone is to share them on Social Media :)

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