Want to know how to scale your startup? Our experts at TechSparks 2016 give you the lowdown
Being perennially bombarded by new inventions and technologies, companies have had to completely change the way they look at scale. Businesses looking to scale need to keep pace with the speedy process of evolution of things.
And scaling up has gained that much more relevance with the rise in demand, as businesses just can’t afford to lose customers.
However, experts believe that there is a lot of risk involved while scaling up a business. So, when businesses are trying to increase the offering, the challenge of continuing to provide the same customer experience increases manifold.
At TechSparks 2016 on Friday, Neena Budhiraja, Director of Product Management at Ola shared the ways in which the company managed to achieve astronomical scale. Ola, for the first four years of its operations, was in 12 cities, and later within six weeks of its operation it expanded to 102 cities. So, this level of scaling could only have happened if we understood the diversity that exists in the Indian ecosystem down to the very last cab we offer.
She added that scaling was the most exciting part of running a startup. It meant you have solved some equation for your startup and now investors were expecting more from you. However, while scaling businesses must also ensure that they maintain the promises made to customers earlier, as well as take care of the monetary equation.
On the same subject, Prabhakar Jayakumar, Country Manager, Digital Ocean said that before thinking of business expansion, startups needed to think about the available demand for the product, and figure out if it was even. No matter how much resources a business pumps in, if there’s no demand, no business can scale. Besides, the mantra of success is not same for all, so the meaning of scaling up differs for different businesses.
Ravi Sangtani of Target Accelerator concurred, adding that startups needed to scale their business when the market demanded it. During the process, they also needed to cut out the trash that is not suitable for a particular market and shouldn’t replicate the same model across the board.
A big shoutout to all our sponsors - Zendesk, Axis Bank, Sequoia Capital India Advisors , Digital Ocean, Microsoft, AWS, Akamai, Target, Verisign, Kerala Startup Mission, Brand Launch Centre, Tork and Blink.
