HomeLane founder Srikant Iyer on execution and importance of uncommon service

We continue the #InsightsPodcastSeries and in this episode, we focus on the importance of execution and how to get it right in the early stage of a startup. To talk about this topic, we have Srikanth Iyer a successful serial entrepreneur who has built large companies across multiple industries. Initially, Srikant was in the education sector with Edurite (sold to Tutorvista/Pearson) and is currently the founder and CEO of fixed furniture ecommerce startup HomeLane.

In the first part of the podcast, we discuss the importance of execution and specifically the following topics:

• What is execution and why is it important
• Early days — how to get things started, how to figure out must-haves versus nice-to-haves and focusing on must-haves
• Speed versus getting things right — what is more important
• Customer delight — to get to product-market fit — how to go about it
• Role of product/tech — how important in early stage vs once you are focusing on scale
• Launching with a Minimal Viable Product (MVP) and then continue refining the product/tech
• Why scaling prematurely can hurt your startup

We also discuss a book that has really inspired Srikanth to deliver outstanding service to his customers. The book is “Uncommon Service” and highly recommended for founders — particularly startups that involve services. Here are some of the key takeaways from the book and we discuss a couple of them in the podcast in the context of Srikanth’s experience.

Uncommon Service — key tenets:

Tenet #1: You CANNOT be good at everything — to be great at something its ok to be bad at something else — how do you decide on what to be good at as CEO?

Tenet #2: Someone has to pay for it — what does that mean?

Tenet #3: It’s not your Employee’s fault — but they are the ones executing?

Tenet #4: You must Manage your customers — how do you do that?

Tenet #5: Now multiply it all by Culture — talk to us about the importance of this one?

In the next few podcasts, we will dive deeper into the importance of execution and how to get that right as a startup founder.

Anand Daniel is a seed/early stage venture investor with Accel Partners.

(Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of YourStory.)