Scale, success, social impact: test your business creativity with Edition 125 of our weekly quiz!
This insightful feature from YourStory tests and strengthens your business acumen! Here are 5 questions to kick off this 125th quiz. Ready?
Lateral Sparks, the weekly quiz from YourStory, tests your domain knowledge, business acumen, and lateral thinking skills (see the previous edition here). In this 125th edition of the quiz, we present issues tackled by real-life entrepreneurs in their startup journeys.
What would you do if you were in their shoes? At the end of the quiz, you will find out what the entrepreneurs and innovators themselves actually did. Would you do things differently?
Check out YourStory’s Book Review section as well, with takeaways from over 355 titles on creativity and entrepreneurship, and our weekend PhotoSparks section on creativity in the arts.
Q1: Pandemic resilience
Sagar Daryani, Co-founder and CEO of Wow! Momo Foods, termed 2019 as “the best year" for his momo retail business. Then came the COVID-19 pandemic, which shuttered 240 of his 300 outlets. How did this food company survive and bounce back?
Q2: MSME success
MSMEs are a core part of the economy, but many face challenges of managerial and technical talent in an increasingly digital era. How can they gear up effectively for the Industry 4.0 paradigm?
Q3: Social and environmental impact
Creating and sustaining social and environmental change takes time. However, traditional forms of venture investing look for quick and exponential returns. What other financial models could work here instead?
Q4: Edtech strategy
In the post-pandemic era, many hyper-scaling startups in sectors like ed-tech have taken a hit in revenues and valuation. What’s a better approach to growth here?
Q5: Fintech inclusion
In many emerging economies, small towns have little presence of large public and private banks, and many people do not have formal credit scores. Still, there is a vast fintech opportunity here – how can it be tapped?
Answers!
Congratulations on having come this far! But there’s more to come – answers to these five questions (below), as well as links to articles with more details on the entrepreneurs’ solutions. Happy reading, happy learning – and happy creating!
A1: Pandemic resilience
The pandemic resulted in ‘Version 2.0’ of Wow! Momo Foods. Earlier, only a tenth of the business was via takeaway delivery, but the pandemic forced almost all orders to switch to online delivery.
“We learned what ecommerce is. We learned what D2C is. We learned what ‘cost-for-click’ is. And we unlearned a lot of things,” explains Sagar Daryani, Co-founder of Wow! Momo Foods. Read more here of his lessons from his keynote address at TechSparks Mumbai 2024.
A2: MSME success
Sonam Motwani, Founder of B2B on-demand manufacturing startup Karkhana.io, points to the prevailing reluctance to a data-driven approach for decision-making as one of the key challenges facing MSMEs.
Despite the industry's vision of Industry 4.0, MSMEs struggle to capture basic data, hampering their mastery of demand and machine productivity. Read more here about how Karkhana.io helps MSMEs with standardisation, systematic sourcing, and decision-making based on data and not just experience.
A3: Social and environmental impact
Impact investing blends profit motives with social and environmental considerations, explains Venkat Vallabhaneni, Managing Partner at Inflexor Ventures. There is a growing recognition of investment vehicles to create positive social impact alongside financial gain.
This requires requiring long-term patient capital support through various stages of development and growth. “The involvement of impact investing VCs also stimulates broader market adoption and systemic change,” he adds. Read more about impact investing models and sectors here.
A4: Edtech strategy
Edtech is a business that shouldn’t be blitzscaled; instead, it should be built with a strong emphasis on profitability, explains Gaurav Munjal, Co-founder and CEO of Unacademy. The segment still holds vast profit potential and can positively impact lives.
The edtech company experienced a surge in its online business during the pandemic, but offline operations became a fundamental aspect in the post-pandemic era. Read more here of his cautionary advice about optimising for product-market fit and staying away from greed and excessive acquisitions.
A5: Fintech inclusion
Insant credit platform KreditBee serves 400 million customers, with a hefty 77% of them coming from smaller cities and towns. The growing appetite for small-ticket loans has helped the company thrive, according to Madhusudan Ekambaram, Co-founder and CEO.
“The banks are competing heavily for the top 3% of the population that is residing in Tier 1 cities,” he observes. Read more here about how KreditBee services SMEs, from kirana shops and bakeries to roadside dukaans.
YourStory has also published the pocketbook ‘Proverbs and Quotes for Entrepreneurs: A World of Inspiration for Startups’ as a creative and motivational guide for innovators (downloadable as apps here: Apple, Android).