Money won’t solve for scaling, innovation does: tech executives on growth hacking

Following two years of funding in India’s startup and tech ecosystem coinciding with the advent of artificial intelligence, founders and tech executives are forced to rethink ways to scale thier business.

While burning capital and acquiring users has been the tried-and-tested method of scaling and growing a tech business, there are innovative ways to hack growth, with lessons to be learned from bygone eras, way before startups were a thing in India. 

For instance, Srikanth Iyer, Co-founder and CEO of home furnishing company HomeLane, found it difficult to find buyers for CDs loaded with children's content during the early 2000s, when he founded edtech company Edurite (eventually acquired by Pearsons).

“What we realised was that we were way too early. We started the business in 2000 and we realised we were 10 years early,” he said. “But obviously we needed to survive, we needed to hack our way into revenue, growth, and hopefully make profits.”

Iyer was speaking during a panel titled Scaling secrets: Art of growth hacking for startups, at YourStory’s flagship tech summit Techsparks 2024 in Bengaluru on September 28.

“PC penetration was less and we had content for kids from age 9-10 years olds,” he said, adding that at the time there were 215 million kids going to school and only 2% of them had PCs at home. “By the time we found these kids they had to shell out Rs 10,000 and they were not willing to pay.  We found that we were in a flywheel which was kind of a losing proposition and we needed to get out of that.”

His company found innovative ways of hacking growth by relying on existing distribution. For instance, Edurite partnered with Intel to market their PC for education purposes and add CDs as well, while Edurite collected a royalty fee. 

Similarly, Iyer was able to strike a deal with textbook publishers to add the CDs to the textbook for a nominal fee of Rs 20 at a time when the perceived value of CDs was Rs 500. 

“One way was to find 10,000 students who could pay you $100 each in India to get that revenue. It was extremely difficult to do,” he said. “Nobody was willing to pay. The other way was to find 2 million students who could pay 50 cents each. And that is something we kind of worked on.”

Iyer was also able to strike similar deals with FMCG companies like Hindustan Unilever.

On the other hand, healthtech company Medibuddy’s CTO Enbasekar D credited perseverance and the founders being able to make rapid and quick decisions as the key to the company scaling its business over the years at all stages. 

“When we started right after college we did not even have a bank account forget about a bank balance,” he said. “Our first round came through later which was Rs 15 lakhs ten years ago. And for the first three years we never paid for cloud, we were using startup credits and what not, and we continued building and solving."

"Founders time is the most resourceful even if it is a startup at scale. That is where the focus comes from, be it through rapid decision making, and innovation. I'm sure at any stage, that is our currency," he added.

Meanwhile, Rohini Srivathsa, CTO of Microsoft India and South Asia, said that while building the technology to scale businesses, companies should not restrict its ambitions, as AI helps build many capabilities today without the need to spend a lot of money.

“For example, Makemytrip now has helped customers completely rethink and plan a trip, which is a totally different paradigm of what a customer can do,” she said. “Similarly, with Myntra’s fashionGPT, the customer has the ability to engage in a way that is interactive, conversational and is contextual to what the customer is thinking about."