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Commenting on common pain points and mistakes most young businesses make he said, “Entrepreneurs tend to create their business in office and not in the marketplace.” A hesitancy to connect with consumer often leads entrepreneurs to build products and services that fail to satisfy customer and market needs. Instead, he urged entrepreneurs to build and take a prototype to market first, instead of focusing time and resources on R&D alone. “The product or service should be built in stages,” he advised. “Entrepreneurs must have an outside in perspective; their offerings must be driven by  the customer and not product.”

Building a team and processes, access to capital and go-to-market strategy are three common pain points for most startups as further highlighted by Singhal. Also entrepreneurs, he pointed, are unaware on which market they enter- “It’s important to understand if you have an old product in an old market or new product in a new market,” he said.

The workshop had 15 startups from varied sectors including technology, cloud computing, retail, HR, and legal who brainstormed together with Singhal and gained valuable insights into their business.

Saarthi Consulting is a management and technology consulting firm based in Bengaluru that helps startups get established and scale. Manish Singhal has been an entrepreneur and is also an angel investor. He is a charter member of TiE Bangalore and on the board of several technology, e-commerce and consumer businesses.

Tags:
market, product, Scale business, startup