Many of us shop on the Internet, or order books. We also check out restaurants, use it to get meals delivered and write blogs. And then there are the digital counterparts of the village barber – the matchmaking sites! But some people want more than to browse the net to fulfil their requirements. They want a piece of the pie in this huge marketplace. For such aspiring entrepreneurs, Anuradha Goyal’s book, “The Mouse Charmers: Digital Pioneers of India” (Random House), serves as a textbook. The compact paperback explains how companies like Flipkart, Zomato, Shadi.com, MakeMyTrip and others developed their business model in a little explored world.
The study concentrates on Indian first generation start-ups that have direct customer interactions.
As the author mentions in her introduction, “I have not looked at pure play technology companies that are a whole world in themselves. I have focussed on the enterprises that use technology as their key tool to run their businesses. Most of these companies are established names in India and even a casual reader would have heard or read about them somewhere.”
She wanted to know, “What are they doing right that [venture companies] VCs are investing in these ventures that are not always backed by a marquee name….”
Assessing the feedback to the book that hit the market recently, the Goa-based author states, “A lot of business schools have put it in their recommended reading list for courses on entrepreneurship.” Her key readership, she says, can be divided into “students who may want to take the route of entrepreneurship and young working population looking at stepping out to be on their own at some point in time.”
While the stories of entrepreneurs have been told often enough, the paths of their businesses themselves have not been traced. Says Anuradha, “What was the idea behind them when they started, how they did course corrections on the way due to internal or external reasons…” The biographies, she remarks, “inspire the aspiring ones and then they need some practical insights into businesses. That is where this book comes in.”
She adds, “My most cherished feedback was from a lady in her 70s calling me to say after reading the book she knows how her order is processed at Flipkart.”
The book points out that, online entrepreneurship being a new phenomenon in India, these stories could be called still developing. Yet books have a lasting influence. And this one doesn’t have the advantage of conventional histories, written from a distance in time.
“Yes, I agree with you that writing stories needs some temporal distance,” says the author. “I think the digital companies mentioned in ‘The Mouse Charmers’ had reached a level where they could be written about – not as a full book but as a part of the digital landscape of India. In fact just after the book was published, I was asked to do an unauthorized biography of one of the companies mentioned in The Mouse Charmers and my reply was that I would wait till 2017 at least to see if any of them would have reached a level where they deserve a full book.”
However, she feels, its very newness merits documentation. “It needs to be written because it is not understood well by most of us who are used to brick and mortar setups.”
Another book is in the offing, says the writer, but as she is still doing her ground research, “it would be a bit early to speak about it.” But, as she is also a blogger on travel, books and business innovation, these occupations, she quips, keep her busy “20 hours a day.”
