In a country like India, where age is the gold standard of experience and wisdom, how do you win credibility for a new institution, university or school? How do you overcome the intimidating stature of traditional brick and mortar institutions that have stood the test of time. For Pramath Sinha, Founder & Chairman of Harappa Education and India’s ed-tech ambassador, the answer lies in employing an outcome driven approach. “Focus on ensuring outcomes in your initial years. This does more...

In a country like India where parting with your money is like a painful trip to the dentist, how do you scale lending? How do you forgo the traditional approach of extending loans, where meeting and accessing clients is second nature? “We’ve given out 70,000 loans across India, but 99% of my borrowers haven’t even seen me!” For Lendingkart’s Co-founder and CEO Harshvardhan Lunia, data was the ultimate answer to lending at scale. How did he overcome the historic red tape around loans?...

“2 or 3 campaigns will not make your brand! You have to be consistently at it for years” Content marketing is critical, whether you’re chasing sales or website traffic. It isn’t as easy though, especially for a startup where change- across product, people and placement- is the only constant. And when you’re caught by these waves of change, you either sink or swim unless, of course, you’re smart enough to build a boat and turn a profit by offering rides. Influencer, content entrepreneur and...

How do you thrive in low margin super competitive cohorts? What do you do when your startup is up against really established players -those that are really institutionalized or well-funded or have been in the business for a really long time? “2010 was the worst year ever for the broking industry. That’s when we started.” When Zerodha was started, no VCs had ever invested in a stockbroking firm. Yet, this did not stop the team from building India’s largest stockbroking firm, successfully...

What does it take to overcome regulatory hurdles, build a loyal community of 50 million users and scale-up the business to a billion dollars? It's grit, passion and focus. Starting-off as a fantasy sports platform, then accidentally evolving into a sports social network and then pivoting back into fantasy gaming, the journey of Harsh Jain and his team at Dream11 has been nothing but incredible. By turning couch captains into strategic game players and achieving product market fit within a...

“Leadership is a verb, not a noun!” Founder and CEO of Druva, Jaspreet Singh believes that leaders have to constantly evolve to stay relevant for their team and business. This agility has helped him guide his company through multiple pivots, which was almost like relaunching Druva as a Cloud SaaS company in 2013.    Having scaled their company to a billion, becoming India’s first SaaS unicorn, they now have to navigate the journey to an IPO. With prominent SaaS companies like Slack shunning...

“Grit is the stubborn refusal to quit.” This could easily be the ixigo tagline with co-founders Aloke Bajpai and Rajnish Kumar having mastered the art of turning roadblocks into opportunities for growth. Post financial crisis of 2008, with zero dollar marketing budget, employees at half-salary and four well-funded competitors, ixigo founders share how they had their backs against the wall and how they came up with ingenious ways to scale-up and build consumer loyalty. From leveraging word of...

According to Harvard Business Review, only 7% of customers are online-only shoppers and 73% are omni-channel customers. Clearly, a good looking e-commerce site is not enough anymore.   Ambareesh Murty, Co-founder and CEO of Pepperfry, shares how he navigated through some of the most critical business decisions on omni-channel strategy, franchise model and advertising on television, etc. Why consumer categories like furniture, require a physical presence, not as a distribution channel but a...

“Why is there so much spam in the world!?”  In the process of answering this question, CleverTap grew from being a group of engineers tinkering code, to a global SaaS company. Co-founder & Chief Strategy Officer of Clevertap, Anand Jain, believes that the first step to building a global company is to “remind yourself that the problems you are solving are universal”. If you are building your product keeping the customer in mind, then no borders can constrain your company’s reach. But with...

Revelations from the other side of the table. As season one comes to an end Ankur Warikoo, our host and the Co-Founder & CEO of nearbuy.com, shares his top takeaways from the extremely insightful and brutally honest conversations with some of the finest leaders from across the world.  From building great products that sell themselves to using storytelling to engage with stakeholders and founding the right culture, Ankur shares how implementing some of these learnings at his company has...

A fact deduced by marketers is that the best marketing doesn’t feel like marketing at all. Whether you’re leveraging an influencer or a celebrity for a marketing campaign, it’s vital that you find a way to market authentically. With multiple tools, platforms and techniques to build loyalty for your product, endorsements still remain the most commonly used strategies. Celebrity endorsements have been around for decades and something most businesses tend to take without pre-empting the...

A fact deduced by marketers is that the best marketing doesn’t feel like marketing at all. Whether you’re leveraging an influencer or a celebrity for a marketing campaign, it’s vital that you find a way to market authentically. With multiple tools, platforms and techniques to build loyalty for your product, endorsements still remain the most commonly used strategies. Celebrity endorsements have been around for decades and something most businesses tend to take without pre-empting the...

Customer's money or investor's money, what is more critical? Can hiring right help to scale globally? Can a compelling story mold the core existence of a business? These are some burning questions that every entrepreneur faces while growing their startup. The podcast Building It Up with Bertelsmann, through a series of episodes, covers answers to such questions. So dive in deeper to not just understand the enterprising, dynamic and inspiring guests but also hear their incredible insights on...

In an industry where a large number of companies are attempting to use technology to deliver high quality education to students worldwide, championing educational outreach and expanding globally is a mighty task to achieve. Then how did Eruditus – an online education company offering executive education programs, become one of the first EdTech startup from India to go global? What set it apart from other online ventures? How did it manage to get the top global universities to join them? “A...

In an industry where a large number of companies are attempting to use technology to deliver high quality education to students worldwide, championing educational outreach and expanding globally is a mighty task to achieve. Then how did Eruditus – an online education company offering executive education programs, become one of the first edtech startup from India to go global? What set it apart from other online ventures? How did it manage to get the top global universities to join them? “A...

Putting in place an elaborate sales channel, training an army of dealers and distributors, and executing an aggressive marketing strategy has been customary to several leading companies. However, in industries challenged with fierce competition and volume-driven topline, how can startups put together the most effective sales strategy for their business? “There is no science or logic behind sales, it is about who you can sell to and who is ready to buy”, says Hitesh Oberoi, Managing Director,...

Putting in place an elaborate sales channel, training an army of dealers and distributors, and executing an aggressive marketing strategy has been customary to several leading companies. However, in industries challenged with fierce competition and volume-driven topline, how can startups put together the most effective sales strategy for their business? “There is no science or logic behind sales, it is about who you can sell to and who is ready to buy”, says Hitesh Oberoi, Managing Director,...

An effective brand story is an authentic narrative with a strategic message that expresses why a brand exists, what it stands for and why consumers should choose it. Every Company has a story to tell – either the one that incubated it or the one that inspired its growth. Yet until early 2000s, most of these stories of Indian startups never reached an audience. “Every story can be as extraordinary as we choose to see and the role of communication should be the ability to go behind and see...

An effective brand story is an authentic narrative with a strategic message that expresses why a brand exists, what it stands for and why consumers should choose it. Every Company has a story to tell – either the one that incubated it or the one that inspired its growth. Yet until early 2000s, most of these stories of Indian startups never reached an audience. “Every story can be as extraordinary as we choose to see and the role of communication should be the ability to go behind and see...

Every brand needs to invest in finding and implementing its DNA and core values if they want to remain great. In today’s dynamic customer-driven marketplace, businesses need thoughtful investment into defining their company’s mission to retain their relevance, value, and vitality. But often when founders have dozens of competing priorities, defining this DNA and core value usually takes a backseat and many times, this culture becomes intuitive, especially when the organisation is just a few...

Every brand needs to invest in finding and implementing its DNA and core values if they want to remain great. In today’s dynamic customer-driven marketplace, businesses need thoughtful investment into defining their company’s mission to retain their relevance, value, and vitality. But often when founders have dozens of competing priorities, defining this DNA and core value usually takes a backseat and many times, this culture becomes intuitive, especially when the organisation is just a few...

Over 90% of Indian startups fail within 5 years of inception. What mistakes are these startups making? While some say that ‘premature scaling’ is perhaps, the number one cause, our speaker on this podcast feels the problem lies in the basic foundation of the startup & insufficient understanding of the market. “Startups in India are so good at creating solutions, they spend very little time understanding the problem” says Kunal Shah, Co-Founder of FreeCharge- which was one of India’s most...

Over 90% of Indian startups fail within 5 years of inception. What mistakes are these startups making? While some say that ‘premature scaling’ is perhaps, the number one cause, our speaker on this podcast feels the problem lies in the basic foundation of the startup & insufficent understanding of the market. “Startups in India are so good at creating solutions, they spend very little time understanding the problem” says Kunal Shah, Co-Founder of FreeCharge- which was one of India’s most...

While globally there is a large scale fear that automation will replace jobs and humans, India- the country with world's largest youth population- has a bigger problem, that of employability. For far too long, the traditional education system and regulations haven't kept up with the fast-changing business needs, thereby making graduates less employable. With some promising startups coming-up in the education tech space, green shoots of growth are beginning to be seen however, a lot of...