Stanish GUNASEKARAN

One of the key disruptors in the market has been a democratization of homegrown products. Hydroponics and vertical farming have been concepts that existed over decades but now seeing market entry. The geopolitical instability and climate change effects are key drivers to accelerate this trend towards food production and urban farming and technology today is filling the gaps to enable continuous food monitoring, diagnosis and safety. The industrial automation is also brining prices down to make it affordable for everyone and the social traction for health-conscious food is strongly growing. Urban farming presents a huge market for the future and entrepreneurs need to understand users in the local markets to disrupt change.

The key about entrepreneurship is that it a frame of mind and philosophy to search for 'truths' and rapidly acting towards them. So 'Pivoting' and 'Iterating' are fundamental to a startup success. This is also the advantage startups have over incumbents and market leaders. Start ups can be nimble and fast in changing direction, agile in letting things go and adopting new things. but what is the best way to make these iteration decision? Here is a framework to ask yourself these questions: 1. Am I looking at the right metric to understand growth of the Startup? 2. Is the data validating the assumptions that are fundamental to the startup survival? 3. What is the risk of sticking to the current process and what could that mean?

I have been working with a start up that is making circular fashion sexy. They have an app that enables swapping and has seen steady use Growth. But the truth behind the numbers is a different story. The willingness to pay of users is super low. The big idea behind is to b able to test your assumptions continuosly. This can mean the difference between survival and bust for a startup. You want to run a data centered approach to running an experiment to validate and invalidate. Three things to remember: 1. Always define your sample size. Can vary with assumption. 2. Look at only your focus group and make sure to remove any bias 3. Run your experiments in iterative steps and give a sufficient timeline (example, a week)

How do we define a a problem ? Speaking to founders you hear problems along the lines of 'solving climate change'. There is a lot of refinement that you go through as a founder until you nail on the one specific problem that you want and can solve. Iteration on the problem cant be understated. 1. Ask: Why does the problem exist 2. ... and why does that exist? x5 3. Define hypothesis around the problem 4. Identify the metric you want to ideally change 5. Size up how many people face the problem and how important is it a problem for them to be solved? 6. What would they do it the problem wasn't solved? Now is this a significant and specific enough of a problem that is worth for your to solve?

Over the years as a founder trying to build a coachGPT and as a innovation manager looking at tons of projects, here a few things that founders get wrong and would do better to approach. 1. Do not split the problem and the group of users/customers who face it. Meeting new people in a city can a problem but it is vastly different for a teenager as compared to a senior citizen. 2. Start with a Minimum Viable Project: What is the easiest way to help them solve it? In the previous case how can you help one senior citizen meet new people without any app, platform etc. 3. Focus on one thing super well: Founders and projects get super distracted with features and what else super early. You need the green light on the problem to Run!

Have you ever heard about 'Reverse - Time Managing'? - RTM Do you also relate to the fact that you NEVER are able to stick to your strict calendar? It is humane that sometimes you drift in focus or something important turns up that you react to. Here is where RTM is useful: Every 2 hours I look back at my calendar and 're-block' out how I actually spent it - Now, that could include a impromptu tea, longer lunch, dreaming, researching. This technique has helped me get constant habit of prioritisation in to my day think about what is important for the rest of my day. It helped me become aware and reflect on how I have been spending my time, the patterns and noise to adopt changes into my day. There is indeed an art to designing time.